View of optical fiber connections.
FRED TANNEAU/AFP/Getty Images
The internet can seem vast and intangible but there’s a very physical system of cables, servers and exchange points across the globe (and yes, even under the oceans). In this episode, we find out how a video shows up nearly instantly on our screens and about insanely thin, clear glass tubes are the key to our digital communication.
• Explore a cool interactive map of the cables that crisscross the globe under the ocean made by Nicole Starosielski.
• See a map of all the submarine cables here.
ERDF (Electricity Network Distribution France) and Louis Dreyfus company install an electric submarine cable and optical fiber between Quiberon and Belle-Ile-en-mer, western France, on March 11, 2015. The underwatered power line of 15km is installed by ERDF to connect the Brittany island of Belle-Ile-en-mer inhabited by 5000 people.JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/Getty Images
Workers laying submarine telegraph cable between England and France. Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Watch: Journalist Andrew Blum talks about the physical infrastructure of the internet:
This episode was first published on Dec. 20, 2016. You can listen to that version here:
How does the internet get to us?
by MPRAudio Transcript
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RAVI KOMPARATIV: You're listening to Brains On.
SAMUEL YUN: Where we're serious about being curious.
MOLLY BLOOM: This podcast coming to your ears is coming from a computer.
SAMUEL YUN: Even if you download it to your phone or streaming it in the car.
MOLLY BLOOM: Wherever and however you're listening, it's coming to you from a computer.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: The same goes for anything you do online.
SAMUEL YUN: Watch a video, send an email, play a game, start a chat, and on and on.
MOLLY BLOOM: But have you ever stopped to think about how these things travel from one computer to another?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: We're going to find out right now. Keep listening.
MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from American Public Media. I'm Molly Bloom. And my co-hosts today are Ravi Komparativ and Samuel Yun from Seattle. Welcome.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Thanks for having us.
SAMUEL YUN: Hi, Molly.
MOLLY BLOOM: So how do you use the internet on a typical day? How about you, Sam?
SAMUEL YUN: Well, I mean, most of my time is spent in school. So like, we have our own personal computers. And we use our computers to whether it's research or find different facts, or even use something we call Google Docs. It's like an online word document. That's usually how I spend most of my time online at school. But when at home, I like to play a lot of different video games online with my friends. So that's usually how I spend most of my time.
MOLLY BLOOM: Excellent, and how about you, Ravi?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: The same goes for me. And when I am at home, I usually like to watch videos on YouTube or play online games with my friends as well.
MOLLY BLOOM: So before we started taping the show, had you thought a lot about how the internet actually works and gets to your computer or your phone? How about you, Ravi?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: For me, I had always, like, set up my own internet, whether it be connected to my computer to the router in my house, but I had never really thought about how it gets to individual houses or anywhere across the world. So I think that's one thing I'm interested to learn about on today's show.
MOLLY BLOOM: And I mean, at this point, can you even imagine life without the internet?
SAMUEL YUN: Not really. it's really hard to think about and imagine how we would communicate with people around the world without the internet.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, and especially since we grew up in a time where the furthest back we can remember, the internet was still there.
MOLLY BLOOM: Right. Do you ever, like, ask your parents like, what was it like before the internet?
SAMUEL YUN: I think the biggest thing is when we were doing research for, like, papers and stuff, we have the internet, we have Google. But they had to go through books and go to the library and find the information through the books instead of just the internet.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, one thing that definitely shocked me about before the internet was here. My dad said people actually used to talk to each other, not on their phone. So that's--
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, they actually had to see each other in person
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah. Today's episode was inspired by this question sent to us over the internet, of course, by Jack.
JACK BUTLER: My name is Jack Butler, and I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland. My question is, how does internet flow around the world?
MOLLY BLOOM: This is a fascinating question and one that I think a lot of us take for granted. I mean, I use the internet all the time and had never really stopped to think about what exactly it is or how I access all these files and all this information. So when I send an email to Ravi in Seattle, how does it get there? Or when I watch a video someone posted in the UK, how does it travel to the screen of my phone?
SAMUEL YUN: It's all about cables.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Journalist Andrew Blum traced the path of the internet to his home in New York.
ANDREW BLUM: And I wrote a book called Tubes, a Journey to the Center of the Internet, where I went to visit the physical infrastructure of the internet.
SAMUEL YUN: Andrew first got interested in the topic because of a squirrel.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's nuts.
ANDREW BLUM: When my internet at home broke, the cable guy came to fix it. And he followed the wire from the clump behind my couch out to the back of my building, and then I saw a squirrel chewing on the cable and said, that's your problem, a squirrel is chewing on your internet. And I realized that if a squirrel could chew on that piece of internet in my backyard, there had to be other pieces of the internet that squirrels could chew on.
SAMUEL YUN: Squirrels, it always comes down to squirrels.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: So he traced the path of the wire from his home in Brooklyn to see where it would take him.
ANDREW BLUM: The first place it goes is a manhole on the corner.
SAMUEL YUN: From there, it goes to the cable company office just outside the city.
MOLLY BLOOM: And then from there, it goes to a big building located at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: More about this address in a minute. For now, just know that this is what's called an exchange point.
SAMUEL YUN: That's where the cables that come from all different internet companies physically connect to one another.
MOLLY BLOOM: And this has to happen in order for you to access files stored by all those other companies.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: So let's say you want to watch a movie from Netflix.
SAMUEL YUN: Or look something up on Google.
MOLLY BLOOM: Cables from those companies--
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Like Netflix.
SAMUEL YUN: And Google.
MOLLY BLOOM: --have to physically connect somewhere down the line to the cable that's connected to your home or office or school or library or wherever you're accessing the internet.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: And those connections happen at exchange points.
ANDREW BLUM: One of the most important internet exchange points and one of my favorites is 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. And that was originally the Western Union building, Western Union being the telegraph company. But over the last 15 years or so, it's become one of about probably the top 10 places in the world where more networks of the internet physically connect to each other than anywhere else.
It looks like a regular office building from the 1930s, kind of a Superman sort of look to it, but inside are small offices that are made out of metal cages. You can kind of peer into them. And inside of them are racks and racks of these telecommunications equipment that are sort of like your home Wi-Fi router, but on a kind of industrial scale. And it's these machines that transfer the data from one network to another, that kind of act as the traffic cops.
MOLLY BLOOM: Not all of us live near huge hubs like 60 Hudson. But at some point, our internet goes through a place like it.
ANDREW BLUM: And so if you live in a small town, there's most likely a kind of a small, old telephone building that probably has a bell symbol on the lawn in front. And that's almost always the place where the network connection goes from your neighborhood to a more regional network, and then from the regional network to a big city like Chicago or Denver or Miami and from there, next to the big international networks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RAVI KOMPARATIV: The cables eventually make it back to the place where data are stored.
SAMUEL YUN: A movie, an, email, a game.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: All the information is stored on the server.
ANDREW BLUM: It might be a server that the hard drive in it that holds web pages that might be the size of a pizza box, or it might be a building as big as a warehouse or factory that holds literally millions of these servers that store all of the things we see in our screens, all the movies and pictures and news articles.
MOLLY BLOOM: So the data is stored in servers that take up actual physical space in a place called a data center.
ANDREW BLUM: The most famous of them are probably the ones owned by Facebook and Google. They do look like giant warehouses. They can be a quarter mile long. And then inside, they're often dark and cold. They need to be kept cold to keep the equipment working properly and filled with sort of blinking lights everywhere.
When you try to think about just the amount of data that's stored on your phone or on your laptop, and then you stack that up, and then you begin to make rows and rows of it like a library and have an entire building that you can begin to grasp. And I never have really been able to fully grasp how much data is actually stored in each of these buildings. And then remember that it's not just one of these buildings, but maybe two or three in a single location, and then maybe a dozen different locations around the world.
MOLLY BLOOM: So data is stored on servers, and those servers are physically wired to us through a series of cables.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But what if we want to watch a video from France or read a website from Japan or send an email to someone in Senegal?
SAMUEL YUN: It's still about the cables, a network of cables.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: They run all the way from you, to France or Japan or Senegal, even with the ocean in the way.
SAMUEL YUN: The cables just go underwater.
MOLLY BLOOM: Stop and think about that for a moment. There are cables carrying the internet running all the way across oceans.
SAMUEL YUN: That's a lot of cable.
MOLLY BLOOM: Nicole Starosielski is a professor at NYU, and she studies these undersea cables.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: The network travels under every ocean all around the world. And these are really small cables. They're about the size of a garden hose. Today, they carry almost 100% of all digital communications that run between continents underneath the ocean.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: And how do these cables get to the bottom of the ocean?
MOLLY BLOOM: Scuba divers?
SAMUEL YUN: No.
MOLLY BLOOM: Robots?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Nope.
MOLLY BLOOM: Highly trained cable-carrying squids that work for fish?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: That would be cool, but still very no.
SAMUEL YUN: They drop them off at the back of a boat.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: As the boat crosses the ocean, they have very precise equipment to gauge how fast the boat is going. And so they'll make sure that enough cable is let out at the right speed so that way, it will exactly line the seafloor. So if there's a mountain on the undersea floor, then the cable will go right over that mountain. It won't droop between mountains. It'll stay on the very bottom of the floor.
MOLLY BLOOM: And this is not a new phenomenon. There have been underwater cables going across the bottom of the ocean since the mid 1800s when telegraphs came into use.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: That was the state-of-the-art communication because you could communicate instantly or near instantly between two points on different sides of the ocean. That before would have taken weeks.
MOLLY BLOOM: The same goes for cables across the land. Again, here's Andrew Blum.
ANDREW BLUM: The internet is a new technology, but the paths that it travels are almost always very old. Either along certainly old telephone routes, but before that, even old railroad routes or old horse and buggy routes. The paths that connect us have been there for a very long time. The technology that carries our communications just keeps getting updated.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RAVI KOMPARATIV: There are now about 500,000 miles of undersea cables that carry our digital communication.
SAMUEL YUN: And new ones are being laid every year because we keep sending more and more data.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Being out in the open sea isn't easy. These undersea cables get damaged over time.
MOLLY BLOOM: But contrary to popular belief, it's not because sharks think they'd make good snacks. It's us, humans. And we do more damage than you might think.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: Once every three days, a cable is cut or damaged. Most of the time, it's by a trawling ship, a fishing ship, or somebody just tosses an anchor off their boat and accidentally severs a cable line. Far more than any other disruption, this is the biggest problem for our global internet infrastructure, are people on boats.
MOLLY BLOOM: When cables break and need repair, they're brought back up to the surface, repairs are made, then they're dropped back in the water.
SAMUEL YUN: My phone isn't connected to any cables. Isn't that data just beamed to my phone from a satellite?
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: You think it's wireless, right, because you're walking around. You're not plugged in, so why would you think that this is a cable technology?
MOLLY BLOOM: Satellites are used for GPS and some other communication, but the info coming to and from your phone is traveling mostly through cables, at least until the last leg of its journey.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: It's only usually that first hop that is wireless. So if I'm on my phone, it's going to go to a cell tower first. That's not going to bounce between cell towers all the way across the country. It's going to go down to a cable network, most often, and then come back up to a cell tower and beam to its endpoint.
SAMUEL YUN: So cables carry our data across the country and across the ocean, but how exactly do they do it?
MOLLY BLOOM: We're going to tackle that question in just a second. But first, I have another mystery for you. It's time for the mystery sound.
GIRL: (WHISPERING) Mystery sound.
MOLLY BLOOM: And this one might be easier for those of you over the age of, say, 20. Here it is.
[KEYPAD TONES]
[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]
Any guesses?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: I'd like to say it sounds like something coming from an old computer or a pager.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mm-hmm.
SAMUEL YUN: When I hear that sound, I think of, like, dial-up internet.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mm. That was Sam.
SAMUEL YUN: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Sam, excellent guess. We're going to be back with the answer later in the show.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Did you know that we have a Brains On fan club? It's true, we do. If you're already in our totally free fan club, you'll know that you get emails with extra activities and resources to go along with our episodes. But we have a new twist. If you provide us with your mailing address, you'll get actual physical mail with some fun surprises.
Our next mailing is going to go out in November. So if you want to get it, make sure you sign up for the fan club by October 31. Sign up at brainson.org/fanclub. And if you're already a part of the fan club and want to make sure you get those mailings, you can go to that same site, brainson.org/fanclub, and give us your mailing address.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Do you have a mystery sound you'd like to share with us?
SAMUEL YUN: A question you'd want answered on the show?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Or maybe you want to send us a drawing or a high five?
MOLLY BLOOM: You can send your data through a vast network of cables by heading to brainson.org/contact.
SAMUEL YUN: Or you can send us physical mail, no cables required.
MOLLY BLOOM: Our address is on our website.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Brainson.org.
MOLLY BLOOM: We get so many smart questions from our listeners every day, like this one.
SORIYA IRVING: Hi, my name is Soriya Irving. I come from Toronto, Canada. And my question is, is it true that makeup has bugs in it?
MOLLY BLOOM: We'll be back with the answer during our Moment of Um at the end of the show. And we'll read the most recent group of names to be added to the Brains Honor Roll. So keep listening.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You're listening to Brains On.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: I'm Ravi Komparativ.
SAMUEL YUN: I'm Samuel Yun.
MOLLY BLOOM: And I'm Molly Bloom. Today's episode is about how the internet flows around the world.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: In a word, cables.
SAMUEL YUN: Lots and lots and lots of cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: But what is actually going through those cables?
SAMUEL YUN: In order to understand, we need to know a little bit about binary code.
MOLLY BLOOM: We have an interview with someone-- I mean, something with an intimate knowledge of the subject.
LEE APPLETON: Welcome back to Under The Hood, the show where we interview important machines about their jobs. I'm your host, Lee Appleton. Joining me today is a computer. Thanks for being here with me today, computer.
COMPUTER: I'm with you every day.
LEE APPLETON: Oh, that's a little--
COMPUTER: Creepy? Yes. Answer complete.
LEE APPLETON: I haven't even asked--
COMPUTER: Zeros and ones is the answer.
LEE APPLETON: OK, I know you're receiving data almost as fast as the speed of light, but can we slow down just a tad? This is an interview. Let's just have a conversation.
COMPUTER: Apologies, human.
LEE APPLETON: Please, call me--
COMPUTER: Lee, yes, I know.
LEE APPLETON: [CLEARS THROAT]. So what is binary code?
COMPUTER: Binary code is zeros and ones. Zero means off, and one means on. My processor, or brain, as you humans might think of it, takes this binary code and executes it.
APPLETON LEE: What does that mean? How do you execute zeros and ones?
COMPUTER: My processor is made up of billions of transistors. These transistors have two states, off or on, zero or one. All the complex things we computers do start with these basic on or off commands. They build on each other. And eventually, with enough on and off commands, you can create the huge range of things we computers do.
LEE APPLETON: But I've seen code, and it's not just zeros and ones. It has words that I can understand, like "if" and "then."
COMPUTER: Your processor, brain, would have trouble writing in the zeros and ones that I need. So the code written by computer programmers is converted by translator into binary code. In the early days, code was written in zeros and ones, but things have become much more complicated. Nowadays, most conversion into binary code is done by computers. All information stored by computers is in binary code, even movies.
LEE APPLETON: Wow. So text messages?
COMPUTER: Binary code.
APPLETON LEE: Using you to type a book report?
COMPUTER: Binary code.
LEE APPLETON: Podcasts?
COMPUTER: Yes, binary code. Look, I'm going to have to cut you off here. I have to get back to work crunching some numbers. Well, to be exact, I have to crunch two numbers. But the answer to your questions about how I process anything will most certainly be binary code, zeros and ones.
LEE APPLETON: Before you go, one last thing. Can I check my email on you real quick?
COMPUTER: Fine, just type on my face. Make it quick.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MOLLY BLOOM: So we've got the basics of binary down. We're going to find out how that code travels through the network of cable spanning the globe in a moment. But first, let's go back to that mystery sound. Let's hear it again.
[KEYPAD TONES]
[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]
Any new guesses?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, I think I'm going to stick with my original guess.
SAMUEL YUN: Same here.
MOLLY BLOOM: So you both thought that had to do with computers, and Sam thought dial-up internet. Here's the answer.
NEIL POMERLEAU: That was the sound that computers used to make when connecting to the internet. Hey, I'm Neil Pomerleau. I'm a software engineer at LinkedIn.
MOLLY BLOOM: So Sam, you were 100% correct. How did you know that sound?
SAMUEL YUN: [CHUCKLES]. So usually, online, when someone complains that the internet is super slow, they like, say, my internet is just as fast as dial-up, and then they like, play the sound of the dial-up internet.
MOLLY BLOOM: So you've never actually heard it in use, but you've heard people use it, as like, a reference?
SAMUEL YUN: Yeah, yeah.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, so you guys are lucky that you've never had to hear it before you get online. Neil first got the internet at his house in 1998 when he was seven years old. Back then, every time you wanted to go online, you had to sit through that sound.
[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]
NEIL POMERLEAU: When we all first started wanting to get connected to the internet, we had to find some way to get everybody's computers connected using whatever technologies we already had. And what do we have? Well, it turns out, and this was especially true before cell phones, that just about every home already had a dedicated phone line for the shared house phone.
So obviously, these phone lines are never meant for connecting to the internet, right? So we did this clever thing where we would connect computers to these phone lines and the computers that actually make a phone call and talk to each other using computer sounds. And that's exactly what you're hearing.
MOLLY BLOOM: Today, the cables carrying the internet are mostly fiber optic cables. These phone lines were made of copper. And going online back then took a lot of patience.
NEIL POMERLEAU: Yeah, and dial-up was notoriously slow. That was one of the big problems with. It was-- it was actually thousands of times slower than what we have now.
MOLLY BLOOM: For those of us old enough to remember, we used to hear this sound all the time. Now, it's practically extinct. Neil missed this sound. And since he's someone who's been making websites since middle school, he made a website.
NEIL POMERLEAU: You know, that recording, that recording of the sound is actually a real recording of my computer connecting to dial-up. I don't know exactly why I recorded it, but I just felt like someday, it would be cool to have. And then I decided to share it with the world with dialupsound.com.
MOLLY BLOOM: So if you go to dialupsound.com, you can experience what it was like to sign on to the internet in the mid to late 90s, a little bit of time travel.
CHILDREN: Brain charge.
MOLLY BLOOM: So we've made quite a leap from copper wires to state-of-the-art fiber optic cables.
SAMUEL YUN: To help us understand how exactly these cables carry movies, emails, and games and everything else that makes up the internet, we talked to Rajeev Ram.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: He's an electrical engineer at MIT. We have a couple of questions here. So the first one off is, what are fiber optic cables made of?
RAJEEV RAM: So fiber optic cables are made-- are really threads of glass. So they're made of-- just like the kind of glass that you see in your window, they're made of silicon and oxygen oxygen. But they're incredibly pure glass. That's what makes them so transparent that you could send signals hundreds of miles with getting-- with almost no loss of light.
SAMUEL YUN: I also have another question. The question is, how do they carry the internet to us?
RAJEEV RAM: Usually, optical fibers, basically. So they carry light. So light basically is trapped inside that optical fiber. It basically goes, for example, from Google's data center, and it travels all the way to your house as light. And that light basically comes as pulses. And those pulses represent digital information, they represent ones and zeros. And those ones and zeros-- a string of ones and zeros might represent a letter in the alphabet. A string of ones and zeros might represent how bright a pixel is on your television screen. And so in that way, they can basically transmit emails, they can transmit movies, pictures.
You kind of imagine looking at your television set. So if you get close to your TV set, you can see that image is basically split up into lots of individual pixels. And every little pixel basically is made up of sub pixels that are red, green, and blue. And what the information that-- in order to transmit that image onto your television screen, you basically need information. Your television needs to know how bright to turn the red, how bright to turn the green, and how bright to turn the blue. And so they're pulses.
Usually, I think seven to eight pulses of data basically come, and they basically tell the television set how bright to make the red. And the next seven pulses come and tell the television how bright to make the green. And the next seven tell it how bright to make the blue. And then it goes, and it does that for every pixel on your television set. And it's doing that so fast that your eye basically can't tell that the image-- that that picture is basically being drawn pixel by pixel.
SAMUEL YUN: And I'm sure a lot of data has to transfer.
RAJEEV RAM: That's right. It's a huge amount of data that's basically coming out. So one of the nice things about using optical fiber is that you can send light of different colors down the same thread of optical fiber. And so each of those colors of light can carry its own independent stream of information. So one optical fiber basically leaving a data center might carry a trillion bits per second of information coming out of that.
SAMUEL YUN: That is super cool.
RAJEEV RAM: You can imagine if you got all these different colors of light traveling on the same glass thread, somewhere at Google and somewhere in your house, you might need something that looks like a prism, that can separate those colors out so you can separate the channels. And there's exactly something like that inside the transmitter that's at Google and the receiver on your side, to separate out all those data streams from each other.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Somewhat relatively recently, we jumped from copper wire to fiber optic. Do you think there's going to be a new state of transferring all this data by jumping from fiber optic to another thing?
RAJEEV RAM: Oh, that's a great question. So when we jumped from copper wire to optical fiber, we weren't sure. Actually, in the 1970s people thought that it was either going to be optical fiber or microwave transmission, that we're going to transmit all of our data wirelessly. And you guys kind of know that we're basically doing both now, right? We've got fiber optic cables coming to our house, carrying our YouTube and Netflix data to our computers and our television sets. And we've also got wireless transmission. We've got 3G and 4G coming directly to our smartphones.
And so we're basically getting information every which way we possibly can. And we expect for sort of fundamental physics reasons that there will always be a wire, probably a glass wire, like a fiber optic, coming to your house, carrying data when it basically has to be trillions of bits of information. But the wireless signals will also continue to get faster.
SAMUEL YUN: That is fascinating.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Appreciate your work
RAJEEV RAM: No, I love the questions. These-- these are great questions.
SAMUEL YUN: Even though the devices we might use be wireless, the internet travels along a series of cables.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Across land and under the sea.
MOLLY BLOOM: Data is stored on servers, sometimes in giant warehouses.
SAMUEL YUN: And somewhere along the line, the cable that comes from where the data is stored has to physically connect with the cable that connects with you.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: All this information travels at nearly the speed of light thanks to fiber optic cables.
SAMUEL YUN: Incredibly thin, clear glass tubes, fiber optic cables transmit pulses of light so fast that we can't even see it with our own eyes.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's it for this episode of Brains On.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: This episode was produced by Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and Molly Bloom.
MOLLY BLOOM: Many thanks to William Komparativ, Dennis Yun, Cameron Wylie, Carol Zoll, Jim Gates, Tim Mining, Eric Brigham, and Becca Murray.
SAMUEL YUN: You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
MOLLY BLOOM: We're at Brains_On.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: And we're on Facebook, too.
MOLLY BLOOM: Now before we go, it's time for our Moment of Um.
SORIYA IRVING: Is it true that makeup has bugs in it?
MARISA PLESCIA: Hi, my name is Marisa Plescia, and I'm a cosmetic chemist at Bell International Laboratories in Eagan, Minnesota If you look at the back of lipsticks, or sometimes, blushes or eye makeup, anything that kind of has a little bit of a red tint, you may see the word "carmine" on the back of the ingredient list.
Carmine is a pigment, a natural colorant that comes from the cochineal insect. And this insect has honestly been used for thousands and thousands of years in South America and kind of North America, especially Mexico because it has a really, really nice red, deep color to it. This cochineal insect contains about 17 to 24% of this chemical called carminic acid. Now unfortunately though, to get this carminic acid, you do have to crush up these dead bugs. But once you crush up these dead bugs, all the dead bug parts are filtered out. And so at the end, you're left with carmine. It is more or less a bug juice.
MOLLY BLOOM: I'm never bugged to read this list of names. It's the Brains Honor Roll. These are the amazing listeners who send us their ideas, questions, mystery sounds, drawings, and high-fives. They keep this show going.
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
RAVI AND SAMUEL: Thanks for listening.
SAMUEL YUN: Where we're serious about being curious.
MOLLY BLOOM: This podcast coming to your ears is coming from a computer.
SAMUEL YUN: Even if you download it to your phone or streaming it in the car.
MOLLY BLOOM: Wherever and however you're listening, it's coming to you from a computer.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: The same goes for anything you do online.
SAMUEL YUN: Watch a video, send an email, play a game, start a chat, and on and on.
MOLLY BLOOM: But have you ever stopped to think about how these things travel from one computer to another?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: We're going to find out right now. Keep listening.
MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from American Public Media. I'm Molly Bloom. And my co-hosts today are Ravi Komparativ and Samuel Yun from Seattle. Welcome.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Thanks for having us.
SAMUEL YUN: Hi, Molly.
MOLLY BLOOM: So how do you use the internet on a typical day? How about you, Sam?
SAMUEL YUN: Well, I mean, most of my time is spent in school. So like, we have our own personal computers. And we use our computers to whether it's research or find different facts, or even use something we call Google Docs. It's like an online word document. That's usually how I spend most of my time online at school. But when at home, I like to play a lot of different video games online with my friends. So that's usually how I spend most of my time.
MOLLY BLOOM: Excellent, and how about you, Ravi?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: The same goes for me. And when I am at home, I usually like to watch videos on YouTube or play online games with my friends as well.
MOLLY BLOOM: So before we started taping the show, had you thought a lot about how the internet actually works and gets to your computer or your phone? How about you, Ravi?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: For me, I had always, like, set up my own internet, whether it be connected to my computer to the router in my house, but I had never really thought about how it gets to individual houses or anywhere across the world. So I think that's one thing I'm interested to learn about on today's show.
MOLLY BLOOM: And I mean, at this point, can you even imagine life without the internet?
SAMUEL YUN: Not really. it's really hard to think about and imagine how we would communicate with people around the world without the internet.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, and especially since we grew up in a time where the furthest back we can remember, the internet was still there.
MOLLY BLOOM: Right. Do you ever, like, ask your parents like, what was it like before the internet?
SAMUEL YUN: I think the biggest thing is when we were doing research for, like, papers and stuff, we have the internet, we have Google. But they had to go through books and go to the library and find the information through the books instead of just the internet.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, one thing that definitely shocked me about before the internet was here. My dad said people actually used to talk to each other, not on their phone. So that's--
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, they actually had to see each other in person
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah. Today's episode was inspired by this question sent to us over the internet, of course, by Jack.
JACK BUTLER: My name is Jack Butler, and I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland. My question is, how does internet flow around the world?
MOLLY BLOOM: This is a fascinating question and one that I think a lot of us take for granted. I mean, I use the internet all the time and had never really stopped to think about what exactly it is or how I access all these files and all this information. So when I send an email to Ravi in Seattle, how does it get there? Or when I watch a video someone posted in the UK, how does it travel to the screen of my phone?
SAMUEL YUN: It's all about cables.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Journalist Andrew Blum traced the path of the internet to his home in New York.
ANDREW BLUM: And I wrote a book called Tubes, a Journey to the Center of the Internet, where I went to visit the physical infrastructure of the internet.
SAMUEL YUN: Andrew first got interested in the topic because of a squirrel.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's nuts.
ANDREW BLUM: When my internet at home broke, the cable guy came to fix it. And he followed the wire from the clump behind my couch out to the back of my building, and then I saw a squirrel chewing on the cable and said, that's your problem, a squirrel is chewing on your internet. And I realized that if a squirrel could chew on that piece of internet in my backyard, there had to be other pieces of the internet that squirrels could chew on.
SAMUEL YUN: Squirrels, it always comes down to squirrels.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: So he traced the path of the wire from his home in Brooklyn to see where it would take him.
ANDREW BLUM: The first place it goes is a manhole on the corner.
SAMUEL YUN: From there, it goes to the cable company office just outside the city.
MOLLY BLOOM: And then from there, it goes to a big building located at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: More about this address in a minute. For now, just know that this is what's called an exchange point.
SAMUEL YUN: That's where the cables that come from all different internet companies physically connect to one another.
MOLLY BLOOM: And this has to happen in order for you to access files stored by all those other companies.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: So let's say you want to watch a movie from Netflix.
SAMUEL YUN: Or look something up on Google.
MOLLY BLOOM: Cables from those companies--
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Like Netflix.
SAMUEL YUN: And Google.
MOLLY BLOOM: --have to physically connect somewhere down the line to the cable that's connected to your home or office or school or library or wherever you're accessing the internet.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: And those connections happen at exchange points.
ANDREW BLUM: One of the most important internet exchange points and one of my favorites is 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. And that was originally the Western Union building, Western Union being the telegraph company. But over the last 15 years or so, it's become one of about probably the top 10 places in the world where more networks of the internet physically connect to each other than anywhere else.
It looks like a regular office building from the 1930s, kind of a Superman sort of look to it, but inside are small offices that are made out of metal cages. You can kind of peer into them. And inside of them are racks and racks of these telecommunications equipment that are sort of like your home Wi-Fi router, but on a kind of industrial scale. And it's these machines that transfer the data from one network to another, that kind of act as the traffic cops.
MOLLY BLOOM: Not all of us live near huge hubs like 60 Hudson. But at some point, our internet goes through a place like it.
ANDREW BLUM: And so if you live in a small town, there's most likely a kind of a small, old telephone building that probably has a bell symbol on the lawn in front. And that's almost always the place where the network connection goes from your neighborhood to a more regional network, and then from the regional network to a big city like Chicago or Denver or Miami and from there, next to the big international networks.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RAVI KOMPARATIV: The cables eventually make it back to the place where data are stored.
SAMUEL YUN: A movie, an, email, a game.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: All the information is stored on the server.
ANDREW BLUM: It might be a server that the hard drive in it that holds web pages that might be the size of a pizza box, or it might be a building as big as a warehouse or factory that holds literally millions of these servers that store all of the things we see in our screens, all the movies and pictures and news articles.
MOLLY BLOOM: So the data is stored in servers that take up actual physical space in a place called a data center.
ANDREW BLUM: The most famous of them are probably the ones owned by Facebook and Google. They do look like giant warehouses. They can be a quarter mile long. And then inside, they're often dark and cold. They need to be kept cold to keep the equipment working properly and filled with sort of blinking lights everywhere.
When you try to think about just the amount of data that's stored on your phone or on your laptop, and then you stack that up, and then you begin to make rows and rows of it like a library and have an entire building that you can begin to grasp. And I never have really been able to fully grasp how much data is actually stored in each of these buildings. And then remember that it's not just one of these buildings, but maybe two or three in a single location, and then maybe a dozen different locations around the world.
MOLLY BLOOM: So data is stored on servers, and those servers are physically wired to us through a series of cables.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
But what if we want to watch a video from France or read a website from Japan or send an email to someone in Senegal?
SAMUEL YUN: It's still about the cables, a network of cables.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: They run all the way from you, to France or Japan or Senegal, even with the ocean in the way.
SAMUEL YUN: The cables just go underwater.
MOLLY BLOOM: Stop and think about that for a moment. There are cables carrying the internet running all the way across oceans.
SAMUEL YUN: That's a lot of cable.
MOLLY BLOOM: Nicole Starosielski is a professor at NYU, and she studies these undersea cables.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: The network travels under every ocean all around the world. And these are really small cables. They're about the size of a garden hose. Today, they carry almost 100% of all digital communications that run between continents underneath the ocean.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: And how do these cables get to the bottom of the ocean?
MOLLY BLOOM: Scuba divers?
SAMUEL YUN: No.
MOLLY BLOOM: Robots?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Nope.
MOLLY BLOOM: Highly trained cable-carrying squids that work for fish?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: That would be cool, but still very no.
SAMUEL YUN: They drop them off at the back of a boat.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: As the boat crosses the ocean, they have very precise equipment to gauge how fast the boat is going. And so they'll make sure that enough cable is let out at the right speed so that way, it will exactly line the seafloor. So if there's a mountain on the undersea floor, then the cable will go right over that mountain. It won't droop between mountains. It'll stay on the very bottom of the floor.
MOLLY BLOOM: And this is not a new phenomenon. There have been underwater cables going across the bottom of the ocean since the mid 1800s when telegraphs came into use.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: That was the state-of-the-art communication because you could communicate instantly or near instantly between two points on different sides of the ocean. That before would have taken weeks.
MOLLY BLOOM: The same goes for cables across the land. Again, here's Andrew Blum.
ANDREW BLUM: The internet is a new technology, but the paths that it travels are almost always very old. Either along certainly old telephone routes, but before that, even old railroad routes or old horse and buggy routes. The paths that connect us have been there for a very long time. The technology that carries our communications just keeps getting updated.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
RAVI KOMPARATIV: There are now about 500,000 miles of undersea cables that carry our digital communication.
SAMUEL YUN: And new ones are being laid every year because we keep sending more and more data.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Being out in the open sea isn't easy. These undersea cables get damaged over time.
MOLLY BLOOM: But contrary to popular belief, it's not because sharks think they'd make good snacks. It's us, humans. And we do more damage than you might think.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: Once every three days, a cable is cut or damaged. Most of the time, it's by a trawling ship, a fishing ship, or somebody just tosses an anchor off their boat and accidentally severs a cable line. Far more than any other disruption, this is the biggest problem for our global internet infrastructure, are people on boats.
MOLLY BLOOM: When cables break and need repair, they're brought back up to the surface, repairs are made, then they're dropped back in the water.
SAMUEL YUN: My phone isn't connected to any cables. Isn't that data just beamed to my phone from a satellite?
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: You think it's wireless, right, because you're walking around. You're not plugged in, so why would you think that this is a cable technology?
MOLLY BLOOM: Satellites are used for GPS and some other communication, but the info coming to and from your phone is traveling mostly through cables, at least until the last leg of its journey.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: It's only usually that first hop that is wireless. So if I'm on my phone, it's going to go to a cell tower first. That's not going to bounce between cell towers all the way across the country. It's going to go down to a cable network, most often, and then come back up to a cell tower and beam to its endpoint.
SAMUEL YUN: So cables carry our data across the country and across the ocean, but how exactly do they do it?
MOLLY BLOOM: We're going to tackle that question in just a second. But first, I have another mystery for you. It's time for the mystery sound.
GIRL: (WHISPERING) Mystery sound.
MOLLY BLOOM: And this one might be easier for those of you over the age of, say, 20. Here it is.
[KEYPAD TONES]
[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]
Any guesses?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: I'd like to say it sounds like something coming from an old computer or a pager.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mm-hmm.
SAMUEL YUN: When I hear that sound, I think of, like, dial-up internet.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mm. That was Sam.
SAMUEL YUN: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Sam, excellent guess. We're going to be back with the answer later in the show.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Did you know that we have a Brains On fan club? It's true, we do. If you're already in our totally free fan club, you'll know that you get emails with extra activities and resources to go along with our episodes. But we have a new twist. If you provide us with your mailing address, you'll get actual physical mail with some fun surprises.
Our next mailing is going to go out in November. So if you want to get it, make sure you sign up for the fan club by October 31. Sign up at brainson.org/fanclub. And if you're already a part of the fan club and want to make sure you get those mailings, you can go to that same site, brainson.org/fanclub, and give us your mailing address.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Do you have a mystery sound you'd like to share with us?
SAMUEL YUN: A question you'd want answered on the show?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Or maybe you want to send us a drawing or a high five?
MOLLY BLOOM: You can send your data through a vast network of cables by heading to brainson.org/contact.
SAMUEL YUN: Or you can send us physical mail, no cables required.
MOLLY BLOOM: Our address is on our website.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Brainson.org.
MOLLY BLOOM: We get so many smart questions from our listeners every day, like this one.
SORIYA IRVING: Hi, my name is Soriya Irving. I come from Toronto, Canada. And my question is, is it true that makeup has bugs in it?
MOLLY BLOOM: We'll be back with the answer during our Moment of Um at the end of the show. And we'll read the most recent group of names to be added to the Brains Honor Roll. So keep listening.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You're listening to Brains On.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: I'm Ravi Komparativ.
SAMUEL YUN: I'm Samuel Yun.
MOLLY BLOOM: And I'm Molly Bloom. Today's episode is about how the internet flows around the world.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: In a word, cables.
SAMUEL YUN: Lots and lots and lots of cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: But what is actually going through those cables?
SAMUEL YUN: In order to understand, we need to know a little bit about binary code.
MOLLY BLOOM: We have an interview with someone-- I mean, something with an intimate knowledge of the subject.
LEE APPLETON: Welcome back to Under The Hood, the show where we interview important machines about their jobs. I'm your host, Lee Appleton. Joining me today is a computer. Thanks for being here with me today, computer.
COMPUTER: I'm with you every day.
LEE APPLETON: Oh, that's a little--
COMPUTER: Creepy? Yes. Answer complete.
LEE APPLETON: I haven't even asked--
COMPUTER: Zeros and ones is the answer.
LEE APPLETON: OK, I know you're receiving data almost as fast as the speed of light, but can we slow down just a tad? This is an interview. Let's just have a conversation.
COMPUTER: Apologies, human.
LEE APPLETON: Please, call me--
COMPUTER: Lee, yes, I know.
LEE APPLETON: [CLEARS THROAT]. So what is binary code?
COMPUTER: Binary code is zeros and ones. Zero means off, and one means on. My processor, or brain, as you humans might think of it, takes this binary code and executes it.
APPLETON LEE: What does that mean? How do you execute zeros and ones?
COMPUTER: My processor is made up of billions of transistors. These transistors have two states, off or on, zero or one. All the complex things we computers do start with these basic on or off commands. They build on each other. And eventually, with enough on and off commands, you can create the huge range of things we computers do.
LEE APPLETON: But I've seen code, and it's not just zeros and ones. It has words that I can understand, like "if" and "then."
COMPUTER: Your processor, brain, would have trouble writing in the zeros and ones that I need. So the code written by computer programmers is converted by translator into binary code. In the early days, code was written in zeros and ones, but things have become much more complicated. Nowadays, most conversion into binary code is done by computers. All information stored by computers is in binary code, even movies.
LEE APPLETON: Wow. So text messages?
COMPUTER: Binary code.
APPLETON LEE: Using you to type a book report?
COMPUTER: Binary code.
LEE APPLETON: Podcasts?
COMPUTER: Yes, binary code. Look, I'm going to have to cut you off here. I have to get back to work crunching some numbers. Well, to be exact, I have to crunch two numbers. But the answer to your questions about how I process anything will most certainly be binary code, zeros and ones.
LEE APPLETON: Before you go, one last thing. Can I check my email on you real quick?
COMPUTER: Fine, just type on my face. Make it quick.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MOLLY BLOOM: So we've got the basics of binary down. We're going to find out how that code travels through the network of cable spanning the globe in a moment. But first, let's go back to that mystery sound. Let's hear it again.
[KEYPAD TONES]
[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]
Any new guesses?
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, I think I'm going to stick with my original guess.
SAMUEL YUN: Same here.
MOLLY BLOOM: So you both thought that had to do with computers, and Sam thought dial-up internet. Here's the answer.
NEIL POMERLEAU: That was the sound that computers used to make when connecting to the internet. Hey, I'm Neil Pomerleau. I'm a software engineer at LinkedIn.
MOLLY BLOOM: So Sam, you were 100% correct. How did you know that sound?
SAMUEL YUN: [CHUCKLES]. So usually, online, when someone complains that the internet is super slow, they like, say, my internet is just as fast as dial-up, and then they like, play the sound of the dial-up internet.
MOLLY BLOOM: So you've never actually heard it in use, but you've heard people use it, as like, a reference?
SAMUEL YUN: Yeah, yeah.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, so you guys are lucky that you've never had to hear it before you get online. Neil first got the internet at his house in 1998 when he was seven years old. Back then, every time you wanted to go online, you had to sit through that sound.
[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]
NEIL POMERLEAU: When we all first started wanting to get connected to the internet, we had to find some way to get everybody's computers connected using whatever technologies we already had. And what do we have? Well, it turns out, and this was especially true before cell phones, that just about every home already had a dedicated phone line for the shared house phone.
So obviously, these phone lines are never meant for connecting to the internet, right? So we did this clever thing where we would connect computers to these phone lines and the computers that actually make a phone call and talk to each other using computer sounds. And that's exactly what you're hearing.
MOLLY BLOOM: Today, the cables carrying the internet are mostly fiber optic cables. These phone lines were made of copper. And going online back then took a lot of patience.
NEIL POMERLEAU: Yeah, and dial-up was notoriously slow. That was one of the big problems with. It was-- it was actually thousands of times slower than what we have now.
MOLLY BLOOM: For those of us old enough to remember, we used to hear this sound all the time. Now, it's practically extinct. Neil missed this sound. And since he's someone who's been making websites since middle school, he made a website.
NEIL POMERLEAU: You know, that recording, that recording of the sound is actually a real recording of my computer connecting to dial-up. I don't know exactly why I recorded it, but I just felt like someday, it would be cool to have. And then I decided to share it with the world with dialupsound.com.
MOLLY BLOOM: So if you go to dialupsound.com, you can experience what it was like to sign on to the internet in the mid to late 90s, a little bit of time travel.
CHILDREN: Brain charge.
MOLLY BLOOM: So we've made quite a leap from copper wires to state-of-the-art fiber optic cables.
SAMUEL YUN: To help us understand how exactly these cables carry movies, emails, and games and everything else that makes up the internet, we talked to Rajeev Ram.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: He's an electrical engineer at MIT. We have a couple of questions here. So the first one off is, what are fiber optic cables made of?
RAJEEV RAM: So fiber optic cables are made-- are really threads of glass. So they're made of-- just like the kind of glass that you see in your window, they're made of silicon and oxygen oxygen. But they're incredibly pure glass. That's what makes them so transparent that you could send signals hundreds of miles with getting-- with almost no loss of light.
SAMUEL YUN: I also have another question. The question is, how do they carry the internet to us?
RAJEEV RAM: Usually, optical fibers, basically. So they carry light. So light basically is trapped inside that optical fiber. It basically goes, for example, from Google's data center, and it travels all the way to your house as light. And that light basically comes as pulses. And those pulses represent digital information, they represent ones and zeros. And those ones and zeros-- a string of ones and zeros might represent a letter in the alphabet. A string of ones and zeros might represent how bright a pixel is on your television screen. And so in that way, they can basically transmit emails, they can transmit movies, pictures.
You kind of imagine looking at your television set. So if you get close to your TV set, you can see that image is basically split up into lots of individual pixels. And every little pixel basically is made up of sub pixels that are red, green, and blue. And what the information that-- in order to transmit that image onto your television screen, you basically need information. Your television needs to know how bright to turn the red, how bright to turn the green, and how bright to turn the blue. And so they're pulses.
Usually, I think seven to eight pulses of data basically come, and they basically tell the television set how bright to make the red. And the next seven pulses come and tell the television how bright to make the green. And the next seven tell it how bright to make the blue. And then it goes, and it does that for every pixel on your television set. And it's doing that so fast that your eye basically can't tell that the image-- that that picture is basically being drawn pixel by pixel.
SAMUEL YUN: And I'm sure a lot of data has to transfer.
RAJEEV RAM: That's right. It's a huge amount of data that's basically coming out. So one of the nice things about using optical fiber is that you can send light of different colors down the same thread of optical fiber. And so each of those colors of light can carry its own independent stream of information. So one optical fiber basically leaving a data center might carry a trillion bits per second of information coming out of that.
SAMUEL YUN: That is super cool.
RAJEEV RAM: You can imagine if you got all these different colors of light traveling on the same glass thread, somewhere at Google and somewhere in your house, you might need something that looks like a prism, that can separate those colors out so you can separate the channels. And there's exactly something like that inside the transmitter that's at Google and the receiver on your side, to separate out all those data streams from each other.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Somewhat relatively recently, we jumped from copper wire to fiber optic. Do you think there's going to be a new state of transferring all this data by jumping from fiber optic to another thing?
RAJEEV RAM: Oh, that's a great question. So when we jumped from copper wire to optical fiber, we weren't sure. Actually, in the 1970s people thought that it was either going to be optical fiber or microwave transmission, that we're going to transmit all of our data wirelessly. And you guys kind of know that we're basically doing both now, right? We've got fiber optic cables coming to our house, carrying our YouTube and Netflix data to our computers and our television sets. And we've also got wireless transmission. We've got 3G and 4G coming directly to our smartphones.
And so we're basically getting information every which way we possibly can. And we expect for sort of fundamental physics reasons that there will always be a wire, probably a glass wire, like a fiber optic, coming to your house, carrying data when it basically has to be trillions of bits of information. But the wireless signals will also continue to get faster.
SAMUEL YUN: That is fascinating.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Appreciate your work
RAJEEV RAM: No, I love the questions. These-- these are great questions.
SAMUEL YUN: Even though the devices we might use be wireless, the internet travels along a series of cables.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: Across land and under the sea.
MOLLY BLOOM: Data is stored on servers, sometimes in giant warehouses.
SAMUEL YUN: And somewhere along the line, the cable that comes from where the data is stored has to physically connect with the cable that connects with you.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: All this information travels at nearly the speed of light thanks to fiber optic cables.
SAMUEL YUN: Incredibly thin, clear glass tubes, fiber optic cables transmit pulses of light so fast that we can't even see it with our own eyes.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's it for this episode of Brains On.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: This episode was produced by Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and Molly Bloom.
MOLLY BLOOM: Many thanks to William Komparativ, Dennis Yun, Cameron Wylie, Carol Zoll, Jim Gates, Tim Mining, Eric Brigham, and Becca Murray.
SAMUEL YUN: You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
MOLLY BLOOM: We're at Brains_On.
RAVI KOMPARATIV: And we're on Facebook, too.
MOLLY BLOOM: Now before we go, it's time for our Moment of Um.
SORIYA IRVING: Is it true that makeup has bugs in it?
MARISA PLESCIA: Hi, my name is Marisa Plescia, and I'm a cosmetic chemist at Bell International Laboratories in Eagan, Minnesota If you look at the back of lipsticks, or sometimes, blushes or eye makeup, anything that kind of has a little bit of a red tint, you may see the word "carmine" on the back of the ingredient list.
Carmine is a pigment, a natural colorant that comes from the cochineal insect. And this insect has honestly been used for thousands and thousands of years in South America and kind of North America, especially Mexico because it has a really, really nice red, deep color to it. This cochineal insect contains about 17 to 24% of this chemical called carminic acid. Now unfortunately though, to get this carminic acid, you do have to crush up these dead bugs. But once you crush up these dead bugs, all the dead bug parts are filtered out. And so at the end, you're left with carmine. It is more or less a bug juice.
MOLLY BLOOM: I'm never bugged to read this list of names. It's the Brains Honor Roll. These are the amazing listeners who send us their ideas, questions, mystery sounds, drawings, and high-fives. They keep this show going.
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
RAVI AND SAMUEL: Thanks for listening.
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