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[Assistant] Alvarenga ended up washing ashore on the Ebon Atoll, which is the southern tip of the Marshall Islands and one of the most remote spots on the planet. Had he missed this spot, the next likely stop for him would have been the Philippines, nearly five


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[Assistant] Since it took him 438 days to travel roughly 11,000 kilometers, it probably would have taken him about 240 more days to hit the Philippines.


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[Assistant] Fortunately for him though, he somehow landed on this tiny, tiny speck in the middle of the biggest ocean on Earth and got himself rescued because of it.


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[Assistant] Later, he was flown back to his home in El Salvador, where he published a book and got himself sued by the family of his friend who died on the boat. Because they claim that he probably ate him.


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[Assistant] So, the lesson is, even if you survive more than a year stranded at sea, you could still end up getting sued over something that you may or may not have actually done while you were out there.


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[Assistant] But if you're like me and the ocean terrifies you so much that you'll never actually go, but...


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[Assistant] You wanna learn more about the terrifying scale and the weird creatures that live there anyway,


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[Assistant] You can learn more from the comfort of your phone or PC in your own home by checking out CuriosityStream next.


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[Assistant] CuriosityStream is the first streaming service that exclusively streams documentaries and educational videos, so if you like watching


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[Assistant] Unlimited access to watch all other videos begins at $2.99 per month.


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[Assistant] But you can watch everything on CuriosityStream for free when you visit the link in the description at curiositystream.com slash real life lore and by using the code real life lore during the signup process. So please make sure to go ahead and watch their stuff next and as always, thank you for watching.


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[Assistant] Every bound thing becomes unbound, including eventually at the most subatomic level.


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[Assistant] That's right. And today we're going to focus on some phrases. We're not going to do any vocabulary today. We're just going to learn some phrases that you'll find relating to science fiction.


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[Assistant] Okay, so warp drive, I think a very sci-fi specific phrase here.


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[Assistant] You know, maybe in the woods or something. You send out a search party to find them.


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[Assistant] Alright, so in the dialogue we saw that actually these were not real Star Trek characters, but they were just acting, but it didn't sound quite right, right?


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[Assistant] Exactly, so uhm, Marco, is that an authentic Rolex?


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[Assistant] Alright, so we've got some phrases here that you can use together with a number of different words, right?


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[Assistant] Definitely. Now you can change this by changing the last word. We are under fire.


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[Assistant] Yeah, except that when you're under fire, uhm, there are guns involved.


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[Assistant] Sustain heavy damage. So when you sustain something, you receive it or you undergo this thing.


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[Assistant] Alright, so you see we typically sustain something like an injury, uhm, uh, or damage that is negative.


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[Assistant] Okay, so basically he's just asking, why are you doing this?


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[Assistant] Well thanks for downloading you guys and until next time. Goodbye!


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[Assistant] Hello English learners. Welcome back to EnglishPod. My name is Marco. And I'm Erica. And today we have a special lesson for all of you who are looking for a new apartment or house.


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[Assistant] That's right, so we're gonna be describing an apartment and other vocabulary related to apartment hunting. Why don't we take a look at some of the first words that we have in vocabulary preview.


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[Assistant] Landlord. Landlord. Alright, so who is a landlord, or what is a landlord?


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[Assistant] Okay, very good. Tenants. Tenants. So the tenants are the people that are renting the apartment or house. Exactly. Two important words that we'll find in the dialogue, tenants and landlord.


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[Assistant] Alright, so apparently the apartment was too good to be true.


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[Assistant] Exactly. Well, we did find a lot of great words and phrases, so why don't we take a look at that now in Language Takeaway.


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[Assistant] Alright, so the apartment was newly renovated.


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[Assistant] Okay, so basically, to renovate means to make new again.


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[Assistant] Okay, so it's usually only used for buildings, for apartments, for houses.


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[Assistant] So the apartment was newly renovated and it was bright and airy. Airy? Airy. Airy.


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[Assistant] Alright, so, airy, well I guess we understand the word air, right? So if an apartment or uh, something is airy.


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[Assistant] It's open, okay. An open apartment. Very good.


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[Assistant] Now for our next word, an important question she asked for the square footage.


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[Assistant] Okay, so why don't we listen to some examples of how we can use these two words square footage in a sentence.


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[Assistant] Right? So it's not for the metric system, it's only for some units of measurement in the imperial system.


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[Assistant] Alright, so after we've measured the square footage of the apartment, we saw that they had new appliances. Appliances. Appliances. Appliance. So kitchen appliances, what are those?


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[Assistant] Okay, so appliance can be any type of machine that's used.


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[Assistant] And, well, one of these appliances was a professional grade gas range.


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[Assistant] So, if it's high quality, why do we say it's professional grade?


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[Assistant] Okay, so can I only have professional grade kitchen appliances?


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[Assistant] Okay, or a professional grade pickup truck.


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[Assistant] So after we've seen all the appliances, they describe the house as spacious. Spacious! The house is very spacious.


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[Assistant] It has lots of space. So I guess maybe spacious and airy are a little bit similar, right?


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[Assistant] Okay, and of course once we were in the master bedroom, we saw that they had a walk-in closet. A walk-in closet. Walk-in closet. A walk-in closet.


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[Assistant] Right, so this is very easy. I guess walk in. You can walk into it. Right, and so it's a huge closet, right?


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[Assistant] And apart from this beautiful closet, we had an en suite bathroom.


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[Assistant] Right? So even though it's EN, we pronounce it like an O-N.


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[Assistant] Very good. Unsweet bathroom. So a lot of great words describing the apartment and also other aspects of real estate.


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[Assistant] Alright, so this is always kind of difficult to look for a new apartment and to go and see them. But it's interesting here, they were renting and they had a real estate agent.


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[Assistant] Right, you can find ads in the newspaper, on the internet, and deal directly with the landlord.


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[Assistant] Right, like we saw in the dialogue, the payment terms were first and last month's rent as deposit. So that's basically, they'll keep that just in case you damage something in the apartment.


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[Assistant] Exactly. And another thing is that I've noticed in some countries you pay rent in advance.


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[Assistant] Right. So I guess this is an interesting topic. Real estate and apartment hunting and renting is different in different countries. So that's where you guys need to come and tell us how is, how does this work in your country.


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[Assistant] Right, how many rooms do you have, bedrooms, dining rooms? What's the square footage? Exactly. Or how many square meters, right? Yep. So check out our website.


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[Assistant] Don't take this personally, Dan, but I'm not exactly crazy about someone eavesdropping on my phone call.


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[Assistant] If you eavesdrop on something, you secretly listen to someone's conversation. Something's a private, you know. Oh, of course. I totally understand. Uhm, one quick question for you though. Do you have a smart speaker? You know, like Google Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, or Apple's Siri?


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[Assistant] Ah sure, yes, I've got one. It's great. I can ask it all sorts of questions. It tells me about the news and whether it plays music when I want. It does all sorts. You just give it a voice command and it does what you want. So it can hear you, can it? Of course.


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[Assistant] How else can you give it a voice command? All the time? Well I assume so. So how do you know it's not eavesdropping on you?


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[Assistant] Well, I, uh, oh, oh, I see. I hadn't thought of that. Well, that's our topic for this 6 Minute English. How safe is your smart speaker? However, before that, here is our quiz question.


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[Assistant] By what percentage the number of smart speakers used in US households increased from December 2017 to December 2018? Is it A, around 40%, B, around 60%, or C, around 80%?


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[Assistant] Oh well, I know they are very popular, even in my household, so I'm going to go for C, around 80%. Well, we'll find out if you're right later in the programme.


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[Assistant] So, smart speakers and privacy. Florian Schaub is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. Here he is speaking on the BBC World Service programme The Why Factor about smart speakers.


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[Assistant] What does he say people are introducing into their homes?


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[Assistant] He basically said we're introducing a listening bug.


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[Assistant] Now a bug is a small electronic device used for secretly listening to conversations, much like a spy would use. Yes, and he mentioned it was in our most intimate space. Intimate means private and personal.


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[Assistant] Well, I can't think of anywhere more intimate than my home. Indeed.


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[Assistant] He also said that the smart speaker's microphone is on the whole time, even though the companies insist that they're only actively listening when the key word is said.


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[Assistant] Yes, he suggested that we can't know how far a company might be co-operating with a government to eavesdrop on people. Or whether a government might be circumventing a smart speaker's security and listening in anyway without the company or owner's permission.


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[Assistant] Circumvent means cleverly bypass or go round. So if all this eavesdropping is possible, why are smart speakers so popular? Good question. And here's Florian Schaub again with an answer. He conducted a study on people's attitudes to privacy when it came to smart speakers.


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[Assistant] How do people feel about having a smart speaker that could eavesdrop on them?


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[Assistant] He said that people are resigned to the privacy trade-off.


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[Assistant] If you're resigned to something, you accept something unpleasant that can't be changed. Yes, and a trade-off is a compromise. You accept something bad to also receive something good. So people accept that a smart speaker gives them advantages, even though there could be downsides. Yes.


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[Assistant] In the grand scheme of things, the data that these devices hear


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[Assistant] Probably not that significant considering all the data companies have about us already anyway. So can I have the answer to the quiz then? Of course.


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[Assistant] Earlier I asked by what percentage the number of smart speakers used in US households increased from December 2017 to December 2018.


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[Assistant] The answer is around 80%. From 66 million in December 2017 to 118 million in December 2018. And around 10 million people in the UK now use one too.


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[Assistant] I guess they're not worried about eavesdropping. Nice slide into the vocabulary there, Dan. If someone eavesdrops on you, it means they secretly listen to your conversation. They could be eavesdropping on you through a bug, which is a small electronic device used to secretly listen to conversations.


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[Assistant] Yes, they may have bugged your most intimate or private and personal spaces. Next we had circumvent. If you circumvent something, such as security, you cleverly bypass it or go around it.


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[Assistant] Then we had resigned. If you are resigned to something, it means you accept something unpleasant that can't be changed. And lastly we had trade-off.


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[Assistant] A trade-off is a compromise. You get something good, but you also get something bad.


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[Assistant] Right, like Six Minute English. A great discussion and vocabulary, but the trade-off is it only lasts six minutes. Which is just about now, actually. Time to go. So, until next time, find us all over the place online and on social media. Just search for BBC Learning English. Bye for now. Goodbye.


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[Assistant] He had a flurry of hit records. Uh, he had the S.O.S. band. He had Shirell. What was Shirell's song?


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[Assistant] I was trying to transfer some of the energy of Uptown in the Motown so that artists would want to come.


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[Assistant] They gave you a company that was broken, been losing money for 12 years.


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[Assistant] They couldn't expect you to turn it around in a year or two. I had only been president for 18 months. They chose to make me the scapegoat. Clarence was, he was my protector.


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[Assistant] So the meeting lasts about three minutes and they said, alright, no problem, we'll take care of that.


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[Assistant] He will sit at his desk with a pen and a piece of paper.


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[Assistant] He's been the only one like himself.


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[Assistant] You know, a combination, Reverend Sharpe to Martin Luther King, Malcolm X of the record business.


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[Assistant] There is differences in oil content within the fish, so the belly region is more fattier than the shoulder of the fish, so it's versatile.


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[Assistant] Every deal I had, every contract I got as a record executive.


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[Assistant] I would send it to class. What to ask for, what not to ask for, what to push back on, what not to push back on. Usually it was about, for him it was money.


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[Assistant] What's the money like? And if, and was it on par with what white executives were getting?


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[Assistant] Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope you enjoyed it. We have many more exciting videos to help you improve your English. So be sure to subscribe to our channel to get the full experience of our YouTube channel. See you there!


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[Assistant] Tornadoes are some of the most terrifying natural disasters that happen on our planet. They can strike without warning, obliterate entire cities, and can throw people and cars around like they're toys. But, how exactly big and terrifying can a tornado actually get?


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[Assistant] Most tornadoes have wind speeds that are under 110 miles per hour and are smaller than 80 meters across. Imagine an American football field and the tornado would be about as wide as 75% of the field's length. And while it would certainly be difficult, a human could actually manage to withstand being blown away by that wind speed.


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[Assistant] But that's not what you're watching this video for, so let's just get straight into the insane world of gigantic tornadoes and where they happen.


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[Assistant] Tornadoes have been documented to occur in every continent on Earth except for Antarctica, but a vast majority of tornadoes happen here in the United States in a region known as Tornado Alley. The reasoning for this makes sense because of the area's unique geographic location.


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[Assistant] Cold, dry air flows in, accompanied by the jet stream from the north. Warm, dry air flows in from the deserts to the southwest. And warm, moist air flows in from the Gulf of Mexico to the south and east. The combination of all this air mixing together is what causes Tornado Alley to be such a hotspot for tornadoes. And time and time again, new records have been set here.


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[Assistant] Together in the span of just four days, these tornadoes caused over 11 billion dollars in damages.


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[Assistant] The deadliest tornado in US history happened back in March 1925 in this region of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. There is no record of how fast the wind speed of the tornado may have been at the time, but it slashed through a path between all three states of 219 miles long.


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[Assistant] It traveled that distance in only three and a half hours, meaning that if the tornado instead started in Washington DC, it would have reached all the way to New York City in the same amount of time.


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[Assistant] In that distance, the tornado claimed the lives of 695 people, but even that wasn't the deadliest tornado in world history.


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[Assistant] It was considered an EF-5 tornado, which is the highest possible categorization for a tornado.


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[Assistant] It's often not the wind that actually kills a person in a tornado, but the vast amount of debris that the tornado picks up from obliterating houses and buildings. Wooden splinters, trees, metal, cars, and even animals can all become a swirling vortex of death traveling at speeds of several hundred miles an hour.


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[Assistant] With all of this being said, however, the largest and probably most terrifying tornado known to have ever happened on our planet was the El Reno tornado, and it took place not too long ago, in 2013, just west of Oklahoma City.


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[Assistant] Compared to the size of most tornadoes that I talked about in the beginning of this video, the El Reno behemoth reached a size of 2.6 miles wide and achieved a terrifying wind speed of 302 miles per hour, which is the fastest recorded wind ever taken on our planet.


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[Assistant] To put these numbers into perspective, you could actually fit two fully sovereign countries completely inside the width of the tornado, Vatican City and Monaco.


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[Assistant] Even more ludicrous is what it would look like if we put this tornado over New York City. The entire length of Central Park from end to end is almost a perfect measurement of how wide this tornado actually was. So imagine a tornado that long with wind screaming around it over 300 miles per hour.


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[Assistant] That's fast enough to severely damage even skyscrapers and can rip the asphalt straight off of streets on the ground.


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[Assistant] If you're curious what would happen to your face at those speeds, then here's a video taken from the NASA Langley Research Center back from 1946 showing exactly what would happen to you in such a tornado condition.


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[Assistant] The scariest thing about tornadoes like this one is that they can happen in a huge variety of places with very little warning, and it's entirely possible that the next time a big one happens it won't be in a countryside field, but rather in a large city. I'm going to leave you with this fascinating map from Noah that shows you the daily probability of a tornado strike near your house throughout the year. Enjoy.


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[Assistant] So thank you very much for watching this video. This was done in a collaboration with my good friends over at Life Noggin.


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[Assistant] What about you? You ever feel pressure to live up to your father's name?


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[Assistant] I'm over here now, Neil. Ready for this experiment? I'm ready to eat.


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[Assistant] Alright, open wide, here it comes. I want you to describe now just what you're sensing in your mouth.


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[Assistant] And so we think over our lifetime, our sense of smell changes. So that something which smelled really bad, like Brussels sprouts for example, or spinach when we were a kid, and therefore gave us a bad feeling for the taste, now smells much better.


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[Assistant] Yes, I'd like to check three pieces.


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[Assistant] Okay, so flattering. Now before we get on with this flattering lesson, we need to look at some vocabulary in vocabulary preview. Vocabulary preview.


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[Assistant] So the bar exam is that formal test that lawyers must do to become official lawyers.


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[Assistant] Well we're also going to hear in the dialogue, obnoxious.


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[Assistant] Alright, so this is your typical normal everyday behavior that women show to each other, right?


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[Assistant] Alright, we're doing things a little bit different in this lesson. So we're going to do two fluency builders. And in the first one, we're going to focus on language you can use to flatter someone.


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[Assistant] It could be anything, so I love what you've done with your new house.


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[Assistant] We also heard Darlene say, you haven't aged a day.


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[Assistant] Alright, so then they talk about their kids and they're talking about the son and they, and Valerie says, he's such a handsome guy.


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[Assistant] That's right, or even, uhm, this is such a good day.


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[Assistant] That's right. Now let's move to our final flattering phrase. Valerie says that Darlene's son gets his looks from his mother.


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[Assistant] Right? Or even, he gets his beautiful singing voice from his mother.


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[Assistant] So let's look at those now in Fluency Builder Part 2.


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[Assistant] So basically he or she's saying, we haven't seen each other in a long time.


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[Assistant] So a wonderful way to start a conversation.


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[Assistant] So this phrase, by the way, I heard blah blah blah, is really really useful.


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[Assistant] Right, and so basically you're asking the other person, tell me about this.


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[Assistant] So Marco and I have to get going, but we're looking forward to seeing you on the website. Thanks for listening and until next time. Bye. Bye.


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[Assistant] Hi, I'm John Green, and this is Crash Course Literature. So for the last few weeks, we've been talking a lot about dystopias, imaginary societies gone wrong. Like George Orwell's 1984 is a world of war, surveillance, and mind control. The Handmaid's Tale portrays a toxic landscape in which healthy women are forced to produce offspring for the ruling class.


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[Assistant] Candide showed us the best of all possible worlds, which was terrible. And Parable of the Sower takes place in an alternate universe where a sloganeering strongman president presides over a country experiencing intense social disorder thanks to climate change. Fortunately, none of that stuff has happened.


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[Assistant] But make no mistake about it, the social order in this story is in some ways as oppressive as the others that we've examined. Gilman's narrator is imprisoned within her marriage, and her social order, and also her house. And she eventually goes insane trying to preserve her perspective. Today I want to talk about Gilman, who was a feminist, humanist, sociologist, novelist, poet, and essayist.


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[Assistant] I also want to talk about perspectives on mental health and how they've changed between Gilman's era and ours. And of course,


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[Assistant] So Charlotte Perkins Gilman had a fascinating life. She was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1860, and she lived with her mother and brother after her father abandoned the family. And although she moved from school to school, her childhood was really intellectually rich, largely because of her three brilliant and famous aunts. Isabella Beecher Hooker, suffragist and abolitionist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, bestselling author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Katherine Beecher, education reformer and advocate for Native American rights. With some financial help from her ne'er-do-well father,


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[Assistant] You know, she did know something about wallpaper patterns. In 1884, she married Charles Walter Stetson and gave birth to a daughter, Catherine, and in the years after her daughter's birth, Charlotte experienced a series of what were called at the time, nervous disorders. In 1887, she visited a specialist who encouraged her to try a rest cure, and this involved living as domestic a life as far as possible, having but two hours intellectual life a day, and never touching pen,


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[Assistant] After three months of this so-called treatment, she quote, Gilman wanted to warn others of the dangers of this rest cure. And her story, she explains, was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy.


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[Assistant] And it worked. We'll get to that working bit in a second, but back to her life. So in 1888, Charlotte left her husband and took Catherine with her to Pasadena, California. Her professional life flourished. She organized social reform movements.


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[Assistant] She represented California at the suffrage convention in Washington DC. She became a lecturer and edited a series of magazines. She also wrote essays, poems, a novella, and by far her most famous story, The Yellow Wallpaper. Much of her work focused on women's unequal status in marriage and their need for financial independence. And she achieved financial independence and also an equal marriage in her second marriage. Eventually she was diagnosed with breast cancer and as she had lived on her own terms, she also died on her own terms. She was an advocate of euthanasia.


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[Assistant] And she chose chloroform over cancer, committing suicide in 1935. I wanted to focus a little on Gilman's life story to emphasize that this was a person who experienced severe disabling mental illness and whose treatment ended up making it much worse and yet who still went on to live a long,


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[Assistant] Fulfilling and productive life. I think it's really helpful to read The Yellow Wallpaper with that background. As for the story itself, well, let's go to the thought bubble. The Yellow Wallpaper is the first-person narrative of a 19th century woman suffering from a mental breakdown after giving birth. In a secret diary, this narrator describes her setting as a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house and reach the height of romantic felicity,


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[Assistant] The narrator knows that she perceives reality differently from her husband who is also her doctor. At first she chalks this up to the expected difficulties of male-female relations. John, she writes,


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[Assistant] John belittles her, saying that she suffers from a temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency. Meanwhile, he prescribes her a scheduled prescription for each hour in the day of phosphates or phosphites, the narrator doesn't know which, and a regime of tonics and journeys and air and exercise.


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[Assistant] And it quickly becomes clear that these so-called cures are exacerbating the narrator's condition as she is left with very little to do except stare at the yellow wallpaper.


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[Assistant] Thanks, Thought Bubble. So today we would probably say that the narrator is experiencing postpartum depression and or postpartum psychosis. These are conditions that can result from a drop in hormones like estrogen and progesterone and are intensified by the two central experiences of new parenthood.


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[Assistant] Definitely does not work. If Gilman's story were an argument, this line from it would be its thesis.


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[Assistant] John is a physician, perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. Admittedly, the 19th century wasn't a golden age for psychiatry, but even so, John is exceptionally bad at treating mental illness. At the start of the story, Gilman's narrator craves more society and stimulus. She writes that she must say what I feel and think in some way, forbidden from communicating with a living soul,


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[Assistant] On to the patterns that she sees on the walls.


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[Assistant] I never saw worst paper in my life, she writes, explaining that it contains


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[Assistant] One of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. Still, she finds this pattern compelling. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide.


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[Assistant] But it also describes the story, right? Like, initially, her narrative seems dull. I mean, plot summary, woman stares at wall. But then it becomes confusing. The wallpaper seems to be moving. We aren't sure where this narrator is or if we can trust her.


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[Assistant] Are they intimate descriptions of a failing marriage, the desire for connection, or are they veiled suicidal musings?


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[Assistant] Or maybe their attempts to find a meaning in an extremely limited experience, like Offred opening her hand in the sunlight in The Handmaid's Tale. I've always been fascinated by how the narrator tries to understand her situation in terms of


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[Assistant] Not arranged on any laws of radiation or alternation or repetition or symmetry.


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[Assistant] I think anybody who's experienced mental illness can relate to that. For her, each of these breaths exist as an isolated column of fatuity. In other words, it's meaningless. A pattern only emerges when she considers the strips next to one another.


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[Assistant] So, of course, does the narrator's own captivity. And also, wait, hold on, full disclosure, I'm about to go full Freudian, which I know is like a frustration and annoyance to many of you who are not like hardcore lit-crit people, but just


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[Assistant] So the paper has this peculiar odor that creeps all over the house and is stronger after a week of fog and rain. Her husband might explain it as a combination of glue and mold intensified by humidity, but


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[Assistant] Smells travel through the olfactory bulb, closely connected to the regions of the brain that handle memory and emotion. That's why smells always remind us of moments from our past. And it seems to me the narrator's fixation on this smell could be what Freud called the return of the repressed, or unconscious material rising to the surface. And maybe that's part of why the narrator becomes determined that nobody discover the wallpaper's meaning except herself. Although she had initially craved conversation,


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[Assistant] She decides that it does not do to trust people too much.


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[Assistant] Especially with her most frightening thoughts. I mean, after all, having previously trusted people with her frightening thoughts has landed her in this situation where she has to stare at yellow wallpaper all day. And then eventually the narrator begins to suspect that many women are trapped inside this paper.


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[Assistant] She rips at the wallpaper and thinks that it would be an admirable exercise to throw herself out the window. Then she wedges her shoulder into a smudge that runs along the lower part of the wall and walks.


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[Assistant] Jane? A character not mentioned until this point who may be herself? But then comes this question mark which complicates everything and makes it ambiguous. Charlotte Perkins-Gilman transformed her experience of enduring this rest cure into a story that invites us to reconsider gender dynamics and the treatment of mental health disorders.


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[Assistant] At the time of its publication, the story may have inspired concrete change, too. In an article published in 1913, Gilman claims that her story, quote, But the best result is this. Many years later, I was told that my own doctor had admitted to friends of his that he had altered his treatment of neurasthenia since reading the yellow wallpaper.


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[Assistant] Stories affect the world in mysterious ways, and if the yellow wallpaper helped end the practice of separating the sick from the world, then I am grateful. But I think the story has served another, far more personal function. It has given form and expression to many people's experiences with mental illness, including, I have to say, mine.


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[Assistant] It's a story that explores the ways that physiological brain disorders can be hurt.


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[Assistant] And although we no longer embrace rest cures, we still have a long way to go when it comes to talking about mental illness without the stigmatization that can worsen suffering. But then also, mental illness and the way it's discussed isn't the only yellow wallpaper out there.


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[Assistant] I wonder, what is the wallpaper that constrains you and who else do you feel might be imprisoned by its pattern? How might you escape?


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[Assistant] How might you tell your story to influence others? Those questions haunted me when I first read Gilman's story in high school, and they shaped a lot of the ways that I think about writing today. More than 20 years later, I'm still asking them. Thanks for watching. I'll see you next time.


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[Assistant] Crash Course is filmed here in the Chad and Stacey Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis and it's made possible by your support at Patreon. Patreon's a voluntary subscription service where you can support Crash Course directly through a monthly donation to help us keep it free


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[Assistant] We make Crash Course with Adobe Creative Cloud. You can get a free trial at a link in the description. Thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon and to all of you for watching. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.


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[Assistant] I filled the test tube with sodium hydroxide. Next, I attached the fish pump to the test tube, turned it on, and ran air through it all night.


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[Assistant] Alright, so great dialogue, very popular in the 60s, the music, the mood, and the words, right? That's right. So why don't we get down to business and look at the vocabulary that we saw in this dialogue in Language Takeaway.


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[Assistant] I really like your pad. Pad? Okay, so pad, a very informal way of saying


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[Assistant] Okay, so a bachelor pad. Usually it's very nicely decorated and really a nice apartment, right?


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[Assistant] Right. And now lava lamps, those are those, uh, strange cone looking lamps, right?


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[Assistant] Alright, so the pad is really far out, the lava lamps are great, and he was saying, thanks for letting me crash here tonight.


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[Assistant] Alright, perfect. So, to crash, right? It's still commonly used today. Yep. Now for the fourth word. Groovy.


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[Assistant] Split. Okay, so we saw five really common phrases from the 1960s. Let's listen to the dialogue again a little bit slower and then we'll come back and look at some phrases from the 60s.


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[Assistant] Alright, I'm putting it together today. Let's start with the first part. He talked about, you dig what I'm saying.


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[Assistant] Alright, so we know the verb dig, which means to make a hole, right?


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[Assistant] Okay, now, there's also another meaning to this, right? Apart from understand.


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[Assistant] Okay, so I really dig this type of music.


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[Assistant] Okay, so it's kind of, I like it. Alright. Now moving on, he said, we could throw a bash here.


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[Assistant] Okay, so I can say, uh, last week I threw a birthday party in my house.


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[Assistant] Okay, or next week I'm gonna throw a dinner party at my house.


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[Assistant] So man is one of those words that you just use at the end of your sentences.


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[Assistant] Very good. And now for the last phrase on putting it together. He said, you go take care of business.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and also we really relate it to the hippie movement, right? Yeah, yeah. People with long hair and baggy clothes and, you know, living in their cars, going from concert to concert.


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[Assistant] Exactly so, come to our website and let us know what you think and also if you have any questions or comments.


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[Assistant] Looks amazing. I think it was pretty cool if the situation wasn't so serious.


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[Assistant] It's a bit nerve wracking going first. No idea what we're going to be in for. We might get up there and it just be completely impossible.


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[Assistant] So I'm the first to go up and I'm just a bag of nerves.


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[Assistant] There's some quite familiar looking things. And then there's some things that I've absolutely no idea about.


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[Assistant] I've got the smoky apple puree. I've got the apple chips in the oven. And I made apple caramel syrup.


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[Assistant] I check on the apple chips, they're still a bit squishy. And they're just not crispy. I'll put the temperature, I'll put them in at.


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[Assistant] There's two guys stood over there who are, who are kind of amazing cooks. We'll just have to see what happens.


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[Assistant] Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and last week we wrapped up our discussion of George Orwell's 1984. Lately here at Crash Course, we've been a bit preoccupied with dystopias, which is to say, imagined futures where things have gone horribly wrong.


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[Assistant] You know, as opposed to the present. I've always loved a good dystopia. They can show us the signposts pointing toward disaster, remind us of the resilience of humanity, help us to think through the consequences of social and political change, and also fill us with pure and unadulterated terror. Which brings us...


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[Assistant] To Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood said that Orwell's 1984 was a direct model for The Handmaid's Tale, which she began writing in the actual 1984. In a Guardian article, she explained that she intended to present a dystopia from a female point of view. Which is to say they've been either the wife in 1984, or


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[Assistant] The Mistress in 1984. Today we're going to discuss the real despotisms that Inspired At would introduce you to her red-cloaked and stony-faced protagonist, Offred, and explain why the author characterizes her novel as speculative fiction. If you like, you can even turn on the captions and read along, because reading is not illegal. Yet.


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[Assistant] Robert Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa, Canada. She's the author of over 40 books of fiction and poetry and essays.


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[Assistant] She's also one of Canada's leading literary critics. Her 1972 survey Survival, a thematic guide to Canadian literature, investigates what gives Canadian works their distinctive national identity. She's also really good at Twitter. Oh, it's already time for the open letter? An open letter to authors' Twitter accounts. But first, let's see what's in the secret compartment today. Oh, it's nothing. What a crushing disappointment.


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[Assistant] Dear Author's Twitter accounts, oh my gosh, why do you have to ruin it? There's such an incredible magic to reading a book that you love and that you're overwhelmed by the beauty of and you think, I can't believe that this book was written by a person.


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[Assistant] That person must be so amazing. And then you go to Twitter and you look up their Twitter account and they're complaining about the wireless at Panera not working. Or their flight was delayed or they're enjoying their vacation in Cape Cod and it turns out that they're just like a totally regular person. Except for Margaret Antwood. I almost universally find author Twitter accounts to be a complete disappointment and I have to say,


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[Assistant] Mine more than most. And yet somehow a few authors retain their intimidating and intoxicating brilliance on Twitter. And by a few, I mostly mean Margaret Atwood. Best wishes.


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[Assistant] John Green. They're a lot like American bugs, except much more polite. And also, they spend half as much money on healthcare, but get better healthcare.


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[Assistant] Are we still talking about bugs? Anyway, given all of this, you might be wondering what Atwood could possibly know of the real despotisms on the scale seen in the Republic of Gilead, the fictional government in The Handmaid's Tale. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret of the authoring trade. Not all fiction is autobiographical. Although my most recent novel sort of is. But anyway, a related point, it's also possible to respond to history that one has experienced from a remove, especially if you're a genius, and Margaret Atwood really is. As for which events crossed Atwood's radar, as she wrote in the mid-1980s,


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[Assistant] And articles from the US about Republican attempts to withhold federal funding from clinics that provided abortion services. There were reports about the threat to privacy posed by debit cards, which were a novelty at the time, and accounts of US congressional hearings devoted to the regulation of toxic industrial emissions in the wake of the deadly gas leak in Bhopal, India. An Associated Press item reported on a Catholic congregation in New Jersey being taken over by a fundamentalist sect in which wives were called


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[Assistant] The events that occur in The Handmaid's Tale are based on these reports, but filtered through an authorial lens that imagined a nightmare of inequality, oppression, and enforced ignorance.


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[Assistant] Fred. The name also suggests that she is an offering. She has been offered to reproduce. The other classes of women that remain in Gilead include wives married to commanders, ekano wives married to lower ranking men, Martha's servants in the commander's houses,


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[Assistant] For the most part, these women are denied an education, the right to vote, and the chance to work for pay.


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[Assistant] The music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sounds, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn whale.


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[Assistant] Garlands made of tissue paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light. There was old sex in the room and loneliness and expectation of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning.


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[Assistant] Thanks, Thought Bubble. So we all know that yearning for the future, but in Gilead, this desire and so many desires have been completely perverted, and the future that happened is, in a word,


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[Assistant] So this future ended up looking a lot like some terrifying funhouse version of the past, in which state-sanctioned oppression based on gender and race were the norm. And that, I think, gets at something important in the novel. In contemporary life, we expect


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[Assistant] The response is to seek restoration to some glorified past, no matter how oppressive it might be. This idea to make a fallen nation strong again or great again is one that we all feel at times, and in The Handmaid's Tale we are shown one vision of what can happen when yearning for the future


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[Assistant] But so back to the plot, Offred had been married to Luke, a man who was married once before, and after the couple and their daughter are caught trying to escape to Canada, Offred becomes a handmaid. She's sent to the home of a military commander and forced to undergo a horrifying monthly ritual modeled on Genesis 30.


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[Assistant] But let's not mince words here. The so-called ceremony is state-sanctioned rape.


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[Assistant] And in the midst of that ordeal, Offred makes two really powerful insights. First, she notices that the commander is, quote,


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[Assistant] And then she observes that the wife, Serena Joy, who is present for the so-called ceremony, continues lying on the bed, gazing up at the canopy above her.


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[Assistant] Stiff and straight as an effigy.


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[Assistant] She retains her individualism, eccentricity, and humanity shortly after the so-called ceremony of copulating with the commander.


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[Assistant] Offred spreads a packet of butter onto her hands and face. As long as we do this, butter our skin to keep it soft, we can believe that we will someday get out, that we will be touched again in love or desire. We have ceremonies of our own.


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[Assistant] And although she describes this act as degrading to such devices we have descended, finding a way to be comfortable in her skin helps Offred remember the desires of her past and to stay sane.


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[Assistant] But Offred's mother pays a steep toll for being outspoken. She is exiled to the toxic colonies. Offred's college friend Moira is similarly brazen in her resistance. After staging a daring escape from the re-education center, though,


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[Assistant] For good this time, or if I couldn't tell that, I'd like to say she blew up Jezebel's with 50 commanders inside it. I'd like to end with something daring and spectacular, some outrage, something that would befit her. But as far as I know, that didn't happen. I don't know how she ended, or even if she did.


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[Assistant] Because I never saw her again. We see here Offred trying to take control of the narrative, trying to tell a story that is daring and spectacular, where the protagonist wins or at least takes a lot of bad guys out with her. But she can't. Those traditional narratives of the hero's journey aren't available to her, because they aren't true to her experience. We also never learn how Offred's mother or Offred herself end. But we do know that she finds a way to tell her story, and that her story survives. But aside from that, we can only speculate. Which makes a kind of sense, because The Handmaid's Tale is speculative.


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[Assistant] I'd like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe. And speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on planet Earth. As to the point of speculative literature, Atwood writes,


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[Assistant] Out into the light, where we can take a good look at them, and perhaps come to a better understanding of who we are, and what we want, and what the limits of those wants may be. Understanding the imagination is no longer a pastime, but a necessity, because increasingly, if we can imagine it,


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[Assistant] We'll be able to do it. Part of the magic of The Handmaid's Tale is that it feels so real. It belies the old line that it can't happen here and reminds us it can always happen here. In short, The Handmaid's Tale is speculative and it is fiction, but that doesn't mean it's untrue.


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[Assistant] Patreon is a voluntary subscription service where you can support Crash Course directly through a monthly donation to help us keep it free for everyone, forever. We make Crash Course with Adobe Creative Cloud. You can get a free trial at a link in the description. Thanks to everyone who supports us on Patreon and to all of you for watching. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.


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[Assistant] But we've known about it for even longer. You can picture the Earth more or less like a spinning top as it rotates around its axis, and just like a top, it wobbles as it spins.


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[Assistant] Earth's axis is moving slightly this way or that in what's known as polar motion. A lot of this movement is pretty predictable. It has to do with how all the stuff that makes up our planet, from the mantle to the atmosphere to the oceans,


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[Assistant] Known as the Chandler Wobble. Which also, coming soon, the name of my new TikTok dance. Other changes happen on much longer timescales, influenced by things like glacial isostatic adjustment.


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[Assistant] But just over a decade ago, scientists noticed the direction of the North Pole's drift had shifted dramatically in the mid-90s. It started heading eastward instead of south. And it accelerated. Between 1995 and 2020, the average speed of the drift


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[Assistant] Could the culprit be climate change? The thinking was that the faster melting of glaciers beginning in the mid-90s could have caused enough redistribution of the world's water to set the Earth-top wobbling different than usual. The key to finding out if this is the case is a pair of satellites launched into space in 2002 for a mission called the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment.


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[Assistant] They allow us to accurately measure changes to the Earth's gravity caused by the location and movement of ice


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[Assistant] Now, the others say that it's possible there are other explanations for what moved some of this water around and caused the unexpected polar drift. But they're not exactly great news, either. One possibility is that in some areas, the shift in terrestrial water was actually more about humans using groundwater unsustainably for things like farming. There's one pretty neat outcome from the research, though.


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[Assistant] Instead of trying to predict the movement of the North Pole based on known measurements of glacier loss, they think


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[Assistant] We could perhaps use known measurements of the poles' locations to guess at how much of the world's terrestrial water was lost earlier in the 20th century. And that would allow them to reconstruct a history of how the Earth's water moved


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[Assistant] And melted during a time when we weren't able to precisely measure it. But in the meantime, it turns out we probably have another completely bonkers thing to blame on climate change knocking the Earth


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[Assistant] A little bit off its axis. Thanks for watching this episode of SciShow News. If you'd like to help us bring cutting-edge discoveries to the internet every week, you can become a member of our channel. Not only do members get access to cool perks, but you're helping us make the world a little bit more curious. Check out the join button below to get started, and if you're already a member, thank you very much for your support.


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[Assistant] The biggest volcanic eruption in recent history was the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. It expelled ash over 620,000 square miles and shot volcanic gases more than 20 miles into the air.


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[Assistant] Hello and welcome to 6 Minute English. I'm Neil. And I'm Rob. Rob.


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[Assistant] What generation are you? Oh, well, what are my choices? You can't choose what generation you are. It depends on when you were born.


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[Assistant] Well, there are Baby Boomers, who were born in between the 1940s and the early 60s. Then there was Generation X, born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. Then there's Generation Y, also known as Millennials, born mid-1980s to late 1990s.


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[Assistant] What marks Gen Z in particular is that they are the social media generation. They have never known a time without social media.


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[Assistant] Oh, poor them. Well, that's one view. Other opinions are available.


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[Assistant] Before we look at Gen Z in more detail, a question though. No-one can quite agree on who first used the term social media.


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[Assistant] Rob, what's your answer? Well, come on, it's quite a recent thing so it's got to be Well, we'll find out the answer later in the programme.


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[Assistant] Now we're going to hear from Hiral Patel, who is an analyst for Barclays. She appeared on BBC Radio 4's You and Yours programme and was asked whether there was much difference between Millennials and Generation Z.


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[Assistant] Does she think they are the same or different?


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[Assistant] So Rob, does Hiral Patel think there's much difference between the


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[Assistant] I think I'm pretty savvy when it comes to modern connected technology and media, but I didn't grow up with it. It's new. For Gen Z, this level of technology is what is normal. It's all around and always has been. It's their norm, as Hiral Patel put it. Here she is again.


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[Assistant] Right, time to review this week's vocabulary, but first let's have an answer to that quiz. In what decade was the term social media first coined?


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[Assistant] Was it a, the 1980s, b, the 1990s or c, the noughties? What did you say, Rob? Yeah, well I said c, the noughties. You're wrong. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the 1990s is the answer. I'm sure most of you got that one correct.


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[Assistant] That would be true, but I'm savvy enough to know that it's time to end the programme. Do join us again next time and remember you can find us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and of course our website bbclearningenglish.com. And let's not forget our app, Rob. Download it now. It's free. Join us again next time. Goodbye. Bye.


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[Assistant] If you want a glimpse of Marie Curie's manuscripts, you'll have to sign a waiver and put on protective gear to shield yourself from radiation contamination.


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[Assistant] Madame Curie's remains, too, were interred in a lead-lined coffin, keeping the radiation that was the heart of her research, and likely the cause of her death, well contained.


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[Assistant] Growing up in Warsaw in Russian-occupied Poland, the young Marie, originally named Maria Skarowska, was a brilliant student, but she faced some challenging barriers.


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[Assistant] As a woman, she was barred from pursuing higher education. So, in an act of defiance, Marie enrolled in the Floating University, a secret institution that provided clandestine education to Polish youth.


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[Assistant] By saving money and working as a governess and tutor, she eventually was able to move to Paris to study at the reputed Sorbonne.


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[Assistant] There, Marie earned both a physics and mathematics degree, surviving largely on bread and tea and sometimes fainting from near starvation.


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[Assistant] In Paris, Marie met the physicist Pierre Curie, who shared his lab and his heart with her. But she longed to be back in Poland.


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[Assistant] Upon her return to Warsaw though, she found that securing an academic position as a woman remained a challenge.


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[Assistant] All was not lost. Back in Paris, the lovelorn Pierre was waiting, and the pair quickly married and became a formidable scientific team.


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[Assistant] In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium spontaneously emitted a mysterious X-ray-like radiation that could interact with photographic film.


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[Assistant] Curie soon found that the element thorium emitted similar radiation.


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[Assistant] This led her to conclude that radiation was coming from something fundamental within the atoms of each element.


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[Assistant] The idea was radical and helped to disprove the long-standing model of atoms as indivisible objects.


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[Assistant] Next, by focusing on a super-radioactive ore called pitchblend, the curies realized that uranium alone couldn't be creating all the radiation.


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[Assistant] They also coined the term radioactivity along the way.


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[Assistant] By 1902, the Curies had extracted a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride salt from several tons of pitch blend. An incredible feat at the time.


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[Assistant] Later that year, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but Marie was overlooked.


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[Assistant] Pierre took a stand in support of his wife's well earned recognition.


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[Assistant] Well funded and well respected, the Curies were on a roll.


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[Assistant] But tragedy struck in 1906 when Pierre was crushed by a horse-drawn cart as he crossed a busy intersection.


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[Assistant] Marie, devastated, immersed herself in her research and took over Pierre's teaching position at the Sorbonne, becoming the school's first female professor. Her solo work was fruitful.


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[Assistant] In 1911, she won yet another Nobel, this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds.


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[Assistant] This made her the first, and to this date only, person to win Nobel prizes in two different sciences.


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[Assistant] Professor Curie put her discoveries to work, changing the landscape of medical research and treatments.


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[Assistant] She opened mobile radiology units during World War I and investigated radiation's effects on tumors.


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[Assistant] However, these benefits to humanity may have come at a high personal cost.


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[Assistant] Curie died in 1934 of a bone marrow disease, which many today think was caused by her radiation exposure.


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[Assistant] Marie Curie's revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few.


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[Assistant] For good or ill, her discoveries in radiation launched a new era, unearthing some of science's greatest secrets.


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[Assistant] Ernest Oberton, with his localistic model, argued that a particular region of the brain was devoted to each separate process. Pierre Gratiolet, on the other hand, argued for the distributed model, where different regions work together to accomplish all of these various functions.


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[Assistant] The debate they began reverberated throughout the rest of the century, involving some of the greatest scientific minds of the time.


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[Assistant] And in the late 18th century, a young student named Franz Josef Gall had observed that the best memorizers in his class had the most prominent eyes and decided that this was due to higher development in the adjacent part of the brain.


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[Assistant] As a physician, Gall went on to establish the study of phrenology, which held that strong mental faculties corresponded to highly developed brain regions observable as bumps in the skull.


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[Assistant] The widespread popularity of phrenology throughout the early 19th century tipped the scales toward Oberton's localism. But the problem was that Gall had never bothered to scientifically test whether the individual brain maps he had constructed applied to all people.


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[Assistant] And in the 1840s, Pierre Florence challenged phrenology by selectively destroying parts of animal brains and observing which functions were lost.


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[Assistant] Florence found that damaging the cortex interfered with judgment or movement in general, but failed to identify any region associated with one specific function, concluding that the cortex carried out brain functions as an entire unit.


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[Assistant] Florence had scored a victory for Gratiole, but it was not to last. Gall's former student, Jean-Baptiste Bouillot, challenged Florence's conclusion, observing that patients with speech disorders all had damage to the frontal lobe.


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[Assistant] And after Paul Broca's 1861 autopsy of a patient who had lost the power to produce speech but not the power to understand it revealed highly localized frontal lobe damage, the distributed model seemed doomed.


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[Assistant] Localism took off. In the 1870s, Karl Wernicke associated part of the left temporal lobe with speech comprehension.


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[Assistant] Soon after, Edward Hitzig and Gustav Fritsch stimulated a dog's cortex and discovered a frontal lobe region responsible for muscular movements. Building on their work, David Ferrier mapped each piece of cortex associated with moving a part of the body.


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[Assistant] And in 1909, Corbinian-Brodman built his own cortex map with 52 separate areas. It appeared that the victory of Oberthalm's localistic model was sealed. But neurologist Karl Wernicke had come up with an interesting idea.


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[Assistant] He reasoned that since the regions for speech production and comprehension were not adjacent, then injuring the area connecting them might result in a special type of language loss, now known as receptive aphasia.


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[Assistant] Fernicke's connectionist model helped explain disorders that didn't result from the dysfunction of just one area.


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[Assistant] Modern neuroscience tools reveal a brain more complex than Gratiole, Oberton, or even Veronica imagined.


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[Assistant] Today, the hippocampus is associated with two distinct brain functions, creating memories and processing location in space.


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[Assistant] We also now measure two kinds of connectivity, anatomical connectivity between two adjoining regions of cortex working together, and functional connectivity between separated regions working together to accomplish one process.


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[Assistant] A seemingly basic function like vision is actually composed of many smaller functions, with different parts of the cortex representing shape, color, and location in space.


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[Assistant] When certain areas stop functioning, we may recognize an object, but not see it, or vice versa.


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[Assistant] There are even different kinds of memory for facts and for routines.


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[Assistant] And remembering something like your first bicycle involves a network of different regions each representing the concept of vehicles, the bicycle's shape, the sound of the bell, and the emotions associated with that memory.


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[Assistant] In the end, both Gratio-Lay and Aubertin turned out to be right, and we still use both of their models to understand how cognition happens. For example, we can now measure brain activity on such a fine time scale that we can see the individual localized processes that comprise a single act of remembering.


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[Assistant] But it is the integration of these different processes and regions that creates the coherent memory we experience.


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[Assistant] The supposedly competing theories prove to be two aspects of a more comprehensive model, which will in turn be revised and refined as our scientific technologies and methods for understanding the brain improve.


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[Assistant] Because my empathy is bumming me out. Goodbye, sadness.


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[Assistant] To your heart, they can talk about science, music, or art. They can put you together. Or they can pull you apart, but don't trust these sluts, don't.


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[Assistant] Don't you dare, the force you trust them and love them and care and then they'll be gone and then you'll be aware of that hole in your heart that that dumb slut left there. Thank you very much. So...


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[Assistant] I was eight years old. She brought me into the dining room. She sat right across the table from me. She said, do you know your father and I love each other? I said, of course, you and dad love each other.


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[Assistant] I want you to somehow survive a terrible car crash and somehow not survive a small fender bender on the way back from the hospital.


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[Assistant] The squares lived happily in their square houses, in their square yard, in their square town.


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[Assistant] Uhm, there's things that I don't want to come across in my show.


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[Assistant] Alright, we've done studies, young people do not respond to this, you know, introspective material or these challenges of the form, you know.


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[Assistant] You get it? Cool. We'll discuss more later. I know it's a lot. My number is 310-555-


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[Assistant] A lot of clothing production got outsourced, uh, offshored over to the developing world. So countries like Indonesia, India.


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[Assistant] Yes, you're right, Sam. I am lying simply to demonstrate our topic – lying and how to detect it. You detected my lie very easily, Sam.


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[Assistant] To be honest, talking about lie detecting will be much more interesting than biscuits.


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[Assistant] But first, let's start with a question for you to answer.


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[Assistant] A competition is held in Cumbria in the UK every year to find and award the title of the biggest liar in the world. But which type of people are not allowed to take part? a. Farmers b. Lawyers c. Estate agents What do you think, Sam?


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[Assistant] Ah well, that's your opinion but I'll let you know if you're right at the end of the programme. So lying is something I'm sure a lot of us do, sometimes to avoid trouble, sometimes to cheat people or sometimes just to impress someone. Did you know I can speak seven languages, Sam?


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[Assistant] So Sophie mentions two types of lying. There's the one where we try to deceive someone. So that's trying to hide something by tricking someone to gain an advantage.


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[Assistant] Yes, Sophie Scott says we use them in normal conversation when we don't say what we really mean.


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[Assistant] Now telling lies is one thing, but how do you know if we're being lied to? Sometimes there are telltale signs, such as someone's face turning red or someone shuffling their feet.


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[Assistant] Some good advice from Richard Wiseman. So to detect lies, we need to listen out for the response latency – a term used in psychology to describe the time taken between a stimulus or question and a response to it. The bigger the gap, the more chance there is that someone is lying. Is that a good summary, Sam?


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[Assistant] Well now you know how to detect my lies, Sam. Maybe honesty is the best policy, as they say. So I'm now going to give you an honest answer to the question I asked earlier.


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[Assistant] A competition is held in Cumbria and the UK every year to award the title of the biggest liar in the world. But which type of people are not allowed to take part? a. Farmers b. Lawyers c. Estate agents


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[Assistant] And you are wrong, I'm afraid. Lawyers as well as politicians are not allowed to enter the competition. It's claimed they are judged to be too skilled at telling porkies. Porkies is an informal word for pork pies and that rhymes with lies.


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[Assistant] Why not? A fib is a small, inoffensive lie.


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[Assistant] When you deceive someone, you try to hide something by tricking them to gain an advantage.


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[Assistant] Okay, thank you Sam. That's all from 6 Minute English. We look forward to your company next time. Goodbye!


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[Assistant] I do have a few problems with the plan but don't get me wrong, I still think it's a good idea.


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[Assistant] Do you mind lending me a hundred bucks? Sure thing! Could you please send me the email by the end of the day?


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[Assistant] History is never done. It's your call Arthur. But I'd slit his throat. Go on.


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[Assistant] We buried Jose at Dutch. Charles and I stole his body from the law one night and gave him a proper burial. It was real nice.


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[Assistant] I'll spit in your eye! I did! I told them!


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[Assistant] Javier? Yes? Javier, will you ride out with Arthur to take a look for John? You're the two best fit men we've got. Now? She's, we're all, eh, we're pretty worried about him.


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[Assistant] Have you and Dutch talked about how we're gonna get out of this? I was just discussing with Herr Strauss when the weather breaks, I suppose we'll have to keep heading east. East? Into all that, that civilization? I know. The west is where our problems are worse.


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[Assistant] Come on, Herr Strauss, let's get warm. Thank you, Mr. Morgan.


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[Assistant] No! Listen Dutch, I ain't trying to undermine you, I just...


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[Assistant] I just wanna stick to the plan which was to lie low then head back out west. Now, suddenly we're about to rob a train. What choice have we got?


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[Assistant] Leviticus Cornwall's no joke, Dutchies. Who is Leviticus Cornwall? He's a big-


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[Assistant] Alright, Charles, you and me hold the thing up while you try and put the wheel back on after.


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[Assistant] Poor bastards. We really screwed them over down here. Come on, let's not push our luck. What happened? Well, get in. I'll tell ya.


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[Assistant] Just some yarrow and ginseng. Good for the health. Better than that stuff you buy in the store. Yeaah. You can have all this.


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[Assistant] I'm at the point where I can do it with my eyes closed. Oh, okay. Thank you.


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[Assistant] Now, now it is time to prosper. Arthur and I were about to prosper in Blackwater. We were onto something big.


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[Assistant] Then Micah got you all excited about that fairy and here we are.


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[Assistant] I ain't got that long, Dutch. I want folks safe before I go. Me too. And now we are stuck. East of the Gritsleys and out of money.


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[Assistant] To earn their keep. There is a town


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[Assistant] Little way down the track, name of Valentine. Livestock town, all mud and morons if I remember right.


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[Assistant] That seems a decent place to start. And uh, we need food. Real food. That means every day. One of you.


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[Assistant] There's a bunch of the boys already in Valentine. Bill, Charles, and Javier. And Swanson found something down at the train station by the lake, apparently.


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[Assistant] I saw a huge bear. One of the biggest I ever saw. I reckon nearly a thousand pounds.


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[Assistant] Up near the Dakota River? Might take a day or two.


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[Assistant] Me too. It's been a rough couple of weeks. You need anything?


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[Assistant] Let's go then. So you still ain't replaced Bodecia?


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[Assistant] I've been meaning to offload this big Shire horse for a while now, unruly bastard. Where'd you get him? Some big, loud-mouthed bastard tried to rob me, was out riding so I... Well, you know how it is. I see. Let's take him to Valentine.


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[Assistant] Yes, I remember this place. Moonstone Pond. We're going the right way.


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[Assistant] So, what's your plan? Well, we'll see if we can track him, but we might need to lay bait to draw him out.


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[Assistant] Bears like fish, obviously, but they also have a sweet tooth.


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[Assistant] A lot of fellas bait then shoot from the trees, but I prefer to hunt on the ground. More dangerous, but we'll have a much better chance of getting a good shot in. And if he bolts, we can start right off after him. Can you mix up this bait for me while I finish packing this up? Fish? Berries. Tie it up in that rag when you're done.


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[Assistant] We lost him? For now. How little optimism, Arthur. Well, what do you think? I think we split up in each look. Either that or we could place bait here. That could work. Which you think?


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[Assistant] You're fine, old man. Of course I'm fine. It's nothing.


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[Assistant] You know what Arthur Morgan, I'm a little old and beaten up to be after the biggest game. You can have this. What is it? It's a map. A man in a bar.


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[Assistant] Gave it to me. Well, I stole it from him, but that's another story.


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[Assistant] He said it told him where to find some real big animals. Thank you. It's a pleasure. You saved my life, Arthur.


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[Assistant] I think I'm going back to camp to lick my wounds. You coming or you gonna track that monster? Well...


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[Assistant] You can't win them all. So, Arthur, you get the deciding vote.


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[Assistant] The bank. Karen, Tilly, Abigail. I sent them all. They all say the same thing. There's no more than one armed guard. And the police?


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[Assistant] What do you think Arthur? I don't see we have a lot of choice.


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[Assistant] We do it at night. There's the dram of just getting into the bank. Can't do that silently. No. Pick us off far easier. I know.


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[Assistant] I'm just making sure- Every plan is a good plan if we execute it properly. Every problem we had was because we did not execute properly. Even Blackwater from my understanding.


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[Assistant] You got everything, Arthur? Sure. So, we rob ourselves a bank, and within six weeks we're living life anew in a tropical idle, spending the last of our days as banana farmers.


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[Assistant] In Western astrology, it's a constellation determined by when your birthday falls in the calendar.


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[Assistant] But according to the Chinese zodiac, or shēng xiāo,


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[Assistant] It's your 属相, meaning the animal assigned to your birth year.


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[Assistant] And of the many myths explaining these animal signs and their arrangement, the most enduring one is that of the great race.


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[Assistant] As the story goes, Yudi, or Jade Emperor, ruler of the heavens, wanted to devise a way to measure time. So he organized a race.


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[Assistant] The first 12 animals to make it across the river would earn a spot on the zodiac calendar in the order they arrived. The rat rose with the sun to get an early start. But on the way into the river, he met the horse, the tiger, and the ox.


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[Assistant] Because the rat was small and couldn't swim very well, he asked the bigger animals for help. While the tiger and horse refused, the kind-hearted ox agreed to carry the rat across. Yet, just as they were about to reach the other side, the rat jumped off the ox's head and secured first place.


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[Assistant] The ox came in second, with the powerful tiger right behind him.


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[Assistant] The rabbit, too small to battle the current, nimbly hopped across stones and logs to come in forth.


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[Assistant] Next came the dragon, who could have flown directly across, but stopped to help some creatures she had encountered on the way.


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[Assistant] After her came the horse, galloping across the river. But just as she got across, the snake slithered by. The startled horse reared back, letting the snake sneak into sixth place.


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[Assistant] The Jade Emperor looked out at the river and spotted the sheep, the monkey, and the rooster, all atop a raft, working together to push it through the weeds.


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[Assistant] When they made it across, the trio agreed to give Eith place to the sheep.


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[Assistant] He was a great swimmer, but frolicked in the water for so long that he only managed to come in 11.


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[Assistant] The final spot was claimed by the pig, who had gotten hungry and stopped to eat and nap, before finally waddling across the finish line.


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[Assistant] And so, each year is associated with one of the animals in this order, with a cycle starting over every 60 years. Why 60 and not 12? Well, the traditional Chinese calendar is made up of two overlapping systems.


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[Assistant] The animals of the zodiac are associated with what's called the 12 earthly branches, or 十二地質.


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[Assistant] Another system, the ten heavenly stems, or shi tián gān.


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[Assistant] is linked with the five classical elements of metal, jin, wood, mu.


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[Assistant] Each element is assigned yin or yang.


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[Assistant] Creating a 10-year cycle. When the 12 animals of the earthly branches are matched with the 5 elements, plus the yin or the yang of the heavenly stems, it creates 60 years of different combinations, known as a sexagenary cycle, or ganzhi.


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[Assistant] So someone born in 1980 would have the sign of Young Metal Monkey.


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[Assistant] While someone born in 2007 would be yin firepig.


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[Assistant] A true animal based on your birth date and a secret animal based on your birth hour.


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[Assistant] It was the great race that supposedly determined which animals were enshrined in the Chinese zodiac.


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[Assistant] But as the system spread through Asia, other cultures made changes to reflect their communities.


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[Assistant] So if you consult the Vietnamese zodiac, you may discover that you're a cat, not a rabbit.


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[Assistant] And if you're in Thailand, a mythical snake called a naga replaces the dragon.


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[Assistant] So whether or not you play stock in what the zodiac says about you as an individual, it certainly reveals much about the culture it comes from.


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[Assistant] Hello English learners. Welcome back to another edition here with us at EnglishPod. My name is Marco.


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[Assistant] And today we are doing the third part of our Old English series. And today we're transported back to the 1970s.


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[Assistant] Exactly, so it's gonna be a very cool lesson today. And before we start with the dialogue, let's take a look at some of the words that we're gonna find in vocabulary preview.


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[Assistant] Okay, so a roller rink. Let's break that down and let's look at the first part.


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[Assistant] Exactly. So that's roller, and what about rink?


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[Assistant] Okay, so if you go to a roller rink, it's this big area where everyone can rollerblade or rollerskate.


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[Assistant] Alright, very good. So these are the two words that we previewed and we're gonna listen to them now in the dialogue. We're gonna hear two guys just talking about normal everyday things, but we're gonna be listening to them in 1970.


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[Assistant] Alright, on Language Takeaway today, we have the first word, far out. Far out. That was far out. To be far out. Okay, so it's just another way of saying cool. Cool. That was nice. It was really cool.


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[Assistant] So they went to the roller rink, it was far out, it was really cool, but the other guy couldn't go because he saw a foxy lady. A foxy lady. Okay, foxy lady.


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[Assistant] Right, commonly you would hear some men refer to an attractive woman as a fox.


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[Assistant] Yeah, this phrase, you can say it as good, yeah, that's nice, or you can also say it as, well, correct, correct, I agree. So why don't we listen to some examples of how we can use this word in other situations.


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[Assistant] Now, if you look it up in a dictionary, it's gonna tell you something else, right?


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[Assistant] Alright, so now that we understand these six words that we saw in Language Takeaway, it's time for us now to take a look at some great phrases that we can use today in Fluency Builder.


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[Assistant] How's it going? How are you? Now you notice in the spelling that we do have a G at the end, I-N-G, right?


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[Assistant] So he said everything was just groovy and then he started telling him about how he met a girl and he'd chat her up a bit. Shhh.


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[Assistant] To chat her up. Okay, so to chat somebody up.


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[Assistant] Yeah, you're trying to be a little bit, uh, flirty and maybe saying nice romantic phrases or something like that.


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[Assistant] To chat someone up or to chat up a girl, right? Okay, so he was chatting her up.


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[Assistant] So before we explain this word, let's listen to some other examples so then we can maybe understand the meaning.


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[Assistant] So usually it's to ask for money. That's right. Okay, so to hit someone up. And now for our last phrase. Let's book and let's go grab some grub.


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[Assistant] Alright, so some interesting phrases and even though some of these words you may not really commonly hear anymore, they might still be used in movies or something that's related to the disco era because it's very, very popular still, right?


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[Assistant] Yeah, exactly, so it's fun and well, you will use them or you will hear them from time to time, even today.


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[Assistant] Exactly, we're there to answer any questions and, uh, we'll see you guys there.


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[Assistant] Don't get him mad, though! His mama made him mad.


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[Assistant] That was fun, Fenton. Wanna make an actor of you yet?


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[Assistant] I can introduce you to a new best friend, and he's going to give you all the decent robbable stagecoaches a hot-blooded degenerate could require.


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[Assistant] He's one of us. A fellow man of distinction. Okay.


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[Assistant] Well, I'm hoping complete silence won't be necessary. But you're going to wish you had your earplugs.


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[Assistant] Welcome to your next week. This week is all about data and privacy.


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[Assistant] Access to data is important for marketers. It makes it possible to target advertising messages to the right audience


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[Assistant] All that data is related to user behavior, and while users may be okay with sharing some data, there are limits.


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[Assistant] And as a marketing analyst, it's important to understand where the limits are and how to work with data responsibly. So this week, we will answer questions like who owns a user's data? What are the limits on its use? And how is the privacy of users protected?


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[Assistant] First, we'll look at data from the consumer's perspective.


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[Assistant] In the first lesson, we'll take a look at what data consumers frequently provide and how that allows for free online content consumption.


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[Assistant] Once we've looked at privacy from the vantage point of a consumer, we will dive deeper into the value of personal data to an advertiser. We will discuss the use and ownership of data as well as the responsibility advertisers have to guard the trust of the user.


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[Assistant] Finally, we will discuss how user privacy is protected and what rules we as advertisers need to adhere to.


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[Assistant] I'm excited to get started on this lesson, so see you in the next video.


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[Assistant] Thanks to Brilliant for supporting this episode of SciShow. You can check out Brilliant.org slash SciShow to learn how you can take your STEM skills to the next level.


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[Assistant] From the blowing wind to the shining sun, energy is all around us. And humans have an almost insatiable demand for it, so scientists and engineers are always on the lookout


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[Assistant] With tools like solar panels, wind turbines, and geothermal wells, they've already found some great alternatives to fossil fuels.


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[Assistant] Alternative alternatives, if you will. Some could be the next big thing, others could be as kooky as they are clever. Here are six of the weirdest ways to harvest the energy around us. Unless you are standing next to a nuclear reactor or something, the biggest source of energy near you right now might be


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[Assistant] Just sitting around doing nothing, an average adult male gives off heat at a rate of about 90 joules per second, which is to say, 90 watts. That's quite a lot of energy just going out into the world as wasted heat, so some people are trying to put that


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[Assistant] Now, the easiest way might just be to repurpose that heat, like they've done at the Stockholm Central train station. Around a quarter million people pass through it every day, generating a lot of heat as they wait for their train. The station's ventilation system captures that heat by using it to warm water, which then gets piped into nearby buildings to help heat them in the winter. At maximum capacity, those office buildings can cut their heating bills by 25 percent,


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[Assistant] First discovered in 1821, thermal electricity is a property of certain materials. Basically, when there's a difference in temperature across these materials, it can generate an electric current. Traditionally, this was a very inefficient process, but modern material science


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[Assistant] Most thermoelectrics today are semiconductors, like the materials used to make computer chips. Take bismuth telluride. It's a room-temperature semiconductor that, when combined with antimony, produces the thermoelectric used for refrigeration. It might sound complicated, but working with thermoelectrics can actually be really simple. In 2013, for example, a high school student used thermoelectric tiles to generate a self-powered flashlight. Just grab it by the handle, and your hand's body heat


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[Assistant] Creates enough electricity to light up the LED inside.


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[Assistant] No batteries needed. NASA scientists are studying thermoelectrics for use inside astronauts' spacesuits. And in 2017, researchers described using them to create medical implants that can be powered by the patient's own body heat.


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[Assistant] Like devices to help with regenerative therapies for bone tissues, or brain stimulation for motion disorders. For many alternative energy proposals, a major obstacle is the need to build lots of infrastructure at massive costs. But there's one kind of human infrastructure that's already virtually everywhere on Earth.


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[Assistant] From your favorite radio station to the Wi-Fi router on your desk and the cell tower on the block, radio waves


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[Assistant] Are already everywhere we are. And as a form of electromagnetic radiation, every radio wave carries energy that we can snatch.


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[Assistant] But it's pretty cool that it might soon actually be possible. Not all energy sources have potential applications as important as wireless medical data, but that does not mean that they can't be just plain fun. The human body is an amazing tool for converting chemical energy, like


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[Assistant] You know, potatoes, into the mechanical energy of motion. But since every action has an equal and opposite reaction, only some energy in each step goes into pushing you along. The rest is spent trying to push the Earth back, where it's effectively lost. Unless we can capture it. One way to do that is through piezoelectricity.


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[Assistant] A property of some crystals which acquire an electric charge when compressed.


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[Assistant] Talk about power couple. Piezoelectricity works because the crystal structure of some materials


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[Assistant] When you compress one of these crystals, the molecules


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[Assistant] You know, expensive. But there are some places where we step more often than others.


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[Assistant] Like dance floors. In 2008, this idea was put to the test by a pair of night clubs located in London and Rotterdam, and I remember it because I wrote about it in my blog, EcoGeek. By creating a piezoelectric dance floor, the clubs could capture the energy of dancing and put it to use