This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from How StuffWorks.com.

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I'm Julie Douglas.

Julie, who has not dreamed of either having wings themselves or just dreams of winged

humanoids flying about? I mean, it's the stuff of just ancient myth, the stuff of fantasy,

the stuff of religion, the stuff of art. There's something just irresistible about the idea of a human with the wings of a bird

or even the wings of a bat.

Yeah, the desire to fly, I think, is pretty universal.

Even Dorothy from Oz, right?

Somewhere over the rainbow, blue birds fly.

Birds fly over the rainbow.

Why then?

Oh, why can't I?

Yeah.

Want to sing in the rest? No, okay.

But yeah, one example that always comes to my mind. I mean, there are a lot of iconic

ones, obviously, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus is big, the idea that, you know, they

built these wings, and then they fly too close to the sun and then they plummet.

It's just a fantastic metaphor for so much in human endeavor, human technology,

humans reaching to achieve things that they were not necessarily biologically gifted with,

but via their intelligence are, in a sense, genetically gifted with.

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