Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery.

Time flies when you learn super cool stuff.

I'm Nate.

And I'm Callie. If you're dropping in for the first time,

welcome to curiosity where we am to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind.

If you're a loyal listener, welcome back. Today, you'll learn about a surprising discovery

inside the Worms of Chernobyl, a way to protect metals at sea

inspired by barnacles, and foot eye coordination.

Without further ado, let's satisfy some curiosity. In April of 1986, a

catastrophe of nuclear proportions would rock the world and leave parts of

Ukraine utterly uninhabitable. I'm assuming you're talking about Chernobyl, right?

Or Jour noble with an O sound instead of an E, as I guess it's referred to in Ukraine.

I think, I don't speak Ukrainian. The explosion created the most

radioactive environment on Earth. By some estimates, between 50 and 185 million

curies of radio nuclides were released into the atmosphere.

And you don't need to know what a radio nuclide is to guess that the devastation was enormously widespread.

I mean, as I understand that people kind of fled the area almost immediately.

Rightly so. And the area around the plant now known as the Children Noble Exclusion Zone

is still highly radioactive after 40 years. But there's an interesting twist here. With all the people

gone, the natural ecosystem and the wildlife that calls this radioactive zone

home has taken back the land. And this has given scientists of all stripes, biologists,

physicists, naturalists, botanists, a sort of field lab for all kinds of studies.

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