February 23, 2012 • 30 mins
You no longer have to turn yourself inside out to travel through your digestive track. Just swallow a camera-bot, grab some pop corn, and watch the kernels traverse your guts. Join Robert and Julie as they look into the world of capsule endoscopy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
did you ever see a little film by the name
of Fantastic Voyde. I've not seen it in its entirety,
but I've seen clips and it is a pretty wonderful,
(00:24):
funny glvie. Yeah, this was six and it's the plot
involves like a diplomat is nearly assassinated, and so in
order to save him, the government is going to go
to ridiculous sci fi extremes. Right, He's got a blood
clot in his brain, right, so the natural thing to
do is, let's build a special submarine. Then let's use
(00:46):
mysterious technology to actually shrink the submarine down so small
that it can that it can swim around inside the
bloodstream inside the human body and actually address this problem
on a micro scale. And we're also shrinking down an
entire crew to manage, which includes uh oh, Donald Pleasants,
the young James Brolin and uh and of course yeah,
(01:10):
of course, um. And it is just it's so funny
to watch because you're like they're kind of trying to
swim through the body and they mean, it's just it's
very uh a low tech. Obviously, it's incredibly well lit
inside the human body in that film too, despite the
fact that there's no light inside there. It's it's like
the whole the old thing about outside of a dog.
(01:32):
What is the thing outside of a dog? The book
is a man, that man's best friend, but inside of
a dog it's too dark to see. Oh okay, yeah, yeah, alright,
alright with that, so anyway, I digress. Uh, fantastic voyage,
great film. Isaac Asimov wrote the screenplay after being assured
that he could fix the plot holes and sort of
tweak the science and then uh. Younger audiences are probably
(01:56):
familiar with The Ven's inter Space, which was a Joe
Dante film that started Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg, Ryan
and Uh and also some older names in the form
of Kevin McCarthy and Henry Gibson. And this was this.
Did you see this? This was an amazing picture. I
probably could not watch it today, but as a kid
(02:16):
it was. It was fabulous because you have Dennis Quaid
is a hot shot like fighter Jock who ends up
getting miniaturized inside this little submarine, and then the submarine
is injected into Martin shortz buttocks, and so most of
the film is Martin Short like freaking out and doing
freaky things because Dennis Quaid is sort of tinkering and
(02:37):
puppeting with him inside with this little submarine. And then
later in the film, a second submarine is injected into
Martin Short and then so it's like a villain in
one submarine and then Dennis Quaid and the other and
they duke it out in Martin and shwortz gut. That
sounds about right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I was
kind of wondering what role Martin Short would take in
(02:57):
and that that totally makes sense. I'll want to note
the benign violation theory here right when we talked about
how humor works. Here you have he's got something that's
put up his bumb right, but it's well, it's not
put up, it's more put here in his bumba. But
they're dude duking it out in his bowels. Yeah, and
somehow that's funny and not so much violating. There is
(03:20):
in this mild spoiler, but there's an awesome scene where
the where Dennis quad is fighting the bad guy off,
and the bad guy has to jettison his suit, so
he's just like in a like a kind of a
diving suit and he's on the outside of Dennis quakes
submarine trying to like drill through the glass screen. And
so Dennis Quaid like puts his suit his submarine into
dive and goes into the stomach acid and then uh,
(03:42):
and so it dissolves like all the skin off of
the villain. He's just his skeletons clinging to the outside
of the submarine. And it's and it's awesome if you're eight. Well,
and I mean, I kind of think that's what's happening
in my stomach right now. Yet a really heavy breakfast.
But of course we're talking about all of this because
this this seemed like a dream right when it was
(04:03):
first introduced to the audiences, right, this idea that you
could shrink technology and you could take this fantastic voyage
through the body. But as we'll discussing this podcast, uh,
the technology is here, We're already making some pretty fantastic
voyages and as we look look into the future, um,
the technology is just going to get that much more amazing. So,
(04:24):
but before we talk about shrinking down Roquel Welch and
putting her in your small intestine, we should probably talk
about what we did in the past to peer into
the digestive system right and digestion and it's many problems.
I mean, we've always been obsessed with this. We've always
been trying to figure out why, what well, how does
it work? And why does it rarely seem to work well?
(04:46):
Hence the pooping duck right right, the pooping duck. Um.
I was looking through a book of you're familiar with
with neudrius right the whole the hand, the hands symbols
and hand configurations in in Buddhism and Huduism, and there
whole lot of them, like an enormous number of moodras
are related to to digestion and sort of tweaking your
(05:06):
digestion through a particular energy flows. So scientifically and non scientifically,
it's been a hot topic for a while, but for
the longest we weren't actually really able to observe what's
happening in there. Again, hey, there's no light and uh
and be we can't really turn ourselves inside out or
no one and we certainly can't miniaturize ourselves and go
(05:27):
in and witness digestion firsthand. We only had the autopsies
and and and sort of you know, diagnosis of symptoms
to go on, but no real time observation of what's
going on until undreds Dr William Bowman. Dr William Bowman, Yeah,
it's pretty pretty amazing, dude. His his family were British
(05:47):
and they moved to the colonies. He was like twenty six.
He was enlicted as a surgeon's mate in the U. S. Army.
So so he it's it's important to note of for
what's about to come, that that he saw a lot
of a lot of battlefield injuries, a lot of blood
and guts, a lot of blood and guts, and then
a particular case of blood and guts came his way
on June six. The American Fur Company was in Macana,
(06:10):
island of French Canadian property right now part of Michigan. Yeah,
and uh, there's a voyager by the name of Alexei St. Martin.
This is the guy that paddles around in a canoe.
He picks up first and of Native American trappers and
delivers them to fur companies. So is that kind of thing,
a very sort of classic French Canadian kind of thing. Um.
And the point you said, you were saying earlier that
(06:32):
that's still pretty much how things roll on Mcanal. Oh yeah, yeah,
every everything is you know, pretty much horse carriage driven
there and lots of good fudge covered pretzels. Well for trappers.
Alexei St. Martin. He ends up suffering an injury though
basically a musket goes off by accident, blasts a whole
in his abdomen. Yeah, and it's about the size of
(06:54):
a of a man's palm, according to the ride ups,
and Dr Beaumont starts to treat him right right, the
natural thing, of course, let's fix the fix the ailment
and close that hole in your stomach because it, I mean,
it's pretty ghastly wound. Yeah, And again he was no
stranger to blood and guts um. And in fact, he
you know, before he even discovered them, the extent of
(07:17):
the wound. He had carved off a bit of St.
Martin's ribs and he could stuff the lung back in
and then apply a poultice. Right, But before doing so,
he noticed that he could peer into the into his stomach. St.
Martin's stomach and actually see his breakfast there. Yeah, it
was to the point, like their descriptions in the text
(07:38):
that like food and drink would slash out of this hole. Yeah,
it's it's pretty pretty gross sounding. But as we mentioned,
this is as a doctor views this as an inquisitive
mind looks at this hole. Obviously, he's thinking about the
possibilities here first and foremost, he try he's trying to
help this guy, trying to heal him, trying to heal him.
But then he I think that the gears are already
(08:00):
working because the first thing he does is he hires
alexey On in April of eighteen twenty three as a
is if his families live in handyman shopping wood, mowing
the fields, all that sort of stuff. And he waits,
he waits a couple of years before until August the
first to actually get the experiment rolling right, because at
(08:21):
this point has become very obvious, obvious that this is
a gastric fistula. It is not going to heal. He's
going to have this gaping hole in his stomach his
whole life. Yeah, and you can just imagine during that too,
like during that two year stint, like did he did
he sort of work up to it. You know what?
At what point did he say, Hey, Alexei, Um, I
(08:42):
got this idea. Would would you be cool? It's say
tomorrow morning, instead of doing some yardwork, you came into
the office and I took some little pieces of meat
and tied him to strings and I dangled him through
that hole in your belly. Yeah, do you mind if
you are a human fond pot for me? Yeah? Gaster
fun to Yeah. Can you imagine like that? That would
(09:02):
be a very awkward conversation, And in fact, I think
that would be a very awkward work arrangement for as
long as they had. Of course, I instantly think of
the classical art images of doubting Thomas and Jesus Christ
with wound in his side, and Thomas has to stick
his finger in the in the wound to see if
it's real. And I mean the comparison here is obvious.
I mean, Beaumont is a doubting Thomas. He's a very
(09:24):
inquisitive individual and he cannot help but poke around in
that hole because there are answers in that hole. Well,
and up until now, scientists could not figure out what
digestion was about. Was it mechanical, like was it grinding
up things, because that's how did they know? Or was
it chemical? And here he has a specimen in front
of him in in the form of St. Martin, and yeah,
(09:44):
he starts doing some things that seem uh kind of disgusting, Yeah,
but very incightful. Like they started off rather simple with
for instance, the meat on the strength thing, like, get
a few different pieces of meat, tie strings to them,
dangle them through the hole, and then after an hour
has pasted, pull out one of the pieces of meat,
see what what what rate has it digested? An hour later,
(10:06):
two hours have passed, you pull out a second piece
of meat. After three hours have passed, you pull out
a third, and you can compare. You know, it's very
it's very scientific. Yeah, he's a playing the scientific method
to this, and he really is earnest and earnest trying
to research this and um in fact researches it for
like another decade, not not primarily on um St. Martin,
but other patients with gastric fistulas, and he comes to
(10:29):
publish a book on the subject, Experiments and Observations on
the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of digestion, and he says, definitively,
here's the deal, Um, this stuff in the stomach is
made up of hydrochloric acid. Your answer, yeah. And the
various experiments he conducts to to figure this out and
to and to further explore the particulars of the of
(10:51):
what's going on in the gut are pretty amazing. Like
at one point he removes some gastric juice. On several
points he actually removes the gastric juice from alexei stomach. Uh.
In particular, one case involved taking some of the juice out,
putting in a glass, and then putting meat in his belly,
putting meat in the glass of gastric juice, and then
putting meat in just a glass of water, and then
(11:12):
comparing and in this he was able to tell that, yes,
the gastric juices are essential, but heat is also important,
and the the sample that's just setting out on his
desk doesn't have the heat to aid in digestion. He
was able to study things such as exercise, how exercise
effects because you know, you dangle some meat inside Alexei
and then send him out to do some work us
imagining him on a treadmill, but of course that didn't exist. Yeah, yeah,
(11:35):
he was probably chopping wood or doing you know, attending
to his other duties around the property. Or Another thing
that would happen is that Alexei would occasionally become irritable
during all this whole poking and uh and that would
be measurable to determine how how emotion, how agitation affects
our digestion and uh. In the whole time he's he's
(11:56):
also testing various meats to see what the rate, like,
how how does chicken stack up against beef? At one
point he uh puts twelve raw oysters to let directly
through the stomach hole. Sounds about right, right right, and
uh and yeah, this continues for about a decade and
it and it really is important work in our in
(12:16):
our historical understanding of how the digestive system works. Yeah,
thanks to St. Martin. And the crazy thing too, is
that Alexei St. Martin lived to the eighty six years old.
That's fifty eight years after his accident. That alone is amazing,
but along the way he was able to make kind
of a career out of this. Well. Also amazing because
duct tape wasn't invented yet, right, I mean, how how
(12:36):
is he you know keeping um, you know, presumably he
was changing out the poultices. Yeah, um, that we're covering
the wound. But I mean that is incredible. I mean
he outlived but yeah, and at one point he had
moved away and then he ended up moving back with
his family, like Billmont was able to let to lure
him back into these experiments. Yeah, there's no real definitive
(12:59):
accounts there, but there there there's some suggestions that the
it was an odd relationship and um, as you talked
about before, the family wasn't very supportive of Hey, let's
why don't you go let this guy poke around you all?
You know. Year. Yeah, when he when Alexei finally died
at this rifled age, his family let his body decompose
in the sun for a few days before they buried
(13:20):
him in an unmarked grave because because they didn't want
people digging and they didn't want an autopsy performed on him.
They didn't want anybody poking around anymore with him. And
you know, if to say, look, you really did enough
of this while he was alive, and we would really
like to mourn, um, you know, a husband the father
or a grandfather, and not just a dude with a
hole in his stomach. He was leave him alone already,
(13:43):
I think what they were saying. Um. All right, so
now we know how how it was done in the
olden days. Um. Right after this message, we'll talk about
the amazing technology that we had today. All right, we're back.
Now we're moving into a more modern understanding of of
what's going on inside the human body and uh in
(14:04):
our ability to poke around inside it. Long before Beaumont,
we were of course interested in this, and long before Beaumont,
doctors were poking around in the various holes in the
human body. Uh. And you had physicians even as far
back as the tenth century a d. Who were trying
to develop devices that would allow them to better see
the inside of the human body through various body orifices,
(14:27):
and through the eight hundred you actually you've had several
scientists attempting to construct actual endoscopic instruments. But it wasn't
until basically the the mid eighteen hundreds and then eventually
the early twentieth century that this technology began to really
take hold. And certainly it was the sixties and seventies
before we were actually using endoscopic technology to to view
(14:49):
inside the human body. The indios endoscope. Just think of
it like a telescope, except instead of looking at the
cosmos looking outward, we're looking inward. Right, And it pokes
inside the body through either one of its naturally occurring
holes or a surgical incision. Right. And a lot of
people are familiar with this with these endoscopies and colonoscopies. Right.
(15:11):
And the traditional way to do this as a person
who goes endoscopic ultrasound and they're sedated prior to this. UM.
After sedation, the doctor in search the endoscope into the
person's mouth a rectum and then observes the intestinal track
on a TV monitor in the ultrasound image on another monitor.
So this is how we can sort of turn ourselves
inside out what we've been doing in the past at least.
(15:34):
So the problem with this, um, I mean, it's a
great technology, but the problem is that you know, obviously
the you could accidentally puncture an oregon or some other
accident that could occur. This doesn't happen a lot, but
it could result in death. Um, it's a little bit
more invasive than you probably want it to be, right, Yeah,
you're ultimately sticking a camera, very narrow camera into a
(15:56):
hole in the body, So there is the potential first
for injury to take place. Yeah, but it's incredibly useful
for trying to detect calling, cancers, digestive disorders, nodules, just
any number of things that you want to know more
about that you can only go inside. Yeah. Yeah, it
allows the doctor to look at things that that they
(16:17):
otherwise would not be able to see and will not
be able to examine and diagnose. The technology really became
advanced around the six That was at the point where
we had a video computer chip technology that allowed magnification
and projection of images from an endoscope. So that this
is for the point where it really began to be
useful during general surgery, even where you could you could
(16:41):
you could actually have an image of of what's going
on inside the human body projected or displayed on the
television screen during surgery. And then of course, um you
capsule into scopes came more into vogue in the two
thousands and they started to be used widely, and at
that time they were unable to propel themselves. They were
like more on muscle contractions to move them along but
(17:03):
the cool part of this is that this is really
where the fantastic voyage comes into play. Talking about a capsule,
you know, the size of a vitamin that has the
camera in it. That is really far less invasive, right,
it's it's uh. If you think of the digestion system,
is this is highway that food has to travel and
it tends to run figures very but it's the digestion
(17:24):
system from mouth to anus is somewhere between twenty two
and twenty six ft in length. And if you are
limited by tethers by a pole, if your car was
had some sort of rope on the end of it.
R yeah. Yeah. It's like imagine you had to pump
gasoline through a hose to your car. You can only
travel so far. Become before we just become it just
(17:46):
wouldn't be feasible anymore. Like diving comes to mind as
you know, an example of this. If you're having to
pipe air down to the diver. Uh, you know, it
just becomes more and more of a pain, and it
becomes it ultimately isn't feasible and want to keep coiling
out the pipe. What you want is a diver with
a tank so that they're independent of the of any
(18:08):
tether to the surface world. And that's what's happening here.
If you could put it in a capsule, the individual
can swallow it and you can travel the whole course
without having wires or lines or anything trailing down one
orifice or up another. And then a doctor could manipulate right, right,
Because that's the other thing too. We want to be
able to manipulate the capsule, and you want to be
(18:29):
able to fit enough, like you know, you you want
to get a camera in there, and you're you're gonna
need power in there, but you don't want to necessarily
have a couple of double a's, You don't you don't
want to have to have room in there for digital
storage of the of the photos because this is this
is gonna travel through the human body and needs to
be relatively small in size. It's going to go through
the poop shoot and you don't want necessarily all that
(18:50):
data to go into the toilet, right, So you want
it to go elsewhere so that you have access to it.
So let's talk a little bit more about the specs
on this. Yeah, some of these are about the size
of the vitamin um, but some of the more experimental
versions have actually gotten down as small as a as
a piece of rice grain of rice, which is and
(19:10):
they're able to to solve some of these problems of
size by actually having the individual who has swallowed the
capsule where a belt, and this belt has the technology
to both uh being power to the capsule so that
doesn't have to have an onboard power source, and it
has the ability to receive images from the camera, so
(19:31):
the camera is out putting the images to a contraption
on the belt, right, and it has a magnetic field
that allows a tart to to actually manipulate the pill
to go where he or she wants it to go. Yeah,
and when we're talking about taking images, we're talking uh,
you know somewhere in the neighborhood of like eight D
seventy thousand images. That's the that's the number that's given
(19:53):
for the Saka endscopic capsule that was developed by the
Japanese RF System Lab. This was a pretty ma using
a little piece of technology, especially when you consider that
it achieves all of these these goals while only costing
around a hundred dollars. So it's actually a disposable camera
passes through the human body, and then the patient doesn't
have to dig it out of their stool at the
(20:14):
end of it. It's just completely another advantage people. I
would yeah, I would think so unless you want, you know,
you could I guess you could get it out of
there and keep it as a souvenir. But but if
you're squamish about that sort of thing, just I guess
flush it. Yeah, And this procedure really is considered low risk.
There's a chance that the capsule becoming watching the intestine,
but that usually happens about one percent of the cases
(20:37):
that happens. Uh. They can remove it with a scope
or through surgery. Right. The next stage in the development
of the Fantastic Voyage, though, is the idea of a
self propelled intoscopic camera, so it's it's not having to
depend on either muscle contractions or magnetic fields to move.
There's this a little device called the Mermaid, and it
comes to us from Japan's Koku Universe and Osaka Medical College,
(21:01):
and it it's called the Mermaid, but it actually looks
more like a tadpole. It's a it's one of these
little capsule and the scupic cameras, but it has this
little tail that it actually uses to propel itself throughout
the digestive system. It can go in at either end,
swim around, and apparently make it through the entire body
in just a few hours, as opposed to well what
(21:22):
is supposed to like several hours with the other types
of capsules. Yeah, and a cornby sandwich will typically run
two hours. Put that in perspective with normal traffic flow
through the human body. Yeah, so that's like the bullet train. Yeah,
of technology for for the capsule. The doctors on the
outside will be able to control it, control it with
(21:43):
the joystick and there there's also they would have a
certain amount of autonomous navigation as well. You could sort
of do its own thing in there. Okay, so it
could possibly be programmed to go and do it something
and scoop up data. Um, so some people have said
by people, I mean there have been some scientists who
say and some researchers who who questioned the amount of
(22:05):
data that is transmitting And so their argument is, and
there have not been a lot of studies on this,
so we don't know definitely, their question is can you
really have that much data those that many images and
be able to look through it in a very thorough
way and catch everything. Yeah. Their their argument is that
(22:27):
images is maybe too much for anybody to process. Anyway,
if if you've ever been subjected to vacation photos and
uh and and and no editing has been used, you
probably know what they're talking about, Like they're there. An
individual can only look at so many photos and diagnose
what's happening in And this is often the case. Our
(22:47):
ability to collect data outpaces our ability to process it
with the same technology. So when we can have an
automated or remote control camera that can take all this stuff,
we we don't uh, we don't have the processing technology
to just load it into a computer and say, all right, computer,
let me know which images are a little suspect so
that an actual doctor can look at them. Which maybe
that's the next step. Yeah, I may imagine it will be,
(23:09):
but right now, that is that's the main point that's
being made. Is just just like you would um here
in an argument about security, like if you have a
million cameras all collecting data, you know, do you have
the manpower to actually go through and detect a security threat?
But you know that's that'll probably be easily solved because
I mean, imagine if you were you're an editor of
the small paper and you send a photographer out to
(23:30):
cover an event and they bring back eight hundred and
sixty thousand images. That's not the answer you want. You
want show me the good ones, show me the ones
that should be concerned about, right right, Yeah, But you
know that being said, this is a great technology and um,
you know it's it's been growing something like twelve point
nine percent annually since two thousand and seven. And it's
not just the digestive system. Galermo Tyarney at the Messages
(23:52):
General Hospital in Boston has been working on and using
this technology to examine what's going on in arteries to
figure out ways to detect dangerous blood clots uh and
ultimately deal with them at this micro scale. So not
like you know, the fantastic voyage where where they have
a little beam they are trying to laser beam that
(24:12):
they're trying to repair the clot. But same idea, right,
So that's the very exciting thing about this. And we
bring up Aubrey de Gray that the bearded um, the
bearded one as we call him, the Jerry O excuse me,
bio gerontologist and he talks about this very sort of
thing as being part and parcel of living to be
a thousand years old. If you can have a sort
(24:32):
of self maintenance at this level, detecting illnesses diseases before
they get out of hand, then boom, you are setting
yourself up for a much lengthier life. Yeah. Yeah, and
the technology is headed there. I mean, it's it's easy
to imagine, just as we've seen the technology improved from
a a a camera wand that we we shove up
(24:54):
the rectum, that we've seen an advance from that to
a capsule or even something the size of a grain
rise that we swallow. It's easy to imagine it coming
to the point where you would swallow this little, little
tiny device and it would swim around and it would
not only diagnose, but potentially address problems in the digestive system. Yeah,
it's it's completely amazing. And it's also hasn't it has
(25:16):
it not been used for art? Did you send me
a link? Yeah, yeah, there's there's an art project. Um
it's art installation by media artist Stephanie Bardon that's called
m to A. M to A refers to the endoscopic capsule,
the ones that we've just been talking about. The name
is short from mouth to anus and the captured video
is combined with data from a separate capsule that since
(25:36):
this pH and pressure and the gastro intestinal tract. So
what she did is she fed one subject a meal
of top Raymond, gatorade and gummy bears classic classic Neil
that good stuff to observe getting broken down. She fed
another subject handmade noodles okay, pomegranate cherry juice, gummy bears
(25:59):
and hybisc gatorade gatoradeing quote. So the more whole foods
aspect of the um the boxed foods. So she was
trying to look at the difference in digestion and it's
really interesting. Um, I don't know how scientifically tight some
of her her observations are, but it is scored to
(26:20):
a disco version of the flight of the bumblebee. Oh
very nice. I mean, that's that's panache right there. That
is wow. So yeah, once again we're happy to share strange,
grotesque guests or intestinal art with you guys, and we
will be sure to include a link to that and
other related topics on the blog posted a companies to
this podcast. So don't worry about having to actually go
(26:40):
out in Google that particular art project, because there's no
telling where you'll wind up. That's right. You don't want
to get into digestive videos take a nasty turn. All right,
here comes Arnie. Oh, here's a robot with our listener mail.
All right, what do you have for us today? All right? First,
all we heard from while one listener who was concerned
(27:03):
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(27:25):
die while listening to our episode on the Rat King,
if that's the last thing, uh you hear, you're probably
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(27:45):
while now, but I usually download them in batches, so
I could be a little late with this one. And
she's finding to our cheating in the name of the episode,
which actually isn't that old, and and certainly never worry
about responding to an old topic. We're happy to revisit them.
She says. The podcast about cheating reminding me of something
I did in chemistry exam during my first year of university.
There were only about five minutes lefting the exam and
(28:06):
I had absolutely no clue how to even begin the
last question. Honestly, I can't even remember what the question
was about, so instead of attempting to answer it or cheating,
I wrote insert Act of God here. Apparently my tutor
loved it because I got part marks on this question
for originality. Well, I know that isn't It wasn't cheating.
I thought I would share my experience because it was
(28:26):
an interesting way of getting extra marks for an exam.
Thanks for the podcast, Amanda. All right, kids, you heard
it there. Try that out and let out and let
us know how that shakes out. For everyone else. And
then we also heard from a listener by the name
of Victoria, and Victoria was responding to our episode about
the rat King, The Layer of the Rat King. She says, Hello,
I wanted to thank you for your podcast on the
(28:48):
rat King. I brought up. It brought up many memories
for me, and I wanted to share them with you.
And then she shares them kind of a stream of
conscious way that I really did. She says, there was
the underwater version of the nutclut Hecker Ballet, complete with
dancing lobsters about by the Milwaukee Ballet, my college professor's
lecture on the plague and rats uh the whole time
(29:09):
with a piece of tissue peeking out of his left nostril,
The story of my mother actually finding a rat in
the toilet when we lived in the Philippines I was
too young to remember, and seeing my first cat sized
rat upon moving to Baltimore. Thanks for such a great episode.
I enjoy listening to you. I love that. I love
like when whatever episodes just hits one of you guys,
like on all cylinders, and I feel like we're just
(29:31):
sort of like tapping into your mind. Yeah, So if
you would like to tap into our mind. You can
find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter.
On Facebook, just search for stuff to Blow your Mind.
You will find us on Twitter. Our handle is blow
the Mind, so you know, shoot us, get us some
comments on there. We're happy to listen to you, and
you can always send us an email at blow the
(29:53):
Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. It's join
how staf Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
did you ever see a little film by the name
of Fantastic Voyde. I've not seen it in its entirety,
but I've seen clips and it is a pretty wonderful,
(00:24):
funny glvie. Yeah, this was six and it's the plot
involves like a diplomat is nearly assassinated, and so in
order to save him, the government is going to go
to ridiculous sci fi extremes. Right, He's got a blood
clot in his brain, right, so the natural thing to
do is, let's build a special submarine. Then let's use
(00:46):
mysterious technology to actually shrink the submarine down so small
that it can that it can swim around inside the
bloodstream inside the human body and actually address this problem
on a micro scale. And we're also shrinking down an
entire crew to manage, which includes uh oh, Donald Pleasants,
the young James Brolin and uh and of course yeah,
(01:10):
of course, um. And it is just it's so funny
to watch because you're like they're kind of trying to
swim through the body and they mean, it's just it's
very uh a low tech. Obviously, it's incredibly well lit
inside the human body in that film too, despite the
fact that there's no light inside there. It's it's like
the whole the old thing about outside of a dog.
(01:32):
What is the thing outside of a dog? The book
is a man, that man's best friend, but inside of
a dog it's too dark to see. Oh okay, yeah, yeah, alright,
alright with that, so anyway, I digress. Uh, fantastic voyage,
great film. Isaac Asimov wrote the screenplay after being assured
that he could fix the plot holes and sort of
tweak the science and then uh. Younger audiences are probably
(01:56):
familiar with The Ven's inter Space, which was a Joe
Dante film that started Dennis Quaid, Martin Short, Meg, Ryan
and Uh and also some older names in the form
of Kevin McCarthy and Henry Gibson. And this was this.
Did you see this? This was an amazing picture. I
probably could not watch it today, but as a kid
(02:16):
it was. It was fabulous because you have Dennis Quaid
is a hot shot like fighter Jock who ends up
getting miniaturized inside this little submarine, and then the submarine
is injected into Martin shortz buttocks, and so most of
the film is Martin Short like freaking out and doing
freaky things because Dennis Quaid is sort of tinkering and
(02:37):
puppeting with him inside with this little submarine. And then
later in the film, a second submarine is injected into
Martin Short and then so it's like a villain in
one submarine and then Dennis Quaid and the other and
they duke it out in Martin and shwortz gut. That
sounds about right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I was
kind of wondering what role Martin Short would take in
(02:57):
and that that totally makes sense. I'll want to note
the benign violation theory here right when we talked about
how humor works. Here you have he's got something that's
put up his bumb right, but it's well, it's not
put up, it's more put here in his bumba. But
they're dude duking it out in his bowels. Yeah, and
somehow that's funny and not so much violating. There is
(03:20):
in this mild spoiler, but there's an awesome scene where
the where Dennis quad is fighting the bad guy off,
and the bad guy has to jettison his suit, so
he's just like in a like a kind of a
diving suit and he's on the outside of Dennis quakes
submarine trying to like drill through the glass screen. And
so Dennis Quaid like puts his suit his submarine into
dive and goes into the stomach acid and then uh,
(03:42):
and so it dissolves like all the skin off of
the villain. He's just his skeletons clinging to the outside
of the submarine. And it's and it's awesome if you're eight. Well,
and I mean, I kind of think that's what's happening
in my stomach right now. Yet a really heavy breakfast.
But of course we're talking about all of this because
this this seemed like a dream right when it was
(04:03):
first introduced to the audiences, right, this idea that you
could shrink technology and you could take this fantastic voyage
through the body. But as we'll discussing this podcast, uh,
the technology is here, We're already making some pretty fantastic
voyages and as we look look into the future, um,
the technology is just going to get that much more amazing. So,
(04:24):
but before we talk about shrinking down Roquel Welch and
putting her in your small intestine, we should probably talk
about what we did in the past to peer into
the digestive system right and digestion and it's many problems.
I mean, we've always been obsessed with this. We've always
been trying to figure out why, what well, how does
it work? And why does it rarely seem to work well?
(04:46):
Hence the pooping duck right right, the pooping duck. Um.
I was looking through a book of you're familiar with
with neudrius right the whole the hand, the hands symbols
and hand configurations in in Buddhism and Huduism, and there
whole lot of them, like an enormous number of moodras
are related to to digestion and sort of tweaking your
(05:06):
digestion through a particular energy flows. So scientifically and non scientifically,
it's been a hot topic for a while, but for
the longest we weren't actually really able to observe what's
happening in there. Again, hey, there's no light and uh
and be we can't really turn ourselves inside out or
no one and we certainly can't miniaturize ourselves and go
(05:27):
in and witness digestion firsthand. We only had the autopsies
and and and sort of you know, diagnosis of symptoms
to go on, but no real time observation of what's
going on until undreds Dr William Bowman. Dr William Bowman, Yeah,
it's pretty pretty amazing, dude. His his family were British
(05:47):
and they moved to the colonies. He was like twenty six.
He was enlicted as a surgeon's mate in the U. S. Army.
So so he it's it's important to note of for
what's about to come, that that he saw a lot
of a lot of battlefield injuries, a lot of blood
and guts, a lot of blood and guts, and then
a particular case of blood and guts came his way
on June six. The American Fur Company was in Macana,
(06:10):
island of French Canadian property right now part of Michigan. Yeah,
and uh, there's a voyager by the name of Alexei St. Martin.
This is the guy that paddles around in a canoe.
He picks up first and of Native American trappers and
delivers them to fur companies. So is that kind of thing,
a very sort of classic French Canadian kind of thing. Um.
And the point you said, you were saying earlier that
(06:32):
that's still pretty much how things roll on Mcanal. Oh yeah, yeah,
every everything is you know, pretty much horse carriage driven
there and lots of good fudge covered pretzels. Well for trappers.
Alexei St. Martin. He ends up suffering an injury though
basically a musket goes off by accident, blasts a whole
in his abdomen. Yeah, and it's about the size of
(06:54):
a of a man's palm, according to the ride ups,
and Dr Beaumont starts to treat him right right, the
natural thing, of course, let's fix the fix the ailment
and close that hole in your stomach because it, I mean,
it's pretty ghastly wound. Yeah, And again he was no
stranger to blood and guts um. And in fact, he
you know, before he even discovered them, the extent of
(07:17):
the wound. He had carved off a bit of St.
Martin's ribs and he could stuff the lung back in
and then apply a poultice. Right, But before doing so,
he noticed that he could peer into the into his stomach. St.
Martin's stomach and actually see his breakfast there. Yeah, it
was to the point, like their descriptions in the text
(07:38):
that like food and drink would slash out of this hole. Yeah,
it's it's pretty pretty gross sounding. But as we mentioned,
this is as a doctor views this as an inquisitive
mind looks at this hole. Obviously, he's thinking about the
possibilities here first and foremost, he try he's trying to
help this guy, trying to heal him, trying to heal him.
But then he I think that the gears are already
(08:00):
working because the first thing he does is he hires
alexey On in April of eighteen twenty three as a
is if his families live in handyman shopping wood, mowing
the fields, all that sort of stuff. And he waits,
he waits a couple of years before until August the
first to actually get the experiment rolling right, because at
(08:21):
this point has become very obvious, obvious that this is
a gastric fistula. It is not going to heal. He's
going to have this gaping hole in his stomach his
whole life. Yeah, and you can just imagine during that too,
like during that two year stint, like did he did
he sort of work up to it. You know what?
At what point did he say, Hey, Alexei, Um, I
(08:42):
got this idea. Would would you be cool? It's say
tomorrow morning, instead of doing some yardwork, you came into
the office and I took some little pieces of meat
and tied him to strings and I dangled him through
that hole in your belly. Yeah, do you mind if
you are a human fond pot for me? Yeah? Gaster
fun to Yeah. Can you imagine like that? That would
(09:02):
be a very awkward conversation, And in fact, I think
that would be a very awkward work arrangement for as
long as they had. Of course, I instantly think of
the classical art images of doubting Thomas and Jesus Christ
with wound in his side, and Thomas has to stick
his finger in the in the wound to see if
it's real. And I mean the comparison here is obvious.
I mean, Beaumont is a doubting Thomas. He's a very
(09:24):
inquisitive individual and he cannot help but poke around in
that hole because there are answers in that hole. Well,
and up until now, scientists could not figure out what
digestion was about. Was it mechanical, like was it grinding
up things, because that's how did they know? Or was
it chemical? And here he has a specimen in front
of him in in the form of St. Martin, and yeah,
(09:44):
he starts doing some things that seem uh kind of disgusting, Yeah,
but very incightful. Like they started off rather simple with
for instance, the meat on the strength thing, like, get
a few different pieces of meat, tie strings to them,
dangle them through the hole, and then after an hour
has pasted, pull out one of the pieces of meat,
see what what what rate has it digested? An hour later,
(10:06):
two hours have passed, you pull out a second piece
of meat. After three hours have passed, you pull out
a third, and you can compare. You know, it's very
it's very scientific. Yeah, he's a playing the scientific method
to this, and he really is earnest and earnest trying
to research this and um in fact researches it for
like another decade, not not primarily on um St. Martin,
but other patients with gastric fistulas, and he comes to
(10:29):
publish a book on the subject, Experiments and Observations on
the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of digestion, and he says, definitively,
here's the deal, Um, this stuff in the stomach is
made up of hydrochloric acid. Your answer, yeah. And the
various experiments he conducts to to figure this out and
to and to further explore the particulars of the of
(10:51):
what's going on in the gut are pretty amazing. Like
at one point he removes some gastric juice. On several
points he actually removes the gastric juice from alexei stomach. Uh.
In particular, one case involved taking some of the juice out,
putting in a glass, and then putting meat in his belly,
putting meat in the glass of gastric juice, and then
putting meat in just a glass of water, and then
(11:12):
comparing and in this he was able to tell that, yes,
the gastric juices are essential, but heat is also important,
and the the sample that's just setting out on his
desk doesn't have the heat to aid in digestion. He
was able to study things such as exercise, how exercise
effects because you know, you dangle some meat inside Alexei
and then send him out to do some work us
imagining him on a treadmill, but of course that didn't exist. Yeah, yeah,
(11:35):
he was probably chopping wood or doing you know, attending
to his other duties around the property. Or Another thing
that would happen is that Alexei would occasionally become irritable
during all this whole poking and uh and that would
be measurable to determine how how emotion, how agitation affects
our digestion and uh. In the whole time he's he's
(11:56):
also testing various meats to see what the rate, like,
how how does chicken stack up against beef? At one
point he uh puts twelve raw oysters to let directly
through the stomach hole. Sounds about right, right right, and
uh and yeah, this continues for about a decade and
it and it really is important work in our in
(12:16):
our historical understanding of how the digestive system works. Yeah,
thanks to St. Martin. And the crazy thing too, is
that Alexei St. Martin lived to the eighty six years old.
That's fifty eight years after his accident. That alone is amazing,
but along the way he was able to make kind
of a career out of this. Well. Also amazing because
duct tape wasn't invented yet, right, I mean, how how
(12:36):
is he you know keeping um, you know, presumably he
was changing out the poultices. Yeah, um, that we're covering
the wound. But I mean that is incredible. I mean
he outlived but yeah, and at one point he had
moved away and then he ended up moving back with
his family, like Billmont was able to let to lure
him back into these experiments. Yeah, there's no real definitive
(12:59):
accounts there, but there there there's some suggestions that the
it was an odd relationship and um, as you talked
about before, the family wasn't very supportive of Hey, let's
why don't you go let this guy poke around you all?
You know. Year. Yeah, when he when Alexei finally died
at this rifled age, his family let his body decompose
in the sun for a few days before they buried
(13:20):
him in an unmarked grave because because they didn't want
people digging and they didn't want an autopsy performed on him.
They didn't want anybody poking around anymore with him. And
you know, if to say, look, you really did enough
of this while he was alive, and we would really
like to mourn, um, you know, a husband the father
or a grandfather, and not just a dude with a
hole in his stomach. He was leave him alone already,
(13:43):
I think what they were saying. Um. All right, so
now we know how how it was done in the
olden days. Um. Right after this message, we'll talk about
the amazing technology that we had today. All right, we're back.
Now we're moving into a more modern understanding of of
what's going on inside the human body and uh in
(14:04):
our ability to poke around inside it. Long before Beaumont,
we were of course interested in this, and long before Beaumont,
doctors were poking around in the various holes in the
human body. Uh. And you had physicians even as far
back as the tenth century a d. Who were trying
to develop devices that would allow them to better see
the inside of the human body through various body orifices,
(14:27):
and through the eight hundred you actually you've had several
scientists attempting to construct actual endoscopic instruments. But it wasn't
until basically the the mid eighteen hundreds and then eventually
the early twentieth century that this technology began to really
take hold. And certainly it was the sixties and seventies
before we were actually using endoscopic technology to to view
(14:49):
inside the human body. The indios endoscope. Just think of
it like a telescope, except instead of looking at the
cosmos looking outward, we're looking inward. Right, And it pokes
inside the body through either one of its naturally occurring
holes or a surgical incision. Right. And a lot of
people are familiar with this with these endoscopies and colonoscopies. Right.
(15:11):
And the traditional way to do this as a person
who goes endoscopic ultrasound and they're sedated prior to this. UM.
After sedation, the doctor in search the endoscope into the
person's mouth a rectum and then observes the intestinal track
on a TV monitor in the ultrasound image on another monitor.
So this is how we can sort of turn ourselves
inside out what we've been doing in the past at least.
(15:34):
So the problem with this, um, I mean, it's a
great technology, but the problem is that you know, obviously
the you could accidentally puncture an oregon or some other
accident that could occur. This doesn't happen a lot, but
it could result in death. Um, it's a little bit
more invasive than you probably want it to be, right, Yeah,
you're ultimately sticking a camera, very narrow camera into a
(15:56):
hole in the body, So there is the potential first
for injury to take place. Yeah, but it's incredibly useful
for trying to detect calling, cancers, digestive disorders, nodules, just
any number of things that you want to know more
about that you can only go inside. Yeah. Yeah, it
allows the doctor to look at things that that they
(16:17):
otherwise would not be able to see and will not
be able to examine and diagnose. The technology really became
advanced around the six That was at the point where
we had a video computer chip technology that allowed magnification
and projection of images from an endoscope. So that this
is for the point where it really began to be
useful during general surgery, even where you could you could
(16:41):
you could actually have an image of of what's going
on inside the human body projected or displayed on the
television screen during surgery. And then of course, um you
capsule into scopes came more into vogue in the two
thousands and they started to be used widely, and at
that time they were unable to propel themselves. They were
like more on muscle contractions to move them along but
(17:03):
the cool part of this is that this is really
where the fantastic voyage comes into play. Talking about a capsule,
you know, the size of a vitamin that has the
camera in it. That is really far less invasive, right,
it's it's uh. If you think of the digestion system,
is this is highway that food has to travel and
it tends to run figures very but it's the digestion
(17:24):
system from mouth to anus is somewhere between twenty two
and twenty six ft in length. And if you are
limited by tethers by a pole, if your car was
had some sort of rope on the end of it.
R yeah. Yeah. It's like imagine you had to pump
gasoline through a hose to your car. You can only
travel so far. Become before we just become it just
(17:46):
wouldn't be feasible anymore. Like diving comes to mind as
you know, an example of this. If you're having to
pipe air down to the diver. Uh, you know, it
just becomes more and more of a pain, and it
becomes it ultimately isn't feasible and want to keep coiling
out the pipe. What you want is a diver with
a tank so that they're independent of the of any
(18:08):
tether to the surface world. And that's what's happening here.
If you could put it in a capsule, the individual
can swallow it and you can travel the whole course
without having wires or lines or anything trailing down one
orifice or up another. And then a doctor could manipulate right, right,
Because that's the other thing too. We want to be
able to manipulate the capsule, and you want to be
(18:29):
able to fit enough, like you know, you you want
to get a camera in there, and you're you're gonna
need power in there, but you don't want to necessarily
have a couple of double a's, You don't you don't
want to have to have room in there for digital
storage of the of the photos because this is this
is gonna travel through the human body and needs to
be relatively small in size. It's going to go through
the poop shoot and you don't want necessarily all that
(18:50):
data to go into the toilet, right, So you want
it to go elsewhere so that you have access to it.
So let's talk a little bit more about the specs
on this. Yeah, some of these are about the size
of the vitamin um, but some of the more experimental
versions have actually gotten down as small as a as
a piece of rice grain of rice, which is and
(19:10):
they're able to to solve some of these problems of
size by actually having the individual who has swallowed the
capsule where a belt, and this belt has the technology
to both uh being power to the capsule so that
doesn't have to have an onboard power source, and it
has the ability to receive images from the camera, so
(19:31):
the camera is out putting the images to a contraption
on the belt, right, and it has a magnetic field
that allows a tart to to actually manipulate the pill
to go where he or she wants it to go. Yeah,
and when we're talking about taking images, we're talking uh,
you know somewhere in the neighborhood of like eight D
seventy thousand images. That's the that's the number that's given
(19:53):
for the Saka endscopic capsule that was developed by the
Japanese RF System Lab. This was a pretty ma using
a little piece of technology, especially when you consider that
it achieves all of these these goals while only costing
around a hundred dollars. So it's actually a disposable camera
passes through the human body, and then the patient doesn't
have to dig it out of their stool at the
(20:14):
end of it. It's just completely another advantage people. I
would yeah, I would think so unless you want, you know,
you could I guess you could get it out of
there and keep it as a souvenir. But but if
you're squamish about that sort of thing, just I guess
flush it. Yeah, And this procedure really is considered low risk.
There's a chance that the capsule becoming watching the intestine,
but that usually happens about one percent of the cases
(20:37):
that happens. Uh. They can remove it with a scope
or through surgery. Right. The next stage in the development
of the Fantastic Voyage, though, is the idea of a
self propelled intoscopic camera, so it's it's not having to
depend on either muscle contractions or magnetic fields to move.
There's this a little device called the Mermaid, and it
comes to us from Japan's Koku Universe and Osaka Medical College,
(21:01):
and it it's called the Mermaid, but it actually looks
more like a tadpole. It's a it's one of these
little capsule and the scupic cameras, but it has this
little tail that it actually uses to propel itself throughout
the digestive system. It can go in at either end,
swim around, and apparently make it through the entire body
in just a few hours, as opposed to well what
(21:22):
is supposed to like several hours with the other types
of capsules. Yeah, and a cornby sandwich will typically run
two hours. Put that in perspective with normal traffic flow
through the human body. Yeah, so that's like the bullet train. Yeah,
of technology for for the capsule. The doctors on the
outside will be able to control it, control it with
(21:43):
the joystick and there there's also they would have a
certain amount of autonomous navigation as well. You could sort
of do its own thing in there. Okay, so it
could possibly be programmed to go and do it something
and scoop up data. Um, so some people have said
by people, I mean there have been some scientists who
say and some researchers who who questioned the amount of
(22:05):
data that is transmitting And so their argument is, and
there have not been a lot of studies on this,
so we don't know definitely, their question is can you
really have that much data those that many images and
be able to look through it in a very thorough
way and catch everything. Yeah. Their their argument is that
(22:27):
images is maybe too much for anybody to process. Anyway,
if if you've ever been subjected to vacation photos and
uh and and and no editing has been used, you
probably know what they're talking about, Like they're there. An
individual can only look at so many photos and diagnose
what's happening in And this is often the case. Our
(22:47):
ability to collect data outpaces our ability to process it
with the same technology. So when we can have an
automated or remote control camera that can take all this stuff,
we we don't uh, we don't have the processing technology
to just load it into a computer and say, all right, computer,
let me know which images are a little suspect so
that an actual doctor can look at them. Which maybe
that's the next step. Yeah, I may imagine it will be,
(23:09):
but right now, that is that's the main point that's
being made. Is just just like you would um here
in an argument about security, like if you have a
million cameras all collecting data, you know, do you have
the manpower to actually go through and detect a security threat?
But you know that's that'll probably be easily solved because
I mean, imagine if you were you're an editor of
the small paper and you send a photographer out to
(23:30):
cover an event and they bring back eight hundred and
sixty thousand images. That's not the answer you want. You
want show me the good ones, show me the ones
that should be concerned about, right right, Yeah, But you
know that being said, this is a great technology and um,
you know it's it's been growing something like twelve point
nine percent annually since two thousand and seven. And it's
not just the digestive system. Galermo Tyarney at the Messages
(23:52):
General Hospital in Boston has been working on and using
this technology to examine what's going on in arteries to
figure out ways to detect dangerous blood clots uh and
ultimately deal with them at this micro scale. So not
like you know, the fantastic voyage where where they have
a little beam they are trying to laser beam that
(24:12):
they're trying to repair the clot. But same idea, right,
So that's the very exciting thing about this. And we
bring up Aubrey de Gray that the bearded um, the
bearded one as we call him, the Jerry O excuse me,
bio gerontologist and he talks about this very sort of
thing as being part and parcel of living to be
a thousand years old. If you can have a sort
(24:32):
of self maintenance at this level, detecting illnesses diseases before
they get out of hand, then boom, you are setting
yourself up for a much lengthier life. Yeah. Yeah, and
the technology is headed there. I mean, it's it's easy
to imagine, just as we've seen the technology improved from
a a a camera wand that we we shove up
(24:54):
the rectum, that we've seen an advance from that to
a capsule or even something the size of a grain
rise that we swallow. It's easy to imagine it coming
to the point where you would swallow this little, little
tiny device and it would swim around and it would
not only diagnose, but potentially address problems in the digestive system. Yeah,
it's it's completely amazing. And it's also hasn't it has
(25:16):
it not been used for art? Did you send me
a link? Yeah, yeah, there's there's an art project. Um
it's art installation by media artist Stephanie Bardon that's called
m to A. M to A refers to the endoscopic capsule,
the ones that we've just been talking about. The name
is short from mouth to anus and the captured video
is combined with data from a separate capsule that since
(25:36):
this pH and pressure and the gastro intestinal tract. So
what she did is she fed one subject a meal
of top Raymond, gatorade and gummy bears classic classic Neil
that good stuff to observe getting broken down. She fed
another subject handmade noodles okay, pomegranate cherry juice, gummy bears
(25:59):
and hybisc gatorade gatoradeing quote. So the more whole foods
aspect of the um the boxed foods. So she was
trying to look at the difference in digestion and it's
really interesting. Um, I don't know how scientifically tight some
of her her observations are, but it is scored to
(26:20):
a disco version of the flight of the bumblebee. Oh
very nice. I mean, that's that's panache right there. That
is wow. So yeah, once again we're happy to share strange,
grotesque guests or intestinal art with you guys, and we
will be sure to include a link to that and
other related topics on the blog posted a companies to
this podcast. So don't worry about having to actually go
(26:40):
out in Google that particular art project, because there's no
telling where you'll wind up. That's right. You don't want
to get into digestive videos take a nasty turn. All right,
here comes Arnie. Oh, here's a robot with our listener mail.
All right, what do you have for us today? All right? First,
all we heard from while one listener who was concerned
(27:03):
when she heard a listener mail that mentioned listening to
our podcast while riding a bicycle. She was concerned that
this was not safe. Um that you know, you're gonna
be distracted if you have your headphones in and you're
listening to the podcast. We're not going to tell you,
guys how or when to listen to the podcast, but
do just be careful out there, because I mean, God forbid,
something should happen to you when you're riding on a
bicycle listening to our podcast, because I think if you
(27:25):
die while listening to our episode on the Rat King,
if that's the last thing, uh you hear, you're probably
not gonna get into heaven. Sorry, yeah, well our heads Yeah,
so yeah, just be careful there, guys. Uh. And then
we also heard from Amanda from Australia. Amanda writes in
and said, I've been listening to your podcast for a
(27:45):
while now, but I usually download them in batches, so
I could be a little late with this one. And
she's finding to our cheating in the name of the episode,
which actually isn't that old, and and certainly never worry
about responding to an old topic. We're happy to revisit them.
She says. The podcast about cheating reminding me of something
I did in chemistry exam during my first year of university.
There were only about five minutes lefting the exam and
(28:06):
I had absolutely no clue how to even begin the
last question. Honestly, I can't even remember what the question
was about, so instead of attempting to answer it or cheating,
I wrote insert Act of God here. Apparently my tutor
loved it because I got part marks on this question
for originality. Well, I know that isn't It wasn't cheating.
I thought I would share my experience because it was
(28:26):
an interesting way of getting extra marks for an exam.
Thanks for the podcast, Amanda. All right, kids, you heard
it there. Try that out and let out and let
us know how that shakes out. For everyone else. And
then we also heard from a listener by the name
of Victoria, and Victoria was responding to our episode about
the rat King, The Layer of the Rat King. She says, Hello,
I wanted to thank you for your podcast on the
(28:48):
rat King. I brought up. It brought up many memories
for me, and I wanted to share them with you.
And then she shares them kind of a stream of
conscious way that I really did. She says, there was
the underwater version of the nutclut Hecker Ballet, complete with
dancing lobsters about by the Milwaukee Ballet, my college professor's
lecture on the plague and rats uh the whole time
(29:09):
with a piece of tissue peeking out of his left nostril,
The story of my mother actually finding a rat in
the toilet when we lived in the Philippines I was
too young to remember, and seeing my first cat sized
rat upon moving to Baltimore. Thanks for such a great episode.
I enjoy listening to you. I love that. I love
like when whatever episodes just hits one of you guys,
like on all cylinders, and I feel like we're just
(29:31):
sort of like tapping into your mind. Yeah, So if
you would like to tap into our mind. You can
find us on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter.
On Facebook, just search for stuff to Blow your Mind.
You will find us on Twitter. Our handle is blow
the Mind, so you know, shoot us, get us some
comments on there. We're happy to listen to you, and
you can always send us an email at blow the
(29:53):
Mind at Discovery dot com. Be sure to check out
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. It's join
how staf Work staff as we explore the most promising
and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.
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