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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff Works dot Com where

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Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi Marshall Brain with today's question. In the

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Speaker 1: movie Salt, could Evelyn Salt really have created an exploding

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Speaker 1: missile like you see in the movie? At the beginning

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Speaker 1: of the movie Salt, you see Evelyn Salt get outed

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Speaker 1: by a Russian agent and she is about to get

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Speaker 1: locked up, and she tries to escape, and she ends

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Speaker 1: up on this vacant floor of an office building, and

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Speaker 1: she needs a way to create a diversion. So what

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Speaker 1: she does in the movie is she disassembles a table

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Speaker 1: to create or to find a tube that she can

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Speaker 1: use as a missile launcher. And she finds some chemicals

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Speaker 1: and she mixes them together and she loads them into

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Speaker 1: a little cartridge that she finds at the bottom of

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Speaker 1: an office chair, and then she uses a CEO to

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Speaker 1: fire extinguisher to launch this thing and incapacitate a small

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Speaker 1: team of people who are trying to capture her. So

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Speaker 1: you watch it and you notice that she's mixing two

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Speaker 1: chemicals together. One of them is clearly marked as a

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Speaker 1: bottle of ammonia, and the other is a smaller bottle

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Speaker 1: with a dark red liquid in it. After mixing, she

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Speaker 1: gets this really kind of thick, reddish fluid that she

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Speaker 1: puts on some paper towels, loads into her little missile,

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Speaker 1: and then fires it. Is there any truth to this?

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Speaker 1: Is it possible to mix together any two maybe household

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Speaker 1: kind of chemicals and get an explosive that could incapacitate

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Speaker 1: a team of trained commandos? Most likely the writers of

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Speaker 1: the movie are trying to suggest that she's making something

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Speaker 1: called nitrogen triiadide, and it is a real chemical that

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Speaker 1: really can be made out of two simple chemicals that

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Speaker 1: you might find around the house. Traditionally, when you make

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Speaker 1: nitrogen try iodide, you take iodine crystals and you you

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Speaker 1: grind them up into a powder, and then you mix

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Speaker 1: that with the ammonia. And in the movie they're using

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Speaker 1: liquid iodine instead, but still those two chemicals will make

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Speaker 1: an explosive that can be pretty powerful. If you go

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Speaker 1: on YouTube, you can first of all find videos about

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Speaker 1: how people make this stuff, and you can also find

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Speaker 1: videos about how it explodes. And what you notice in

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Speaker 1: the exploding videos is that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly

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Speaker 1: sensitive to any kind of pressure. In some videos, you'll

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Speaker 1: see them activated with just a touch of a feather

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Speaker 1: and it will explode with just that much disturbance. So

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Speaker 1: it's a very, very sensitive explosive. So the good news

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Speaker 1: is it really is possible to make a shock or

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Speaker 1: an impact sensitive explosive out of household chemicals that are

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Speaker 1: relatively easily available. But there are two problems with the

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Speaker 1: movie version that we see in Salt. First, she has

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Speaker 1: no time to dry her mixture and it wouldn't work

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Speaker 1: in the wet state that's shown in the movie. And second,

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Speaker 1: you can see and if you watch any of the

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Speaker 1: videos on YouTube, that nitrogen tri iodide is incredibly touchy.

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Speaker 1: It would definitely explode on impact, but it would probably

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Speaker 1: also explode during the launch process or the loading process

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Speaker 1: if it actually had been dry, So this might not

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Speaker 1: be the perfect thing to use for a missile as

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Speaker 1: shown in the movie. Now we can ask a second

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Speaker 1: bonus question, would Evelyn Salt actually have any hearing left

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Speaker 1: after a career of being a spy? As shown in

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Speaker 1: this movie, the explosion that she creates with nitrogen tri

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Speaker 1: iodide is just the first of many many explosions and

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Speaker 1: gunshots that her ears have to endure. She's in an apartment,

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Speaker 1: a small apartment, her small apartment when they throw a

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Speaker 1: flashband grenade in, and that grenade is powerful enough to

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Speaker 1: blow out the windows, so it certainly would have done

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Speaker 1: something to her ear drums. She's in a steel ship

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Speaker 1: where she dropped several grenades in close proximity to her ears.

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Speaker 1: That would be another set of explosions that would have

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Speaker 1: an effect on her hearing. She's in car accidents. She's

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Speaker 1: in a stone tunnel when she sets off an explosion

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Speaker 1: that's enough to take out the whole floor of a cathedral.

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Speaker 1: She stands in front of a bulletproof glass window and

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Speaker 1: shoots a whole handgun magazine and then a machine gun

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Speaker 1: magazine at it. She would probably, in fact, she would

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Speaker 1: certainly be deaf if this is her normal lifestyle, because

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Speaker 1: the ears can only take so much of this kind

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Speaker 1: of punishment before either you blow out the ear drums

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Speaker 1: or you just completely deadened their sensitivity to sound. So

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Speaker 1: we would probably if this were a real movie, see

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Speaker 1: a woman who's constantly replaced the batteries and her hearing aids,

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Speaker 1: or who is using sign language instead of speaking. If

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Speaker 1: you'd like to see some of the videos I talked

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Speaker 1: about in this podcast, you can go to Google and

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Speaker 1: type in brain Stuff Evelyn Salt, and it'll take you

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Speaker 1: right to the blog posts I did that contains the videos.

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Speaker 1: Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff

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