Shatter Me Like Sub-Zero

World War Two as a potential material for building aircraft carriers. Now, the so called berg ship that that they wanted to build was made obsolete by changes in other war conditions before it was ever built, so we don't know if it would have worked. But the research on pike crete as a material itself remains very interesting. And so if you haven't listened to that episode, I would recommend you go back and check it out now. I think it

was a lot of fun. Yeah, and we also talked a bit about of Thrones in there, if you need a little fantasy to encourage you to check that episode out right. So, the short version is pikerete is a suspension of wood pulp in water ice, and the ideal mixture arrived at by Allied Research with something like eighty six percent watered fourteen percent would pulp, and it had a number of material advantages as a as a building

material or structural material. Uh This included that the structural properties of pi crete were less variable and thus more predictable than regular ice, So if you wanted to make a structure out of ice, you could understand what you were working with a lot more predictably with pikerete. But also pikerete melts more slowly than regular ice. It seems like the wood pulp content helps insulate it. So you take the same amount of material of ice versus pikerete,

the pikerete melts a lot slower. Also, pike crete is much stronger than regular ice. It can withstand heavier loads and more powerful impacts with less fracture and less plastic deformation.

And one of the reasons it's supposed that pike crete is stronger than regular ice is that if a crack forms under pressure or impact, the would pulp fibers prevent the crack from spreading along the full width of the material, so it's just far less susceptible to fracture based failures, It would maybe kind of deform and sag in a plastic way over time, but it's also less susceptible to

that than regular ices. But anyway, when we were reading about all this, I immediately thought of a parallel type of material to pike crete, where various fibrous substances are enmeshed in a suspension that is by mass mostly water, and that composite material is our bodies. And I started to wonder, is the principle that makes pike create resistant to fracture the same reason that if you drop a mass of frozen meat on the ground, it doesn't shatter

the way a block of ice would. Now we can come back to that, but this immediately got my brain spinning on another question which takes us into some outworld territory. UH. Specifically, this question is if you froze a human body the way sub zero does in Mortal Kombat, or like many other examples we can talk about from from movies and games and stuff in a bit, could you shatter that human body with a slick roundhouse kick or would a frozen human body be resistant to fracture and shattering? And

if so, how far would that resistance go. Yeah, we actually chatted about this a bit when we recorded the pi crete episode, but then we ended up cutting it for a couple of reasons. First of all, for length um, but then also you wanted to look into it a little bit more as our call. Well. Yeah, one reason I think is that the discussion we actually had about it when we originally recorded the episode was kind of incomplete. Like we talked about how the wood fibers within the

pi crete and make it resistant to shattering. How this was probably a reasonable analogy for the frozen flesh of an animal, which is a composite sort of alloy of a different kind with lots of materials in meshed in between. Mean, you know, muscle, fibers, fat, protein, bone, and bone has its own different components. It's got a collagen protein component and a mineral hydroxy appetite component. And anyway, for these reasons, a frozen body might be somewhat similar in its resistance

to shattering. And of course I mentioned this a second ago, but there's an experience probably a lot of people can relate to. If you've ever dropped a heavy piece of ice on the ground, you you know it shatters. It's just very brittle. It shatters into a million pieces. But if you drop a similar weight piece of frozen meat from say six feet in the air, I think you're

very unlikely to see anything that looks like shattering. It's more likely to kind of bounce a little bit and might get bruised as it does so, but it's not going to shatter like glass. Yeah, And it's it's similar to how the various frozen foods we bring home from the grocery store. Have you ever opened the box and you're like, oh, man, I dropped that frozen pizza and now it's shattered into a million pieces. No, we just

don't see that, right. So something about the contents, the material makeup of of meat, of animal flesh, of body parts seems to make it more resistant to fracture than other you know, suspensions in water would be so our initial discussion in that episode we we sort of said, you know, I don't think it's very plausible that you

could shatter a body. But after we recorded it, I sort of thought some more and I was like, wait a minute, this really should depend on some more conditions that we didn't actually get into, Like, so could you shatter a human body at regular freezer temperatures around zero degrees fahrenheit or negative eight teen celsius. I think on a normal circumstances, the answer to that is just no,

probably not so. Initially our answer to this question was that the sub zero scenario where sub zero freezes you with a blast device and then kicks you and you shatter all over the place, that's fairly far fetched. But what we didn't really get into in our original conversation was how far this shatter resistance extends. What if you get the body really really cold, deep into the sub

zero wild, then I think the question becomes more interesting. Absolutely, and and also if we're going to talk about sub zero, I mean sub zero is is not just a guy throwing around some liquid nitrogen. He is supposed to be a a Linn cou grand Master. You know. He's a magician, a sorcerer who's using frost magic and martial arts to battle various gods and cyborgs and other worldly monsters. So before we we we get back into the science, I want to talk just a little bit about this obsession

that emerges um. I think largely uh post nine uh that this idea of bad guys and sometimes good guys being frozen, partially frozen, and then partially or entirely shattered, as if they were a piece of porcelain. Now, why would you trace it to n Well, here's the thing, and and I'm not entirely it's entirely possible that there's some of some work prior tonight that features both the freezing and shattering of an adversary. Certainly you have examples

of things being frozen, enemies being frozen. The classic uh the Blob comes to mind, right where they the creatures defeated with the cold. But in terms of of something being frozen and shattering is key because that's when James Cameron's Terminator two came out. Yes, and I always forget how early in the nineties it actually came out. It always catches me off guard that it was ninety one, which is, you know, basically the eighties. Oh No, one

was still the eighties. As we've discussed Cannon on this show, is that the nineteen eighties ended in ninet. In fact, that the most eighties year there ever was the like most iconic when we think of everything that is the eighties was the year nineteen nine. Yeah, I mean is

the culmination of it. Right. So Terminator two, of course iconic sci fi action blockbuster, famous for a number of reasons, but it also featured some incredible effects, incredible digital effects that just you know, changed what we expected in films. And there were, you know, so many copycats that that

came along afterwards. Uh, some better than others. But there's this one sequence in particular where Arnold Schwarzenegger's T eight hundred Terminator freezes or incident accidentally freezes um the liquid metal T one thousand terminator played by Robert Patrick with liquid nitrogen. It's like a factory setting for their fight and an environmental um um you know, hazard of that

fight is a frozen T one thousand. Uh. So Arnold lifts up his shotgun I believe, uh, fires a one line a w liner at him as well as a shotgun shell or a slug or something, and it just explodes, just just causes the the T one thousand, the frozen T one thousand, to explode into hundreds and hundreds of shards of of this froze now frozen liquid metal, which of course then begins to slowly melt and then reform into the T one thousand once more. As I remember it,

he shoots him with a pistol. But I could be a pistol. Okay, that's my memory. I could be wrong. But also this is definitely when he he uses the phrase he's learned as still a Vista baby, showing that he has learned humanity from Edward Furlong. That's right, by the way, I was reading about this film um Again, It's been a very long tent since I've seen it, but there's this weird deleted scene that lines up with the whole topic of demonic duck feet on succuby that

we've discussed in the past on the show. This idea in medieval and post medieval um Catholic and Protestant culture, the idea that you would have these demons that would disguise themselves as attractive members of the say, the opposite sex, that would then try and seduce you into sin. But God, taking pity on the pious uh man or woman, would and would make sure that the disguise was imperfect. While this demon might take the form of a beautiful woman,

it wouldn't be able to get the feet right. The feet would be duck feet, like demonic duck feet. Um, so there's a way out for the for the pious, right, So if you're very observant, if you keep your wits about you, then you would never fall for one of these like a succubus, because you notice us you've got

bird feet. So yeah, according to the Internet Movie Database, there's a there is a sequence in the Steel Mill where the T one thousand um is it's been previously frozen and then of course exploded, and then it's come back together and not everything's working properly. It's having difficulty maintaining its shape and color, like when it touches other materials.

And there's a scene where it's trying to pretend to be Sarah Connor um and and then John Connor looks down and sees, oh, it's not Sarah Connor because it has grotesque liquid metal feet instead of instead of human feet, right the feet, its feet are becoming the same texture as the floor that it's walking on, which is a cool detail. It is, Yeah, but it but it made me think back to that the idea that the the the otherworldly alien pretender, uh can't quite get the feet

right on its disguise. Okay, so you think that it's probably the scene in Terminator to where the T one thousand gets shattered that spawns these many copycats that come afterwards and video games movies where everybody is getting frozen and shattered into a million pieces. Right, like to take take sub Zero for instance. Okay, a character in the

Mortal Kombat video game. Now, Mortal Kombat, the original arcade game came out in nine two, which is really too close to ninety one for it to reflect that Terminator to death or explosion scene to any significant degree. And perhaps due to that overlap, you don't see any shattering action uh in the game really? Uh? Sub Zero can freeze people and then he can, you know, uppercut the frozen person in some ice goes flying, some blood goes flying,

but nobody has shattered. Sub Zero's original fatality in that game is a blatant predator homage rather in which he rips the opponent's spine out of their body. Okay, so it was a movie rip off, even an Arnold movie rip off, but a different one, right. But then uh, three the following year, we see the ports of this game make it out to the different home systems, and this was too violent for Nintendo. Famously, Supernintendo changed the blood into sweat and and they toned down some of

the fatalities. But they did one really cool thing is they completely replaced sub Zero's fatality with one in which first he freezes the opponent and then he like backhands them and shatters them into a million pieces. Well, that sounds like one of the few upgrades for the Supernintendo version, which I had as a child, and like, it was very odd seeing the the quote blood coming off people. That was not blood. It was just some weird kind of gray tan colored liquid flying on every time you

punch somebody. Yeah, I had the I had the Genesis version of the game. Uh so I had had the blood, but I remember being a little jealous of that frozen fatality that sub Zero had. Now it's definitely in the Mortal Kombat movie, which, dude, if you have not gone back and watched that masterpiece recently, I recommended it. It uh really really holds up in the worst possible way.

It's one of those movies with early c g I where all of the marketing for it bragged about the c g I, except like I remember the VHS box said strap yourself in for these amazing morphin sequences. But then if you look at it now and it's like, you know, everything has about four corners and it's just assaulting your eyes with poison. Oh yeah, well this is yeah, this is so plenty of time to to to really go after that terminator to uh style and try and

use some of that technology. Paul ws Anderson was the director, and uh, you know, as weird as some of the c g I is compared to today, I have to say the Goro puppet was really cool. They had some nice practical effects mixed up in there as well. Yeah, I'll give him that, but that's we're not talking about Goro today. Goro when we will come back to another time. But we're talking about sub Zero and that scene does

feature some great free shatter action. I think the moment that actually made it into the trailer as sub Zero is fighting some red shirt like he's he's literally fighting a ninja that's wearing red um and it's not Irmac or anything, it's just straight up red red shirt ninja. He's wearing a sign that says I am here to die. Yeah. Basically, you know what he's there for he's a demo Ninja.

He's here to demonstrate this fatality. So he does a big leaping kick at sub Zero right as sub Zero unleashes all this crazy Um you know I have to say, and this will come into play later. I feel like there's some really cool like atmospheric stuff going on with the effects that sub Zero uses here to to create his ice magic, like he's doing something to the air and perhaps the moisture in the air there and then is that Ninja comes flying across the room. Bam, sub

Zero freezes him. Ninja smashes into the wall and just shatters into a million pieces perfection. Yes, um, so we'll we'll keep coming back to sub Zero. But that was was not, by any means the only um copy cat or um or let's say, it wasn't the only film inspired by this kind of freeze and shattered death sequence.

You of course had time cop into. Directed by Peter Hyams, who also directed two thousand ten and Outland, which is a kind of a a sleazy, not really sleazy, maybe kind of intentionally seedy sci fi film starring Sean Connery. Is that the one that's supposed to be high noon in space. Yeah, it's straight it's a straight up Western really with Peter Boyle. I think it's the bad guy. It's ah. I remember digging it when I was younger.

But that's another one I haven't seen in Forever. Time Cop, however, features a time traveling time cop as you would expect, played by Jean Claude that damn and a great villain roll, really a dual villain role, because he plays himself as like is the present version of himself and a path

version of himself played by the late Ron Silver. And there's one scene in particular where a hinchman gets his arm frozen again by liquid nitrogen that just happens to be there in the space where people are fighting, and then Jean Klon van Damme kicks that frozen arm and

shatters it. There's actually, uh just involving an arm. I remember there's a scene in the older version the movie adaptation of Snow Piercer where a character is punished by having their arms stuck outside into the cold, and then it gets pulled back in and it's frozen solid and they smash it. Oh, that's a good one. That's a good. More more recent example of the frozen shatter death or torment sequence. Another big one from ninety three is Demolition Man.

It's Stallone versus Wesley Snipes, and Stallone eventually freezes Snipes and kicks his head off, which then chatters, Am I the only person who saw the fur staff of this movie about five times and never saw the end? Oh no, I don't think I even saw that much. Is one that they were showing on like Sci Fi Channel or something, A lot of it. I guess it must have been.

I just remember like seeing over and over again the scenes about like introducing the premise that the problem with the future is that the cops are not violent enough. Maybe from my from my part anyway, I think maybe it was prominently featured in the trailer. And since I never saw the film and only the trailer, that's all I know about it. I know like the basic premise and have sort of a general idea about the look of this future. Yeah. Well, I think it posits that

the whole future is the galleria. It's just the whole future is like a shopping mall from the nineties. All right, let's see a few other quick examples. UM saw both of the film Cube utilize a freezing trap in there um film Alien Resurrection. Uh, there's a sequence where this happens to a xenomorph that like escapes and there's a

freezing trap and it matters itself. And then there's one from two thousand four that I don't think i'd ever heard of, titled mind Hunters, not to be confused with a recent television series that's that's actually, you know, quite quite good. Uh No, this is a different beast entirely.

And there's a crazy sequence that you can find on YouTube in which a trap, again some sort of liquid nitrogen powered trap, freezes Christian Slater's characters ankles and then causes him to snap off of the ankles fall over backwards. And then I guess he's still freezing as he falls over, because then he like grotesquely shatters when he hits the ground. That's rough, man. Now, the one that I I can't get out of my head is Jason X, which I

know is one of your favorites. Oh yes, Uh, this is probably my favorite Friday thirteenth movie because of course Jason X takes place in outer space and there's a scene there multiple that has a lot of great kills in it um let of creative kills, Uh, including one scene in which uh cyber Jason at the point I think he's Cyberjason. At this point, Um dunks a person's face into like a tray or a uh that of liquid nitrogen and then shatters their face by smacking it

into a tabletop. So clearly in the nineties everybody got the bug. The filmmakers saw it, saw something. They were like, oh, shattering people, and they were just on the train. They were ready. Yeah, I think you know, it's it's new. It's an early death scene to include in your your violent nineties picture. But then also I have this feeling that this, this this trope is popular because it also drives home this this idea about the exaggerated fragility of

the human body. You know, we we see this in various Turn to Stone tropes. We see it, you know, quite um, you know, quite tragically. I think we've discussed in the past on the show of Um delusions in which one believes their body to be essentially be made of glass and be so fragile that they don't dare touch anything. And then you see like the opposite of

it in some action films especially. I think the the ultimate ex dream of this is the Hong Kong action film Ricky Oh, The Story of Ricky, in which our hero, like a lot of heroes in these films, it's pretty much indestructible. But to just an alarming degree, nothing seems to hurt him, and when he hurts anyone else, when he fights back against bad guys, it seems like that the slightest touch just makes them explode like a bag of blood. They're just everyone else is just so fragile. Yeah,

everybody else is just vegetable soup. I mean, I seem to recall a scene where two characters punch at each other and their fists hit and Ricky splits the other guy's arm down the middle lengthwise like a Mattock splitting a log. Yeah. Yeah, basically the human body is just made out of balsa wood in according to that film. Well, maybe we should take a break and then when we come back we can talk about the the actual relationship

between temperature and brittleness. Than all right, we're back now today again, we're a looking at this question of could you could you freeze somebody and shatter them like sub zero? There are some complications to this question. Obviously, this is not an experiment you could perform ethically on a real person, right, but you know, you can seek out some analogies. There's another reason that this question is a little bit hard to answer if you're just trying to reason from general

knowledge on materials and mechanics and heat. And that's of course that the body is a complex matrix of different kinds of materials all stuck together. So you can look up, say, existing published knowledge on the temperatures where brittle fracture is more likely to happen in materials like common industrial plastics or types of steel. But I have not found a similar chart for animal bodies, and I doubt that there would be such a thing, because who would do that research.

Maybe you do that research. If you do, let us know. But in general, there is actually a documented relationship between temperature and brittleness in many material reals. And this relationship does extend well beyond the simple transition of water from its liquid to frozen states. So it's not just the

freezing of liquids into solids. Even once you have you know, already frozen things as they get colder, or things without water content as they get colder very often, in fact, almost always, they tend to get more and more brittle. So just one example of this, I was looking at a short, well presented article on on m T. S website m I T. S ask An Engineer where they were addressing the question of why plastics get brittle when

they get cold. It was by Peter Dunn and it was interviewing Greg Rutledge from m T. S Department of Chemical Engineering, and so they were looking at the concepts of ductility and brittleness. Now, ductility is the ability of a material to absorb stress by changing shape without breaking. Brittle materials react to stress put on them by fracturing and shattering, and plastics are mostly considered to be ductal because of the behavior of molecules down at the molecular level.

Often these molecules themselves can stretch, absorbing energy in the process. But when you add all this together, these molecules can each absorb energy by stretching, and they can dissipate stress from loads or impacts, and this ability to dissipate stress helps prevent fracture. But this depends on the somewhat free motion of individual molecules. So if you were able to zoom all the way down to the molecular level of

the material. For a material to be ductal, what you would want to see is the ability of molecules to slide past or through one another. Uh. And the analogy that Rutledge uses here is like spaghetti coated with olive oil. Right, you cook a bunch of spaghetti and it does not have any oil on it. Obviously, what's it gonna do. It's kind of stick together in a big clump. You try to stir it up and it does not stir easily. But if you put olive oil on it, suddenly all

the new goals. They can kind of slide around. So in a material, especially like a plastic, if the molecules in the material behave this way where they all kind of stick together in a rigid structure and they can't stretch, and they can't slip easily pasted or through one another. When stress is applied at a particular place, the energy from that stress can't be dissipated by spreading all across

the material. So if the stress is too great and the energy can't be dissipated, it'll start to create a crack and then a full fracture. Now, where does temperature come in here, Well, there's something that is known as the glass transition temperature, which they point out is the point where you have an amorphous solid. And this could be like a glass or it could be rubber. They

also give the example of cotton candy. It's at the point where that goes from being ductal, like we were just talking about two, being brittle, where it's susceptible to cracks, and so each material has its own temperature where that transition happens. Usually, the temperature for most materials that we deal with on the day to day is either very

high or very low. So you're not going to really observe things going through this transition temperature if you're just doing every day you know, uh, stuff like you're dealing with a piece of rubber. Normally the stuff you would do with it does not take it to its glass transition temperature. So, for example, in the case of tire rubber, they say that the glass transition temperature is negative seventy

two degrees celsius. You're not usually getting down that far, so you're not getting to the point where you observe vulcanized rubber becoming brittle, So we're not used to it, but it is a totally real part of physics, and it all depends on the materials. Some amorphous solids can become brittle at much more manageable temperatures. The article gives the example of polypropylene, which they say as a glass transition temperature of somewhere between negative twenty and zero degrees celsius.

And so that's within you know, temperatures you might encounter out on a cold winter day or even in your own freezer. And I have noticed this person only when taking plastic food containers out of the freezer. If sometimes if you drop them or knock them against something, they seem much more prone to cracking or shattering than they than they aren't room temperature. And I have not noticed

a similar difference for glass. But I was looking around at some other articles, and yeah, it just seems that for all kinds of materials. Maybe there are a few exceptions, but for almost anything, if you cool it down really really cold, it starts getting into territory where it becomes more brittle. Like there's this term that's often talked about with reference to metals, which is the ductile to brittle transition. Uh so, so steel is an example here that undergoes

a ductile to brittle transition. Some compositions of steel, unfortunately have ductile to brittle transition temperatures that are within the range of natural fluctuation. So some steel structures can actually become brittle enough to fail by cracking instead of absorbing stress by deforming and reforming under like real world conditions like winter conditions. Yeah, there's there's this case of the

Liberty class cargo ships during the Second World War. This was a British concept kind of concept constructed by the US at a low cost for you know, basically a mass produced cargo option for the war. So they ended up building thousands of these things. But unfortunately, the metal of their their holes was observed to fail after exposure to frigid North Atlantic waters, frigid enough to make the

steel itself brittle. And this was this is due to some of the issues were discussing already, but also part of it apparently had to do with the fact that the holes were welded as opposed to riveted together from separate plates. And this was also compounded by just frequent overloading of the vessels themselves. Uh so so Yeah, another example of what can happen when you take UM UH to take a ship that is not specifically designed to

maybe throw even like really frigid waters and put them there. Yeah. And essentially every source I looked at UH seemed in agreement that this this holds true for almost any material that what we've been mainly talking about, because most of the research seems to be in UH in plastics and metals, you know, things that stuff like glass, things that you would expect to be researched because they are industrial materials.

But it would also hold true to some extent for other types of composite materials, things that have mineral content, things that have proteins in them, and this would probably include bodies. So at lower and lower temperatures, the ability of material to shift and reform at the molecular level continually decreases. The links between molecules become more and more prone to tiny initial defects spreading into full scale fractures

in their crystal in structure. And if you add a lot of these fractures at the same time, basically you get shattering. So I'm increasingly convinced now that Actually, I think if you've got a body or or a piece of a human body cold enough, you very well could shatter it. So the question at this point would be what is the level? How cold would it have to get? You know, what is the level? Because is it coldness

that could actually be achieved in reality? And again I think, just based on what I've been reading, the answer there is probably yes, and you could. It's at temperatures that you could actually achieve given something like liquid nitrogen. You know, the more we talk about this, I would love to see a scene in like a kung fu action film where the villain and the hero are about to square off and then they both notice that there's a tank of liquid nitrogen behind them, and they're like, whoa, let's

let's go outside. Let's move into a different part of the factory, because this is just I don't like where this is headed. It's like the Pucci episode where they never actually get to the fireworks factory, except this they just they never get to the liquid nitrogen. Oh man, there has to be a liquid nitrogen sequence in Itchy and Scratchy. Oh sure there is, but because they always flip it around on you, it wouldn't be a straightforward

chattering what would it be. It would be something more interesting. Oh, probably made into ice and then ground up into ice cubes that are somehow still alive in the cocktail that the mouse is drinking. You're joking, but they literally did that. That's why I did that. Okay, that's what That's why it comes to me because it's stuck in my mind somewhere. Yeah, the the eyeball ice cubes become ice cubes in a drink.

There you go. So, liquid nitrogen is a convenient place to investigate this or I guess it's not a place a convenient substance with which to investigate this question, because it's something you can actually get huge tubs of and in its liquid state, liquid nitrogen is somewhere between sixty three and seventy seven kelvin or so, which is like negative two and ten celsius two d ninety six celsius or negative three forty six fahrenheight to three twenty fahrenheits

sorry for all the numbers, but just wanted to give you an idea. It's very very cold. It tends you know, it's boiling at room temperature. If you have a bucket of liquid nitrogen at room temperature. It's kind of like if you put you know, a pan of water and like a six hundred degree oven or something, it's gonna be it's gonna be bubbling. It's it's it's aggressive stuff because it wants to convert back into the gas. That's the same gas that's in the air we breathe. It

is more than the air we breathe. So so this is very very cold. If you could submerge a person in liquid nitrogen long enough to actually freeze them all the way through, I'm starting to get the feeling that some kind of shattering, maybe not you know, a billion pieces glass type shattering, but some significant, you know, chunking off of of brittle shards would actually happen. But anyway, this is all just theoretical reasoning based on other things

we know about materials. Uh So, so maybe talk is cheap, Maybe we should look for physical evidence that this has actually happened in the real world. Yeah, and luckily there have been people that have experimented with this that have said, you know what I'm going to get I think of of with nitrogen, and I'm going to get something that could stand in for a human head, and we're going to see what what happens. Yeah. So, but before we get to direct empirical research, At first I wanted to say, Okay,

is there anything documented in nature? Right? I combed through a big newspaper database, trying a bunch of different combinations of search terms to find any evidence I could of a documented case of a frozen body being shattered. I found nothing. I found tons of stuff, but nothing like what we were actually looking for. I found lots of reviews of movies and TV shows like that one with Christians.

Later you mentioned a bunch of articles about that. I found a lot of old crime reports involving frozen bodies and people named shafter. I found a lot of stuff about frozen seafood and a kind of packaging called a shatter pack, which I think is terrible name for a type of packaging. But so, if there is any natural, documented case of a human body being frozen and then shattering,

I could not find it. Now, the closest thing I came across was I did find an old Straight Dope column where the author is trying to answer the exact same question, can you shatter a body? And finds a bunch of cases of people being frozen sort of or exposed to liquid nitrogen in various ways and not shattering, And the column concludes from this that you probably would

not shatter if you were frozen. But I don't think any of the cases that the column looks at really count because it's stuff like somebody gets uh, somebody gets

liquid nitrogen spilled on them, which you know. In fact, one thing that's it seems to be true is that you can probably say that, I mean, don't try this at home, but you can probably safely get a little bit of liquid nitrogen uh splashed against your skin and you'd be okay because the light and frost effect immediately turns it into two gas that insulates your skin from the freezing cold liquid itself. Now, if you were like to dip your hand in it or can have continued exposure,

obviously that would be extremely bad. There was one case documented in the Straight Dope column of a person who apparently dipped their foot in a container of liquid nitrogen and kept it there. It's not not quite clear why this happened, but there was no documentation of that person's foot shattering, though obviously it was massively traumatic to the body, like, so don't do that at all, So that column concludes. Quote, judging from the above, I'm guessing fibrous tissue would prevent

a body from simply shattering no matter what happened. But then again, okay, so so you could take that and say, okay, that sort of holds up with you know, if you drop a piece of frozen meat from the freezer, it doesn't shatter, So maybe it just wouldn't happen to a body. But I want to come back with a few empirical, controlled examples that we can talk about now. I have not found any controlled studies published in actual scientific journals

about shattering frozen animals or animal parts. Maybe there's something I haven't dug up yet, but I don't think it's out there. But I've come up with a number of informal tests that have been published just some other people's articles, podcast videos, YouTube and stuff. For example, the Naked Scientists one time they explored this on their podcast in an episode from Actually it was an episode that featured recent show guest Cat Arnie. They didn't freezer, I hope, no. No. Unfortunately,

Cat was not involved in this particular experiment. It was a couple of the other hosts, but but a couple of the other hosts didn't an empirical experiment. They explained as follows. You get some chicken pieces turkey drumstick, you freeze them with liquid nitrogen and then attempt to smash

them with a hammer. So they pour liquid nitrogen all over meat inside a bucket, and after being submerged in the liquid nitrogen for a while, the experimenters believes they've gotten the flesh down to almost negative two hundred degrees celsius around negative three forty fahrenheit. And at this temperature, uh, First, they experiment with just kind of like hanging the frozen meat against a wood block with the hand or dropping it, and this doesn't seem to do much of anything interesting.

But then what happens if more forces applied? But if you you know, hit it harder. This appears to be the key. When they hit the nitrogen frozen meat with a hammer, it does, in fact shatter. It splits off into many small brittle shards like ice or glass. They say it's a thousand bits of chicken. Oh man, well, that that sounds like the super a s sub zero fatality right there. Yeah, and so the host concludes, quote, it does work, but it's an awful lot tougher than

you might expect. So if you just fell over, you wouldn't shatter into a thousand pieces. You might crack a bit. And I think that they are based on everything I've read, I think they're basically on the money. That brittle shattering of flesh is quite possible, but it requires a very very cold piece of meat down to like liquid nitrogen

level temperatures, and it requires a very very heavy impact act. Well, everything's coming up set zero in this one, because he has otherworldly ice magic okay, surely capable of reaching those low temperatures, and is a skilled martial artists who knows just just where to hit you and how hard to create this death art that he calls the fatality. So uh so. And also, if you want to investigate this for yourself, fortunately, in this age of widely distributed video content,

there's a bunch of video too. You can see it for yourself, assuming there's no video trickery involved. I think given the amount of content I've seen like this, that's you know, it's probably not all explained by video trickery. So there are tons of videos of people deep freezing various meats, animal bones, model bodies, and other fleshy objects with liquid nitrogen and then shattering them. You know, the internet will provide um. So just mentioning a couple of

examples I found. One of these was a video from a cooking channel called chefs Steps that was attempting to cut through a cow femur with a heavy cleaver and with the femur unfrozen. It takes a bunch of heavy strokes and like swinging it like an axe. I think it took at least a half dozen strokes. But when a cow feemur is frozen and liquid nitrogen, it seems to kind of explode in a shower of brittle pieces after one hit with the same clever, and you might think, wow,

even even a cow femur. I mean, that's a really, really thick bone. But to comment on this, you know, you might sometimes think of bones as something that is naturally brittle to begin with, right, it's kind of like a rock, But bones are actually excellent naturally designed shock absorbers when a normal temperatures. I mean, think about all of the stuff you do with your body. That just

doesn't seem quite right. If your bones were actually composed of say, you know, like rock material of the same size and shape as your bones, yeah, they they really are quite quite durable. I guess part of it is we tend to we tend to only notice them, uh you know, when they're hurting or broken or bruised. Right, that's when we we we began to realize, oh my bones, right, yeah, yeah, Well, you know, a good bone. It's it's like a great

film director is the director. You don't notice great bones or bones you don't think about because they just do the job. They're just there for you. And so bones are not like rocks. They're they're not composed entirely of brittle mineral content. Instead, they're kind of like a natural mesh of one part structural mineral but then softer, more ductile material that can stretch and flex and dissipate mechanical stress. And I think of the things that that help absorb

and dissipate impact stress on bones. One of them, of course, is collagen, which is a protein content in the bones. Is found throughout the hydroxy appetite crystal structure of your bones, but on a deeper chemical level. I also came across an interesting, relatively recent finding that's about exactly what's going

on with bones that helps them flex like this. So it was paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences inteen by Davies at all I think it was a team based primarily out of Cambridge University. But the short version is that they discovered that a major factor helping bones absorb shock without shattering is what they call a goog that is trapped in between the

mineral crystals and our bones. And this goo is actually made of a viscous solution of water containing citrate, which is interesting. So citrate is a derivative of citric acid. It's a natural byproduct of sell metabolism. But various forms of citrates have tons of uses in chemistry, Like one that I think about in in food uses is a trisodium citrate. It's one of the sodium salts of citric acid, and it has a bunch of uses in foods, for example,

emulsified cheese sauces. You know, you ever wonder like what makes something like Velveta style cheese melts so smoothly instead of breaking and getting all greasy. It's because it has a citrate based emulsifier in its sodium citrate. Actually, I I don't know for sure if Velvita in particular uses that one, but I know some like processed melting cheeses do. A good amount of American cheese is going to have

some kind of emulsifier like that. But anyway, so back to bones, Like within our bones, they've they've got this fluid citrate that allows molecules to slip and slide past each other like we were talking about earlier, and this makes the bones more ductal and less brittle and able to absorb loads and impacts without breaking nearly as easily as they would if they were purely rigid mineral structures like rocks. And there are other interesting videos you can

find too. I found one kind of strange video of a pig heart submerged in liquid nitrogen, and and it was left in there until it was deep frozen, and then it was shattered by being thrown against the floor. Assuming that's real, that seems like pretty good at it. And I've seen another one where some people deep froze a sort of simulated model of a frozen human head and then they had a boxer smash it with a heavy punch. It kind of shattered. The damage was reasonably shattery.

So I think I've been convinced. I think the answer is clearly that while animal flesh, including a human body, is not very likely to shatter at regular freezer temperatures like zero degrees fahrenheit or or a negative eight teen celsius, if you get it really really cold in the neighborhood of liquid nitrogen temperatures and then you hit it with a very very heavy impact, shattering becomes a much more realistic reaction. So anyway, consider me a convert converted to

the ways of sub zero. All right, on that note, we're gonna take one more break. But when we come back, UM, I have some additional stuff to throw in about this idea of shattering ice magic, and uh what else we could possibly pull out of the natural world to back this up? I can't thank Alright, we're back, So Robert hit me with some shattering ice magic. All right, I have kind of a shattering ice magic. Um, uh, buffet here a few different offerings here. Uh so, first of all,

there's frost shattering. This is something we mentioned briefly in the pie crete episode. But one way that we we naturally see stone shattered via freezing water occurs via frost shattering. It's a gradual process by which the freezing of water in poor spaces and joints in rock leads to fragmentation. Okay, so this is actually caused by the freezing process itself, right, and the of course the expansion of water in little

cracks and all. Um. You know this this gets down to like why do we have potholes, right, um, because you end up with water. And one of the reasons that you end up with water getting into little cracks in the road, it freezes, it expands, it shatters the the stone work there, and then it has to be repaired. So I don't know how that really helps out sub zero, but it's worth mentioning. Well, I mean, I think it is worth mentioning that things with water content in them

undergoes some natural trauma in the freezing process. Like yes, some some foods that you freeze, um, don't do so well when freezing, like you saw them out and eat them later. And maybe something about the texture is kind of wrong. I mean, like freezing can form crystals that just harm the cells in the food. Yeah. Now another idea that comes to mind. This is more of, I guess a munitions based thing to think about. But you have dry ice bombs, which you absolutely should not try

and make. They're illegal in places and dangerous. But a simple but dangerous explosive device can be made using dry ice, which again dry ice is solid carbon dioxide. Uh and and and and basically all this really does is just shows that, you know, there's a lot of power bound up in the manipulation of the phases of matter, especially when it comes to the expansion, concract contraction of the

substances in question. Okay, and that's gonna play more into like my main idea here, and that is Okay, sub zero he has this ice magic. He's he's a master of ice. He can make it into weapons, he can freeze people as they fly through the air. He can do these complex fatalities. But is he only a master of ice phase one? Or might he have magical access to all seventeen types of crystalline ice and three types of amorphosis that we touched on in our previous episode. Okay,

see the Master of many worlds? Yeah, I mean and that's just known ice. I think they're in total somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred or so theoretical phases of water ice that could be possible. So the question that one might raise this might there be varieties of ice that would prove more advantageous to magical martial arts than even typical every day ice, which of course is pretty powerful. We've already discussed how it can. It seems

like it is you can. You can certainly like shatter a human head, or given enough time, shatter of the stone face of a mountain with its power. But I started looking around about about this, my you know, what other varieties of ice are out there? For example, UM One that came to mind was what if sub zero instead of using or just instead of only depending on phase one UM ice water, what if Heke was also a master of what is referred to as super ionic

ice or ice eighteen. Now, this is one of the high pressure ices that can exist in places like the depths of Urineus and Neptune, and it has been created in the lab on Earth as well. For instance, in twenty nineteen, UNI University of Rochester scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used six giant laser beams to compress water into this exotic ice form. So this is this is really weird stuff. And I have to say, when you read about this, it really bucks you know,

the everyday idea of what ice even is. And it it also makes you realize like the slim pressure and temperature constraints that make up the human world and ultimately are sort of default understanding of reality. Right. So again this, this is this weird ice. This ice ay teen um is is is made via extreme pressure. We're talking um one to four million times the pressure of Earth's atmosphere and uh and it's it depends on extreme temperatures of

three thousand to five thousand degrees fahrenheit. Yeah, so it sounds like ice. I know, it's it's really hot, but um and it's also it's four times as dense as as normal ice. Um and it's uh, it's hot and it's also black. And if you were to take this ice and suddenly expose it to Earth's surface to air pressure, it would rapidly decompress. Does that mean explode or do we not know? Well? I couldn't find a write up

that that specifically mentioned explosion. But we know that rapid decompression, can you know, it's the sort of thing that can produce UH, something that could be described as an explosion. So the way I like to imagine it, UH, you could have sub zero. Feel free um video gamemakers to steal this for your next video game. But you can

have sub zero manipulates the atmosphere around UH. An individual's body, then crushes them down to a mass of high pressure, high temperature black super ionic ice, and then he releases this magical pressure that he's built up around it, and then you're crumpled black and frozen. High temperature body would then rapidly decompress and just explode all over the screen. I'd like it put it in Mortal Kombat seventeen or

whatever they're on, whichever one's next. Now, a lot of other ice phases are are are certain a higher density as well, not necessarily as high density as these, but you also have some that are lower density. Ice is as well, both known and theorized, including I think ice sixteen as an example of that. But I sixteen wouldn't really do sub zero much good unless based on the some of the articles I was looking at, unless he was looking to harvest gas from the sea floor and

transport it in pipes. That's that's one of the main areas where they see uh I sixteen research as having a real world benefit. But our universe is home to forms of ice far colder, such as ice fourteen, which at around which is roughly I think a negative one and sixty degrees celsius or negative two hundred and fifty six degrees fahrenheit. And this is apparently the cod coldest ice we've yet found in the natural world. And this too is found on the icy moonsh icy moons, and

outer planets. So I like the idea of sub zero potentially using that as well. The idea of an ice sorcerer used ing uh plutonic ice against the occasional literal thunder god that he does battle with. That is good, Okay. So here's what I'm thinking, ice warlock and the external power that the warlock context to get his to get his power as a being that lives on Pluto. Yeah, some sort of ice god from the outer reaches of the Solar system. I mean, where else would an ice

god live. I know, we've been saying we're given out these ideas for free. Maybe we should just t M stamp everything. We're saying, no, you can't have it. We're making this game, all right. Well, I have one more example to discuss here on on the topic of frozen things and explosions, because there's the matter of the mysterious Siberian perma frost craters. To consider craters that, at least in some photos especially, I was looking at one from Seen that I included for you to hear for you

to see as well, Joe. It's the crater of what has been dubbed Yamal Crater from the Yamal Peninsula peninsula in northern Siberia, and it looks hauntingly like a scene from John Carpenters the thing. Oh yeah, the ice pit where the space ship was. Yeah, it's forty Why, that's a hundred and thirty one feet So it's it's pretty big, and if you're looking at it, you get the impression that there's either been some sort of an impact or there's been an escape, something has been freed from its

icy prison. And this seems to be exactly the case, only instead of an ancient alien visitor shape shifting its way, you know, out of the ice and then ultimately out of the the frigid waste land. Instead, it is methane exploding out of the permafrost buried natural bombs. Yeah, So basically think to the frozen wooly mammoth. So the frozen permafrost is an ice box storing these exceptional cases of preserved organic matter. But they're also there's plenty of less

exciting stuff frozen in there as well. Since it's frozen, none of it truly rots, at least not until the permafrost heats up due to climate change, and as that happens, the rot finally finds these ancient morsels, releasing carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases. By the way, now methane explosions are they're not known to be the cause of the craters, right, It's just a hypothesized possible explanation.

That's my understanding of it. I was looking around at different articles about it, um because there's other stuff too that they've looked at. There's something similar seems to have happened thousands of years ago on the floor of the Arctic Ocean in places where it seems like methane venting or even explosions may have occurred, resulting in large craters some three thousand feet wide apparently. Um. But and then also we're talking about rare occurrences in remote tundra regions.

So the way this would supposedly work as the frost would heave up over the course of a year or so. UM. But then that's ultimately hard to observe. And I also don't think there have been any actual explosions witnessed. What you have. Instead, you'll have some you know, some of the people will find this big crater. There'll be some accounts from locals about some loud noise they heard in some cases reports of smoke or flame. But um. But other than that, like, again, there's no footage of this

occurring as far as I know. And on top of that, these craters then tend to turn into lakes within a couple of years and are hard to distinguish from other lakes. Uh. This according to Vigne Clavillain of the Skull Tech Center for Hydrocarbon Recovery Man, this is one of those things where there's so much that's potentially amazing in the world that just nobody's around to see. Yeah, it's uh so, as far as I understand, the research is still ongoing

and the scientists are still looking into this. For instance, researchers are still debating whether permafrost melting is going to release mostly methane or mostly carbon dioxide of still figuring all of that out. Well either way, I mean, we don't want more methane or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere right right. The melting of the perma frost is um is alarming. Uh, certainly, no matter what the exact ramifications are. Well, but what does it mean for sub zero um? I

don't know. Maybe nothing, But it could also provide a mechanism by which a frozen warrior might explode given enough time. I don't know. It depends how you look at it. He he generally doesn't let you stand there and rot. But they do have a fighter now that is a master of time, So they could like they could they could like double team um a a corpse and make it, you know, freeze it and then let it rot and then it explodes and the time master speeds it up

there so that it does that. That seems like cheating if you're a master of time. You're just unbeatable, right even if you if you're about to lose, you always go back to start over again, I guess. But that's how video games work, right, So maybe he's perfect. Oh yeah, he's the living example of safe scrubbing. Yes, yes, well this one's been fun, Robert, Yes, yeah it has. Obviously.

We'd love to hear from everyone out there about your frozen food exploits, about your viewing experience with UM with nineties cinema and the various things that get frozen and exploded UM or if you have some feedback about our thoughts on the Moral Kombat franchise, we'd love to hear from you on that as well. Or do you have any uh, do you a direct experience of these permafrost regions we've been discussing here. Perhaps you have some some

feedback there. In the meantime, if you would like to listen to other episodes stuff to blow your mind, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be. We just asked the rate review and subscribe huge things as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode, UH, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow

your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.