Star Wars Week 2026, Part 1: Hoth

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And today on the podcast, we are going to be starting a two part series of episodes exploring a kind of salad bar of topics related to the Star Wars universe. Now, Rob, I know you love a calendar tie in. We've got something going on on the calendar the week that these episodes are airing. That's right. May the 4th, the unofficial turn, basically official holiday for all things Star Wars. OK, that's a pun, right? May the 4th be with you. Be with you. Yeah. Very cute. Yeah. So I think for all of the first episode today, we're going to be talking about a setting from The Empire Strikes Back, my favorite of the Star Wars movies. It's going to be the planet Hoth, the ice world location of the hidden rebel base, where the first act of the movie takes place. So we're going to be talking about Wampas. We're going to be talking about tauntons as organisms, tauntons as sleeping bags and maybe some other stuff. Rob, I wonder if you have a similar kind of particular childhood memories of the Hoth scenes to the ones that I hold. So I really loved the Hoth segment of Empire when I was a kid, not just because of the ice planet aliens. I did really like those, but I really liked the snow speed or battle scene. I remember that always stood out to me as one of my favorite, you know, spaceship battle scenes in the movies. And I think it's because it wasn't just blaster beams shooting back and forth. I really liked the way that they used the trick with the harpoons and the toe cables around the. They used that to trip up the walker legs and knock them down. Really like action scenes with the with the tactile change up like that, where there's like a different kind of, I don't know, substance being deployed. And I remember liking the Ewok battle in Empire or sorry, in Jedi for the same reason, though that one maybe didn't age quite as gloriously for me personally. But it's still great. Well, you love a good booby trap and yeah, I do have traps. Both of these involve setting traps for big lumbering like machines. So and yeah, I mean, I obviously I love Empire Strikes Back as well. It's one of these weird films, though, for me that I saw it so early on, like as a tiny child and like grew up with it and grew up with the toys from this movie, grew up with the world of this movie. It's almost like growing up like within a religion or a certain culture that you it was only much later that I really set down and thought about, well, OK, this is why I liked it. This is why it connected with me. And these are the things that are legitimately great about it. Because yeah, it was just all around me. In fact, I had to bring this in. I have my Tonton action figure, our action accessory from when I was a kid, showing that off on the video for folks who have the video. I didn't keep most of those things, but I did keep the Tonton. And I think that there are only a few aliens that I connected with so much that I had to like hold on to them in one way or another. There's this, there's Max Rebo. There's a few others like that. And I had to keep the Tonton. You showed me earlier. Can you let the people, those who are watching on video, can you see the hinge where the action figure goes into the back of the Tonton? Oh, yeah, right here. So there was also a saddle. There were, you know, accessories and all. But but yeah, there was this little place where you just stick the feet directly into the back of the Tonton, which is is not how it actually worked in the show. But something like that, of course, occurs. Why did they make horses like that that you can ride inside? I don't know. I wonder if this was a common toy build. I don't know. Toy historians will have to write in and let us know if this trick was ever employed with just straight up like cowboy and horse action figure sets. All right. Well, maybe we should just jump right in and talk a bit about the give a sketch of the fictional world of the planet Hoth. All right. I'm going to go ahead and mention a book. I have a number of different like Star Wars bestiaries and one is full of droids. So I guess it's a I don't know what you would call that droid technical guide. But this one here, this is a field guide from Star Wars. The wildlife of Star Wars, a field guide. This one was by Teryl Whitlitch and Bob Corral. They're both those from 2001. Both of these authors, by the way, are interesting figures in the history of Star Wars because Corral wrote a co-wrote the 1984 film The Ewok Adventure and Whitlatch, an illustrator with a background in zoology, served as a principal creature designer for Star Wars Episode One, The Phantom Menace, which of course has a lot of great creatures in it. OK. So let's provide just a little overview of Hoth first, just a reminder. And actually, before I do the reminder, I'm going to give our standard sort of geek disclaimer here. Joe and I are not experts on Star Wars lore. We we love a lot of it. We know what we love, but, you know, there's this is not going to be like a lore dump sort of episode. So there are things that we're going to talk about that might not completely sync up with canon or extended universe and the various different like religious divisions within Star Wars fandom. So, you know, refer to Wikipedia if you have any additional questions, but certainly write in if you have, you know, if you do want to say yes, but actually write in, we're happy to have those conversations. I feel more inclined to give the non-expertise caveats about like scientific domains. I would say when it comes to Star Wars lore, not even George Lucas is an expert in Star Wars. I I firmly believe things like this. Like it ends up belonging to everybody. So you can take what you want and and make that be your Star Wars, make that be your universe and and so forth. So, you know, try not to get to be trying to get to to a rut over any of it. But at any rate, let's talk about hot. Hot is the sixth planet where I understand revolving around a small, lower level, blue, white sun. As we all know, it's frigid. It's a frozen world, mostly known to humans anyway, for its vast glacier fields and snow drifts. It also has a breathable atmosphere, which from our point of view is a big deal. But I guess within the Star Wars universe is not that exceptional. There are planets that have atmospheres that most human oids can breathe. Seems like almost all of them. Right. Yeah. Now, as the wildlife of Star Wars field guide points out, there is apparently a great deal of geothermal heat that never fully reaches the surface, yet adequately warms various underground crates, underground caves and carotos. So the surface is also frequently pelted with castaways from the nearby meteor belt, but still life persists on the planet and to a great degree within the planet. So in these various caves of rock, caves of ice, there's life down there. And in particular, we're to understand there's like in a plant matter because there seems to be enough plant matter on this world for an herbivore population to thrive. And these are, of course, the Tantans. We mainly see the one Tantan species, I think, in the movies. This is sometimes referred to as the giant Tantan. But as this book gets into and various other bits of Star Wars, you know, extended lore have have have explored, there may be as many as 15 Tantan species. And so you have like smaller Tantans that are like crawling or climbing Tantans. And this just happens to be the biggest one that can be domesticated or at least utilized as a steed by humanoid visitors to this world. Now that I think about it, the movie never actually says that the Tantans are herbivores, does it? You just assume that since you see one get attacked by the Wampa, a larger, obviously carnivorous animal. So at least in my brain, it went like, oh, OK, Tantans are prey. Therefore, they are herbivores. And I guess because animals that we ride in reality tend to be herbivores. I don't know if there are any standard carnivorous animals that people ride as a regular thing. I mean, it's weird enough that the carnivorous feline cat is in such close proximity to us, you know, an omelette meat eater. But but yeah, I don't think we ever see the Tantans eat in the movie. But yeah, we just it's implied or we just assume that they eat plants. So therefore, there must be enough plants on hoth or in hoth to sustain a sizable population of Tantans. And there are enough Tantans to sustain some population of apex predators, the Wampa. Interesting. Yeah. But as you're alluding to those plants, must be mostly in places that we don't see in the film, because again, we just see these like glaciers and ice fields. Right. There's obviously not much to eat. Yeah, they must be eating something that is under the snow, under the ice in one way or another, and geothermally, thermally heated caverns. Seems like a good enough bet. So what does a Tantan look like? I think most of you are probably picturing it, but if or you if you have video, you saw me hold up the toy and you're in that case, maybe reminded that it it. It kind of looks like a cross between a ram, a goat and a dinosaur. Yeah. Yeah. That's very good. Yes, like theropod dinosaur posture on the two back legs with the large hips and then a counterbalancing tail and a big upper body. But then, yeah, a kind of fluffy, furry kind of appearance, more like a goat with those rams horns. And then the face is a little bit goat and also just a little bit Muppet, a little bit luck dragon sort of. Yeah. And I don't know if this makes sense, but I used to think that they kind of look like George Washington in the face. I don't know if that makes a lot of sense, but I'll hold it up here. I don't know. I just as a kid, I would look at that and think it kind of looks like the guy on the dollar bill, but maybe that was just me. I honestly can't say I see it, but I I'm trying. OK. So what is this? Is it a mammal? Is it is it a reptile? Well, I some of the lore books would say it is a repto mammalian creature. So some sort of warm-blooded creature with scales, fur and thick blubber. The let's see, sort of some other things worth mentioning on the field guide here says, you know, I think the other thing that is established in the movie is that they smell bad. Yes, characters are always commenting on this. The field guide says that they can somehow turn this odor off or at least cease to produce it while resting or holding up with young so as not to attract predators. Though, given that they seem to have only one predator, perhaps that predator just simply doesn't depend on smell. I don't know. Just throwing that out there. Interesting. Well, now I never thought about this. I always just assumed the idea that they smell bad is like people who aren't used to being around farm animals might think that farm animals smell bad. But I guess the other place you could go is that they have an incredibly like biologically intentional pungent odor like a skunk that is somehow used for something. Right. Right. Like you could be I mean, certainly this could be a way of communicating. It could be either could be marking their territory. It could be the result of some sort of the oils in their coat or somehow pungent or it could indeed be something that is signaling, stay away from me. Like don't eat me, Wampa. I smell terrible. It could be defense. It could even be a signal that there perhaps is something that they consume that makes them potentially toxic for a predator to consume. And we may come back to that idea here in a bit. Interesting. OK. Now, as a kid, I'm not sure I ever really made that connection between Tauntaun and dinosaur, though, I just I was super into dinosaurs. I really love Star Wars, but I didn't like think of them as big. Really, all that connected somehow. I don't know. The toys probably even interacted with each other. But I just thought of the Tauntaun more as a kind of goat or ram like monster. Well, can I offer one reason that I think our brains might not have gone to this connection, even though morphologically, it seems so obvious. And it's that the Tauntaun exists on an ice world. And at least when I was growing up, I would have said dinosaurs existed in hot weather and in hot weather only. I don't think when I was a kid, I would have even entertained the possibility that there could be a dinosaur on an icy, snowy world. But now I start to wonder, yeah, what exactly was the the temperature range of environments that could be occupied by dinosaurs? What do we know about that? Yeah, this is a fascinating topic. And I think you're right on because when we were kids, we're looking at various excellent examples of paleo art and what's happening. It's a tropical environment and there's a volcano erupting in the background. There's no snow flurries. There's no ice. And, you know, and they and all the dinosaurs are presented as being just very large, reptile creatures that we instantly associate with warmer climates. Yeah. And they live in hell. Literal like molten lava environment. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, to be clear, we are talking about a distant earth that was on the whole warmer. Yeah. And I think this idea of dinosaurs living in a warm world and, you know, kind of a tropical environment certainly was was more of the mainstay back in 1980 and even 15 years ago, I think this was more common. But paleontology increasingly paints a picture of prehistoric settings in which dinosaurs sometimes lived in colder climates. So and this would actually include bipedal theropods, bipedal theropods are among the remains found in what is now Southeastern Australia, which over 110 million years ago would have existed within the Cretaceous Antarctic Circle is explored in the 2020 article, How Dinosaurs Thrive in the Snow by Riley Black for Smithsonian Magazine. This region was a temperate rainforest, but its three month dark winters would have been harsh, featuring snow and ice. We also have evidence from the Prince Creek formation in northern Alaska. This suggests similar snow dinos from that part of the world as well. Yeah, I don't think I would have been able to tell you before reading up for this episode that there were actually dinosaurs that lived above the Arctic Circle during the Cretaceous period or during the Mesozoic generally, that there were dinosaurs that they probably had similar kinds of adaptations to many larger animals that live in far northern or southern climates, near polar climates today. But yeah, we know there were some large dinosaurs that lived up there and that raises a lot of interesting questions like did they survive by migration or did they have extreme life adaptations to stay up in those kinds of conditions year around? Yeah, yeah. And a lot of these questions, I think, are still being discussed and we're still working out the answers. But yeah, you'd be dealing with situations where for like three months out of the year, this region might be shrouded in darkness and subject to some extreme temperatures. And yet the dinosaurs seem to have existed. There are at least some populations of them remain through these periods. Yeah. So I was reading a bit more about this in paleontology, snow falling on dinosaurs by Florian Moderspacher. This was published in Current Biology 2021. And the author points out that yeah, we used to think that dinosaur activity was limited more towards the warmer climates on a warmer Earth. But paleontology finds in southern Australia and in Antarctica as well. And then also northern Siberia and northern Canada have challenged those assumptions. Prince Creek formation findings have painted a picture of considerable polar dino diversity from seven different families plus one bird. And this includes large and small body dinos. It includes both herbivores and carnivores. And this also includes the facultatively bipedal hydrosaur that was once thought to be a separate species and had a temporarily had its own name, but is now thought, I think, to basically be a variety of the Edmontosaurus. But that could change these things change. But yeah, it paints this picture. And we've seen this in more of more recent and updated paleoart. And I believe it's made its way into some of the the big budget computer animated documentaries about prehistoric life where we're now seeing images of dinosaurs, things we would even identify readily, even with feathers as dinosaurs roaming about in some sort of a snowy icy setting. Now, without getting into the larger topic of broad dinosaur metabolism, the consensus today tends to be that theropod dinosaurs were likely warm blooded and the same is likely true for the Edmontosaurus as well. And as it's interesting to think about about this, our current take on all this when considering the tauntaun because when the tauntaun was conceived, I don't think there was any sense of like, hey, I think dinosaurs actually were warm blooded and lived in snowy environments. It seems more like a clear sci-fi hybridization of mammals and reptiles, which, of course, is a great way to try and conceive what alien life forms on an alien world might look like. If you look at some of the Ralph McQuarrie early sketches for what a tauntaun was going to be, they're fascinating because they kind of look like they look more like large rodents or kind of like weird furry kangaroos. Well, I see two different illustrations that you've included in the outline here. I'd say in the left one, yeah, I see the large rodent. It looks like a big mouse with a long, shaggy tail and huge hind legs, big bipedal mouse. And then the one on the right to me just looks like a furry velociraptor. Yeah, yeah, it does. Yeah. But it's also interesting to think about this as, OK, it's kind of like a thought experiment of like, what if what if reptiles could live in a snowy environment? Well, they'd have to be furry. They'd have to be kind of half mammal, right? But, you know, we increasingly, I guess, realize that this isn't really necessary. A creature like this without fur, though possibly with considerable feathers, could certainly work in an environment similar to Hawth. And as we've discussed before in the show, the penguin is just a great example of how a dinosaur descendant does just fine in a polar climate. That's true. Penguins are dinosaurs. Yeah. Strange thing to think about. Now, we'll come back to some other scenes with tauntauns here in a bit, but there's one scene involving the tauntaun in Empire Strikes Back that is, I'm sure, already on everybody's minds. And we teased it out a little earlier. And that is, you know, what happens inside of a tauntaun sometimes? Sometimes. Sometimes. What can be made of what's inside a tauntaun if you're too cold? Yeah. So to set up this scene at the beginning of the movie, Luke Skywalker is out scouting. He's on the surface of Hawth, the snowy world on a tauntaun when he gets attacked and dragged away by a wampa. And we're going to come back and talk about the wampa later in this episode. But it is shown to be some kind of bipedal carnivorous beast, like a predatory abominable snowman. Yeah. He Luke later escapes the wampa's ice cave and then he stumbles out into the snow as night is falling, so it's going to be getting even colder on Hawth. And there he has a vision of his dead master Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan is telling him, hey, got to go say hi to Yoda. Got to go visit Yoda. And so Luke is there in the cold saying, Yoda, take a bus system. Meanwhile, Han Solo back at the rebel base, he learns that Luke has not come in for the night and so he gets concerned about his friend and then rides out on his own tauntaun looking for him. So Han finds Luke already collapsed in the snow and delirious. And right when Han gets there, his own tauntaun dies. So improvising, Han takes Luke's lightsaber. I think this is the only time in the main series we see Han Solo using a lightsaber. But he takes Luke's lightsaber and then he awkwardly turns it on and slices open the tauntaun belly, showing these guts bulging out, many of which look like like transparent, slimy white balloons, kind of gross little appearance. And then Han shoves the semi-conscious Luke inside the tauntaun. We don't see this directly happening. We get the tauntaun in the foreground and then you see something's happening on the other side, you get some squishing sound effects. And Han says, you know, it might not smell good, but it'll keep him warm until Han is able to build the shelter. And we don't see what happens after that until the next morning when the search party is out in the snow speeders and they find that our heroes have survived to the night. So we don't see anything between stuffing Luke into the guts and the next morning when they're all right, but it does work, we are told. Now, first of all, I was wondering, are there any direct biological parallels to this? Is there an organism in nature that kills another large organism and then crawls inside it for warmth in snowy conditions? And maybe I overlooked something, but I was searching for something like this for a long time and didn't find anything that really fit the bill. So as far as I can tell, there is nothing in nature like this. There are animals that crawl inside other dead organisms, but they tend to do this for reasons other than seeking warmth. Like there are animals that will make use of the physical structure of another dead animal, like the bones of another dead animal to provide some kind of shelter, maybe sheltering protection in the rib cage of a larger animal using that as a windbreak or something. Or there are animals, there are plenty of animals that go inside another animal to eat that animal or to lay their eggs in there. But there they're using the flesh as an energy source, not trying to capture and make use of the residual warmth of this dead animal. So again, if listeners out there have a great example from nature of an animal that actually goes inside another animal just to capture the residual warmth after that animal's death, let us know. Contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com because I would love to find one, but I don't think there's an example of that except humans. There are there are some stories I want to talk about in human history. Before we get into that, I will add that there's there's something you can do that doesn't involve cutting open another animal. And we've already mentioned in passing the penguin, but we see this with all sorts of species, but just getting really close to another organism is a great way to share heat with that organism. And we see this in penguins, we see this in humans, we see this in relationships like humans and dogs, dogs and cats, cats and humans, where on a cold day, these organisms will come together and share heat without actually crawling inside each other's bodies, though it may seem like like your cat may want to do this on really cold days. Yeah, yeah. I guess that would have been the next best option. If there were no Tauntaun there and if Han did not have a shelter that he could build. I guess they just have to kind of huddle up and snuggle and see if they can make it through. But I think the prospect for Luke in that situation would not be very good. So yeah, the question, the next question to look at is, are there any historical analogs of the Tauntaun sleeping bag scene? And I think the answer is yes. Now, when I started searching for stories like this, initially, I found a lot of sources bringing up the American frontiersmen and fur trapper Hugh Glass, who lived roughly 1783 to 1833. A fictionalized version of this historical figure is the main character of the 2015 film, The Revenant. This character is played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie. And in the movie, there is a scene where the character based on Hugh Glass survives a freezing night, I think a blizzard by gutting a horse and crawling into the body for warmth. However, from what I could find, this story is a fictional invention for the film, not something based on not based on anything that actually happened in the life of Hugh Glass. But I did find one apparently real and very well documented account from much more recently. So one of my main sources here is an article in The Washington Post from February 2016 by Karen Brouillard. And the title of the article is Move Over to Caprio. This man really did survive the cold inside a dead horse. Oh, wow. Again, the title there, referencing the scene in The Revenant. And then I'm just going to read like a lead paragraph from this article. Quote, if you're wondering whether the carcass as tent technique would work in real life, let us introduce you to Richard Daly, 68, who is very likely one of the few Americans who has sheltered inside a horse. OK, I'm just saying this better than really necessary. You're about to hear the whole story. You can make your own decisions about this. And many people have judged the men involved in this story. So we'll see what we think. The event in question took place in November 1983. At the time, Daly was, so this would be three years after Empire Strikes Back. Yeah, yeah, born in a post-Empire world. Post-Empire world, yes. And that will become relevant, actually. So at the time, Daly was 35 years old, working as a firefighter in Caldwell, Idaho, which is a small city west of Boise. One day that November, Daly decided to go on a several day long hunting trip at a place called Cutty Mountain, which is north of Caldwell near the border with Oregon, and he took along his neighbor, Stephen McCoy. They were going to be traveling on horseback. And so imagine out in the forest around this mountain hunting on horseback for several days at a time and camping out. And the article also, I should just say, mentions Daly's horse's name. The name is She's Obligion. OK. The name will become more tragic as the story goes on. Rob, I included in the outline a picture you can see of Richard Daly and Stephen McCoy. This is from the AP, the Associated Press article that came out on this event from November of 1983. I mean, they look like some real cowboys. They're wearing cowboy hats, kind of, I don't know. Steve McCoy looks like he's, I mean, it's a black and white photo, but I can sense a real denim tuxedo thing going on with his outfit here. Yeah, these are some real cowhands right here. So the two men on their two horses went out hunting as winter was falling and it started to snow while they were out on the mountain. On the third day, they shot two large deer. And then while loading one of the carcasses onto the horse, She's Obligion, the horse, the horse's body at least did not oblige and it buckled and fell under the weight and that broke daily saddle in the process. After this, there are some shifting plans and recalculations about where to go next and what to do. But in short, they end up trudging through the snow with one of the deer carcasses, but not the other one, deciding they're going to come back for the second carcass. And while they're doing this, the storm is getting worse and worse with terrible wind in the article from the original event, the AP article. They estimate 50 to 80 mile per hour winds, 80 mile per hour winds are going to be hurricane territory. But they also estimate earlier in this storm, 50 mile per hour winds, so really high winds, they say, very cold. And it also sounds like maybe they were not, I think they were sort of prepared, but not prepared enough for whether this bad. So it starts raining and they get completely soaked and then the rain turns to sleet again and so they are soaked to the bone, freezing out on this mountain and they get lost and they can't find their truck. The article mentions that they were so cold that they had been shivering uncontrollably and then they stopped shivering when you stopped shivering. That's a dangerous sign of hypothermia. This is you're starting to reach life threatening conditions here. So they abandoned the plan of finding the truck and focus instead on immediately building a fire. They did have matches and kindling and fuel, but it was so windy and so wet that they couldn't get a fire started. And at this point, these two guys are going into panic mode. They knew they were about to cross some points of no return and probably freeze to death. So here I'm here. I'm also consulting that Associated Press article from 1983 that says that the first thing they tried to do was daily was like, well, I'm going to skin this deer carcass and we can wrap ourselves in the hide and that'll save us. But quoting daily, it says, quote, I couldn't function after half the hide was skinned out and I was watching Steve, his clothes weren't as wind resistant as mine. And he was just standing there almost asleep and watching me. So at this point, daily guests that they had less than an hour until they were dead, if they didn't do something. But McCoy felt that somehow he knew they would survive. Again, from the AP article, it quotes McCoy saying, I just knew that wasn't the way I was going to go. And then it narrates, McCoy and daily earlier had discussed had discussed stories they'd heard about using the body of an animal for warmth. But they put off a decision until McCoy's increasingly slurred speech alarmed them to action. Now, I want to note that this original AP article characterizes the ideas coming from stories they had heard, which is a vague and almost euphemistic sounding attribution. The 2016 article from The Washington Post that has this interview with daily is more specific, quote, by then it was about 10 p.m. That's when McCoy brought up the Tauntaun scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, wow. So this is fascinating. It almost feels like, and I'm not casting a lot of blame here, but maybe in subsequent tellings of the story and even tellings of it within a journalistic framework, there's maybe a tendency to lean more into the pure cowboy aesthetics of the thing. Or just not say what it was. I don't know what it was. Don't bring up Star Wars. This is such a rustic story of survival. If we bring Star Wars, it's just going to feel kind of jarring. We can bring that up in the conversation. It just feels kind of jarring, right? Well, to be clear, it's not the only story like this in reality. There have been other claims of people crawling inside animals for warmth in history that are not very well documented, it seems like. So maybe they could have brought that up also. But here, Daily is specific. He says, yes, McCoy brought up the Tauntaun scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Well, I mean, there's no indication that they said this, but I mean, you could say Tauntaun me and you would know what I meant by that. You would know I need to cut open of the archanimal carcass and shove me inside it. So after this, they did not wait. They shot the horses and they immediately got to work with the gutting. Here I'll quote from The Washington Post, quote, lest you think gutting a horse under such circumstances would be revolting. Daily recalls it as almost euphoric, quote, its guts came out all over your hands and wrists. He said, you can't imagine how good it felt. Immediately warmed you up. So at first they thought they could shelter together inside one of the horses. That makes sense, right? You get two men in one horse, you can share each other's body heat and horses are huge animals. Yeah, a horse is very big, so you would think you could get two two men inside the horse. But no, it seems like our intuitions are quite wrong here. Daily says that not only could they not both get into one horse, daily could not even get all of himself alone into the horse's gutted body cavity. He got his upper body in wedging his shoulders and head into the top of the rib cage, but his legs were hanging out and he had to cover them with saddle blankets. Oh, God, this is just this is at once like oddly kind of hilarious, but also just so grisly and serious. Like I feel like my body doesn't even know how to react to the telly. So they each had to get inside one of the horses and daily describes his reaction as initially relief, like warming and counteracting of the hypothermia. And then claustrophobia and disgust. He says that every couple of hours he would panic and have to get back out of the horse, but then would start shivering and freezing again and have to get back inside. Also, this fix was only temporary. They say by about 2 a.m., which is about four to five hours after the horses were killed, the carcasses had cooled significantly and were no longer providing much warmth. By 5 a.m., the men were again shivering uncontrollably. At that point, they felt that they could get out of the horses and continue looking for their truck, which the AP article says turned out to be only about a mile and a quarter from where they had been. So one of those things where if they just not known where to go, they couldn't, you know, they could have just made it to their truck. But as we discussed before, like people become lost in wilderness scenarios all the time, not that far from some sort of point of reference or possible refuge. It's just that's what happens to the human mind when we get lost in the woods without, you know, with the caveat that certain preparations and certain knowledge can make the difference, but not always. Yeah. I mean, when you don't know where to go, you don't know where to go. Yeah. And then, you know, in the next waiting conditions with the horrible weather and and shivering cold, understandable. So they both survived the incident. But when word got out about this, many locals were outraged at the two men. The article says that some accused them of doing this as a publicity stunt. I don't know if that means that they thought that the men made the story up or if they like actually did it, but just for fame. The latter idea seems crazy to me. Yeah, because in this scenario, they would have both killed their horses in order to achieve this slight level of fame. It just doesn't seem very reasonable. Apparently McCoy was deeply shaken by these events and moved away from the area not long after. But then to quote from towards the end of that article, it says, quote, Sylvanah Daly, Richard Daly's wife, said he later took her to see the dead horses bones, another trip laden with misadventures. Everything to Richard is, gee, this is a lot farther than I remembered, she said. So there is one case where it's very well documented that some guys actually were on the verge of freezing to death, crawled inside of a large, recently dead animal carcass and did manage to survive probably due to being inside the dead animal. So but my question was, OK, this this it works in this scenario. I mean, I guess we don't know for sure whether they would have died otherwise. But it seems likely it worked in this scenario. But would this normally work? Is this something that generally has some validity as a survival technique? Went around reading several different articles and experiments that looked into this in different ways. So I read a 2015 article in Slate by Laura Bradley, which again was connected to the scene in the Revenant film. This article consulted a couple of experts on the question and it quotes one named Robert Reed, who is a research wildlife biologist with the USGS. Reed says he thinks, yes, at least temporarily, a large animal carcass will provide residual heat, but it will start to cool right after death. So this is going to be temporary. He estimates that a very large animal like a moose or an elk would buy you about six hours worth of heat. Remember that Daley said that the horse stopped being warm after four to five hours. And when you really think about it, once the horse stops being warm, that's not just like a net, you know, like no, no benefit. That actually becomes worse than being out of the horse, right? Because you're in this like colder thing that's wet around you. It is going to be sapping heat from you. Oh, yeah, it's like a really gross version of what happens when it's when you are maybe at your house and you decide, hey, it's a cold night. I'm going to take a hot bath. Well, that hot bath is great at first, but then it becomes a slightly less hot bath. Then it becomes a warm bath. And if you stay in long enough, it becomes a cold bath. And yeah, getting out of that, you're going to be even worse off than when you went in. Yeah. So it's obviously going to be bad to be in this cooling, in this cooling wet environment inside the animal. But the other thing is animal bodies are wet inside. So getting into it to be almost, you know, wet. So getting inside one gets you wet. And so once you get out of the animal, you'll also now be wet because you have been inside this wet day and animal. Then again, in the daily story, you know, that they were already soaked earlier from the rain and the sleet. So kind of at that point, like what do you have to lose? But but yeah, you like you don't want in a situation where you are at risk of freezing, getting wet is generally going to make your situation much, much worse. A commonly cited figure is that you lose body heat something like 20 to 25 times faster if you're wet than if you're dry. So like getting wet is the last thing you want to happen in a in a cold survival situation. Yeah, I think we've all seen survival scenarios, at least in movies, where individual gets falls into the water in a wintery environment. Like the next thing they've got to do is get out of those wet clothes and like warm up by the fire. Like the wet clothes absolutely have to come off. Exactly. Better to be naked in the cold than in wet clothes. You cannot stay wet when it's cold. That is really dangerous. Yeah, Reed also mentions some other things. For example, dead animals can quickly attract predators such as wolves or bears or perhaps in our health case, Wampas. So that could add to your troubles. Yeah, the Wampas is going to be like, this is a chardunkin here. This is perfect. There you go. I would also add infection risk from all those animal guts. But once again, if you are about to freeze to death anyway, I would say other concerns, take a back seat and yes, Reed thinks that on balance, getting inside the large dead animal would probably buy you a few hours of survival. And, you know, this all, I guess, depends on other variables in the scene. Like how long does it take Han to build the survival shelter? The movie doesn't say what resources are available once the shelter is built. Is it just a tent or does it have heaters and dry towels and things like that? Like all of this makes a difference. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, coming back to what you said about infection risk, I mean, Luke survives and he does. He's going into the box to tank. You know, that's going to presume he can get antibiotics. Take care of everything so they can worry about that later if he survives. OK, another weigh in on the question of would this normally work? The Mythbusters tried it. Of course they did. Yes. I would, you know, good on them. So this was episode 208. It was a Star Wars special. And I wasn't able to watch this. I'm relying on a summary of the episode from MythResults.com. This is a website that tracks all of the episodes and what they found. So in this experiment, they made a model tauntaun out of a big chunk of foam with an outer layer of synthetic skin and fur lining, and then they gave it some artificial internal organs so that it would retain and conduct heat somewhat like a real body. In this test, they also used an in-house dummy called Thermoboy, which I think they had originally made to test something from the movie Titanic. OK. But they had constructed it to simulate thermal properties of a human body. So it has like an internal heater and a circulatory system to simulate human metabolism and heat distribution. And then they simulated the conditions of Hoth by building an insulated chamber lined with dry ice within an industrial freezer, creating conditions of negative 40 degrees Celsius. Then for the test, they heated the dummy and the tauntaun body to body temperatures of 99 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius. And they monitored the temperature of the dummy, reasoning that Luke would die if his body temperature fell to 82 degrees Fahrenheit or 28 degrees Celsius. And after the 2.5 hours that they estimated it would take Han to build the shelter, I don't know if that's a good guess or not. Do we we first see the shelter, right? We never see. Not really. Well, you kind of see some snow piled up in a few poles, but no, you don't get a good look at it because that would make a huge difference. Like are we talking some sort of a sci-fi collapsible thing where he just like pushes a button while a shelter or is Han about to like make some snow bricks and build some sort of an igloo sculpture structure out there on the ice? You know, I saw something online about some kind of Star Wars media. I think that had said Mace Windu carries something called a wallet tent or something. OK, it's like a little thing that fits in the pocket and you can flip it out and press a button and it turns into a full size tent immediately. Obviously, it'd be good for Han to have something like this, but the movie makes it sound like it's going to take him a while, which is why he has to get Luke in the tauntaun. If you had one of those things and it would just instantly assemble, you don't think the tauntaun would be necessary. The rebellion clearly doesn't have the resources of the Galactic Republic. So I guess it makes sense. So let's see. Anyway, yeah, they said after the 2.5 hours that it would take Han to build the shelter. And their guests, the dummy Luke's body had only gone down to 92 degrees Fahrenheit or 33 degrees Celsius, which is not good, but not fatal by their estimation. So they deemed the tauntaun survival sleeping bag plausible. Not a long term solution, but it would probably buy Luke's survival for two and a half hours in their view. Now, on the other hand, I found an interesting argument that given other specifics of the scene in Empire or assumptions about what was going on there, this would actually not save Luke. This was an article from 2012 by a writer named Keith Varanese, I believe, originally for I09, but now hosted on Gizmodo. In this article, Varanese uses Newton's law of cooling, which is a real reliable method for modeling a cooling body after death. It's not just for a cooling body after death, but it is used to model that, among other things. And it is used in reality by forensic investigators to determine time of death in murder victims. Because, you know, if you have a fairly stable environmental temperature and you know what that temperature is, roughly, you can guess about how long it takes for a body to cool in that environment. So Varanese in this article does the math and comes up with a few estimates based on Luke's starting body temperature and the ambient surroundings of Hoth, which he estimates are negative 60 degrees Celsius at night. So he says if Luke starts at normal body temperature, Han's got a little bit under an hour before the time he needs to get Luke dry and warm in the shelter in order to avoid severe hypothermia and risk of death, he says if Luke starts already with mild hypothermia, which he kind of seems to have in the movie, given the sluggishness and confusion, Han has only about 47 minutes. And I think the difference between this estimate and the mythbusters result is not just like theory versus the simulated experiment. I think it's at least in part due to environmental temperature differences. So the mythbusters use that freezer that's negative 40 degrees Celsius. This thought experiment uses negative 60 degrees. So anyway, I would say in summary, I'm not a survival wilderness survival expert. So, you know, don't don't plan your survival around anything you've heard on this show. We're just doing our best based on what we read. But my best understanding based on everything we've read here is that crawling inside a recently dead tauntaun or other large animal can probably buy you some survival time protecting you from the cold. Yes, it can do that. But maybe not as much time as you would think, somewhere on the order of less than an hour on the shorter end to maybe four to six hours, depending on a bunch of factors like your starting body temperature, your body mass, the animals, starting body temperature, the animals, body mass, and of course, outside temperature and conditions. And then even other things that you might not think about, like how much of your body you can get inside the animal? Because like here's the guy, you know, in that one story where he's like, well, I can I can crawl inside a horse, but it turns out, no, not enough room inside the horse for me to get in there. Yeah, like if the tauntaun had been big enough, like couldn't have fit all of Luke in there, he might have lost an arm or something. Yeah, totally. In one of the articles I was reading, they consult a guy who I think was just being a little too happy, go lucky about the experiment. He was like, if you really want to do it right so you can get your whole body inside and close up the incision, you should also cut out the animals trachea so you can use it as a breathing tube. And I don't know. OK. That's it. And then, of course, you know, this it could possibly buy you a short amount of time to stave off severe hypothermia, but it comes with many dangers and downsides. Besides just being gross, you know, you got the exposure to potentially pathogenic bacteria could attract predators. It gets you wet if you're not already wet and probably some other stuff. I'm not even thinking who knows. Well, that's fascinating. You know, I trust Han Solo. So when when he does this in the film, I assume this is absolutely the best option. He's not going to mess around. But yeah, I really had no idea exactly how this matched up with reality or about that amazing, but again, post empire example of someone actually doing something similar to this in the wild, seemingly inspired by the film. Yeah. Crazy. Now, if I can offer a critique of Han Solo's form, I'd say the movie really makes it look like Han Solo does not appropriately gut the animal. Oh, I always assume he doesn't gut it at all. No, I don't see anything coming out. I just see the slice. You see the guts kind of plop kind of splooping out a little bit, but he doesn't pull them out so he's not creating a cavity inside. It seems like he is overstuffing this couch here with Luke's body going in. Just get in there, kid. Yeah. I don't know if there's going to be room. Yeah. You know, this raises other questions about it. I don't remember if they established how long the republic, I'm sorry, the rebellion had been on Hoth. Like, how long have people been coming here? How long did it take to do at least partially domesticate the Tantans? You know, how much like folk knowledge is there about? Well, if you get into a jam, you need to cut one of these Tantans open and shove your friend inside of it. I'm not sure. Maybe this is a lore that exists with other planets as well. That's true. We don't know if Han is doing something that he just thought of in the moment or if he has received wisdom about this. That's true. We don't know. Yeah. All right. Well, for the rest of the episode, we're going to turn back to the Wampa. And I do want to want to show off that I am I'm drinking my water from my Wampa Tiki mug here once we record this. Those of you with video can see that. If not, look it up. You can find these things everywhere. But yeah, the Wampa is, as we discussed, kind of like a big yeti, like a big abominable snowman, large, at least partially bipedal creature, has a gorilla-like locomotion, and the creature is certainly terrifying in Empire. But we don't even in the theatrical cut, we don't even get to see some of those these additional sequences. Right. Oh, that's right. Yeah, there are deleted scenes from Empire. I don't know if they were fully even filmed, but at least planned and partially filmed scenes where I think it's while the Empire is attacking the Rebel base on Hoth, that also some Wampas get loose in the base. And I think you get to see a Wampa like grabbing a stormtrooper and yanking it behind a doorway or something. Yeah. It's been a while since I've seen it, but I remember it being funny. Yeah. The main thing we see from it, of course, is that scene where it ambushes Luke. Who to be clear is a, you know, not a full blown Jedi yet, but is a Jedi in training. He has heightened human abilities and this thing still gets gets the upper hand on him. It knocks him out, takes him back to a cave and has fixed him to the ceiling. We'll come back to to how this supposedly works. But he doesn't have long. He manages to use the force to get his lightsaber free himself and what slice the arm off of the creature and make his at least temporary escape. And then luckily, Han Solo saves it. Now, speaking of different versions of the film, am I correct that some of the great looking Wampa stuff in the version of the movie that I've seen more recently is actually like part of the Star Wars? I don't know, that second round of versions of the film they did. Like I remember less of the Wampa in the version I grew up with than the version I have in my blue right now. Yeah, it's it's it's tough. Isn't it looking back at those those revamped versions that came out ahead of the prequels because some of the things that they added are kind of obvious and obnoxious and maybe don't work well. The not great CGI. Yeah, but others. But this is like a practical. Yeah, yeah, practical insertion here. This is probably off the top of my head. Maybe the best practical thing they did in those those remixes, those revamped versions of the episodes. But at any rate, in the version that I most recently saw, I certainly found it to be a frightening creature. Yeah, it looks great. So the film definitely positions the Wampa as an ambush predator. And so does most of the lore. Like the Star Wars Field Guide that I've been referring to, they talk about it as an ambush predator, and they also discussed how clearly this is not a creature that is capable of running down a tauntaun in a dead chase. Like we see tauntauns out, you know, running around, you know, they're they run their stop motion. So their their their gate is a little bit funny. But you get the impression that they can move when they want to move. And another interesting thing about it is that, you know, we can compare the tauntaun to creatures like an ostrich or a giraffe. And we know that from those creatures interactions with potential predators, that it's not just running that the that, you know, some of these creatures can do. They can also kick and we can look at a tauntaun's basic build because those big claws and those big muscular legs. And you can easily imagine this thing just kicking the hell out of a Wampa. Should a Wampa get too close? So it makes sense that if a Wampa were to actually bring down, especially one of these larger tauntaun species, it would have to really get get the drop on them. It would would have to depend on some sort of ambush scenario. Yeah. The the other thing I've looked at other texts that have talked about the Wampa's tendency to infiltrate cave systems, something that I think does factor into those deleted scenes for Empire, you know, what are they doing down here? Where are the bases are? Well, it's because that's what Wampas do. They they know that life on Hoth is in the caves. That's where their prey can be found. And so you can delve after them. That makes a lot of sense as well. And, you know, we do see something like this with cave environments in our own world, with predators or scavengers entering certain caves to take advantage of certain high concentrations of bats. And, you know, that might be to actively prey on the bats, to actively hunt the bats or ambush them in some fashion, like catch them leaving the cave at a certain choke point or to scavenge what falls from the bats, such as, you know, guano, but also potentially dead bats or young bats and so forth. But I think a slightly more apt comparison might be looking at the way certain predators invade ant colonies or beehives. And I think that the beehives, a great example is what the the death said month. And now I don't think the Wampa is probably taking advantage of any scent masking deception strategies here, but I can see it thriving in this capacity, you know, like, you know, gonna creep into the caves, find those caves where the the tauntauns are bedded down for the night or where they have their young. And then that's when you're going to jump and make off with one or two of them. Interesting. Now, in Empire Strikes Back, of course, again, Luke's Luke is frozen feet first to the ceiling in a Wampa's ice cave. And within the heat of the moment, I don't know that I ever really question how does this happen? What possibly caused this to occur? Oh, I did. I thought that was pretty cool. I liked that when I was a kid. And you know what? I got the the answer. I don't know if this is, you know, Lucas approved canon answer, at least in the old days, how it used to go. But one answer came from the old Super Empire Strikes Back video game for the Super Nintendo in which in the Hoth stages, you fight a lot of Wampas and you find out that they have freezing breath so they can breathe on you and that freezes you solid for a second, like Sub-Zero and Mortal Kombat. And they can kind of swipe at you until you unfreeze and bust out. So I what I learned from this is that a Wampa can go, you know, like huff on your feet and then freeze them solid into a wall. OK, all right. Well, that that that works. I guess I never really thought about it, but the field guides, I believe, makes the case that essentially what the Wampa would do is pick you up, like stick your feet in its mouth, I guess, or somehow get it saliva on your feet nice and wet and then like stick you up to the ice. And I guess hold you as if it's like super gluing you until your feet have frozen in place. They have to clamp you for a minute, wouldn't they? Yeah, unless they did have the freezing breath. The freezing breath would help in this scenario, maybe make it a little less awkward. I guess so. But if this were this would also while the Wampa is holding you up there, the hump, the Wampa is essentially hugging you. So that would also maybe help you survive a little bit. Some of that Wampa potty heat. That's true. Now, the authors of the The Wildlife of Star Wars, a field guide, they also present the idea that Wampas impale prey on large icicles and or in addition to sticking them to the ceiling with their saliva. And that this is also in the saliva count. They mentioned that the saliva may be somehow an anesthetic. Indeed, one of the books, three Wampa illustrations that I've included this one here for you, Joe, depicts a mother Wampa tending to her younglings in a cave where no fewer than four tontons are hanging. And these are, I believe some of them may be hanging just from their feet frozen into the ceiling, but some are pierced through the lower legs by meat hook like upward thrusting ice spikes. Yikes. Yeah. So I don't know to what extent this is actually described in some of the extended universe material, but pretty grisly detail to include here. And of course, not just grisly, it brings to mind terrestrial butcher birds, the Shrike, you know, cases where you'll have actual birds on our on our on our world, not a Star Wars universe, they use plant thorns to tear and store the bodies of insects in small rodents, as well as detoxify certain insects such as the eastern Luber grasshopper. So the Star Wars authors don't the Star Wars Field Guide authors don't really get into this, but it does make me wonder, OK, if you if they're sometimes used to detoxify meat in the case of actual terrestrial birds, what if the what if the the wampa is dealing with the tontons like extinct to some degree by sticking them up there? Like, again, tontons are famously stinky. What if they are toxic and essentially the wampa has to detoxify the meat before it can eat it? Aging them in a way to somehow improve the texture or aroma or flavor. Kind of like the way, you know, we do in temperature controlled caverns or environments, we do age meats, humans do that kind of thing all the time, maybe treating their tontons like a parma ham. Yeah. Yeah, I was looking around and there used to be this idea that was presented that squirrels, some squirrels might do the same thing with certain toxic mushrooms or or even psychedelic mushrooms. I do not think that this is a popular interpretation today. I think this is something you found in certain nature writings and even some mycological texts from the 1960s. I think mostly the way we're we're looking at it now is, OK, you know, squirrels are going to cash away some amount of food stuffs and, you know, and and also squirrels are going to maybe be a little bit more robust and can handle things that we can't eat because, you know, as we've discussed on the show before, they are tough as nails. So they're probably not trying to detoxify anything, but but they're at least at one point that was a possible explanation that was presented. Well, I mean, when I see the extra tontons hanging from the ceiling or the scene in the movie where Luke is hanging there, just my mind immediately goes to not a pre-processing or aging thing, but rather just a storage storage of extra food resources. Yeah. And that that would also make a lot of sense that the Wampa is a predator. Maybe is going to find itself in a scenario where, OK, I can't find enough to eat for vast periods of time, but then maybe I get lucky and I get to kill a whole nest of of tontons. Then what do I do? Well, I'm going to drag it all back and I'm going to store it in a place. And then I know where the meat is and I am going to depend on that meat. And so we'll perhaps any, you know, Wampa young ones that need to eat as well. Now, finally, the idea of them using ice spikes. This is also pretty fascinating because various terrestrial mammals, birds and fish do manipulate ice or snow in their environments. And I believe we've talked about this example before in the show when we've talked about polar bears, because it's pointed out by Gloria Dickey in a 2021 science news article, Polar Bears and the title of that. This is one of those cases where the title of the article tells you what I'm about to tell you, polar bears sometimes bludgeon walruses to death with stones or ice. Yes, polar bears have been observed to even throw blocks of ice at seals. And indigenous accounts report that polar bears sometimes use blocks of stone or ice to bash in the heads of walruses. As the article explains, scientists take this possibility very seriously, especially given similar behavior observed in the wild and in captivity. Interesting, especially because we're always looking for previously undiscovered examples of tool use among animals. And that would seem to be a pretty blatant use of a tool, right? If it's if they're using ice as a weapon or even as a projectile. I mean, that seems like a more advanced form of tool use. Yeah, I was looking at another article on this. This is do wild polar bears use tools when hunting walruses by sterling at all? This was this was published by the Arctic Institute of North America. And, you know, they point out that that it does seem to be the case that they're they're using ice as a weapon, sort of, but it's going to be limited to dealing with walruses for the most part. And the main reason here would seem to be that walrus is a pretty risky and dangerous prey for them to go after. You know, it is a big creature. It is difficult to kill. And if you attack one, it's a very high probability that you're going to suffer injury as well. And of course, that's always the gambit with predators. Right. Is it an easy meal or is it a hard meal? And what does a hard meal mean? Does that mean you end up dying after you partially secure it? So any ice weapon usage by polar bears is going to be very limited, but still amazing that they seem to do this. This seems to be within the tool chest of possibilities for them. So that that being said, you know, I don't think it's that much of a stretch to imagine a wampa swinging an oversized ice sickle at a Jedi. Does this happen in the video games that you grew up playing? You know, I don't know if I remember this one. I think maybe there are some other things that kick ice at you in the in the Hoth levels, but I don't know. I'll have to revisit now. Now I'm curious. The wampas aren't like throwing big like video game blocks of ice and you have to dodge that. I don't remember that. I remember them breathing the ice breath and then slashing at you with claws. And then there's a big wampa that there's like a giant wampa boss. You have to fight in a cave. Oh, is he throw barrels? He's just like, no, he's more like he's across the top of the screen and he's kind of reaching in at you with big arms. Oh, maybe that thing's not even a wampa. I don't remember what that is. Listeners right in. Yeah. Yeah. I never played the the Empire game in this series. I think I played because they did one for each of the original pictures. Right. I only did this the first one, I think. The Empire game was my favorite of the three, actually. Yeah, I liked it. Nice. Though one thing I always liked about the return of the Jedi game for Super Nintendo is there were levels where you could pick which character you wanted to play as and you couldn't do that in the other games. I don't know. So like, you know, there's a level where you're fighting through the desert to go to Jabba's palace and I think you could play either as maybe as Chewbacca or as Leia in her bounty hunter outfit or as maybe as Luke, I'm not sure. OK, but Max Rebo not in the mix. No, you could never play as Max Rebo. OK, not yet, but hopefully one day we'll get there. I remember those games were hard. Yeah, really hard. Yeah, difficult platforming. Oh, well, in that case, maybe I shouldn't. I was tempted to look them up, but I don't know if I can handle an old school platforming game these days. I don't want to discourage you too much. I mean, they're not battle toads or Ninja Gaiden or something. I mean, they're hard, but they're not like old NES hard. You know, challenging. Yeah. All right. Well, listeners right in. We'd love to. We know we have some Star Wars fans out there and we'd love to hear anything you have to add to the conversation about any of this. And yeah, everything goes according to plan. The next episode of Stuffed to Blow Your Mind will be another Star Wars episode and we'll get into some additional Star Wars topics. So tune in and find out what those are going to be. Just a reminder for everyone out there that Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays and on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. And since this is Star Wars week here on Stuffed to Blow Your Mind, each of these episodes is going to be Star Wars themed one way or another. I think you'll you'll be pleasantly surprised what we're going to talk about on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, JJ Pawsway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other to suggest a topic for the future or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to blow your mind dot com. Stuffed to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Trends come and go. Your skin barrier doesn't. E45 lotion is effective, science-backed hydration for everyday use. Light weight, fast absorbing and trusted to do what your skin needs. No fuss, no compromise. Just soft, smooth, healthy looking skin every day. Grab your E45 lotion now. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.