[Music]
okay so you're not gonna believe this
story but I swear it's true and I'm
gonna prove it to you with this balloon
Eric Wooldridge is a system admin at a
hospital in Chicago one day he got a
call that an iphone eight had randomly
crashed then he got another call about
an iPhone 7 and more and more calls just
kept coming in after that but strangely
no one was having problems with Android
devices so he started asking some
questions and found out that a new MRI
machine was being set up at the hospital
that day
so maybe the MRI machine had led off an
electromagnet of pulse killing these
devices but that would have killed all
the devices in the hospital so what kind
of EMP would have killed only Apple
hardware Eric was stumped so he asked
for help on reddit where some sysadmin
speculated that it might be caused by
the liquid helium used to cool the MRI
machine he investigated and it turns out
there was a helium leak that occurred in
the building at the same time but why
would this only cause Apple devices to
stop working that's where we come in at
the heart of every electronic device is
a clock but the clock is like a digital
heartbeat of your computer sending
electrons through the system like the
blood in our veins without a clock the
CPU just won't work most electronics use
quartz oscillators a crystal that
vibrates at a regular frequency but
quartz oscillators aren't skinny enough
for Apple's newest designs so they found
a clock that was quite a bit smaller a
micro electromechanical chip or a MEMS
chip made by a little-known company
called sigh time we started to wonder if
the sigh time chips might be susceptible
to helium so we started some digging and
sure enough site time says that the
seals used on some of their chips could
be impacted by large concentrations of
small molecule gas helium is a small
molecule gas so it sounds like we've got
a solid theory let's check it out
I'm gonna put this iPhone in a bag fill
it up with helium and wait to see what
happens
and it worked after four and a half
minutes the phone was completely
unresponsive so now what is it dead not
quite
Apple's user guide for the iPhone and
Apple watch actually admits that
exposing your device to helium may cause
problems but if you air it out for about
a week after being exposed it should
work just fine ours came back to life
after a full 24 hours so it's official
iPhones are allergic to helium who know
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[Music]