We Didn't Start the Fire

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Speaker 3 You're about to listen to a brand new episode of Curious Cases.

Speaker 3 Shows are going to be released weekly, wherever you get your podcast, but if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes first on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 6 I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Dara O'Brien.

Speaker 3 And this is Curious Cases.

Speaker 2 The show where we take your quirkiest questions, your crunchiest conundrums, and then we solve them.

Speaker 7 With the power of science.

Speaker 6 I mean, do we always solve them?

Speaker 7 I mean, the hit rate's pretty low.

Speaker 6 But it is with science.

Speaker 7 It is with science.

Speaker 8 Look, I have a problem.

Speaker 3 Tell me.

Speaker 6 You know, I think, and I've been very quiet about this for the last two years I've been doing this show.

Speaker 2 Good of you.

Speaker 6 That when the approach is made for me to come in here, the title sort of promised something.

Speaker 3 Curious cases? Yeah. I mean...
What were you expecting?

Speaker 6 Well, I was expecting more like...

Speaker 6 What mysterious secrets secrets does the universe like in a Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, a 1970s, here's some grainy footage of a Yeti.

Speaker 6 I thought that we'd be out looking for alien life and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We're like curious, weird things.

Speaker 3 Crop circles, that sort of thing.

Speaker 6 Yeah, and I've been very good at me sitting there talking to all these esteemed scientists and really interesting.

Speaker 3 But you wanted super natural. But I kind of wanted an inexplicable thing.

Speaker 6 I kind of wanted like, why do the plates fly across the room?

Speaker 6 You know, that's what I thought this was going to be.

Speaker 3 Right. I haven't seen the R C.
Clarke program that you've been.

Speaker 6 Oh, these are amazing. It was a time of mysteries, the 70s.
We had no answers to anything, but we had a lot of questions. And we had a lot of footage of stuff.

Speaker 6 Footage that has mysteriously dried up since we gave everything in the world a camera. And now we no longer have any photographs.

Speaker 3 Which is which is weird, isn't it? It is strange.

Speaker 3 I think that that does mean that there was a time limit on shows like that. I'll be honest with you.

Speaker 3 I think the kind of cases that we're investigating are more for now.

Speaker 3 Look, people can send in their supernatural questions if they like to curiouscases at bbc.co.uk, But the premise of this show is that we answer listener questions and so I can only deal with what I'm given, Dara.

Speaker 6 All right? Oh, I'm already writing a poltergeist letter.

Speaker 6 Hello, I'm Darren O'Byrne. Hi, poltergeists.

Speaker 3 Do you really want something that's a bit...

Speaker 6 I just feel that some of those questions still linger in my head. But this week, I think we genuinely have a thing.

Speaker 3 We can turn it into that if you want.

Speaker 6 Oh, I totally want to turn it into that. I know when we start.
We're going to start as if it's a science question, but we're going to get to the.

Speaker 3 We're going to get to the weird.

Speaker 6 We're going to get to the mythic weird thing.

Speaker 3 Should we tell them what it's about? Yeah, dude. Okay, all right.
We're going to do spontaneous combustion. Oh, look at that.
It's a phenomenal thing.

Speaker 6 And of course, at some point, we're going to do spontaneous human combustion.

Speaker 3 We're going to do spontaneous combustion. Hold it back.

Speaker 3 Which is the idea that in the 1970s and 80s, I think, particularly, there were endless stories of mostly women, I think, having just

Speaker 3 burst into flames.

Speaker 6 Burst into flames. But it was such an evocative image.

Speaker 6 There'd be a photograph, it'd be post-mortem photographs of a chair, and there'd be scorch marks all around the shape of a body, and then there'd be two feet left. I'll be like, what happened?

Speaker 6 It must have happened instantly.

Speaker 2 Just like that.

Speaker 3 Gone. Okay.
It's a little treat for you. If you get all the way through it, Dara, and you behave very well, I'll let you do spontaneous human combustion.
Oh, wow.

Speaker 3 So here is the question that we got sent in by listener Nicole. Who lives in France?

Speaker 9 Bonjour, Hannah and Dara. I'm Nicola and I live in Saint-Matia, France.
I'm renovating a farmhouse and want to nourish my aged wooden floors.

Speaker 9 One choice is to use linseed oil that should be rubbed in with a rag. The directions on the tin say that all rags must be washed or submerged in water after, as they may spontaneously combust.

Speaker 9 That got me thinking, how does this happen and what other materials can spontaneously combust? Abianto!

Speaker 3 Okay, it's less supernatural than you might like, but it's still interesting.

Speaker 6 It turned into a property show for a second there.

Speaker 3 Well, you know, nothing says beautiful, idyllic French countryside like an impending threat of a fireball. You know?

Speaker 3 Luckily, today in the studio, we have got some people to help answer these questions, including human combustion later.

Speaker 3 We've got Andrew Seller, who is a professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, and science teacher turned content creator Emmanuel Wallace, better known to his millions of social media followers as Big Manny.

Speaker 3 All right, Andrea, let's start with the most obvious question we've got here. What is spontaneous combustion?

Speaker 8 So I think before we get to the spontaneous bit, we should just look at combustion. And combustion is the idea that something would be consumed by fire, effectively.
It's a chemical reaction.

Speaker 8 The technical term would be exothermic. In other words, the temperature rises.
And secondly, it produces light, so generally a flame.

Speaker 3 This spontaneous part, though, tell me about that.

Speaker 8 So the spontaneous part is kind of interesting. And I first came across it as a child.
So I grew up in New York City until I was about 12. And my parents would rent for a week a house somewhere.

Speaker 8 And we were on a place called Fire Island, which looks out over the Atlantic. It was one of these classic wooden houses.

Speaker 3 Sorry, it was called Fire Island.

Speaker 8 Funnily enough, that's the name of the place. Classic, classic house, which had those steps, those wooden steps up the front.
And one afternoon, I could smell smoke.

Speaker 8 And I saw some wisps coming up from the steps.

Speaker 8 And what turned out was that they had a storeroom under the stairs. And there were the classic things, tins of paint, rags.
And over time, things had gotten to the point where they were smoldering.

Speaker 6 Look, I'm now thinking of rags and tins of paint in my own house. This is not reassuring.
So what's going on right now in people's rags?

Speaker 8 So rags are, first of all, they are flammable, right? You can burn a rag if you heat it up enough. On its own, it's not going to heat itself up.

Speaker 8 But the interesting thing is that if you soak it in something like linseed oil, it's kind of a classic.

Speaker 3 Which is what Nicola was talking about with the French house. Exactly.

Speaker 8 I mean, if you use something like linseed oil, then linseed oil reacts with air very, very gently.

Speaker 8 It reacts with air gently, it reacts with the oxygen, because the oil itself, it's actually one of those polyunsaturates, and those are subject to react with oxygen.

Speaker 8 And when they react with oxygen, guess what? They warm up a little bit. And the thing about the rag is that it will have the linseed oil very thinly spread, so you've got quite a big surface area.
And

Speaker 8 it may very gently pick up oxygen, warm up, and under the right conditions, it can get to the point where it's hot enough to become self-sustaining, right? That it takes off.

Speaker 8 And so that would be the spontaneous bit, is that there's been no intervention. When you think about fires, you know, in school we learn about the fire triangle, right?

Speaker 8 There's the fuel, there's the oxidizer, and then typically you need some source of ignition. You need a spark or a match or something.

Speaker 8 But in this this case, that ignition comes from the fact that the fuel and oxidizer are reacting together and it just gets warm enough to go over a threshold and then it takes off.

Speaker 8 And that's what must have happened under those steps.

Speaker 6 Yeah, because when I was a kid and I'm seeing the fire triangle the first time, it was just heat. I thought, that's not enough.

Speaker 6 Surely I need a spark or I need something explosive, like a match going off or something. But it can just be a case of it just slowly warming to a point where...

Speaker 8 That's right. Where suddenly it really takes off and then a flame bursts out and now your house burns down.

Speaker 3 Okay, but all of a sudden, I mean, I'm worried about sort of everyday things. Manny, is this apart from avoiding living in places that are actually called Fire Island,

Speaker 3 what kind of other things should I be worried about in everyday life? Is there anything else that can spontaneously combust?

Speaker 10 One of the things that can combust is grass. As Andrea was saying, we need three main ingredients to start a fire.
We need a fuel, we need oxygen, and we also need heat.

Speaker 10 Now, during summer, when the sun is extremely hot, we have that heat. So that's already one part of the triangle.

Speaker 10 We have the dry grass, which is the fuel, and then obviously we have the oxygen as well, which is just around in the atmosphere.

Speaker 3 Hang on, though. So, this is like I have heard of stories of like giant hay bales just bursting into flames.
Is that what's happening there?

Speaker 10 Yeah, because it's literally like the perfect conditions.

Speaker 8 The additional factor which comes into play is also fermentation, is that often sort of in the middle, everything is quite compressed and you've got bacteria which are going to be chewing away.

Speaker 8 They will help to warm things up.

Speaker 8 And so, you know, essentially, it's this question of getting up to that threshold temperature at which suddenly things take off and become kind of irreversible, uncontrollable, or whatever.

Speaker 10 Yeah, because it's literally like large amounts of energy is released. So that's the exothermic part of the reaction.
So that's how we get the heat.

Speaker 3 Right, so we're avoiding grass and hay bales and all of a sudden I mean I'm worried about all of the rags and tins of paint in Dora's house.

Speaker 8 So I think there's an interesting question here going back to Nicola and whether Nicola should be terribly worried about her floorboards.

Speaker 8 The process which actually leads to the spontaneous combustion is this oxidation, this autoxidation which happens.

Speaker 8 And when she applies it on the surface of the wood as a kind of thin layer, the autoxidation leads to curing. Now, the surface area is actually really quite limited.
Once it's cured, it's locked down.

Speaker 8 You're not going to have your floorboards catching fire, and that's one of the reasons why we don't have to worry if we're using tongue oil or whatever it is to make our kitchen worktops look prettier.

Speaker 6 So, should she, or should we, excuse me, or any of us who have to lay them flat, hang them out, whatever, what's the best?

Speaker 8 I mean, I think just not keeping large numbers of rags together and certainly storing them in a way that there isn't other fuel available.

Speaker 3 Talking about hay setting on fire, right?

Speaker 3 One of my favorite news stories of recent years was there was a pig farm that wanted to prove that they had free-range pigs, so they put pedometers on each of the animals.

Speaker 3 And pigs, I don't know if you know this about them, have a habit of eating everything.

Speaker 3 So one of the pigs ate a pedometer, it passed through the body of the pig, and then when it came out the other end, spontaneously combusted and basically set the pig farm on fire.

Speaker 3 I mean, there is something in like lithium batteries are particularly prone to this, right, Manny?

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, lithium batteries can be quite hazardous. So lithium metal by itself is an alkali metal.
It's very flammable. It's easy for it to catch fire alone.

Speaker 10 And in lithium batteries, we have three main ingredients. Lithium compounds, oxidizers, and we also have hydrocarbons.
So, what happens is, yeah, let's say you're charging up your phone.

Speaker 10 It might be nighttime, you're in bed, you've got your phone on charge, you've got it under your pillow. So, what's going to happen is, yeah, it's going to start heating up.

Speaker 8 And in this case, what you really don't want is a short circuit.

Speaker 10 Yeah, because literally, like, at that point, lithium compounds are going to start decomposing and they're going to break down. Now, this reaction is exothermic, so heat energy is released.

Speaker 10 And as the temperature rises, what we have is thermal runaway, which is where the battery catches fire.

Speaker 3 Got a long list of things to avoid now, haven't we? Absolutely, yeah.

Speaker 6 I mean, I can't even fly back to check out the rags because my laptop might explode. But that's presumably why they keep going.
Do you have anything?

Speaker 6 That's the reason these are asked on airplane journeys, because you don't want the fire untended in the cargo hold.

Speaker 8 So, the beauty of a battery is that you're placing a reducer and an oxidizer. And And so you have these two halves, which are separated by a very thin membrane.

Speaker 8 And the moment the short circuit happens, you've got the two talking to each other very intimately. And this kind of chemical orgy results in huge exotherm.

Speaker 8 The thing will expand typically and potentially catch fire.

Speaker 3 I think this might be quite a good time to bring on another guest because joining us remotely, we've got Matt Oakley, who is a fire investigation officer with the Surrey Fire and Rescue.

Speaker 3 Matt, your whole job is going to the scenes of fires and trying to work out what caused them. How often do you come across spontaneous combustion of the type that we've been talking about?

Speaker 11 It happens a lot. There's lots of reasons why things catch fire.
So what we're trying to do is investigate all the possible hypotheses that can cause an ignition

Speaker 11 and eliminate the ones that aren't credible. and come up with the one that is.
So yeah, we deal with a lot.

Speaker 3 What about lithium batteries?

Speaker 11 I mean, we were talking about thermal runaway in batteries do you see that happening we do see an increasing amount um from a fire investigation point of view we've actually created a database now to kind of monitor this phenomenon with uh thermal runaway with the lithium batteries the problem is they are notoriously difficult to control so to put it in perspective last year we recorded 55 confirmed fires where the battery was the source of ignition, where the battery has overheated, thermal runaways occurred, the breakdown between the positive and negative side has caused a spark.

Speaker 11 We've had ignition. But what you also don't know is there are a number of fires where a fire has occurred for other reasons.

Speaker 11 The fire has then spread to an area where there are lithium batteries stored. Then you get this accelerator runaway where the lithium batteries cause rapid fire development.

Speaker 11 I mean, they're like missiles. When the casing fails, and these batteries fail, we can have multiple ignitions where I've seen one of the hoverboards during COVID that have been plugged in lots.

Speaker 11 and I've gone to a burnt-out garage with about eight seats of fire thinking it's been an attack and actually I've found burnt out lithium battery cells that have literally rocketed out of the device under heat and just

Speaker 11 landed somewhere else and set a fire over there. So it's

Speaker 6 what sort of what sort of devices are we talking about here? Just to really get the scare factor up here.

Speaker 11 Without putting the fear into people, you know, lithium batteries are everywhere.

Speaker 11 If we buy from a recognized source, they're pretty safe but why do batteries fail it's normally an overcharge or an undercharge which means the wrong charger the wrong currents being put through it which is putting the battery under the wrong amount of loading that it's designed to have so people pulling a charger out of a drawer because the nozzle fits into the hole properly is not necessarily a safe thing to do it's using the right charger for the right battery secondly it's impact damage So failure where we've not looked after the batteries properly.

Speaker 11 They've been dropped, which has caused an internal break in the structure of the battery so when you then charge it up the positive and negative side of the battery are already trying to short out and i'll give you a good example of that one we attended a fire in a van that caught fire spontaneously on the motorway and the gentleman's jumped out and we found a load of battery power tools in there and one of the battery tools looked like a source of ignition when you ask him about his routine he said well i finish up for the day and then what i do is i'll lob all my tools into the back of the van and so day in day out he's chucked all his tools in the back and gradually impact damage on the battery has led to one of them to fail and as he's driving along the battery's just overheated and caught fire and he's now got a fire in the back of his van as he's driving down the motorway.

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Speaker 3 I don't think people know how dangerous this stuff is because you're saying these things. I do all of them.
Like, I just grab a charger from a drawer and plug something in. Yep.

Speaker 11 Yeah, I mean, and so it's also tools uh bikes presumably as well yep so what we've seen now is e-bike conversions where people have taken the front wheel off their bike put a new hub on and they buy a battery pack that goes with it if you're not buying from a recognized provider we have a problem and you think about the type of people who are going to use an electric converted bike students people who live in maybe a flat with a communal hallway where security is an issue so where where would people store an electric bike on charge in their only exit route, which is in the hallway of the entrance hall to their flat.

Speaker 11 And we've had it before where the fire has occurred and one couple had to jump out of the second floor window of their flat. On this occasion, this was in Guildford.

Speaker 11 The battery is overheated, thermal runaways occurred, the hallways caught fire very quickly and the couple are asleep in bed.

Speaker 11 So the only route out of the house was out of the bedroom window and two floors up onto the onto the lawn outside the flats. So they survived, but their flat was completely, completely destroyed.

Speaker 11 So it's not so much the batteries that cause the batteries will catch fire on occasion, but it's how we use batteries nowadays,

Speaker 11 which is a real concern. They are day-to-day existence.
You've got a phone in your pocket.

Speaker 11 How often have you had it get slightly warm?

Speaker 3 I mean, not exactly easy to make this into a happy-clappy episode, is it? No, no, no. Well,

Speaker 3 you can do it.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 11 it's about human behavior, about, you know, if I've been out in the sunshine and I feel

Speaker 11 the battery on the phone's hot, first thing I do is turn the phone off, stop the reaction, stop the power circulating through the battery, turn it off, let it cool down.

Speaker 11 If you've got any kind of swelling in your laptop on the back where the battery's degraded, it's time to get rid of it. So there's lots of things we can do.

Speaker 11 It's not that batteries are bad because they've been around for 100 years. It's the background story with it about where we've got it from, who we've bought it from, has it got previous damage to it?

Speaker 3 and have we dealt with it responsibly or the right way well okay matt i mean thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Matt.
No worries. Thanks.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 6 We've talked about spontaneous combustion in everyday settings in a series of scare stories, by the way.

Speaker 6 But it can be useful, can't it?

Speaker 8 Oh, absolutely. It's also a lot of fun.

Speaker 8 I mean, the idea that you might be able to start a fire, get a lot of heat and maybe a lot of gas with it.

Speaker 8 Pretty good idea, especially if you want to fire rockets. And so there are certain chemical reactions where you take two liquids and you mix them together and they ignite instantly, you get a flame.

Speaker 8 That's how we actually fly a lot of military missiles, that kind of thing. These are called hypergolic reactions.
And I once filmed one of these. I'd never actually properly seen one.

Speaker 8 And I really didn't know what to expect. And when I put the first drop of the hydrazine

Speaker 8 into the

Speaker 8 N2O4 nitrogen dioxide. The thing went quite literally like a rocket and it scared the pants off me.
They're amazing.

Speaker 3 Quite a different sort of chalk and cheese. Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 6 we were taking a gear change here, definitely. Were you going to demonstrate something for us?

Speaker 8 Well, I mean, there's plenty of chemistry out there that is very, very sensitive to oxygen. And what I'm going to show you, so I've got a little bit of hydrochloric acid,

Speaker 8 and

Speaker 8 what I've done is prepared magnesium and sand together and I heated them up until essentially it ignited and what that does is it makes an interesting compound called magnesium silicide can I just say that you put on some sense goggles and I think maybe I'll put some on as well yeah yeah you're closest I'm going to double up glasses and goggles okay so I'm going to put a little bit and we might see something when I drop it in there and then I'll explain.

Speaker 8 Here we go.

Speaker 12 Ooh!

Speaker 3 it's like a little firework going.

Speaker 6 Yeah, it's like sparking and flaming.

Speaker 8 Isn't it beautiful?

Speaker 3 It's lovely.

Speaker 8 It makes a tiny little wisp of smoke, so I'm just going to put a beaker on top.

Speaker 3 So that is interesting, then, because separately, you have what looks like a jar of a clear liquid not doing anything, and you've got this sort of, I mean, it looks like grey sand, what you have here, but put them together, and you're seeing these sparks literally fly.

Speaker 8 Absolutely. So, what's happening here is that

Speaker 8 the compound in the magnesium silicide reacts with the acid and it produces silane, SiH4. It's like methane, as in natural gas, with silicon instead.

Speaker 8 And that reacts with oxygen instantly, produces lots of heat, and that's where the flame comes from.

Speaker 8 Then it goes out because there's very little fuel there, and that's why we've been allowed to do it here in the studio.

Speaker 8 I wanted to do it with a shovel and a swimming pool, but the budget didn't extend to it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, nor will the BBC help in safety valuations, presumably.

Speaker 8 But it is quite pretty, isn't it? It is lovely, actually.

Speaker 6 There are various chemicals, money, that do you have this auto-igniting property? Pyrophoric substances. Is that the technical term for them? Do you use them in your videos?

Speaker 10 Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, like, I use a lot of alkali metals in my videos.
Metals like lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium.

Speaker 10 These alkali metals are actually used in fireworks because they each burn of a different color. So, for example, lithium is going to give you a nice crimson-red flame.

Speaker 10 Sodium is going to give you yellow, potassium, like a lilac purple. That's why they use them in fireworks.

Speaker 10 So, what I normally do with them is I just like get a little bit of sodium or potassium, drop it into some water, and you get a nice explosion with the different colors as well.

Speaker 10 Now, the most reactive metal on a periodic table is called francium metal. It's the alkali metal as well.

Speaker 10 It's so reactive that it can only exist for a maximum of 20 minutes because it actually breaks down and decomposes into another chemical, another element, because of how reactive and radioactive it is.

Speaker 10 And that's not a lot of time. So we don't really know much about it.
But the one below that, cesium, I've done experiments with cesium before.

Speaker 10 So it's so reactive here that as soon as you open the vial, it explodes instantly because it reacts with oxygen and moisture in the atmosphere.

Speaker 3 Have you put cesium in water, Manny?

Speaker 10 You know what? I couldn't actually put cesium in water, I had to put the water on the cesium because it would have just reacted before I had a chance to even drop it in there.

Speaker 3 Right, I've got a pitch for a video, okay? Yeah, a shovel, cesium, and a swimming pool. Okay,

Speaker 8 wow, it has to be done.

Speaker 10 That's got to be a massive

Speaker 8 expensive, though. Expensive.

Speaker 6 I think we can accept so far. Spontaneous combustion occurs.
It is a genuine serious issue that occurs.

Speaker 6 And intriguingly, both in ancient trades like agriculture and very much in our modern life that we've made battery-dependent.

Speaker 6 Honestly, everything we do is something that's waiting to erupt, and that's fine. So, surely there is a version of spontaneous human combustion.

Speaker 3 I mean, surely. Surely.
Surely. Okay, well, Roger Byad is a professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and he's also a forensic pathologist.

Speaker 3 So he is exactly the person that we need to be asking about this. He's done lots of work with spontaneous human combustion.
Have a listen to this.

Speaker 12 The first time I ever encountered spontaneous human combustion was when I was a student. I was 18 years old and I was fruit picking in central Tasmania.

Speaker 12 And the hut that my friend and I were staying in used to be occupied by an old man who we were told had died of spontaneous human combustion about three weeks before. So that was my first encounter.

Speaker 12 And then many years later, I was reading about a coroner in Galway in Ireland in 2011.

Speaker 12 And he he had a case and he said that the only possible conclusion he could come up with was spontaneous human combustion.

Speaker 12 So I thought well if senior medico-legal people believe in it how many other people do?

Speaker 12 And so I went to write about it and to research it and to show that it is basically a very long-standing urban myth.

Speaker 12 What happens is people are found dead in a house and only their legs and arms may be left and everything else is burnt and there's all sorts of soot and it's really been a very obviously long-standing smoldering fire and so people said well this must be spontaneous and particularly in France several hundred years ago there were a number of cases and people said that it was basically a visitation of God and then other people came up with the idea that basically it was spontaneous explosions inside people

Speaker 12 and there was a British surgeon in the 19th century who said no no it's helium and hydrogen produced in the colon colon. And it's a burning eructation.
He was quite convinced with this theory.

Speaker 12 But the type of person that's typically involved is an obese, elderly white female who lives on her own. She's wrapped up in blankets, smoking and drinking spirits.

Speaker 12 And what we think now happens is that these people drop their cigarette, they probably spilled a bit of spirits, and it acts like a wick effect.

Speaker 12 So there's this smoldering fire and they just slowly incinerate. Now, people have said, well you know you can't burn a body at a low temperature.

Speaker 12 Once fat starts burning it can burn at very low temperatures and it does take a while. It's a long process and it explains why nothing else around them is burnt.

Speaker 12 It's because the fire is contained within the blankets. One of the important things about spontaneous human combustion is it's never been witnessed.

Speaker 12 Now it's been around for hundreds of years and yet if it was a medical event, people would be bursting into flames in the supermarket, at footy matches or walking down the street. They don't.

Speaker 12 It's always people are on their

Speaker 12 i mean it's it's been in literature a dickens in the bleak house had it melville had it you know people have described it everywhere people people want to believe in something as unusual as this but it's it's an urban myth

Speaker 6 sorry yeah i accept it to be honest i i don't hear that

Speaker 6 we've all believed it in the 70s but by the 80s somebody had done a thing and said what is a sadder case basically that people are often overcome by the fumes uh when the burning starts or whatever so they're very much knocked out when this occurs.

Speaker 6 And then it happens post-mortem, essentially, that the body slowly burns. So no, we have to accept that it isn't

Speaker 6 in the sense of there being some greater power struck a lightning bolt and the whole thing evaporated in seconds.

Speaker 6 But, I mean, there's a lot of rewording, stuff that I think we could still call spontaneous combustion.

Speaker 3 I think what remains is to thank all of our guests today, Andreas Ella, Manny Wallace, Matt Oakley, and Roger Byard.

Speaker 6 So the upshot basically is that that we've settled for people that there isn't spontaneous human combustion, but that everything else in your life might explode.

Speaker 6 I mean the grass, the hay, your bike, your phone, your laptop, things you plug in and things that just grow. Everything is just the stuff under your house.

Speaker 3 And sort of everything in between, frankly.

Speaker 6 It's all just ready to go.

Speaker 3 Oh, those rags? No. Oh, the rags.
I forgot the rags. Do you know what we should have done when we had the experts here? Is just get them to give us a whitelist, you know? Because

Speaker 3 I think the more we start digging, the more we go. Is there anything? Is there anything that we can be safe?

Speaker 6 Yeah, always ready to go at a moment's notice. Just every so often, just go through life, just putting your hand onto things and going, oh, I feel a bit warm.

Speaker 6 See if you can, in any way, cool it down.

Speaker 3 You know how you're going to write in a question for the episode of Poltergeist from

Speaker 3 Dora Brewer. Yeah, yeah, Dora Brown.
I think I might write one in actually from myself: what is the least flammable thing? And then

Speaker 3 proceed to completely surround myself by it and never leave.

Speaker 6 Oh dear. And on that note.

Speaker 3 And on that note, sleep soundly, everybody.

Speaker 6 Subscribe to Curious Cases on BBC Sounds and make sure you've got push notifications turned on and we'll let you know as soon as new episodes are available.

Speaker 3 Hello, I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 I'm Robin Inks and we're back for a new series of the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 We have our 201st extravaganza where we're going to talk about how animals emote when around trains and tunnels or something like that. I'm not entirely sure.

Speaker 13 We're doing one on potatoes.

Speaker 1 Of course, we're doing one on potatoes. You love potatoes.
I know, but.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you love chips.

Speaker 13 I'll only enjoy it if it's got curry sauce on it.

Speaker 1 We've always got techno-fossils, moths versus butterflies, and a history of light. That'll do, won't it?

Speaker 13 Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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