I’ve seen some bizarre conspiracy theories in my time, but this may be the plain old weirdest: The snow that paralyzed Atlanta, Georgia in January of 2014 was not *really* snow: It was some sort of chemical that didn’t melt, and scorched when held to a flame! Is it some weird engineered mind-altering material? Maybe nanobots, like one guy claims?

Yeah, not so much. Oddly enough, this idea struck me as being really, really, REALLY silly, so I decided to test it myself with the help of some freshly fallen snow in Boulder. I repeat the experiments done in other videos – making a snowball and holding a lighter up to it – and show that… well, see for yourself. But can you guess *why* the snow doesn’t appear to melt, and why it gets scorched?