In 2026, the world’s largest academic  explosions lab opened in Texas.

And no, I’m not talking about SpaceX! I’m talking about a place where  scientists blow things up on purpose.

Why are we paying scientists  to do that, you might ask? There’s actually a surprising number of good answers to that question. It so happens that studying explosions  can help us explore the future of high-speed travel, the deaths  of stars, and cures for diseases. [♪INTRO] The first reason to master  the art of blowing stuff up is to learn how to not blow stuff up.

Stuff like industrial facilities  that store a lot of flammable gas. One of the worst industrial explosions ever happened at the Buncefield oil depot in the U. K.

In late 2005, a fuel tank overflowed,  and the spilled fuel evaporated to form a massive cloud of  flammable gas around the facility. Before long, the inevitable happened:  It came in contact with a spark. At first the flame burned slowly  but soon it was burning faster and faster until it exploded in the largest blast peacetime Europe has ever seen.

An explosion happens anytime energy is building up too rapidly to disperse smoothly. Normally if you’re burning fuel in, say, a car engine, the burning is slow and steady. As the flame unlocks energy in  the fuel, that energy creates pressure waves that ripple  outward at the speed of sound.

And as long as the flame isn’t  blazing forward faster than that, all’s well — the ripples stay ahead of the flame and energy dissipates normally. This is a kind of combustion  reaction called a deflagration. But if that fuel starts burning super fast — faster than the speed of sound — all that unlocked energy piles  up and forms a shock wave: a big spike in pressure that  travels along with the flame front.

That’s the thing that goes  boom. It’s called a detonation. This is what happened at Buncefield.

But why? How did a slow-burning flame start moving fast enough to detonate? This is the kind of question  scientists are interested in studying at explosion labs:  how ordinary deflagration suddenly transitions to a detonation — and how they can stop it.

It’s a surprisingly tricky  question, because lots of different factors can affect  how fast a flame burns. At Buncefield, one major factor  was trees surrounding the facility. As the flame hit them, they  created turbulence that wrinkled up the flame front and created more surface area, which made the flame burn faster and faster.

So at the new explosion lab in Texas, scientists will run experiments  to study effects like these. The lab is basically a giant  tube that gets filled with flammable gas and oxygen and then ignited. Inside the tube there are different  obstacles that create turbulence.

So scientists can study how different types of objects affect the speed of a flame. The better they understand that, the  better they can control the speed of any flame, whether they want to  create an explosion or stop one. One tool they can use to prevent catastrophes like the one at Buncefield is called an arrestor.

That can be anything that slows down a flame. Some arrestors work by absorbing  heat, dumping buckets of water, or spraying dust to quench a flame. Others force gas through narrow  metal channels, which forces a high-pressure wave to  dissipate before it can detonate.

But perfecting an arrestor  depends on understanding exactly how flame fronts interact with  the things they encounter — and scientists are hoping to  learn a lot about that here. The things scientists learn  from those experiments can also help them /harness/ the power  of controlled detonations… for many things, possibly  including hypersonic flight. Back in the 1940s, years  before a plane had ever even broken the sound barrier,  a German researcher built the first engine ever powered by detonations.

It was a long tube that he  filled with a mixture of oxygen and hydrocarbon fuel and then ignited. At some point along the tube, the flame got fast enough to set off a detonation. What he built was an early version of what’s now called a pulsed detonation engine.

Pulsed because after each detonation, the process has to be repeated: The chamber has to be emptied,  refilled with fuel, and ignited again. That means the engine produces thrust in pulses. Pretty cumbersome, but in theory,  engines powered by detonation can be way more powerful than  standard deflagration engines.

The key is, at the leading  edge of the flame, there’s a shock wave where pressure  spikes almost instantaneously. We won’t wade too deep into the  thermodynamics of engines today, but what you need to understand is this: Pressure matters because  the amount of work you can extract from a gas depends on  how much pressure it’s under. Just think about letting the air out of a balloon.

A full balloon will blast itself across the room, while a balloon with less air  will just kind of flop over. The same goes for engines, even  though they’re much more complex. In a regular jet engine, you don’t get any big pressure spikes because energy disperses smoothly.

But in a detonation engine, the  spike from the shock wave lets you extract way more energy  from the same amount of fuel. Literally more bang for your buck… So, ever since the mid-20th century, the idea of a detonation engine has been  super interesting to engineers — because it could propel jets or rockets multiple times the speed of sound! And it’s not entirely theoretical.

The US Air Force actually  built one that flew in 2008. Those tubes sticking out the  back are part of the engine. It maxed out at just around 120 miles per hour, but still, it proved that the engine could work.

Unfortunately, pulsed detonation  engines aren’t ideal because there’s a pause in thrust every time  you empty and refill the engine. That’s why scientists came up  with a rotating detonation engine. In these, fuel travels in a ring  around the edge of a cylindrical tube.

Once you trigger a detonation,  the detonation shock wave can travel around the ring as long as  there’s enough fuel to sustain it. Engineers hope to eventually  get these out of the lab and into rockets or jet engines,  but they’re not there yet. They need to figure out how to conduct quick, precise detonations in order to  use them in real jets or rockets.

And labs like this get them a little closer to understanding how to do that. When it comes to detonation reactions, energy isn’t the only product  scientists are interested in. Sometimes there are also… diamonds.

Soviet scientists first  discovered this in the 1960s at a nuclear weapons lab where they had a side hustle making synthetic diamonds. One way to do that was by detonating fuel to send a shock wave through some graphite. Its carbon atoms would rearrange themselves under pressure and pop out a diamond.

But the Soviets realized it should  actually be possible to get diamonds without graphite too, as long as  your fuel has enough carbon in it. They put this to the test and  found that when a detonation wave passes through the fuel, diamonds  rain out of it almost instantly. And you end up with super tiny, nearly spherical crystals called detonation nanodiamonds.

No one would be getting down  on one knee with one of these, but it didn’t take long for researchers to realize they had something special on their hands. Biomedical researchers were especially intrigued. They thought these tiny  crystals could make excellent little vehicles for delivering  meds around the body.

They’re great at carrying cargo, for one, because they have a bunch of surfaces  you can stick things to. Even better: Those surfaces  have different charges, so they act as magnets for drug molecules. Certain proteins can also be chemically bonded to their surfaces if the drugs  need to be stuck on more tightly.

Another big perk is the fact  that diamonds themselves don’t react with the human body, because they’re chemically stable, so cells  don’t try to kick them out. Even cancer cells let them glide  right in meaning diamonds can act as Trojan horses that deliver  their cargo without being detected. And they’re small enough to duck  right into the cell nucleus — which means they can deliver new genetic material to cells to treat genetic diseases.

If scientists could master this  technology, it could save countless lives, but for the time being,  there are still big hurdles. One is just figuring out how to get  stable, pure, individual crystals. The better researchers can  understand how they form and what causes their imperfections, the  closer we’ll be to consistently making pure nanodiamonds that  we can actually use in medicine.

The amazing thing is, these explosions that take place in a lab look incredibly  similar to explosions that happen light-years away in certain stars. And they give scientists a front-row seat to something they’d never be able to see close up. I’m talking about supernovas — explosions of stars that are so powerful a single star can burn as  bright as a whole galaxy.

Scientists have observed tens of  thousands of supernovas by now. But we still don’t know exactly what causes them. The problem is, once you  detect a supernova explosion, it’s already too late to see what triggered it.

Most clues have already been blown to smithereens. And it’s hard to do a forensic study on the fading embers of a blown-up star light-years away. Here’s what we do know, though.

One particular type of  supernovas, called type Ias, start out as medium-sized stars — with less than 10 times the mass of our Sun. And then, for some reason, when  they reach the end of their lives, they tend to explode in an oddly similar way, peaking at a similar brightness. Astronomers think that Type  Ias form from dying stars that have burned through all  their fuel, leaving behind dead cores of carbon and  oxygen called white dwarfs.

As for what happens next, astronomers can only make an educated guess. The general idea is that, in most cases, this white dwarf begins pulling  matter off a companion star. As it gets more massive, the core gets dense enough to kick off nuclear fusion again.

At first, the leading edge of the  burning is moving relatively slowly — it’s just regular deflagration at this point. But as the star keeps collecting  new matter, it eventually gets so dense and hot that the rate of  fusion goes faster and faster until it tips past the speed of  sound and becomes a detonation. There’s no chemical flame in a supernova like there is in a rocket engine or  in an explosion lab on Earth, but the explosion nevertheless  follows the same principles.

And that means scientists  can study the dynamics of supernovas right here on Earth  by blowing stuff up in labs. The main thing they want to  understand is how exactly deflagration transitions to  detonation in a white dwarf. For one, we know that detonations  on Earth typically happen when obstacles create turbulence  that speeds up a flame.

So researchers want to  explore how a detonation can take place without obstacles — in  a smooth ball of gas like a star. And what conditions have to exist, in terms of temperature, pressure, and  chemistry, for it to happen? Researchers also want to  investigate the hypothesis that detonation actually starts in  the surface layer of white dwarfs — the part of the star made of stolen helium.

In this scenario, detonation of this layer sends a shockwave inward, which then detonates the core. In the lab, researchers can layer  different kinds of gas, to see if a detonation in one really can kick  off a detonation in the other. These are questions we could likely  never study in a star itself.

And yet, we can start to figure  out how these mind-blowing explosions play out by using  a lab right here on Earth! It might seem strange to build a  whole facility just to blow things up. But sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

To prevent a catastrophic blast,  you have to know how to create one. To make a futuristic engine, or a  model of a supernova, or a perfect vessel for fighting disease, you  have to know how to blow things up. Sometimes you have to destroy  things to make any progress. [♪OUTRO]