 that the signature ability of Sub-Zero is the frequent and full freezing of his opponents. Over the years and across dozens of fighting stages, the Masked Man has done everything from crumble torsos to rip human popsicles in half. But what would it really take to shatter ahead? This is the science of Mortal Kombat. Welcome to my Mortal Kombat version of The Void, a region of time and space complete with a legion of minions ready to do my science-y bidding. We have entire areas here dedicated to the over-analysis of gratuitous kicking and punching. In today's episode, the ghastly scenario that we are considering comes to us from Mortal Kombat 11, Netherrealm Studios and Warner Brothers' latest entry into the fabled Mortal Kombat series. Just like in the other two decades worth of fighting games in NK-11, Sub-Zero is still completely freezing combatants. In its signature fatality, though, the fighter gloriously and gruesomely shatters a whole tent. So, we are here today to test both how possible it is to freeze ahead quickly and shatter it efficiently, you know, without shattering our hands. And if we can't replicate in a more realistic fashion what we see Sub-Zero do in the game, we are going to ramp it up until we do. So, minion, get your best pair of gloves. We've got some testing to do. Get your gloves. Go, get out of here. Look, I'm not mad at them. They just, they just never bring their gloves. First, we need to know exactly what we're dealing with. As you probably know, playing the old water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Human flesh is mostly water, but getting it to freeze and freeze fast isn't so simple. For example, if you wanted to turn my head into a chunk of frozen flesh, you would have to encourage the heat in my head to flow out of it. Now, this happens naturally. Heat always flows from areas of high temperature to areas of low temperature. But if we want this process to happen quickly, we're going to have to get a lot colder than this. At and below, negative 180 degrees Celsius, even gases like hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen start to liquefy. We loosely define this point as the start of so-called cryogenic temperatures. And when we mere mortals want to freeze something as quickly as possible, we subject an object to cryogenic temperatures in a process called flash freezing. It simply involves putting an object like, I don't know, a chicken leg or your mortal enemy's flaming skull in direct contact with cryogenic fluid. The larger the temperature difference between the object and the surroundings, the faster it will freeze, but the term flash in flash freezing is a bit misleading. Flash freezing, like you'd expect Sub-Zero to employ, is very useful in the food industry because it can freeze food so quickly that ice crystals don't have time to get out of control. Freeze something organic quickly enough and the ice crystals that form inside of that piece of food or whatever are small and uniform. If the process takes too long, the ice crystals become large and jagged, which can pierce the cell walls, destroying the cells, destroying parts of the food. This is what freezer burn is. But the fastest this flash freezing can happen, even in the best case, is minutes to hours. Unlike what we've seen Sub-Zero do for decades, you simply cannot freeze a chunk of flesh in seconds. If you could, the food industry probably would have figured that out years ago and saved themselves billions. In our testing, we are going to use probably the most famous cryogenic substance there is, liquid nitrogen, to see just how long it takes to mostly freeze our head analog. And then we are going to test its smash ability. Man, it is freezing in here. No matter what we say theoretically, we still have to actually test putting a flesh analog in cryogenic fluids. So to help me do that, I've enlisted the help of science YouTuber, Super Nerd and friend, Alan Pan. Hey Alan, what you cutting up? Hi Kyle, you know, just what I normally do on a weekend morning. Cutting up a head? This is a ballistics gel dummy with a skull inside. The skull is made of a material that is similar strength properties to a real human skull. And the fleshy stuff has similar impact properties to human flesh. So I figure if we want to find out what happens, if you freeze a human skull and hit really hard, this is the analog to use. The only thing I'm worried about is potentially the freezing time. How long do you think it's going to take to freeze this most of the way through, if not all the way through? I'd say probably at least half an hour. Sure. It's going to take a while. It's a lot harder to freeze stuff than is to like set stuff on fire. Yeah, I'm worried about the insulating properties of the ice itself. As the ice forms on the outer layers of the flesh, the heat isn't going to transfer quite as well out from the head and into the liquid nitrogen. I would say the bigger issue is going to be the Leidenfrost effect. Or any like really cold liquid. When it hits this head, the first thing it's going to do is it's going to start boiling off. Yeah. And it's going to create kind of a layer of like vapor in between the head and the liquid. And that's really going to slow things down a lot. And that's why you can pour just a little bit of liquid nitrogen on your hand. But don't do that. Just a little bit. We're talking about Sub-Zero, but liquid nitrogen can't be Sub-Zero. Nothing can go below Absolute Zero. How cold is liquid nitrogen? Yeah, it's pretty darn close. It's like a handful of degrees above Absolute Zero. So it's about the coldest thing that we have access to. Exactly. If anything is going to do the trick, it's probably readily available liquid nitrogen. And what I think might happen here is that if we freeze the head, put it in contact with these cryogenic temperatures, the flesh might transition to a more crystalline phase and maybe be more brittle. So more easily shatterable? What do you think? You mean the glass transition temperature? I mean, if you want to get technical about it. Normally our pretty sticky boy here. Stop doing that. Is kind of pliable and he's soft. Yes, I can feel that. But under a certain temperature, this material becomes very brittle and hard. Yeah. And that's when if anything you're going to be able to shatter it. Sure. And that's still close to what human flesh would do, which is the point of this. Yeah, just about. All right, we'll let you get to it and you figure out how long it will take to freeze this head pretty much all the way through. All right, I'll think about that. Oh, okay. Don't kiss it. You little buddy. Oh, it's so cold. It's okay. I'm right here. Brutality. While our head freezes, we want to establish at least what a successful test will look like. So first we want to test if you can shatter a head subzero style under human power. So I'm going to use one of my minions real hands to see if they can do that. But if their hands can handle it, just put some ice on it, you'll be fine. If one of my minions hands can handle it, then hopefully Alan will come up with some kind of way to replicate what we see in Mortal Kombat 11. I think that we will have a successful test if we can freeze a head in a decent amount of time and get a shatter ability that is fatality worthy. The heads are ready. The heads are ready what? The heads are ready Grandmaster Doctor Professor Kyle. Thank you. You may go. It's really not that hard. Finish him. Okay. Hey, Alan. Hi, Kyle. Looks like our heads are just about fully frozen. How long did that take? Five or 10 minutes? No, we're near the amount of time that we see in the game, but we can still test its shatter ability. Yes. We have it set up pinata style just like we see in the fatality of Mortal Kombat 11, which is great. But now we need someone who can punch it. And guess who I have? Not you. Two Division. UFC World Champion, Daniel Comier. Wow. You have everyone in here. Sure do, buddy. What's going on? Nice. Daniel, do your worst. That's Victor. What did you do to him? Oh, yes. I did not expect that to happen. Look at all the cracking. His skull cap is no more. He doesn't have a head anymore. What do you think is going on here? I mean, there was a lot of thermal shock from just being frozen to that cold of a temperature in a relatively short amount of time. That along with the fact that we have someone with perfect punching technique results in exactly what we see in the game. Yeah, I think if you have someone who's literally a champion, someone like Daniel here, someone like Sub-Zero, I think you can get pretty reliably the shattering that you see in the game. Wow. Hey, so, you know, what do you think? Yeah, do you think? What do you think the chances of? Yeah, you think maybe we'd be able to, you know... Woo, look at these. Yeah. No. Okay. You're not punching anybody's heads off. You know, just, I just thought because, you know, because you did it and you're so cool with it. Yeah, maybe it's just a matter of technique, you know, if you've trained us. Sometimes we got to kind of stay in our lane, but it's okay. You're very smart guys and you can talk about what it takes to break somebody's skull. I'll break the skull for you. No, it's okay. Thanks. We set out today to test whether or not you could really shatter a whole human head like we see Sub-Zero do in Mortal Kombat 11. And I think this move is surprisingly doable. Even though it takes way longer than we see in the game to freeze a whole human head, if you have experienced fighters with enough punching power, then you can get some of the shattering that we see in the game. So, until next time, I'll see you in the void. Coming up next on the science of Mortal Kombat. Oh no, what is it now? Well, Scarlet uses psychic powers to control blood. Hey, get that away from my face. Scarlet. Looks like we're all lined up and ready to fire. Behold, the ballistic shell torso of two. Wow, it's beautiful. Thank you. Now we got some blood to blast.