How does the internet work?
Fly View Productions/Getty
The internet can feel like magic. You send a video of a squirrel eating an acorn to your friends and BOOM! A few seconds later, they can watch it! But how does the internet actually work?
In today’s episode, Molly and co-host Kayson take a tour of the internet. They find out where information on the internet is stored and how that information moves around the world using long skinny cables on the ocean floor! They also call on Shark Manchez the computer hacker to explain the secret language computers speak. Plus, another tricky mystery sound!
Experts:
Nicole Starosielski is an author, researcher and professor at UC Berkeley who studies the internet. Read more about her work here.
Andrew Blum is a journalist and author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet (inspired by a squirrel!). Learn more about his work here.
Resources:
Check out this map of underwater internet cables.
Audio Transcript
Download transcript (PDF)
SPEAKER: You're listening to Brains On, where we're serious about being curious.
SPEAKER: Brains On is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
SQUIRRELIFER: Hey, Squirrelathan.
SQUIRRELATHAN: Oh, hey Squirrelifer.
SQUIRRELIFER: What are you up to today?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Oh, you know, eating some acorns, gathering some acorns, burying some acorns. Being a squirrel. How about you?
SQUIRRELIFER: Oh, me? I got big plans. Really big plans.
SQUIRRELATHAN: This is where I'm supposed to ask you what your big plans are, right?
SQUIRRELIFER: Yes. Oh, thank you for asking. I'm going to become the most famous squirrel in the world.
SQUIRRELATHAN: By collecting the most acorns?
SQUIRRELIFER: Oh, no. Better than that. I'm going to star in a video that humans will not be able to resist. They will watch it, they will laugh, and they will share it with all of their human friends. And it'll be a video of me.
SQUIRRELATHAN: Doing what? Collecting acorns?
SQUIRRELIFER: Oh, no. See that guy sitting on that bench?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Uh-huh.
SQUIRRELIFER: And you see how he's waving to his friend taking a video of him?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Uh-huh.
SQUIRRELIFER: And do you see how he's also holding an ice cream cone in one hand?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Uh-huh.
SQUIRRELIFER: Well, while he's distracted waving for the video, I'm going to grab the ice cream, maybe take a lick, maybe carry it around. We'll see where the moment takes me. OK, gotta go. Bye.
SQUIRRELATHAN: OK, Bye, Squirrelifer.
MAN: Hey! Come back here, you squirrel! That's my ice cream.
SQUIRRELIFER: Dude. [LAUGHS] That was hysterical. I got to upload that like right now.
[THEME MUSIC]
MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom and my co-host today is Kayson From Tarboro, North Carolina. Hi, Kayson.
KAYSON: Hi, Molly.
MOLLY BLOOM: So, Kayson, I'm so happy you're here today. I'm just wondering, How do you use the internet on a typical day?
KAYSON: So I use it most of the time in my day. I use it when I'm bored. And I use it when I don't know where to go. If I have to talk to somebody, I could use the internet.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, the internet is so useful. I also use it for all those things. When I'm bored, I do a crossword puzzle with the internet. I love to talk to my friends on FaceTime. It's a very useful thing. So I'm wondering, before this show, had you thought at all about how the internet works?
KAYSON: So I knew that it would go to towers and stuff. The only thing I didn't know about the internet is, How does it get to continents?
MOLLY BLOOM: Nice. You were like towers are involved. You knew that.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: But you didn't really understand how it would get like so far.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Interesting. So can you imagine life without the internet?
KAYSON: Not really, because it would be so hard to talk to other people without the internet. You can't really talk to your friends. The only way you can talk to your friends is going over to the house, which you don't really want to do all the time.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, the internet makes it so much easier to talk to your friends. Like, you can send them text messages. You can do video chats with them. And without the internet, you would have to go to their house or use an old-fashioned telephone, which a lot of people don't have anymore. Are there other things in your life that you're like, wow, that would be really hard to do without the internet?
KAYSON: Going somewhere. Because if you need a map, you need like Google Maps or something like that, and you need that to figure out where you're going.
MOLLY BLOOM: Totally. Yes. I use my maps on my phone all the time. There's not that many places I could get to without my maps these days. So, yeah, the internet is a really, really big part of my life. It sounds like it's a big part of your life, too. And there was a time when the internet didn't exist. Your grandparents didn't have the internet for most of their lives. And when I was little and your parents were little, we didn't have it either. So what do you think were the good parts about not having the internet?
KAYSON: The good parts about not having the internet is probably you can just go outside when you're bored. You don't think about what's going on in your phone as soon as you don't know what to do. And mostly that.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so you have to find other ways to entertain yourself by going outside, maybe a little more variety potentially.
SPEAKER: (SINGING) Ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba
Ba-ba, ba-ba-ba
Brains On
MOLLY BLOOM: Today's episode was inspired by this question sent to us over the internet, of course, by Jack.
JACK: 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 I really never stopped to think about what exactly it is or how it brings me all these pictures and videos and stuff.
KAYSON: So when I send an email to you in Minnesota, how does it get there?
MOLLY BLOOM: Or when I watch a video someone posted in the UK, how does it travel to my phone?
KAYSON: The answer might surprise you. It's all about cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's right. The internet, the thing that brings us movies, emails, games, and so much more, seems like it just shows up on our phones and computers through thin air.
KAYSON: But a lot of the journey takes place through actual physical cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: You probably see cables all the time-- power cables strung up along big metal towers.
KAYSON: Or telephone cables hanging on those big wooden poles.
MOLLY BLOOM: You might even have a cable running from the wall to your TV or one for a desktop computer. The internet travels in cables of all different sizes to get to us, even if it jumps through the air for the last leg of the journey.
KAYSON: We'll explain how that works in a bit. But first, How do those cables get internet to our houses? That's something Andrew Blum wondered too. He's a journalist who wrote a whole book about this.
ANDREW BLUM: And I wrote a book called Tubes-- A Journey to the Center of the Internet.
KAYSON: Andrew first got interested in the topic because of a squirrel.
MOLLY BLOOM: A squirrel? That's nuts. See what I did there? Because squirrels like nuts.
KAYSON: Uh-huh.
MOLLY BLOOM: [LAUGHS] Anyway, here's Andrew.
ANDREW BLUM: When my internet at home broke and 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 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 the internet in my backyard, there had to be other pieces of the internet that squirrels could chew on.
KAYSON: Squirrels. It always calms down the squirrels.
MOLLY BLOOM: So he traced the path of the wire from his home in to see where it would take him.
ANDREW BLUM: The first place it goes is a manhole on the corner.
KAYSON: From there, it goes to the cable company office just outside the city.
MOLLY BLOOM: And from there, it goes to a big building located at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan.
KAYSON: More about this address in a minute.
MOLLY BLOOM: For now, just know that this is what's called an exchange point. That's where the cables that come from all the different internet companies physically connect to one another. So let's say you want to watch a squirrel documentary on Netflix.
KAYSON: Well, look up "squirrel facts" on Google.
MOLLY BLOOM: Cables from those companies--
KAYSON: Like Netflix, 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.
KAYSON: And all those different cables meet up at exchange points. It's like a giant party palace and all the cables are invited.
MOLLY BLOOM: Here's journalist Andrew Blum again.
ANDREW BLUM: One of the most important internet exchange points and one of my favorites is 60 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan. It looks like a regular office building from the 1930s, kind of a Super-Man 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.
MOLLY BLOOM: Not all of us live near huge exchange points like this one, 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 and Miami and from there connects to the big international networks.
MOLLY BLOOM: So you have these spots where all the cables from different companies are hooked together.
KAYSON: But the cables are just connecting two points. If one point is your home, where's the other point?
MOLLY BLOOM: This chain of cables starts at big machines that hold lots and lots of data. These big machines are called servers. Whether it's a movie, an email, a game, all that information is stored on a 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 a factory that holds literally millions of these servers that store all of the things we see on our screens, all the movies and pictures and news articles.
MOLLY BLOOM: So everything on the internet is stored in machines called 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 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, I mean, begin to grasp. I never were really able to fully grasp how much data is actually stored in each of these buildings.
KAYSON: And there are a lot of these kinds of buildings, more than 8,000 globally.
MOLLY BLOOM: And more are being built all the time. We keep making more data that needs to be stored. So data is stored on servers. And those servers are physically wired to us through a series of cables. Sometimes those cables are buried underground, sometimes above ground strung between poles. 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?
KAYSON: It's still about cables, a network of cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: They run all the way from to France or Japan or Senegal even with an ocean in the way.
KAYSON: The cables just go under water.
[RUMBLES, BURBLES]
MOLLY BLOOM: Stop and think about that for a moment. There are cables carrying the internet running all the way across oceans underwater.
KAYSON: Thousands of miles along the ocean floor.
MOLLY BLOOM: That is so far.
KAYSON: That's a lot of cable.
MOLLY BLOOM: It's truly bananas. Nicole Starosielski is a professor at UC Berkeley, 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.
KAYSON: And how do these cables get to the bottom of the ocean?
MOLLY BLOOM: Scuba divers.
KAYSON: No.
MOLLY BLOOM: Robots.
KAYSON: No.
MOLLY BLOOM: Highly trained cable-carrying squids that are paid in fish?
KAYSON: That'd be cool, but still no.
MOLLY BLOOM: What is it then?
KAYSON: They drop them off the back of a boat.
MOLLY BLOOM: Excuse me? They drop them off 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.
KAYSON: And this is not a new thing. There have been underwater cables going across the bottom of the ocean since the mid 1800s.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's when people started using telegraphs to communicate with each other. Telegraphs were machines that used cables to send coded messages across really long distances. This was before telephones even. We're still using underwater cables today, but we're using lots more of them because we're sending more and more information all the time. There are now more than 500 undersea cables, and we need to keep adding new ones.
KAYSON: But being out in the open sea isn't easy. These undersea cables get damaged all the 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 fishing ship or somebody just tosses an anchor off their boat and accidentally severs the cable line. Far more than any other disruption, this is the biggest problem for our global internet infrastructure, and 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.
KAYSON: So all these skinny cables, the width of a garden hose, run across the ocean floor.
MOLLY BLOOM: And that's how the internet gets from continent to continent.
KAYSON: OK. But tablets or phones are only connected to wires when they're charging, right?
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, they're only connected to wires when they're charging, sometimes not even then.
KAYSON: So how is the internet getting to those things?
MOLLY BLOOM: We're going to tackle that question in just a second. But first, I have another wireless delight for you. It's time for the--
[EERIE MUSIC]
SPEAKER: (WHISPERING) "Mystery Sound."
MOLLY BLOOM: Are you ready for the "Mystery Sound," Kayson?
KAYSON: Yes. Yes, I am.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK, great. Here it is.
[MYSTERY SOUND]
Whoa. I have no idea what that is either. What do you think it is?
KAYSON: I think it's a drill.
MOLLY BLOOM: Oh, a drill?
KAYSON: Or a race car, a toy race car.
MOLLY BLOOM: Nice. Those are both good guesses. A drill or a toy race car. Do you want to hear it again?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: All right. Here it is.
[MYSTERY SOUND]
OK. Any new thoughts?
KAYSON: No, I still think it's a drill or a race car.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK. Drill or race car. Maybe even some combination of race car and drill, a race car that can go down the track and then screw a screw into the wall? Maybe. I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
Who knows? Well, we'll have another chance to hear it and guess at the end of the show. And then we'll find out the answer after the credits.
KAYSON: Stay tuned.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
MOLLY BLOOM: We're working on an episode all about sneezing. Every sneeze is unique from big, loud honkers like "AH-CHOO" to tiny little squeakers like "ah-chie!" So we want to hear from you. If your sneeze had a name, what would it be? Record yourself doing your best sneezing impression. Tell us what you'd name it. Kayson, do you have a sneeze you would like to tell us about and what you would name it?
KAYSON: Mkay. So my sneeze probably sounds like this. "Laaaaah-choo!"
MOLLY BLOOM: Ooh, I like it. What would you name that sneeze?
KAYSON: I'll name it a Tigercat.
MOLLY BLOOM: Ooh, a Tigercat. I love that. Why would you name it Tigercat?
KAYSON: Because it sounds like a tiger, kind of like a cat when they're screaming.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes. Yeah, can I hear that sneeze one more time?
KAYSON: "Laaaaah-choo!"
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes, the Tigercat. So good. Listeners, record your sneeze name and sound and send it to us at brainson.org/contact. While you're there, you can send us your mystery sounds, drawings, and questions.
KAYSON: Like this one.
SPEAKER: Why are cactus prickly?
MOLLY BLOOM: You can find answers to questions like these on the Moment of Um podcast, a short dose of facts and fun every weekday. Find Moment of Um and more at brainson.org.
KAYSON: So keep listening.
SPEAKER: Brains On! Universe is a family of podcasts for kids and their adults. Since you're a fan of Brains On, we know you'll love the other shows in our universe. Come on, let's explore.
SPEAKER: Here we are in Brains On! Universe.
[ZAP]
Home to my favorite podcasts.
[BEEP]
Brains On.
[BEEP]
"Smash Boom Best."
[BEEP]
"Forever Ago."
[CHATTER]
[GASPS] I found one.
[BLIP]
"Forever Ago," the history show hosted by Joy Dolo.
[BLIP, BLOOP]
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
JOY DOLO: It was the early 1800s. Beethoven was busy composing new symphonies, steam-powered trains were brand new inventions, and a British naturalist named William Swainson was exploring the jungles of--
[BLIP, BLOOP]
SPEAKER: [GASPS] Ah, what a great show.
[BEEP]
Need more "Forever Ago" now.
SPEAKER: Listen to "Forever Ago" wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER: (SINGING) Brains On
On
On
KAYSON: You're listening to Brains On. I'm Kayson.
MOLLY BLOOM: And I'm Molly. Today's episode is all about how the internet flows around the world.
KAYSON: It's all about cables. Lots and lots of cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: But a lot of the devices we use to access the internet don't have cables attached to them. So what's the deal there? Here's Nicole Starosielski again.
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: But it is, in fact, coming through cables for most of the journey. It's the last leg of the journey to your wireless device that sends data across the air. Wireless data is sent from something called a cell tower. There are cell towers all over the place, and the one closest to you will send the message data to your phone or tablet using radio waves that travel through the air.
KAYSON: But these radio waves can't travel too far.
MOLLY BLOOM: So if you were only using radio waves to send a message, it would have to hop between lots of cell towers to get all the way to the person you were sending a message to. And that would take a while.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: 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.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK, so let's break this down. Say you're sending a text message. You type it out.
KAYSON: "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone."
MOLLY BLOOM: You press Send. Your phone sends that text message to a cell tower near you using radio waves.
(ROBOTIC TONE) "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone."
(SPEAKING) When those radio waves get to the cell tower, the data gets transferred from radio waves into a signal sent through a cable.
(ROBOTIC TONE) "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone."
(SPEAKING) Your text message travels through cables and eventually ends up at another cell tower near the person who's getting your text message. That cell tower sends the message to that person using radio signals.
(ROBOTIC TONE) "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone"
(SPEAKING) And then your friend will know all about the squirrel in your back yard, thanks to radio waves and cables. And all of this happens in seconds.
KAYSON: Whoa. So you can't see the cables, but they're really important to the process.
MOLLY BLOOM: Exactly. And Wi-Fi in your house works in a similar way, except instead of messages being sent over a cell tower, they go from a cable to your Wi-Fi router. Then that router sends the information through the air to your device.
KAYSON: OK, but how does my text message or the squirrel video I want to watch get sent to the cables?
MOLLY BLOOM: In order to understand, we need to know a little bit about something called binary code, which sounds kind of complicated. So we've asked everyone's favorite computer expert, Shark Manchez to help us out.
KAYSON: You mean Brains On producer Marc Sanchez?
MOLLY BLOOM: Well, you see, in our episode about computer viruses, we found out that our buddy Marc is also a world renowned white hat hacker, which means he helps computer users everywhere figure out how to protect themselves. Shark Manchez is his hacker name.
KAYSON: Isn't his identity supposed to be secret?
MOLLY BLOOM: I mean, if he wanted it to be secret, would he have written himself a theme song?
["SHARK MANCHEZ'S THEME SONG" PLAYING]
SPEAKER: (SINGING) He's Shark Manchez
A white hat hacker
That means he's smart
And he can crack your computer code
While staying handsome
This is his anthem
He's Shark Manchez
KAYSON: Hi, Marc. I mean, Shark.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Hi, Kayson. Hey, Molly. Yes, I heard there was a computer question for me. Shark Manchez is here.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
KAYSON: How do cables carry all this data, movies, games, text messages?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Oh, easy one. The answer is lasers. Is that all? OK, bye then.
MOLLY BLOOM: Excuse me. Your answer is just lasers? I think we need a little more explanation here.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Ah. OK. I spent a lot of time talking to computers, and they get the point real fast. I forget that humans sometimes more razzle dazzle, like sound effects.
[ZAP]
MOLLY BLOOM: I do really appreciate sound effects.
SHARK MANCHEZ: I know. But computers, they don't need sound effects. They speak in binary code. Let's start by looking at this cable.
KAYSON: Looks kind of like a fancy hose.
SHARK MANCHEZ: But when we cut it open, it's full of very thin glass tubes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Whoa, those are thinner than a strand of hair.
KAYSON: Dude, that's so thin.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Oh, yeah.
KAYSON: You got a sound effect for a thin glass tube?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Ooh, I like a challenge. How about this one?
[DING]
KAYSON: I tip my hat to you, sir.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Thank you. These glass tubes are very thin, very flexible, and very strong.
MOLLY BLOOM: And these glass tubes somehow send messages in binary code?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Indeed, they do. Computers don't speak in letters or words. They understand two things-- off and on.
KAYSON: That's it?
SHARK MANCHEZ: That's it. And binary code uses only 0's and 1's.
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 0, 1.
SHARK MANCHEZ: (SPEAKING) But it's not like math. 0 means off.
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 0.
SHARK MANCHEZ: (SPEAKING) And 1 means on.
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 1.
MOLLY BLOOM: But what's turning off and on here?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Well, in the case of cables, lasers!
[ZAP]
The light from the lasers travels down the glass tubes.
[DING]
But the lasers are flashing off and on.
KAYSON: Off and on? Like, binary code?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Now, I'm tipping my hat to you, Kayson. The 1's and 0's are like the off and on of the lasers.
[ZAP]
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 1.
SHARK MANCHEZ: And you can use these on and off patterns to send a code that the computer reads and translates into things like text or an image.
MOLLY BLOOM: I understand how you could use a code of on and off blinking lights to send a message. It's kind of like that old Morse code, where you use short and long taps to send messages that someone else hears and translates.
[BEEP]
SHARK MANCHEZ: Exactly, Molly.
KAYSON: But how does turning a light on and off mean. I can watch a video on my phone? That seems super complicated.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Aha. So have you heard of a pixel?
KAYSON: Yes, I have.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Excellent. Yeah, so a pixel is a little on a screen.
[BEEP]
And that dot on the screen can churn different colors.
[BEEP]
So when you're looking at a text message, the text on the screen is actually made up of a bunch of little pixels in a very specific pattern of black and white.
KAYSON: Whoa!
SHARK MANCHEZ: Whoa, indeed. And when you're watching a movie, each pixel is getting a message through the cable about what color it's supposed to be and how bright it's supposed to be. And that pixel keeps changing as the images on the screen change.
MOLLY BLOOM: So that's so much information just for a single second of a movie.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Yeah, but the laser's pulse really fast. These messages are sent and decoded so, so, so, so so fast. And each glass tube--
[DING]
--can send lots of messages at once by sending each in a different color light down the tube.
KAYSON: That's so cool.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Yeah, it's pretty much a rainbow of cool. Just think of how much data flows through our lives all the time and how busy all those cables must be.
MOLLY BLOOM: So when you're listening to a podcast, since the podcast comes over the internet, is the podcast also made out of 0's and 1's.
SHARK MANCHEZ: [INAUDIBLE] Molly.
KAYSON: Am I made of 0's and 1's?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Well, the version of your voice that's being heard through this podcast. Yeah, you are 0's and 1's.
KAYSON: I think I need my own theme song then.
["KAYSON'S THEME SONG" PLAYING]
SPEAKER: (SINGING) It's Kayson's voice
But now it's data
Zeros and ones
Are all that matter
It's coming through lasers and cables
011010110110000101111001011100110110111
SHARK MANCHEZ: Wow. That was amazing. High five. Kayson.
KAYSON: Maybe you mean high 0 or high 1.
[THEME MUSIC]
MOLLY BLOOM: Even though the devices we use might be wireless, the internet travels along a series of cables.
KAYSON: Across land and under the sea.
MOLLY BLOOM: And somewhere along the line, the cable that comes from where the data is stored has to physically connect with the cable that connects to you.
KAYSON: All of this information travels at almost the speed of light, thanks to fiber optic cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: Those are incredibly thin, clear glass tubes. Fiber optic cables transmit pulses of light that computers understand and translate into things like text or videos. That's it for this episode of Brains On.
KAYSON: This episode was written by--
MOLLY BLOOM: Molly Bloom.
KAYSON: --and edited by--
SPEAKER: Shahla Farzan.
KAYSON: And--
SPEAKER: Sanden Totten.
KAYSON: Fact-checking by--
SPEAKER: Jess Miller.
MOLLY BLOOM: Engineering help from Robert Michael and Derek Ramirez with sound design by--
SPEAKER: Rachel Breeze.
MOLLY BLOOM: Original theme music by--
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
KAYSON: We had production help from the rest of the Brains On! Universe team.
MOLLY BLOOM: Rosie DuPont, Anna Goldfield, Nico Gonzalez Wisler, Ruby Guthrie.
SPEAKER: Lauren Humpert.
SPEAKER: Joshua Ray.
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
MOLLY BLOOM: Charlotte Traver, Anna Weggel.
KAYSON: And?
SPEAKER: Aron Woldeslassie.
MOLLY BLOOM: Beth Perlman is our executive producer. And the executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks to Irese Robinson, Ryan Jones, [? Khari ?] Jones, and [? Frandy ?] [? Mungo. ?]
KAYSON: Brains On is a non-profit public radio program.
MOLLY BLOOM: There are lots of ways to support the show. Subscribe to Brains On! Universe on YouTube, where you can watch animated versions of some of your favorite episodes or head to brainson.org.
KAYSON: While you're there, you can send us mystery sounds, drawings, and questions.
MOLLY BLOOM: All right. Kayson, are you ready to hear the mystery sound again?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: All right. Here it is.
[MYSTERY SOUND]
What do you think?
KAYSON: I think it's a drill drilling on wood.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK. A drill drilling on wood. I think it's a cricket plane. A really, really tiny violin that needs to be tuned.
KAYSON: Hmm.
MOLLY BLOOM: I think your guess seems more likely.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: But let's see. Should we see?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: You never with these mystery sounds. Here is the answer.
OLIVER: Hi, my name is Oliver. I'm from Japan. And that was the sound of a cicada.
MOLLY BLOOM: A cicada?
KAYSON: Yeah, a cicada?
MOLLY BLOOM: Oh, my goodness.
KAYSON: They are loud.
MOLLY BLOOM: They are loud. I think-- I mean, a cicada does sound a lot like a drill. I really thought you were right. [LAUGHS] I really did.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Do you have cicadas near where you live?
KAYSON: Yes. Because it was cicada season like two months ago, I think so.
MOLLY BLOOM: Nice. So they're loud, right?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: They're very, very loud. Wow, that's cool. Cool mystery sound. I didn't know they were in Japan, either. I'm learning so much today from the mystery sound.
[BUZZING]
Now it's time for the Brains Honor Roll. These are the incredible kids who keep the show going with their questions, ideas, mystery sounds, drawings, and high fives.
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
SPEAKER: (SINGING) Brains Honor Roll
High five
MOLLY BLOOM: We'll be back next week for an episode all about how or if animals pick their leaders.
KAYSON: Thanks for listening.
SPEAKER: Brains On is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
SQUIRRELIFER: Hey, Squirrelathan.
SQUIRRELATHAN: Oh, hey Squirrelifer.
SQUIRRELIFER: What are you up to today?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Oh, you know, eating some acorns, gathering some acorns, burying some acorns. Being a squirrel. How about you?
SQUIRRELIFER: Oh, me? I got big plans. Really big plans.
SQUIRRELATHAN: This is where I'm supposed to ask you what your big plans are, right?
SQUIRRELIFER: Yes. Oh, thank you for asking. I'm going to become the most famous squirrel in the world.
SQUIRRELATHAN: By collecting the most acorns?
SQUIRRELIFER: Oh, no. Better than that. I'm going to star in a video that humans will not be able to resist. They will watch it, they will laugh, and they will share it with all of their human friends. And it'll be a video of me.
SQUIRRELATHAN: Doing what? Collecting acorns?
SQUIRRELIFER: Oh, no. See that guy sitting on that bench?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Uh-huh.
SQUIRRELIFER: And you see how he's waving to his friend taking a video of him?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Uh-huh.
SQUIRRELIFER: And do you see how he's also holding an ice cream cone in one hand?
SQUIRRELATHAN: Uh-huh.
SQUIRRELIFER: Well, while he's distracted waving for the video, I'm going to grab the ice cream, maybe take a lick, maybe carry it around. We'll see where the moment takes me. OK, gotta go. Bye.
SQUIRRELATHAN: OK, Bye, Squirrelifer.
MAN: Hey! Come back here, you squirrel! That's my ice cream.
SQUIRRELIFER: Dude. [LAUGHS] That was hysterical. I got to upload that like right now.
[THEME MUSIC]
MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from APM Studios. I'm Molly Bloom and my co-host today is Kayson From Tarboro, North Carolina. Hi, Kayson.
KAYSON: Hi, Molly.
MOLLY BLOOM: So, Kayson, I'm so happy you're here today. I'm just wondering, How do you use the internet on a typical day?
KAYSON: So I use it most of the time in my day. I use it when I'm bored. And I use it when I don't know where to go. If I have to talk to somebody, I could use the internet.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, the internet is so useful. I also use it for all those things. When I'm bored, I do a crossword puzzle with the internet. I love to talk to my friends on FaceTime. It's a very useful thing. So I'm wondering, before this show, had you thought at all about how the internet works?
KAYSON: So I knew that it would go to towers and stuff. The only thing I didn't know about the internet is, How does it get to continents?
MOLLY BLOOM: Nice. You were like towers are involved. You knew that.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: But you didn't really understand how it would get like so far.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Interesting. So can you imagine life without the internet?
KAYSON: Not really, because it would be so hard to talk to other people without the internet. You can't really talk to your friends. The only way you can talk to your friends is going over to the house, which you don't really want to do all the time.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, the internet makes it so much easier to talk to your friends. Like, you can send them text messages. You can do video chats with them. And without the internet, you would have to go to their house or use an old-fashioned telephone, which a lot of people don't have anymore. Are there other things in your life that you're like, wow, that would be really hard to do without the internet?
KAYSON: Going somewhere. Because if you need a map, you need like Google Maps or something like that, and you need that to figure out where you're going.
MOLLY BLOOM: Totally. Yes. I use my maps on my phone all the time. There's not that many places I could get to without my maps these days. So, yeah, the internet is a really, really big part of my life. It sounds like it's a big part of your life, too. And there was a time when the internet didn't exist. Your grandparents didn't have the internet for most of their lives. And when I was little and your parents were little, we didn't have it either. So what do you think were the good parts about not having the internet?
KAYSON: The good parts about not having the internet is probably you can just go outside when you're bored. You don't think about what's going on in your phone as soon as you don't know what to do. And mostly that.
MOLLY BLOOM: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so you have to find other ways to entertain yourself by going outside, maybe a little more variety potentially.
SPEAKER: (SINGING) Ba-ba, ba-ba, ba-ba
Ba-ba, ba-ba-ba
Brains On
MOLLY BLOOM: Today's episode was inspired by this question sent to us over the internet, of course, by Jack.
JACK: 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 I really never stopped to think about what exactly it is or how it brings me all these pictures and videos and stuff.
KAYSON: So when I send an email to you in Minnesota, how does it get there?
MOLLY BLOOM: Or when I watch a video someone posted in the UK, how does it travel to my phone?
KAYSON: The answer might surprise you. It's all about cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's right. The internet, the thing that brings us movies, emails, games, and so much more, seems like it just shows up on our phones and computers through thin air.
KAYSON: But a lot of the journey takes place through actual physical cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: You probably see cables all the time-- power cables strung up along big metal towers.
KAYSON: Or telephone cables hanging on those big wooden poles.
MOLLY BLOOM: You might even have a cable running from the wall to your TV or one for a desktop computer. The internet travels in cables of all different sizes to get to us, even if it jumps through the air for the last leg of the journey.
KAYSON: We'll explain how that works in a bit. But first, How do those cables get internet to our houses? That's something Andrew Blum wondered too. He's a journalist who wrote a whole book about this.
ANDREW BLUM: And I wrote a book called Tubes-- A Journey to the Center of the Internet.
KAYSON: Andrew first got interested in the topic because of a squirrel.
MOLLY BLOOM: A squirrel? That's nuts. See what I did there? Because squirrels like nuts.
KAYSON: Uh-huh.
MOLLY BLOOM: [LAUGHS] Anyway, here's Andrew.
ANDREW BLUM: When my internet at home broke and 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 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 the internet in my backyard, there had to be other pieces of the internet that squirrels could chew on.
KAYSON: Squirrels. It always calms down the squirrels.
MOLLY BLOOM: So he traced the path of the wire from his home in to see where it would take him.
ANDREW BLUM: The first place it goes is a manhole on the corner.
KAYSON: From there, it goes to the cable company office just outside the city.
MOLLY BLOOM: And from there, it goes to a big building located at 60 Hudson Street in Manhattan.
KAYSON: More about this address in a minute.
MOLLY BLOOM: For now, just know that this is what's called an exchange point. That's where the cables that come from all the different internet companies physically connect to one another. So let's say you want to watch a squirrel documentary on Netflix.
KAYSON: Well, look up "squirrel facts" on Google.
MOLLY BLOOM: Cables from those companies--
KAYSON: Like Netflix, 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.
KAYSON: And all those different cables meet up at exchange points. It's like a giant party palace and all the cables are invited.
MOLLY BLOOM: Here's journalist Andrew Blum again.
ANDREW BLUM: One of the most important internet exchange points and one of my favorites is 60 Hudson Street in Lower Manhattan. It looks like a regular office building from the 1930s, kind of a Super-Man 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.
MOLLY BLOOM: Not all of us live near huge exchange points like this one, 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 and Miami and from there connects to the big international networks.
MOLLY BLOOM: So you have these spots where all the cables from different companies are hooked together.
KAYSON: But the cables are just connecting two points. If one point is your home, where's the other point?
MOLLY BLOOM: This chain of cables starts at big machines that hold lots and lots of data. These big machines are called servers. Whether it's a movie, an email, a game, all that information is stored on a 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 a factory that holds literally millions of these servers that store all of the things we see on our screens, all the movies and pictures and news articles.
MOLLY BLOOM: So everything on the internet is stored in machines called 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 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, I mean, begin to grasp. I never were really able to fully grasp how much data is actually stored in each of these buildings.
KAYSON: And there are a lot of these kinds of buildings, more than 8,000 globally.
MOLLY BLOOM: And more are being built all the time. We keep making more data that needs to be stored. So data is stored on servers. And those servers are physically wired to us through a series of cables. Sometimes those cables are buried underground, sometimes above ground strung between poles. 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?
KAYSON: It's still about cables, a network of cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: They run all the way from to France or Japan or Senegal even with an ocean in the way.
KAYSON: The cables just go under water.
[RUMBLES, BURBLES]
MOLLY BLOOM: Stop and think about that for a moment. There are cables carrying the internet running all the way across oceans underwater.
KAYSON: Thousands of miles along the ocean floor.
MOLLY BLOOM: That is so far.
KAYSON: That's a lot of cable.
MOLLY BLOOM: It's truly bananas. Nicole Starosielski is a professor at UC Berkeley, 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.
KAYSON: And how do these cables get to the bottom of the ocean?
MOLLY BLOOM: Scuba divers.
KAYSON: No.
MOLLY BLOOM: Robots.
KAYSON: No.
MOLLY BLOOM: Highly trained cable-carrying squids that are paid in fish?
KAYSON: That'd be cool, but still no.
MOLLY BLOOM: What is it then?
KAYSON: They drop them off the back of a boat.
MOLLY BLOOM: Excuse me? They drop them off 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.
KAYSON: And this is not a new thing. There have been underwater cables going across the bottom of the ocean since the mid 1800s.
MOLLY BLOOM: That's when people started using telegraphs to communicate with each other. Telegraphs were machines that used cables to send coded messages across really long distances. This was before telephones even. We're still using underwater cables today, but we're using lots more of them because we're sending more and more information all the time. There are now more than 500 undersea cables, and we need to keep adding new ones.
KAYSON: But being out in the open sea isn't easy. These undersea cables get damaged all the 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 fishing ship or somebody just tosses an anchor off their boat and accidentally severs the cable line. Far more than any other disruption, this is the biggest problem for our global internet infrastructure, and 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.
KAYSON: So all these skinny cables, the width of a garden hose, run across the ocean floor.
MOLLY BLOOM: And that's how the internet gets from continent to continent.
KAYSON: OK. But tablets or phones are only connected to wires when they're charging, right?
MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, they're only connected to wires when they're charging, sometimes not even then.
KAYSON: So how is the internet getting to those things?
MOLLY BLOOM: We're going to tackle that question in just a second. But first, I have another wireless delight for you. It's time for the--
[EERIE MUSIC]
SPEAKER: (WHISPERING) "Mystery Sound."
MOLLY BLOOM: Are you ready for the "Mystery Sound," Kayson?
KAYSON: Yes. Yes, I am.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK, great. Here it is.
[MYSTERY SOUND]
Whoa. I have no idea what that is either. What do you think it is?
KAYSON: I think it's a drill.
MOLLY BLOOM: Oh, a drill?
KAYSON: Or a race car, a toy race car.
MOLLY BLOOM: Nice. Those are both good guesses. A drill or a toy race car. Do you want to hear it again?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: All right. Here it is.
[MYSTERY SOUND]
OK. Any new thoughts?
KAYSON: No, I still think it's a drill or a race car.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK. Drill or race car. Maybe even some combination of race car and drill, a race car that can go down the track and then screw a screw into the wall? Maybe. I don't know.
[LAUGHTER]
Who knows? Well, we'll have another chance to hear it and guess at the end of the show. And then we'll find out the answer after the credits.
KAYSON: Stay tuned.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
MOLLY BLOOM: We're working on an episode all about sneezing. Every sneeze is unique from big, loud honkers like "AH-CHOO" to tiny little squeakers like "ah-chie!" So we want to hear from you. If your sneeze had a name, what would it be? Record yourself doing your best sneezing impression. Tell us what you'd name it. Kayson, do you have a sneeze you would like to tell us about and what you would name it?
KAYSON: Mkay. So my sneeze probably sounds like this. "Laaaaah-choo!"
MOLLY BLOOM: Ooh, I like it. What would you name that sneeze?
KAYSON: I'll name it a Tigercat.
MOLLY BLOOM: Ooh, a Tigercat. I love that. Why would you name it Tigercat?
KAYSON: Because it sounds like a tiger, kind of like a cat when they're screaming.
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes. Yeah, can I hear that sneeze one more time?
KAYSON: "Laaaaah-choo!"
MOLLY BLOOM: Yes, the Tigercat. So good. Listeners, record your sneeze name and sound and send it to us at brainson.org/contact. While you're there, you can send us your mystery sounds, drawings, and questions.
KAYSON: Like this one.
SPEAKER: Why are cactus prickly?
MOLLY BLOOM: You can find answers to questions like these on the Moment of Um podcast, a short dose of facts and fun every weekday. Find Moment of Um and more at brainson.org.
KAYSON: So keep listening.
SPEAKER: Brains On! Universe is a family of podcasts for kids and their adults. Since you're a fan of Brains On, we know you'll love the other shows in our universe. Come on, let's explore.
SPEAKER: Here we are in Brains On! Universe.
[ZAP]
Home to my favorite podcasts.
[BEEP]
Brains On.
[BEEP]
"Smash Boom Best."
[BEEP]
"Forever Ago."
[CHATTER]
[GASPS] I found one.
[BLIP]
"Forever Ago," the history show hosted by Joy Dolo.
[BLIP, BLOOP]
[CLASSICAL MUSIC]
JOY DOLO: It was the early 1800s. Beethoven was busy composing new symphonies, steam-powered trains were brand new inventions, and a British naturalist named William Swainson was exploring the jungles of--
[BLIP, BLOOP]
SPEAKER: [GASPS] Ah, what a great show.
[BEEP]
Need more "Forever Ago" now.
SPEAKER: Listen to "Forever Ago" wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER: (SINGING) Brains On
On
On
KAYSON: You're listening to Brains On. I'm Kayson.
MOLLY BLOOM: And I'm Molly. Today's episode is all about how the internet flows around the world.
KAYSON: It's all about cables. Lots and lots of cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: But a lot of the devices we use to access the internet don't have cables attached to them. So what's the deal there? Here's Nicole Starosielski again.
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: But it is, in fact, coming through cables for most of the journey. It's the last leg of the journey to your wireless device that sends data across the air. Wireless data is sent from something called a cell tower. There are cell towers all over the place, and the one closest to you will send the message data to your phone or tablet using radio waves that travel through the air.
KAYSON: But these radio waves can't travel too far.
MOLLY BLOOM: So if you were only using radio waves to send a message, it would have to hop between lots of cell towers to get all the way to the person you were sending a message to. And that would take a while.
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: 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.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK, so let's break this down. Say you're sending a text message. You type it out.
KAYSON: "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone."
MOLLY BLOOM: You press Send. Your phone sends that text message to a cell tower near you using radio waves.
(ROBOTIC TONE) "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone."
(SPEAKING) When those radio waves get to the cell tower, the data gets transferred from radio waves into a signal sent through a cable.
(ROBOTIC TONE) "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone."
(SPEAKING) Your text message travels through cables and eventually ends up at another cell tower near the person who's getting your text message. That cell tower sends the message to that person using radio signals.
(ROBOTIC TONE) "OMG, there's a squirrel in my back yard with a half-eaten ice cream cone"
(SPEAKING) And then your friend will know all about the squirrel in your back yard, thanks to radio waves and cables. And all of this happens in seconds.
KAYSON: Whoa. So you can't see the cables, but they're really important to the process.
MOLLY BLOOM: Exactly. And Wi-Fi in your house works in a similar way, except instead of messages being sent over a cell tower, they go from a cable to your Wi-Fi router. Then that router sends the information through the air to your device.
KAYSON: OK, but how does my text message or the squirrel video I want to watch get sent to the cables?
MOLLY BLOOM: In order to understand, we need to know a little bit about something called binary code, which sounds kind of complicated. So we've asked everyone's favorite computer expert, Shark Manchez to help us out.
KAYSON: You mean Brains On producer Marc Sanchez?
MOLLY BLOOM: Well, you see, in our episode about computer viruses, we found out that our buddy Marc is also a world renowned white hat hacker, which means he helps computer users everywhere figure out how to protect themselves. Shark Manchez is his hacker name.
KAYSON: Isn't his identity supposed to be secret?
MOLLY BLOOM: I mean, if he wanted it to be secret, would he have written himself a theme song?
["SHARK MANCHEZ'S THEME SONG" PLAYING]
SPEAKER: (SINGING) He's Shark Manchez
A white hat hacker
That means he's smart
And he can crack your computer code
While staying handsome
This is his anthem
He's Shark Manchez
KAYSON: Hi, Marc. I mean, Shark.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Hi, Kayson. Hey, Molly. Yes, I heard there was a computer question for me. Shark Manchez is here.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
KAYSON: How do cables carry all this data, movies, games, text messages?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Oh, easy one. The answer is lasers. Is that all? OK, bye then.
MOLLY BLOOM: Excuse me. Your answer is just lasers? I think we need a little more explanation here.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Ah. OK. I spent a lot of time talking to computers, and they get the point real fast. I forget that humans sometimes more razzle dazzle, like sound effects.
[ZAP]
MOLLY BLOOM: I do really appreciate sound effects.
SHARK MANCHEZ: I know. But computers, they don't need sound effects. They speak in binary code. Let's start by looking at this cable.
KAYSON: Looks kind of like a fancy hose.
SHARK MANCHEZ: But when we cut it open, it's full of very thin glass tubes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Whoa, those are thinner than a strand of hair.
KAYSON: Dude, that's so thin.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Oh, yeah.
KAYSON: You got a sound effect for a thin glass tube?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Ooh, I like a challenge. How about this one?
[DING]
KAYSON: I tip my hat to you, sir.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Thank you. These glass tubes are very thin, very flexible, and very strong.
MOLLY BLOOM: And these glass tubes somehow send messages in binary code?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Indeed, they do. Computers don't speak in letters or words. They understand two things-- off and on.
KAYSON: That's it?
SHARK MANCHEZ: That's it. And binary code uses only 0's and 1's.
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 0, 1.
SHARK MANCHEZ: (SPEAKING) But it's not like math. 0 means off.
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 0.
SHARK MANCHEZ: (SPEAKING) And 1 means on.
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 1.
MOLLY BLOOM: But what's turning off and on here?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Well, in the case of cables, lasers!
[ZAP]
The light from the lasers travels down the glass tubes.
[DING]
But the lasers are flashing off and on.
KAYSON: Off and on? Like, binary code?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Now, I'm tipping my hat to you, Kayson. The 1's and 0's are like the off and on of the lasers.
[ZAP]
SPEAKER: (ROBOTIC TONE) 1.
SHARK MANCHEZ: And you can use these on and off patterns to send a code that the computer reads and translates into things like text or an image.
MOLLY BLOOM: I understand how you could use a code of on and off blinking lights to send a message. It's kind of like that old Morse code, where you use short and long taps to send messages that someone else hears and translates.
[BEEP]
SHARK MANCHEZ: Exactly, Molly.
KAYSON: But how does turning a light on and off mean. I can watch a video on my phone? That seems super complicated.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Aha. So have you heard of a pixel?
KAYSON: Yes, I have.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Excellent. Yeah, so a pixel is a little on a screen.
[BEEP]
And that dot on the screen can churn different colors.
[BEEP]
So when you're looking at a text message, the text on the screen is actually made up of a bunch of little pixels in a very specific pattern of black and white.
KAYSON: Whoa!
SHARK MANCHEZ: Whoa, indeed. And when you're watching a movie, each pixel is getting a message through the cable about what color it's supposed to be and how bright it's supposed to be. And that pixel keeps changing as the images on the screen change.
MOLLY BLOOM: So that's so much information just for a single second of a movie.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Yeah, but the laser's pulse really fast. These messages are sent and decoded so, so, so, so so fast. And each glass tube--
[DING]
--can send lots of messages at once by sending each in a different color light down the tube.
KAYSON: That's so cool.
SHARK MANCHEZ: Yeah, it's pretty much a rainbow of cool. Just think of how much data flows through our lives all the time and how busy all those cables must be.
MOLLY BLOOM: So when you're listening to a podcast, since the podcast comes over the internet, is the podcast also made out of 0's and 1's.
SHARK MANCHEZ: [INAUDIBLE] Molly.
KAYSON: Am I made of 0's and 1's?
SHARK MANCHEZ: Well, the version of your voice that's being heard through this podcast. Yeah, you are 0's and 1's.
KAYSON: I think I need my own theme song then.
["KAYSON'S THEME SONG" PLAYING]
SPEAKER: (SINGING) It's Kayson's voice
But now it's data
Zeros and ones
Are all that matter
It's coming through lasers and cables
011010110110000101111001011100110110111
SHARK MANCHEZ: Wow. That was amazing. High five. Kayson.
KAYSON: Maybe you mean high 0 or high 1.
[THEME MUSIC]
MOLLY BLOOM: Even though the devices we use might be wireless, the internet travels along a series of cables.
KAYSON: Across land and under the sea.
MOLLY BLOOM: And somewhere along the line, the cable that comes from where the data is stored has to physically connect with the cable that connects to you.
KAYSON: All of this information travels at almost the speed of light, thanks to fiber optic cables.
MOLLY BLOOM: Those are incredibly thin, clear glass tubes. Fiber optic cables transmit pulses of light that computers understand and translate into things like text or videos. That's it for this episode of Brains On.
KAYSON: This episode was written by--
MOLLY BLOOM: Molly Bloom.
KAYSON: --and edited by--
SPEAKER: Shahla Farzan.
KAYSON: And--
SPEAKER: Sanden Totten.
KAYSON: Fact-checking by--
SPEAKER: Jess Miller.
MOLLY BLOOM: Engineering help from Robert Michael and Derek Ramirez with sound design by--
SPEAKER: Rachel Breeze.
MOLLY BLOOM: Original theme music by--
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
KAYSON: We had production help from the rest of the Brains On! Universe team.
MOLLY BLOOM: Rosie DuPont, Anna Goldfield, Nico Gonzalez Wisler, Ruby Guthrie.
SPEAKER: Lauren Humpert.
SPEAKER: Joshua Ray.
MARC SANCHEZ: Marc Sanchez.
MOLLY BLOOM: Charlotte Traver, Anna Weggel.
KAYSON: And?
SPEAKER: Aron Woldeslassie.
MOLLY BLOOM: Beth Perlman is our executive producer. And the executives in charge of APM Studios are Chandra Kavati and Joanne Griffith. Special thanks to Irese Robinson, Ryan Jones, [? Khari ?] Jones, and [? Frandy ?] [? Mungo. ?]
KAYSON: Brains On is a non-profit public radio program.
MOLLY BLOOM: There are lots of ways to support the show. Subscribe to Brains On! Universe on YouTube, where you can watch animated versions of some of your favorite episodes or head to brainson.org.
KAYSON: While you're there, you can send us mystery sounds, drawings, and questions.
MOLLY BLOOM: All right. Kayson, are you ready to hear the mystery sound again?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: All right. Here it is.
[MYSTERY SOUND]
What do you think?
KAYSON: I think it's a drill drilling on wood.
MOLLY BLOOM: OK. A drill drilling on wood. I think it's a cricket plane. A really, really tiny violin that needs to be tuned.
KAYSON: Hmm.
MOLLY BLOOM: I think your guess seems more likely.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: But let's see. Should we see?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: You never with these mystery sounds. Here is the answer.
OLIVER: Hi, my name is Oliver. I'm from Japan. And that was the sound of a cicada.
MOLLY BLOOM: A cicada?
KAYSON: Yeah, a cicada?
MOLLY BLOOM: Oh, my goodness.
KAYSON: They are loud.
MOLLY BLOOM: They are loud. I think-- I mean, a cicada does sound a lot like a drill. I really thought you were right. [LAUGHS] I really did.
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: Do you have cicadas near where you live?
KAYSON: Yes. Because it was cicada season like two months ago, I think so.
MOLLY BLOOM: Nice. So they're loud, right?
KAYSON: Yes.
MOLLY BLOOM: They're very, very loud. Wow, that's cool. Cool mystery sound. I didn't know they were in Japan, either. I'm learning so much today from the mystery sound.
[BUZZING]
Now it's time for the Brains Honor Roll. These are the incredible kids who keep the show going with their questions, ideas, mystery sounds, drawings, and high fives.
[LISTING HONOR ROLL]
SPEAKER: (SINGING) Brains Honor Roll
High five
MOLLY BLOOM: We'll be back next week for an episode all about how or if animals pick their leaders.
KAYSON: Thanks for listening.
Transcription services provided by 3Play Media.
