Killer Cable Slice. Starting with a crazy looking video shot on the deck of an aircraft carrier, Adam and Jamie find their next myth. This video shows a jet that is supposed to be stopped by a thick cable stretched across the deck of the carrier. But instead of being stopped, the cable snaps, and whips back across the deck. One amazingly alert crewman jumps over it, but several others are caught in the whiplash, begging the question: Can such a snapping cable cut someone in two?
I’ve wondered this myself, and in Final Destination 2, an uprooted barb wire fence does this very thing while flying through the air. I figure if a cable that is stretched taut can do it, I might just buy that a loosely-strung rusty fence can. But I have my doubts.
The first thing to do is build a scale model and figure out how this works. They stretch some rope across a table and repeatedly snap it to see what happens. Unsurprisingly, when they snap the rope at one end, the tension at the other pulls it in a fairly straight line towards the other side. So inserting an obstacle in the middle creates the reaction they need. Satisfied that this will produce the results needed on a larger scale, it’s off to do the shopping.
Adam gets some pigs for the test (since Buster wouldn’t be sliced – his body is too hard) and Jamie gets some equipment. The first test involves rope, and it barely leaves a mark. Then the cable goes and while it leaves some markings, but there is certainly no slice happening. It would hurt to get hit by such an event, but it doesn’t seem that you’d be sliced in two. There is simply no way that a loosely-strung barb wire fence, as that seen in Final Destination 2, would have done it while flying through the air. I knew it! Busted.
Pottery Record (Archaeoacoustics). Meanwhile, Grant, Kari and Tory are working on their own project – to see if ancient pottery can hold recordings, also known as the “science” of archaeoacoustics. The story comes about from email circulating that says somehow as pottery was made, it actually picked up ambient sounds that were then recorded into the pottery, and could be played back later.
This was popularized on The X-Files when they found some pottery that was allegedly scanned to reveal sounds from the time of Christ. Is it actually possible? The build team aims to find out.
First, Kari and Tory do their best Ghost impression and make some pots. Perhaps needless to say, but Kari does a lot better than Tory. Tory just doesn’t have the patience, and his penchant for spinning the wheel too fast means his pot is a lot smaller than it needs to be. It is cute, however.
Once they have pots, they use brushes to “record” their voices by simply yelling at the pots. While this does seem to work, because it leaves an impression in the pots, in the end it seems that the raw material of the pot is just too malleable to adequately record the sound. If it were a bit harder, perhaps it would do okay. Busted.
