This is an I-Heart podcast.

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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hey, welcome to Scuff to Blow Your Mind.

My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick. And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick.

And today on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we're going to begin a series of episodes talking about microbial organisms called diatoms, focusing both on their living biology and on the way that their fossilized remains in mineral form have pervaded human techno history and culture.

Rob, I don't remember if I told you this, but I actually got the idea to do this episode jumping off of a sort of research tangent that I ended up not going down when we did an episode on sand a few weeks back.

I was looking at weird different kinds of, you know, sand and soil on Earth.

And I started thinking, actually, diatomaceous Earth is so much weirder than people think about

when they go, like, buy a canister of food grade diatomaceous Earth or get some for their garden.

Yeah, you know, and I don't think I'd really ever encountered it on the commercial end of things

before.

Like, I don't think I've ever purchased a canister of this stuff before or anything like that.

But I do find it, I think it's great that it's a spinoff of our sand episode, which I think

everyone was excited for, and so were we.

It is also, in a weird way, kind of a continuation of our Dust series from years back.

Yes.

A series that some people were like, how are they, why are they doing episodes on dust?

It makes me so angry.

But people love those episodes as well, and we loved researching them and recording them.

We're getting into that same area, and I think it's a fascinating world, especially when we leave behind the human perspective, and we start really zeroing in on what's going on at a much smaller scale.

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