Like a Dirty Rotten Whale
We’re cleaning out the proverbial fridge, but instead of old food, it’s fantastic and forgotten questions from the Outside/Inbox. Conversation topics include Taylor’s humiliatingly old headlamp, the olfactory experience of a dead whale and, of course, the answers to the following queries…
Do humans have a mating season?
Why do so many deer collisions happen in November?
I live next to a highway. What can I do about the noise pollution?
In the final Lord of the Rings movie, there’s a crust that forms on top of the lava that the ring is thrown onto. Is that legit?
Featuring Christopher Schell, Eric Nystrom, and Erica Walker.
Thanks to our listeners who called in: Dusty, Kyle, Claire, Amanda, Gretchen, Zach, and Sabrina.
We’re looking for new submissions to the Outside/Inbox! Send us those questions by recording yourself on a voice memo, and emailing that to us at outsidein@nhpr.org. Or you can call our hotline: 1-844-GO-OTTER.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
If you want to learn more about noise pollution check out our episode “Shhhh! It’s the sound and silence episode.”
Check out for yourself what those clunky old mining headlamps used to look like.
SUPPORT
To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.
Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.
CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and produced by Marina Henke, Felix Poon and Nate Hegyi
Mixed by Marina Henke, Felix Poon and Nate Hegyi
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Marina Henke
Our staff also includes Justine Paradis and Jessica Hunt
Executive producer: Taylor Quimby
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR. This is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am Nate Hegyi here with the whole freaking team. Well, almost the entire team. Justine. We'll see you soon. But we got Marina Henke.
Marina Henke: Hello.
Nate Hegyi: Taylor Quimby.
Taylor Quimby: Here.
Nate Hegyi: And the magical, mysterious. Felix Poon.
Felix Poon: I am here.
Taylor Quimby: I wish there was a podcast version of, like, running onto the field and, like, bursting through the paper archway. You know.
Nate Hegyi: I wish that as well. So we're just, like, sitting here drinking coffee.
Taylor Quimby: It is coffee o'clock.
Marina Henke: Well, for you, it's always coffee o'clock Taylor
Taylor Quimby: And for Nate it's like 3 a.m. or something.
Nate Hegyi: It is still dark outside.
Marina Henke: Oh my God.
Felix Poon: Is it really? No, it's not actually dark out.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. It’s eight in the morning.
Taylor Quimby: Eight in the morning in Alaska though. How many hours of daylight you getting these days?
Nate Hegyi: We're doing well. We get 8:30 to 3:45 right now. But remember, in the summertime, it's like 3 a.m. to 11 p.m..
Felix Poon: But that's like, not good. How do you fall asleep?
Nate Hegyi: I can sleep with light out. It's pretty easy.
Taylor Quimby: You know, it's weird. I love to nap in sunlight like a cat or a dog. But at night I like it dark. Why is that, do you think?
Nate Hegyi: Is this one of our questions?
Taylor Quimby: No, no, but I'm saying, like the sunlight. It's not just like I like… I get sleepier in sunlight if it's a nap.
Nate Hegyi: Taylor. You get, you get sleepy anywhere and everywhere you get sleepy driving cars, if I remember correctly.
Felix Poon: That's because cars like are like a massage chair.
Taylor Quimby: What are you driving?
Nate Hegyi: Well, are you when you're driving, are you cruise controlling it?
Taylor Quimby: Oh, I go back and forth. Kind of depends what traffic's like.
Nate Hegyi: Because I had to take a, I had to take a, so in order to get your Alaska driver's license, you have to take a knowledge test. It's just tons of questions. And one of them was like, which of the following is not true? And it was like, if you're driving with cruise control, like road hypnosis and fall asleep. And I was like, that's not true. And it was one of the ones that was true!
Marina Henke: That's totally true. I don't drive with cruise control for this exact reason.
Felix Poon: I mean, that's one of those subjective questions that they put on a multiple choice. That's like some people do, maybe some people not, I don't know. It depends on other factors. Maybe you're blasting heavy metal, like on cruise control. It's going to keep you up.
Marina Henke: Okay. Wow. Well I think we should maybe be sending in our questions to the Outside/Inbox, but we can't.
Felix Poon: I'll start my burner account and start sending these questions.
[MUX IN: Moons of Saturn]
Nate Hegyi: There you go.
Marina Henke: Okay. We've maybe buried the lead here, but we are gathered to hear some questions from our trusted outside inbox. There's no theme this time. I know sometimes we have them, except that these were all great, they are kind of weird, and some of them are kind of old.
Taylor Quimby: The theme that you just described is basically like, we're going through a refrigerator that needs cleaning, like old expired questions from the very back of the outside inbox for fridge.
Nate Hegyi: It smells a little funky in here where we're diving in.
Marina Henke: We're going to kick it off after a short break. Uh, nobody get road hypnosis in the meantime.
AD BREAK
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR. This is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am here with the whole team today to answer questions from our Outside/Inbox.
Marina Henke: Should we dive in?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, let's do it.
Felix Poon: This is exciting.
Marina Henke: Okay. All right, here is our first question.
Dusty: I've got a question to you all about smell and dogs. So last winter we had a whale wash up on the tidal flats on the edge of town. And that whale over the last 6 or 7 months has been just rotting and decaying on the tidal flats in the beach. And a couple of weeks ago, my dog and my friend's dog decided they wanted to go roll in the whale, which smells as bad as you can imagine a decomposing whale smelling. Which brings me to my question, which is why do dogs love to roll in things so much? I understand that they have a really strong sense of smell and why they're interested in sniffing or maybe eating things that we would find gross. But what is it about rolling in things and getting that in their coat that they like so much? Thank you. Bye.
Marina Henke: All right. That was Dusty from Anchorage.
Nate Hegyi: Oh, from Anchorage. I knew it was going to be somewhere in Alaska.
Taylor Quimby: It would have been funny if he was like, I'm from Oklahoma.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, it would have been concerning.
Taylor Quimby: Like, there's a bigger question here.
Nate Hegyi: I think they're rolling it because, uh, if I remember correctly, because my dog rolls in dead salmon, that it's some ancient trait from when they were wolves or wolf like to essentially like show their buddies, hey, when you go back to the pack, like, check out what I found.
Felix Poon: It's like how they can bottle up a scent and bring it to their friends.
Taylor Quimby: I had a completely different theory, which is I was going with the also old wolf trait, but like the hunter theory, which is they like smells that mask their doggy, you know, like all that human dog shampoo and all that kind of nice smelling stuff that we put on our dogs. They're like trying to get all that off so they smell yeah, like a dirty, rotten whale. And they can sneak up on, you know, some unsuspecting smaller animal.
Marina Henke: Could it just also be like a delightful sensory experience? It's a smushy dead piece of flesh. And like, it feels cool and gooey on their little dog skin.
Taylor Quimby: I can just imagine a dog being like, “ooh, cool and gooey!” Well, I guess maybe we don't know. Or maybe Nate's right.
Felix Poon: I guess there's only one way to find out.
Marina Henke: Ooh.
Nate Hegyi: Which is do journalism.
[MUX IN: Tall Harvey ]
Marina Henke: Okay, it has been a few months since we batted around these questions. I would say that Nate, you've gone off you've done the journalism. So let's hear what we found.
Nate Hegyi: So this is a very familiar problem for me. My dog, he has an uncanny ability to find every single dead fish on the beach and roll in it. It happens so much these days that it is very normal for me to just take a shower with him after a walk to my nose. It is disgusting. But to him.
Chris Schell: Your dog is probably doing that because they really enjoy it. It's just play behavior.
Nate Hegyi: Chris Schell is an urban ecologist and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Chris Schell: The animals are getting a kick out of all of the novel scents, and because their olfaction is dozens of times more sensitive than ours is they get a lot of exhilaration and joy from just rolling around in that stuff.
Nate Hegyi: But dogs aren't just gluttons for pleasure. One kind of obvious reason they're attracted to dead stuff is that they like to eat dead stuff. And just like their canid cousins, wolves and coyotes, dogs are pack animals. So getting back to the den and smelling like rotting fish says something.
Chris Schell: It allows him to communicate with others in their tribe that, hey, there's some food over here. Look, I smell like it.
Nate Hegyi: Kind of like how humans will post a photo of a pretty sunset or a superbloom on Instagram. For dogs, it's more like #dead salmon. #rotting whale. Now, sometimes dogs roll in dead stuff, not because they want to smell like it, but because they want it to smell like them. This is known as scent marking. It's a way to tell other dogs that this decaying chunk of fur and meat is mine. I got dibs, stay away! Chris says canines aren't the only animals getting up close and personal with the dead. Elephants, for example, will often rub their trunks on other dead elephants.
Chris Schell: They may partly be doing that to assimilate the scents from the dead organism, to then honor that organism, which also comes in the form of animal culture. Right. Many cultures within animal societies mourn their dead.
Nate Hegyi: I would like to think that this is what one of my dogs, Gilly, was doing when she literally rolled in the skeleton of another dead dog. That image, by the way, seared into my memory. Anywho, the list of why animals roll in dead stuff continues.
Chris Schell: So if you smell like something dead, there may be animals that don't want to eat you.
Nate Hegyi: You think Walking Dead right where the heroes cover themselves in blood and guts so they don't get eaten by zombies. Finally, there are crows and ravens. We talked about this on a recent episode of Outside/In, but.
Chris Schell: Crows may not necessarily roll around in the dead material of one of their compatriots, but they certainly will circle around their dead compatriot to investigate what may have happened to that animal.
Nate Hegyi: They essentially act as murder investigators. But this isn't the only reason crows will get cozy with another dead bird. Very occasionally, crows have been observed having sex with the dead. This tends to happen during mating season, so scientists think maybe their hormones are just going wild and they pick the wrong mate. So Dusty, at least be happy your dog isn't doing that to a rotting whale.
[MUX IN, Greylock]
Taylor Quimby: Well, congratulations, Nate, because I think that might be the first necrophilia reference in Outside/In history, as far as I know.
Nate Hegyi: There’s gotta be a first. Got to be a first for everything.
Felix Poon: So. So do animals not have the sense of disgust that humans have? Is this a uniquely human experience?
Nate Hegyi: No, because there's other things, Taylor, I'm sure you can say this as well, that really gross out dogs like that are appealing to us like soap smells. I feel like if I put up soap near my dog's nose, it's like, oh no, that's disgusting.
Taylor Quimby: It's hard to tell from my dog the difference between something that she's disgusted by or terrified by, because she is afraid of many, many things.
Marina: Poor Gabby.
Taylor Quimby: By the way, #RottingWhale would be a great name for a podcast.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, absolutely.
Marina Henke: I say change it now at the end of the show, reintroducing Outside/In, #rottingwhale.
Taylor Quimby: Can we make a new a new theme song?
Felix Poon: How does it go? Taylor.
Taylor Quimby: I think it would be like a death metal, hashtag rotting whalllllleee.
Nate Hegyi: We need more death metal in this podcast.
[MUX IN, I Despise, Epidemic]
Marina Henke: All right, I say we go to the next question.
Taylor Quimby: Let's do it.
Kyle: Hello, this is Kyle Beachum calling from Derby, Kansas. Do humans have a mating season? I know some animals do. I'm not sure if every animal does. We're animals. Do humans have a mating season Yes or no.
Taylor Quimby: Ooh. This is a good question.
Nate Hegyi: No. Because like the question is obviously like deer and other animals, the fall, the rut is the mating season. But that's only because I think, I think they only go into heat around the same time.
Taylor Quimby: It's like the question between, is there a true specific mating season and no mating the rest of the time, right. Versus a large increase in mating activity based off of biological processes during certain times of year, but technically, they could still do a little mating in the off season.
Nate Hegyi: I will say, I will say there are a lot of September birthdays, right?
Felix Poon: I was just about to say that !I would say if there is a mating season, quote unquote, or like changes in mating habits, it's due to something that's very unique to humans, which is culture. We have a New Year's that is like, you know, different cultures have different New Year's… but maybe what we need to look at are a cross-cultural comparison of birth rates compared nine months after their New Year. You know, is there like kind of a consistent spike?
Marina Henke: So in that way, like a social mating season rather than a biological mating season.
NH: Okay, so Kyle, the answer is no. But an interesting thing to think about.
Marina Henke: Yeah. Can you imagine if we had this, if humans were like, yeah, it's the first two weeks of May that humans are able to reproduce fun.
Felix Poon: You know, it's like…
Taylor Quimby: It’d be like a global spring break.
Felix Poon: Yeah, someone should start this!
Marina Henke: Okay, okay. Next question. We're moving on. We're moving on.
[MUX IN, The Crisper]
Marina Henke: From Salem, New Hampshire Amanda says, I happened to cross the border into Massachusetts, where the electronic highway signs all say the same thing. 25% of deer collisions happen in November 1st. Why do a quarter of all deer collisions happen in one month? Is it just that it's a rutting season? More cars on the road. Some terrible confluence of the two. Second part is how do we drive? And best avoid a deer.
Taylor Quimby: Nate, what do you, what do you know about the rut theory?
Nate Hegyi: Uh, I think well, okay, so I used to live in Montana in a very deer-heavy area. And I remember when we would drive the hour and a half between our little house out in the middle of nowhere to the next biggest town in November during the rut, the rut being when they all congregate together to mate and make babies and they get really dumb. Uh, it is like spring break for deer. They just cross the road all the time and they're on the road and they're jumping off the road. Also, it's getting darker earlier, I imagine your evening commute is now like 4 or 5:00, and deer are most active in those last few hours of sunlight or the first few hours of the day. So it's probably just like morning commute clashing with the rut makes it, uh, very deadly.
Taylor Quimby: Also, November is, um, still like early November is still leaf peeping season in parts of Massachusetts. Yeah. So yeah, it might be a little bit more leaf tourism.
Nate Hegyi: How do you avoid hitting deer though?
Felix Poon: I mean, I think the answer to anything about how do you avoid collisions is drive slower. This is my, if not number one, number two takeaway from doing the Race to Net Zero series. So I think those signs are probably just… the messaging really should be “Drive Slower.”
Taylor Quimby: I wonder if it's more dangerous with cruise control on.
Marina Henke: Ooooooh.
Felix Poon: Probably is.
[MUX IN, Tall Harvey]
Marina Henke: Okay. Hello from the future. Uh, Nate, you promised to fact check us. Were we right?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, we were right! We were definitely right. Uh, you know, deer mate, uh, during the fall, oftentimes anywhere between, you know, late October until late November. So they're just not paying attention. And then also deer are more active during a full moon.
Marina Henke: Why?
Nate Hegyi: There's just more light, more illumination for them to be able to move around more. They're seeking cover. You know, if there's predators, they can see them. And so deer just move around a lot more during a full moon than when it's a new moon.
Taylor Quimby: Are you sure it's not because they're like pagan animals that are doing cool moonlight rituals?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. I'd like to issue a correction on on on what I just said. That is in fact the truth.
Felix Poon: They're probably out recharging their crystals.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Exactly. They're so focused on their crystals, they don't see the headlights coming towards them.
[MUX IN, Falafel]
Marina Henke: All right. We are going to take a quick break, but we will be back with more questions.
AD BREAK
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR this is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am Nate Hegyi here with the whole team. Rapid roll call. Marina Henke
Marina Henke: Here.
Nate Hegyi: Taylor Quimby.
Taylor Quimby: Here.
Nate Hegyi: Felix Poon.
Felix Poon: Hi.
Marina Henke: Okay, our next question comes from, I think, one of the most interesting places that we have ever gotten an Outside/Inbox question from.
Taylor Quimby: The moon. (Laughs). Was it the Artemis people?
Marina Henke: Oh my, I would cry. I would actually cry, I would weep.
Taylor Quimby: I'd be actually a little worried if they called us. I'd be like, uh, you guys seem more qualified.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly.
Gretchen: Hello, this is Gretchen Stokes trail named Taco Cat, and I'm currently finishing up a thru hike of the Appalachian Trail. I heard your call out about the color red and what it makes me think of that is very pertinent to my current experience is the etiquette of turning on the red light on your headlamp at night. When did this become a standard thing on headlamps, and when did this become standard etiquette? Or am I just in the thru hiking bubble?
Taylor Quimby: Mm.
Marina Henke: Thru hiking bubble or no?
Taylor Quimby: I bet you this is in the past 20 years that it's become common.
Nate Hegyi: We've used it for hunting in the early morning when you're hiking out to a spot and you don't want to be like having a bright flashing light, you'll have something red, which is a little bit harder to see. And I've used it like a night in tents, but I have never… I've only had one instance where a guy did not like my bright headlamp, but he was… he's the kind of guy who ran barefoot, literally barefoot in the mountains. So he was very like, oh naturale. And we were running at night and he wanted to run underneath the moonlight. And he asked me to turn my headlamp off.
Taylor Quimby: And that was the day I broke both my kneecaps.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah exactly!
Marina Henke: Well, I gotta say, I think this is a fascinating question for particularly like hiking gear and culture, because my sense is I think of red light being used in like military operations, but it feels like a great example of like, is this another moment where like the technologies that are used in way different spaces slowly trickle their way into, you know, what us plebeians are using on a, on a little night hike.
Taylor Quimby: This, this makes me think like I would be down to hear an entire headlamp history in four minutes.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah from then to the now.
Taylor Quimby: That'd be interesting.
[MUX IN: Tall Harvey]
Marina Henke: A couple months later, I'm here to offer those exact four minutes that you asked for Taylor. And I gotta say, guys, we were right about some things, but not everything.
Taylor Quimby: Oh, well, I, uh, I can't wait. Here we go.
Marina Henke: To figure out when headlamps started to use red light. You got to know when humans started to use headlamps. That story starts in a place darker than any hiking trail.
Eric Nystrom: The kind of profound darkness of someplace underground is difficult to describe.
Marina Henke: This is Eric Nystrom, a history professor at University of Nevada, Reno. He's talking about mines. That's because miners were the first people to use headlamps. But these were way lower tech than what you might see today.
Eric Nystrom: Really? You trace the first ones to candles.
Marina Henke: Candles! But since miners needed their hands to mine, those candles had to go somewhere.
Eric Nystrom: So some folks would take a dot of clay and sort of affix it to the crown of their hat.
Marina Henke: Except this was dangerous because an open flame could cause a methane explosion, or it could just go out.
Eric Nystrom: You know, you think about what a flame on your head goes through when you move your head around. There's wind, you know, there's movement, there's jostling. And that flame is your light. And it might be your ability to get out of the mind.
Marina Henke: Needless to say, it was a big deal when a new technology came onto the scene. Carbide lamps.
Eric Nystrom: Carbide is a, that's a manufactured product. And it's discovered in the late 1890s. And then pretty quickly, they figure out when it comes in contact with water, it generates acetylene gas. Acetylene burns with a bright white flame.
Marina Henke: Carbide lamps took advantage of this reaction. Separated by two chambers, water would drip over dry carbide. Cue the acetylene gas and then by strike of a flint… presto! Light. This flame was about ten times brighter than a regular candle.
Eric Nystrom: You can just imagine it's a revolution!
Marina Henke: But the revolution didn't end there. With the development of batteries. Electric headlamps entered the mining world in the 1930s, but the early models looked, well, kind of like a Victorian torture device. And the batteries.
Eric Nystrom: You take one of those biographies of a president or something like that? It's the size of one of those things.
Marina Henke: So yeah, these early headlamps weren't quite ready for your weekend hikes, but they did make their way into another pocket of outdoor recreation.
ARCHIVAL CLIP: Up in the alps, some cavers from Grenoble have beaten their previous record of minus 933 meters of their exploration of the Gouffre Berger.
Marina Henke: Caving. In 1973, as batteries were getting lighter and lighter a caver named George Petzl had an idea. Could an elastic band, carry the weight of both the bulb and the battery pack. Welcome the Petzl headlamp. Petzl by the way, is still one of the most popular brands of lighting gear today, as these headlamps became popular amidst your average weekend warrior of the 80s, red light was already pretty common in a different realm. The military. That's because red light allows you to see in the dark without ruining your night vision.
Eric Nystrom: You see, in the First World War, and really, certainly by the Second World War, the development of flashlights that have a replaceable lens cover so that you can filter your light if you wanted to have it, you know, temporarily useful for night vision.
Marina Henke: But as always, military tech takes a while to make its way to the public. Recreational headlamps wouldn't offer that handy red light setting until the early 2000. Now, as far as the etiquette question, I don't know when this became a thing, but it does seem like a nice way to avoid blinding hikers going the other way. And besides, you know who also hates bright white lights? The animals whose home you're kind of crashing.
[MUX IN, Tillys Delight]
Taylor Quimby: There we go. Short and sweet. Four minutes. I feel like I know 1,000% more about headlamps than I did before this.
Felix Poon: I think it's really cool that people put candles on their hats.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, I'm like, blown away by carbide. That's so cool.
Taylor Quimby: My headlamp doesn't have a red light setting, I don't think.
Marina Henke: Taylor did you buy that in like the 80s?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. I mean, no, it's it's…
Felix Poon: It's just a candle. (Laughs)
Taylor Quimby: Yeah (laughs)!
Nate Hegyi: You know they have batteries now.
Marina Henke: You know how people are trying to go analog with their cell phones? Taylor's actually trying to go analog with his, with his headlamp.
Taylor Quimby: I grumble about the people with the red lights. I'm like, come on guys, go, go old school.
[MUX IN, Young Buck]
Zach: Hello. Outside/In team. I live next to a major highway that runs through Minneapolis. It's one of those, you know, mid-century neighborhood destroying highways. Uh, we're about two blocks off of that highway, and we can hear it kind of a low hum almost all the time. I've read that constant sound from highways can kind of lead to cognitive issues. I worry that I'm dooming my two young daughters to issues growing up next to this highway. So I'm wondering if you'd be willing to tackle this question and see what you can find out. Thanks a lot.
Felix Poon: I think we should get him to record the sound. Like, I think it really depends.
Marina Henke: Well, okay then. Let's say he lives two two blocks off, no wall. He's hearing the dull, dulcet tones of highway noise every day. All the time.
Taylor Quimby: I still think that Felix is right, which is there's probably a decibel threshold at which we know there are more deleterious effects. Right. But also, there are some differences. You remember Felix did this story about pickleball and he talked about the –
Felix Poon: I was about to say I would take a highway over a pickleball court!
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. There's a certain white noise. Is it bad that I'm kind of just like, I think they'll be fine? We have been living around loud sounds for probably like 160, 170 years at least. You know, I mean, like since the beginning of the industrial age where people were living next to loud factories. Like I grew up next to train tracks and it was just constant, you know? And I'm fine. I'm fine.
Felix Poon: I grew up next to train tracks too, and it was actually quite comforting to hear like the, the horn, it just lulled me to sleep.
Marina Henke: I think this is where… I'm speaking though, on like a paper that I scanned from an article about noise. So you know, but I'm pretty sure they've found that it's not good.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
Marina Henke: Not to freak Zach out, but I'm pretty sure that it's not like it's causing these massive, you know, shifts in your behavioral well-being. But I think the dull background noise, the very noise, we're like, “that's probably fine!” Again, I'm not speaking in great scientific terms here, but I think it's not doing, doing us well.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah, I agree that this is probably pretty well studied. And we'll be able to find some definitive answers about what is and is not healthy and what the outcomes are for people who live next to constant noise.
Marina Henke: Sounds like a question for the outside inbox.
Taylor Quimby: Yeah.
[MUX IN, Tall Harvey]
Marina Henke: All right. Well, a question for the outside inbox. Indeed. Felix, you took this up, right?
Felix Poon: I did, I looked into it.
Marina Henke: Okay. I'm on the edge of my seat, I gotta know. Let's get the scoop.
Felix Poon: All right. So if you live next to a highway, you're in good company. About 17% of people in the US live close to a highway or busy road. In some parts of the country, that figure doubles, like in California, where it's closer to 40% and it can be noisy.
Erica Walker: I used to live in a community where every time a car would pass over, this bump on the highway would be like this.
Felix Poon: This is Erica Walker. She's an assistant professor of epidemiology and runs the Community noise lab at Brown University. And Erica says there are a bunch of potential health impacts, from chronic exposure to noise, like higher rates of depression and anxiety, heart disease, diabetes, even dementia. The common denominator of all these conditions is that noise can be stressful. And when you're stressed.
Erica Walker: Cortisol is one of the hormones that are released when your body is getting into that flight or fight response.
Felix Poon: Erica has been measuring cortisol across different communities in a pretty unique way. I think it's cool, even if it may sound a little gross.
Erica Walker: We are actually taking biological samples of their fingernails.
Felix Poon: You heard that, right? Fingernails. Turns out that your nails act like little storage tanks for stress hormones released in your body. Even though a lot of the study's participants told Erica that they're not all that bothered by noise.
Erica Walker: Their nails tell a different story.
Felix Poon: The story that Erica found was that the fingernails from people in rural areas had less cortisol in them than the fingernails from people in urban areas. While she's not sure yet if the difference is because of the noise or because of other factors like income or race. The link between noise and stress is backed by other studies. When it comes to kids, noisy environments have been linked to more difficulty paying attention, slower cognitive development and mental health issues. Though not all noise is made equal, some researchers found that intermittent noises like honking trucks, for example, are worse than, say, the steady home of a highway. So what are we to do about all this noise? Short of moving out of the neighborhood and going somewhere quieter, which, let's be real, a lot of people can't afford, Erika does have some ideas from getting a pair of earplugs to installing soundproof windows to what she does in her own home.
Erica Walker: I have a masking system, and a masking system is basically a noise, kind of like white noise that you blast into your home. That sort of diffuses the noise from outside. You can get masking systems for as cheap as 30 bucks, to where you can have fancy, sophisticated ones put into your Hvac system.
Felix Poon: But this is still an individual approach to a systemic problem. Erica says something you can do at the community level is petition your Department of Transportation to install sound walls along highways, which don't just reduce noise. They also reduce air pollution. And going forward, she says, we should be more thoughtful about how we plan future development. So as we're building more housing, more roads, more data centers, we need to take noise pollution seriously. Which is why when I asked Erica what advice we should be giving to Zach.
Erica Walker: Zach should quit his day job and become an urban planner and direct our cities to be planned better.
Felix Poon: Erica reminded me that kids are resilient, but whatever you end up doing. Good luck to you, Zach.
[MUX IN, Mazamorra]
Nate Hegyi: Well, I was definitely wrong.
Taylor Quimby: Wouldn't it be crazy if Zach quit his job and became an urban planner? And then, like, five years from now, he's like, “guys, you changed my life!”
Marina: Zach, let us know.
Nate Hegyi: How do you guys deal with noise pollution?
Felix Poon: My air purifier kind of masks all the noises out there. And then in the summer, I have, uh, my fan going, so.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Marina Henke: Yeah. No, I should say I sleep with a noise machine and it lulls me right to sleep. But it also like during the summer when AC units are turning on and off and they're loud. And then when trucks go by, it's exactly what Erica described. It kind of just dulls everything.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, because you can't handle the sound of radiators popping.
Marina Henke: Oh. Simply cannot. I'm a tender wetlands.
Felix Poon: I still think there is something to like getting used to sounds that kind of almost become cozy, like radiators popping to me kind of symbolizes, oh, I'm inside, I'm warm.
Taylor Quimby: That's nice. I don't, I'm not capable of that. I'm a total grump. But, uh, I think that's great that you do that, Felix. You know, I think there's some amount of like, if you live in, in a place with a lot of density, there are great things that come from that. And you get to enjoy, you know, maybe a little bit more nightlife or museums and, you know, there's community, but then you just have to deal with that… the noise.
Marina Henke: Well, it's cultural, right? Where, you know, you'd also find somebody who moves to a really quiet place and says, I actually can't fall asleep with it being fully quiet.
Felix Poon: Yeah.
Marina Henke: It can definitely be easy I think when you hear this kind of information to like, imagine, okay, the solution is one thing for every person when that's like not the case.
[MUX IN, Balti]
Marina Henke: Okay, we're gonna round this out with a question that came in, I think, a year and a half ago. I know we have some fans in the room.
Sabrina: My name is Sabrina. I'm calling from Corvallis, Oregon State. I just finished watching Lord of the rings. Like I spent all night watching Lord of the rings. And in the final movie, they throw the ring into the volcano, and it's like laying on a crust above the lava. I'm just wondering if that's, like, a real thing. Like, do volcanoes have some sort of crust atop the lava? And if so, when is it made out of?
Taylor Quimby: Ooh.
Felix Poon: Great question.
Taylor Quimby: Great scene too. Let's be honest.
Felix Poon: It's a great scene, and I'm willing to bet it's not, uh, purporting to the laws of physics, but to the laws of dramatic climax. Because can you imagine that scene where just like plops in like, oh, like it's gone?
Taylor Quimby: Oh, it takes a super long time. Like, I would actually love to go back to this and put a stopwatch to it because I want to say it's like a full 15 seconds as like the ring hits and then the, you know, the writing in…. Oh God, what's the, what's the language of Sauron?
Felix Poon: Wasn't it Elvish on the, on the ring?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. But it's a specific type of evil Elvish, I think.
Marina Henke: Oh, boy Taylor.
Nate Hegyi: Taylor's taking this question 100%. He's taking this question. Sorry, everybody.
Taylor Quimby: I would be willing to bet if you threw a ring on a, a stable pool of lava, it would sit on top for a brief period because of the, the surface tension, but I don't think it would stay long before it slipped under.
Marina Henke: I think we could answer this.
Nate Hegyi: I think so too.
Marina Henke: Okay, well, I hope Sabrina is still patiently waiting for this tardy reply.
[MUX IN: Tall Harvey]
Marina Henke: Taylor, you have some answers for us, right?
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. I mean, kind of. Um, so the one thing I can say is the Lord of the Rings here is definitely inaccurate from a scientific perspective.
Felix Poon: I never would have thought!
Taylor Quimby: Yeah. Uh, so I talked a little bit about surface tension there. And I think, I think that just like isn't going to be a part of this. The thing is that lava is just super dense. And so a person would float on top of lava and probably catch fire and die in that fashion. They would not sink.
Gold is denser than lava, so it might sink – but that actually depends on the temperature of the lava, because the hotter it is, the more liquidy, whereas the surface of a cooling lava bed is more like molasses, in which it might stay on the surface for awhile like it does in the movie.
Marina Henke: Oh, I mean, I hate to even bring this up, but we haven't talked about the heat and whether the heat would just melt the ring.
Nate Hegyi: Thank you! We shouldn't even be in this situation. I think they both die of heat. And just all the gases at that lip of the volcano. Like you can't be hanging out up there. You're breathing in toxic fumes. It's insanely hot.
Felix Poon: Well, we don't understand hobbit physiology though, sooooo.
Taylor Quimby: That is true. They're very hardy!
Nate Hegyi: Yeah that's true. That is also true. We don't know if they can withstand incredible temperatures.
Taylor Quimby: They’re not even –
Nate Hegyi: They’re not even wearing shoes! Yeah.
Taylor Quimby: That's what I'm saying.
Marina Henke: Wow. Well, Taylor, you really, you did really look into it. You tried your hardest, and I appreciate that. I appreciate a good try.
Taylor Quimby: There's one thing that we also straight up didn't answer that she, she basically asks like, oh, you know, if you look at the video, there's like some blackened parts of the top of the lava. And she was like, what's that crust? And would that happen? And yes, absolutely. Like if you look at lava, you know, basically as soon as it's hitting the air, the top is cooling and it's turning back into rock. And so you can have like a pretty thick crust of what is becoming solid rock on top of that molten rock.
Felix Poon: So was her question about the body of Gollum or the ring, because I don't really feel like we've answered the question.
Taylor Quimby: You know what, Felix? You're just gonna have to live with this, and, you know, we'll do a full episode on it another time.
Marina Henke: Three parter.
[MUX IN: Jackknife]
Marina Henke: A trilogy.
Taylor Quimby: (Laughs) One might say, yeah.
CREDITS
Nate Hegyi: Alrighty, that is it for today's episode. If this inspired you to send in a question to the Outside/Inbox, do it now, please. Before you forget! You can call us at one 1-844-GO-OTTER, or you can email us at outside-in at NHPR.org.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was recorded, produced and mixed by Marina Henke. Felix Poon and me, your host, Nate Heggie. It was edited by Marina and our executive producer, Taylor Quimby. Our staff also includes Justine Paradis and Jessica Hunt. Rebecca LaVoy is NHPR's director of On Demand audio. Music is from Blue Dot Sessions, No Sons of Mine, and Erik Fernholm. Outside in is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
Marina Henke: Cue rotting whale theme song. Whale whale whale…
Taylor Quimby: That’s it!
Nate Hegyi: Whale whale whale!
Taylor Quimby: WHALE WHALE WHALE, ROTTING WHALE!