This is an I-Hard podcast.

Guaranteed human.

A common trope in science fiction is the strategic move of signal jamming, interfering with your

enemy's ability to communicate.

My personal favorite example of this is not from Star Wars or from Star Trek, but spaceballs. When their communications fail,

they realize they've been jammed because literal raspberry jam drips across the screen. But is that

really how jamming technology works?

Or is it more like noise-canceling headphones or something else?

Today we'll dig into the physics of signal jamming, including the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps.

Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

Hello, I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm a big fan of jam. Oh, but not the kind that we're talking about today. Were you in a band or anything in high school? Oh, I play the clarinet in a marching band, and you could totally not hear anything. And I play the saxophone in a jazz band. So not a very

cool kind of band, but yeah, I've been in bands. How about you? You were goth as a teenager,

so you were either listening to or performing music, I'm guessing. Yeah, I played the electric guitar

in some grunge rock bands. It was pretty awesome. And you were recently invited by a

listener to be on their hip-hop track. Yeah, we'll see where that goes. They said, they said I needed

singing experience. So I'm guessing that's going to disqualify me because singing in the car probably

doesn't count. I don't know. That's experienced. Shows and cars. I guess.

We'll see. All right. So my question for you today is we're talking about like, you know,

equipment and when it doesn't work, whether it's, you know, because someone's being malicious or not,

that's really frustrating. Yes. So what piece of equipment in your life has been the most

frustrating to you? Oh, wow. I think the thing I'm most

often frustrated by are the things I use most to like a phone to computer. But in reality,

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