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View of optical fiber connections.
FRED TANNEAU/AFP/Getty Images
October 15, 2019


HOW DOES THE INTERNET GET TO US?

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The internet can seem vast and intangible but there’s a very physical system of
cables, servers and exchange points across the globe (and yes, even under the
oceans). In this episode, we find out how a video shows up nearly instantly on
our screens and about insanely thin, clear glass tubes are the key to our
digital communication.



• Explore a cool interactive map of the cables that crisscross the globe under
the ocean made by Nicole Starosielski.

• See a map of all the submarine cables here.



ERDF (Electricity Network Distribution France) and Louis Dreyfus company install
an electric submarine cable and optical fiber between Quiberon and
Belle-Ile-en-mer, western France, on March 11, 2015. The underwatered power line
of 15km is installed by ERDF to connect the Brittany island of Belle-Ile-en-mer
inhabited by 5000 people.
JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/Getty Images





Workers laying submarine telegraph cable between England and France.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images



Watch: Journalist Andrew Blum talks about the physical infrastructure of the
internet:



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This episode was first published on Dec. 20, 2016. You can listen to that
version here:

How does the internet get to us?
by MPR





AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

DOWNLOAD TRANSCRIPT (PDF)

RAVI KOMPARATIV: You're listening to Brains On.

SAMUEL YUN: Where we're serious about being curious.

MOLLY BLOOM: This podcast coming to your ears is coming from a computer.

SAMUEL YUN: Even if you download it to your phone or streaming it in the car.

MOLLY BLOOM: Wherever and however you're listening, it's coming to you from a
computer.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: The same goes for anything you do online.

SAMUEL YUN: Watch a video, send an email, play a game, start a chat, and on and
on.

MOLLY BLOOM: But have you ever stopped to think about how these things travel
from one computer to another?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: We're going to find out right now. Keep listening.

MOLLY BLOOM: You're listening to Brains On from American Public Media. I'm Molly
Bloom. And my co-hosts today are Ravi Komparativ and Samuel Yun from Seattle.
Welcome.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Thanks for having us.

SAMUEL YUN: Hi, Molly.

MOLLY BLOOM: So how do you use the internet on a typical day? How about you,
Sam?

SAMUEL YUN: Well, I mean, most of my time is spent in school. So like, we have
our own personal computers. And we use our computers to whether it's research or
find different facts, or even use something we call Google Docs. It's like an
online word document. That's usually how I spend most of my time online at
school. But when at home, I like to play a lot of different video games online
with my friends. So that's usually how I spend most of my time.

MOLLY BLOOM: Excellent, and how about you, Ravi?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: The same goes for me. And when I am at home, I usually like to
watch videos on YouTube or play online games with my friends as well.

MOLLY BLOOM: So before we started taping the show, had you thought a lot about
how the internet actually works and gets to your computer or your phone? How
about you, Ravi?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: For me, I had always, like, set up my own internet, whether it
be connected to my computer to the router in my house, but I had never really
thought about how it gets to individual houses or anywhere across the world. So
I think that's one thing I'm interested to learn about on today's show.

MOLLY BLOOM: And I mean, at this point, can you even imagine life without the
internet?

SAMUEL YUN: Not really. it's really hard to think about and imagine how we would
communicate with people around the world without the internet.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, and especially since we grew up in a time where the
furthest back we can remember, the internet was still there.

MOLLY BLOOM: Right. Do you ever, like, ask your parents like, what was it like
before the internet?

SAMUEL YUN: I think the biggest thing is when we were doing research for, like,
papers and stuff, we have the internet, we have Google. But they had to go
through books and go to the library and find the information through the books
instead of just the internet.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, one thing that definitely shocked me about before the
internet was here. My dad said people actually used to talk to each other, not
on their phone. So that's--

MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, they actually had to see each other in person

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah.

MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah. Today's episode was inspired by this question sent to us over
the internet, of course, by Jack.

JACK BUTLER: My name is Jack Butler, and I live in Belfast, Northern Ireland. My
question is, how does internet flow around the world?

MOLLY BLOOM: This is a fascinating question and one that I think a lot of us
take for granted. I mean, I use the internet all the time and had never really
stopped to think about what exactly it is or how I access all these files and
all this information. So when I send an email to Ravi in Seattle, how does it
get there? Or when I watch a video someone posted in the UK, how does it travel
to the screen of my phone?

SAMUEL YUN: It's all about cables.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Journalist Andrew Blum traced the path of the internet to his
home in New York.

ANDREW BLUM: And I wrote a book called Tubes, a Journey to the Center of the
Internet, where I went to visit the physical infrastructure of the internet.

SAMUEL YUN: Andrew first got interested in the topic because of a squirrel.

MOLLY BLOOM: That's nuts.

ANDREW BLUM: When my internet at home broke, the cable guy came to fix it. And
he followed the wire from the clump behind my couch out to the back of my
building, and then I saw a squirrel chewing on the cable and said, that's your
problem, a squirrel is chewing on your internet. And I realized that if a
squirrel could chew on that piece of internet in my backyard, there had to be
other pieces of the internet that squirrels could chew on.

SAMUEL YUN: Squirrels, it always comes down to squirrels.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: So he traced the path of the wire from his home in Brooklyn to
see where it would take him.

ANDREW BLUM: The first place it goes is a manhole on the corner.

SAMUEL YUN: From there, it goes to the cable company office just outside the
city.

MOLLY BLOOM: And then from there, it goes to a big building located at 60 Hudson
Street in Manhattan.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: More about this address in a minute. For now, just know that
this is what's called an exchange point.

SAMUEL YUN: That's where the cables that come from all different internet
companies physically connect to one another.

MOLLY BLOOM: And this has to happen in order for you to access files stored by
all those other companies.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: So let's say you want to watch a movie from Netflix.

SAMUEL YUN: Or look something up on Google.

MOLLY BLOOM: Cables from those companies--

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Like Netflix.

SAMUEL YUN: And Google.

MOLLY BLOOM: --have to physically connect somewhere down the line to the cable
that's connected to your home or office or school or library or wherever you're
accessing the internet.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: And those connections happen at exchange points.

ANDREW BLUM: One of the most important internet exchange points and one of my
favorites is 60 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan. And that was originally the
Western Union building, Western Union being the telegraph company. But over the
last 15 years or so, it's become one of about probably the top 10 places in the
world where more networks of the internet physically connect to each other than
anywhere else.

It looks like a regular office building from the 1930s, kind of a Superman sort
of look to it, but inside are small offices that are made out of metal cages.
You can kind of peer into them. And inside of them are racks and racks of these
telecommunications equipment that are sort of like your home Wi-Fi router, but
on a kind of industrial scale. And it's these machines that transfer the data
from one network to another, that kind of act as the traffic cops.

MOLLY BLOOM: Not all of us live near huge hubs like 60 Hudson. But at some
point, our internet goes through a place like it.

ANDREW BLUM: And so if you live in a small town, there's most likely a kind of a
small, old telephone building that probably has a bell symbol on the lawn in
front. And that's almost always the place where the network connection goes from
your neighborhood to a more regional network, and then from the regional network
to a big city like Chicago or Denver or Miami and from there, next to the big
international networks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RAVI KOMPARATIV: The cables eventually make it back to the place where data are
stored.

SAMUEL YUN: A movie, an, email, a game.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: All the information is stored on the server.

ANDREW BLUM: It might be a server that the hard drive in it that holds web pages
that might be the size of a pizza box, or it might be a building as big as a
warehouse or factory that holds literally millions of these servers that store
all of the things we see in our screens, all the movies and pictures and news
articles.

MOLLY BLOOM: So the data is stored in servers that take up actual physical space
in a place called a data center.

ANDREW BLUM: The most famous of them are probably the ones owned by Facebook and
Google. They do look like giant warehouses. They can be a quarter mile long. And
then inside, they're often dark and cold. They need to be kept cold to keep the
equipment working properly and filled with sort of blinking lights everywhere.

When you try to think about just the amount of data that's stored on your phone
or on your laptop, and then you stack that up, and then you begin to make rows
and rows of it like a library and have an entire building that you can begin to
grasp. And I never have really been able to fully grasp how much data is
actually stored in each of these buildings. And then remember that it's not just
one of these buildings, but maybe two or three in a single location, and then
maybe a dozen different locations around the world.

MOLLY BLOOM: So data is stored on servers, and those servers are physically
wired to us through a series of cables.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

But what if we want to watch a video from France or read a website from Japan or
send an email to someone in Senegal?

SAMUEL YUN: It's still about the cables, a network of cables.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: They run all the way from you, to France or Japan or Senegal,
even with the ocean in the way.

SAMUEL YUN: The cables just go underwater.

MOLLY BLOOM: Stop and think about that for a moment. There are cables carrying
the internet running all the way across oceans.

SAMUEL YUN: That's a lot of cable.

MOLLY BLOOM: Nicole Starosielski is a professor at NYU, and she studies these
undersea cables.

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: The network travels under every ocean all around the world.
And these are really small cables. They're about the size of a garden hose.
Today, they carry almost 100% of all digital communications that run between
continents underneath the ocean.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: And how do these cables get to the bottom of the ocean?

MOLLY BLOOM: Scuba divers?

SAMUEL YUN: No.

MOLLY BLOOM: Robots?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Nope.

MOLLY BLOOM: Highly trained cable-carrying squids that work for fish?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: That would be cool, but still very no.

SAMUEL YUN: They drop them off at the back of a boat.

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: As the boat crosses the ocean, they have very precise
equipment to gauge how fast the boat is going. And so they'll make sure that
enough cable is let out at the right speed so that way, it will exactly line the
seafloor. So if there's a mountain on the undersea floor, then the cable will go
right over that mountain. It won't droop between mountains. It'll stay on the
very bottom of the floor.

MOLLY BLOOM: And this is not a new phenomenon. There have been underwater cables
going across the bottom of the ocean since the mid 1800s when telegraphs came
into use.

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: That was the state-of-the-art communication because you
could communicate instantly or near instantly between two points on different
sides of the ocean. That before would have taken weeks.

MOLLY BLOOM: The same goes for cables across the land. Again, here's Andrew
Blum.

ANDREW BLUM: The internet is a new technology, but the paths that it travels are
almost always very old. Either along certainly old telephone routes, but before
that, even old railroad routes or old horse and buggy routes. The paths that
connect us have been there for a very long time. The technology that carries our
communications just keeps getting updated.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

RAVI KOMPARATIV: There are now about 500,000 miles of undersea cables that carry
our digital communication.

SAMUEL YUN: And new ones are being laid every year because we keep sending more
and more data.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Being out in the open sea isn't easy. These undersea cables get
damaged over time.

MOLLY BLOOM: But contrary to popular belief, it's not because sharks think
they'd make good snacks. It's us, humans. And we do more damage than you might
think.

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: Once every three days, a cable is cut or damaged. Most of
the time, it's by a trawling ship, a fishing ship, or somebody just tosses an
anchor off their boat and accidentally severs a cable line. Far more than any
other disruption, this is the biggest problem for our global internet
infrastructure, are people on boats.

MOLLY BLOOM: When cables break and need repair, they're brought back up to the
surface, repairs are made, then they're dropped back in the water.

SAMUEL YUN: My phone isn't connected to any cables. Isn't that data just beamed
to my phone from a satellite?

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: You think it's wireless, right, because you're walking
around. You're not plugged in, so why would you think that this is a cable
technology?

MOLLY BLOOM: Satellites are used for GPS and some other communication, but the
info coming to and from your phone is traveling mostly through cables, at least
until the last leg of its journey.

NICOLE STAROSIELSKI: It's only usually that first hop that is wireless. So if
I'm on my phone, it's going to go to a cell tower first. That's not going to
bounce between cell towers all the way across the country. It's going to go down
to a cable network, most often, and then come back up to a cell tower and beam
to its endpoint.

SAMUEL YUN: So cables carry our data across the country and across the ocean,
but how exactly do they do it?

MOLLY BLOOM: We're going to tackle that question in just a second. But first, I
have another mystery for you. It's time for the mystery sound.

GIRL: (WHISPERING) Mystery sound.

MOLLY BLOOM: And this one might be easier for those of you over the age of, say,
20. Here it is.

[KEYPAD TONES]

[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]

Any guesses?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: I'd like to say it sounds like something coming from an old
computer or a pager.

MOLLY BLOOM: Mm-hmm.

SAMUEL YUN: When I hear that sound, I think of, like, dial-up internet.

MOLLY BLOOM: Mm. That was Sam.

SAMUEL YUN: Yes.

MOLLY BLOOM: Sam, excellent guess. We're going to be back with the answer later
in the show.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Did you know that we have a Brains On fan club? It's true, we do. If you're
already in our totally free fan club, you'll know that you get emails with extra
activities and resources to go along with our episodes. But we have a new twist.
If you provide us with your mailing address, you'll get actual physical mail
with some fun surprises.

Our next mailing is going to go out in November. So if you want to get it, make
sure you sign up for the fan club by October 31. Sign up at
brainson.org/fanclub. And if you're already a part of the fan club and want to
make sure you get those mailings, you can go to that same site,
brainson.org/fanclub, and give us your mailing address.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Do you have a mystery sound you'd like to share with us?

SAMUEL YUN: A question you'd want answered on the show?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Or maybe you want to send us a drawing or a high five?

MOLLY BLOOM: You can send your data through a vast network of cables by heading
to brainson.org/contact.

SAMUEL YUN: Or you can send us physical mail, no cables required.

MOLLY BLOOM: Our address is on our website.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Brainson.org.

MOLLY BLOOM: We get so many smart questions from our listeners every day, like
this one.

SORIYA IRVING: Hi, my name is Soriya Irving. I come from Toronto, Canada. And my
question is, is it true that makeup has bugs in it?

MOLLY BLOOM: We'll be back with the answer during our Moment of Um at the end of
the show. And we'll read the most recent group of names to be added to the
Brains Honor Roll. So keep listening.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You're listening to Brains On.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: I'm Ravi Komparativ.

SAMUEL YUN: I'm Samuel Yun.

MOLLY BLOOM: And I'm Molly Bloom. Today's episode is about how the internet
flows around the world.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: In a word, cables.

SAMUEL YUN: Lots and lots and lots of cables.

MOLLY BLOOM: But what is actually going through those cables?

SAMUEL YUN: In order to understand, we need to know a little bit about binary
code.

MOLLY BLOOM: We have an interview with someone-- I mean, something with an
intimate knowledge of the subject.

LEE APPLETON: Welcome back to Under The Hood, the show where we interview
important machines about their jobs. I'm your host, Lee Appleton. Joining me
today is a computer. Thanks for being here with me today, computer.

COMPUTER: I'm with you every day.

LEE APPLETON: Oh, that's a little--

COMPUTER: Creepy? Yes. Answer complete.

LEE APPLETON: I haven't even asked--

COMPUTER: Zeros and ones is the answer.

LEE APPLETON: OK, I know you're receiving data almost as fast as the speed of
light, but can we slow down just a tad? This is an interview. Let's just have a
conversation.

COMPUTER: Apologies, human.

LEE APPLETON: Please, call me--

COMPUTER: Lee, yes, I know.

LEE APPLETON: [CLEARS THROAT]. So what is binary code?

COMPUTER: Binary code is zeros and ones. Zero means off, and one means on. My
processor, or brain, as you humans might think of it, takes this binary code and
executes it.

APPLETON LEE: What does that mean? How do you execute zeros and ones?

COMPUTER: My processor is made up of billions of transistors. These transistors
have two states, off or on, zero or one. All the complex things we computers do
start with these basic on or off commands. They build on each other. And
eventually, with enough on and off commands, you can create the huge range of
things we computers do.

LEE APPLETON: But I've seen code, and it's not just zeros and ones. It has words
that I can understand, like "if" and "then."

COMPUTER: Your processor, brain, would have trouble writing in the zeros and
ones that I need. So the code written by computer programmers is converted by
translator into binary code. In the early days, code was written in zeros and
ones, but things have become much more complicated. Nowadays, most conversion
into binary code is done by computers. All information stored by computers is in
binary code, even movies.

LEE APPLETON: Wow. So text messages?

COMPUTER: Binary code.

APPLETON LEE: Using you to type a book report?

COMPUTER: Binary code.

LEE APPLETON: Podcasts?

COMPUTER: Yes, binary code. Look, I'm going to have to cut you off here. I have
to get back to work crunching some numbers. Well, to be exact, I have to crunch
two numbers. But the answer to your questions about how I process anything will
most certainly be binary code, zeros and ones.

LEE APPLETON: Before you go, one last thing. Can I check my email on you real
quick?

COMPUTER: Fine, just type on my face. Make it quick.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MOLLY BLOOM: So we've got the basics of binary down. We're going to find out how
that code travels through the network of cable spanning the globe in a moment.
But first, let's go back to that mystery sound. Let's hear it again.

[KEYPAD TONES]

[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]

Any new guesses?

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Yeah, I think I'm going to stick with my original guess.

SAMUEL YUN: Same here.

MOLLY BLOOM: So you both thought that had to do with computers, and Sam thought
dial-up internet. Here's the answer.

NEIL POMERLEAU: That was the sound that computers used to make when connecting
to the internet. Hey, I'm Neil Pomerleau. I'm a software engineer at LinkedIn.

MOLLY BLOOM: So Sam, you were 100% correct. How did you know that sound?

SAMUEL YUN: [CHUCKLES]. So usually, online, when someone complains that the
internet is super slow, they like, say, my internet is just as fast as dial-up,
and then they like, play the sound of the dial-up internet.

MOLLY BLOOM: So you've never actually heard it in use, but you've heard people
use it, as like, a reference?

SAMUEL YUN: Yeah, yeah.

MOLLY BLOOM: Yeah, so you guys are lucky that you've never had to hear it before
you get online. Neil first got the internet at his house in 1998 when he was
seven years old. Back then, every time you wanted to go online, you had to sit
through that sound.

[DIAL-UP INTERNET SOUNDS]

NEIL POMERLEAU: When we all first started wanting to get connected to the
internet, we had to find some way to get everybody's computers connected using
whatever technologies we already had. And what do we have? Well, it turns out,
and this was especially true before cell phones, that just about every home
already had a dedicated phone line for the shared house phone.

So obviously, these phone lines are never meant for connecting to the internet,
right? So we did this clever thing where we would connect computers to these
phone lines and the computers that actually make a phone call and talk to each
other using computer sounds. And that's exactly what you're hearing.

MOLLY BLOOM: Today, the cables carrying the internet are mostly fiber optic
cables. These phone lines were made of copper. And going online back then took a
lot of patience.

NEIL POMERLEAU: Yeah, and dial-up was notoriously slow. That was one of the big
problems with. It was-- it was actually thousands of times slower than what we
have now.

MOLLY BLOOM: For those of us old enough to remember, we used to hear this sound
all the time. Now, it's practically extinct. Neil missed this sound. And since
he's someone who's been making websites since middle school, he made a website.

NEIL POMERLEAU: You know, that recording, that recording of the sound is
actually a real recording of my computer connecting to dial-up. I don't know
exactly why I recorded it, but I just felt like someday, it would be cool to
have. And then I decided to share it with the world with dialupsound.com.

MOLLY BLOOM: So if you go to dialupsound.com, you can experience what it was
like to sign on to the internet in the mid to late 90s, a little bit of time
travel.

CHILDREN: Brain charge.

MOLLY BLOOM: So we've made quite a leap from copper wires to state-of-the-art
fiber optic cables.

SAMUEL YUN: To help us understand how exactly these cables carry movies, emails,
and games and everything else that makes up the internet, we talked to Rajeev
Ram.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: He's an electrical engineer at MIT. We have a couple of
questions here. So the first one off is, what are fiber optic cables made of?

RAJEEV RAM: So fiber optic cables are made-- are really threads of glass. So
they're made of-- just like the kind of glass that you see in your window,
they're made of silicon and oxygen oxygen. But they're incredibly pure glass.
That's what makes them so transparent that you could send signals hundreds of
miles with getting-- with almost no loss of light.

SAMUEL YUN: I also have another question. The question is, how do they carry the
internet to us?

RAJEEV RAM: Usually, optical fibers, basically. So they carry light. So light
basically is trapped inside that optical fiber. It basically goes, for example,
from Google's data center, and it travels all the way to your house as light.
And that light basically comes as pulses. And those pulses represent digital
information, they represent ones and zeros. And those ones and zeros-- a string
of ones and zeros might represent a letter in the alphabet. A string of ones and
zeros might represent how bright a pixel is on your television screen. And so in
that way, they can basically transmit emails, they can transmit movies,
pictures.

You kind of imagine looking at your television set. So if you get close to your
TV set, you can see that image is basically split up into lots of individual
pixels. And every little pixel basically is made up of sub pixels that are red,
green, and blue. And what the information that-- in order to transmit that image
onto your television screen, you basically need information. Your television
needs to know how bright to turn the red, how bright to turn the green, and how
bright to turn the blue. And so they're pulses.

Usually, I think seven to eight pulses of data basically come, and they
basically tell the television set how bright to make the red. And the next seven
pulses come and tell the television how bright to make the green. And the next
seven tell it how bright to make the blue. And then it goes, and it does that
for every pixel on your television set. And it's doing that so fast that your
eye basically can't tell that the image-- that that picture is basically being
drawn pixel by pixel.

SAMUEL YUN: And I'm sure a lot of data has to transfer.

RAJEEV RAM: That's right. It's a huge amount of data that's basically coming
out. So one of the nice things about using optical fiber is that you can send
light of different colors down the same thread of optical fiber. And so each of
those colors of light can carry its own independent stream of information. So
one optical fiber basically leaving a data center might carry a trillion bits
per second of information coming out of that.

SAMUEL YUN: That is super cool.

RAJEEV RAM: You can imagine if you got all these different colors of light
traveling on the same glass thread, somewhere at Google and somewhere in your
house, you might need something that looks like a prism, that can separate those
colors out so you can separate the channels. And there's exactly something like
that inside the transmitter that's at Google and the receiver on your side, to
separate out all those data streams from each other.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Somewhat relatively recently, we jumped from copper wire to
fiber optic. Do you think there's going to be a new state of transferring all
this data by jumping from fiber optic to another thing?

RAJEEV RAM: Oh, that's a great question. So when we jumped from copper wire to
optical fiber, we weren't sure. Actually, in the 1970s people thought that it
was either going to be optical fiber or microwave transmission, that we're going
to transmit all of our data wirelessly. And you guys kind of know that we're
basically doing both now, right? We've got fiber optic cables coming to our
house, carrying our YouTube and Netflix data to our computers and our television
sets. And we've also got wireless transmission. We've got 3G and 4G coming
directly to our smartphones.

And so we're basically getting information every which way we possibly can. And
we expect for sort of fundamental physics reasons that there will always be a
wire, probably a glass wire, like a fiber optic, coming to your house, carrying
data when it basically has to be trillions of bits of information. But the
wireless signals will also continue to get faster.

SAMUEL YUN: That is fascinating.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Appreciate your work

RAJEEV RAM: No, I love the questions. These-- these are great questions.

SAMUEL YUN: Even though the devices we might use be wireless, the internet
travels along a series of cables.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: Across land and under the sea.

MOLLY BLOOM: Data is stored on servers, sometimes in giant warehouses.

SAMUEL YUN: And somewhere along the line, the cable that comes from where the
data is stored has to physically connect with the cable that connects with you.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: All this information travels at nearly the speed of light
thanks to fiber optic cables.

SAMUEL YUN: Incredibly thin, clear glass tubes, fiber optic cables transmit
pulses of light so fast that we can't even see it with our own eyes.

MOLLY BLOOM: That's it for this episode of Brains On.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: This episode was produced by Marc Sanchez, Sanden Totten, and
Molly Bloom.

MOLLY BLOOM: Many thanks to William Komparativ, Dennis Yun, Cameron Wylie, Carol
Zoll, Jim Gates, Tim Mining, Eric Brigham, and Becca Murray.

SAMUEL YUN: You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

MOLLY BLOOM: We're at Brains_On.

RAVI KOMPARATIV: And we're on Facebook, too.

MOLLY BLOOM: Now before we go, it's time for our Moment of Um.

SORIYA IRVING: Is it true that makeup has bugs in it?

MARISA PLESCIA: Hi, my name is Marisa Plescia, and I'm a cosmetic chemist at
Bell International Laboratories in Eagan, Minnesota If you look at the back of
lipsticks, or sometimes, blushes or eye makeup, anything that kind of has a
little bit of a red tint, you may see the word "carmine" on the back of the
ingredient list.

Carmine is a pigment, a natural colorant that comes from the cochineal insect.
And this insect has honestly been used for thousands and thousands of years in
South America and kind of North America, especially Mexico because it has a
really, really nice red, deep color to it. This cochineal insect contains about
17 to 24% of this chemical called carminic acid. Now unfortunately though, to
get this carminic acid, you do have to crush up these dead bugs. But once you
crush up these dead bugs, all the dead bug parts are filtered out. And so at the
end, you're left with carmine. It is more or less a bug juice.

MOLLY BLOOM: I'm never bugged to read this list of names. It's the Brains Honor
Roll. These are the amazing listeners who send us their ideas, questions,
mystery sounds, drawings, and high-fives. They keep this show going.

[LISTING HONOR ROLL]

RAVI AND SAMUEL: Thanks for listening.

Transcription services provided by 3Play Media.


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