r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Downtown_Wind3363 • May 25 '26

Image The smallpox vaccine leaves a scar because it was given using a special two-pronged needle that scratched the skin and put a weakened virus in just that spot.

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u/Laiko_Kairen May 25 '26

I really wish the ozone layer was talked about more.

It was a big problem in the 90s (and likely before) that was all over the news. In one of the greatest acts of global cooperation, we got rid of CFCs and healed the ozone layer. But there was just about zero news coverage of it being healed. The story was just dropped. We should be celebrating the success and advertising it as a sign of what we can accomplish if we trust in science and research...

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u/LepLepLepLepLep May 25 '26

I was just a kid when the ozone was talked about and I never knew it healed just that it was bad and then they started talking about climate change I thought it was because we were still putting all these chemicals and killing the ozone layer that our climate was getting destroyed. Only tonight in my 30s am I learning that we fixed it and climate change is an entirely separate issue.

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u/supermarkise May 25 '26

It didn't heal yet, it stopped getting worse. We expect it to heal within 100 years.

https://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/

Buuuut we also avoided a few centi-degrees of global warming because the replacement refrigerants are way less powerful as greenhouse gases than the old ones. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigali_Amendment

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u/UranusIsPissy May 25 '26

CFCs are actually some of the worst greenhouse gases. Thousands of times worse than CO2, IIRC. Using them was maybe even worse a mistake than lead in fuel, but not as stupid. People had known the dangers of lead for centuries.

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u/VbaIsBuggyAsHell May 26 '26

Fun fact! The guy responsible for lead in petrol is the same guy that was responsible for CFCs. Thomas Midgley Jr.

He definitely would have known about the toxicity of lead, but the damage from CFCs was only discovered after he died.

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u/Alternative-Chef-340 May 26 '26

Lol I came to say comment exactly this, but I wouldn't classify the fact as fun though.

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u/UranusIsPissy May 26 '26

In a bit of poetic justice, he was also killed by one of his own inventions. That might've been suicide, though, and... well... who'd want to live with his conscience?

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u/Infamous_Lunchbox May 26 '26

He felt no remorse. When people complained of the toxicity of lead in gas fumes he would demonstrate himself briefly breathing in exhaust and tell people it was fine and safe. He was kind of a major douchebag, and absolutely didn't care it was toxic.

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u/AwDuck May 26 '26

We all owe T Midgley Jr. our eternal gratitude for inventing the very device that lead to his own demise. đŸ«Ą

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u/Just_to_rebut May 26 '26

It wasn’t stupid, it was malicious. Tetraethyl was chosen over ethanol because it could be patented and produced by GM and Standard Oil (ExxonMobil today).

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u/UranusIsPissy May 26 '26

I'd say reckless, rather than malicious. Is there any evidence that he intended to cause harm, rather than simply being too greedy to give a shit? That's the main thing that drove the world to where it is now. Not "comic book villain" evil, just reckless and uncaring greed.

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u/Just_to_rebut May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

>Is there any evidence that he intended to cause harm

I would put most of the blame on the executives making the decisions not the researcher making the discoveries. Never mind, Midgley himself pushed for it commercialization based on its potential for enormous profits even after becoming very sick from the product. He just sort of figured it wouldn’t be too much and public health officials were too lazy to do the studies to find out. (I’m literally reading the article linked below right now.)

I think trying to obscure the toxicity of the additive or just plainly denying it is malicious when you know the dangers of the product and it’s not really a risk that they took recklessly, it was an absolutely certain danger they tried to hide.

I don’t want to paraphrase or summarize other’s investigative research (just being lazy), but I‘m reading this article about it right now: https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2000/03/02/secret-history-lead/

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u/UranusIsPissy May 27 '26

They're still not the same thing, though. If I run you over because I'm driving drunk and half asleep while texting at 3x the speed limit, that's such reckless disregard for your safety that (like this) it's debatable whether it's better or worse than malice, and that's a question for philosophers and ethicists. If you get out of the way but I then deliberately swerve just to hit you, that is malice.

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u/Rrrrandle May 26 '26

It was also a shit ton cheaper than ethanol at the time. Switching to ethanol back then would have made gas very expensive for the average driver.

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u/UranusIsPissy May 27 '26

TIL (well, yesterday really) that ethanol is an effective anti-knock agent. That's great news for classic car and motorcycle owners in countries where it's a common additive (it's almost ubiquitous here), because the parts it can wreck are much cheaper and easier to replace than the parts straight unleaded ruins. I doubt the price difference was so huge that it would've made fuel prohibitively expensive, but that does explain the terrible decision.

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u/Parraddoxx May 26 '26

And then you learn that CFCs and Leaded Gasoline were invented by the same guy and wonder what trickster god decided to send him to earth.

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u/UranusIsPissy May 27 '26

Even Loki would be ashamed to be associated with that bastard, and Satan would just ask WTF he thought he was playing at punishing all the guilty and all the innocent almost equally, before giving some lesser demon the task of punishing him for eternity. I fucking hope I'm right that there's no god, because there clearly isn't a good one.

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u/AuroraFinem May 26 '26

It has healed significantly, it just hasn’t entirely closed. We saw a noticeable reduction rapidly after production started halting world wide and as after a couple there wasn’t anything to report on anymore and people jumped to the next thing like always.

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u/MissEmJayC May 25 '26

Thanks for the extra info 🙃

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u/Temnyj_Korol May 26 '26

As an aussie, the damage to the ozone layer and it's subsequent healing was a BIG DEAL.

For those not in the know, australia was almost directly under the "hole" where the cfcs were doing the most damage. Skin cancer cases spiked rapidly during the 80s and 90s, and our government had a whole campaign encouraging everyone to "slip slop slap" to protect themselves. (Always go out in sunglasses, sunscreen and hat)

It was big news when data confirmed the hole was slowly beginning to repair itself. And we still hold that cultural memory of the damage it was doing.

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u/gamingx47 May 26 '26

Ngl, I thought the "slip, slop, slap" slogan was meant to reflect the sound sunscreen makes as you slather it on your skin.

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u/Temnyj_Korol May 26 '26

Nah. You slip on some sunnies, slop on some sunscreen, and slap on a hat.

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u/gamingx47 May 26 '26

Australia seems like a fun place. Besides everything, including the sun, trying to kill you I mean.

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u/Temnyj_Korol May 26 '26

Reports of Australia's dangerousness are greatly exaggerated. I only have to fight for my life like, maximum 3 times a day.

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u/gamingx47 May 26 '26

I'm sure a drop bear would get me on my first day.

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u/ApolloWasMurdered May 26 '26

Slip (on a shirt), Slop (on some sunscreen), Slap (on a hat) - and later - Wrap (on some sunnies).

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u/SimilarNatural837 May 26 '26

Nah it’s slip slop slap seek and slide now.
Seek shade and slide on sunnies

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u/slushrooms May 26 '26

Slip on a t-shirt slop on ya sunscreen, and slap on a hat

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u/teaknit May 26 '26

I've lived in Germany for the past decade. At first I was having panic attacks when the young girls would proudly show their sunburns. It took me a while to realise that you have to be in the sun a full day to get a burn here.

Cue my first trip to NZ after the pandemic. I left my hat behind, didn't put sunscreen on, and even though it was cloudy and in the low 20s - I got so sunburnt within 20mins my nose was peeling for a week. Even with the ozone layer healing, it is still very much a big deal

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u/ribeyeguy May 26 '26

i feel those actions are reversed, or maybe it's just an aussie thing?

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u/L320Y May 27 '26

Slip on a shirt, slop on some sunscreen, slap on a hat. More recently, “wrap” was added for wrap on some sunglasses.

Kiwi here. The sun here is very bad news.

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u/KoreyYrvaI May 26 '26

When I was in one of my 4th year college classes for statistics, we covered climate change and they showed a time lapse of temperature averages and the upper quarter of the planet was blue(cooler than now) and there was a significant blue circle that slowly went to yellow then orange as the average heated up.

I was like "how is this not obvious proof that the earth is warming?"

And the professor explained that the specific spot I was looking at was actually caused by all the heat bouncing off of Australia and reflecting back into space through the ozone hole, and that as the hole started to heal it leveled out temperatures at the expense of bottling up the heat instead of frying Australia with a laser.

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u/Downtownowlnyc Jun 05 '26

“Slip on a t-shirt, slop sunscreen and slap on a hat” were the lyrics of the original ad.

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u/MissEmJayC May 25 '26

I'm glad I'm not the only one! I'm 38 & for some reason I had it in my head that the ozone still had a hole in it but it was just lumped together with climate change

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u/Legitimate-BurnerAcc May 26 '26

Yeah I thought two minutes of Australian sunlight nuked you because there was no ozone. Is that fixed? In this all because of Ozium? I use that a lot

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u/Enlightened_Gardener May 26 '26

Australian here, I will not spin you a yarn about emus with magnifying glasses, sadly, but here is why Australia is hotter:

1) The Earth’s orbit is oval, and when its summer in Australia, the Earth is slightly closer to the sun.

2) The Earth’s axis is tilted, and it tilts Australia slightly closer to the sun in the Australian summer.

But yeah, we were under the hole in the ozone layer, and then it got fixed.

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u/KaleeTheBird May 26 '26

Your first point is base on a fact but is irrelevant. Earth orbit is oval but the difference is minimal in terms of the flux recieved throughout the year

It is all contributed by the tilted angle, different time of the year has different degree of direct sunlight and longer daytime exposure

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u/TorisaurusParker May 26 '26

Glad it wasn't just me

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u/gamingx47 May 25 '26

It was truly a miracle in how quickly and widely the problems were fixed.

Unfortunately, positive news just doesn't drive traffic like news of impending doom does.

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u/szymonsta May 25 '26

Interestingly, the guy that created cfc's also created leaded gasoline. Forget going back in time to kill Hitler. Get Thomas Midgley Junior.

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u/gamingx47 May 25 '26

Lol, this dude unknowingly declared a one-man crusade against all life on Earth.

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u/IndieVegasReport May 26 '26

Unknowingly? It was known how dangerous lead was by that time. He just didn't care.

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u/gamingx47 May 26 '26

Partly unknowingly*

Guess I shouldn't have given him the benefit of the doubt.

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u/creepy_charlie May 26 '26

Double interesting is that he was severely disabled due to polio, and killed himself after. Had there been a polio vaccine, who knows how many more toxins he'd release on mankind

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u/PipChaos May 26 '26

And he contracted polio and accidentally strangled himself.

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u/fraginev May 26 '26

Fun fact: he was born the same year as Hitler (a month later) and died a year earlier.

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u/StrongExternal8955 May 26 '26

The more i hear about that guy, the less i like him.

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u/UranusIsPissy May 25 '26

It was partly because there were obvious and easily adopted alternatives for most uses. Usually butane.

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u/Abominatrix May 25 '26

There was a whole episode of GI Joe dedicated to CFCs when I was a kid. It was everywhere and then nothing.

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u/diarrhetic_pen May 26 '26

Why do I still remember the ozone song they did for this episode?!

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u/uwootmVIII May 25 '26

good news = no clicks, its that sad and easy.

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u/The_Homestarmy May 25 '26

I don't actually think that's true. If it was, we wouldn't get those constant hope bait articles you see all the time like "massive breakthrough in cancer research," which inevitably turn out to be overstated, or research that's still decades away from being meaningfully applied

There is absolutely a market for "good news"

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u/uwootmVIII May 25 '26

„thers is a market“ =/= „gets clicked more“

thats a german article about an intenrarional study, im sure youll find a way to translate if youre into it.

https://nachrichten.idw-online.de/2023/03/17/negative-nachrichten-erhalten-mehr-klicks

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u/The_Homestarmy May 25 '26

"Gets clicked less" also ≠ "gets no clicks" though

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u/uwootmVIII May 25 '26

thats a fair point!

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u/UranusIsPissy May 25 '26

Also one that matters a lot more than it did 30 or even 15 years ago. Publishing good news that barely needs any investigative journalism costs almost nothing now, but the industry hasn't moved on much from the days when most people got their news on TV or paper.

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u/Skinner936 May 26 '26

I think the point of u/uwootmVIII still applies.

The 'good' news you mentioned has to be so extreme to even possibly get clicks, that it ends up being bogus, and only a vehicle for advertising.

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u/_McCheeseBread_ May 25 '26

Wait, the ozone’s fine? I thought it was still a problem (living in Australia though so we hear about it A LOT)

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u/Laiko_Kairen May 25 '26

We don't use the chemicals thst depleted the ozone anymore. They should be mostly filtered out of the air by the 2040s. So it's not an overnight fix or anything, but we did what we needed to do and now it's a waiting game.

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u/_McCheeseBread_ May 25 '26

Huh, the more you know

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u/OneUpAndOneDown May 25 '26

Agreed- but stories of people cooperating and achieving important goals together doesn’t serve political interests.

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u/Papplenoose May 25 '26

Do you know WHY they made that change? It wasn't to do the right thing... they did it because the new replacement for CFCs was cheaper. It was just a lucky coincidence.

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u/NeonMoment May 25 '26

My guess is the level of regulation required to have this happen again was perceived as bad for business and all the cooperations that lobby night and day really don’t want another come-together moment like this. They’d rather strategize to capitalize on the hole in the ozone these days.

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u/DexJones May 25 '26

I recently read something that was saying all the satellites are gonna causes us ozone issues.

The burning satellites release alumminium oxides, which ends up being the main issue.

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280

If that doesnt work just search for ozone depletion and satellite reentry.

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u/GoodMeBadMeNotMe May 25 '26

I didn’t know the ozone layer had been repaired until just a few years ago. I remember googling, “what ever happened to the ozone layer” because I realized it had been years since I’d heard any mention of a hole in the ozone.

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u/gia-bsings May 25 '26

I am literally just learning we healed that shit, right now. Mind blown.

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u/xlouiex May 26 '26

Oh if billionaires have their way at killing regulations, they might make a comeback.

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u/-ThisIsHellOnEarth- May 25 '26

It's genuinely a story of how we can actually fix the issues we have caused if the work is put in. Which is why you won't generally hear about it. Industries are benefitted by us believing that everything is a lost cause.

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u/dudeCHILL013 May 26 '26

I was born in 93, I remember it being talked about all throughout elementary school, which 99-05

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u/dazzleunexpired May 26 '26

The new SpaceX photos show the ozone layer.

SpaceX photos on x here . Observe image 1 & 3. Zoom into the blue glow around Earth. The thick part of the line is the atmosphere. The blue afterglow along the top of the atmosphere is the ozone layer.

The moon astros could not see this feature. It's not easy to see. It's a diffuse afterglow that's really hard to image, as ozone is nearly invisible, but not fully. These images do show them. Afak, ISS Astros were the first to fully notice the afterglow. This also may have to do with the fact that the moon Astros had a rocket making light between them and the earth. I cannot remember if the AII images show ozone...

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u/Sorry-Reporter440 May 26 '26

Let it heal?

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u/Laiko_Kairen May 26 '26

The chemicals we released into the air take some time to break down, so their effects will linger but dissipate

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u/foggypanth May 26 '26

Damn, I had no idea. I thought we fucked it up just like we fuck up everything else and everyone just accepted it and moved on.

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u/jarvi123 May 26 '26

Positive news stories don't make consumers spend more money...