Hi, I'm Flora Lichten, and you are listening to Science Friday.

Today in the show, what is going on in the minds and bodies of thrill seekers?

A lot of the high sensation seekers I've talked to actually tell me that adrenaline gets in the way of what they want to do.

But first.

The latest installment in the Mission Impossible franchise, the final reckoning, is out today.

And if you've seen any Mission Impossible movies, you know that they go big on the stunts. Tom Cruise is famous for doing his own stunts. We've seen him climb the Birch Khalifa, do a high-altitude skydive

from a plane, jump off a cliff on a motorcycle, which got us thinking, is there a science to stunts

and how has stunt technology changed over the years?

Here to tell us more is sci-frey producer Kathleen Davis, who saw the new Mission Impossible movie early.

Hello, Kathleen.

Hi, Flora.

And yes, I can tell you that this new movie has one particular extended stunt that genuinely had me holding my breath. We will have some

small spoilers for the movie, but we're not going to spoil the plot for you. About halfway

through the movie, our main character, Ethan Hunt, who is, of course, played by Tom Cruise,

dives to a submarine at the bottom of the Bering Sea to retrieve an item that's important to the

plot. So Ethan Hunt breaks into the

submarine. He's in a wetsuit with an oxygen tank. He's running around the sub. When it starts

rolling, like picture a submarine rolling down an underwater hill, it starts filling with water.

He's trying to find the escape door. It's a very dramatic scene. And there's a lot

of sloshing, a lot of upside-down Tom Cruise. So I wanted to find out what kind of science it

takes to pull off a stunt like this. And I called up the movie's stunt coordinator and second

unit director, Wade Eastwood, to talk about it. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

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