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BZ, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, is a Frankenstein monster of a drug, inspired by natural compounds from nightshade plants. It’s something very few chemists have even heard of. This is a weapon, an incapacitating agent that makes LSD, PCP and mushrooms seem like varieties of herbal tea. This isn’t stuff you can find on the black market or even in the darkest recesses of the dark web for that matter. BZ never caught on. It never became a thing. Anyone who was ever exposed ended up too terrified to relive the experience, many of them stating the effects are too awful, even for use in warfare, on the enemy. Even for those with an interest in extreme and exotic drugs, even for the suicidal and certifiably insane, BZ never developed a fanbase. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net

The Universe as a size limit, smaller than which, things stop making sense. When something gets too tiny, it can slip right through the cracks of reality itself. This minimum allowable size in our observable universe is a lot smaller than even the tiniest virus, a lot smaller than even one nanometer. The smallest size that can fit into reality is called the Planck length and it is unimaginably miniscule. One could comfortably fit 1 billion billion billion viruses across just one Planck length. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. #nano #nanotechnology #stem #materialscience #heisenberg #explained #listenable #quantumphysics See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

Chemicals are a lot like people. Some are gentle, helpful and kind. Other chemicals seem almost mean spirited. Some chemicals seem to be our friends and others tend to be real jerks. There are some chemicals out there that are controversial, substances that have people in a moral standoff. Carbon dioxide is just three atoms. It’s just a tiny little peapod of a molecule floating around in the atmosphere, but it has everyone in a tizzy. How afraid should we be of this gas coming out of all our noses and mouths right now? Carbon dioxide is a key nutrient and a building block to life. It’s in the air, the water, the dirt, the rocks. It’s a food ingredient. It’s an industrial gas. It’s used to power lasers. When it’s pressurized into liquid, it’s a key, nontoxic solvent. It can be formed into a useful ice. Carbon dioxide was the first gas ever described by chemists. In 1640, CO2 gas was called wild spirit. Carbon dioxide gas has even been used in psychiatric treatment as a mind-altering agent. Inhalation of CO2 rich gas mixtures has been known to cause profound shifts in visual perception and mental state. The brain interprets an increase in blood CO2 levels as suffocation, impending death, and this leads to a cascade of profound psychological and physiological changes. Even with carbon dioxide, the product of our own respiration, the stuff of our exhaled breaths, the dose makes the poison. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin #carbondioxide #co2 #materialsscience #materialscience #listenable

What happens when we shrink an object down until it’s way smaller than a ball bearing, tinier than a louse, smaller than bacteria, even a virus, small enough that it takes a modern supercharged transmission electron microscope just to see the thing. A quantum dot is an isolated island of material in a sea of nothing. They can be made from any chemical or material. It’s not the chemistry that’s driving the properties of quantum dots. That’s only part of it. For materials like this, it’s mostly their near infinitesimal size and shape. QDs, for this reason, behave not so much like the material they’re built from but more like the individuals they are and it depends on the environment in which they’re surrounded. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin #quantumdot #listenable #nanotechnology #psychedelic #materialsscience

A black hole seems like the stuff of myth. They’re mysterious monsters that consume everything in reach, including light. They’re so heavy that they distort space itself to such a degree that the invisible fabric warps into an inescapable whirlpool that only ends in cosmic death and transformation for anything caught in the current. Hawking radiation is special light that can somehow do the impossible and escape the death grip of the black hole. How was Hawking radiation getting away? How is this food escaping the event horizon? If a black hole is basically defined as something matter and even light can’t escape, what’s going on here? Why does a black hole glow? Why is Hawking radiation so different? Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin #blackhole #stephenhawking #quantumphysics #cosmology #stem

Materials scientist, Christopher Rankin, Ph.D. presents the most dangerous minerals in the world. Sometimes it seems like Earth is the sweetest and most hospitable oasis, a true mother to humanity. However, Earth has dark side and kills far more than it allows to survive. Even the rocks, the Earth itself, can be as toxic as the worst industrial waste sites. There are rocks sitting out there that contain minerals that have racked up a serious body count over the years. Here is the list in order of capacity for most death and terror: 11. Arsenopyrite 10. Hutchinsonite 9. Orpiment 8. Crocidolite – Blue Asbestos 7. Chrysotile – White Asbestos 6. Erionite 5. Phenacite 4. Potassium feldspar 3. Cinnabar 2. Stibnite 1. Quartz Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin #minerals

If you had asked me a few years ago if I believed extraterrestrials were regularly visiting the planet and flying around in spaceships that put the best human technology to shame, I would have counted you among the crazy. But as time has passed, new evidence has accumulated, and on this matter, my mind has changed. On October 19, 2017, astronomers captured an unexplained image, a bright red spot near the sun that had come out of nowhere. The signal belonged to an object moving almost two hundred thousand miles per hour. Alerts were immediately sent to other observatories, who began tracking the mystery dot with other telescopes. The more they watched the anomalous object, the more puzzling its behavior seemed. This bright spot astronomers concluded, was something never seen before. They agreed it was an interstellar object, something from beyond our solar system. To astronomers on the inside, it was named Oumuamua (oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian word for scout. This isn’t the only new recent development. Commander David Fravor, fighter pilot for almost twenty years, recently went on the record to describe his bizarre encounter over the ocean with the infamous tic tac UFO. Another accomplished Navy pilot with a flawless reputation, Lieutenant Ryan Graves told 60 Minutes, he and his colleagues saw strange flying objects around Virginia Beach every day for years. I never thought I would see the day that mainstream government sources would admit, on record, there is something alien with us on Earth. Yet, here we are. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin #vanadium #oumuamua #tictac #unexplained

With all the technology in the world and everything humans know about alloys, polymers, composites and nanomaterials, is it possible to create impenetrable armor? What about a sword that can slice right through other swords, the adamantine metal of Wolverine’s claws or the Valyrian steel from Game of Thrones? It turns out there was something like this in actual history, something called Damascus steel. Modern metallurgists are still trying to fully nail down the recipe for Damascus steel and there is still some argument about whether science really understands how this material works. Further research seems to be just intensifying the mystery. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

Water is commonplace on Earth but also a common source for inspiration, research and mystery. It has been considered magical over the ages and probably for good reason. From its controversial origins, to anomalous thermal expansion, to odd physical properties to apparent memory, water is full of surprises. To a material scientist, this substance is just baffling. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

BZ, 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, is a Frankenstein monster of a drug, inspired by natural compounds from nightshade plants. It’s something very few chemists have even heard of. This is a weapon, an incapacitating agent that makes LSD, PCP and mushrooms seem like varieties of herbal tea. This isn’t stuff you can find on the black market or even in the darkest recesses of the dark web for that matter. BZ never caught on. It never became a thing. Anyone who was ever exposed ended up too terrified to relive the experience, many of them stating the effects are too awful, even for use in warfare, on the enemy. Even for those with an interest in extreme and exotic drugs, even for the suicidal and certifiably insane, BZ never developed a fanbase. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net Conspiracy Brothers on YouTube Instagram @vanadiumpodcast @conspiracybrothers Twitter @realchrisrankin Christopher Rankin is a scientist and the author of Enter the Uncreated Night, Ann Marie's Asylum (Volume One: Master and Apprentice), Creating Monsters and his latest novel, Break the Bastion. He studied engineering at Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Enter the Uncreated Night Psychologist Oscar Loste is facing the most confusing and frightening case of his career. Six-year-old Beth Bardo is displaying bizarre behavior, including interaction with an imaginary friend she calls Mister Smiler. This invented character supplies Beth with an impossible degree of knowledge about everything from science to ancient cultures to Oscar’s own secrets. The little girl’s parents, a highly-educated couple who also happen to be one of the wealthiest in the country, seem as bewildered as Oscar over Beth. The more he gets to know the little girl and her family, the more Oscar slips into chaos. Self-medication with a mysterious cough syrup recently taken off the market is plaguing him with strange hallucinations and fueling his obsession with the case. As the chilling truth about Beth and Mister Smiler unfolds during her therapy sessions, Oscar must face consequences beyond his imagination. www.amazon.com/Enter-Uncreated-Night-Christopher-Rankin-ebook/dp/B00PMY57KM/

Just a museum today, The Ether Dome was a surgical operating theater at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. It served as the hospital's main operating room from its opening in 1821 until 1867 but also as a kind of entertainment attraction for physicians and scholars to observe the early development of surgery. It was the site of the first public demonstration of the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anesthetic on October 16, 1846, otherwise known as Ether Day. Medicine, especially surgery would never be the same after this milestone and it would even have implications for philosophy and physics more than a hundred years later.

Edward Bernays was an American publicist, who is generally considered to be the pioneer of public relations, advertising and spin. Bernays was also nephew of famous psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. He was respected, even adored by intellectuals at the time. Edward Bernays was a Jewish man who was admired by even the Nazis for the power of his ideas. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

The world has no shortage of crazy people. An interesting thing I’ve noticed over the years is scientists seem to be overrepresented in the eccentric category. The idea of a mad scientist isn’t just a trope or story device. There is something to it. There are real and spectacular examples throughout history. Some of these wild physicists, chemists, engineers and inventors steered the course of civilization through technology, medicine and advances in warfare. Movies, books, legends are filled to the brim with the mad scientist character. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

Adrenochrome is one of the most mysterious and confusing substances in the pharmacopeia. It has a rich, dark history and has been featured in The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net Conspiracy Brothers on YouTube Instagram @vanadiumpodcast @conspiracybrothers Twitter @realchrisrankin Christopher Rankin is a scientist and the author of Enter the Uncreated Night, Ann Marie's Asylum (Volume One: Master and Apprentice), Creating Monsters and his latest novel, Break the Bastion. He studied engineering at Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Enter the Uncreated Night Psychologist Oscar Loste is facing the most confusing and frightening case of his career. Six-year-old Beth Bardo is displaying bizarre behavior, including interaction with an imaginary friend she calls Mister Smiler. This invented character supplies Beth with an impossible degree of knowledge about everything from science to ancient cultures to Oscar’s own secrets. The little girl’s parents, a highly-educated couple who also happen to be one of the wealthiest in the country, seem as bewildered as Oscar over Beth. The more he gets to know the little girl and her family, the more Oscar slips into chaos. Self-medication with a mysterious cough syrup recently taken off the market is plaguing him with strange hallucinations and fueling his obsession with the case. As the chilling truth about Beth and Mister Smiler unfolds during her therapy sessions, Oscar must face consequences beyond his imagination. www.amazon.com/Enter-Uncreated-Night-Christopher-Rankin-ebook/dp/B00PMY57KM/ Break the Bastion Morgan Battle grows up in the shadow of the Bastion, the barrier between what remains of civilization and the void. A wall of titanium climbing over four-thousand feet tall, the Bastion is the world’s grandest structure and all that’s left to protect America’s East Coast from the ocean, which has become humanity’s most dreaded monster. Global climate change and fracking have reshaped the Earth’s landscape and raised the Atlantic over a thousand feet. The Bastion has held steady against the abyss for over seventy years. Morgan lives in the slums at the base of the colossal structure and he’s been chosen by its mysterious architect for a secret experiment, known as Strix. He meets the two other fourteen-year-old subjects, beautiful but brooding Callista and Lucas, a bullied boy afflicted with a puzzling and incurable illness. The experiment brings their lives together in extraordinary ways as they race to solve a frightening mystery and stop something sinister on the horizon. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KKUXMOU/ Creating Monsters In modern Philadelphia, where a deep economic depression has left the city near collapse and most of its inhabitants in gruesome poverty, Mitchell Gray, a twenty-year-old graduate student in a beleaguered university physics department, spends most of his time playing piano and touring the city’s worst slums in stolen cars. He is a technical virtuoso whose scientific ideas challenge the foundations of his field but he lives in hiding from one of the world's most powerful billionaires who is obsessed with Mitchell and determined to capitalize on his strange inventions. When he falls in love with an older woman, the wife of a wealthy pharmaceutical executive, their relationship inspires him with a mad plan to use his creations to change the world. With the help of a brilliant and neurotic chemistry student named Charlie Nolan and technology so advanced that it resembles magic, Mitchell devises horrifying yet harmless schemes and supernatural hoaxes, causing an uproar in the city. His nights as a modern day robin hood also raise the alarm of some of the real monsters in Philadelphia, including a mysterious child murderer rumored to possess supernatural powers, known only as "The Demon." Christopher Rankin's debut novel is a haunting story of love, friendship and survival in a world of revolution. www.amazon.com/gp/product/B006W41EYE/

How can objects separated by light years of distance still be linked in such a way that interacting with, measuring, or perturbing the state of one immediately somehow changes or sets the state of the other? Even Albert Einstein had trouble believing in quantum entanglement. It even made him question quantum mechanics. Einstein and others considered such behavior impossible because it seemed to violate the idea of local realism and causality itself. Einstein referred to entanglement as "spooky action at a distance." He argued that it was ridiculous and therefore quantum mechanics itself must therefore be incomplete. The trouble is quantum entanglement is not impossible. In fact, there is no debate about the existence of this effect. Entanglement or spooky action at a distance is being used in real world technology today. In 2016, China launched the world’s first quantum communications satellite in their $100m Quantum Experiments at Space Scale (QUESS) mission. In 2020, researchers reported quantum entanglement between something actually visible to the naked eye, a millimeter-sized mechanical oscillator and a distant cloud of atoms. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

Can a chemical turn a perfectly normal human being into a zombie? There is a real psychoactive drug out there with legendary status. Scopolamine has deep roots in witchcraft and voodoo, and its use has been well documented throughout history. This drug has been used in ancient and occult rituals and as a tool for crime, murder, and as part of a top-secret CIA program. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of Christopher Rankin. All music by Christopher Rankin See more at: www.christopherrankin.net worlds scariest drug,devils breath,most dangerous drug,true crime podcast,true crime rocket science,the devils breath plant,twilight sleep,flying ointment,datura mystery reddit,million dollar ride,voodoo,witchcraft,scopolamine stories,jimson weed vs angels trumpet,jimson weed vs moonflower,anesthesia surgery,anesthesia,the devils breath flower,twilight sleep anesthesia

On the night of October 15, 1991, something strange streaked across the Utah sky. It left a fluorescent trail that was picked up by astronomers at the Dugway Proving Ground during an experiment to study cosmic rays. The scientists detected a particle moving at unprecedented speed. It contained energy beyond anything humans have ever created, observed or even imagined. When it collided with Earth, the Oh-My-God particle, as it came to be known, had more energy than anything even the universe is supposed to be able to generate. It was more powerful than anything scientists can create using the large hadron collider at CERN. However, even today the OMG’s cause and source are unidentified. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

J. Robert Oppenheimer is the real-life modern Prometheus, leading the grandest and most advanced science experiment in recorded human history, The Manhattan Project. The person in charge of an undertaking like this had to be a master of everything. It required deep understanding of just about every scientific discipline, from high-energy physics, to the chemistry of explosives, metallurgy, structural, electrical and aerospace engineering. Oppenheimer was as fascinating a person as Albert Einstein and just as important and influential. Just like the Earth revolves around the sun, the world seems to revolve around characters. He is also the subject of an upcoming movie by Christopher Nolan, called Oppenheimer. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin

A twenty first century war between world superpowers might look a lot different than we would expect. There is a resource that runs the entire modern technological world and one nation is developing a monopoly. Rare earth minerals can’t be created, faked or substituted and these materials are in just about every critical new technology you can think of. Everything from electric car batteries and motors, to electronics, to computers, to lasers, to space technology, it all requires rare earth minerals and a lot of the stuff. China has been slowly taking control of the world’s supply of these critical materials. They’ve been making it clear that those who don’t cooperate could lose all access to rare earth metals, miss out on developing all the most important technologies and become even more dependent on the nations that do. This kind of power could be like an atom bomb. This kind of economic bomb could effectively send a nation back to the third world. Vanadium features video explorations of the many fascinations of materials scientist, Christopher Rankin PhD. See more at: www.christopherrankin.net All music by Christopher Rankin