Natural disasters are a fact of life when you live on a giant ball of water, ice, and rock with a gooey magma center that’s hurtling through space… and all the pollution we’re pumping into the environment doesn’t really seem to be helping, either.

Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! 

If you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:

[Truth or Fail]

Cloud seeding

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-935704-30-0_9

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/195/4274/139

Absorbent polymer

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5d.html

http://discovermagazine.com/2002/sep/featrain

Hail cannon

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477(1981)062%3C0368%3AHRTFHC%3E2.0.CO%3B2

https://www.businessinsider.com/volkswagen-hail-cannons-mexico-farmers-draught-2018-8

https://books.google.com/books?id=h-ADAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA548

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hail-cannons-the-devices-that-supposedly-blast-away-bad-weather

Soot

https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5b.html

[Fact Off]

Year Without a Summer:

https://scied.ucar.edu/shortcontent/mount-tambora-and-year-without-summer

http://mentalfloss.com/article/73585/15-facts-about-year-without-summer

https://medium.com/@spencerbaum/the-year-without-summer-and-the-origins-of-frankenstein-13e6884c3ece

Tae Bo “earthquake:”

https://www.geek.com/geek-cetera/korean-skyscraper-shakes-from-17-middle-aged-people-doing-tae-bo-1405157/

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2011/07/117_91209.html

http://mentalfloss.com/article/31349/how-power-literally-rocked-house

[Ask the Science Couch]

Glass rain:

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worlds/galaxy-of-horrors/

Cryovolcanoes: 

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20081215b.htmL

https://www.nature.com/news/2009/090325/full/news.2009.190.html

Ice quakes on Earth: 

http://climate.missouri.edu/news/arc/mar2014b.php

http://time.com/5517690/frost-quakes-ice-polar-vortex-sounds/

[Butt One More Thing]

Hurricane Florence poop:

https://www.govtech.com/em/disaster/Hurricane-Florence-Bathed-North-Carolina-in-Raw-Sewage-New-Figures-Show-it-was-Even-Worse-than-we-Thought.html

https://www.livescience.com/63625-pig-manure-overflow-hurricane-florence.html