Super Cool
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT KRULWICH: I am Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab.
ROBERT: And what we're gonna do in this particular show, is we're gonna ...
JAD: This is one of my favorites.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: Fav-o-rites!
ROBERT: It should be, because you really—you certainly gave it your all.
JAD: Exactly. I don't know. What do we need to say here? I mean ...
ROBERT: Well ...
JAD: ... this is like—this is a little bit of a tussle. We sort of wanted to bring it back because, you know, winter's approaching, things are kinda heavy right now. We could use a little lightness.
ROBERT: So this begins with a very, very successful film editor with—well, you'll meet him in a moment. Comes to us with an idea, which Jad loves, I hate. And things go from there.
JAD: [laughs] Perfect.
JAD: Can you hear us now?
WALTER MURCH: Hello, hello?
JAD: Starts with Walter, my hero.
WALTER MURCH: Walter Murch. I'm a film editor and sound designer, and I've been working in film since the late 1960s.
JAD: Resume includes ...
[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Godfather: I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse.]
ROBERT: The Godfather?
JAD: Apocalypse Now.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, Apocalypse Now: I love the smell of napalm in the morning!]
JAD: Ton of other films.
ROBERT: The thing we're talking about ...
WALTER MURCH: Yeah?
ROBERT: ... so you should know, is the ...
JAD: One of the more spectacular stories I've ever heard.
ROBERT: [laughs] How did you bump into this tale?
WALTER MURCH: Well, I was in Lyon, in France.
JAD: Doing a film.
WALTER MURCH: Unbearable Lightness of Being.
JAD: This is back in 1986.
WALTER MURCH: I was supposed to be there for a week and it wound up I was there for a month. And I ran out of things to read, so I went down the street from the hotel, and there was a bookstore. And I was interested, and still am, in cosmology, so I picked up a book by the Carl Sagan of France, a man named Hubert Reeves.
JAD: Hubert.
WALTER MURCH: Hubert.
JAD: Actually, he's French Canadian.
ROBERT: He translates as Carl Sagán.
WALTER MURCH: [laughs]
ROBERT: Anyway.
JAD: Murch ends up buying Reeves' book, goes back to the hotel, finds a cozy spot.
WALTER MURCH: So I was happily reading away, and he was trying to explain—with some difficulty, because it's a difficult topic—how did matter condense out of the sort of quark soup that we believe happened right after the big bang? And he tried various attempts scientifically, but then he said, "To give you a sense of the poetry of this moment, the best thing is the story that Malaparte tells."
ROBERT: Who is Malaparte?
WALTER MURCH: Well, he was a journalist, a poet, a diplomat, soldier ...
ROBERT: Wow.
WALTER MURCH: ... prisoner, film director, and somebody who, uh ...
ROBERT: Got around.
WALTER MURCH: Yeah.
JAD: And speaking of getting around, in 1942, a Milanese newspaper ...
WALTER MURCH: Corriere della Sera.
JAD: ... sent Malaparte ...
WALTER MURCH: To report on the eastern and northern fronts of the war.
JAD: Specifically the Russian-Finnish border.
WALTER MURCH: And he had a front row seat of the siege of Leningrad, the agony of the Nazi bombardment of that city.
ROBERT: And it's from there that Malaparte tells his story.
WALTER MURCH: So this one day, this was in the winter.
ROBERT: Malaparte was posted with a Finnish army who were fighting along with the Nazis, and they were perched just north of Leningrad.
WALTER MURCH: On the shores of Lake Ladoga, which is this big lake abutting the city.
ROBERT: And on this day ...
WALTER MURCH: The Nazis bombarded the area around the lake. This started a forest fire. Everyone ran for cover.
JAD: Soldiers ran every which way. And in the middle of the forest, there were Soviet horses that were locked up in a stable.
WALTER MURCH: And the horses panicked and broke out of the stables. Hundreds of them.
JAD: And they just started running.
ROBERT: Rushing to get away from the fire.
WALTER MURCH: Right.
JAD: So you have hundreds of horses bolting through this flaming forest.
WALTER MURCH: Heading towards the open space ahead, which was the lake.
JAD: And all at once, they burst out of the forest and go barreling into the lake, stampeding one on top of the other as they all get deeper and deeper.
WALTER MURCH: Up to their heads.
JAD: And it is at this moment when they enter the lake that, according to the story, something very weird happens. In the blink of an eye ...
WALTER MURCH: The lake snaps them shut.
JAD: It just freezes!
WALTER MURCH: Suddenly turns to ice.
JAD: With a bang. It goes from water to ice with this violent snap, and suddenly the horses are entombed. Malaparte writes that even the waves on the lake were gripped in midair and sort of suspended there.
WALTER MURCH: Fade out. The next morning, when Malaparte and the Finns woke up, they discovered the forest fire had burned itself out. And look at that! The lake has frozen solid overnight. And his Finnish friends said, "Yes, that sometimes happens." And then they look and see what are those bumps on the ice over there? They go to investigate, and they find themselves in this horrific sculpture garden of horses' heads sticking up out of this solid, marble-like floor of ice.
JAD: You said hundreds. So hundreds of horse heads.
WALTER MURCH: Hundreds of horse heads.
ROBERT: These are—these are not gonna decay, right? Because it's freezing cold. So they'll ...
WALTER MURCH: Those horses stayed there all winter. And Malaparte was there in that region of the world during that winter, and every so often he and the other soldiers would go and have a smoke, and they'd go into the sculpture garden and wander around looking at this miraculous thing.
JAD: So this image of the horses frozen in this lake ...
WALTER MURCH: This image, beautiful and strange and disturbing and profound in some way.
JAD: ... made us wonder. Well, made me wonder, I should say.
ROBERT: I told you at the time, don't trust this story, it's not ...
JAD: And I ...
ROBERT: It's scientifically impossible ...
JAD: And I ...
ROBERT: ... for a whole lake.
JAD: ... keeping an open heart ...
ROBERT: You thought ...
JAD: ... thought, "Could this possibly be true?" Could there be a grain, perhaps several grains, perhaps a lake's worth of grains of truth ...
ROBERT: Your heart's all right ...
JAD: ... to the story?
ROBERT: ... just, your mind is, like, loose like a sieve.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Anyway, we've argued about this for a year.
JAD: Yeah, and you know what? We're gonna—we're gonna reconstruct that argument right now and take this uptown.
AMANDA ARONCZYK: All right. All right. Let's do this.
ROBERT: To a real scientist.
JAD: "Oh, to a real scientist!" In the course of our argument, we ended up going uptown to Rockefeller University to meet a couple people who know about ice.
ALEXANDER PETROV: So we're going to go play with some super cool ice.
JAD: Among them, this fellow.
ALEXANDER PETROV: I'm Alexander Petrov. I am the Raymond and Beverly Sackler fellow.
ROBERT: Do you—have you ever wondered who are Raymond and Beverly Sackler?
ALEXANDER PETROV: They occasionally almost show up and I almost meet them, but I never have.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: [laughs]
ALEXANDER PETROV: Yeah.
JAD: By the way, the Sackler family has recently come into a bit of controversy. We all know that now. We didn't at the time. In any case, Alex, who it must be said is an amazing dude, graciously agreed to demonstrate that you can in fact create the conditions of that massive lake inside a tiny little test tube.
ALEXANDER PETROV: Okay, could somebody hold this sort of in here and I'll get the tube set up.
JAD: He reached inside his freezer, grabbed his trusty falcon.
ALEXANDER PETROV: Yeah, this is called a falcon tube.
JAD: It's just a plastic tube filled with water. Now this is not normal water.
ALEXANDER PETROV: This is the really nice water.
JAD: It's very, very pure water. No minerals, no dust in there. It's, like, super distilled. And he says when you take water like that and you cool it down, you can get it far below its freezing point and it won't freeze! Unless that is, you happen to have a horse.
ALEXANDER PETROV: You have a tiny horse here?
ROBERT: We have a tiny horse.
ALEXANDER PETROV: And we're gonna drop that into the falcon tube and do that.
ROBERT: [laughs]
ALEXANDER PETROV: That's gonna be awesome!
JAD: So he handed us the tube.
JAD: I'm holding a little vile of super cold water. What—Alex, what temperature do you think this is?
ALEXANDER PETROV: Oh, -20.
JAD: This is minus 20?
ALEXANDER PETROV: C.
JAD: C.
JAD: Celsius.
ROBERT: When does water freeze? At zero.
ALEXANDER PETROV: Zero.
ROBERT: So it's 20 degrees below freezing point and it's still water.
JAD: But not for long because we unscrewed the cap.
MATT KIELTY: Are you—are you filming?
JAD: We held the little plastic horse over the tube.
ROBERT: Countdown or something.
JAD: Okay, on the count of three, Kielty. All right, three, two ...
JAD: One.
[cheers]
ROBERT: Oh my God! Oh my God!
JAD: Point for Jad! Because the moment that little plastic horse hit the water, the water slammed into ice.
AMANDA: I got excited, and ...
JAD: Suddenly that little guy was trapped in an ice cube.
JAD: Oh my God, he's—the horse is frozen! That's amazing! [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
ROBERT: Please remember the horse was plastic. No animals were harmed in this experiment.
JAD: This is honestly breathtaking. Like, it happened so fast.
VIRGINIA WALKER: Catastrophic ice formation, just like that.
JAD: Did you hear that C word, Robert? Say it again. Catastrophic.
VIRGINIA WALKER: Catastrophic.
JAD: This is Virginia Walker.
VIRGINIA WALKER: And I'm in the department of biology, Queens University.
JAD: Virginia was one of the many people that we called up to ask, like, what the hell? Like, why does this happen? Like, shouldn't this water just freeze gradually the way that most water does, you know at 32 degrees Fahrenheit or whatever?
VIRGINIA WALKER: No! Actually, so you see, this is why we have to start at the beginning. As Julie Andrews says, a very good place to start, right?
JAD: [laughs]
VIRGINIA WALKER: All right, so the only reason that water freezes normally at zero Celsius and 32 Fahrenheit is that there's something there that makes it freeze. We call that a nucleator.
JAD: Sounds like a superhero.
VIRGINIA WALKER: Yeah. All right, so it's a nucleator.
JAD: A nucleator is like a seed, right? Didn't know this, but it turns out water almost always needs a seed in order to grow ice.
ERIN PETTIT: So it turns out, water by itself is not actually that good at remembering how to become ice.
JAD: That is Erin Pettit. She's a glaciologist.
ERIN PETTIT: At the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
JAD: And what she means is that when water cools down, the molecules start to slow their movement.
ERIN PETTIT: They get a little bit closer together.
JAD: And at that point, they want to all hold hands and become ice.
ERIN PETTIT: But the water molecules don't quite remember very well how they're supposed to be organized.
JAD: They're like, "Wait. Do you stand here and I stand here? How do we do this again?"
ERIN PETTIT: They need to be shown what combination of angles work the best to create a nice, stable structure.
JAD: What they need is, say, a speck of dust. That's the nucleator. If you throw in some dust into otherwise pure water, now they have a guide.
ERIN PETTIT: Because ice can start to mimic whatever the—the shape of the dust particle is.
JAD: But what happens is that the water molecules start to form a cage around the dust particle, and that cage shape is very similar to the shape they need to make ice. And suddenly they're like, "Oh, that's how we do it!" So in a sense, the dust particle is reminding the water molecules how to freeze!
VIRGINIA WALKER: Well, no. I don't think of it like that.
JAD: Virginia says it's actually not quite so gentle. Really what's happening is the dust particle is forcing the water molecules into the right shape around it. It's like a—it's like a command.
VIRGINIA WALKER: It's nothing about memory. It's a physical thing. They just get jammed in there.
ROBERT: Wow, that's just like Julie Andrews, like a Nazi. [laughs]
JAD: [laughs]
ERIN PETTIT: [laughs] So then these ...
ROBERT: Now let's start at the very beginning. Start at the very beginning!
JAD: Okay, so if, as we just learned, water needs a catalyst, a nucleator in order to freeze, doesn't this at least raise the possibility that that Finnish-Russian lake had reached a super cold state, along come these horses and they were the nucleators. Maybe they had dust on their hair, or whatever. I don't know. But whatever it was, it started a chain reaction. Ice spread outward from these horses, shot across the entire lake, and froze the whole damn thing at once.
[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Sound of Music: [singing] The end!]
ROBERT: Now, if you'll excuse me for just a second because this is like a Touretting, like, impulse I have. [blows raspberry]
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Now we can continue.
JAD: Hold your horses there, Krulwich, but we're gonna take a break, and we'll continue this meaningless tussle in just a moment.
[LISTENER: This is Alicia Bridges calling from Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Okay, so—Jad, Robert, Radiolab. Before the break, we posited what I thought was an interesting theory. Robert, not buying it.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: We'll get to your skepticism in a moment, but I wanna talk a little bit more about nucleators for a second, because when we were talking with Virginia, she told us something kinda cool. We asked her, like, "What else nucleates ice? Like, we've learned about dust, but what else can do it?"
VIRGINIA WALKER: Okay, so the best nucleator is ice itself.
JAD: She says if a little bit of snow falls into some water, or a little bit of ice forms in the water organically, the water molecules will rush around that and—bam.
VIRGINIA WALKER: If you don't have ice, what is the second best thing to nucleate this ice? Happens to be bacteria.
ROBERT: Hmm.
JAD: Turns out, she says, there are three different kinds of bacteria that can generate these special proteins.
VIRGINIA WALKER: Big honkin' proteins.
JAD: That can instantly turn water into ice.
ROBERT: In fact, when we were reporting this story, a video started circulating on the internet that showed a scientist taking a bottle of water, squirting out a little bit of this bacteria in it, and then the thing just shot into ice.
VIRGINIA WALKER: And the cool thing is these bacteria are actually plant pathogens.
JAD: Plant killers.
VIRGINIA WALKER: So you've probably seen grass growing in your backyard or whatever, and it can be all covered with frost, but then, you know, the frost can melt and it's still green.
JAD: Yeah.
VIRGINIA WALKER: But if those bacteria are present ...
JAD: She says they'll spit out their proteins onto the plant, which generates these ice crystals.
VIRGINIA WALKER: The ice crystals ...
JAD: Then slice the plant open.
VIRGINIA WALKER: And expose the inside of the plant. And the bacteria say, "Mmm, yummy! Here's lunch." And they eat the—eat the insides of the plant.
JAD: It's a good strategy, but that's not the cool part. Virginia says she has also found these proteins in bacteria that don't kill plants.
VIRGINIA WALKER: So that made me think.
JAD: Made her wonder why. Like, why would they need to make ice? And that's when it occurred to her and a few other researchers, "Maybe it's about transportation."
VIRGINIA WALKER: Exactly.
ROBERT: What?
JAD: Well, think about it. These bacteria are just sitting on these plants.
VIRGINIA WALKER: And what happens is the wind comes along, blows up these little bacteria into the upper atmosphere.
JAD: Blows them literally up into the clouds.
VIRGINIA WALKER: They're not particularly cold-hearty.
JAD: So now they have a situation. They do not want to be all the way up there.
VIRGINIA WALKER: They gotta get back down to the Earth, and unless they hitch a ride on those horses that you keep talking about ...
JAD: [laughs]
VIRGINIA WALKER: ... they're so light, they might not come down to Earth.
JAD: So what they do, she suspects, is they use the plant trick. They spit out these proteins into the cold, wet cloud, which galvanizes the water molecules around them to form a snowflake around their body. So now they've got this little hovercraft that they can use to coast on down.
VIRGINIA WALKER: If they make ice, they can get back down. And they can get back down in a different place and start a new colony of bacteria somewhere else. And so by this way, they get dispersed around the whole Earth.
JAD: Think about that the next time it's winter and it snows.
VIRGINIA WALKER: Apparently, if you melt each snowflake, you'll find a little bacterium inside it.
JAD: You're saying all of them? All the snowflakes?
VIRGINIA WALKER: I—I haven't looked at every single snowflake.
JAD: Well, of course. [laughs]
VIRGINIA WALKER: But it makes perfect sense, doesn't it?
JAD: But that's ama—that's a very, very cool idea.
VIRGINIA WALKER: Yeah.
JAD: I suddenly like the bacteria movie a hell of a lot better than the horse movie.
VIRGINIA WALKER: [laughs]
JAD: So at least I've—you know? And it—and it at least has a shot at being true.
JAD: Yeah, the horses. So when we were reporting this story and we were talking to Erin Pettit and Virginia Walker and a bunch of other scientists, when we asked them, "Could an entire lake have flash frozen in an instant, trapping all those horses?" Uniformly the answer that we got was ...
ERIN PETTIT: No.
ROBERT: Did you hear her 'no' there? Did you hear the sound of it?
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: It seems somewhat—let me ask it to you a different way: would you say absolutely not? Or is it just a kind of a gentle no?
ERIN PETTIT: I'd say that's an absolutely not. [laughs]
ROBERT: Okay.
ROBERT: Because as Erin told us, when you're talking about freezing an entire lake, well you've got a lot of problems to consider. First ...
ERIN PETTIT: The process of freezing, actually is a source of heat itself.
ROBERT: Because, like, when water molecules form bonds to make ice, that's a lot of activity. And activity produces energy, and now that's gonna make things a little bit warmer. Not to mention the fact that horses are warm-blooded animals, so they also would slow down the process of freezing.
ERIN PETTIT: Right.
ROBERT: Also, the water would never have been pure enough to super cool in the first place.
ERIN PETTIT: Because there's—there's too many things in the lake that would provide that initial nucleation: plants, organisms, dirt.
JAD: Dammit!
ERIN PETTIT: Did somebody actually see this? What is the actual evidence that ...
JAD: Um ...
WALTER MURCH: No. Nobody saw any of this as it actually happened.
JAD: When we told Walter Murch what the scientists told us, in typical Walter Murch fashion, he was icy calm. And he reminded us that he never told us it was true, that Malaparte often mixed fact and fiction, and that the real reason he was attracted to this story was because it offered a metaphor for cosmology.
WALTER MURCH: Right. The beginning of the universe.
ROBERT: Really? I mean, if you'll excuse me, I have a small bit of skepticism.
JAD: [laughs]
ROBERT: Now Walter thinks it's true for the universe?
JAD: Metaphor. Metaphor.
ROBERT: Even so.
JAD: It's a metaphor.
ROBERT: Even so.
JAD: Come on!
ROBERT: Well, what does he mean?
JAD: Well, he ...
ROBERT: What does he mean?
JAD: Here's what he means. And if you're a physicist listening right now, just turn off the radio. [laughs]
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: So ...
ROBERT: We're just talking among ourselves here.
JAD: Right. So you can think of it in one of two ways, right? The first is that idea of super cooling that we saw at Rockefeller, where under the right circumstances, water can cool down way below its freezing point, not freeze, and then all of a sudden ...
ROBERT: Ah! Oh my God!
JAD: Oh!
ROBERT: Oh my God!
JAD: ... then it can suddenly do that, which we saw at Rockefeller in the test tube. Now according to Janna Levin ...
JANNA LEVIN: Professor of Physics and Astronomy. Bard College, Columbia University.
JAD: The metaphor holds because that bizarro flash-freezing phenomenon actually happened repeatedly, she says, in the moments after the big bang.
JANNA LEVIN: Yes. Super cooling is definitely something that happens in the early universe.
JAD: She says right when the universe got its start, it was still small like the size of a grapefruit. Inside that grapefruit it was extremely hot.
JANNA LEVIN: Back then, it was probably a million, trillion, trillion, trillion times hotter. [laughs]
ROBERT: A million, trillion, trillion, trillion times.
JANNA LEVIN: 10³² times hotter.
JAD: But as the little grapefruit began to expand, the temperature started to drop. And it dropped and dropped to a point where the universe ...
JANNA LEVIN: Should freeze.
JAD: So to speak. But it didn't. And it's waiting, and it's waiting to freeze, and you're like, "What's happening? Why aren't you freezing?" Then suddenly!
ROBERT: Pow!
JAD: There it goes. Phase change!
ROBERT: Right, so ...
JAD: This happ ...
ROBERT: Go ahead.
JAD: Okay.
ROBERT: I don't know exactly what you're saying, but keep going.
JAD: All I'm saying is there's a lot of phase changes, some of them were super cool. Don't worry about it.
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: There's another parallel which I think is actually even more interesting. It has to do with those seeds we talked about. So if you go back to the grapefruit ...
ROBERT: Okay.
JAD: Inside, it's very, very hot. You've got this wash of energy, and this energy is uniform, right? It's all the same thing, spread evenly, everywhere the same. But then as things cool, you begin to get these ...
JANNA LEVIN: Tiny fluctuations.
JAD: Little variations in temperature and density.
JANNA LEVIN: Right. It's a little bit hotter and denser in one point.
JAD: Than another. We're talking about clumps. Like maybe over here there's a little bit more matter and heat than over there. And these are our seeds.
ROBERT: See, I don't think that you're describing seeds like I understand seeds. Seeds are little things.
JAD: I have a ...
ROBERT: Little things that attract other stuff.
JAD: No, no, but these behave just like seeds. Because as the universe cools down and expands and begins to add all these new forces and all these new particles ...
JANNA LEVIN: Gravity, electrons, photons, atoms.
JAD: ... those little bits of variation from the beginning are still there, and now they're growing bigger because now we have gravity, right? So little concentrations of stuff are now attracting more stuff, and then more stuff, and then more stuff. And as the universe expands, they expand until ultimately, those little blips have become these massive objects.
JANNA LEVIN: Amazingly, the largest structures that we know about in the universe have their seeds in these tiny fluctuations.
ROBERT: Does that mean when you go on a—on a Star Wars-kinda voyage. So you're in your spaceship and you're going at some incredibly high speed, you're rushing through the universe, and you see huge clouds of gas with nurseries for stars. And you leave them and you go to a galaxy and then another galaxy. There's a galaxy over here, and a galaxy over there, and a galaxy over here. You're saying that these massive structures, walls of galaxies, neighborhoods of stars are reflections of a very early moment when something went—wheew, wheew—in the initial broil of stuff. Like the ...
JANNA LEVIN: These beautiful structures that you're describing are like the snowflakes around the little bit of dust.
ROBERT: So does that mean that the empty spaces that we see when we gaze at the current universe are actually filled with something that hasn't cooled yet, or that hasn't—or isn't visible to us, or is working under different rules?
JANNA LEVIN: Well, if I can hijack your question, I can say we might not have seen the last of the phase transitions. Our universe is absolutely continuing to cool.
ROBERT: [gasps]
JAD: Is it really?
JANNA LEVIN: Yeah. It's ...
JAD: It's cooling down?
JANNA LEVIN: It's very cold right now. We have this dark energy driving the universe to expand at an ever-accelerated rate, and it's conceivable that in the future, that energy will endure some phase transition and it will go away, or decay to something else. And this new state of matter, it might do something different to the evolution of the universe.
ROBERT: Oh!
JANNA LEVIN: So we might have a phase transition in our future.
ROBERT: Huh! Suddenly I feel a little—oh dear!
JAD: Hello.
ROBERT: We have many people to thank who helped us on this particular podcast.
JAD: Totally. Producers Matthew Kielty, Molly Webster.
ROBERT: Whoo!
JAD: Also Amanda Aronczyk.
ROBERT: Aktish Batcha Fashur and Maureen Budeault.
JAD: The super cool people at Rockefeller University.
ROBERT: Absolutely.
JAD: Jeanie Gabarino, Philip Kidd and of course, Alexander Petrov. Thanks also to Jeffer Sanstrom, Inger Herberg, Mark Martin, Martin Truffer, Mark Tuckerman.
ROBERT: And Jason Wexler. And sincere thanks to all the listeners from Facebook and Twitter who helped us translate Russian and Finnish books.
JAD: Oh, and certainly last but not least, Walter Murch, for being my hero.
ROBERT: Jad loves you!
JAD: I love you! And more importantly, he released a book translating Malaparte from Italian to English, which is where we got the story of the—of the horses falling in the lake. It's called The Bird That Swallowed Its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte.
ROBERT: All right. So that's—that's us saying ...
JAD: Oh, oh, oh, oh, wait! One more thing, one more thing. Go to our website, Radiolab.org, and you can see videos we shot at Rockefeller of water turning into ice in a flash, super cooling right in front of your eyes. It's amazing. Radiolab.org. I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: Thanks for listening.
[LISTENER: This is Stephanie calling from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Maria Matasar-Padilla is our managing director. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachael Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Habte, Tracie Hunte, Matt Kielty, Robert Krulwich, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Amanda Aronczyk, Shima Oliaee, David Fuchs, Nigar Fatali, Phoebe Wang and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris.]
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