25 Terrifying and Fascinating Facts About Gases

[00:00:00]The air you're breathing right now, mostly useless nitrogen. But dig just a little deeper and the chemistry [music] gets genuinely wild. We're talking about a gas that turns your voice into a cinematic supervillain, a party drug for British elites that accidentally revolutionized medicine, and a ticking time bomb under the Arctic that could permanently break the climate. I'm like with this 25 and these are 25 terrifying and fascinating facts about gases. 25, you are half factory. Before the 20th century, human population growth was hard capped by how much nitrogen the soil could naturally produce. Without it, you can't grow crops or build muscles. Then came the Haber-Bosch process. Scientists figured out how to yank nitrogen right out of the air using insane heat and pressure to make synthetic fertilizer. It completely broke the biological bottleneck. Today, roughly 50% of the nitrogen atoms in your body originated inside an industrial chemical factory. 24, found on the sun. Every single element on the periodic table was discovered here on Earth first, [music] except one. In 1868, astronomers staring at a solar eclipse spotted a chemical signature they didn't recognize. They named it helium after the Greek sun god. It took another 27 years before anyone actually found it on Earth. It was floating around us the whole time, but it took starlight for us to finally notice it.

[00:01:23]23, [music] too dangerous for Nazis.

[00:01:26]During World War II, German scientists cooked up a chemical weapon called chlorine trifluoride. It was an absolute nightmare. It burns at over 2400° C and doesn't even need a spark. It just spontaneously catches fire when it touches literally anything organic and it explodes on contact with water. The Nazis built an entire factory to mass produce it, then abruptly shut it down.

[00:01:49]No, they didn't grow a conscience. They just realized it was way too dangerous for their own troops to handle. 22, Earth's first mass murder. We think of oxygen as the stuff of life. When it first showed up, it was a weapon of mass destruction. About two and a half billion years ago, early microbes started pumping out oxygen. For the dominant life forms at the time, this was catastrophic because oxygen was completely toxic to them. As it built up in the atmosphere, it wiped them out in what scientists literally call the oxygen catastrophe. Everything alive today descended from the few mutants that managed to survive. 21, the ocean's lungs. When we talk about saving Earth's oxygen supply, everyone instantly points to the Amazon rainforest. We really should be pointing at the ocean.

[00:02:33]Microscopic phytoplankton produce anywhere from 50 to 85% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. Just one specific type handles a fifth of the planet's oxygen all by itself. The air you breathe is actually way more dependent on healthy oceans than healthy trees. [music] 20, the unaffordable anesthetic. Xenon is basically the holy grail of surgical anesthetics. It works instantly, clears out your system fast, keeps your heart stable, and even actively protects your brain during surgery. So, [music] why aren't you getting it? Because it's absurdly expensive. Xenon only exists in tiny trace amounts in the atmosphere and has to be extracted from liquid air. The energy costs make it economically impossible for routine surgical use. So, it just [music] sits on a shelf. 19, defying gravity. If you cool helium down to -271° C, the normal laws of physics just stop applying. It becomes a superfluid with zero viscosity. If you pour it into a cup, it'll literally climb up the walls, flow over the edge, and empty itself. It moves straight up against gravity because there's absolutely no internal friction stopping it. It stops acting like a liquid and starts behaving like one giant quantum object. 18, toxic [music] pure oxygen. Oxygen already wiped out most of Earth's life once.

[00:03:51]Turns out, too much of it isn't great for you, either. Our bodies are built for air that's roughly 21% oxygen. If you breathe 100% pure oxygen, it completely overwhelms your system.

[00:04:03]Within 16 hours, it starts actively destroying the tissue inside your lungs.

[00:04:07]Keep going, and it attacks your nervous system. More is definitely not [music] better. 17, bathing in carcinogens.

[00:04:15]Every year, tens of thousands of people flock to a Ukrainian resort town to soak in radioactive water. The mineral springs are loaded with radon gas, and visitors claim it cures joint pain and inflammation. The World Health Organization heavily disagrees. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer on Earth. It shoots alpha radiation directly into your DNA. There is absolutely zero safe level of radon exposure, but the spas stay packed anyway. 16, crowds make you dumber.

[00:04:45]Carbon dioxide gets a lot of press as a climate issue, but it's also actively ruining your ability to think. Normal outside air is about 400 parts per million of CO2. Pack a bunch of people into a poorly ventilated conference room, and that number skyrockets past 2,000. Studies show your cognitive performance drops by 50% at those levels. We regularly make our most important business decisions in rooms designed to quietly suffocate our brains. 15, the red meat illusion. A lot of packaged beef in the US gets hit with trace amounts of carbon monoxide before the plastic is sealed. The gas reacts with the proteins to lock in a bright cherry red color. The problem is that it locks the color in permanently. The meat could be way past its prime and actively spoiling, but will still look perfectly fresh on the shelf. The FDA says it's fine, but places like Canada and the EU ban the practice specifically because it tricks consumers. 14, the furry convention attack. In 2014, someone dropped shattered glass jars full of pool chlorine acid in a stairwell at a massive hotel in Chicago. They deliberately created a chlorine gas weapon right in the middle of the Midwest Fur Fest convention. 19 people were hospitalized and the entire building was evacuated into the freezing cold. The FBI investigated but more than a decade later it remains totally unsolved. Nobody knows who did it or why. 13, [music] the smell of tragedy.

[00:06:12]Natural gas is completely odorless. You would never know if your house was filling up with it. The gross rotten egg smell we associate with gas today is an artificial additive and it only exists because of a massive tragedy. In 1937, an undetected gas leak built up under a school in New London, Texas. A random spark ignited it killing nearly 300 students and teachers. Within months, Texas forced companies to add that foul smell and the rest of the world quickly followed. 12, the radioactive house. In 1984, an engineer named Stanley Watras walked into the nuclear power plant where he worked and set off the radiation alarms. The crazy part? The plant didn't even have nuclear fuel yet.

[00:06:53]They tested him and realized he was tracking the radiation in from home. His house was built on soil pumping out insane levels of radon gas, higher than an active uranium mine. Finding out your house is radioactive is a pretty terrible way to end the work day. What's the absolute weirdest or worst thing you've ever discovered hiding in a place you lived? Let me know in the comments.

[00:07:13]11, high society medicine. Nitrous oxide or laughing gas was discovered in 1772, but instead of using it for medicine, the British upper class spent the next 40 years just getting high at exclusive parties. Guests would inhale it from silk bags and stumble around the room.

[00:07:30]The guy who popularized it even wrote down that it seemed to numb physical pain hinting it could be used for surgery. Nobody cared. They just kept partying for another four decades until a dentist finally put the pieces together in 1844. 10, the detonated by a scratch. Diazomethane is an incredibly useful gas for synthetic chemistry, but it is an absolute nightmare to handle.

[00:07:53]The molecule is so wildly unstable that the tiniest amount of energy will tear it apart. Even the microscopic friction from a tiny scratch on a glass beaker is enough to trigger a massive explosion.

[00:08:04]Chemists have to use perfectly polished, scratch-free glassware and blast shields just to survive working with it. Nine, the banana radius. Bananas release heavy amounts of ethylene gas as they ripen.

[00:08:17]It's a natural plant hormone, and it actively forces anything sitting nearby to ripen faster, too. Commercial agriculture uses this trick industrially to ripen green tomatoes for grocery stores, but it's happening right in your kitchen counter. If you leave a banana next to an avocado, you're basically gassing the avocado into aging faster.

[00:08:36]Eight, the Darth Vader effect. Helium makes your voice high because it's lighter than air. Sulfur hexafluoride does the exact opposite. It's five times heavier than air, so it slows sound waves down and drops your voice into a deep, cinematic, supervillain rumble. I don't have either of those gases, I'm sorry. But, because it's so heavy, it actually sinks and pools at the bottom of your lungs. You literally have to hang upside down to cough it out, or it'll just silently suffocate you without any warning.

[00:09:06]Fine. Seven, the green tech irony.

[00:09:09]Nitrogen trifluoride is a gas used heavily to manufacture flat screens and solar panels. Tech companies switched to it because older chemicals were destroying the ozone layer. There's just one massive oversight. It's 17,200 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas, and it sticks around for over 700 years. The production of green tech is ironically leaking a catastrophic climate warming gas right back into the atmosphere. Six, healing flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is the toxic gas that makes flatulence smell like rotten eggs, but at incredibly low microscopic concentrations, it's actually beneficial. Your body produces tiny amounts of it naturally.

[00:09:49]Researchers found that it protects cells, reduces inflammation, and helps repair brain tissue. Pharmaceutical companies are literally developing drugs right now to release controlled bursts of fart gas directly inside your body.

[00:10:01]Can't wait to tell Kiera.

[00:10:03]Oh, she's so stinky. Five, coal to drywall. Sulfur dioxide is the nasty stuff that pours out of coal plants and causes acid rain, but power plants use heavy scrubbers to capture it. They mix it with limestone and water, which turns it into synthetic gypsum. Gypsum is the core ingredient in drywall. Right now, about 30% of the drywall used to build American homes is directly made from the captured pollution of coal-fired power plants. Four, the Arctic time bomb.

[00:10:30]Underneath the Arctic permafrost is one of the most terrifying climate triggers on Earth. There's an insane amount of organic matter frozen solid in the dirt.

[00:10:39]As the permafrost thaws, ancient microbes wake up, eat that organic matter, and burp out massive amounts of methane. Methane traps heat over 30 times more effectively than CO2. If this fully thaws, it creates an unstoppable feedback loop. More warming equals more thawing, which equals more methane, completely out of human control. Three, the wrong end. Everyone makes the joke about cow flatulence destroying the ozone layer. But that joke is aimed at the wrong end of the animal. Up to 95% of the methane cattle produce actually comes from burping. The gas is generated in their upper digestive tract as they break down grass. A single cow burps out hundreds of liters of methane a day. If we want to fix agricultural emissions, we have to deal with the burps. Two, earthquake alarms. Before massive earthquakes, monitoring stations often pick up unusual spikes in radon gas leading out of the soil. It happened right before massive quakes in Kobe and Tohoku. As tectonic plates grind and build pressure, tiny cracks form deep in the rock, letting trapped radon escape to the surface early. It isn't reliable enough to be a foolproof early warning system yet, but scientists are treating it as one of our absolute best shots at predicting when the ground's going to snap. One, a cure from catastrophe. In 1943, a German bomber hit an American ship in an Italian harbor. The ship was secretly carrying a massive payload of mustard gas. It exploded, blanketing the harbor in toxic chemicals. A military doctor examining the victims noticed something incredible. The mustard gas specifically targeted and destroyed fast-dividing cells in the bone marrow.

[00:12:15]Cancer is fundamentally a disease of fast-dividing cells. They connected the dots, researchers started running trials, and the very first chemotherapy drugs were born directly from the ashes of a chemical weapon disaster.

[00:12:27]Invisible, weightless, and quietly running the entire planet. It turns out the stuff you can't see is almost always the most important. [music] If the periodic table is your kind of rabbit hole, you're going to have to check out the video on your screen right now. 25 weirdest elements on the periodic table.

[00:12:43]As always, I'm Mike McAslin.

[00:12:46]Stay curious.

[00:12:47]I'll see you in the next one.