What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Jellyfish can learn from their mistakes even though they have no brains

By Rachel Feltman

Before we can talk about how jellyfish learn, we have to talk about the fact that they have no brains. That probably doesn’t surprise you if you’re thinking of the human brain as the archetype of the organ. 

But a brain is really just a cluster of nerve cells that control the body they’re in. Exactly what that cluster looks like can vary a lot, especially among invertebrates, where they’re often very simple structures called ganglia. But most of them have some kind of centralized nerve center. Jellyfish are some of the only animals that lack this structure entirely. Others include sea cucumbers, sea urchins, coral, and other marine creatures known for their deep intellectual pursuits. 
In a new study, researchers showed that the Caribbean box jellyfish can actually learn from experience, no brain required. Some scientists say this could mean that individual neurons are capable of learning. To learn more about the experiment—and its implications for our own cognitive abilities—check out this week’s episode.

Fact: Hollywood quicksand peaked in popularity back in the 1960s—but how does the real stuff work?

By Jess Boddy

Quicksand used to be everywhere in movies. It was every 10-year-old’s worst fear in the ’90s. One day you’re just livin life, walkin around, and then BAM!!!!!! Sucked into quicksand, sometimes up to your waist, sometimes ALL THE WAY IN. and we all know the classic instructions: DO NOT MOVE! The more you move, the faster you sink.

And although we may remember quicksand best from movies like The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story, it was actually most popular as a story device back in the 1960s. And as one Slate writer posits, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that ’60s culture outside of film was steeped in quicksand, too—from the Vietnam war to policies nicknamed “the quicksand model.” And as decades progressed, quicksand fell out of fashion with bell bottoms and tie-dye, though it did persist to scare us all as kids in the ’80s and ’90s.

But does quicksand behave in real life like it does in the movies, making you disappear into the ground in less than a second? If you struggle, do you really sink faster? Listen to this week’s episode to hear the verdict, corroborated by both real-life experience, a Nature study, and the MythBusters.

The post Even without brains, jellyfish learn from their mistakes appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Scientists made a claw machine out of a dead spider

By Rachel Feltman

This story comes from the 2023 Ig Nobel Awards. We’ve talked about a few Ig Nobel winners on the show before. In 2007, the government plans for a so-called gay bomb won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Anyway, the Ig Nobels are an annual award ceremony for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. They were held in September, and one of the stories in particular really stuck out to me.

Last year, researchers from Rice University coined the ominous phrase “necrobotics” to describe a bold new field they’d ventured into. That’s “necro” for dead and “botics” for robotics. 

In a move that makes me think of those Big Mouth Billy Bass The Singing Sensation things that got really popular in the late 90s, the researchers used dead spiders to create robotic claw hands. 

This started in 2019, when mechanical engineers were setting up their lab at Rice and noticed a dead spider at the edge of a hallway. They got to wondering why spiders always curl their legs up so tight when they die. As any arachnid-expert could have told them, spiders have a hydraulic pressure system that controls their limbs. Basically, a spider’s muscles naturally keep its legs contracted into a closed position. It opens them by applying hydraulic pressure. When they die, they can no longer pump fluid into their little hydraulic legs to keep them open. So they default to their curled up state. The researchers decided to see if they could harness that claw-machine-like mechanism. All they had to do was find a way to pump up the hydraulic pressure. 

They landed on inserting a needle into the internal valves that wolf spiders use to fill up their own hydraulics, then super gluing it into place and attaching a syringe full of air. Puffing the air into the spider legs made them open up. You might be surprised to learn this study stirred a bit of controversy from other academics. 

In searching for other examples of necrobotics, I came across Custom Robotic Wildlife. They’re a 25-year-old small family business in Wisconsin that specializes in adding high-tech capabilities to taxidermy. Why, you may ask? Usually, it’s to create convincing decoys of wildlife to catch would-be poachers. To learn more about their unique roadkill robots—including some that poop candy—check out this week’s episode. 

FACT: Learning to talk to dolphins might help us talk to theoretical aliens

By Laura Krantz

Humans have been broadcasting our presence for about 85 years now, with radio, television, and radar, essentially spamming space with all kinds of messages. Very few of those have actually been deliberate—like the one from the Arecibo Telescope (RIP), or the Doritos commercial we sent out in 2008. But these are essentially messages in a bottle, tossed into the great black ocean of space, and it doesn’t seem likely that anyone or anything is going to come across them. But what if they do? What would we do if something answers back? How on Earth would we even figure out what they’re saying? Enter Dr. Laurance Doyle, an astrophysicist and member of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. He thinks if we really want to get some practice trying to communicate with species other than ourselves, we don’t have to look to space—we’ve got plenty of opportunities right here. 

In 1932, a linguist by the name of George Zipf had his students count the letters in the book Ulysses to see how many there were of each letter. What he found is that the second most common letter occurred approximately half as often as the first most common. The third most common occurred one third as often as the first, and so on down the line. Graphed out using a logarithmic scale, this information showed up as a downward 45 degree slope, or a minus one slope. In the end, Zipf plotted dozens and dozens of languages and got that same minus one slope for all of them. This statistical distribution became known as Zipf’s Law and scientists think that if a message obeys Zipf’s Law, it indicates that it’s a real language, that meaningful knowledge is being transmitted.

Now, this was supposed to just apply to human communications. But Laurance and two colleagues, Dr. Brenda Mccowan and Dr. Sean Hanser, had an idea. Dr. Mccowan had recorded and classified the whistles of bottlenose dolphins and so Dr. Doyle graphed her data based on Zipf’s Law—and got a minus one slope for dolphin whistles. The dolphins are talking (which, of course, Matt Groening already knew…). It turns out that several bird species do this as well, including African penguins.

The problem, of course, is that we have no idea what they’re saying. Per Dr. Doyle’s line of thinking, that seems to provide us with an excellent opportunity to practice our translation abilities. Should we ever receive that extraterrestrial message, we might have better luck dissecting it. And, of course, our understanding of how different species communicate here on Earth might give us a sense of how advanced an alien civilization is based on the complexity of the signal.

Check out more stories like this on today’s episode, in addition to my new book, Is Anybody Out There? A Wild Thing Book.

FACT: The oldest living aquarium fish has been around for at least 15 US presidents and maybe as many as 18

By Chelsey B. Coombs

It’s surprisingly difficult to tell how old a fish is. In the past, if you wanted to know a fish’s age, you had to use a ring-counting method like you use with trees, but with these strange calcium carbonate structures located directly behind the brain called otoliths. And unfortunately, that means having to kill the fish, which is obviously bad if you’re working with endangered species like the Australian lungfish.

One Australian lungfish in particular has been around for a looooooong time, and her name is, appropriately, Methuselah. She arrived at the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences all the way back in November 1938.

Methuselah is a legend and a sweetie who apparently loves figs and getting belly rubs. But no one knew exactly how old she was – they were going off of her arrival date to the museum, which would put her around 84 years old.

Luckily, two scientists, Dr. Ben Mayne of CSIRO, which is like Australia’s NSF, and Dr. David T. Roberts of Seqwater, the Queensland Government Bulk Water Supply Authority, created a non-invasive way to estimate the age of fish using their DNA. That’s important because it helps us predict how populations will grow and we can use that data to aid in the conservation of these important species.

They found that our girl Methuselah is probably around 92 years old, although taking into account the method’s margin of error, she could be as old as 101. And that makes her, as far as we know, the oldest living aquarium fish.

The post Scientists made a claw machine from a dead spider appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Einstein’s brain got stolen, then got lost, then got used for some terrible “science” 

By Rachel Feltman

I’ve wanted to talk about Einstein’s noggin for a while, but I decided to finally take the leap because my hometown haunt the Mütter Museum has been in the news. The Mütter Museum is where medical students, history nerds and hot goth girls alike go to learn about the history of medicine through the lens of creepy and beautiful displays that include soapified corpses, phrenology skull collections, watermelon-sized ovarian cysts and fetuses with deadly congenital disorders.

I won’t go too deep into the current controversy, but the Mütter, which has been collecting and displaying medical paraphernalia and human remains since 1863, is under new management and overdue for an ethics review—and a lot of people are freaking out. You can hear my own rambling thoughts on the issue by listening to this week’s episode, but this piece by artist Riva Lehrer gets at the heart of the issue better than I ever could. 

One of the Mütter’s most commonly praised specimens is more ethically dubious than most visitors realize. It’s the brain of none other than Albert Einstein. 

First things first: Albert Einstein’s brain was straight up stolen. Einstein wanted to be cremated, but when he died of an aortic aneurysm in Princeton, New Jersey in 1955, the pathologist who presided over his autopsy, one Thomas Harvey, was like “surely he didn’t mean his brain” and just… kept it! When Einstein’s son Hans Albert found out, Harvey apparently convinced him that the scientific value of his father’s brain was such that cremating it would be a tragedy, and Hans demurred. But this happened after Einstein’s ashes had been scattered in a private moment by his family somewhere along the Delaware River, so you have to imagine Hans might have had a different answer if there had still been time to put the brain back with the rest of him. 

But despite Harvey’s big talk about using Einstein’s brain to unlock the secrets of genius, it would mostly get carried around the country for the next 30-odd years. 

Harvey lost his job at Princeton Hospital, then spent some time in Philadelphia, where he had the brain dissected into hundreds of blocks and mounted on thousands of slides. He then traveled throughout the midwest, occasionally giving universities some slivers of brain to study, apparently often carrying them in a beer cooler. But no one would actually publish research on Einstein’s brain until 1985. Several studies have cropped up since then, but they’ve all reached pretty dubious conclusions. To find out more about how Einstein’s actually-pretty-unremarkable brain has revealed our misguided obsession with innate intelligence, check out this week’s episode. 

FACT: A Miami county is fighting peacock overpopulation by giving the birds vasectomies

By Sandra Gutierrez

Parts of Miami-Dade county have been positively overrun by peacocks. This invasive species was brought from India and commercialized as “exotic yard ornaments” in the 1920s and 30s. They have since become sort of a symbol of Miami—they’re part of the scenery and people love them. 

But peacocks are not the brightest and can be kind of jerks. They’re known to peck and scratch dark-colored vehicles because they see their reflection and think it’s another male. There have also been reports of these colorful birds harassing kids holding food, and getting extremely territorial around mating season. To add insult to injury, peacocks poop everywhere, their feathers clog AC units, and they are very vocal—Miami residents have been complaining about the birds waking them up in the middle of the night and interrupting their Zoom calls with all their squawking.  

Controlling the peafowl overpopulation has been a challenge. Catching them can be somewhat  of a dangerous sport since they can grow to be up to 4-feet tall, and there’s regulation protecting the birds from being killed or captured. This is the context in which Pinecrest, a Miami-Dade county municipality, pitched a vasectomy initiative to wane the presence of peafowl within its borders. For every procedure, they’ll prevent up to 7 females from laying fertilized eggs, which is efficient but also expensive and labor-intensive. 

Avian vasectomies are pretty similar to human ones, as the anatomy is very similar. Unlike ducks, geese, and swans, peacocks don’t have a penis. Instead, they have a small bump of erectile tissue on the back wall of their cloaca called papilla. Just like in humans, vasectomies don’t prevent the release of seminal fluid, only of sperm, so the bird can continue to act as a dominant male.

We don’t know if this is going to solve the peacock problem at Miami-Dade, but research shows that just like what happens in humans and other mammals, avian vasectomies are safe and overall, don’t have reported negative effects: they don’t change breeding behavior, hormonal levels stay the same, and courtship and copulation post-surgery remain unaltered, so the peacocks should be just fine.

FACT: Hippos were nearly farmed in the US for meat

By Sarah Gailey

If you like Beyond Meat patties, wait’ll you try this beef alternative. In 1910, America had two big problems to solve: a shortage of meat, and an abundance of invasive water hyacinth choking off the Mississippi river delta. Congressman Robert Broussard proposed a bold solution—he suggested the importation of exotic livestock, including hippopotami, into the US. Broussard’s proposal would have resulted in one of the biggest land grabs in United States history, along with one of the most disastrous ecological and economic collapses in the world. Listen to find out just how big a bullet we dodged, and how close we came to being a nation overrun by feral, furious tanks made of ham. We also discuss the legacy of cocaine in Central America, the growth behaviors of one of the most invasive plants in the world, and (of course) the question of how hard it would be to castrate an unwilling hippo. Supplemental reading material includes Jon Mooallem’s deep dive and my book, American Hippo, an alternate history asking what kind of cowboys we might need to tame a hippopotamus-infested frontier.

The post American hippopotamus ranching almost took off 100 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Leprosy is back. So where did it come from?

By Rachel Feltman

In early August, a case report in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal sounded the alarm on, you guessed it, an emerging infectious disease. But instead of a new strain of bird flu or some exotic new mosquito-borne parasite, the researchers were warning the medical community about the return of a real throwback: leprosy. Cases in the southeast have doubled over the last decade. Central Florida has such a disproportionate share of reported cases—81% of the 159 cases in 2020, to be exact—that the researchers suggest leprosy might now be endemic there, which means there’s a consistent, ongoing presence of the disease, as opposed to occasional outbreaks when someone brings it in from somewhere else. 

Like news reports on cases of the plague, which yes, people still get, this one set off a lot of frantic headlines about “biblical diseases” being back on the rise. Leprosy, which is officially called Hansen’s disease these days, is probably the most commonly referenced and least understood infectious disease in history. So let’s talk about how it got that way. 

First, the facts: Yes, Hansen’s disease, which is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and M. lepromatosis, is contagious. But it’s extremely hard to catch. We aren’t even exactly sure how it’s transmitted, because we know casual contact, like sitting next to someone on public transportation or shaking hands with them, isn’t enough. Leprosy has been called a “wimp of a pathogen,” because it dies pretty much instantly once it’s outside of the body. It’s possible that the bacteria spreads through droplets from coughs and sneezes, but in any case, it seems like you only run the risk of catching it from someone if you have really prolonged close contact. 

Side note: You can also catch leprosy from touching or eating an infected armadillo. The nine-banded armadillo is known to carry the disease. Humans are thought to have transmitted it to them about 500 years ago. Red squirrels were recently found to carry it too, and the trade of their fur in medieval Europe may have fueled an epidemic at that time. 

Even if you’re in close contact with a person (or armadillo) with Hansen’s disease, you’re extremely unlikely to contract it. Only five percent of people who are exposed actually become infected, because most people’s immune systems are able to brush these bacteria off. Certain genetic variations are thought to play a role in determining susceptibility. Even then, the bacteria grows so slowly that it can take years or decades for you to develop symptoms. 

The first noticeable sign of leprosy is often the development of pale or pink coloured patches of skin that may be insensitive to temperature or pain. The loss of fingers and toes often associated with untreated Hansen’s disease isn’t because leprosy makes tissue fall off; it’s because it can cause nerve damage, and without pain receptors in fingers and toes, it’s very common to injure them without realizing and get infections, similar to what happens in people with severe and untreated diabetes. 

Luckily the disease is easily treated with antibiotics, and you stop being contagious within days of starting treatment.

So how did we get our overblown idea of what leprosy is? 

Our oldest physical evidence of Hansen’s disease dates back to 4,000 years ago. A skeleton was found in India that showed signs of the bone lesions that can occur if the disease is left untreated. While there are lots of earlier historical references to leprosy, it’s likely that these descriptions referred to all sorts of conditions that affected the skin, including syphilis, which actually is highly contagious. 

So: Conflation of many diseases, lack of certainty about how and when someone might contract Hansen’s disease, plus the very real issue of serious disease in a few folks led to an outsized fear of the relatively benign ailment. 

This stigma peaked in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, when people with Hansen’s disease were said to literally be doing their time in purgatory while still alive, and were banished to the edge of town to beg for alms. 

But this ridiculous stigma also has a pretty recent history. In 1865, Hawaii introduced laws allowing the arrest and removal of people with leprosy, and began housing them in isolation on the island of Molokai. Those laws weren’t lifted until 1969. As of 2015, there were still 16 former patients living there. 

If you live in an area where leprosy is on the rise, keep an eye out for symptoms and see your doctor about any mysterious rashes. But don’t be weird about it! Hansen’s disease is no reason to treat humans (or armadillos) with fear or disgust. 

FACT: Ancient people made high-tech tools out of space rocks

By Sara Kiley Watson

The Bronze Age, which lasted from around 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE was a step up, at least engineering wise, from the Stone Age. Humans essentially graduated from rock tools to metal tools—namely, duh, bronze. Bronze was made from melting tin and copper together, and could be made to use some pretty neat stuff, especially when it comes to weaponry.

As we know today, there are even stronger materials than bronze, and one of those is iron. And we still use a whole lot of iron in the modern world. The problem here is that to turn iron ore, which is relatively common throughout the world into usable iron, you need to know what you’re doing. So how did iron end up in a rare selection of Bronze Age tools, long before the art of smelting was commonplace? Meteors. Yep, some of the biggest and baddest characters of the ancient era, King Tut included, had superstrong tools made from space rocks long before humans really got the hang of iron.

FACT: Ancient tweezers made people scream so loud, people wrote noise complaints

By Laura Baisas

If you think waxing is bad, try plucking your armpit hair. That was par for the course in Roman Britain. A recent archaeological dig in the UK uncovered more than 50 tweezers dating back to the Roman occupation that were used to tweeze armpit hair. Roman author and politician Seneca once wrote a letter complaining about the noise coming from from the public baths, noting “the skinny armpit hair-plucker whose cries are shrill, so as to draw people’s attention, and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him.” Learn more about this agonizing fact in today’s episode.

The post Ancient Romans tweezed their armpits until they screamed appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Curly hair may have evolved to keep our heads cool

By Rachel Feltman

As a certified Curly Girl, I’ve always been fascinated by the different shapes human hair can take. But for most of modern history, science has woefully neglected the study of curly and tightly-coiled hair. Thankfully that’s starting to change, due in large part to the curiosity-driven research and advocacy of Dr. Tina Lasisi. You can read more about Lasisi and her work on the morphology and evolution of human hair here, in an awesome article by PopSci alum Hannah Seo. 

On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I dig into the findings of one of Lasisi’s most intriguing studies. In 2021, she and her colleagues were able to demonstrate that curls help keep our heads cool. Humans evolved to rely on thermoregulation from sweat, which uses evaporative cooling. But our big ol’ brains are prone to overheating, so in a perfect world, we don’t want them getting hot enough to produce sweat in the first place. That’s likely why we kept the fur on our heads while losing almost all the rest of it, which makes us look pretty bizarre lined up with other mammals and even other apes. Hair can block the radiant heat of the sun, thereby preventing it from scorching up our scalps and cooking our noggins. 

Here’s the problem: While hair does physically block sunlight from hitting our heads, it also serves as insulation, trapping any heat that makes it through. 

Because tighter curls tend to correspond with areas with higher UV exposure, globally speaking, Lasisi and her colleagues decided to test whether coils and ringlets did a better job of keeping heads cool than straight hair. They tested this using a delightfully odd looking setup involving mannequins with glamorous wigs and power cords plugged into their eye sockets. 

Sure enough, they found that wavy hair kept heads cooler than straight hair, while tighter cools provided the greatest cooling effect at all. And having any kind of hair was better than being bald, in terms of the sun’s ability to sizzle the skin atop your skull. 

Lasisi and her colleagues think that curls create a sort of spongy effect, allowing air to circulate freely and keeping heat from getting trapped there. Listen to this week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week to hear more interesting facts about the evolution of curls and coils.

FACT: Turkey Vultures projectile vomit in self defense

By Liz Clayton Fuller

Turkey Vultures are one of the heroes of the bird world. Often misunderstood, these incredible birds perform a service to society by eating carrion, the decaying flesh of dead animals. Carrion can carry (see what I did there) all kinds of toxins and diseases like anthrax, tuberculosis, and even rabies. Incredibly, Turkey Vultures can ingest all of the aforementioned contaminants unharmed because their stomachs are so highly acidic! The acidity of their stomachs makes their projectile vomiting strategy particularly effective. While consuming their carrion prey they stay nice and clean by having bald heads with no feathers and huge nostrils so that no bits of carrion get stuck to them. They also engage in a practice called “urohidrosis” which is where an animal urinates on itself in order to cool down when it gets hot out, so Turkey Vultures have certainly earned their reputation for being a little nasty—but still amazing.

So Turkey Vultures perform this incredible service to humanity by cleaning up carrion, but how do they find the carrion to take care of? Turkey Vultures have the largest and most powerful olfactory system in the bird world which helps them find their (already deceased) prey. Their sense of smell can lead them to carcasses miles away and in fact many other Vultures rely on Turkey Vultures to locate carrion and then they follow them to it! As for what kind of carrion is on the menu, they prefer freshly dead meat. It is a common misconception that Turkey Vultures stalk and kill their prey, but they only arrive after their prey is deceased. Other than the common denominator of being freshly dead, Turkey Vultures aren’t picky at all. In Tennessee alone I’ve seen them on the clean up crew of Armadillos, Skunks, Cow, Deer, Groundhogs, and more. So next time you see a Turkey Vulture soaring by, tell them thank you for being nature’s clean up crew!

Fact: Renegade Zambian astronauts tried to beat Americans to the moon

By Purbita Saha

In 1964 the world was buzzing about the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. But a feature in Time magazine brought forth a new contender: Zambia, a southern African country that had recently won independence from the British. In the article, a science teacher named Edward Makuka Nkoloso shared that he was training a team of 12 astronauts to catapult his nation to the surface of the moon. No, they weren’t literally building a space catapult—they had a claustrophobic barrel-shaped rocket—but the candidates were learning to walk on their hands because that’s how Nkoloso thought they would have to navigate inhospitable lunar terrain. Ultimately, the teacher settled on a crew of a teenage girl, a missionary, two cats, and his own dog, Cyclops. But without any funding, Nkoloso’s dream to send his country folk beyond Earth’s orbit fizzled into legend. No one could ever confirm if his endeavor was genuine or an attention-grabbing stunt—a 2014 short film called The Afronauts reimagines it as pure fiction.

Maybe Nkoloso would be proud of his region’s emerging importance in astronomy today. From the MeerKAT radio array to the Africa Millimeter Telescope, multinational teams of scientists are finding never-before-seen wonders in the stars, all thanks to the clear skies of southern Africa. If nothing else, the proud Zambian who was interviewed by Time more than 60 years ago had a vision for the future.

The post Turkey vultures have the ultimate self-defense technique: projectile vomiting appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Ancient people survived the apocalypse in style

By Annalee Newitz

Around 1200 BCE in the Mediterranean region, there was an historical event that archaeologists often call the “Bronze Age Collapse.” Nobody is certain what happened, but there is strong evidence that there were earthquakes and social uprisings, which together left several large, wealthy cities in ruins. From Mycenae off the coast of Greece, to Ugarit in Syria, researchers have found the remains of fire, fighting, and destruction that signaled the end of the area’s great Bronze Age powers. But a new study reported in Antiquity journal reveals that civilization survived – albeit in humbler places.

A group called Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS for short) conducted a survey of surface-area remains from a thriving post-Bronze Age town in Porto Rafti, a coastal area southeast of Athens. Among the items left from households in the town, BEARS found fancy jewelry and ceramics, as well as obsidian tools imported from distant regions and complex collections of cookware that had previously been seen in elite kitchens on Mycenae. The archaeologists believe that this town continued to enjoy the luxuries of a Bronze Age city in their small coastal town because they had easy access to trade routes that allowed them to maintain social and economic relationships with other communities. 

So if you want to survive a massive social transformation in style, the best thing you can do is keep up good relationships with your neighbors.

FACT: Researchers thought that the remains of this powerful Copper Age leader were of a man. A tooth proved otherwise

By Chelsey B. Coombs

It’s really hard to tell someone’s sex from poorly preserved remains. While archaeologists have often relied on size differences they see in craniums and pelvises, those parts don’t always escape the sands of time.

In 2008, archaeologists came upon a burial chamber in Valencina, Spain, with an incredible treasure trove of goods, including an entire African elephant’s tusk, which was kind of weird to find in Europe, a large ceramic plate with traces of wine and cannabis, a flint dagger, an ivory comb, and just one person’s remains in it. Clearly, this was the burial site of an important person. The remains weren’t super well preserved and using the standard methods of analysis at the time, they determined they belonged to a man between 17 to 25 years old, who they dubbed the Ivory Man.

Since then, there have been advances in science that make determining human remains’ sex much easier, and they involve teeth. There’s a protein in our tooth enamel called amelogenin that comes in different forms based upon sex chromosomes, X and Y, and it’s often preserved pretty well. Using this methodology, in 2021, archaeologists determined that the Ivory Man was actually the Ivory Lady.

It’s fascinating because it shows there’s this huge sex and gender bias, present in all science, but in this case, archaeology, that has informed our ideas about what prehistoric society was like.

FACT: Birds have been using anti-bird spikes to build love nests and fortresses 

By Rachel Feltman

Researchers at the The Natural History Museum in Rotterdam have found that anti-bird spikes are being co-opted for pro-bird purposes: They’re showing up as building materials in nests. 

Birds using gnarly human materials in their nests isn’t news in and of itself. Published reports of nests made out of wire date back to 1933, and researchers have reported birds using barbed wire, nails and screws. One study even showed that pigeons in Canada were using old syringes for their (infamously terrible looking, but actually surprisingly adequate) nests. Generally speaking, birds are great at using our trash to build homes, for better and for worse.

The Rotterdam researchers reported on several bird nests made using anti-bird spikes, an example of hostile architecture. They found that crows were harvesting and using the spikes to shore up the stability of their nests, while magpies were using them to adorn the outside of their spherical nests. They believe that in addition to adding decor to the flashy magpie nests, the spikes may serve to deter larger birds and other potential predators. 

The post Birds have been using anti-bird spikes to build love nests and fortresses appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Male mice are terrified of bananas

By Rachel Feltman

A while back, researchers at McGill University were studying pain sensitivity in mice and noticed something weird: When pregnant female mice—which were being used for another experiment—were kept close by, the male subjects started acting strangely. A grad student picked up on the fact that they were “aggressive” and had “super-high pain thresholds” when the pregnant females were in the area. 

So, not only is this a weird quirk that begs explanation, but it was also potentially messing up the study’s results—and maybe even the results of other, previously published studies where scientists had inadvertently skewed data by keeping pregnant mice around. The researchers decided to start a new experiment to investigate further. 

They zeroed in on the fact that soiled bedding from a pregnant female was enough to give males the superhuman (supermouse?) pain tolerance. A look at their hormonal levels also showed they were experiencing a spike in stress. They eventually isolated the chemical n-pentyl acetate, which can appear in female mouse urine, as the signal the males were reacting to.

Totally coincidentally, n-pentyl acetate is what gives bananas their signature odor. The researchers picked up some banana oil from a local supermarket and doused cotton balls in it to see if their presence would have the same effect. Sure enough, the banana funk raised stress hormones and lowered pain sensitivity. In both cases—urine and banana—the effect kicked in within five minutes and lasted about an hour. 

The researchers think this hormonal spike directly relates to a fight or flight response. Why would pregnant mice (and, as a result, bananas) have such an effect on young, healthy males? Because pregnant mice, generally speaking, can and will kick the absolute crap out of a young male mouse. 

Male mice, especially virgins (which researchers call “sexually naive”), have a tendency to try to kill babies. Rodents in general are more open to infanticide than we would like; females of many species will chow down on their children if something makes them smell unfamiliar, or if they have too many babies at once. Meanwhile, males of many species will go after pups that aren’t theirs. There have been some studies that suggest that introducing the smell of an unfamiliar male is enough to make certain rodent mamas stop caring for their pups, presumably because they assume some dude is going to come eat them and don’t want to waste energy on them in the meantime. 

By the way, young females without pups are also known to sometimes go bananas on other mice’s babies. They stop this behavior once they have kids of their own. Researchers have found that a whole region of the brain quiets down after a mouse gives birth, and that chemically blocking it can keep young ladies from getting infanticidal—while stimulating it can send any mouse on a baby-eating rampage. 

Research on the Chilean degu, an adorable rodent that nests in big social groups and does not put babies on the menu, suggests that there are genes that make a species more or less likely to go the infanticide route. Communal nesting may have evolved as an alternative to violent male competition. 

Back to mice: Studies have shown that a gene called Trpc2 is a big factor in determining whether a mouse is a parent-of-the-year—or at least a decent babysitter—or an infanticidal brute. Females who lack the Trpc2 gene act like males, which is to say they run around harassing pups and trying to mount other adult mice. When scientists engineered a male mouse with an activated Trpc2 gene, he reacted to the introduction of strange pups by building a nest and gently placing the foundlings inside. 

The protein that Trpc2 encodes is crucial in allowing animals to sense pheromones, which brings us back to the banana business. 

Basically, the researchers concluded that nursing mothers give off this chemical signal to say “don’t mess with me or my pups, or I will mess you up”—and males have evolved to actually listen, or at least get ready for the fight of their lives. 

Obviously this finding is kind of weird and funny, but it’s also important. Just like the researchers in this study, many scientists studying animal behavior in the lab are inadvertently introducing variables that mess up their data. The researchers point out that female pheromones, in particular, have been woefully underrepresented in the scientific literature—male animals are more likely to be studied, which is a known scientific bias and a huge problem in actually understanding how animals work. Plus, who knows: maybe even a grad student’s unfortunate choice of snack could insidiously skew an experimental result. 

FACT: One of our ancestors had extremely swole leg muscles

By Sara Kiley Watson

Human lineage split from chimpanzees (are our closest living relatives today) about seven million years ago, but early, primitive primates were evolving around 55 million years ago. Fast forward to 2 or 3 million years ago, and we’ve got the earliest tools being made, and also around the middle of when Australopithecus africanus’s reign, which had a bigger brain than its predecessors. Fast forward again to November 1974, and scientists discovered Lucy, a 40-percent complete fossil of a young female Australopithecus afarensis.

While the discovery of Lucy changed archeology forever, there are still loads of questions about who she was and how she lived. But recent research shows that Lucy was probably a lot more like modern humans than we realized when it comes to her ability to walk around on two legs—and she had the super-powered muscle mass in her legs to prove it.

FACT: Wildfires and fungal spores are dangerously intertwined

By Kasha Patel

If we learned anything from The Last of Us, it’s that some fungi can appear immutable and even indestructible. We take a tour on how fungal infections are linked with wildfire smoke, how fungi are adapting to warmer temperatures and why infections are hard to treat.

The post Male mice are utterly terrified of bananas appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Ornithologists play bird chess so you don’t get pooped on

By Amanda Reed

A muderous scene descended on the University of Pittsburgh campus and surrounding Oakland neighborhood in fall 2017. Students and faculty would leave class at the Cathedral of Learning or leave the Carnegie Museum of Art and see hundreds of crows roosting in the trees. 

The university sought out the help of The National Aviary in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood, which is the country’s largest aviary (aka bird zoo) and the only one with an honorary national distinction from Congress. However, the university couldn’t play any ol’ bird sounds to scare away the crows: Beloved peregrine falcons roost on top of the Cathedral of Learning, and choosing the wrong predator could scare away the crows and the falcons. The solution laid in the deep hoots of this common North American bird. This story is my magnum opus from college and I’m giving it the flowers it finally deserves. 

FACT: Crocodile dung was probably a better birth control method than you’d expect

By Rachel Feltman

Around 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, women were shoving crocodile turds up their vaginas in a bid to keep babies at bay. Shocking? Yes. Upsetting? A bit. Laughable? Well, no. Not really. To be clear, this tactic is far from advisable compared to modern-day options. Even so, it’s quite reasonable to suspect this horrifying method sorta kinda probably worked. 

The poo in question would have served as a physical barrier between the vagina and the cervix, which would have prevented some if not all sperm from meeting an egg. In fact, the moldable nature of a somewhat dried turd may have allowed for a more comfortable and effective barrier than a ready-made, hard object, such as a piece of wood or metal. We also know that, at least in some cases, ancient Egyptians were not relying on dung alone. They—smartly!—mixed honey (we now know this is a powerful antimicrobial agent, which would have helped keep this contraceptive from causing gnarly infections) with ground-up acacia leaves (these produce the known spermicide lactic acid, which is one of Phexxi’s active ingredients). It sounds awful. But, by god, it makes sense.

While we don’t know for sure how well such a concoction would have worked, the basic recipe of a physical barrier and a sperm-killing additive is a classic combo, found again and again across the ancient world. The Talmud references women using sponges soaked in vinegar: this, like the Egyptian version, would have provided a cervical barrier, while also making the vaginal pH less hospitable to sperm. Other cultures in antiquity used various toxic substances like lead, mixed with oil and honey, or ghee along with rock salt. Elephant dung made at least one appearance. Now, to my knowledge, no one has put these to the test in a modern experimental setting, for reasons I hope are obvious. But the mechanics make sense. 

This is not to say that doctors should tear up their prescription pads and send patients wading into the Nile. We’ve come a long way in our pursuit of reliable family planning. To give just the briefest of overviews: Folks tried to sneeze or high-kick the semen right out of them (this didn’t work). They inserted primitive precursors to IUDs that kept their cervixes permanently stuffed with metal or glass (ow). They took various herbs with varying degrees of success (and varying degrees of death). Less than 100 years ago, Lysol was almost literally marketing its corrosive cleaning fluid as a way to keep ones’ uterus spic-and-span and inhospitable to human life. 

To learn more about the wild history of human sex and related shenanigans, check out my book. 

FACT: A monkey took a selfie and set off a years-long legal battle

By Stan Horaczek

Copyright law is complicated, especially when wildlife gets involved. In the late 2010s, nature photographer David Slater spent several years in Indonesia to document the endangered Celebes crested macaques. Part of his creative process included setting up a camera on a tripod with a remote trigger cable. One of the monkeys grabbed the cable and started taking photos, which panned out to be adorable monkey selfies. That’s when the trouble started. Since the monkey had technically triggered the shutter by pushing the button on the remote, it seemed possible that the monkey would hold the intellectual property of the image. Since animals aren’t allowed to own IP, the image risked falling into the public domain, which would prevent Slater from licensing the image. This kicked off a legal battle that lasted nearly a decade in order to find out just what happens when a wild macaque tries its hand at professional photography.

The post Ancient Egyptians used crocodile dung for birth control—and it kind of worked appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Kids might just be better (amateur) archeologists than adults are 

By Rachel Feltman 

A few months ago, an eight year old girl named Elise was playing during recess at her school in Norway. She bent down to pick up a piece of litter, and noticed a nice rock. So she grabbed it. Her teacher was like, Elise, sorry, I have to confiscate this rock, because I’m pretty sure it’s an object of historical significance! Don’t you hate it when that happens?

It turned out to be a neolithic dagger—a more than 4,000 year old hunk of flint from the time when humans were transitioning to agricultural lifestyles. 

This story got me thinking about kids finding fossils and other ancient relics. There are so many news stories like this one! In 2006, the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club in New Zealand took a group of children to go fossil-hunting. The kids found a 30-million-year-old giant penguin. In 2014, two different kids—one 10 and one 11—found prehistoric projectiles on the same stretch of New Jersey beach within weeks of one another. 

In 2015, a four-year-old named Wiley was out with his dad, a zookeeper, and spotted a 100-million-year-old dinosaur bone. In 2018, a Swedish eight-year-old named Saga reached into the water at her family’s lake house and pulled out a three-foot-long sword that turned out to be 1,500 years old. In 2019, a 12 year old Ohio boy named Jackson Hepner was playing around in a creek bed when he stumbled across an odd, jagged object jutting out of the mud. It turned out to be a 7-inch-long mammoth tooth. 

In 2021, the Libyan department of antiquities honored six children who had found relics from different eras by chance while playing in the vicinity of an ancient city. The department of antiquities had launched an awareness campaign to encourage youth and other citizens to keep an eye out for artifacts, and to turn them in instead of selling them. Also in 2021, a four year old named Lily Wilder was walking with her parents on the beach in South Wales and spotted a fossilized dinosaur footprint, which turned out to be 220 million years old. 

What gives? Is this just about newspapers being biased in favor of adorable kids covered in dirt? Almost certainly yes. But that doesn’t mean kids don’t have a very real edge over adults when it comes to finding fossils and other ancient treasures.

In a 2019 Atlas Obscura article, Jessica Leigh Hester spoke to several archaeologists who agreed that kids have the advantage when it comes to being an amateur relic hunter. They’re curious, they’re closer to the ground, they tend to relish in getting dirty, and they’re not self-conscious or nervous about scrabbling around or getting on the ground to take a closer look at something. 

As promised in this week’s episode, here’s more info on the “closet archeology” adventures happening in one NYC elementary school. We love ancient history! 

FACT: Spicy peppers may have a quite unlikely origin

By Sara Kiley Watson

Where do chili peppers come from? Many folks would say South America, and for good reason. Until very very recently, scientists believed that chili peppers evolved in South America at most 15 million years ago. Chili peppers are varieties of the berry-fruit of plants from the genus Capsicum, which are members of the nightshade family Solanaceae. Solanacea makes up a ton of the most important plants in your pantry—tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, tomatillos, eggplants. But it also has some toxic cousins: belladonna, mandrake, tobacco to name a few. These kinds of plants are found kind of everywhere in the world, but tend to be happiest in tropical latin america where they are abundant and widely distributed. 

But, these flavorful little fruits actually likely have a much longer back story—one that could start in an unexpected locale. In 2021, a postdoc and undergrad student in Colorado met up to check out some specimens in the collection from the Green River Formation. What they found could shake up the spicy history of this culinary favorite. 

FACT: The Babylonians were absolutely god-like at mathematics

By Moiya McTier

A paper from 2016 shows evidence that ancient Babylonians used an advanced form of abstract geometry 1400 years before it was thought to be invented in England. Dr. Mathieu Ossendrijver studied clay tablets that describe how the Babylonians used geometry instead of arithmetic to track the motion of Jupiter. They were interested in the big planet’s behavior because they thought it reflected the will of their patron god Marduk. We already knew Babylonians were influential astronomers, but now we know they were equally prodigious mathematicians! 

The post Why kids make the best amateur fossil hunters appeared first on Popular Science.

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ARE YOU a sucker for a good Wikipedia spiral? Do you love crushing the competition at trivia night? Are you determined to be the most interesting person at every party you go to? Then you’re going to love The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

On the hit Popular Science podcast, our hosts share the strangest, silliest, most fascinating stories they can find from science, history, technology, medicine, and more. From the history of doctor-prescribed cannibalism, to tales of the world’s most devastating butter-fueled fires, to the bizarre legacy of competitive guppy swallowing, this show has it all. Accidental death rays? Yes. Scientific scam artists? Obviously. Bugs with pee-related superpowers? All day long.

Live show: August 24 at Caveat in NYC

Join the podcast hosts for an evening of bizarre tales from science and history, hilariously educational visual aids, audience games, prizes and more. PopSci+ members get $5 off tickets for the show or livestream. To become a member and get the discount code (plus full access to all PopSci+ stories), sign up here.

Longtime Weirdos will love our line-up, which includes beloved show alums Claire Maldarelli and Sara Chodosh along with host Rachel Feltman and producer Jess Boddy. See you there!

And if you can’t make it, check out the regular podcast every other Wednesday morning on Apple, Anchor, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

The post Live from New York: ‘The Weirdest Thing’ podcast (in person!) appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

ARE YOU a sucker for a good Wikipedia spiral? Do you love crushing the competition at trivia night? Are you determined to be the most interesting person at every party you go to? Then you’re going to love The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

On this hit Popular Science podcast, our hosts share the strangest, silliest, most fascinating stories they can find from science, history, technology, medicine and more. From the history of doctor-prescribed cannibalism, to tales of the world’s most devastating butter-fueled fires, to the bizarre legacy of competitive guppy swallowing, this show has it all. Accidental death rays? Yes. Scientific scam artists? Obviously. Bugs with pee-related superpowers? All day long.

Live show: August 24 at Caveat in NYC

Join the podcast hosts for an evening of bizarre tales from science and history, hilariously educational visual aids, audience games, prizes and more. PopSci+ members get $5 off tickets for the show or livestream with code BUTTERFIRE.

Longtime Weirdos will love our line-up, which includes beloved show alums Claire Maldarelli and Sara Chodosh along with host Rachel Feltman and producer Jess Boddy. See you there!

And if you can’t make it, check out the regular podcast every other Wednesday morning on Apple, Anchor, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

The post Check out our live show! appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Before humans ate chickens, we treasured them as exotic pets 

By Rachel Feltman 

This fact started with an article called “How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry” by ​​Kenny Torrella at Vox, which is as wild and interesting as it sounds. But in an effort to not just crib this one fantastic piece of reporting, I decided I’d pull a few random facts from farther back in chicken history. My mind is blown. 

It turns out that the origin of domesticated chickens is hotly contested. Until recently, it was fairly widely accepted that people were breeding jungle fowl in Asia as far back as 10,000 years ago. There wasn’t any evidence of butchering that long ago, though, so some suggested the birds were bred for cockfighting, not for eating. The oldest signs of chicken bones that people had slaughtered and snacked on came from the ancient city of Maresha, which is in the Judean Lowlands and sat at the crossroads of trade routes for Egypt and Jerusalem during the Iron Age, peaking between 400 and 200 BC. 

But in 2022, an international group of researchers called foul. They used radiocarbon dating to confirm the ages of 23 of the proposed earliest chickens found in western Eurasia and north-west Africa. In addition to finding that a lot of bones were younger than previously thought, the researchers also showed that those 10,000 year old cock fighting bones were actually from pheasants. 

According to the new analysis, the oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were found in central Thailand and dated to between 1650 BC and 1250 BC.

Based on the timing, which coincides with the rise of rice and millet cultivation in dry fields in that region, the researchers think domestication could have started when a few jungle fowl were tempted down from the trees and into human settlements by the abundance of free grain—sort of like the way the most docile wolves started hanging around human campfires. 

But we know based on the archaeological evidence that people didn’t start eating chickens for meat for hundreds of years. And according to the new study, as domesticated fowl spread across Asia and then throughout the Mediterranean along routes used by early Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician maritime traders, there was a clear pattern of the birds arriving several centuries before people started eating them. 

In early Southeast Asian sites, partial or whole skeletons of adult chickens were found placed in human graves. And in Europe, several of the earliest chickens, from around 50 BC to 100 AD, were buried alone or in human graves and show no signs of having been butchered. One grave chicken even showed evidence of a healed leg fracture, suggesting someone cared for it lovingly during its life. 

The researchers argue that these domesticated jungle fowl would have been some of the most colorful and friendly birds folks had ever encountered, making them sort of like pet parrots. So even if cultures didn’t actively revere them, it would have been understandable for them to see them as exotic and cute and cool to keep around. 

During the rise of the Roman Empire, we know that eggs became an extremely popular snack. It seems like the widespread adoption of chicken meat as a human food probably followed naturally from that industry. In England, chickens were not eaten regularly until around 1,700 years ago, and that happened at urban and military sites influenced by Roman occupation. 

Fast forward through the shipping error that started it all and a delightfully bizarre competition to breed the best possible chicken, and we come to the modern poultry industry. It’s… not great. Here’s what to look for on labels if you want to make sure your chicken is as ethically raised as possible. 

FACT: Sizing for women’s clothing is based on a whole lot of hooey

By Heather Radke

From the very beginning of my book research, I was certain that eugenicists must have had something to say about butts. They were, after all, obsessed with bodies, and obsessed with putting bodies in hierarchies. Butts are complex, fraught symbols and, by the time American eugenics had become massively popular in the early 20th century, they had become widely associated with racial categorization and female fertility, both major interests of the eugenics movement. Despite my certainty, though, it took a long time for me to find the connection between butts and eugenics. I read histories of eugenics, talked to archivists, and eventually interviewed a woman named Kate O’Connor, who was a PhD student at the University of Michigan studying the history of sterilization. It was in my interviews with Kate that I learned about two statues, called Norma and Normman. The statues were created by a gynecologist and a sculptor and were meant to be depictions of the most normal American man and woman—representations of bodies, and butts, that were perfect in their averageness. In order to attain this ideal for Normman, the creators mined army data and were relatively easily able to create a sculpture of an “ordinary American man.” Norma proved to be a much trickier project. At first it seemed there was no data set that offered a similar set of statistics for women that the army data did for men. But then, the sculptor and gynecologist found a WPA project, put together by a woman named Ruth O’Brien, that was designed to solve a century-old problem: the fit of women’s clothes. O’Brien had been trying to create standardized sizing for women’s ready-to-wear clothes. She sent “measuring squads” across the United States to measure thousands of women in order to design a system of sizes that would fit the most number of women possible. The squads took dozens of measurements and noted them all down to send back to O’Brien in Washington, with one exception. O’Brien had instructed them all to throw out data from non-white women. Her sizing scheme excluded women of color. For the gynecologist and sculptor, both committed eugenicists, this exclusion was a feature, not a bug — they were only interested in depicting the most normal white women. And that’s exactly what they did. They made a sculpture of the most normal woman with the most normal butt and displayed it in the American Museum of Natural history.

FACT: Parrots seem to really enjoy video chatting with other parrots.

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Pet loneliness is a huge problem because humans just can’t be there for their animals 24/7. There are over 20.6 million parrots kept as pets in the US, but they often don’t get enough enrichment like they would in the wild with a flock. That can lead to negative behaviors like pacing, excessive sleeping and vocalizations, feather-picking and even self-mutilation.
So scientists at Northeastern University, the MIT Media Lab and the University of Glasgow decided to create and test a parrot-to-parrot video calling system to find out if that could help.

During the introductory phase, the birds learned how to use a bell to ask their caregivers to video chat with other birds using Facebook Messenger. In the main phase of the study, a group of birds and owners would schedule a three-hour-long window in which they were all available to make and receive calls. During that time, the bell and the phone or tablet would come out, and the parrots could choose which of the other birds they wanted to call.

And it ended up being really successful! 100% of the caregiver participants said they believed their birds had at least a moderately positive experience, and some birds even learned new bird behaviors they’d never known how to do before. And while all of these calls were still facilitated by caregivers, this study could help inform new technology that would let parrots video call their friends whenever they wanted.

The post Before humans ate chickens, we treasured them as exotic pets appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Roaches are changing the way they have sex, and it’s all our fault (again)

By Rachel Feltman

A recent study showed that human interference may have had a big impact on the way German cockroaches romance one another—and this isn’t even the first time that’s happened. 

When it’s time to do the deed, a male cockroach will provide a “nuptial gift” to his female of choice. It’s a solution full of proteins, fats and sugars, so it’s sort of like giving chocolate to someone you’re trying to woo (if you secreted that chocolate from a gland under your wings). The goo contains maltose, which quickly turns into glucose when it hits a female’s saliva. 

The delicious gift entices the female to climb up onto her sugar daddy’s back for easier access, which gives him an opportunity to latch his hooked, telescoping penis (!) onto her reproductive tract. Then they face in opposite directions, attached at the bum, and stay that way for an hour and a half. And they say romance is dead! 

Humans screwed this process up in the late 20th century. Because roaches love sweet treats—nuptial and otherwise—researchers created pesticides containing glucose to tempt them into poisoning themselves. It worked so well that by the 1980s, there were German roach populations in Florida who no longer sought out sweet stuff to eat. Several other populations have shown similar mutations since then. Basically, hijacking the cockroach sweet tooth was so effective that bugs with weird sugar-hating mutations were doing all the baby-making. 

That’s a real problem for amorous male roaches. Last year, researchers confirmed that females with the glucose aversion mutation actively avoided male nuptial gifts. They’d run off from the mating attempt as soon as they got a taste of something other than fat and protein.

Unfortunately for us, it seems like roaches have created a solution all by themselves. In a study published in April, scientists showed that glucose-averse male cockroaches have developed two traits to deal with this issue. For one, they’ve started to secrete less maltose and more maltotriose. It’s a more complex sugar molecule that takes five minutes to break down into glucose in the female’s saliva. Females seem to like it better even when they don’t have the glucose-aversion mutation, and the long delay keeps glucose-averse maidens from scurrying off in disgust. The males have also gotten faster in doing their chocolate-to-penis bait and switch. It usually takes a male three to four seconds to lock their genitalia onto a female’s, but scientists say the ones they observed had shaved around a second off of that time. Meanwhile, the females seem to be developing changes in their saliva that make the process of turning maltose or maltotriose into glucose even slower. 

For more weird animal sex, check out my book!

FACT: Fire swamps à la Dark Souls and The Princess Bride have a real-life counterpart

By Jess Boddy

I was inspired to research this fact during a recent playthrough of Dark Souls I was doing on Twitch. As I traversed the infamous Blighttown swamp, zweihander in hand, it struck me how wild it is that there’s an entirely separate zone situated just beneath all of the poison gunk—a fire zone. And sometimes, as with the spider boss Quelaag, that fire seeps up through the poison gunk. And that made me think of The Princess Bride, a wonderful film that has a swamp where fire spurts from the ground. So I was thinking, why are fire swamps a thing? Could they exist in real life?

Reader, they can. There have been instances of people traversing swamps, either on foot or by boat, and they see a plume of flames. This is where a lot of swamp ghost stories come from. For example, in some European folklore, these fireballs were thought to be satanic sprites that could wield fire, and these were called will-o-the-wisps! 

So, yes, it happens in real life… but let’s say it’s NOT ghosts. Could it be a scientific phenomenon? Well, PopSci actually did a story on this back in 2018, and a microbiologist explains how bog water is stagnant and oxygen-deprived, creating the perfect environment for anaerobic bacteria, or microorganisms that live without oxygen. Sometimes, those microbes can create the right conditions for some flammable gasses to build up.

The notion of fire swamps even go back to 1783, in what many consider to be the very first American science experiment. George Washington, waiting in Princeton, New Jersey for the freshly-signed Treaty of Paris to arrive, fiercely debated with his soldiers on whether will-o-the-wisps were ghosts or science. (A classic debate.) They paddled down the river with a torch and a long stick, literally probing for an answer. Then, apparently, moments later, a “great, big flash” erupted from the water. So… fire swamp!

Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about real-life fire swamps and how Dark Souls’ connection of chaos and pyromancy also has roots in science.

FACT: Scientific scammers are everywhere. Here’s how to spot them

By Amanda Reed

Scientific scams are more common than we think. The “vaccines cause autism” study: scientific scam! The deeply flawed original 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield was retracted and he had his medical license revoked for it, but people still run with it today. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos: scientific scam! Thernanos’ Edison testing device was not doing anything magical with fingerpricks of blood, and now she’s is serving time for it. What defines a scientific scam, or scientific misconduct? Per the National Academy of Sciences’ “On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research, scientific misconduct is “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” It ranges from using Photoshop to manipulate images and graphs to even abuse of confidentiality in peer review. But there are ways to spot them—you just have to listen to the episode to learn more. 

The post Fire swamps are more than just folk legend appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The dishwasher was invented by one of America’s first girlbosses

By Sara Kiley Watson

Behind many inventions are typically pretty interesting people. After all, to dream up and actually create some of the stuff we have on earth takes a lot of creativity and will, especially when it comes to the devices we often take for granted today. Take the dishwasher. 

You might not think about the dishwasher that often, but trust me, when you don’t have one, you’ll be thinking about it. Washing dishes, after all, is a chore. And back in the 1800s, chores were a full time job. But dishes were one aspect that frankly Josephine Cochrane didn’t have the time for. This is a story of an invention not driven by much more than frustration—and tells the tale of one of America’s first innovative girl bosses. 

FACT: This mysterious sickness put a million people to sleep

By Rachel Feltman 

In the graphic novel and Netflix series Sandman, the world is struck by a mysterious plague called the sleepy sickness, which leaves sufferers in a fairytale-esque slumber for decades. Believe it or not, this spooky sleepy sickness is based on a very real pandemic that happened during the early 20th century. And it’s one that scientists still don’t fully understand.

As you can probably guess, the real-life version of the sleepy sickness didn’t actually strike millions of people at once. But the truth is only a little less unsettling. 

This disease, which in extreme cases can cause victims to fall into a coma-like state, spread through the world for more than a decade starting in late 1916, and affected at least a million people during that time. 

The scariest thing about encephalitis lethargica is that we’re still not sure exactly what it is. 

Because we know so little about this illness, we also don’t know of any particularly effective treatments or cures for it. But the good news is that some of the people who survived the 20th century pandemic only to suffer from symptoms like muscle rigidity and catatonia did eventually recover. 

In the 1960s, neurologist and writer and absolute king of my heart Oliver Sacks treated several survivors who were living in a nursing home in the Bronx. He noticed that while they were thought to be totally unresponsive, most of them showed some kind of reaction to random bits of stimuli, like reflexively catching things tossed at them or reacting to music or touch. He decided to try treating them with L-DOPA, which is an amino acid that’s able to cross the blood-brain barrier and raise dopamine levels. The results were profound and shocking, with some patients regaining consciousness and the ability to interact with the world. That story is the subject of the book and film Awakenings, which I really recommend, along with all of Oliver Sacks’ work. Here’s a picture of him on a motorcycle being a gay icon. 
You can learn more about this unsettling plague by listening to this week’s episode—or by checking out my TikTok series about it!

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Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Pueblo peoples might have moved huge logs for over 60 miles by strapping them to their heads

By Sandra Gutierrez G. 

Researchers always seem to be wondering how ancient civilizations moved big stuff around, but they rarely get the opportunity to try their theories empirically. 

Enter a team of anthropologists and physiologists from the University of Colorado Boulder. In the true spirit of experimental science, they strapped 136-pound logs to their heads to figure out how Pueblo peoples from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico might have carried the timber necessary to build their extraordinary architecture. 

Chaco Canyon was the most important political and ceremonial center for the Ancestral Puebloans. There, they built their famous stone and adobe dwellings along the cliff walls, ritual structures called kivas, as well as semi-circular constructions known as great houses. 

Scientists calculate that 200 thousand timbers were used in the construction of this particular site—but there are no trees anywhere nearby. In 2001, tree-ring experts at the University of Arizona used chemical analyses and discovered that the wood in the Puebloan constructions was sourced from mountain ranges at least 46 miles away—the furthermost, Chuska mountains, are 62 miles away from Chaco Canyon. 

Puebloans had no wheel, no draft animals, nor any other type of modern carriage system that we know of. Plus, archeologists have not found scrape marks on the grounds around Chaco Canyon that would hint at the logs being dragged or pushed. So, logs as big as 16 feet and 190 pounds had to be carried by hand. 

There have been a number of theories but the researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder tested the one proposing that the timbers in the Chacoan constructions were actually moved only by a few people at a time using tumplines: a technique that involves carrying a load on the lower back by strapping it to the head. 

Three of the four authors of this study trained for three months to figure out if the theory was humanly possible and how long would it take them to transport a 132-pound pine timber over 15.5 miles using tumplines made out of nylon webbing and foam padding. 

Considering small breaks every 20 minutes and longer breaks every two and a half miles, researchers completed the test in a total time of 9 hours and 44 minutes, walking at an average speed of 2.8 miles per hour.

So yes, tumplines are a perfectly feasible method of carrying heavy timbers over long distances. Researchers say the tumplines were “surprisingly comfortable” and communication was key to coordinating the walk and avoiding the timber from swaying.

FACT: Wolves can help humans get into fewer car crashes 

By Rachel Feltman

Anyone who’s spent time driving in an even vaguely rural area knows that deer have a preternatural ability to get hit by human cars. In 2021, a study in Wisconsin found an interesting connection between the all-too-common phenomenon of deer collisions and the presence of wild wolves. According to 22 years of data, having wolves around means people hit deer less often. 

You might assume that’s because the wolves ate the deer. After all, deer populations have a tendency to run amok if there aren’t predators keeping them in check. Wolves eating deer could explain a six percent reduction in crashes, according to the study. But the researchers saw a 24 percent drop.

That remaining three-quarters of the impact came from “a landscape of fear.” Wolves tend to follow whatever the clearest path is in a wooded area, like a stream. When humans come in and build up the landscape, that means artificial clearings for things like roads, pipelines, and rail tracks. Deer are known to change their behavior and location to avoid predators. So when wolves are in town, they roam the roadside—and deers stay off the streets. 
The study estimates that wolves save Wisconsin about $10.9 million in losses each year by preventing car crashes, which more than covers what the state pays out to people who lose pets or livestock to wolves, which tends to be the biggest public objection to letting their populations bounce back. The researchers also noted that there were other potential economic benefits they hadn’t calculated, like the lowered risk in lyme disease transmission we see when deer populations are well managed.

FACT: Sometimes articles published in academic journals are totally made up

By Ali Hazelwood

In 1996, NYU physics professor Alan Sokal wrote and submitted a scholarly paper to the journal Social Text. The paper was accepted and published—and after a few weeks Sokal revealed that the paper was a hoax: it was full of nonsense and jargon, and he’d written it to demonstrate the pitfalls of the academic peer-review process.

The post This ancient civilization literally used their heads to move massive logs for miles appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: These insects have a pee-related superpower 

By Rachel Feltman

Glassy-winged sharpshooters aren’t exactly the most lovable bugs. They’ve got wiggly abdomens that they use to make vibrations to communicate when it’s time to mate, bulbous eyes, and red-veined wings. They’re also considered pests: when they and other sharpshooters feed off of grapevines, they leave a bacterium called Xylella fastidiosa behind that causes leaves to yellow and wither with a condition known as Pierce’s disease. That plague can wipe out more than half of a vineyard’s vines in a single outbreak, and is estimated to cost $100 million in lost grapevines and mitigation efforts in California alone. And unlike the blue-green sharpshooter that tends to spread the disease most in Napa and Sonoma counties and along the coast, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, which causes trouble in Southern California, is invasive—it likely came over from its natural habitat in the southeastern US on the back of a nursery plant in the early 1990s. 

But in addition to posing a threat to the wine industry, glassy-winged sharpshooters pose a more immediate threat to any humans who happen to pass by them: The threat of being sprayed with a constant mist of bug urine.

Learn more about the super-powered urinary capabilities of these insects by listening to this week’s episode—or by hopping on over to this article about the prolific pee-ers. 

FACT: A fear of clowns may stem from the makeup itself

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Despite the cultural cache that a fear of clowns holds, and the fact that it’s super common for pop culture to reference it, there hasn’t been much academic research on the fear of clowns.

So the authors of a new study from the International Journal of Mental Health decided to examine the fear of clowns in an international population with the appropriately named “Fear of Clowns Questionnaire,” which was adapted from the “Fear of Spiders Questionnaire.”

Out of 927 participants, 27% said they had a fear of clowns, with 5% saying they were extremely afraid of clowns. More women reported that they were afraid of clowns and they had a more extreme fear of clowns than men, which actually follows a similar pattern in phobias just generally.

The strongest factor the researchers found causing people’s fear of clowns was that a clown’s makeup keeps people guessing at what their actual intentions are. They may have a permanently happy face, but that conceals whether they’re angry or upset, so the authors believe that being unable to know what a clown is really thinking or what they might do puts us on edge.

FACT: In the 18^th Century, toilets were not just for poop

By Melissa Dunphy

We’ve all come across signs in toilets begging us not to flush anything other than waste and sewer-safe toilet paper for fear of clogging or damaging plumbing. But before modern sewer systems, no such rules applied. Colonial Americans who used privy pits—shafts dug into the ground beneath an outhouse—tossed all kinds of trash into the depths along with their sewage. Wine bottles, kitchen waste, unwanted ceramic plates and bowls, old buttons, toys, cannon balls, smoking pipes, waste from cottage industries such as tanning and metalwork, and anything else they needed to get rid of from their households often ended up down the toilet hole, since in addition to lacking sewage pipes, they also lacked the convenience of modern trash collection. If, for example, your horse died while you were too busy to find a better means of disposal, you might simply heave it into the privy instead. It certainly couldn’t have made the smell any worse.

During this time period, specialists known as nightsoil men were paid to manually clean out privies every now and then, but after sewer systems came along, many privies were simply filled in, trash intact. Modern archaeologists especially value these privy pits as rich time capsules that provide fascinating snapshots into the everyday lives of the people who once used them, demonstrating that just about any trash will become treasure if you wait long enough.

The post There’s a good reason why so many adults are scared of clowns appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: A bunch of 18th-century dudes hung out in very hot rooms together in the name of science 

By Rachel Feltman

This story comes from a paper I read about in the Public Domain Review called “Experiments and Observations in a Heated Room,” circa 1774, which sounds like the name of a one-act play, and frankly should have been turned into one. 

The paper, by British physician and scientist Charles Blagden, recounts his experience being invited to the home of the scientist George Fordyce to see the man’s very very hot rooms. 

Fordyce had constructed a series of sealed rooms that were basically saunas, with pipes radiating heat into them and thermometers mounted on the walls. According to Blagden’s paper—and the sequel he published in 1775—he and several other gentlemen worked with Fordyce to test the limits of the human body with regard to heat. 

They started out in a 100 degree Fahrenheit room, which is not particularly impressive. But by the time they finished their second bout of experiments in 1775, they’d worked their way up to 260 degrees.

They made a lot of observations that might seem obvious now. They noticed that, at those higher temperatures, it was actually more comfortable to have clothing on than to be naked, since the heat scorched the skin much more quickly than it actually raised core body temperature. Blagden also noted that they could tolerate higher heat in dryer rooms, and correctly surmised that this was because water carried the heat to the body more efficiently than air, and that sweating—which is more effective when the air has more room to take up moisture and evaporate your sweat—was the key to the body’s heat-destroying powers. He was one of the first western scientists to make this connection, though it’s reasonable to assume that people living in hotter climates had probably figured this out by necessity. Keep in mind that the first thermometers designed to measure human temperature only showed up in the 1600s, and they wouldn’t be part of standard clinical medicine until the 1800s. 

But it is worth pointing out that they were being a bit obtuse about the temperatures previously endured by humankind. In his initial paper, Blagden actually made reference to “the experiments of M. Tillet,”—the botanist and metalworker Mathieu Tillet. In 1760, while trying to figure out how to heat grain enough to kill pests without wrecking the crop, Tillet ran into trouble with his data. He was using a thermometer attached to a long shovel to get the exact temperature inside the sugar-baking ovens he was using, but the temperature went down in the time it took to take it out. The girl tending the oven offered to just walk in and mark the level of the thermometer with a pencil, and told the scientist, at least according to his notes, that she “felt no inconvenience” in the 288 degree furnace. He and his colleague proceeded to basically goof off with a bunch of random items in the oven to see how the heat affected them. Blagden notes that the maid in question endured temperatures of 280 degrees for upwards of 10 minutes, and basically seems to be saying that he thinks girls who work by hot stoves probably get used to working by hot stoves, seemingly as a nod to the very obvious reality that he and his friends did not actually find and test the upper limits of human heat endurance. 

We now know that Blagden was very correct about the importance of moisture in the air: The more humid it is, the less heat we can take before our bodies start breaking down, because we’re not able to dump heat back into the air by way of evaporating sweat. A forecast of 120 degrees in death valley can be as physiologically tolerable as a sub-90 degree day in a swampy area. 

When you see weather reports refer to the “wet bulb” temperature, that’s a measurement of the combo of heat and humidity. Once it gets to 95 F wet bulb, give or take a couple degrees, we’re in trouble. At 100 percent humidity, we can only handle temperatures up to 87 degrees. 

On a lighter note, here’s a quick aside about the guy who built the hot rooms, who was memorialized in a local restaurant guide in the early 1800s for his absolutely bananas diet. 

FACT: When whales die, they create entire cities

By Sabrina Imbler

In 1987, a submersible scanning the seafloor of the Santa Catalina Basin detected something unusually large, 1,240 meters below the surface of the sea. It was a 65-foot-long whale skeleton. The whale had been dead for years, but its remains had become a thriving community on the seafloor, feeding clams, mussels, limpets and snails.

A natural burial for a whale—dying in the ocean and sinking to the seafloor—is called a whale fall. Ecosystems this deep are food limited, and many creatures rely on the constant drizzle of decaying flesh, poop, dust, and snot called marine snow to survive. But a whale fall is like a spontaneous deep-sea banquet that can sustain entire communities for years. Scientists estimate one whale fall is the equivalent of a thousand years of marine snow.

Whale falls are devoured in multiple stages. First, mobile scavengers like sleeper sharks, hagfish, and isopods travel long distances to feast on the carcass. This stage can last for several years until all the soft tissue is chewed away. The next stage is called the enrichment-opportunist stage, where worms, crustaceans, and bacteria feast on the whale nutrients sunken into the surrounding sand. The third, sulfophilic stage, can last for decades. Here, bone-eating Osedax worms and sulfur-oxidizing bacteria break down the fat inside whale bones. The fourth and final stage of a whale fall is called the reef stage, can last somewhat indefinitely. Now, the whale has become hard substrate, where suspension feeders like anemones and sponges can latch on and grow.

Whale falls were much more abundant hundreds of years ago, before whale populations drastically diminished the number of whales sinking to the seafloor. This has likely led to a ripple of extinctions in species that specialize on whale falls and rely on these carcasses to complete their life cycles. One whale researcher suggests about a third of whale fall specialists may have already gone extinct in the North Atlantic, where whaling reduced populations by about 75 percent. It’s only fitting that a creature this awe-inspiring in life would also be so consequential in death.

FACT: Neanderthals couldn’t smell just how stinky they were

By Sara Kiley Watson

You probably have a unique aroma that you can’t smell at all. And in your brain, it’s not that you don’t stink—it’s that you’re so used to your own stink that it doesn’t phase you anymore. In fact your own odor is comfortingly kinda familiar. After all, if you were constantly sniffing yourself, you’d probably have a breakdown from the sensory input of all of the stinks of your microbes, sweat, farts, etc. So–when some of your self produced stink, well, stinks, your nose gets used to it. And really, it’s not just your own stink after a while, eventually you’ll get used to the smell of your pets and family members and favorite foods.

But smelling is unique to all species, and individuals. For a study published in December, scientists looked at 30 different olfactory receptors across the Neanderthal, Denisovian, and ancient homo sapien genomes. They found 11 receptors in the extinct humans that had unique DNA that didn’t appear in humans. 

Via a difference in receptors, Neanderthals had a bit of a superpower. They couldn’t smell body odors as well as their cousins—specifically one neanderthal had a genetic mutation that slimmed their ability to smell androstadienone, a chemical we associate with urine and sweat smells. Considering these guys were living in caves, building complex structures there from around 176,000 years ago, this probably came in handy when it comes to living in a world without deodorant. 

The post Sunken whale carcasses create entire marine cities on the ocean floor appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: 1920s New York City architects hid spires in their buildings to sneakily become the tallest

By John Kennedy

In June 1930, the Empire State Building was ready to claim the title of world’s tallest, but its developers were at least a little bit worried the nearby Chrysler Building would sneakily unveil its final form and snatch the trophy right back.

This will-they-won’t-they suspense epitomized the architectural design slugfest between three (yes three) New York City buildings in the late 20s as they each tried to simply be bigger than all the others. The one you’re least likely to have realized was a part of this contest was 40 Wall Street, now known as the Trump Building. That’s because this 927-foot structure was, at best, only briefly No. 1 before the Chrysler developers secretly built a height-boosting spire inside the main structure and hoisted it into place, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Naturally, at least a few people working on the Empire State Building a few blocks away were worried the Chrysler architect, William Van Alen, had a similar trick up his sleeve for when their structure finally surpassed Chrysler’s 1,046-foot height. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about New York City’s race to the sky, and the underlying rivalry between former business partners that’s now set in stone and steel.

FACT: A bug that hadn’t been seen in decades showed up at a Walmart—and got identified over Zoom 

By Rachel Feltman

In 2020, Michael Skvarla had the unenviable task of leading an insect identification lab course over Zoom. The director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab was partway through describing a bug from his personal collection—one he’d labeled as an “antlion,” which is a dragonfly-like creature known for having predatory larvae most people call doodlebugs—when he froze. He was realizing, on Zoom and in real-time, that this wasn’t an antlion. He told the class they’d reclassify it together, and in a couple minutes they’d come to a shocking conclusion. 

It was actually Polystoechotes punctata, a member of a family of giant lacewing that’s existed for at least 100 million years.

A few quick caveats: Many news outlets referred to the giant lacewing as a “Jurassic-era insect,” but J. Ray Fisher, who works remotely from Fayateville for the University of Missouri and helped Skvarla confirm the insect’s identity, pointed out that this is a bit of a stretch. This is one of about 60 species with an evolutionary lineage that can be traced back to a common ancestor that originated in the Jurassic.

It’s also important to note that the giant lacewing is only “giant” in relation to other lacewings, which are smaller. The specimen Skvarla found has a wingspan of about two inches. 

So, this isn’t some massive bug that’s been missing since the days of the dinosaurs, or even one that’s been missing at all. You can still find it in the western US. But the species has been considered extirpated—that is to say, regionally extinct—in most of the country since 1950. If you look at the map of their recorded sightings, in the 1800s you see a few on the east coast, and in the early 20th century there are a handful around the midwest, but by the mid century the only citings are way out west. It’s not entirely clear why this happened, but most experts say that increased light pollution and invasive species drove them out.

Not only was Skvarla’s specimen from Arkansas—hundreds of miles east of any member of this species found for more than half a century—but he casually scooped it up from the facade of a Walmart in an urban area of Fayetteville. And this was way back in 2012. 

After that thrilling discovery via Zoom, Skvarla analyzed the bug’s DNA to confirm its identity. The big question now is whether there are more of them around. It’s possible that the Ozark mountains have some pockets of hitherto unknown giant lacewing populations. It’s also possible, as Fisher has pointed out to the press, that the bug just hitchhiked on a cross-country Walmart truck. 

FACT: Corpse wax is a thing in Elden Ring and the real world

By Jess Boddy

Last year, the masterpiece of a video game Elden Ring came out. I’ve been streaming it on Twitch basically ever since, and I’m still uncovering lore and secrets—many of which are science adjacent.

Something that the developer of Elden Ring, a company called FromSoftware, is very good at, is world building and lore. They tell these very deep, complex stories just through the environment—first in games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and now with Elden Ring. You’ve gotta explore the worlds they make and read item descriptions to understand what the heck is going on. It’s so rewarding and frankly, really fun to play games like that, kind of unraveling their stories one piece at a time. And Elden Ring is by far the most MASSIVE—there are like 10 different plots in Elden Ring that all kind of spin together in one way or another. And one of those stories has to do with corpse wax.

There’s one area of the game called Leyndell, Royal Capital. As the name suggests, it’s this big city kind of in the middle of the map. And as you explore the city, it’s clear some kind of tragedy went down there. And many of the buildings are totally sealed shut… but around some of the doorways, this orangey yellow, ooey-gooey substance is oozing out. The first time I saw it, I was like… I want to eat this. It looks like when you leave a fruit roll up in the car and it like melts. It looked delicious. Of course, the Elden Ring ooze is probably not delicious, because that was corpse wax. 

In real life, corpse wax is a thing that happens when a body SHOULD decompose, but it has a little too much moisture and very little or no oxygen. That is the perfect formula for a process called saponification to occur. Basically, anaerobic bacteria, the kind that don’t need oxygen to live, will go to town on a corpse’s body fat, and help set off a bunch of chemical reactions that turn that fat into a soapy, waxy substance called adipocere – aka, corpse wax. It starts off all ooey gooey, and then turns hard and brittle. That can actually kind of seal off the corpse, preserving it! Which is kind of an archeologist’s dream!

To hear all about how corpse wax in Elden Ring connects to real-life corpse wax mummies, check out this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

The post <em>Elden Ring</em>’s corpse wax is real—sort of appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: We still don’t understand some of the most basic things about the lifecycle of American eels

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum

American and European Eels are species catadromous fish. This means that they live the opposite kind of life from a salmon—eels spend most of their life in freshwater rivers, and then spawn in the ocean. But when their hormones say it’s time to reproduce, they leave their homes in Europe and North America and all migrate to the same place: the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Sargasso Sea is the only sea bordered on all sides by water, so named because of the vast mats of sargassum seaweed floating on its surface. It’s a patch of calm, blue water produced by a gyre of ocean currents spinning clockwise across the Atlantic. It’s an important place for fish and seabirds alike who take refuge in its seaweed, including American and European eels.

Eels start their lives as small, transparent young, called glass eels. For a long time, scientists thought that these glass eels and American/European eels were different species; it wasn’t until 19th century biologist raised the glass eels in tanks that they realized that hey matured into the big yellow-brown adults. But to this day, their lifestyle has remained a mystery—no one has found a European Eel egg or observed one spawning, for example. They just know that the little guys appear in the Sargasso.

We’re starting to learn more about the strange lives of these eels, though. For example, we now know that the adults of both species undertake the epic migration to the sargasso, dissolving their guts in order to conserve energy for the journey and dying after spawning. Scientists detected adult American eels in the Sargasso for the first time in 2015. Another team announced detecting European eels migrating to the Sargasso last year. Both American and European eels are endangered, critically endangered in the case of the latter. They’re especially vulnerable to fishing, plus the damming of the rivers where they spend their lives after spawning. So It’s more important than ever that we understand the ecology of these enigmatic fish.

FACT: ‘Bog butter’ is exactly what it sounds like, and it might just be delicious

By Rachel Feltman 

In 1859, archeologists Edward Clibborn and James O’Laverty published a paper in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology titled, simply, “Bog Butter.” 

“For many years past there have been found, from time to time, in the bogs of Ireland—and especially in those of the North—wooden vessels filled with butter in a hardened state, and quite free from putrefaction,” they wrote. “Specimens of these vessels, generally very much broken, are to be seen in all our museums, but until now we have never met with one in nearly a perfect state.”

But in the County of Derry, they said, they’d found a bog butter vessel in excellent shape. Based on this and other specimens, they wrote, along with what they knew about the history of Irish dairy prep, they now felt confident that the substances and pots had to do with butter churning and cheese making.

This was a huge win for the bog butter enthusiast community: in the 1800s there was simply no way to suss out the molecular makeup of butter-like substances you found buried in bogs. That didn’t stop the study authors from sampling the “yellowish white” substance they found, which they said tasted “somewhat like cheese.” 

Bog butter is now considered one of the more common historical relics one might find in a bog, especially in Ireland. There have been nearly 500 reported specimens found, and the oldest known example is from 3,500 years ago. The most recent dates to as late as the 1800s, so researchers suspect the preservation method persisted in some rural pockets until pretty recently. 

In 2019, researchers used stable carbon isotope analysis on the individual fatty acids in 50 bog butter samples to finally show, definitively, that there was butter in them there bogs. 

So, why did people put butter into bogs? The answer is probably: lots of reasons! Why not put butter into a bog?

Researchers point out that it’s a common and misguided trope for archeologists to try to come up with a single explanation for a practice that spanned thousands of years. And not every bog butter is the same: some are in elaborate wooden vessels that predate the butter inside them by centuries, suggesting a longstanding practice of making and reusing bog butter pots, while others were seemingly dumped in without any protection. But their best guesses for those myriad reasons include protecting or hiding precious resources from enemies and authority figures (at times in Ireland you could literally pay your taxes with butter), offering up said precious dairy to gods or spirits, storing the butter to preserve it, or even using the bog process as a way of creating distinct flavors. 

To find out more about why bogs are freakishly good at preserving food—and how modern scientists went about making bog butter of their own—give this week’s episode a listen. 

FACT: You always get some splashback on you when peeing

By Purbita Saha

Why is peeing into a toilet or urinal so messy? This is actually a big head scratcher in fluid dynamics science. No matter how and where you pee, you’re bound to get a bit of splashback on yourself or your surroundings. This, of course, is amplified if you go no. 1 standing up. The amount of splashback also depends on the trajectory of your stream and the receptacle. Lessening the scatter effect could improve hygiene in public toilets—and make pee-recycling systems more efficient.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot of research on this topic. The Splash Lab, run by engineer Tadd Truscott, has been analyzing the behavior of pee once it rushes out of the human body for more than a decade now. Formerly based at Brigham Young University and now at Utah State University, the team uses giant spray jets and tanks to mimic the act of peeing and trace the splatter pattern of each single drop with high-speed cameras. 

Their takeaway was basically that once pee is airborne, it has a mind of its own. Once it’s traveled a few inches outside the urethra, the stream begins to break up. So, when it finally reaches the inside of a toilet bowl or the back of a urinal, it hits the hard surface as thousands of individual drops. That’s when all hell breaks loose.

Depending on the angle at which you pee, plus how much and how quickly you have to relieve yourself, the force of the droplets will guarantee splashback. Closing in the distance, ideally by sitting on or squatting over the toilet, can blunt the damage. You’ll still get some pee on your netherregions, but your clothes, the seat, the floor, and, god forbid, the ceiling should be protected.

If peeing straight down isn’t an option, get as close to the receptacle as possible. Then, pee at a gently sloping downward angle so that the back of the urinal or toilet bowl still captures the bulk of the splashback. Don’t send the stream down straight into the water or drain: Making contact with another surface can cause the droplets to separate and spread out even more.

Some of the findings from the Splash Lab have helped other researchers innovate streamlined urinal designs. A recent one from the University of Waterloo, nicknamed the “Nautiloo,” is shaped like a mollusc shell with a narrow long channel, raised edges, and a curved bottom to force the pee to stream down rather than break into oodles of droplets. It was also tested for urninators of different heights, which makes a difference. Others have experimented with inserts that mimic desert moss from Mongolia to actually absorb or filter the pee to prevent splashback. But none of these are available for public restrooms or your personal bathroom just yet. So for now, it’s best to suck it up and pop a squat. And then maybe clean up after with a bidet attachment.

The post ‘Bog butter’ is exactly what it sounds like: delicious appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The Drug Enforcement Administration had to get involved in the first successful cardiac xenotransplantation.

By Sandra Gutierrez G.

Because of tricky logistics, scarcity of viable organs, and various cultural apprehensions, doctors have been looking into xenotransplantation, where animal tissue is implanted into a human body. 

Researchers had been experimenting on baboons for years, and in 2021 a team at NYU successfully transplanted two genetically engineered porcine kidneys into human patients. But in January 2022, Muhammad Mohiuddin and a medical team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine upped the ante by successfully transplanting a pig’s heart for the first time. The patient, 57-year-old David Bennet Senior, unfortunately died two months after the procedure, but the cause of death was unrelated to the porcine heart beating in his chest, which is why the operation was a true medical breakthrough. 

Before the surgery, the pig’s heart soaked in a particular concoction containing a mix of hormones and a very special ingredient—one gram per liter of dissolved cocaine. The solution was developed by Swedish doctor Stig Steen, who gave it the cute name of “brain death cocktail.” In a 2016 paper, Steen showed that the liquid helped stabilize the pig’s heart for up to 24 hours after harvesting, which would theoretically increase the chances of a successful transplant. 

But the recipe behind the brew is proprietary, which means the team at the University of Maryland had to import it from Sweeden, creating a bureaucratic nightmare that forced the Drug Enforcement Administration to get involved.

It’s unclear exactly how this works and what’s the specific role of cocaine in this brew, but working with tissue that stays healthy for longer could be key not only for future xenotransplantations but also to address organ shortages and making it possible to fly in organs from across state lines. 

FACT: Scientists once taught goldfish to drive.

By Rachel Feltman 

About a year ago, researchers in Israel published evidence that goldfish can learn to drive tanks. Fish tanks, that is. 

They started by crafting what they called FOVs—fish operated vehicles, of course—which basically amounted to aquariums secured to motorized wheels. The rig included a little camera hooked up to a Raspberry Pi computer, which pointed down into the water, tracked the movements of the fish inside, and translated them into wheel movements based on a simple algorithm. 

The researchers placed a pink board somewhere in the room, and the fish were given a food pellet the moment their tank-mobile successfully tapped the target. After a few days, the six goldfish—who it feels important to note were named after Pride and Prejudice characters—all learned how to steer their FOVs to the snack zone. They were able to navigate the vehicle from different starting points, and managed to ignore false targets and even recover and redirect when they bumped into walls. Apparently Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley were the best drivers. 

The point was to see whether goldfish have some innate sense of logic when it comes to navigating a space. The purpose of the FOV is just to make it possible for a fish to navigate a non-aquatic space. It doesn’t matter what the fish thinks is happening when it makes the tank move; what matters is that the fish is figuring out the best way to get to an arbitrary target, using extremely non-fish-native wayfinding points, because it knows there will be food there. 

They were even able to approach their targets from a variety of different angles, which suggests that they have some internal representation of the strange world around them. And they got faster over time. 

All of this helps support the idea that the way we navigate space, which we know has to do with parts of our hippocampus that are pretty similar in all vertebrates, has more to do with some innate inner mind mapping that goes on than it does species-specific ways of figuring out an environment. 

A study published in 2019 did genuinely teach rats to drive little cars. The point of that study really was to teach rats to drive, not just propel themselves around in a strange space. The idea was to show whether growing up in so-called enriched environments—cages with multiple levels to climb on and interesting stuff to play with—made rats better able to learn stuff and less likely to be stressed about the novelty. 

FACT: Rodent DNA revealed a black market seal trade.

By Sara Kiley Watson

150 years ago, sealers in New Zealand nearly brought fur seals, also known as Kekeno, to extinction. Nowadays, they are doing much better—the last recorded count shows in 2001 there were 200,000 of the fuzzy cuties bouncing around the rocky shores throughout mainland New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, and the sub-Antarctic islands, as well as parts of Australia. 

The hunting of Kekono began with the Maori people who lived in New Zealand and the Cook Islands pre-colonialism, but things got especially troubling with the arrival of Europeans. By the 1700s, seals were confined to the far south of New Zealand, and by the early 1800s the seal populations were already in dangerous decline and the legality of sealing became more of a legal gray area. 

But, a discovery that lays open some secrets about an illegal seal trade between Asia and New Zealand has only recently unfolded, with the help of tiny detectives—rodents that have stowed away on ships and created populations of two distinct species on the two islands of New Zealand. As it turns out, while one population can be traced back to trade with Europe, another population comes solely from Asia—a region where this seal trade was largely kept off the books. 

The post Goldfish learned to drive tanks on wheels—and that’s not even the best part appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Lubrication is why chocolate feels so good on your tongue

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Most of us aren’t thinking about physics and materials science when we eat chocolate, but there’s a reason chocolate’s melt-in-your-mouth sensation feels so good, and it’s all about lubrication.

In a paper published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces in January 2023, researchers from the University of Leeds created a 3D artificial tongue surface and used techniques from a field of engineering called tribology to better understand the reason for chocolate’s specific mouthfeel. Tribology is basically the study of how surfaces interact with each other while they’re in motion and how friction and lubrication affect them.

What they found is that chocolate releases a fatty film – the lubrication – that mixes with your spit to coat your tongue and mouth. But the really interesting thing is that it’s the fat layer on the outside layer of the chocolate that contributes to chocolate’s mouthfeel and *not* the fat located on the inside of the bar. The researchers hope the research could help food scientists develop multilayered chocolate that’s better for you by reducing the fat on the inside of the chocolate, but keeping it in the outside layer that actually comes into contact with your tongue.

FACT: There’s a German word for a bird with an arrow stuck through its neck 

By Rachel Feltman

In 1822, a white stork flew by a northern German estate with a shocking passenger in tow: it had a two-and-a-half-foot spear sticking through its neck. The wound didn’t seem to have bothered it much, since it had carried the weapon all the way from Africa. 

The bird, which after all that was shot out of the sky and stuffed, was dubbed a pfeilstorch—an arrow stork. Examination of the weapon that impaled it revealed it was made of African wood, and similar in design to weapons used in Central Africa. 

But that wasn’t just shocking because it meant the bird had flown thousands of miles with an arrow through its neck. The very idea that a stork might spend time on another continent was really big news. At that time, at least among Europeans, the fact that birds disappeared for part of the year was considered a total mystery. They didn’t know that the birds were migrating. The appearance of a local bird that carried proof of having recently been on a different continent also provided the best evidence to date that birds migrated.

Not everyone was totally clueless about migration. There are Indigenous folk tales that involve references to migrating geese flying off for the winter, and some Polynesian myths involve birds traveling long distances as well. That makes sense, because many Polynesian explorers were island-hopping themselves. They would have had a better chance of spotting a bird making a seasonal pilgrimage than, say, Aristotle would. 

Aristotle, for what it’s worth, described some short-range migrations around the mediterranean as he observed them, and hypothesized that cranes might go to the edges of the earth to do annual battle with humans who lived there, for some reason. But he also thought that some birds, like swallows, simply hibernated in muddy lake beds, while others turned into entirely different kinds of birds, like caterpillars turning into butterflies. 

These beliefs were still circulating in the late 1600s, which is when a scholar named Charles Morton argued that storks disappeared because they flew to the moon.

One especially fun thing about the pfeilstorch is that folks say some 25 of them have been recorded. I tried to trace that number back to its source, and the furthest I got was a 2003 newsletter, in German, from the University of Rostock, which is the institution that studied and taxidermied that infamous bird in 1822. I als found an english-language review of a German book published in 2005 called “Das Buch von Pfeilstorch,” or the book of the arrow stork, which apparently recounts and summarizes 24 known instances from the last few hundred years. 

We do know that this strange phenomenon has happened more than once, because at least two have been reported at different times in recent history in Israel. 

We now know that the stork’s 4,000 mile or so round-trip migration is actually pretty chill as far as bird migrations go. The Arctic tern flies from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle and back every year, which is nearly 19,000 miles. In 2022, researchers reported what could be the longest non-stop journey for a migratory bird, which was a five-month-old bar-tailed godwit that made it from Alaska to Tasmania—about 8,500 miles—in just 11 days. According to the little solar-powered GPS it was carrying, it did not stop. 

FACT: Ovaries are more regenerative than we thought

By Rachel E. Gross

There’s one fact everyone seems to remember from high school biology: If you have XX chromosomes, you’re born with all the eggs you’ll ever have. Starting around puberty, your ovaries begin pumping those eggs out monthly, and the count starts falling. By the time you hit menopause, you’re down to zero. So I remember being shocked to learn while reporting my book Vagina Obscura that this simple countdown isn’t the whole story. Not even close. We now know that ovaries, like most tissues in the body, harbor stem cells. And those stem cells seem to be able to grow into new eggs.

As you might expect, this change holds serious consequences for how we think of female health and fertility. It also suggests that the ovaries may be less like trickling-away hourglasses, and more like rechargeable batteries.

One surprising reason we’ve started re-examining human ovaries in the first place is thanks to scientists who study sex shifting chickens and their mind-blowing gonads. Chickens have just one ovary—the other one withers away soon after birth—that supplies them with hormones and grows massive eggs on a near-daily basis. That single ovary also has remarkable powers of regeneration. In past experiments where scientists removed it, they learned that it often grew back completely, eggs and all. Sometimes, the bird even grew a new testes!

Often it takes fresh blood and a new lens to move science forward. For half a century, ovarian biologists of the human variety stuck to the truism that women were born with all their eggs, and ovaries degenerated over time. It’s no coincidence that chicken scientists were some of the first to point out that actually, human ovaries, too, might be using their stem cells to regenerate and replenish themselves throughout your lifetime—potentially even past menopause.

The post A stork impaled by a 30-inch spear flew thousands of miles to make it home appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: You can (sort of) blame pirates for your inability to understand temperatures in Celsius 

By Rachel Feltman

As someone who married into a European family, I deal with the persistent absurdity of America’s stubborn use of English measurement more than most. I often wonder how we got to be pretty much the only country that eschews the metric system—the only other nations that haven’t officially adopted it are Liberia and Myanmar—and it turns out that pirates can take at least part of the blame.  

When the US was new and it was time to decide what its official way of doing business was, the idea of standardized measurements, even within a single country, was relatively novel. This is not to say people didn’t measure things before then; the concept of units of measurement has existed since ancient Mesopotamia, if not longer. But for most of human history, those measurements were relatively relative. You needed something to reference when weighing or measuring, and those had to be common objects, like seeds or parts of the human body, which all have variations in size. 

Fast forward to the 1790s, when the founding fathers are trying to figure out how the US will measure things. Luckily for us, France—which had amassed hundreds of confusing and inexact regional units of measurement over the years—was on the cusp of something huge in the wake of its own revolution. 

Tasked with developing a more enlightened system by the National Assembly, the French Academy of Sciences decided to base the system on a natural physical unit: the length of 1/10,000,000 of a quadrant of a great circle of Earth, measured around the poles of the meridian passing through Paris. Figuring that out took a six-year survey led by some of the greatest minds of the day, but they were finally able to ascertain the length of the arc of the meridian from Barcelona to Dunkirk. The new unit was dubbed the metre, from Greek metron, meaning “measure.”

You might think that after all that hard work, the US would have jumped at using such a sensible system—especially given that it came from the French, our revolutionary allies, and was created as a sort of symbol of reason and democracy. But of course we know that didn’t happen.

That’s where pirates came in. Thomas Jefferson did indeed express interest in the new metric system, and France sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey to the US with a standardized copper kilogram weight for reference. Unfortunately, the ship blew off course to the Caribbean, where a bunch of British privateers tasked with causing trouble for enemy merchant ships took him prisoner and tried to ransom him, after he failed to convince them he was actually just a Spanish sailor. He died in captivity, and they auctioned off the contents of his ship. 

The weight didn’t turn up until the 1950s, when someone donated it to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. 

The US ended up sticking with British units, which had evolved out of Anglo-Saxon and Roman systems. Britain would implement the British Imperial system a few decades later, while the US formalized its own version. It’s quite a stretch to say the pirate misadventure was the reason we went with British imperial measurements instead of the flashy new French system, but it certainly didn’t help. 

Loads of countries had adopted the metric system for themselves by the mid-19th century, and international governments were starting to talk about how absurd it was not to have standardized measurements for science and industry. In 1875, 17 different countries, including the US, signed the “treaty of the meter” in Paris and agreed to define all units based on the standard metric bases. In 1893, the US officially adopted metric standards as our own fundamental definitions for measurement units. 

The reason we didn’t switch entirely is that our machines and factories and official documents all revolved around English units, and business entities lobbied against having to make the overhaul. But these days, a lot of companies voluntarily use metric measurements in creating their products to make them easier to sell and use internationally. 

FACT: Your earwax says a lot about you

By Lauren Young

In many Asian cultures, ear cleaning is an act of care and affection that’s been around for centuries. The gentle practice of removing the sticky or flaky stuff in your ear holes is seen as a soothing, loving household ritual depicted in Japan Edo-era woodcut prints and manga of wives who would clean their husbands ears or of mothers who would clean their children’s ears with these thin ear rakes. And these very special soothing moments call for special bamboo ear picks or rakes, called mimikaki in Japanese. There are many different types of ear picks in Asian culture: some had a little down puff or decorative Daruma doll on the opposite end of the curved scoop; others were made of precious metals like gold and silver. Today, a number of Asian countries have ear cleaning salons. But the obsession with removing earwax spans across time and cultures—from the ancient Romans, Europeans in the 16th and early 17th century, and the Vikings. Now we’ve got a variety of modern-day earwax removal kits made of plastic and stainless steel, and sport  little lights and even cameras.

Even though we’re super obsessed with getting rid of it, many ear, nose, and throat doctors say that earwax is best left alone. In fact, your earwax can tell quite a bit about you. For instance, most of us fall into two main groups of earwax types: wet or dry. What type you have links back to your genetics. In 2006 a Nature Genetics study identified a specific gene that was responsible for earwax type, and found that wet earwax was the more dominant trait than dry. The study also explained that wet earwax is more commonly found in populations of European and African descent, while dry earwax is typically prevalent in East Asians (of course, there are exceptions). The scent of your earwax can occasionally tell you about the health of your ear. A change in odor can tip off a otolaryngologist of a potential fungal or bacterial infection, like swimmer’s ear. While earwax generally doesn’t change, an infection can cause the ear to leak a liquidy, smelly discharge. 

Earwax is a defensive lubricant, filled with antibacterial and antifungal proteins that helps keep the ear healthy. As a rule of thumb, ear, nose, and throat doctors recommend not trying to clear out your earwax if it’s bothering you (please, put down those cotton swabs). But too much earwax can be a bad thing. There are instances where earwax should be checked and removed by medical professionals. If you’re experiencing any pain in the inner ear, doctors sometimes need to clear out earwax to take a look at your eardrums to ensure there isn’t any damage. It’s particularly important for people who wear hearing aids or hearing assistive devices to get their ears regularly cleaned to prevent severe impactions. Earwax pushes out of the ear canal on its own. However, the ear molds of hearing devices block this natural movement and can also increase earwax production. As the substance builds up, it can worsen hearing loss or cause conditions like tinnitus. People with hearing aids need to vigilant about cleaning their devices and going in for regular cleaning appointments with their doctors. 

If your ears aren’t already full of earwax facts, you can learn more in an article on PopSci.

FACT: Gender norms in STEM aren’t universal

By Angela Saini

During the 1980s and 1990s, the proportion of women studying computer science in the computer science department of Yerevan State University in the former Soviet republic of Armenia never fell below 75%. When they were writing a paper about this is 2006, the authors even felt they had to point out that “this is not a typo”. Because the Soviet Union encouraged women to work and go to technical colleges, gender norms in STEM are still different in former socialist states.

The post Your earwax contains multitudes—of secrets about your health appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Dinosaur sex might’ve been simpler than we thought

By Dustin Growick

Listen. We’re not quite sure how dinosaurs literally came together to make more dinosaurs…but there are some pretty wild theories out there. Did male T. rexes use their tiny arms to tickle the backs of the females while mating? Probably not. Did giant long-neck sauropods—the largest animals to ever walk the face of the Earth—have to go to “sex lakes” in order to breed? Come on now. One thing we’re pretty sure about—based on modern reptile and bird corollaries—is that dinosaurs had cloacas. What’s a cloaca? Well, it’s kind of like one hole to rule them all, out which comes pee, poop, and the sexytime juices. So, yes, like most modern birds, dinosaurs probably practiced a “cloacal kiss” in order to reproduce. How romantic!

FACT: The Monty Python “silly walk” can be great exercise

By Rachel Feltman

The 2022 holiday issue of the British Medical Journal had a real Christmas cracker of a study: An investigation into the biomechanical implications of the Monty Python “silly walk.”

This actually isn’t the first time the silly walk has shown up in peer-reviewed literature. In 2020, Dartmouth researchers published an analysis of the gaits of the two silly walkers—dubbed Putey and Teabag in the sketch—for the journal Gait and Posture. They basically measured how much variation between steps there was, and unsurprisingly found that both were way more variable than a normal gait, but that Teabag’s was much more so than Putey’s. 

Researchers from the University of Virginia, Arizona State University, and Kansas State University took things a silly step further in this new BMJ paper. They gathered 13 healthy adults and had each of them put on a rig to measure how much oxygen they were taking in, how much energy they were expending, and how intensely they were exerting themselves. Each of them first walked around in a normal gait, then tried to mimic Teabag and Putey. 

The scientists found that while the Putey walk didn’t expend much more energy than a normal stroll, the Teabag walk basically amounted to intense exercise. 

Based on their findings, the researchers say that doing the Teabag silly walk for 11 minutes a day could provide adults with their recommended amount of physical activity. 
Even if someone can’t or doesn’t wish to kick their legs into the air and shuffle strangely for a dozen minutes or so a day, the researchers point out that the key is that the movement is inefficient, from an energy expenditure standpoint. Anything that makes movements less efficient—like traveling in a zigzag—can accomplish the same goal. And since the best physical activity is whatever activity gives you joy to do, a silly walk could sometimes be better than the gym!

FACT: Two ground-shaking discoveries were recently found in old museum cabinets

By Sara Kiley Watson

As someone who doesn’t clean their desk out often enough—do it more often. Especially if you happen to work at a museum. For two museums, the finds in the back of their cupboards were game changing. Researchers found both a hidden lizard relative that holds the key to when squamates originated and the remains of the last Tasmanian tiger on the planet.

When it comes to the lizard, scientists at the Natural History Museum in London originally thought a unique fossil belonged to the Clevosaurus family, a part of the Rhynchocephalia group. These guys only have one living relative, the tuatara of New Zealand, and the oldest fossils go back to the Middle Jurassic, some 238 to 240 million years ago. These guys split from squamates, which includes most of today’s lizards and snakes, way back then. Scientists decided to take a closer look at the fossil, doing x-ray scans and reconstructing the skeleton in 3D, and discovered that this wee lizard has more in common with the ones scampering around your backyard than the unique Tuatara—pushing back lizard evolution as we know it quite a bit before we thought.
The next reason to clean out your old drawers comes from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) in Hobart, Tasmania. And while these remains aren’t millions of years old, they are still a big deal. For 85 years, the remains of the last known Tasmanian tiger or thylacine were missing—until they were found recently in a museum cupboard. This means the well-photographed “last Tasmanian tiger” wasn’t the last one at all.

The post The Monty Python ‘silly walk’ could replace your gym workout appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Dr. Robert White did a primate head transplant—but did he transplant a soul?

By: Brandy Schillace

We tend to give precedence to the brain, and so long as our consciousness remains intact, we are we. But should we have that brain removed from the body that houses it—well, that’s another story. In fact, it’s this story. I tell the incredible story of a “Frankenstein” event, the world’s first successful primate head transplant, but also how this bizarre encounter shaped, and in fact inaugurated, life-saving technologies that still save lives today. The book will also explore a mystery that still begs to be solved: if you make a brain to live outside a body, what becomes of the self? Or as one doctor puts it, “Can you transplant the human SOUL?” And finally, this story will follow a contest every bit as determined as the space race: the Cold War contest between Russia and America to perform the first head transplant in a bid to overcome mortality and to bestow life.

Fact: Koalas have shockingly human fingerprints—but the forensic implications have been greatly exaggerated 

By Rachel Feltman

Let’s start with a supposed ‘fact’ that just isn’t true. Supposedly, back in the 90s, a spate of robberies turned out to have been committed not by a human, but by a koala—because these animals have fingerprints so similar to our own as to confuse police. 

There haven’t actually been any koala capers, as far as the record shows. This seems to have been inspired by the statement of a scientist back in the ‘90s, who pointed out that koala prints could, in theory, confuse police at crime scenes, and he figured someone should probably look into that. And in terms of purely theoretical happenings, he wasn’t wrong: You could absolutely confuse a koala’s fingerprint with a human’s, which is wild when you consider how mysterious fingerprints are to begin with.

Let’s zoom out from koalas for a minute. What exactly is a fingerprint, and why do we have them? 

Our fingerprints are made out of ridged skin that can be found on our hands and the soles of our feet, as well as on several other body parts in different mammals. They come in three major pattern categories called loops, whorls, and arches. But the idea that no two fingerprints are alike comes down to tiny shapes and changes in the characteristics of the lines within those figures, which are known as minutiae. That’s why the forensic reliability of fingerprints is more hotly debated than you might think, given that they’ve been a ubiquitous part of crime scene investigation since the early 1900s. Because the differences in fingerprints come down to loads of tiny little features, it’s very possible for an unscrupulous or biased analyzer to call something a match when it’s actually not. 

But while we can’t actually say with certainty that no two people have ever had the same fingerprints, because that’s more of a statistical question than a biological one, we do know that the amount of tiny variations that are possible in the formation of a fingerprint make it nearly, if not literally, impossible for two individuals to end up with the same set. Identical twins have more similarities between their fingerprints than fraternal twins do, and the similarities increase out from there as relations get more distant, so it’s clear there’s a genetic component. Basically, the general vibe of your fingerprint is quite heritable, but the many minutiae aren’t.

That comes down to how fingerprints form. When a fetus is about seven weeks along, its hands and feet start to form little humps called volar pads. A few weeks later, the fetus starts to grow quickly enough that those bumps just sort of fade back into the palms of its hands and feet. The shifting pressures of growing tissue seem to cause folds to form in the skin, which is how we get our whirls, arches, or loops. And which one you get depends on when, in your fetal development, your volar pads got overtaken by your growing hands and feet. That timing definitely has a genetic component, so families tend to have the same general type of fingerprint. But the formation of minutiae is way more arbitrary, and can be impacted by everything from the viscosity of your amniotic fluid to how much you punched your mom’s kidneys in utero. 

Scientists have yet to land on one concrete explanation for why fingerprints evolved, but their best guesses come down to improving our grip strength by creating friction or making us more sensitive to tactile information—there’s some evidence that the ridges of our fingerprints increase the vibrations we feel when we touch something. One 2009 study suggested that fingerprints might amplify useful vibrations while dampening others to help specialized nerve cells interpret surface texture. When that paper came out, a lot of news outlets crowd about how the “urban legend” that fingerprints existed to improve grip strength had been “debunked,” but that’s far from true. As recently as a couple of years ago, researchers were continuing to explore how these friction ridges might affect our ability to grab things, particularly when our skin is moist due to sweat. Some experts have even pointed out that an improved sense of touch could contribute to better gripping abilities, since it would help you realize when something was slipping out of your grasp, so both benefits could have been involved in fingerprint evolution. 

Let’s get back to our cuddly buddies down under. Back in the 1990s, a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist named Maciej Henneberg who’d recently come to work at the University of Adelaide was working with some koalas at a wildlife refuge when he got to looking at their digits. He was surprised he’d never read or heard anything about their fingerprints, because they looked to him to be quite human-like. He and his colleagues found some recently deceased specimens to scan with an electron microscope, and their study showed that they did indeed have a lot of similarities. 

Fingerprints show up in other primates, but koalas aren’t nearly as closely related to us as chimps and gorillas are. Marsupials branched off from primates more than 70 million years ago. So this seems to be a case of convergent evolution, meaning that what worked for primate fingers also happened to work for koala fingers. Koalas, after all, do a lot of climbing. They’re also very particular about what plants they eat, so tactile sensitivity must be useful. We see this a lot in nature—bat wings and bird wings are super similar, but didn’t actually come from a common ancestor. 

Henneberg never actually set out to catch a koala on the lam, nor did he suggest the police should actually do so. But he did point out that a crime scene could potentially be contaminated by koala prints, and the rest is history. 

I think part of the reason this sometimes gets shared as an anecdote about actual crime scenes is some rather cheeky reporting on Henneberg’s 1996 study by UK newspaper The Independent, which ran the headline “Koalas make a monkey out of the police.” The story included a local anecdote from 1975, when Hertfordshire police raided several zoos to take prints from a handful of chimps and orangutans. The guy who ordered the exercise said it was because cops used to refer to ambiguous prints as “monkey prints,” so, sure, an idiom is a great reason to go dust chimps for prints, I guess. On the bright side, zookeepers recall the chimps being happy to get the attention. This very strange side quest showed the police force that the prints were very similar, but not actually close enough to human prints to trick a trained eye—which is likely the case with koalas, too. 

I do have to dunk on The Independent circa 1996 for this one line in particular: “The chimp file is likely to be re-examined in the light of new evidence yesterday that criminal investigations in Australia may have been hampered by the presence of koala fingerprints at the scenes of crimes.” That’s based on quite literally nothing said by any of the sources quoted or referenced, and I’m pretty sure it’s what gave people the idea that primates and marsupials were under active investigation.

Fact: Sea sponges sneeze!

By: Sara Kiley Watson

It is sneeze season. And there’s plenty to make you sneeze out there–colds, the flu, allergies, you name it. 

Humans aren’t the only animals that sneeze–elephants, pandas, seals, puppies, and more all get that tickle in their nose sometimes. But not all animals sneeze—sharks for instance have nostrils and everything, but those nostrils don’t link to the back of the throat like humans do, so if they get something stuck up in their smellers they have to just try to shake it out, apparently. Aquatic animals in general don’t have the advantage of using a ton of air to push out every single annoying particle they suck up while swimming about.

However, a new study shows how one aquatic animal, in its own little way, sneezes to get rid of junk that clogs up their internal filter system—sea sponges. 

Sea sponges are some of the oldest creatures out there, with a fossil record dating back approximately 600 million years to the earliest (Precambrian) period of Earth’s history. Sponges don’t have noses, obviously. They instead have all of these tiny pores that suck in stuff from the water around them, which they use as food and nutrients. But just like when you get a whiff of stinky perfume instead of fresh air, sometimes sponges just need to sneeze something out. And sponges can’t move, so if their home all of the sudden becomes really gross, they especially need one hearty achoo. 

How their sneezes work is their little water inlets release mucus slowly over time, which builds up on their little sponge-y surfaces. When that mucus becomes too much, the sponge tissues contract and push the waste-filled snot globs into the water. Visually, it’s like pimples popping themselves, so if that’s your thing then you’ll be a big fan of the sponge sneeze.

The post A sea sponge’s sneeze lasts a very, very long time appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Scientists are feeding poisoned toad butts to predators to save their lives.

By Bethany Brookshire

Cane toads hopped across Australia beginning in the 1930s. Scientists brought them in originally to try to combat the cane grub attacking sugar cane farms. Unfortunately, cane toads weren’t much for cane grub control. Instead, they bred really well and started hopping west. (For the best possible content on this, I recommend this iconic cane toad documentary on YouTube.) In the process, they came to the attention of the local predators. But cane toads are toxic! They have poisonous pads on their shoulders. Predators who ate them quickly found out they had eaten their last meal. Up to 90% of predators would end up dead as cane toads spread west. To save the predators, scientists have started giving naive predators bits of toad before the real ones arrive, hoping to teach the predators that toads are a never food. Some predators get sausages made of toad, others get non-poisonous toad butts. Both are laced with lithium chloride, a substance that doesn’t kill, but does make the animals feel very, very nauseated. The animals that rely on live prey get exposed to baby cane toads, ones too small to kill them outright, but with enough poison to make the predators learn their lessons. So far the toad butts appear to work! Predators exposed to cane toads only decline by about 50% when the big toads arrive. It’s still bad, but not as bad as it could be.

For more on cane toads, and on the other amazing animals that we hate, and why we hate them, check out Bethany Brookshire’s book, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, wherever fine books are sold. 

FACT: No one actually thought riding a train would make your uterus fly out of your body—but the moral panic was very real.

By Rachel Feltman

A couple years back on Weirdest Thing, I talked about how the invention of the modern bicycle led to all kinds of moral and medical uproar about why women shouldn’t ride them.  And in my recent book, I talk about the history of the term hysteria—which was once a fully serious medical belief that the uterus wandered around the body following exciting smells like some kind of feral rodent, thereby impacting health. 

Both of these stories prompted friends and readers and listeners alike to say “you’ve got to talk about how when trains were first invented, men thought that moving at such speeds would make a woman’s uterus go flying right out of her!!!”

I’ve attempted to do this episode multiple times, but my cursory research efforts have always come up short. I found loads of blog posts and listicles and Reddit comments discussing this historical anecdote, but kept striking out on an actual historical source. As it turns out, there probably isn’t one! 

This specific supposed factoid seems to come from a 2011 interview with a technologist from Intel. And in her defense, the way she paraphrased the historical attitudes around trains was pretty clearly, at least in my reading, meant to be off-the-cuff and a bit hyperbolic. But people really latched onto the idea that Victorian men literally thought organs were getting ripped out of bodies, and it’s gotten repeated as fact over and over. 

The closest thing we actually find to this in the historical literature, though, is an article in the New England Medical Gazette from 1870, where a doctor fussed over the strong vibrations of the bench a woman might sit on while riding a train, and how that might delay a menstrual cycle and/or cause “uterine flexion or dislocation.”

Important context here is that people still believed in the whole hysteria thing, whereby the uterus shifted around the body and caused trouble. A lot of physicians by this point had come up with more modest and reasonable amounts of motion a uterus could undertake, in contrast to their forefathers who had literally thought that thing could go anywhere, but they still thought it was an organ prone to ending up in the wrong spot. So, someone saying this is very different from someone saying they thought trains would send your uterus flying out your vagina. 

That’s not to say that Victorians were chill and reasonable about railway trains (or uteruses). According to papers from the 1860s, which was a few decades after passenger steam trains first became a thing, consumers had been worried about everything from suffocating in tunnels to fainting in the exhaust fumes. When The Lancet solicited research on rail travel in the early 1860s, doctors blamed it for everything from miscarriage to brain congestion. 

In hindsight, we can see the clear rise of a moral panic around railway travel. In the 1860s and 1870s, as train travel became more ubiquitous—even as doctors wrote confidently that fears of asphyxiation and such had been unfounded—there started to be accounts of totally healthy people boarding trains and being driven to violent madness. There was loads of media coverage, which may have made people who were on-edge more prone to having the sort of breakdown they were supposed to have on a train. People also started to write stories about how patients from mental asylums could just pop onto a train and you’d never know, and you’d be stuck with them, which really puts the concept of Uber Pool into sharp perspective. 

There was also a lot of debate over something called Railway Spine, which referred to the long term physical distress reported by survivors of the first passenger train crashes. Railway owners saw this as an obvious sign that folks were faking distress for money, but doctors worried that something about the high speeds of rail—and the resulting force of its collisions—could be creating an illness they’d never seen before. Now it’s easy to characterize these symptoms as traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, or both. But the belief that there was something special about trains that made them particularly dangerous may have 

led to the general sense of panic around them.

Trains were obviously not our first moral panic over technology. Ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates groused about how writing and reading were a slippery slope into laziness and anti-intellectualism, since obviously the natural way to learn new information was to hear it in person and then just remember it perfectly. People thought telephones would electrocute them and keep everyone from leaving their homes. Zippers may have been associated with laziness and moral decay. The printing press would allow for false prophets to print satanic bibles. Reading popular novels would rot young peoples’ brains.

In her 2020 paper “The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics,” Cambridge University experimental psychologist Amy Orben points out that adolescents are often at the center of moral panics around new tech. Orben also points out that we’ve looped scientists into these questions, looking for data-driven answers on how something might impact our youth. But she notes that these studies are almost always flawed—they make generalizations about who uses the tech and how, and assume all people using it will be affected the same way, and generally have a specific negative outcome they’re looking to connect it to. 

FACT: Aye-ayes pick their noses with XXL fingers.

By Lauren Young

The beauty of the aye-aye is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. This species of lemur from Madagascar, Daubentonia madagascariensis, is often known for its visually striking looks—a coat of shaggy, wispy black and gray fur, large bat-like ears used for echolocation, and a pair of bright yellow-orange eyes that seem to piece into your soul. Averaging about 15 inches long and five pounds, they’re one of, if not the largest known nocturnal primate in the world. But perhaps the aye-aye’s most notable feature is its long, spindly fingers. 

Aye-ayes, in general, have very strange hands. For one, biologists discovered in 2020 that they actually have a sixth finger, tiny pseudo-thumb, on each wrist that might have evolved to help the aye-ayes grip branches and climb. The rest of their fingers are noticeably long—the fourth and longest finger accounts for more than two-thirds the length of its hand. If you consider the human hand, a finger with the same proportions would be nearly a foot long. Instead of being cumbersome, these solitary tree dwellers have developed a variety of specialized functions that take full advantage of the long appendages. For instance, they’ll tap their digits along branches and trees and listen in for insect grub with those echolocating ears. When they hear a delectable snack scuttling inside, they’ll use their fingers to scoop out the food. Researchers at the Duke Lemur Center, a leading lemur research and education hub, have also found that the third middle finger—which can be around three inches long—can be used to drink water and eat fruit.  

In November, a study in the Journal of Zoology reported observations of an aye-aye inserting the entire length of its skinny middle finger into its nose, before proceeding to lick it clean of snot. Yum. Study author from the University of Bern, who worked with the Duke Lemur Center, noted that the nose-picking and eating behavior—known scientifically as mucophagy—didn’t seem to be a one-off instance. The researchers also obtained museum specimens of the head and hand of an aye-aye and took CT scans of the nasal cavity, which revealed that the finger could reach all the way down to the throat. 

[Related: There’s no proof picking your nose causes Alzheimer’s]

Only 12 primate species have been observed to pick their nose, whether with fingers or sticks or other tools, the study authors report. This includes humans, gorillas, chimps, and now aye-ayes. It’s still a mystery why exactly the aye-ayes, or any nose-picking animal, eats their boogers. The study authors pointed to past studies that suggest humans may have evolved ingesting boogers to boost the immune system, or that the slimy materials coats our teeth and prevents bacteria from sticking, which might improve oral health. Others have proposed snot could have some sort of nutritional value for animals. But these findings aren’t concrete, and other studies contradict that booger eating is good for you. For instance, other experts suggest that picking your nose in general can spread or introduce harmful bacteria to your nasal cavity.

While the answer might be up in the air, the study does shed light on another trait primates seem to share. Unfortunately, aye-ayes get a bad rap because of their appearance—including that long booger-picking finger. Folklore has said if the aye-aye’s finger points at someone, it’s thought they are marked for death. This has caused aye-ayes to have been killed in the past, and they are an endangered species due to habitat loss. Scientists in Madagascar have found that not all villages and locals have this negative perception of aye-ayes. Some locals have actually found that they could be a beneficial form of pest control because they like to eat bugs that infest sugar cane crops.

The post These long-fingered lemurs pick and eat their boogers, just like humans appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Piss was once a precious commodity 

By Rachel Feltman

For most people, urine is a fluid best flushed away as quickly as possible. But for much of human history, our pee was a powerful tool and an important resource. If you let the substance sit around to ferment and evaporate for a spell, its high ammonia content turns it into an effective cleansing and bleaching agent. It can also be used to produce potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpeter, which is a component of gunpowder. 

Known as lant, this fermented pee was clearly important to everyone from laundresses to military leaders. There were even times when governments demanded that people turn their liquid waste over to serve the needs of the many. But for the most part, we don’t know much about how people peddled in lant. We have quite a few more records on folks hired to deal with poop—specifically, the poopsmiths hired to get it away from everyone else. 

Because the use of lant offends our modern sensibilities, there are loads of probably-not-very-true stories about its historical applications. There’s been plenty of internet chatter, for example, about references to “lanted” ale—beer laced with fermented pee. But it seems unlikely this was a real trend, and it’s definitely not one that homebrewers should try to replicate. (Side note: Here’s that Yorkshire dictionary entry I mentioned during the episode.) 

FACT: Snakes have no legs, but they do have two penises

By Sara Kiley Watson

Male snakes have two penises. Actually, it sounds like a decent amount of lizards and things have two penises—squamates, the largest order of reptiles, are actually known for the fact that they have two penises. But the story of the snake’s “hemipenis” is an interesting evolutionary one for certain.

About 150 million years ago, the ancestors of the slithery snakes we now know and love were waddling and walking around on legs. Apparently, snakes still have that leg development ability in their DNA, but the “make legs happen” switch is just turned off. This is because of a gene that researchers call the “Sonic hedgehog” gene, which is responsible for growing limbs. The researchers found that the Sonic hedgehog gene “flickers” briefly in python embryos that are around 24 hours old, and the gene previously hasn’t been spotted in actual slytherin pythons. Essentially, for the first 24 hours of embryonic development, snakes have legs—then a light bulb goes off. 

So what do these legs have to do with snake penises? Well, another study found that in lizards, snakes, birds and mammals alike the development of the genitals is run by the embryonic structure the cloaca—which is pretty much the butt hole. The location of the cloaca, however, is key—in lizards and snakes, it’s right up close to those hind legs (or the hind legs that could’ve been for snakes). Enter the double penis right where those legs could’ve been.

At the end of the day, instead of legs, the male snake got penises in their place. 

FACT: Timothy Dexter was perhaps the luckiest businessman who ever lived

By Annie Rauwerda

Timothy Dexter was a goofy, 18th-century guy who was a wildly successful businessman, seemingly by accident. First he made money off his investment into Continental currency (almost worthless at the time), then by selling bed warmers to the West Indies (which is already warm!) where they were sold very profitably as ladles for the molasses industry. Then, Dexter sent wool mittens there, which Asian merchants bought for export to Siberia. Then he sold coal to Newcastle (where there was a coal mine!!) and happened to profit because the miners went on strike.

All in all, Dexter’s business trajectory is an epic tale. From whale bone hoarding, to faking his own death, and an autobiography without any punctuation, you’ll want to hear all the details in this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

The post Snakes may not have legs, but they do have two penises appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Birds are real

By Purbita Saha

This fact might be blatantly obvious to listeners of a famous science podcast, but it’s important to clear the air with all the misinformation flying around the internet. In 2017, a student from Tennessee launched a national campaign called Birds Aren’t Real. He claimed that the CIA replaced every feathered creature, starting with rock pigeons, with drones during the Cold War. Apparently, these well-disguised machines are still used to surveil Americans today.

In recent interviews, the founder of Birds Aren’t Real says his movement calls attention to the harms and pervasiveness of real conspiracy theories, like QAnon. But whether it’s counterprogramming, clever marketing, or a big, fat joke, it’s raised the hackles of people who love and study birds. Avian evolution dates back hundreds of millions of years to a prominent group of dinosaurs that included T. rex, velociraptors, and the possibly flighted Archaeopteryx. Over time, the survivors have taken on diverse forms, shown stunning intelligence, and illuminated many natural phenomena. 

But the best part about birds is that they’re accessible to everyone, everywhere. You don’t have to hike up mountains or paddle out to islands to experience their uniqueness—they will come to you. Giant flocks of passerines, raptors, and more migrate through the US and Eurasia in fall and spring. A tiny ruby-crowned kinglet might stop by on your windowsill (as one did while I was recording this podcast), reminding you that not only are birds real: They’re basically perfect.

FACT: There’s way too much poop on Mount Everest

By Rachel Feltman

Let’s start with some basic stats to put things in perspective. Mount Everest, which sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet, is the highest point on Earth—its summit is 29,031 feet above sea level. That doesn’t actually make it the world’s tallest mountain, to be clear: Mauna Kea on Hawai’i is about three quarters of a mile taller than Everest from tail to snout, as it were, but a big portion of that sits below the surface of the pacific ocean. To make things even more confusing, there’s another mountain that, by certain definitions, could be considered the world’s tallest. Because Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, Ecuador’s Chimborazo mountain happens to sit at just the right bulgy spot below the equator to be particularly far from the planet’s core. The summit measures more than 3,900 miles from the center of the Earth, which is 6,798 feet farther than Everest. But Chimborazo isn’t even the tallest mountain in the Andes by more traditional measurements! But I digress. 

As of July of 2022, around 6,100 people had summited Everest some 11,000 times since the first known success in 1953. It’s also one of just 14 peaks in the world that stretches into what’s known as the “death zone.” At around 26,000 feet, it’s no longer possible for the human body to acclimatize. 

In a 2019 article by Weirdest Thing alum Eleanor Cummins, Pulmonary expert Peter Hackett put it this way: “You’re slowly dying at 18,000 feet, but when you get above 26,000 feet, you start dying much more quickly.” Over the last three decades, the researchers found, success rates among climbers have actually doubled, while the death rate has stayed pretty level. But it’s still super dangerous to climb, and at least 310 people have died trying to make it to the top. Their bodies are still there. 

In addition to the bodies we’ve left on Everest, we’ve left a lot of trash—and poop. Like, a really problematic amount. Every year the Nepali government and an NGO run by the Sherpa people of Tibet work on clearing up the worst of the trash left by 700 or so climbers and the people that support them. It’s difficult to know exactly how much garbage there is, because some of it is basically impossible to get to due to hazardous conditions. One 2015 estimate suggested there’s more than 26,000 pounds of poop left behind each year in total, which says nothing of the ripped-up tents and empty oxygen tanks and all the rest of it. And in January of 2022, groups estimated that at Base Camp 2, there had been more than 17,000 pounds of human poop left behind in just the previous climbing season. 

Rising temperatures mean that there are fewer deep ice crevasses to dump excrement into, by the way, which means it’s more and more likely for feces to contaminate the melting snow that people who live around base camp rely on for drinking water. 

Consider this your friendly reminder that you really shouldn’t leave your poop behind on any mountain, even a chill one. Yes, you can dig a deep hole if you’re not close to a water source, but if you’re on a rocky trail or one that’s really populated, you need to admit to yourself that there simply isn’t room for everyone’s poop. Pack that crap out! 

Fact: In the 1970s, inventors tried to make a Ford Pinto fly

By Corinne Iozzio

In the 150 years Popular Science has been around, few concepts have gotten as much airtime as the flying car. Almost immediately after terrestrial autos hit the roadways, inventors began dreaming of them taking flight—and they never quite stopped. Some ideas seemed better grounded than others. Take, for example, the Mizar: Invented in the early 1970s by a pair of career aerospace engineers, it screamed practicality. At least on the surface. The car, which debuted to much press fanfare, married together a compact model of Ford and a Cessna plane. The driver, the concept went, would simply need to back his car into the tail-end of the craft, lock the two parts together, and get ready to take off. 

Of course, there was a catch—actually several. Not least of which was their car of choice: a Ford Pinto. Now infamous for bursting into flames at even a light tapping of its rear end, the Pinto had yet to make fiery headlines when the Mizar’s inventors tried to launch it into the skies. The Mizar’s true failings, however, laid in its construction. Bolting the car onto a Cessna overtaxed the airframe. And, later reports revealed, the connections between car and plane left a lot to be desired. 
Test flights were rocky, and eventually turned deadly for the Mizar’s intrepid inventors. But the public was captivated by the idea. And, to some degree, we still are. Visions of flying cars today, though, embrace a different kind of practicality—one that doesn’t put everyday drivers in the cockpit.

The post How do we know that birds are real? appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Vampire epidemics are real

By Rachel Feltman

Back in September, there were a lot of headlines and tweets and TikToks about a new archeological finding in Poland. It was the 300-year-old grave of a seemingly wealthy woman in the village of Pien. She was wearing a silk cap and she was buried in a cemetery—signs that she was someone of status—but she was also shackled to the grave by her big toe. And she had a sickle placed over her neck in such a way that, should she try to rise, she would have been decapitated. These sorts of physical booby traps, along with more symbolic bits of protective magic, are generally accepted as signs that the living feared the dead would rise. In other words: They thought this lady was a vampire.

It’s not surprising that people were spooked and intrigued by this story, but it’s worth noting that it’s unlikely this woman did anything truly menacing, let alone anything seemingly supernatural, to inspire those fears. The archeologists who found her noted that she had a very prominently protruding front tooth, which may have been enough to make her a suspicious figure to her neighbors—especially if she was wealthy and independent.

I really appreciated that tooth detail, because it gets at something important about vampire burials—yes, plural, because these happened with some frequency all over the world. According to Stanley Stepanic, an expert on Slavic languages and literature from the University of Virginia, these beliefs and practices were common enough to prompt an official ban on vampire burials in 14th-century Serbian legal codes. And they show up outside of Eastern Europe, too. The thing that tends to unite them is that people saw vampires when they looked at people who were different—especially when they had reason to worry about disease. Other graves found with such signs of superstition have largely been associated with deaths from various plagues.

The so-called Vampire Epidemic of the 18th century, which is when the idea of vampires really entered the zeitgeist and became a downright common explanation for the spread of disease, may have been tied to pellagra, a condition caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, which would have arisen as more of Europe started to live primarily on corn. (Fun fact, in mesoamerica, where corn originated, people prepared maize in an alkaline solution like ashy water, which made its B3 bioavailable and made it healthy to live on! Europeans apparently did not get the memo.) Before the arrival of corn, diseases like rabies could have helped shape the myths. As for why people became so convinced that the dead were rising, some historians point to the fact that urbanization meant that, for the first time in human history, hundreds or even thousands of corpses were being crammed into cemeteries that sat right next to bustling human settlements, often in simple shrouds due to poverty. That meant people being inadvertently disinterred by scavenging animals or flash flooding was suddenly much more common. Plus, several physicians of the era started spreading the idea that some of the corpses in question weren’t decomposing as quickly as they should, but that probably just had to do with the huge uptick in corpses they had the ability to observe.

The US had its own vampire panic in the 1800s, when an epidemic of tuberculosis in New England got blamed on dead people draining the life out of the relatives they’d left behind. TB tends to spread within households, and it takes a while to cause symptoms and kill you, so people started to figure that the first one to die must be slowly leeching the rest. One of the best documented cases of this was the exhumation of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island in 1892. Mercy was actually the third member of her family to die of consumption, but when the local doctor dug all their corpses up, she was the one who seemed suspiciously intact—because she had literally just died, and she’d been stored in a freezing crypt for two months. To save her brother Edwin, the village burned her heart and liver and mixed them into a tonic for him to drink. It didn’t work. 

While ostentatious vampire burials and rituals are the ones that are most fun to talk about, some people were indeed killed because their neighbors thought they were, quite literally, parasitic monsters. The origin of vampiric panic is closely tied to the origin of blood libel, which is the pervasive belief that Jews ritually murder Christian children and drink their blood. In Medieval Europe, it wasn’t uncommon for Crusaders—or peasants caught up in the fervor of holy war—to target Jewish populations in retaliation for assorted local deaths. You don’t have to look too closely at the 18th, 19th, and early 20th-century vampire stories we know and love to see plenty of antisemetic tropes, either. 

Fact: Even if Bigfoot doesn’t exist now, there’s a legit possibility that it might have once upon a time

By Laura Krantz

Let’s start by saying that there is no scientifically accepted evidence that Bigfoot is out there, roaming around the woods of the Pacific Northwest (or anywhere else for that matter). But there are some scientists who think that there is a very real possibility of Bigfoot.

To be clear, this is conjecture. But there are lots of eyewitness accounts, stories, myths and legends about a big, hairy, ape-like creature that have been handed down over generations – from indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, and other parts of the US, as well as in other countries—Russia, China, parts of Europe. As anthropologists have pointed out, when stories appear in disparate places, they can be grounded in some fact.

For example, there are all these tales about giant floods from all over the world – in the Bible, the Quran, from ancient Mesopotamia, South America, Australia, India. In recent years, geologists have found evidence that around 10,000 years ago, when Earth was much cooler, enormous dams made of ice broke and caused huge floods. They also found evidence that when large meteors from space hit Earth’s oceans, they caused giant waves and floods. Events like those might have been the reason there are so many stories about floods that have been passed down through generations.

The thought is that this could be true for a Bigfoot as well. It likely isn’t around any longer, but there might have been some sort of creature like this that existed in the distant past and the stories were handed down. After all, humans coexisted with at least 7 other hominid species at one point in time—and those are the ones we know about. Given that the fossil record is incomplete, the possibility of a giant, bipedal ape-like creature isn’t hard to imagine.

Fact: Parasites actually turn animals into zombies

By Lauren Young

If you ever read or watched the late 1990s young adult series Animorphs, you might remember the particularly unsettling alien villain species: the Yeerks. In a ploy to take over the world, the parasitic slug-like creatures would wriggle through the ear canal and meld themselves to the brain of human hosts to control them. While the Yeerks are a work of fiction, there are real-life parasites that exhibit “mind control” abilities. 

These creatures are popularly called “zombie parasites,” as many species often turn their hosts into walking brain-dead organisms. But many parasitologists often refer to this as host manipulation, where a parasite essentially alters the host’s behavior in typically self-destructive ways that ultimately benefits the parasite. There are numerous parasites that use this method for a variety of reasons, such as traveling to a more favorable environment, finding or reaching food, reproducing, or completing part of its life cycle. 

This Halloween episode rounds up some of the most fascinating zombie parasites—including a four foot long worm that forces crickets to drown themselves, bacteria that alters the behavior of rodents to make them less scared of cats, and fungi that take over insects to burst and spread spores. While we might be grossed out (and freaked out by these parasites), you really don’t have to be afraid. For the most part, many of these species won’t ever affect you and they are often host specific. 

Parasitologists, like University of New England’s Tommy Leung, emphasize the importance of parasitic relationships in ecosystems: “There are parasites that are causing a great deal of suffering for people,” Leung told me when I interviewed him for Science Friday. “But they are extremely interesting in their own place.” These field experts learn a lot about evolution and ecological relationships from these very interesting, and really clever, means of survival. While the thought of losing your freewill might seem terrifying, it’s a fascinating trait that parasites have evolved in order to survive and thrive. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: This skeleton was found with a knife in place of his hand

By Sara Kiley Watson

Inside Longobard cemeteries, really weird stuff can be found—people sharing tombs, jewelry, dogs, headless horses. But the strangest of all is likely the knife-armed man. Researchers who excavated the site in the 1980s and 1990s disccovered a corpse dated back to around the 6th to 8th century AD who had his right forearm amputated, healed, and replaced with a knife. The knife was likely once bound to the remaining stump with leather. 

And this knife wasn’t just for show—studying the arm bones and the knife placement suggests the knife acted as his prosthetic arm, but his teeth and shoulders showed some serious wear and tear from what likely was the act of tightening up his knife stump with his teeth. When it comes to his shoulders, he developed a C-shaped ridge of bone from holding the shoulder in an unnaturally extended position to tighten the prosthesis in his mouth, which only could’ve happened if he was up to this tightening trick pretty often.

The stump healed really well, apparently. Well enough that the man, dubbed T US 380, not only survived but lived for quite some time afterwards—he made it to around his 40s or 50s, which was middle-aged at the time. So not only is the knife armed man a badass, but also a sign that communities have been caring for their disabled members for a really long time.

Fact: The government wanted to create a gay bomb

By Rachel Feltman 

So in 2007, the Ig Nobel Awards—which is a satirical take on the Nobel Prize that highlights research that “makes you laugh, then makes you think—honored a few real heavy hitters. The prize for Medicine went to research we actually talked about on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, where scientists used sword swallowing to better understand gastrointestinal stuff. Physics honored several studies on how sheets become wrinkled. A Japanese chemist won for her work on extracting vanilla flavoring from cow dung, which isn’t too gross if you remember, from a previous Weirdest Thing episode, that the best natural source of the stuff is beaver anal glands. 

But today we’re talking about the 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, which went to The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio for their efforts to develop a chemical weapon capable of making enemy soldiers suddenly irresistible to one another. In short, they tried to make a gay bomb. According to reports of the award ceremony, no one showed up to accept the honor—probably because their research was meant to be a secret. 

Unfortunately, the group responsible for uncovering the existence of the so-called gay bomb is now defunct. The Sunshine Project was an NGO based in the US and Germany that formed in 2000 to expose research on biological and chemical warfare using the Freedom of Information Act. According to the website, which you can still access using the Wayback Machine, the group suspended its operations in February 2008 due to a lack of funding. 

Now, many so-called non-lethal weapons are absolutely horrifying, which is why the folks behind the Sunshine Project found their development so concerning. Weapons that maim and disfigure people are often classified as non-lethal or less-lethal. But that doesn’t mean that some of the military’s ideas, especially the ones that never actually took off, can’t inspire at least a bit of a chuckle. And people chuckled quite a bit in 2005, when the Sunshine Project released a 1994 memo from The Air Force Wright Laboratory called “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘bad guy’ Identifying Chemicals.” 

This paper was basically just a list of spitball ideas—an attempt to create broad categories of chemical weapons that might be worth investigating further. Just to make this abundantly clear: They didn’t have chemicals in hand that could definitely do this stuff. They were focused on listing what kind of outcome you might want a hypothetical weapon to produce, with the idea that finding the right compounds to make it happen would take funding and time. The chemists suggested, for example, that compounds designed to attract biting insects could weaken enemy defenses or even disrupt the food supply, or that certain chemicals could be used to tag so-called “bad guys” for later identification, like those exploding ink packs on clothing tags at the mall. 

Most insidiously, they talked about influencing the behavior of their targets in a way that might cause confusion or damaged morale. You might make your enemy super sensitive to sunlight, for example. The chemists went on to note that a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” option would be to use “strong aphrodaisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

When the Sunshine Project dropped these papers in 2005, the US military came out saying that none of the proposals contained therein had ever been taken seriously. The Sunshine Project responded by producing evidence that the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate included it on a promotional CD-ROM about its work that got distributed to other US military and government agencies in the year 2000. So, just to be clear, six years after the lab wrote the memo, it was still getting passed around in official channels. 
When this story went mainstream in 2007 thanks to the Ig Nobel Awards, The Guardian reported that researchers had actually asked for $7.5 million to develop the gay bomb. But that doesn’t mean it actually exists. For starters, sexual attraction is deeply complicated, and no cocktail of chemicals can simply flip a switch on someone’s orientation—let alone make them suddenly horny enough to want to get down in a war zone. As someone who just wrote a book about the history of sex, I feel completely confident that if scientists ever found a true aphrodaisiac, gay-making or otherwise, the pharmaceutical industry would slap a patent on it and market it six ways to Sunday. Until that day comes, we’ll just have to settle for viagra.

FACT: Honey bees become robbers when times are rough.

By Chelsey B. Coombs

During early spring before plants have begun blossoming and in the fall when plants are wilting away, some honey bee colonies will actually turn to robbing other, weaker colonies of their hard-earned honey stores–and even kill them in the process. 

Just like a heist movie, the enemy robber bees “case the joint” to scope out their victims’ hive. They fly side to side in what’s called a “casting” pattern to look for back entrances or weak spots in the hive itself so they can sneak in and get the goods. 

They’re also surveilling for the defensive bees of the hive: guards. Those specialized guard bees hang out at the hive entrance to determine whether returning bees are friends or foes based on their smell. They use their antennae to touch the returning bees, bite them and even threaten to sting by grabbing the bee with their legs or mouth and making a sting motion with their abdomens. And sometimes they even sting, killing the potential intruder and themselves. It looks like a fight in The Octagon. Bee researchers have long noted that after a robbery, the poor victims, as one would expect,  increase their defensive behaviors. 

And the perps change their behaviors, too, according to a March 2021 Animal Behaviour study led by Clare Rittschof, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. Rittschof’s team found that after a robbing, the bully colony increases both their foraging and defense behaviors, even against their own nestmates returning from foraging. 

But their increased defensiveness isn’t due to weird smells that the robbers are bringing back with them from victim hives like it was previously thought. The study looked at the brain gene expression patterns of robbing bees and found they are unusually aggressive. The returning robbers actually provoke aggression from their nestmate guards when they come back to their home hive.

And while the increased defensiveness of the guards seems like it would be bad because it increases the number of colonymates who die, it’s actually advantageous. Because the nectar conditions are so bad, which led the colony to start robbing in the first place, they’re increasing their defensiveness in case a colony comes to rob them, next. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Rats can’t vomit and rat poison (probably) can’t kill you—unless it’s old as heck 

By Rachel Feltman

Here’s the thing: Rats can’t vomit. Rodents as a general rule, don’t puke. That’s why most available rat poisons contain chemicals that induce vomiting; the urge to let out a technicolor yawn will save most humans and pets from getting an accidental dose of pesticides, but it doesn’t do diddly squat for a rat. 

Vomiting is a super common evolutionary tactic, and it’s one that makes a lot of sense. When toxins get into our bodies, our bodies try to push them out. It’s simple! It’s elegant! It’s gross! It works! And rodents just… don’t do it. Instead, they have a super intense gag reflex. When rodents taste something unfamiliar or otherwise suspicious, they reflexively and definitively spit it right out. Blech! 

Now that humans have come to understand this strange biological quirk, we’ve come to use it to our advantage in the lab. Scientists are always trying to get better at studying nausea—just look at the puking robots they’ve designed to hurl chunks on command—because our species’ tendency to vomit can have dire consequences. During chemotherapy, for example, the common inability to keep food down can seriously impact a patient’s chance of recovery. The mechanisms that make us more or less likely to throw up are still pretty mysterious, too: some cannabis users, for example, suffer extreme nausea after smoking, even though cannabinoids are frequently used to make other people less queasy. The fact that rats reliably gag—but never actually vomit—makes them a perfect model organism for studying nausea. Scientists can test different ways of mitigating the urge to purge without having piles of puke all over their labs. 

Let’s circle back to the fact that rat poison is designed to use rodents’ evolutionary trick against them. If you’re wondering why rodenticide still shows up in fiction as a tool for doing murder, that’s because we used to make pesticides out of obscenely toxic substances. A century ago, ingesting household pesticide—or even touching it without gloves on, in some cases—could absolutely kill you. While it’s still a good idea to avoid direct contact with pesticides, and it’s very important to keep them away from small children and pets, we’ve fortunately found pest-control compounds that are much less likely to cause us harm in the small doses that kill mice and rats. Plus, now that we know that rats can’t puke, the addition of emetic agents has become a common tactic to make rodenticides safer. 

Fact: The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever created

By Swapna Krishna

JWST​is a groundbreaking space observatory that launched on Christmas day last year and is currently orbiting a spot a million miles away from Earth. It’s designed to see deeper into the universe than we’ve ever seen before. Looking out into the cosmos is also a chance to see back in time because light takes so long to reach us — so if we see something a million light-years away, that’s what it looked like a million years ago. JWST, an infrared optimized telescope, is so sensitive it can detect the heat of a bumblebee as far away as the moon. We’re hoping it will be able to see far enough away to detect the first light of the universe after the Big Bang.

Fact: Octopus mothers can self-destruct

By Sara Kiley Watson

Giving birth when you are an octopus is a fate worse than death. After laying her eggs, octopus moms die slowly and dramatically, self-harming until they meet their bitter end. After laying eggs, a female octopus goes from living a normal life and gently caring for the embryos to no longer eating, dropping muscle tone, changing color, and even engaging in acts of self harm (like eating her own body parts). 

Generally the timeline after death looks something like starvation or reduced food intake over time, and in an extreme case, deep-sea octopus Graneledone boreopacifica, brooding can take up to four years and basically the octopus mom guards her eggs as her body slowly withers away. Octopus hummelincki, which have been studied before for this mechanism, typically don’t live longer than 9 months in total and don’t have more than 2 months post-eggs. 

There have been a lot of questions about why this happens. Is it triggered by the lack of food? Or is some kind of ‘self destruct’ built into female octopuses? Back in the 1970’s, psychologist Jerome Wodinsky started to take a deeper look at what kind of signals in the octopus body could be linked to the whole self-destruct idea. And after a somewhat accidental expiriment of getting female octopuses drunk and removing their sex glands, he discovered that minus sex-glands, octopus moms thrive after birth.

Research from this year broke down the chemicals that the optic gland was producing around the time of the octopus mother’s behavioral break. Researchers found three specific pathways light up: The first produces pregnancy steroids pregnenolone and progesterone; the second produces components for bile acids; and the third produces increased levels of cholesterol-precursor 7-dehydrocholesterol (7-DHC).

Elevated 7-DHC levels are linked directly to a human disorder called Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, which can affect mental development and behavior in children. Kind of like octopus moms, people with this disease often struggle with self-injury and aggression. Research on the dramatic end of life of many octopus moms may actually help us better understand other species, like humans.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: The tech that powers E-ZPass comes from Soviet-era spy gadgets.

By Purbita Saha

I live in a New Jersey suburb right next to the Garden State Parkway. I flash my E-ZPass way more than I pump my own gas. So to me, and probably the millions of other drivers in the Eastern US who use this electronic toll system, E-ZPass is a daily essential. And while the technology itself isn’t cool enough for a Weirdest Thing yarn, the story behind it is surprisingly juicy.

According to a 2016 episode of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the origin of E-ZPass and electronic tollbooths goes back to the invention of RFID transponders. The credit goes to two inventors: a Soviet spy and a NASA rocket scientist. In the 1920s, Russian cellist Leon Theremin was experimenting with microwaves and gases when he realized he could create sounds with different volumes and pitches by simply moving two antennas around. (His instrument was mass produced by RCA, and still has a cult following today.) This caught the attention of Vladimir Lenin, who promoted Theremin to be a representative for Soviet science in Europe and the US. 

When Theremin returned to the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s reign, he was imprisoned for his overseas forays and forced to work for the state. In his new role, he designed a wireless bug powered by the same electromagnetic waves from his instrument to eavedrop on the US ambassador in Moscow. Legend has it that it was hidden in the embassy’s seal throughout World War I.

Fast forward to the 1960s, when Mario Cardullo, a NASA space flight engineer in New York, began fiddling around with primitive versions of RFID shoplifting tags. Cardullo sampled Theremin’s approach by triggering a small transponder with microwaves, but added a memory chip that could hold a bundle of information and share it with a matching receiver. The prototype measured out to about the size of a Galaxy Z Fold4, which was too big for a window or car window. It took a few decades before Cardullo landed his invention in an actual tollbooth (in Scandinavia). It took off in Europe and Asia, and finally started transforming bridges and highways in the US in the 1990s. Today, Cardullo’s dream of decking out the George Washington Bridge with Soviet-spy technology has been realized.

Fact: A bisexual goose raising a family with two black swans isn’t as strange as it sounds.

By Rachel Feltman 

Here’s a fact from my recent book “Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex,” which you can buy as an audiobook narrated by yours truly! So, in the early 90s, a black swan flew into New Zealand’s Waimanu lagoon. Locals dubbed her Henrietta after a wing injury kept her from leaving with the rest of her flock and she took up with a white goose named Thomas. For nearly two decades they were generally seen together, with Thomas protecting Henrietta from dogs and other disturbances. 

Then another black swan showed up, and things got… complicated. Henrietta started spending more of her time with her new gal pal, and Thomas got aggressive toward the swans. Then the newly arrived black swan laid eggs, and Henrietta started caring for them the way you’d expect a papa swan to care for his young. Plot twist: Henrietta had been a boy the whole time! 

Very confusingly, the tour guides who worked at the lagoon where this all went down decided to name the newly-arrived, actually female bird Henrietta, while the artist formerly known as Henrietta got rechristened as Henry. 

The good news is that Thomas didn’t hold a grudge for long, and took on a tertiary parental role once the chicks hatched—and continued to care for all of Henry and Henrietta’s 68 babies over the next six years. Thomas became an icon to tourists from around the world, who were just absolutely charmed by his devotion to the little black swans. He even helped teach them to fly. 

Here’s the coolest part: For Henry and Henrietta, these family arrangements wouldn’t have seemed unusual at all. Research on the species shows that male black swans frequently pair up together, both in captivity and in the wild. They sometimes have chicks by briefly associating with a female black swan before kicking her out, but they’ve also been known to simply overtake an existing nest full of eggs to raise as their own. Henry may have spent the better part of the 90s wondering why his beloved Thomas wasn’t off robbing nests to get their family started! 

Black swans can also set up long-term throuples, where all three birds—two males and one female—participate in mating displays, and the males take turns between mounting the female and parading around protectively. In this setup, where the female isn’t kicked out as soon as her laying is done, the males actually take over caring for the nest so she can immediately go lay some more. 

The New Zealand triad stayed solid until Henry died of old age in 2009, which prompted Henrietta to go looking for more of her kind. Geese and swans can reproduce and create mottled hybrids known as swooses (sweese?), but it seems Thomas just wasn’t Henrietta’s type. 

Ironically, a few years before that, when Thomas finally met a female goose he fancied enough to settle down with, another goose stole the chicks for their own. No word on whether that goose was gay, but I’m pretty sure the BBC would have mentioned that, so we have to assume their motives were less heartwarming. Apparently geese sometimes kidnap goslings from less powerful birds around them to “pad” their broods—literally adding extra babies to the outer edge of the nest, so predators will grab the adoptees instead of the better-protected natural young. Nature isn’t always cute! But while we don’t know the fates of Thomas’s biological chicks, I think we can all agree that he got to experience the joys of fatherhood at least 68 times over. 

When Thomas died in 2018, he was beloved by tourists from all over the world—and, at the age of 40, extremely old in goose-years. Long may he live in our hearts! 

Fact: Louse feeder was a job during WWII, and it was also a part of the resistance against the Nazis.

By Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke 

So, it all starts with typhus. Typhus, specifically epidemic typhus, is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium known as Rickettsia prowazekii. Spread by body lice, it’s understandably a disease that often would rear its head whenever times were tough and lice would flourish. Things like famine, displacement, war—these were generally conditions under which body lice are easily transmitted person to person carrying this little rickettsia and thus spreading typhus.

But just knowing those two things, what causes the disease and how it’s transmitted, simply wasn’t enough to stop the spread of disease. Because even if you have effective treatment for the disease, you won’t be able to get rid of typhus if you can’t clean your clothes in hot water and then not wear them for five days. If you’re on the move during a war or you’re displaced, how are you gonna do that? Prevention was key. And how do you prevent a disease? Vaccines.

Enter: Dr. Rudolf Weigel. Dr. Weigl came up with the brilliant idea to use the lice themselves as the maintenance animal to create a lot of typhus pathogen for vaccine research. But how do you get enough lice to make enough vaccine material? Well, you need a louse colony and a way to feed them. And because lice are so species specific to humans… humans had to supply the food. In the form of blood. Yep, humans were the louse feeders. 

With WWII on the horizon and Nazis being terrified of typhus, they used this fear as an excuse to enact horrific policies. Because typhus wasn’t seen as this universal threat that could impact anyone – the Nazis blamed its spread on Jewish people. 

Under German occupation, Weigl’s institute grew rapidly, where it served as the only means of survival for many Polish people who faced death, starvation, or deportation. Weigl went out of his way to hire hundreds of people as louse-feeders, often Polish intellectuals or Jewish people, people who were under incredible threat from the Nazi occupation. While feeding the lice, people often sat around and chatted, exchanging ideas about philosophy, mathematics, and even actively working in the resistance against German forces.

To find out more, listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing—and check out This Podcast Will Kill You wherever you get podcasts. Plus, you can find out more information about Dr. Weigl in the book The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl by Arthur Allen.

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Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: There’s a right and wrong time to eat wild oysters

By Sara Kiley Watson

According to some, oyster season only truly happens when the months of the year have an “R” in them. While the validity of that is contested, it apparently has some deeply seeded roots in the native populations of the southeastern US.

The first part of this myth is based on pretty simple science—oysters in the summer tend to be in their youth phase. They can be fatty, watery, soft, and lack flavor versus a more mature, tasty oyster in chilly months with the firm texture and brine many have come to love. Bacteria like Vibrio parahaemolyticus have caused illnesses in harvesting areas throughout the summer. They can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and the like when someone eats a raw oyster. 

But, humans have been eating oysters for thousands of years before we knew about bacteria. Oyster shells have been found in “shell rings” littered across the coasts of places like South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. These shell rings are circular or semi-circular “middens” of shells, pottery, bones, soil, and other artifacts. Researchers from the Florida Museum found that the islanders living on St Catherine’s were primarily foraging or capturing oysters in the chillier times of year—aka the R months. Why they did this is a bit of a mystery—maybe trial by error of sickness, perhaps merely a tastiness issue. But one of the authors suggests it could also be one of the earliest records of “sustainable harvesting,” because leaving the oysters to spawn in the summer helps guarantee a replenished stock for the next season’s big chow down. 

So, the R month legend has thousands of years of history. But a lot of stuff has happened, technologically, climate-wise, science-knowledge-wise, since the days of the shell ring. Namely, refrigeration. Nowadays, you can get your oysters farmed any time of the year with exposure to hot summer air and water, the big issue when it comes to icky bacteria, under control. But if you’re fishing oysters out of the sound on your own, it is probably best to eat them in cold seasons—for your health and taste.

Fact: Project Plowshare was an ambitious, nuclear fail

By Laura Krantz

In the wake of WWII, the US government was looking for peaceful ways to use atomic power. One of their most ambitious (and insane) programs was called Project Plowshare, which would use nuclear explosives for big public works projects, like building harbors and canals, and extracting natural gas. Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some proposals that were put forth: Widening the Panama Canal, blasting underground aquifers in Arizona to connect them, cutting a road through the California mountains to help build the interstate, and using hydrogen bombs to create a new harbor in Alaska. Not all of these were pipe dreams. In Rulison, Colorado, scientists detonated a nuclear bomb underground in the hopes of freeing natural gas trapped in the rock. It worked but the gas was so contaminated with radioactivity that it couldn’t actually be used. Officials eventually mothballed these public works projects in 1978, although similar ideas still crop up every now and then like the time a former American president—I’ll let you guess which one—repeatedly floated the idea of nuking a hurricane to prevent it from making landfall.

FACT: Erectile dysfunction treatments have a shocking, somewhat contentious origin story 

By Rachel Feltman

This week’s Weirdest Thing fact is one pulled from my recently published book, “Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex.” Here’s a little snippet:

“Giles Brindley is undeniably a man of many and varied talents. In the 1960s, the UK native developed a neuroprosthesis capable of restoring some sight to the blind and casually invented an instrument he dubbed the “logical bassoon.” According to a 2014 profile published in the British Journal of Neurosurgery, he spent his sixties taking up marathons and relay racing; as this book went to print, he was in his nineties and studying the origins of falsetto. Brindley is a polymath if ever there was one. But if he wanted to be most remembered for his life-altering work in prosthetics, his sexagenarian sportsmanship, or his endeavor to create a more perfect bassoon—well, he shouldn’t have flashed a room full of people in Vegas.”

Check out this week’s episode—or grab a physical, digital, or audio copy of “Been There, Done That” (narrated by yours truly)—to hear more about Brindley’s surprisingly scientific flashing incident. 

The post Wild oysters are tastiest in months that end with ‘R’—here’s why appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Echolocation might be a much more common human ‘superpower’ than you think

By Rachel Feltman

In 2015 the NPR podcast Invisibilia did an episode called “How To Become Batman.” That was my first real introduction to Daniel Kish, who’s arguably the most famous human echolocator on the planet. 

Even if you missed that NPR segment, you’ve probably seen viral videos of Kish. He lost his eyes to retinal cancer during infancy, but his ability to navigate the world rivals that of any sighted person. He uses his tongue to make clicking noises, then interprets the sounds and their echoes to give him feedback on the space and objects around him. 

Kish is now famous for teaching other people with visual impairments how to use what he calls “Flash Sonar,” and his prominence has inspired loads of research. And as it turns out, echolocation might be a pretty common superpower. 

According to an analysis by Cambridge psychologists in 2014, the earliest known example of this practice was reported in 1954, when researchers described a child who produced clicking sounds to navigate his neighborhood by bicycle. And it’s actually quite likely that the French philosopher Diderot described something similar in 1749, when he recounted a blind acquaintance who could locate and estimate the positions of objects that didn’t give off their own sound. 

Diderot thought that his friend was taking note of tiny changes in air pressure to his skin. As late as the 1940s, folks were still trying to suss out how that might work, and a lot of the proposed explanations were very woo woo. It was around this time that researchers started to figure out that this was actually an auditory thing; the objects weren’t producing sound, but the people perceiving those objects were. 

In hindsight, it’s obvious that any visually impaired person who has full use of their hearing does this to some extent. When someone uses a mobility tool like a cane, for instance, they’re getting auditory input as well as tactile.

But while many popular portrayals of flash sonar suggest that it relies on an enhanced sense of hearing, the truth is even more fantastic: it’s possible that any human who can hear can also learn to echolocate.  

In 2021, a small study led by researchers at Durham University showed that blind and sighted people alike could learn to effectively use flash sonar in just 10 weeks, amounting to something like 40 to 60 hours of total training. By the end of it, some of them were even better at specific tests of their spatial perception than long-time experts of the technique.

When the average person off the street hears clicks like the ones Kish uses, their brains just hear noise. They react the way they react to the sound of a man clicking his tongue. But something different happens in your brain if you’ve learned to use flash sonar like Kish has. And it’s different between sighted people and blind people. If you can see, parts of your brain associated with auditory processing light up: you’re recognizing that there is information encoded into these clicks, and you’re looking for it with the part of your brain that interprets audio. 

In blind participants, researchers saw those same areas light up. But they also saw parts of the brain associated with visual processing light up. 

The journal Frontiers for Young Minds, which writes up scientific findings for young kids to read about, had a great way of explaining this. Imagine your brain is full of train lines. You’ve got your NYC subway and your metro north regional rail and Amtrak and you need the right ticket to get on each one. Sight and hearing are similar in that they take input from the world—light waves and sound waves—and convert them into electrical signals that your brain then interprets. But they run on different rail lines. So, research on so-called human echolocation shows us that if you’re not using your visual processing centers, your brain can reroute different traffic there. Imagine if suddenly your weekly subway ticket was good for Amtrak, too.

Why do we care? Because anything that involves getting your brain to do things differently than it’s always done them is easier when you’re a kid: you’ve done less. The brain is still actively forming and building those transit lines. So there’s reason to believe that giving blind children the freedom to explore the world around them will set them up to be able to navigate that world without limitations as they get older. 

That’s an important lesson for all parents, because research shows that having the ability to undertake risky, dangerous play in the safest possible settings is key to developing confidence and critical thinking skills and self preservation. Even letting kids experiment with being kind of mean is an important way to let them develop a moral code, as opposed to just being afraid of everything.

As Daniel Kish puts it: Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster.

FACT: A madcap crew is trying to make pogo into an extreme sport

By Corinne Iozzio

The concept of a souped-up pogo stick goes almost as far back as the first pogos in the US. Inventors adapted the spring-loaded toys with propellers, even gas engines. But it wasn’t until the last couple decades that any such over-engineered stick—the latest use air pressurized two times the level of a car tire to send jumpers skyward—caught on. The reason? A generation of pogo jumpers hellbent on turning bouncing ten-plus feet aloft into the next BMX, skateboarding, or snowboarding.

Welcome to the world of extreme pogo, where athletes push the limits of physics to bust out midair tricks so wild they may just succeed in bouncing right into the spotlight. The road to every year’s Pogopalooza—their championship event, which has been going on since 2004—has been paved with cracked kneecaps, broken bones, split muscles, and even reconstructive surgery. But it’s also marked by incredible feats like 12-foot leaps, backlips, and combo stunts that sling pogoers upside-down, sideways, and pretty much everywhere in between.

FACT: Female African elephants are dropping their tusks to get the upper hand on poachers.

By Purbita Saha

In the past decade, biologists and rangers in several African countries, including Mozambique, Zambia, and Kenya, have noticed more tuskless elephants being born in national and wildlife parks. Oddly, all of the animals have been female. Last year, researchers finally put it together. 

In the late 1900s, poaching was rampant in several parts of Africa. Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, for example, saw near-extermination in all its big mammal populations during a harrowing civil war. Today, herds of African bush elephants roam the park again, thanks in part to constant security and a crackdown on ivory sales. But hunters have still left an imprint on the genetic makeup of the animals. DNA analysis of several tuskless elephants shows that the individuals have a mutation on the same marker that helps grow incisor teeth in humans. The mutation kills male offspring, but is passed down among females, leading to a pattern of tusklessness. In Gorongosa, experts think the trait could affect up to 60 percent of the population if it continues across generations.

It’s still not clear if losing tusks to avoid poachers hurts the affected elephants’ survival in the long term. The mammals use the lengthy ivory accessories to dig up food, defend territory, and fight off predators. Elephants born without them might have low-nutrition diets or issues finding a mate. Either way, the rapid rate of adaptation in the African bush elephant is truly stunning—and shows that wildlife are fighting tooth and nail to make it with all the changes humans have made to the world. Read more examples, reported by Jason Bittle, in the fall “Daredevil” issue of Popular Science.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Human echolocation is real—and you might be able to do it appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: An intentional detonation of some 6,000 pounds of gunpowder was showcased on PopSci‘s 1915 cover.

By Rachel Feltman

One of PopSci’s most popular vintage covers is for our November 1931 issue. It features a painting by Edgar F. Wittmack that appears to show a man watching a volcanic eruption in progress. He’s wearing a headset and talking into a microphone, and he’s tinkering with a contraption that looks like a xylophone. Is it some kind of old-timey soundboard he’s using to broadcast the news of this spectacular natural disaster? No. It’s actually a detonator that he’s using to cause the eruption.

In fact, the event this cover commemorates wasn’t a true eruption at all. It shows the intentional detonation of some 6,000 pounds of gunpowder inside the crater at the summit of Lassen Peak in California.

Why? More like why not, which was kind of the spirit of PopSci back in those days. I found this story while helping to set up our new Popular Science merch shop, which features museum-quality prints of our favorite vintage covers (along with a few throwback logo t-shirts) to celebrate our 150th anniversary. Digging through the articles that served to explain the beautiful, often fantastical images that graced our magazines throughout the 20th century yielded quite a few quaintly outlandish and misguided historical experiments.

Here’s what we know about this particular “scientific” scene: Lassen Peak’s last real eruption started on May 30, 1914 with a small phreatic eruption, which according to the US Geological Society is a steam-driven explosion that occurs when water beneath the ground or on the surface is heated by magma, lava, hot rocks, or new volcanic deposits. Those materials can reach temperatures higher than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing water to boil away so quickly it makes a burst of steam.

That little flurry of activity near the peak’s summit kicked off a year of more than 150 additional explosions, which around May of 1915 shifted into lava flows, avalanches, and mudflows full of volcanic debris known as lahars. That kerfuffle culminated in a pyroclastic flow—which is the kind of chaotic, fast-moving spew of lava people think of when they hear “eruption”—on May 22. The eruption column reached around 5.5 miles into the air above the summit and devastated the land for several miles around, and fine ash reportedly fell as far as 300 miles away. There continued to be intermittent small eruptions for around two more years, but Lassen’s been quiet ever since.

Except for this one time.

I actually had a pretty hard time finding info on the 1931 spectacle outside of the pages of PopSci itself, presumably because the National Park Service would rather forget it. But according to a blog on Lassen County’s history run by local Tim Purdy, the explosion was devised as a celebration by one L.W. Collins, who became Lassen Volcanic National Park’s first superintendent in 1922. According to Purdy, Collins’ plans for a giant park dedication in 1931 were “widely criticized,” but that didn’t stop him from arranging for a big pyrotechnics show.

Edgar F. Wittmack’s iconic oil painting for Popular Science recalls the event in much more splendor than it probably deserves. According to Purdy’s blog, the wind actually blew the smoke away so quickly that there was basically no danger of mistaking the boom for a real eruption—though folks did say it looked pretty.

Fact: We kept using asbestos in everything after we knew it was deadly.

By Purbita Saha

Asbestos might have a dark and dangerous legacy, but for centuries, people thought it was miraculous–including several Popular Science writers through the ages. Archaeologists have detected traces of it in Macedonian funeral shrouds, classic Byzantine wall paintings, ancient Greek clothing, and early Inuit lantern wicks.

But what’s so great about asbestos? It all comes down to its chemical composition. The mineral comes from six different silicate compounds found in serpentine and igneous rocks. After it’s mined and broken up, it forms the kind of white fibrous material that you might imagine in a crumbling classroom ceiling. And of course, they’re also fireproof. Asbestos has a melting point of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, and is easy to manipulate into various structures, too, which made it such a darling in manufacturing. Once industrialization exploded across the world, asbestos was being added to everything from house shingles to baby blankets to firefighter uniforms.

As asbestos’s popularity grew, so did concerns over its effects on people’s health. Some of the earliest medical studies on factory workers showed that the fibers could embed in organ tissues, causing lung scarring, inflammation, and worse. Today, we know that asbestos exposure is a major cause of mesothelioma, especially in firefighters. As a result, most manufacturers and contractors have stopped using the material—though it still isn’t fully banned in the US. (The Environmental Protection Agency is working on that, again.)

Fact: What if we’re all ‘moon crab guys’?

By Corinne Iozzio

“Do beavers rule on Mars?” has long been regarded among the PopSci staff as the most laughably absurd of our archival bylines. For certain, its author, Thomas Elway, didn’t think the buck-toothed dam builders were supreme regents of the Red Planet. What he did think, however, was it was a thought exercise worth having. Given what planetary scientists knew about the fourth planet from the Sun in May 1830—that its temperatures were extreme, its sunlight faint, its gravity minimal, and its oxygen supply nearly nonexistent—Elway’s aim was to help readers understand what life there might look like. Of course he didn’t mean a literal Earth beaver, but instead a monstrous creature with massive eyes, a burly chest, and a lankier form.

It’s all very…logical? Until it’s not. There are obviously many holes to poke in the idea, but there is at least one major sticking point: Elway asserts that life on Mars never evolved past this point because the planet had never experienced the mass extinction of an ice age. We now know that to be very incorrect; in fact, researchers at Colgate University in 2021 showed evidence that Mars had been through a dozen such swings. As if the bubble-chested beaver idea hadn’t already been sufficiently popped.

This wasn’t Elway’s only such flight of fancy. In December 1929, he posed mutant grabs as a possible explanation for some shifty activity observed on the surface of the moon. Absurd though they may seem to modern eyes, it’s hard to judge his ideas too harshly. Elway’s fantastic beasts can be seen as a type of hard science fiction: visions whose ideas, technology, and landscapes are consistent with our own known reality.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Martian beavers, intentional explosions, and other weird facts from 150 years of PopSci appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Scientists and high-society ladies once used radiation to grow mutant flowers and veggies 

By Rachel Feltman

Most folks know that during World War II, the Manhattan Project figured out how to harness nuclear chain reactions to commit unspeakably horrifying acts of mass-murder and war. But in the early 1900s, when we were just starting to understand radioactivity, nuclear science had a much more fantastical and optimistic following. This led to plenty of dangerous and misguided nonsense, like irradiated slippers designed to glow in the dark, but also a general sense that understanding physics would give us unlimited energy and unlimited food—that it could make resources so abundant that utopia simply had to follow. Part of that research involved using x-rays to try to induce helpful mutations in plants like peanuts. Radiation can break down the bonds that keep DNA together, causing cancers when cells start reproducing out of control or radiation burns when they start dying. But DNA damage in sex cells can also get passed on to offspring, and result in literally any kind of physiological change. 

All those rosy utopian avenues for using nuclear physics were put on hold so the US could make a terrible bomb, which we did. But the Manhattan Project did keep at least half an eye on radioactive plants. They understood that radioactive fallout was going to fundamentally alter the ecosystem of any place where bombs were tested or dropped. 

Enter gamma ray gardens, where scientists would essentially plunk a tube of radioactive material (usually the isotope cobalt-60) into the center of a field. They’d plant various crops in a kind of pizza pie configuration of concentric circles. Eventually the isotope rod would get dropped into a bunker that shielded the surface from its gamma rays, and scientists could safely go check on their spoils. 

Gamma rays have an even smaller wavelength than x-rays—they’re something you can only get after you split into an atom—and they can shoot through basically anything like a bullet. So, surprise surprise, the plants right next to the radiation center would die. Some of the closest ones to survive would grow tumors. But somewhere farther out in the circle, you’d start to see plants that were just…a little different than what you’d planted. Maybe they’d grow especially tall, or have especially high fruit yields, or produce an unusual variety of colors in each flower.

That became very interesting to the US government during the cold war; politicians wanted to prove to the world that there was a bright side to the whole nuclear weapon thing. There were a bunch of initiatives designed to get nuclear physics into our everyday lives in a helpful and morally palatable fashion, and one of them was using those gamma gardens to create exciting and useful new plant varietals. 

Researchers would start by trying to spot any potentially useful adaptations that cropped up thanks to irradiation. Then they’d take the mutant plant and try to improve on it; they might cross-breed with something else, or irradiate a second or third or fourth generation of it, for example. At each stage they would store some seeds, so that when they found something really neat—either for aesthetic or agricultural purposes—they could get those nuclear plants out to the public. 

Even folks without any interest in nuclear science interacted with some of these plants, and we still do today. The Rio Star grapefruit, which is now very common, is just one example, which was bred in an atomic garden to have very dark flesh and sweet juice. Most of the world’s mint oil comes from a peppermint cultivar called “Todd’s Mitcham,” which is resistant to certain fungi, and was bred at Brookhaven National Lab’s gamma garden. There are more than 3,000 registered plants that got to be the way they are because of radiation. 

But some civilians wanted to get an even closer look at this exciting new science. One of the most famous was an oral surgeon named CJ Speas, who shot seeds up with radiation in a backyard bunker and sold them across the world. This provided a hint of the same mystery of a gamma garden without having to bury cobalt-60 in your own backyard; you never knew what kind of mutation the seed might have taken on until you planted it. 

One of Speas’ most prolific overseas distributors was a British woman named Muriel Howorth. She also started the Atomic Gardening Society, which did things like put on interpretive dance performances to explain how nuclear physics worked. 

Some countries still use gamma gardens to find new and better plant varietals, but more targeted genetic engineering has made the practice pretty obsolete. While post-war proponents talked about irradiation as if it jump-started the process of evolution, it actually only jump starts the process of mutation. For more info on this strange era of botany, listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing! 

FACT: Pain is subjective—but that doesn’t make it any less painful

By Leigh Cowart

Every time you experience pain, the brain cooks it up fresh, which sometimes means mistaking a snake bite for a pointy stick. Pain is, simply and maddeningly, always subjective. There’s no machine in existence today that could peer inside your head and quantify the exact amount of pain you’re in. There’s just no standard experience of pain! When you have pain, the brain takes into account your surroundings, emotional state, expectation, arousal, and a slew of other factors to calibrate and deliver the aversive sensation we know so well. But this doesn’t mean pain isn’t real, quite the contrary: the experience of pain is as real as the brains that provide the suffering itself. And I would know. Even my scientific understanding of the trickster capsaicin could not save me from sobbing through the exquisite burn of Dante’s gazpacho when I ate the world’s hottest pepper. For more agony in the name of science, tune into this edition of The Weirdest Thing and check out my book, “Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose.“

FACT: Puppies get emo, too

By Sara Kiley Watson

Ever wonder why your seemingly perfect pup turned into a total menace over night right before their first birthdays? It might just be teen angst.

Until fairly recently, there’s not been a whole lot of proof that animals that aren’t human undergo the same kind of parental-mind-boggling teen drama during puberty. Especially when it comes to the animals that we really see as our own babies. That is, until a study came out in 2020 about teenage puppies going through shockingly similar dramatic changes in attitude—especially towards their parents. A team of British researchers worked with the charity Guide Dogs to see if around doggy puberty, around six to nine months, and substantial behavioral differences were spotted. 

The team of researchers took two different groups of pups, all German shepherds, golden retrievers, labrador retrievers or crosses of these breeds. The first group was around five months old, still in their bouncy baby phase where their human parents are the light of their lives, much like kids before hormones start running amok. The second group was at eight months—peak of potentially grouchy teen angst era. They took these two teams of dogs and did the classic “sit” command. At five months, pups responded pretty well to their parents telling them to sit, and not so much a stranger. But by eight months, this reverses—a teenage pup will more gladly sit when some random person asks them to, but when it comes to mom or dad, they’ll be more angsty about it.

Considering, however, that we can’t really give up our teens for adoption when they are driving us up the wall, folks do have the ability to rehome their dogs if they start acting out of control—even if it is just their hormones making them a little grumpier than usual. So if your pup is acting out a little more than usual, remember how you were when you were going through puberty, because growing up can certainly be ruff for man’s best friend. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Nuclear war inspired peacetime ‘gamma gardens’ for growing mutant plants appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things messy—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: A kitchen scrubber changed marine biology

By: Corinne Iozzio

True story: About a decade ago, the Clorox company discontinued a kitchen scrubber and sent the world of marine science into a tailspin. The scrubber in question was a poofy orange-red-yellow ball called the Tuffy, and for years marine biologist had been using this cleaning-aisle product as a collection medium for plankton—specifically mussel larvae. Counting these populations gives scientists a means to glimpse the health of the ocean. They’d been doing this since the 1980s, when an Oregon State marine biology professor named Bruce Menge happened up the wonder-collection-medium while wandering grocery aisles. As feature contributor Ryan Bradley writes in the Messy issue, without the Tuffy to rely on, marine scientists worldwide were left to scramble, buying Tuffys in bulk, second-hand, or even developing ways to reuse the scrubbers. But, as it turns out, even when the Tuffy supply runs dry, this special li’l scrubber is still making its mark.

Fact: Chocolate rivers make for terrible cleanup 

By Purbita Saha

A chocolate spill might sound like the stuff of dreams, but for one tiny hamlet in Germany, it created an infrastructure nightmare. In December of 2018, the DreiMeister Chocolate Factory in Westönnen dumped nearly 2,000 pounds of liquid cocoa on public streets after a malfunction on one of its storage tanks. The confection quickly hardened in the chilly weather (chocolate has a higher freezing point than water), forming a bumpy shell on top of the pavement. Firefighters from nearby towns had to chip away at the chocolate with shovels, and even resorted to burning it off with blowtorches. 

A month later, a tanker truck spilled 3,500 gallons of melted chocolate across an interstate in Flagstaff, Arizona. This time the chocolate retained its sludge-like consistency, allowing public safety workers to suck it up with hoses. It all goes to show how tricky the substance is to handle. In the kitchen chocolate requires a slow-heating and -cooling process called tempering. This is mainly because of its molecular structure: Cocoa butter can form six different crystals based on how it’s manipulated. The shiny, snappy kind that bakers aspire to is called Beta V. Of course, cooking methods will differ based on if you’re using dark, milk, or white chocolate and what other goodies you’re folding in. And as host Rachel Feltman shares in the podcast, chocolate fountains present a whole different chemistry challenge (and mess).

FACT: Pooping in space used to be so messy and difficult that free-floating turds were not uncommon 

By Rachel Feltman

While recently researching the conundrum of dealing with Irritable Bowel Syndrome while traveling through space, I was reminded of one of my favorite pieces of NASA lore: The free-flying turd incident. 

In May of 1969, with humanity just on the cusp of our first lunar landing, three NASA astronauts set off on Apollon 10 to orbit the moon. And then someone pooped. 

Pooping in space is complicated, even with modern technology and know-how. In 1969, the process of emptying one’s bowels in orbit was even trickier. See, astronauts had to adhere plastic baggies to their rear-ends using a bit of adhesive, then use their own hands to make sure poops actually made a safe landing in the intended receptacle. Without gravity, after all, there was no natural force acting to separate their BMs from their butts. 

But this process left plenty of room for user error. And on Apollo 10, the result was a free-floating turd—several, in fact. Don’t believe me? You can see for yourself: Each awkward incident got recorded on the official mission transcript (as did the many inevitable arguments about who’d created the floater in question). 

For more on the saga of the Apollo 10 turds, listen to this week’s episode. To learn more about how modern astronauts handle poop problems, check out our article about how NASA handles space diarrhea. And for dozens of other tales of messes both historical and recent, check out the latest digital issue of Popular Science.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post The inside scoop on Apollo 10’s infamous floating turd appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The first international vaccine campaign in history used young orphans as human refrigerators 

By Rachel Feltman

There are stories you expect to be uncontroversially positive and stories you expect to be irredeemably negative. The Balmis Expedition defies such binary categorization. On the one hand, it’s the tale of the first international effort to get vaccines into arms all over the world—an instance of a monarch choosing to put resources toward improving public health and eradicating a horrific disease. On the other hand, it involves young orphans—toddlers, in some cases—being crowded onto ships and sent around the world to serve as human incubators. But even those two polarities risk oversimplifying this moment in history.

By the 1700s, smallpox was a horrific fact of life, killing an estimated 400,000 people throughout Europe each year. But things were even worse in the Americas, which had been exposed to smallpox by Spanish invaders starting in the 1500s. It’s thought to have contributed to the downfall of the Incas and Aztecs, as the disease was almost always fatal to indigenous populations. 

King Charles IV of Spain had lost several family members to smallpox and seen several of the survivors scarred significantly by virolation, which as I talked about on a past episode of Weirdest Thing, was the practice of purposefully infecting people with smallpox scabs or pus that had been weakened with steam or some other method. Because virolation actually infected you with smallpox, albeit often a weaker case than you’d catch naturally, you still got sick and had pus-filled lesions. 

That changed in the 1790s, when Edward Jenner tested pus from cowpox blisters as a less dangerous form of inoculation, thereby inventing vaccines as we know them. He tested it in 1796 on his gardener’s son, which is a bit of a foreshadowing. 

In 1803, King Charles announced his intention to provide free vaccination to the masses in the Spanish colonies—and to leave each region with the resources and knowledge necessary to continue their own vaccination programs in the future. Royal physician Francisco Javier de Balmis, who had spent time in Mexico researching botany and folk medicine, led the charge. 

The hitch: Pus could stay usable on a piece of cloth or pressed between glass and sealed with wax for a journey of a few days, but what then? Some suggested bringing cows on board and slowly giving them cowpox one by one. But cows are loud, messy, and large—so Balmis went with 22 Spanish orphans between the age of 3 and 9 instead. Two boys would be infected with cowpox, and just before their pustules healed over, their pus would be used to inoculate another pair, and so on. The group made it to the Americas just in time to use one final remaining pustule—and to replenish their chain of children by renting some from local families. 

By the time the expedition finished, some 300,000 people in the Canaries, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines and China had received the vaccine for free. 

FACT: Legends are strange things. But the legend of the poop knife is especially so.

By Sara Kiley Watson

Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist sometimes called the “real-life Indiana Jones,” is passionate about telling stories about the Inuit and their relationship with their icy homeland. But one of his stories is especially iconic. He wrote of a mysterious Inuit tale in one of his books, called Shadows in the Sun, back in 1998. This tale of survival goes as such, and I quote:w

“There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.”

On its own, the story is bizarre enough, but in the past few years it’s taken on a new, more scientific life. Enter a group of scientists who said “hmmm let’s actually test this whole poop knife theory.” So they did—and really, really committed. The Kent State researchers created their own replica of the Inuit diet to create authentic poop, then molded said poop into knife shapes to see if Davis’s story would hold up in real life.

Using the poop knives that were frozen at brutally cold temperatures, they attempted to slice and dice a pig hide—but the knives left melty skid marks instead of serious dashes, meaning murdering a dog with ice cold poop is likely more myth than miracle.

And if testing the legend wasn’t enough, it spurred a discussion of whether or not we should take these kinds of tales at their face value. But whatever way you spin it, making a knife out of your own feces is definitely a tale to be told, even if the resulting weapon is pretty crappy.

But what about the boys? While historical records do suggest that Balmis intended for them to have wonderful lives in Mexico City—better lives than they could have had in Spain—but what information we have about them suggests that didn’t pan out. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more. 

FACT: Bird tongues are way stranger than you think

By Lauren Young

There’s a lot of reasons why I am enamored with birds—I’ve waxed poetic about their stunning plumage and unique vision, silly mating dances, and food hoarding tendencies. So, the story for my Weirdest Thing debut fittingly ties around a peculiar, perhaps overlooked, feature of our avian friends: Their tongues. 

Birders and scientists can glean a lot from the tongue of a bird, from feeding tactics to the anatomy of ancient extinct birds. Tongues can be so distinct that they can help identify different species, if you so happen to catch a lucky peek. Bird tongues come in a diversity of shapes, sizes, and structures, which each supply birds with an array of fascinating (and weird) behaviors. Some tongues are short and thick, some are frayed and barbed, some are pronged at the tip, while others are long and narrow—like certain woodpecker species. 

Woodpeckers are well-known high-speed drillers, but many species have a remarkably long tongue within that chisel-like beak. These rope-like, fleshy extensions can grow to a third the length of its body, while others even have tongues that reach up to 5 inches past the tip of the bill.  

You might be wondering, like I was, where does all that tongue… go? It turns out that woodpeckers tuck their tongues all nice and snug around the top of their skulls, and poke it through the nasal cavities.

If you think this floppy, long tongue would be cumbersome, think again: its length serves a number of functional advantages. In some species, like the Northern Flicker woodpecker, a sticky mucus coats around the tongue to help collect grub, like ants down in an anthill. Other woodpecker species use their tongues to get to hard-to-reach prey in their freshly burrowed trees. 

Additionally, the long tongue is actually one way a woodpecker doesn’t get bad whiplash. By wrapping around the skull, the tongue actually acts a bit like a cushion for the brain and helps support the woodpecker as it pecks into trees, as writer Rebecca Heisman explains for the American Bird Conservancy. (Read the full paper published in PLOS ONE.) Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about how the woodpecker keeps on being its best headbanger self.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Why young orphans were once used as human refrigerators appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Madame CJ Walker’s “Wonderful Hair Grower” was a better, smarter version of dandruff shampoo

By Purbita Saha

There’s no denying that Madame CJ Walker was a genius. The self-taught chemist and self-made entrepreneur was born to two formerly enslaved Louisianans in 1867. At a young age, she took on a job as a laundress, which exposed her to harsh cleansers that made her hair fall out.

Hair loss was a common issue among Black women in America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pharmaceuticals like Johnson & Johnson tried to hawk relaxers and shampoos to them, but Walker knew that their formulas wouldn’t work. Instead, she found inspiration in the budding industry of Black hair care products, and became a door-to-door salesperson for one such company. After just a few months on the job, she came up with her own line of products.

Walker’s inventiveness didn’t apply so much to her mixtures (the main ingredients were petrolatum and sulfur, which are a staple in dandruff treatments), but rather her emphasis on the haircare process. Black families didn’t have reliable access to clean water, so the business maven made sure to incorporate washing and scalp massaging into her regrowth solution. Of course, she was also a savvy marketer: She and her family set up shipping hubs at US rail hubs and took their sales overseas to Caribbean countries. By the time of her death in 1919, she was the first female millionaire in America who hadn’t inherited her wealth. 

Black women still disproportionately struggle with conditions like alopecia today. But Walker’s legacy has helped us learn about the importance of personalizing hair care and the science around it.

Fact: A lightbulb that hangs in a fire station in Livermore, California has been glowing for more than a century.

By Claire Maldarelli  

If you’ve ever had to replace a lightbulb in the middle of the night, you know the frustration that comes along with the fact that lightbulbs don’t last forever. Except for maybe one. In a fire station in Livermore, California, a lightbulb has been glowing for more than one hundred years. A few decades ago, after an investigation by a local journalist, a team of scientists dated the bulb to the early twentieth century. And to this day, scientists who’ve studied the bulb have yet to understand why it’s still working. 

Here’s what they do know. The bulb was made by a company called the Shelby Electric Company, which, a century ago, was known for creating some of the best products around. A part of the company’s success in making such incredible lightbulbs was the way they created the filament. It was constructed of a plastic cellulose material, which would become pure carbon when baked at the right temperature. In this process it would become nearly as hard as a diamond. 

There are many Shelby lightbulbs that have remained glowing for decades. However, most eventually stopped working. So what has kept this lightbulb in Livermore, California? Listen to this week’s episode to find out. And, if you want to see the bulb shining you can check out its live webcam here. 

FACT: Giant spiders and tiny frogs sometimes become roommates 

By Rachel Feltman

I recently saw one of those not-necessarily-reputable screenshots that tout supposed science facts claiming that there are spiders and frogs that link up as best friends—paired, of course, with an absolutely adorable picture. I simply had to investigate. 

Thankfully, this delightful fact is true, though whether it’s fair to call these arachnid-and-amphibian pairs “best friends” is an open question. It’s probably more accurate to call them business partners, because it seems likely it’s a relationship they both benefit from, or what we call “mutualism” in the world of biology. 

This has been seen most often in microhylids, a family of nearly 700, generally tiny frog species. Just to give you an idea, a real whopper of a microhylid species might grow to be about 3.5 inches long. Many of them are smaller than an inch. 

Since the late 20th century, scientists have found several species of microhylids that seem to commune with giant spiders. In 1989, for example, researchers found a dotted humming frog in Peru sharing a burrow with a local tarantula, despite the fact that the spider was large enough to eat the tiny amphibian, and was in fact known to munch on similar frogs. 

Young spiders were occasionally seen picking up the dotted humming frogs and tasting them before putting them back down, which could hint at how the two species came to coexist in such a strange way: It’s now thought that many microchylids have toxins in their skin that make them unpalatable to certain species of spiders. Because the spiders have learned not to eat these species, those lucky frogs have learned that hanging out around tarantulas is safe. 

But why would they do it? Well, because if you share a room with a giant spider, that spider is going to attack anything that tries to attack you—after all, it can’t be sure the predator isn’t going to attempt to run off with some arachnid eggs.  

Some researchers have proposed that while the frog benefits from the spider’s presence, the spider only tolerates the frog or ignores it. But others have suggested that there could be something in it for the spider, too. Frogs eat parasites and tiny creatures like ants that are too small for a tarantula to get their mouthparts around, but that can attack and eat a spider’s eggs. So while the tarantula is basically a bodyguard, the frog is basically a babysitter. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Why some tiny frogs have tarantulas as bodyguards appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’d have an even weirder answer if you’d listened to PopSci’s newest podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and PocketCasts every Wednesday, and it’s your new favorite source for the weirdest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster.

Check out our second episode below, and keep scrolling for more info about the facts contained therein.

Fact: Sometimes your brain just tells you that you’re dead

By Eleanor Cummins

Most people make it through the day without questioning whether or not they’re… alive. And if they did pose the question, they’d find a million comforting answers waiting for them, from the physical (do you move? metabolize? grow?) to the philosophical (“I think, therefore I am”). But all of this goes out the window, it seems, for people with Cotard’s delusion.

Every few years doctors report an encounter with a patient convinced they are dead. First defined by the French neurologist Jules Cotard in 1882, people suffering from the delusion become convinced that they are skin and bones and perhaps actively putrefying. They report the desire to be among other dead people. They lose their appetites—corpses, after all, don’t need to eat.

To this day, no one is certain what causes the delusion. Some propose an organic issue in the brain, which is likely the case with Capgras delusion, where people believe their loved ones have been replaced with look-alikes. Scientists believe a disruption between facial recognition skills and emotions causes this condition. But some experts think Cotard’s delusion is purely psychological. Regardless of its origins, the case studies of Cotard’s delusion—from Mademoiselle X in the 1880s onward—were certainly the weirdest thing I learned this week month.

Fact: Animals can adopt babies of other species

By Rachel Feltman

Yes, okay, you think of your pet dog as your own furry, slobbery baby. But you also know it’s not literally the fruit of your loins. Right?

We can’t know whether this pair of albatross that adopted a chick of another species are loving pet owners, compassionate foster parents, or just extremely confused. But however it happened—and whatever their motivations are—the Short-tailed birds definitely hatched a Black-footed baby, and they seem to be doing a fine job of raising it.

My favorite potential explanation for these alternative family arrangements is that it’s better for a species to be gullible than to occasionally reject their own offspring. What’s the harm in occasionally coddling a member of another species by accident, when the alternative is to be so wary of the chicks in your nest that you might thwart your own evolutionary imperative by kicking one of your kids to the curb? This does occasionally backfire; cuckoos have evolved to lay their eggs in random nests, and birds that don’t know better will devote all their time and resources to the big ol’ bruiser of a cuckoo baby they’re saddled with (after it kills their true offspring).

Related: yes, animals of different species can totally have sex. It happens all the time. It’s a long story.

Fact: The first celebrity diet was basically salt and vinegar chips

By Claire Maldarelli

The Internet is full of dietary advice. Want to lose 10 pounds in 10 days? Quit carbs altogether? Avoid added sugar like the plague? Each nutritional plan is backed up by websites promising scientific evidence (though there usually isn’t any). And almost every diet has at least one celebrity endorsing the trend and claiming it changed their life.

Last week, I was researching healthy diets for this story on lifestyle factors that lead to a longer life. I quickly went down a rabbit hole of the history of diets, and it made me wonder: Who actually was the first celebrity dieter?

While it’s impossible to know for sure, my research led me to Lord Byron, an English poet who lived from 1788 to 1824. The writer attended Cambridge University, and during his time at school, historians claim that Byron was extremely vain. With a crushing fear of becoming overweight, Byron subsisted on a combination of soda water and biscuits. For a little variety, he’d occasionally eat potatoes covered in vinegar.

Byron was likely thinking only of himself, but it turns out he had a profound effect on the other young poets of his day—many of them turned to the same diet or variations thereof, like eating vinegar and rice. They all sought that same pale and thin look that Byron wore with such pride.

But, reality check: Carbs drenched in vinegar do not a nutritious diet make. As we’ve previously reported, vinegar has few, if any, health benefits. And while potatoes are a healthier food than low-carb trends might have you believe, you’d have to eat a lot of them to get all the vitamins and nutrients you need to stay well. As cool as celebrities are, they are probably not the best people to take dieting advice from.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: The first celebrity diet, confused albatrosses, and delusions of death appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Brussels sprouts tasted very different decades ago

By: Sara Kiley Watson

It seems like everyone these days has a new favorite side dish—brussel sprouts. Whether they’re fried up and dusted with parmesan or roasted with crumbles of bacon, these little cabbages seem hotter than ever. But, just a few years ago, these little leafy greens were hardly the apple of America’s eye. They tended to be more of a staple in Europe, and even then they tended to be served boiled.

That’s because, up until recently, the breeding of brussel sprouts allowed for the bitter taste, provided by a chemical called glucosinolates, that have an important role in plant self-defense, to really shine through. On top of the cooking method of boiling them up, this chemical made them more of an ick than a yum for lots of folks (in fact, a 2008 poll showed that brussel sprouts were America’s most hated vegetable). 

But in the 90’s, a Dutch scientist figured out that there was a way to make sprouts less bitter, and therefore much more appealing to the masses. By breeding a hybrid of the sturdy (yet bitter) modern stock with older and milder varieties, the company now known as Syngenta put a sprout out into the world that was delicious, healthy, and didn’t reek so much of sulfur when cooked. And people, especially young people, responded—the tiny cabbages they detested as children suddenly, and mysteriously, became a new delicacy. 
Only a few years ago, there were only about 2,500 acres of brussels sprouts planted across the country—nowadays folks can’t get enough. As of 2019, there are 10,000 acres of sprouts in the US with more fields being planted in Mexico. This comeback is best served crispy with a side of garlic aioli, if you ask me.

FACT: There’s an island so full of snakes that humans can’t go there

By Rachel Feltman

Ilha da Queimada Grande, a stretch of land some 106 acres-big off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil is technically called “island of the big burn.” Sounds cheery, no? But its unofficial name is even more ominous: Snake Island. 

Estimates used to suggest there were as many as 5 snakes per square meter on Queimada Grande, but an actual survey by ecologists a few years back turned up a more reasonable 1 snake per square meter.

And those snakes? They’re not very chill. Queimada’s primary full time residents are extremely venomous pit vipers called Bothrops insularis, or golden lanceheads. Snake Island is infamous for being off-limits to humans, save for occasional trips by the Brazilian navy—to check in on the local lighthouse—and a small number of approved scientific expeditions. 

There are some really gruesome legends from folks over on the mainland, including that the last people who lived on Ilha da Queimada Grande—the family of the person who ran the lighthouse right before the government decided to automate in 1920—were literally stalked and killed by a gang of vipers, like something out of a Syfy channel original movie. That’s probably just a macabre rumor, but the snakes are definitely capable of taking you out. We know that their closest relatives on the mainland can absolutely kill humans, and chemical analysis suggests the golden lancehead’s venom is more potent and faster-acting. 

But while those urban legends are impossible to confirm, these freaky snakes do have a really intriguing backstory. Around 11,000 years ago, when sea levels were rising due to melting ice sheets after the last glacial maximum, the ocean cut off a strip of land from the rest of Brazil—Queimada Grande. 

That shift trapped some number of snakes in the genus Bothrops, which is a type of venomous pit viper found in the South and Central Americas, in a new home—one with, as far as scientists can tell, no natural predators, at least against adults. It’s just some frogs, some bugs, some lizards, some birds, and a whole bunch of vipers. 

So, on the one hand, there was nothing keeping these slithering predators from reproducing like crazy, which is how you end up with a snake per square meter. On the other hand, they didn’t have a lot of great food sources—juveniles could live on millipedes and such, but the biggest prey available to adults would be birds. That poses a bit of a problem. Birds are not easy prey for a snake like the golden lancehead, which lacks a prehensile tail for skillfully navigating trees. Most snakes in this Bothrops genus hunt by biting their prey once, letting it go, and then stalking it to attack again as it weakens. A bird doesn’t have to be able to get very far to get out of a snake’s easy reach, and certainly isn’t easy to track with chemical trails like terrestrial prey. 

Instead, it seems the snakes that thrived on this island were the ones able to keep prey in their mouths after that first bite. If that’s how you’re trying to hunt, extremely potent venom certainly doesn’t hurt your chances. 

Despite their scary countenance, golden lanceheads are actually critically endangered. Snake Island is their only native habitat, and deforestation on the mainland has decreased the number of migratory birds, threatening their main food source. There’s also, naturally, a lot of inbreeding that could start to cause problems as the gene pool shrinks. And, of course, because humans are awful, there’s quite a lucrative poaching market for these vipers, simply because they’re rare. 

There are several golden lanceheads in captivity throughout the state of São Paulo, if you want to visit without breaking the law and, let’s be real, probably dying. 

FACT: The ape language studies of the 1970s imploded — and changed the way we study animal communication

By: Arielle Duhaime-Ross

In the 1960s and 1970s, a handful of psychologists attempted to teach American sign language to Great Apes — most notably to chimps and one very well-known gorilla named Koko. The experiments made many of these animals and their trainers famous, but ultimately the work was engulfed in controversy. One scientist in particular, Herbert Terrace, claimed that none of these apes had learned this human language — even the ape he’d trained himself, Nim Chimpsky. Years later, these experiments were also critiqued for not having involved many animal trainers who were actually fluent in American Sign Language.

Today, the story of Koko the gorilla and Nim Chimpsky is a cautionary tale for scientists hoping to study animal communication. And the field has moved beyond the idea of teaching non-human animals a human language — focusing instead on animal cognition and how animals communicate in their own ways.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post This noxious island is so full of snakes, people can’t even visit appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s newest podcast. Season one of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, PocketCasts, and basically everywhere else you listen to podcasts. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. You’ve got just enough time to binge the whole bunch before our second season arrives early next year.

Check out our surprise holiday episode below:

Fact: The treadmill was originally designed as a way to occupy and employ prisoners.

By Claire Maldarelli

January is a rough time for staying in shape. In at least half the world, the days are as short as they are cold. But, at least for me, working out indoors can be even worse. Case in point: The treadmill. Some gym rats swear by the device, but I see the machine as pure torture. For me, the mental frustration of running in place is far worse than the numbing chill the cold air brings.

As it turns out, that psychological distress is not far from what the exercise machine was originally designed for.

In 1818, a prominent civil engineer named William Cubitt was working as a millwright designing, building, and fixing mills. At that time, he apparently became increasingly interested in the “welfare” of prisoners. So, he took it upon himself to reconfigure a mill such that it required human movement to keep it going, which is how it got the name treadmill.

The device was essentially a giant hollow cylinder with an iron frame around it, with wooden steps built around that frame—far more similar to today’s stairmasters. Forty prisoners at a time would climb up on the steps and as they did so, the mill would turn. The faster the wheel turned, the more rapidly the prisoners would have to keep climbing. It was mainly used to crush grains such as corn.

It was quickly adopted by all the major gallows in the United Kingdom and soon came to the United States as well. The U.S. abolished its use first, and Great Britain followed with the Prisoner’s Act of 1898.

Fast forward to 1968, when aerobic exercise was quickly becoming recognized as the key ingredient to staying healthy. A man named William Staub redesigned the existing treadmill to fit inside people’s homes and appeal to the masses, not just the obsessed athlete. His treadmill was called the PaceMaster 600 and didn’t look all that different from the fancy treadmills of today.

So, the next time you step on the treadmill master this new year, remember that you, unlike the first users of the device, always have the option of stepping off. Hopefully that alone will keep you going—or get you to run outside.

Fact: The origin of sparkling wine isn’t all about Dom Perignon

By Rachel Feltman

When most people ponder the origin story of the bubbles in their New Year’s Eve flutes, they’ll hear the story of a 17th-century monk named Dom Perignon. But while Perignon certainly started the Champagne fever in France, fizzy wine likely didn’t begin in his monastery: Three decades earlier a British scholar had published observations on “sparkling” wines—the first recorded use of that word to describe the beverage—he’d seen produced around England. Sorry, Dom.

Even after Champagne took off in France, it wasn’t like the wine we know today for quite some time. For starters, it was extremely sweet—sweeter than most dessert wines you’ll find today, in sharp contrast to the dry flavors we expect from the classiest modern bottles. It was also either cloudy or kind of flat: the second fermentation process that gives sparkling wine its bubbles also leaves a lot of yeast trapped in the bottle, and they form cloudy detritus as they die. The easiest way to deal with this, for decades of production, was to simply pour the wine from one bottle to another before selling it, skimming out the offending fungi. But all this agitation meant the wine would sparkle quite a bit less upon its second uncorking. The solution came from a widow named Madame Clicquot, a trailblazing entrepreneur in a time when few French women had anything to do with business. She and her colleagues came up with the idea of riddling: wine gets its second fermentation on a special rack that allows the bottles to tilt, and winemakers periodically agitate them slightly before setting them back down at a slightly-more-extreme angle. At the end of the process, the yeast has all been coaxed to sit in a single layer at the very top of the bottle. This means you can simply uncork the wine and skim the sediment, then seal it back up—instead of shaking your delicate product around as you filter it from one bottle to another. There are some wineries where this still happens by hand.

For a bonus fact about why the heck we watch a ball drop every New Year’s Eve, listen to this week’s episode (embedded above).

Calendar power hour

By Eleanor Cummins

You could say we’re publishing this special episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week on Christmas Day, December 25, 2018. But you could just as rightly say we’re publishing it on December 26, 2018—if you’re on the other side of the international dateline. Or on December 12, 2018 if you’re in imperial Russia and still using the Julian calendar. Or on December 25, 106 if you’re somehow accessing the internet from North Korea (hello!) and count in Juche years. In anticipation of our transition to 2019, I decided to look into what a year really is, and how it’s changed from ancient Rome to 1920s Greece to today. Find out more on Weirdest Thing!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on iTunes. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Check out the weirdest New Year’s Eve facts we could find appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

With millions of podcasts streaming online these days, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the amount of variety in the audio-storytelling space. That’s why it’s sometimes better to stick with what you know, like PopSci’s two hit shows, “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week” and “Ask Us Anything.” Not convinced? We put our best episodes from this year into a fun, listenable list—and included other science podcasts we adore to help get you hooked. Bottoms up.

The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week

Moose crash test dummies, famous ferrets, and deadly planets

This wonderful episode features science author Mary Roach, who joined the show to talk about her new book FUZZ: When Nature Breaks the Law. Her fact, which comes straight from the book, is all about why (and how) researchers created moose crash test dummies.

Ancient brain surgeons, the crows have eyes, and why radiators are so annoying

Actor and famous Schitt’s Creek impersonator Michael Judson Berry joined this episode, and it was a downright blast. Listen to Berry impersonate many members of the Rose family and learn all about why we’ve always drilled holes in heads, how radiators saved people during outbreaks, and why crows are, terrifyingly, even smarter than we thought.

Haunted vaginas, fairy floss, and books made of human skin

Halloween episodes of Weirdest Thing are always bangers, and this one is no exception. We learned that ectoplasm is real, but it’s not really the pink or green gooey slime we imagine. More dramatically, the material has been linked to a lot of scams and scandals through history.

Art crime doesn’t pay, canines cooking meat, and eggs done wrong

The comedian (and downright wonderful human) Josh Gondelman made this episode a giggly delight. From unsolved art heists to dogs cooking their humans dinner, this one’s a must-listen.

Science meets magic, high-tech murders, and bees

Jonathan Sims from the riveting horror fiction podcast the Magnus Archives joined the Weirdest Thing for this special recording. The group spun a (true!) story about the first murder reported via telegraph, discussed whether bees can tell time, and blurred the lines between science and magic.

Q&A: Punkin chunkin, mysterious shipwrecks, and midwestern scorpions

In the break between Season 4 and Season 5, host Rachel Feltman and producer Jess Boddy hopped on Zoom to listen to some listener voicemails. What ensued was, as always, wonderful and weird—but to Boddy’s delight, somehow Midwestern-themed. (Did you know scorpions live in Illinois?) The episode is a refreshing change of pace from the typical show format.

See the full list of Weirdest Thing episodes here.

Ask Us Anything

How can you safely send nude photos?

Guest-hosted by Associate DIY Editor Sandra Gutierrez G., the first episode of “Ask Us Anything” Season 2 was juicy and informative. From metadata to camera angles, Gutierrez explains everything you need to know about sending a steamy pic in the safest way possible.

What did dinosaurs taste like?

This is one of those questions that you might never consider—but once you hear it being asked, you’ll be ravenous for the answer. DIY Editor John Kennedy gets into the grisly details of how dinos might have tasted if you tossed them on the grill.

Why can’t we see more colors?

Most humans see the world in a generally consistent way. But other animals see even more colors than we can—so what’s the deal? Is it possible for us to perceive these “invisible” colors too? Science Editor Claire Maldarelli explains what is (and isn’t) possible.

See the full list of Ask Us Anything episodes here.

Other best science podcast episodes

The Outdoor Life Podcast: The mysterious chronic Lyme disease nightmare

Our sister magazine Outdoor Life launched their new podcast this year and took several deep dives on hot topics in the hunting and fishing worlds. This episode focusing on the latest research on chronic Lyme disease, however, felt relatable to a lot of people.

Flash Forward: What is the future of gender?

Former PopSci contributor Rose Eveleth’s podcast is a perennial go-to for our staff. This year’s gender episode really stood out to us, largely because of how it built off a thought experiment Eveleth ran six years ago. A lot has changed in gender science and policies since then, but at the same time, a lot of misunderstandings and questions remain.

Donut Podcasts: How these electric vehicles sparked the Tesla

Another sister publication of ours, Donut Media recently turned its popular YouTube channel into a freewheeling podcasting space. Their episode on the classic tech that fuels modern EVs was fascinating, especially with all the battery-powered trucks and sports cars that were unveiled this year.

For the Wild: Moral landscapes amidst changing ecologies

Indigenous science keeps growing in stature as a way to seek solutions against climate change, extinction, and other environmental problems. This episode, featuring Cal State University East Bay professor and biodiversity expert Enrique Salmón, combines philosophy, chemistry, and deep analysis to help humans rejigger their role in the natural world. It has the power to change minds and practices.

Apple News Today: Does blood hold the key to the fountain of youth?

PopSci writer Kat McGowan chatted about her magazine feature on reverse aging on one of Apple’s premiere podcasts. Listen to her dissect the sensational research that neurobiologists from Harvard and Stanford have been tinkering with for decades. What is fact and what is still fantasy at this point?

Radiolab: Elements

Here’s a nerd fest that you won’t want to miss. WNYC’s “Radiolab” stole our hearts with an entire episode dedicated to illuminating the more obscure parts of the periodic table through poetry, musical theater, and old-fashioned yarn spinning. Turns out, livermorium rhymes pretty well with zirconium.

The post Our favorite science podcast episodes of 2021 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Bees can make a special kind of honey using spotted lanternfly poop 

By Rachel Feltman

Even if you love slurping down a cup of hot tea just full of the stuff, you might not really know what honey is. Bees often make this sweet goop out of nectar from flowers, but any super-sugary liquid will do in a pinch. In 2012, for example, some French bees got into a candy factory’s waste vats and produced blue and green honey from the sticky syrup. 

And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, bees will make honey using the waste emissions of other insects—including the invasive spotted lanternfly. 

The spotted lanternfly, which is a heartbreakingly beautiful and absolutely ecologically devastating little leaf-hopper native to China, was first seen in Pennsylvania in September of 2014. They feed on dozens of species of plants, including food crops, and can cause a lot of damage. In addition to all the nibbling, they also secrete a sticky waste—basically poop or pee—called honeydew, which tends to attract molds that kill the affected plants. Far from being picky eaters, bees have been known to sup on this sweet stuff and produce honey from it (the resulting product is also, confusingly, called honeydew). 

FACT: Super-heated falcon poop can help explain the origins of rocks and life on Earth.

By Lauren Leffer

In 2016 on Mt. Rasvumchorr in Russia, researchers discovered naturally occurring deposits of a substance known as Tinnunculite. The compound is a pale, carbon-based mineral that comes in a variety of colors. It’s also the byproduct of birds pooping near burning coal. When falcon feces reacts with hot gasses, it turns from biodegradable to solid-as-a-rock. And this relatively recent entry to the official list of minerals is also a wild example of how minerals and life co-evolved on Earth.

When you think of evolution, maybe you think of natural selection, Galapagos finches, Darwin, or DNA. But according to mineralogist Robert Hazen, rocks evolve too. Hazen’s hypothesis of “mineral evolution” posits that we have as many living things on earth as we do, in part, because of the presence of minerals. And, that we have so many different minerals because of living things.

For an example that goes beyond guano, there’s “The Great Oxygenation Event.” Before there was life, our atmosphere had no oxygen in it. Oxygen molecules are key to a whole suite of chemical reactions, and without it, not much was happening in the mineral record. But suddenly, microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria emerged, multiplied, photosynthesized, and produced enough oxygen gas to create thousands of new minerals. There are lots and lots of ways (big and small) that living things and rocks are altering each other’s environments and determining each other’s future. In Hazen’s own words, “we need to understand minerals to give us the story of our planet.”

FACT: A doctor tried to cure gluten intolerance with ONLY bananas

By Sara Chodosh

Avid listeners of the show might remember that I have celiac disease, which depending on who you’re talking to is either a legit reason not to eat gluten or “just a fad.” I know a lot about the disease both through having it and through writing about it for PopSci, but even I didn’t know about this week’s fact until really recently.
Banana babies are not, despite what Google says, tiny frozen bananas covered in chocolate (though they look delicious). They’re babies and small children who were fed a diet chock full of bananas in an effort to cure them of celiac. Did it work? No. You don’t have to listen to the episode to figure that out. But is it a wild tale anyway? Absolutely.

In August, Atlas Obscura reported that Philadelphia beekeepers had harvested the sticky results of this bee-and-lanternfly collab. Check out their story for more on the accidental discovery of an intriguing new type of honey, and listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to learn more about how bees can go on misadventures that lead to toxic, spicy, and even hallucinogenic honey. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Spotted lanternfly goo is surprisingly tasty appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things tasty—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: A study ‘proved’ White Castle is good for you

By Corinne Iozzio

The hamburger business was having a hard time in the 1930s. Sales were way down after a wave of public attention around unsavory, unappetizing, and downright unhygienic practices are meat processing facilities came to light in the decades following the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Among the hardest hit was White Castle founder Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram. Despite PR campaigns designed to tout the cleanliness of the production of his famous sliders, Ingram was struggling to tempt the public. So, he decided to get science on his side. He recruited a physiological chemist named Jesse McClendon to design a study to prove the healthfulness of a burger-based diet. The study McClendon completed had a single person eat an entire Crave Case a day (that’s 10 sliders per meal, three meals a day), totaling approximately 4,500 calories. When the single participant survived the month-long burger binge with no immediately apparent ill effects, Ingram was emboldened to launch a campaign touting his menu as not only not bad for you, but were an essential part of building a healthy body. This run of ads was, of course, not unique in an era when scant oversight gave advertisers leeway to trumpet the bodily benefits of everything from junk food to cigarettes. Today, a vast catalog of research into the impacts of fast food on health soundly refutes Ingram’s claims, but chains continue to market “healthy” menu items like plant-based burgers just the same. 

FACT: We might all be cooking up invasive bloodsuckers by 2030

By Purbita Saha

Okay, that year is slightly arbitrary. But the fact remains: Americans should start eating sea lampreys before they decimate all the wildlife in the Great Lakes. The hellish-looking species is native to the Atlantic Ocean (though there is some debate over their origins), and has been making its way inland in the Midwest since the 1800s with the help of canal systems. Today, their population in the region totals in the tens of millions, which is bad news for Great Lakes fish and anglers. Sea lampreys, you see, are voracious predators that latch onto larger prey with sharp, circular suckers. They bore through the scales of their catch, then drain all the blood and bodily fluids out for a nourishing meal. Note: They don’t attack humans.

Wildlife agencies in Michigan and other Great Lakes states have launched lamprey task forces to control the invasive species. But nothing has worked well enough to slow the invasion. So, biologists and chefs are getting creative by encouraging people to eat the fish as many Europeans do. (It’s even rumored that King Henry I died from glutting on boiled lamprey.) The barrier to entry, of course, is the creature’s hideous exterior. If Americans can learn that taste is more than skin-deep, lamprey—and other destructive exotics, like periwinkles, Japanese knotweed, and wild boar—could serve as a reliable and sustainable food source.

FACT: Competitive meat judging is a real sport—and it’s even stranger than it sounds

By Rachel Feltman

First things first: There are people—loads of people—who consider competitive meat judging to be a sport. But while you might reasonably assume that a meat judging competition would be about who raises and slaughters the best livestock, it’s actually about who does the best job of judging random meat. Dating back to at least 1926, when it was introduced at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago, the noble pursuit of competitive meat judging is all about knowing everything there is to know about beef, lamb, and pork carcasses. 

Competitive meat judging’s highest stakes are in the intercollegiate circuit, where a number of schools send students on a whirlwind tour of the nation’s most hallowed meat lockers to prove their stuff. It’s not easy: Competitors spend hours on their feet in frigid rooms, trying their best to evaluate qualities like the size of a cut of meat, its degree of fat marbling, and the age of the animal it came from using nothing but visual cues. 
Fans and alums argue that those strange and tense conditions help breed top-notch critical thinking skills in competitors—some of whom, unsurprisingly, go on to do the same kind of meat analysis in a professional capacity. For more info on the strange world of competitive meat judging, check out this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Inside the cutthroat world of competitive meat judging appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: You used to be able to die “by planet”

By Sara Chodosh

I’ve spent more time than most looking at death statistics. It’s kind of an occupational hazard of being both a health/science person and a data person. I am generally used to them being both quite depressing and pretty mundane—in the modern era in the US the vast majority of deaths are from cancer and heart disease, followed by accidents and respiratory issues. Elsewhere in the world it’s less mundane but much more depressing (read: lots of deaths due to preventable diseases that we largely don’t suffer from in high-income countries). 

So it was something of a pleasant surprise to come across “The Diseases, and Casualties this year being 1632” (strange comma included). I think because the causes of death listed here—Affrighted, Made away themselves, Suddenly—are so removed from how we quantify death today this whole list kind of comes across as funny, or at least amusing. And really what’s ultimately most amusing is the total lack of understanding of disease. “Suddenly” is not an acceptable item on a death certificate in the 21st century because even if someone did drop dead suddenly we could do an autopsy to figure out what actually happened. A stroke, perhaps, or a heart attack. But in the 17th and 18th centuries you just…died. You often did so at home or maybe at work, and the person who came to pick up your body for burial probably knew about as much about why you died as did the person who saw you die in the first place, which is to say: not a lot. 

Of course the more I dug into this list the less funny it became. Death is death, and the more you think about what life was actually like for these people the sadder the whole thing gets. I highly recommend reading the paper I found explaining all the terms—it’s a fascinating look at birth and death, and at how much has changed in just a few hundred years. And we could all probably use a reminder right now of how much better life is today than it used to be.

FACT: This ferret named Felicia is a scientific hero

By Rachel Feltman

Some listeners may recall that in 2016, the Large Hadron Collider, which is a big ol’ particle collider in Switzerland, shut down because of a weasel. There was a massive power outage that turned out to be the result of a small mammal now thought to be a marten weasel, which chewed through some power lines and sadly died, but not before taking the LHC with it, albeit temporarily. 

Animals are not infrequent sources of trouble in these facilities. In 2009, a soggy baguette caused an electrical short at the LHC, and the prevailing theory is that a passing bird dropped it down into the equipment. In 2006, a Fermilab newsletter even recounted an only somewhat facetious report of a “coordinated attack” on the facility by a family of raccoons. 

But speaking of Fermilab, and back to ferrets, I want to talk about a more positive animal interaction at a particle collider.

So, in the early 70s, back when Fermilab was still called the National Accelerator Laboratory, engineers couldn’t get the particles up to the necessary speed without the magnets inside shorting out. Eventually, they figured out that tiny metal shavings left behind by the construction of the tube were interfering. 

But how do you clean out a ring-shaped tube that stretches for something like four miles? 

They found their solution in Felicia, the smallest available ferret from a fur farm in Minnesota, and purchased her for $35. For more on how she helped change the particle physics game, listen to this week’s episode.

FACT: Swedish scientists once crafted a crash test dummy shaped like a moose

By Mary Roach

When to swerve, and when to hit? Most drivers now know that when it comes to deer, the safest thing to do is to simply collide with the unfortunate animal. But when large animals like moose and camels come into play, the potential consequences of a run-in become much more dire—and the choice to swerve becomes the smarter option. For more on the scientific investigation into moose jaywalkers, check out the latest episode of Weirdest Thing—and my latest book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Death ‘by planet’ was surprisingly common in the 1600s appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Dallas Taylor—he’s a sound engineer and the host of Twenty Thousand Hertz. Make sure to check it out!

FACT: At least one very unlucky astronaut claims he had an allergic reaction to lunar dust

By Sara Chodosh

Lunar dust is, at least according to some NASA experts, the number one challenge facing missions to the moon. That may be hard to believe, but only if you know nothing about moon dust. Here’s the 411: it’s both wildly sharp and incredibly powdery, which turns out to be a terrible combination. 

Even worse is that you can—maybe, possibly—be allergic to it. There’s not exactly a large sample size of people who have ever breathed in moon dust, but at least two people have had what appears to be an allergic reaction to it. Cruelly, the first was a geologist who flew on Apollo 17, only to arrive on the moon and realize he was allergic to the very thing he studied. There’s a beautiful kind of poetry to that, I think. 

You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out some of the wilder facts about lunar dust, but I’ll leave you with this tease: astronauts and miners have a lot more in common than you’d think.

FACT: An Ancient Egyptian statue supposedly sung at dawn

By Rachel Feltman

The Colossi of Memnon were built near what’s now Luxor around 1350 BCE, and they originally stood guard over the palatial memorial grounds of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Depicting Amenhotep in the style of Osiris, the statues stood 26 feet high and were carved from a single block of quartzite sandstone that came from hundreds of miles away.

The temple and other structures around the complex didn’t last very long: around 1200 BC, an earthquake did away with everything but the Colossi. In 27 BC, another earthquake hit and shattered the northern Colossus, collapsing it from the waist up and cracking the lower half.

But the legacy of the Colossi was actually just getting started. Around the time of the BCE to AD switch, the Greek historian Strabo reported that one of the Colossi was known to sing.

This phenomenon—which occurred only at the break of dawn—sparked a tourist craze, and visitors left ancient Yelp reviews in the form of graffiti on the statue’s base. Julia Balbilla, a Roman noble who visited in 130 A.D., wrote a poem on the statue’s leg comparing the sound to “ringing bronze.” Others described it as sounding like a broken harp or lyre string.

Many of the visitors to the site suspected some kind of supernatural significance to the sound, especially since it always happened at the same time of day—as dawn broke—but wasn’t otherwise consistent. People put a lot of stock in whether the statue sang on the day they visited.

But the best guess for how this “singing” occurred comes from what we know about when the Colossus stopped singing.

In either 196 or 199, the Roman emperor Septimus Severus visited the site and heard nothing. In an attempt to curry favor with whatever power controlled the singing statue, he supposedly paid for a repair job on it. We know that the sound stopped for good around this time. The best theory: cracks in the stone had previously collected dew, creating sonic vibrations as morning temperatures rose and warmed the liquid. Ironically, when Severus had those cracks repaired, he shut the singing up for good.

We’ll never know for certain whether the Colossus really sang, how it managed to carry a tune, or why it stopped. You can find out more about mysterious sounds that science has yet to solve here.

FACT: Animal sounds make surprising cameos in movies and TV shows

By Dallas Taylor

When you think of the roar of a T. rex, what sound comes to mind? A tiny puppy squeal? No? Well, you may be surprised to learn that the sound designers of Jurassic Park mixed that very noise into a slew of other animal yips and yaps to create the iconic dinosaur’s bellow. On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, we get into the use of real-world animal sounds for creating everything from the purr of an engine to the sci-fi whoosh of a TIE fighter. Stick around for one particularly surprising fact about Netflix’s signature sound (spoiler alert: it involves a goat).

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Imagine traveling to the moon only to realize you’re allergic to it. One astronaut did. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our next NYC live show on June 14.

This week’s episode features an extra weird, very special guest: Bill Nye the Science Guy. Take a listen below (or wherever you like to get your podcasts) and keep scrolling for more info on some of the stories we shared. And don’t forget to check out Bill’s brand new podcast, Science Rules!

Fact: Your brain can ignore a lot—including a person in a giant gorilla costume directly in front of you.

By Claire Maldarelli

In 1999, two Harvard experimental psychologists—Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris—conducted an experiment that changed the way we think about attention.

In a 40-second-long taped scene, the two researchers placed a group of students in a large room. Half wore white shirts and the other half wore black. The psychologists also gave them a set of basketballs to throw around. Halfway through their play, a person in a gorilla costume walked straight through the ball tossing. Once they reached the middle of the room, right in front of the people passing the balls around, they pounded their chest and looked directly into the camera before slowly walking out of sight. In total, the costumed individual spent a solid nine seconds on camera. You can watch the video here.

Later on, the researchers asked study subjects to watch a video of the scene. At the tape’s onset, they were instructed to count how many times the players wearing white passed the ball around. The video played, balls were tossed, a gorilla walked across and pounded its chest. The screen then posed two questions to the viewers: “How many passes did you count?” (the correct answer was 15) and “Did you see the gorilla?”

Most participants correctly guessed the passes, but just half saw the gorilla. The others were completely shocked.

How can someone fail to notice someone in a gorilla suit walking directly in their line of sight? Surprisingly, it’s pretty easy. This is perhaps the best and most ideal representation of something called inattentional blindness, where the brain fails to notice something that the eye has clearly picked up on. In fact, in later replicate studies and analyses the researchers used eye trackers to follow exactly what the participants were looking at. Their eyes did indeed lock on the gorilla; it’s not as if they were so focused on the balls that they failed to look at the strange interloper. So why did they claim they didn’t see it? That’s because seeing something with your eyes is only half the battle. Your brain must still register, interpret, and remember those signals.

Listen to this week’s episode to see how you could also have missed the giant ape in the room, and what else you’re probably failing to see in everyday life.

Fact: Pigeon droppings helped confirm the existence of The Big Bang

By Bill Nye

Here’s a real weird one for you: when scientists first detected the background radiation left over from The Big Bang, they thought the signal was coming from pigeon droppings scattered over the antenna. You’ve got to scrape a few pigeon poops if you want to solve the mysteries of the cosmos. Now if only some bird excrement could help us figure out what came before The Big Bang. Whoa.

Fact: Doctors used to worry that cycling would hurt your heart (and make you ugly)

By Rachel Feltman

I’m about to set out on a 545-mile bike ride for charity, so I’ve been thinking about cycling an awful lot lately. Imagine my delight when, while perusing the very Weirdest-Thing-friendly works of Thomas Morris, I found a story about the physician who thought bikes posed a serious health hazard. At a conference in 1894, George Herschell argued that every cyclist’s heart was a ticking time bomb. He claimed to love the sport himself, but was certain that the craze was causing heart disease. Of races involving hills, he said: “Nothing more suicidal, or more certain to produce heart disease, can possibly be imagined.” He claimed a few moments of over-exertion on a bike would do damage to the heart “from which it perhaps cannot recover.”

His advice? Riders should cease and desist with the cycling as soon as they felt at all out of breath. This was in line with a general sense of distrust around exercise in the Victorian era. Of course, now we know you’re not really getting a hard workout in if you’re not at least a little out of breath, and we also know that (at least for most people) biking is excellent for cardiovascular health.

Herschell would no doubt be appalled by my plans to spend seven straight days on a bike (yes, really—you can donate if you want to encourage this insanity!) but other physicians would have discouraged me for a different reason: bike face. Listen to the podcast to hear about the health scare doctors used to try to keep young women off the streets.

Fact: The platypus was originally considered a hoax

By Eleanor Cummins

Platypuses are venomous, semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammals with duck bills, otter feet, and beaver tails. So it’s no wonder the first Europeans to hear about them didn’t believe they were real. Robert Knox, a prominent scientist of the day, was thoroughly convinced the first specimen sent from the Australian coast was a Chinese hoax. Some say he even went looking for the seams in this allegedly fraudulent work of taxidermy. (Of course, there were none.) But the reasons for skepticism extend beyond the platypus’ strange morphology. On this week’s episode, I talk about a few of the very real nature scams circulating in the 18th and 19th centuries, including P.T. Barnum’s nightmare-inducing “Feejee Mermaid,” the lies circling the pelican, and the overstated case of the mastodon.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. Want to see us get weird in person? Grab tickets to our live show: it’s June 14 in NYC.

The post Bill Nye talks killer clowns, mermaids, pigeon poo, and deadly bicycles appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Doctors used to bind books in human skin 

By Rachel Feltman

For most of us, the idea of everyday objects being made out of human skin is something we associate with horror movies, or maybe with historical monsters like the Nazis. But recent research shows that there was a time when doing so was considered pretty normal.

The Anthropodermic Book Project started up a few years ago to investigate supposed instances of anthropodermic bibliopegy, or books bound in human skin. So far the team has identified 50 supposed skin books, and have tested 31 of them using peptide mass fingerprinting, which is a technique that analyzes the amino acids in the collagen of a skin sample. Of those 31 books, 13 have turned out to be made of some non-human animal leather, but 18 of them have been confirmed as human. And these weren’t found in the homes of serial killers and war criminals. They were mostly medical texts bound by physicians during the 19th century.

For more information on these historical monstrosities, listen to this week’s episode. And be sure to check out “Dark Archives” by Megan Rosenbloom, which is a fascinating new book that goes into the subject in depth. 

If you learn nothing else, know this: You almost certainly wouldn’t be able to tell a human-bound book apart from one wrapped in cow or pig skin by sight, feel, or smell. So if you ever find yourself in the possession of a medical textbook from the 1800s, well… you get the idea. 

FACT: Ectoplasm is real, but it’s not what you think it is

By Sara Chodosh

Ectoplasm is something I associate, perhaps strangely, with Ghostbusters. I don’t think they even use the word “ectoplasm” in the movie, but my mental image of it is still the green slime from Slimer. So during this episode I want you to know one thing: “real” “ectoplasm” (both words really do need to be in quotation marks) is nothing like Slimer’s slime. Instead, it’s something much more ordinary and surprising, though you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out why. 

There is actually real ectoplasm, no quotation marks required, which is the outer layer of foraminifera, a class of single-celled organisms that live in the ocean and use their ectoplasm to catch food. That type is not nearly spooky or weird enough for a podcast episode, though, so the stuff I’m talking about this week is of the type that spiritualist mediums claimed to produce from various orifices in the early to mid 20th centuries. And yes, I do mean “various.” 

FACT: Cotton candy was invented by a dentist

By Claire Maldarelli

I’m pretty confident that if you ask any modern dentist today, they’d tell you that cotton candy isn’t all that great for your teeth. So it might come as a surprise then, that what Americans know today as cotton candy was indeed created by a dentist. William James Morrison, born in 1860, was a prominent dentist from Nashville, Tennessee, who along with a fellow Nashville-based friend, John C. Wharton created a device called the “fairy floss.” While it hardly resembles what any dentist would deem flossing (perhaps the opposite, even), the device became wildly popular and was exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, otherwise known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. To learn more about how the machine and product evolved—and for four more just as fun facts about candy—listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing! 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post How sexy Victorian mediums tricked scientists into believing in ectoplasm appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Trading blood could actually make you “young” again

By Corinne Iozzio

Scientists have long thought that blood has the power to reshape us—to make an old person feel young, an ill person well again, and an agitated person find calm. Some of the earliest experiments to test this notion, though, did not have stellar results. When Robert Lower developed a crude transfusion technique that he tested on dogs, the donating puppers didn’t survive. But he and other physicians in the mid-1600s felt they were onto something; more specifically, they wanted to know if “calm” blood could help quiet mental illness. To avoid a dead donor they instead transfused their patients with lamb’s blood. In 1667, a pair of public experiments—one in London and one in Paris—were relatively successful, according to the scientists’ own accounts, at least. But the first Parisian infusion, scientific historian Holly Tucker recounts in her book Blood Work, raised some, uh, red flags; the subject had what we now know was a normal immune response to such an incursion. The patient’s eventual death, though suspicious, spurred the government and eventually the pope to put the kibosh on the whole bloody business.

Here’s the thing, though: As Kat McGowan reports in the new issue of PopSci, these experiments were, in fact, onto something. Over the last couple decades, a growing body of research has found that a sustained commingling of blood supplies—so-called parabiosis—can reverse the signs of aging in lab mice. What remains is to figure out precisely what in the blood is spurring those changes and put that into a manageable form like a shot or a pill—no blood trading, necessary.

FACT: Candyland wouldn’t exist without polio

By Rachel Feltman

Polio is one of those diseases that most of us are lucky enough to not have to worry about. Jonas Salk created an extremely effective vaccine for it that was released in 1955, and cases dropped by 85 to 90 percent within just two years of that initial rollout. We haven’t had a case of polio with US origins since 1979, and the last time the virus was brought into the country to spread here was 1993. That’s not because polio has disappeared; it’s because our vaccination rates are so high.

Because of that, it’s easy for us to forget that in the 1950s, polio was a devastating and terrifying disease in the US. In around 1 percent of infections, polio attacks the central nervous system and can lead to permanent paralysis of different parts of the body. Young children are at especially high risk of contracting the virus. 

The height of the US polio epidemic was in the 1950s, just before Salk’s vaccine came out, and there was no cure and no understanding of how to prevent it. Something like 15,000 people were being paralyzed each year in the US alone. With no sense of what would actually help their kids avoid polio, a lot of parents spent the early 50s making kids stay indoors all summer, when transmission rates would peak. It was a really scary time—and a boring one.
Enter Eleanor Abbott, a school teacher from San Diego. We don’t know much about her, but we know she contracted polio herself in 1948. And sometime during or after her recovery, she designed Candyland. It’s colorful, it’s simple, and the game mechanic is literally about taking a stroll—which is pretty poignant when you realize she designed it primarily for bedridden kids recovering from illness. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about Abbott’s story—and other surprising origins of beloved American board games.

FACT: You can’t raise a baby chimpanzee like a tiny human

By Purbita Saha

Brave psychology couple Winthrop and Luella Kellogg gave this experiment a go in the 1930s—and though it led to some fascinating results, it didn’t pan out too well overall. Winthrop, who ran an animal-stimuli lab at Indiana State University and then Florida State University, was intrigued by the case of two “wolf children” in India whose feral instincts stuck with them for life. He wanted to dig into the question: How much can an infant’s environment change its behavior and development?

Winthrop couldn’t quite test his hypothesis on a young human, so he and his wife took in a 7-month-old captive chimpanzee from Cuba to raise alongside their 10-month-old son, Donald. Gua, as the ape was called, received the same care and attention as her “sibling” and was tested daily for a long list of metrics. While she never learned to speak or babble like a person, her physical growth and motor skills progressed quickly—on par with other chimps in captivity. Donald, on the other hand, began imitating Gua’s barks and onomatopoeia, which may have been one reason the experiment ended in just six months.

The Kellogg’s documented their whole endeavor in their book, The Ape and the Child. There’s also a silent documentary that’s mostly available online.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post What scientists learned when they tried to raise a chimp with a human baby appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Josh Gondelman, writer and co-Executive Producer for Desus & Mero on Showtime. Be sure to check out his podcast Make My Day if you don’t already listen!

FACT: This dog went ‘extinct’ once we stopped needing it to help us cook our meat

By Rachel Feltman

Yes, a dog was once genetically engineered to serve as a kitchen appliance.

Back when open fires were our best way of cooking things, the spit was invaluable. As early as the 1st century BC, people were sticking meat onto spits so they could turn and cook them evenly instead of like literally setting one half of a carcass on fire while the other stayed raw. But for hundreds of years, that meant someone had to physically turn the spit. In Medieval kitchens, this was a job for the lowest of lowly servant boys, who would be called the “spit boy” or “spit jack.” 

The first mention of the turnspit dog, also called the vernepator cur or canis vertigus (dizzy dog), was in 1576, where it was referred to as the turnespete. But most of what we know about them was written down in the 1800s, near the end of what was apparently centuries of regular use. The long story short here is that people bred terrier-like dogs to have relatively long bodies and short, crooked legs, and to be very strong and high-energy. Their bodies were designed to fit easily into these treadmills that powered various kitchen aids, but primarily the roasting spit. They would run and run and run all day to keep the meat turning.

[Related: Why corgi mixes look like adorable munchkin versions of other dogs]

Unfortunately, this job totally sucked for the dogs for all the reasons it had sucked for humans. According to at least one historian, it was an encounter with a New York hotel’s turnspit dogs in the 1850s that inspired Henry Berg to found the ASPCA.

Turnspit dogs weren’t completely relegated to the kitchen—the lords and ladies of the house would use them as living foot-warmers at church on Sundays, and Queen Victoria is said to have kept several of them as pets. But they were generally considered ugly and mean, probably because people kept making them run on hot treadmills that smelled like meat, so once they became obsolete as kitchen utensils—which happened over the course of the 19th century and as we entered the 20th, when various automated roasting spits became more accessible—they quickly disappeared. 

They’re considered “extinct” now, but dog breeds can’t really go extinct—they’re not distinct species. It’s kind of like how cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussel sprouts, and a whole bunch of other plants are all one species: if we stopped eating cabbage, it wouldn’t really be “extinct,” and the makings of cabbage would still exist in the DNA of the other varietals. Similarly, any “extinct” dog breed is just one where we don’t have proof that a pure descendant of that exact lineage is still around. All we have left of the turnspit dog are its many cousins in the canine world—and one seemingly beloved pet vernepator forever preserved with questionable taxidermy skills. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more!

FACT: An unsolved art heist is still memorialized with empty frames on the museum walls

By Josh Gondelman

In 1990, hundreds of millions of dollars of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (on St. Patrick’s Day, obviously). Because of stipulations made when the museum was founded, several frames remain hanging on the wall where paintings were cut out of them. This robbery, and the subsequent attempts to crack the case, are detailed in the Boston Globe/WBUR podcast Last Seen. The heist remains unsolved to this day, much to the disappointment of people who watched This Is A Robbery on Netflix thinking that the documentary’s producers would reveal a conclusion.

FACT: Chickens deserve our respect and praise

By Sara Chodosh

It doesn’t seem possible that chickens should be able to produce so many eggs. Modern domestic chickens (there are wild varieties called junglefowl) are egg-laying machines—some average more than 300 eggs per year, which is nearly one a day.

Just from a sheer physics standpoint, that is a gnarly amount of matter to convert from food to egg each day, not to mention passing through a hole in your body. Yikes!

So it’s only natural that sometimes they get it wrong.

In this week’s episode I talk all about the ways in which egg-laying can go awry, and boy are there a lot of them. A few highlights: wrinkly eggs, tiny eggs, and sandpaper-y ones, too.

My main egg fact for the episode, though, is about the absolute worst way things can go wrong: when chickens “lay” an egg inside their body. Somehow this also relates to a hormonal implant given to ferrets, but you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out how.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post This dog was genetically engineered to be a kitchen appliance appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on January 15, 2020.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The chainsaw was originally developed to aid in difficult childbirths

By Claire Maldarelli

When you picture a chainsaw, the typical uses that come to mind usually have to do with wood (and, you know, chopping it). But why were chainsaws invented, really? It might surprise you that the device’s origin lands about as far away from a lumber yard as you can get: The creators of the chainsaw were two Scottish surgeons named John Aitken and James Jeffray. And they developed their gnarly and dangerous device to help them do their jobs—cutting human bone and flesh.

Even under the best possible circumstances, giving birth is not what most would call a pleasant experience. But in the 18th century, prior to the development of anesthesia and other modern surgical tools, delivery could turn incredibly dangerous with little warning. When babies came out feet-first or their bodies were otherwise trapped in the birth canal, doctors would have to widen the pelvic area by cutting into the cartilage and bone. Aitken and Jeffray found that a sharp knife just didn’t do the trick in a timely fashion, so, somewhat shockingly, they created a chainsaw as a more precise and humane option.

The resulting procedure was known as a symphysiotomy, and thankfully it is no longer in use today. What’s left is the chainsaw, which is now kept well away from surgical wards. Thank goodness.

FACT: You owe your favorite fitness tracker to a man who diligently weighed his own poop

By Rachel Feltman

The next time you finish a workout and glance down at your Apple Watch for instant gratification, thank 16th-century Italian physician Santorio Santorio. He may not have pioneered the practice of counting steps, but he did something even more important to our understanding of self-quantification: He sat down. A lot. For a long time. For the better part of 30 years, in fact.

Santorio dedicated his career to improving our ability to measure important data points, especially as they pertained to health. In a world of physicians who thought you only needed to balance your humors in order to be well, Santorio wanted to know exactly how much phlegm was going into the equation. To that end, he built himself a special balancing chair designed to keep tabs on his weight at all hours.

By weighing himself at multiple points throughout the day—just after waking up; while sitting around doing nothing; before, during, and after eating; after having sex; before and after urinating or defecating—Santorio developed medicine’s first knowledge of the basal metabolic rate. Today we know that most of the calories we need to eat to survive go straight to fueling our organs. Barring seriously strenuous exercise, the calories we burn by moving around are relatively few.

Santorio didn’t have a perfect understanding of this, but his endless weigh-ins did help him land on the basic concept. Why? Because he needed an explanation for his missing poop. Listen to this week’s episode to find out more.

FACT: Some animals seem to have complete control over when they get pregnant

By Sara Chodosh

Pregnancy in general is a whirlwind of experiences in which your body starts doing things it’s never done before—and it can feel a little out of control. But it turns out a lot of animals have a surprising amount of control over their pregnancy. And that starts with choosing when to get preggers in the first place.

I talk a lot in the podcast about why an animal would want to plan when to give birth, but one thing that didn’t make it into the episode is the fact that a number of species can get inseminated while still suckling their babies, then get pregnant after those babies are weaned. A lot of human mothers think that they experience the same thing—that as long as they’re breastfeeding, they can’t conceive again. But that’s a total myth. It’s true that breastfeeding can affect your fertility, and so some women can have unprotected sex without much risk of pregnancy. But it’s also true that plenty of women are absolutely able to get pregnant even while regularly nursing—and that every year, tons of people end up having their second kid earlier than planned because they didn’t realize that fact. So, consider this your fair warning, and check out this week’s episode to hear about the animals who have a way better handle on the whole conception thing than humans do. For more stories about weird animal baby-making, listen to our previous episode about virgin births (yes, they’re a thing).

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Why were chainsaws invented? To help with childbirth. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits iTunes, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: A special sex hat saved peregrine falcons from extinction

By Sara Chodosh

Most of us are probably squeamish about talking in too much detail about animals’ sex lives. The associations with bestiality, I guess? Whatever it is, the vast majority of us are grossed out by it. I think that’s why I harbor such an undying appreciation for the folks who go into animal husbandry. They’re just so committed to learning about something that other people would rather not even think about: how to get a particular species off.

Enter: falconers.

Falconers are incredibly committed to their birds, so much so that a small group of them banded together in the 1960s to try to figure out how best to collect semen from (and then artificially inseminate) peregrine falcons. The species was dying out—it was their only option. Fortunately, a falconer named Lester Boyd came to the rescue. No longer did teams of two (or three) have to manually ejaculate birds of prey. Now they could use a copulation hat instead.

You’ll have to listen to the episode for the full details, but afterward, I highly recommend you watch this video of a falcon copulation expert getting a male peregrine falcon to ejaculate on his hat. The noises alone are truly incredible.

Fact: It’s legal to buy human bones, and business is booming on Instagram

By Rachel Feltman

Today’s fact comes from an excerpt of Skeleton Keys, a fantastic new book about all things bone by Brian Switek.

The fact that #HumanBones is a thing isn’t altogether that surprising; people are bound to encounter skulls and even fully-articulated skeletons if they go to cool enough museums and tourist destinations. But what about #HumanBonesForSale? Or perhaps #RealHumanSkull? These links aren’t taking you to some seedy dark web underbelly, friends: artists and collectors openly sell and trade human bones on Insta. Find out more about how this works—and why you should really, really think twice (or thrice, even) before buying human bones of your own—in this week’s episode, and in Brian’s book.

Fact: Our muscles jerk us awake so we don’t fall out of trees and die

By Claire Maldarelli

A few years ago, I noticed something strange as I tried to fall asleep: Just as I was about to reach a deep slumber, my muscles would twitch. Each night, it would happen a few times, never in the same area, until I finally fell asleep. I didn’t think much of it, and it even went away for a year or two. Recently, though, the twitching has returned. This time, I felt like I needed to get the final answer. So I did what any health reporter would do: I skipped the doctor and went straight for the medical literature.

As it turns out, I’m super normal. Human bodies are weird. And, unsurprisingly, much of our physiological functioning is still a great mystery to the medical community.

What I was experiencing is what medicine has dubbed a hypnic jerk or, more precisely, a “normal startle jerk.” Exactly as I had experienced, they are sudden contractions of one or more body segments occurring mostly as people fall asleep. They are sporadic and can affect anyone at any age. In fact, some studies suggest they affect between 60 and 70 percent of the general population.

As common as this phenomenon is in the general population, researchers haven’t quite pinned down what makes our muscles flutter. One theory claims it’s a simple act of nerves misfiring as they transition from awake to sleep mode. Another says that it’s a protective reflex: The brain mistakes total muscle relaxation as a free-fall and sends our muscles into action. A related idea from researchers at the University of Colorado takes that theory one step further. It could be, they say, an evolutionary mechanism. In their paper entitled “The effects of the tree-to-ground sleep transition in the evolution of cognition in early Homo,” the researchers surmised that it could be a way for primates to ensure they didn’t literally fall out of trees as they fell asleep. Those awakened by a muscle twitch could readjust themselves and make sure they were in a safe place before their brains and muscles kicked off for the night.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on iTunes (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on iTunes—it really helps other weirdos find the show). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Falcon sex hats and buying human skulls on Instagram appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things hot—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: Some skyscrapers are so shiny they turn into death rays

By Corinne Iozzio

In 2013, a London skyscraper known as the “Walkie Talkie” building made its mark on its neighborhood in an unusual way: Sunlight bouncing off the topmost floors of the bulbous facade melted cars on the street below. At the peak of its shine, the ray emitted 15 times as much solar radiation as would usually be found on the ground—enough to hurt any humans unlucky enough to cross its path.

Strangely, though, this was not the first time the so-called Fryscraper’s architect had set a town alight; the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas had, only a few years earlier, reflected rays so powerful they singed guests’ hair on the pool deck below. This was such a persistent problem that the hotel installed an army of giant umbrellas to shield swimmers and sunbathers. The Walkie Talkie now has a shield in place to provide a similar fix.

Many other buildings dotted around the globe have spurred similarly scorching scenes. Computer-assisted models have since revealed just how dangerous these rays can be, spurring physicists to sound alarms about the reflectivity of our modern structures—and implore architects to design buildings that sweat the exterior temperature as much as the interior one.

FACT: The sun will not explode in the year 2057

By Purbita Saha

Here’s some good news: We still have another five billion years before the sun runs out of hydrogen and sets us and our planetary neighbors on fire. That gives us a little more time than the sci-fi movie Sunshine predicted, and a couple of millennia to understand how stars truly meet their ends.

Astronomers have a pretty good guess at how the sun will burn out, based on the trajectories of yellow dwarves in other solar systems. But not all stars follow the same destiny. An energy analysis of distant galaxy NGC 6946 reveals that the red supergiant at its heart barely exploded as it completed its death spiral. Instead, it sort of just vanished and formed a gaping black hole, leaving its celestial neighbors intact. 

Experts are wondering if the red supergiant Betelguese will go out the same way. The grizzled star was looking dim in the night sky last year, but recent findings hint that it may have been due to a dust cloud, not impending nuclear doom. Tracking its fate and modeling more stellar scenarios could give us more insight on how our—and existence as we know it—will end.

FACT: If you love hot tubs, thank the Jacuzzis

By Rachel Feltman

When I set out to learn the history of the hot tub, the first, like, five pages of google search results were all from companies that sell them, which is absolutely my least favorite genre of history article. But then I found this amazing Atlas Obscura article from 2015 by Rich Paulas. You’ll have to listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to get the full scoop on my deep dive into the history of hydrotherapy—from the Ancient Romans, to bougie old resorts, to literal torture devices, to a bygone vestige of swinger culture, and finally to the fancy wellness aids we know and love today. But if you don’t learn anything else, know this: Jacuzzi isn’t just a product name. It’s also a surname. And the Jacuzzi family had a pretty prolific run as inventors during the first half of the 20th century. The next time you find yourself luxuriating in a whirlpool, take a moment to say salute to the Italian brothers who made your soak possible.

Plus: Click here for tips and tricks on how to take the absolute best and most relaxing bath ever.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Some skyscrapers are so shiny they turn into death rays appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The winner of the 1960 Olympic marathon did the whole race barefoot

By Claire Maldarelli 

Running shoe technology has come a long way in the last 100 years. Companies have added arch support, ridged soles designed to minimize shin splints, and, most recently, literal carbon-fiber plates sandwiched between an energy-returning ultra-lightweight midsole. All of this research and investment is meant to help athletes run their best races, and while world record times, particularly in the marathon, have come down with the advent of higher-tech shoes, sneakers aren’t everything. Case-in-point: Abebe Bikila and his barefoot Olympic triumph. 

Bikila was a last minute addition to the Ethiopian marathon squad at the 1960 Summer Olympic games in Rome. According to a documentary on the Olympics YouTube channel, a few days before he was set to leave for the big games, his shoes fell apart. Despite a long search, he couldn’t find a pair comfortable enough for him to race 26.2 miles in.

[Related: Science helped me run my first marathon in 3 hours and 21 minutes]

Instead of settling for a mediocre pair of kicks, he ran arguably the most important run of his life barefoot—and won. In doing so, he became the first Black African to win an Olympic Gold medal. This all goes to show that while technology can help an athlete succeed, it doesn’t always make or break a race. That’s one of the things about sports—you can’t predict everything that will happen on the day of the event. Listen to this week’s episode to hear how Bikila pulled off such an incredible fee(a)t.

FACT: The early-modern Olympics were a mess of bizarre sports and inconsistent rules

By Rachel Feltman

Before we get into the madness that used to count as an Olympic event, let’s start with a bit of historical context. The Olympics are at least around 3,000 years old—that’s when we know the Ancient Greeks held several major sporting festivals, one of which took place every four years at Olympia—but they didn’t exist from the year 400 to the year 1859. The ancient games tapered off during the Roman empire, and it was only in 1859 that Greece started holding modern Olympiads in Athens. The first international games took place in Athens in 1896, not long after the International Olympic Committee first formed.

The winter games weren’t a thing until 1924, and in general, it took a few decades for the Olympics to look anything like the events we hold today. Olympians had to provide their own lodging until 1932, for instance, so at those first games, most international competitors were people who happened to be in the host country for some other reason—like diplomats. Also, only amateurs were allowed to compete, and rules were kind of all over the place. 

For those first few Olympic games, and especially the second iteration—Paris 1900—countries just inserted events that they expected locals to do well in, which led to some very weird competitions. Motor boating, pigeon shooting, pistol dueling, and croquet were all featured in the 1900 games, to name just a few of the wildest examples. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about when and how the Olympics became the tightly-run ship they are today.

FACT: The Olympics used to give out medals for art and poetry

By Sara Chodosh

When I found out that there used to be Olympic medals for art, I honestly thought I must have misheard or misunderstood the podcast I was listening to. Or maybe that there was some technicality that I was missing—surely they couldn’t have done this. 

But it’s true: there used to be Olympic medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. 

There’s still kind of an artistic component to the Olympics today, in that there’s always a new logo design and some kind of overall aesthetic that ties the event together. There’s usually a public installation of the Olympic rings or some such event, and often the host city keeps that structure in place for years afterward. But the Olympics have changed so much in the past century that it now boggles the mind to consider holding a painting contest as part of the festivities.

There’s lots to admire about Olympic athletes—their commitment, their ambition, their skill—but in the end, the Olympics are an athletic endeavor. And the modern Olympics, in particular, are an event largely designed to make the organizers very wealthy, despite rules against paying the athletes who actually participate. Sorry to be a downer! Listen to the episode for far more fun facts and to learn how all of this somehow relates to Michael Jordan.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post How Abebe Bikila won the Olympic marathon without shoes appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’d have an even weirder answer if you’d listened to PopSci’s newest podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week will issue new episodes to iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and PocketCasts every Wednesday, and it’s your new favorite source for the weirdest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster.

Check out our inaugural episode here below, and keep scrolling for more info about the facts contained therein.

Fact: Thomas Jefferson was super into sloths

From Sara Chodosh

I unearthed this fact while researching a story about how humans might have hunted giant sloths. These beings were eight feet tall, had thick hides, and despite being on the slow side would have been quite hard to kill.

The actual study was pretty straightforward: Archaeologists found human footprints embedded within sloth tracks, and it seemed like the sloths were taking evasive action whenever there were humans tracking them (isolated sloth prints go in a roughly straight line, whereas those with human tracks on top show signs of sharp turns).

To spice up my stories, I try to find tangential facts, so of course I started researching giant sloths on Wikipedia. You always have to make sure those facts are true, but it can be a great starting point—it’s crowdsourced, so people often add these incredible bits of information that you might not find in a standard academic paper. That’s where I read that there’s a giant sloth species named for Thomas Jefferson, and as soon as I started researching I found enough amazing material to write a whole separate post. None of that made it into the final story, but it made for the perfect Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week!

If you want to read on, here’s some more information about the actual sloth, why Jefferson even cared about paleontology in the first place, and why he hoped Lewis and Clark would find gigantic creatures when they journeyed out West. You can even read the original letter that Jefferson wrote to the American Philosophical Society about the sloth bones, in which he mistakes them for a giant cat’s skeleton.

Fact: Butts are so spicy

From Rachel Feltman

Honestly, where do I begin? This week’s facts started with the creation of the Scoville Heat Unit scale (which we use to rank pepper hotness) and ended with the 18th century equivalent of Urban Dictionary. The main takeaways:

Chili peppers taste spicy because they excite the same pain receptors that evolved to protect us from exposure to heat. And yes, those receptors are also in your anus. You need them on every mucus membrane! Do you want to accidentally get fire up your butt? I don’t think so. But it’s unfortunate for us that plants have evolved to take advantage of this necessary pain receptor. And it’s unfortunate for those plants that, in spite of their ingenious method for appearing unappetizing to our sensitive palates, humans keep popping peppers anyway.

No one has a single, definite answer for why humans keep eating painful peppers like a bunch of fools, but one of my favorite notions is the concept of “benign masochism.” We might seek out things that feel dangerous even though they aren’t in order to enjoy the thrill of overcoming adversity—or perhaps to help prepare us for truly dangerous situations in the future.

We wouldn’t have our scale for ranking chili peppers if grad students hadn’t been forced to drink sugar water spiked with capsaicin, the chemical that gives peppers their heat. Capsaicin isn’t the only spicy chemical! Gingerol gives ginger its pungency. People used to put ginger oil in horse butts to make them act livelier. According to Wikipedia, live eels were often used to this terrible end.

But wait! We tracked down Wikipedia’s source. It’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published by Francis Grose in 1785 (and again in 1788). He also defines such phrases as “ars musica” (which means “a bum fiddle,” leaving me with nothing but questions). I do not doubt that this book existed and said what Wikipedia claims it said, but I want to believe that Francis Grose made up the bit about putting live eels in horse butts. Surely it was just a bawdy flam he heard from some hicksius doxius or pickthank!

Fact: Eleanor Roosevelt put her baby in a cage

The weirdest thing I learned last week? There were a few brief decades around the turn of the 20th century where baby cages were all the rage in the United States. Based on a pediatrician’s recommendation that parents “air” their infants, city slickers starved for space crafted chicken wire and other materials into cages, anchored them to their apartment windows, and placed their naked babies out for a good, ol’ fashioned, healthy breeze. For more on baby cages, listen to our podcast, or check out this photo-loaded story from Mashable, or this roundup of the worst inventions ever from Time. (Baby cages makes it in the top 20).

If you enjoyed the podcast, leave us a review on iTunes. See you next week, weirdos!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Giant sloths, caged babies, and spicy horse butts appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Viagra might be a secret weapon against period cramps

By Purbita Saha

Sildenafil has only been on the market since the late ‘90s. In its brief history it’s helped tens of millions of people and made billions for Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies.

But Viagra (the brand-specific name for the drug) wasn’t always meant to treat erectile dysfunction. It works all over the body, relaxing the muscles and dilating blood vessels, which could either lead to a boner or help with a slew of other conditions. The first clinical trials involving sildenafil were actually for angina and hypertension. Throughout the course of those studies, the attending nurses discovered that the pill had some… conspicuous side effects on people with penises.

[Related: How a Victorian heart medicine became a gay sex drug]

The drugmakers saw a major money making opportunity and changed the drug’s focus. That’s a story plenty of folks have heard before. But what’s less known is that the medication also had soothing effects on study subjects experiencing pain from uterine cramping. A more recent clinical trial, run by Penn State University and the National Institute of Health from 2007 to 2011, followed up on this neglected result. It only included 25 participants, with a few receiving Viagra and a few receiving a placebo, so we have to take them with a grain of salt. But those patients did indeed experience massive relief from primary dysmenorrhea, a.k.a. period cramps, within just four hours. (It’s important to note they got the dose vaginally, not orally, which may have maximized the effectiveness and minimized other side effects.)

Those findings were reported almost eight years ago now, and for some reason there hasn’t been much research or buzz around Viagra and period cramps since. Which might point to a larger pattern in medicine—that there just isn’t a big appetite when it comes to understanding and treating reproductive issues that don’t have to do with penises.

FACT: Cats once dropped out of planes to help fight an army of rats

By Sara Kiley Watson

Weird stories tend to keep getting weirder over time—and the true-story turned urban-legend tale of public health officials who parachuted cats to a remote island to prevent a resurgence of the plague has certainly acquired some mythical add-ons over the years. 

Basically, back in the 1950s, Borneo was having a bit of a mosquito problem. What was customary in the day (and still is in some places), was to knock out those nasty biting bugs with DDT. This thorough spritzing had some unexpected consequences, including that enough predatory creatures died off to cause a massive upswing in thatch-eating caterpillars. But the real problem was that cats kept keeling over.

To regain control over a now precariously poised situation for potentially disease-carrying and predator-free rats, the British Royal Air Force allegedly dropped 20 cats over the island in parachuted baskets to “wage war on rats which were threatening crops.”

Over time, the story has picked up multiple spins. Some sources claim that thousands of yowling cats were involved, while others say that the plague had already broken out amongst the people living there. The most popular fabrication is that this is a story of biomagnification. Listen to this week’s episode to separate feline fact from fiction.

[Related: You’re probably petting your cat wrong]

FACT: In the future we might be able to breathe through our butts

By Rachel Feltman

On one of the very first episodes of Weirdest Thing, I did a whole exhaustive history of something called a smoke enema. You’ll have to go back and listen if you want all the grim details, but the gist is that throughout history and until the early 1800s, people sometimes tried to resuscitate, revive, or otherwise treat ailing humans by blowing smoke up their anuses. 

Now, I’m not quite issuing a correction here. I’m not retracting my fantastic smoke enema expose. But I’m here to say that, while I wish it weren’t so, there may have been more to the idea than I thought back when that old episode aired. In May, researchers released a study that showed at least some mammals—mice and pigs, to be precise—can be saved from suffocation with the help of oxygen-rich enemas. 

Lead researcher Takanori Takebe, of the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, was inspired by non-mammalian animals that we already know can absorb oxygen through their intestines. Sea cucumbers, for example, suck water through these branching tubes just inside their anuses, expelling the liquid and absorbing the oxygen. There are also fish called loaches that, in addition to breathing through gills like most fish, can pop their heads out of the water to get gulps of air through their mouth, which are then absorbed by their intestines since they have no lungs.

So, it wasn’t totally far-fetched to think mammals might be able to get oxygen from their rear ends, but we obviously don’t just breathe through our butts every time we go swimming or anything as simple as that. Listen to this week’s episode to hear how Takebe and his team managed to turn a bunch of hypoxic mice and pigs into happy and healthy butt-breathers.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Viagra could have been a groundbreaking cure for period cramps appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s newest podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and PocketCasts every Wednesday, and it’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster.

Fact: Smoke enemas were part of the first real effort to resuscitate drowning victims

By Rachel Feltman

Until the 1700s, Western doctors didn’t generally try to revive patients who seemed to be dead. Drowning victims, for example, were out of luck if someone happened to pull them out of the water before they were quite thoroughly deceased: Touching an unknown body was taboo, given that it might be the corpse of a criminal or someone who’d committed suicide, and in many places a failed effort to resuscitate someone on your property could leave you liable to pay for their funeral. Mouth-to-mouth had some proponents in the medical world, but it was considered vulgar.

Enter London’s Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned (which is now the Royal Humane Society), a group that paid big bucks to folks with proof that they’d successfully implemented one of the premiere resuscitation methods of the day. And yes, one of those methods was a smoke enema: The idea was to warm and stimulate the body, and perhaps gently encourage the lungs to fill, by blowing tobacco smoke down someone’s throat or up their rear end.

You could improvise with a pipe (which was not a great idea in general, but was especially problematic in treating cholera patients—another popular use for tobacco enemas, according to medical literature), but a setup with bellows and various attachment was more professional. In fact, the aforementioned society had kits with this setup—pictured at the top of this article—placed around waterways like the Thames. They allegedly worked a few times.

Tobacco fell out of fashion (at least as a medical treatment) in 1811, when English scientist Ben Brodie confirmed that nicotine caused harm to the cardiovascular system. Why we kept smoking it for fun is a great question.

The history of resuscitation turned up a few other interesting nuggets. For starters, there were other intriguing (and stupid) methods. One involved flopping a patient over a barrel and rolling it back and forth:

This was kind of a precursor to CPR, but it also meant banging a patient’s head around while you tried to revive them. Not ideal!

Speaking of less-than-ideal resuscitation efforts, you can listen to the podcast to hear the thrilling saga of Anne Greene, a woman hanged in 1650 but revived some hours later. Doctors were thorough in their notes about this strange occurrence, so papers on the incident provide an amazing window into medical practices of the day.

Fact: The products you use rely on sneaky sound design to manipulate your emotions

By Sara Chodosh

I didn’t think an academic paper with the title “The psychology of condiments” would lead me to a fact about Clinique mascara, but yet again the world of marketing psychology has surprised me. This week my fact was about how many prototypes Clinique made for one of their luxury mascaras—not of the mascara itself or even of the brush, but of the cap mechanism. (And by the way, shoutout to this 2012 Wall Street Journal article by Ellen Byron for many of the facts I shared this week).

They wanted their mascara to sound high quality, and it turns out humans associate deeper sounds with a more luxurious product. Even though it changed nothing about the actual quality of the mascara, changing the slope of the twist-top cap to produce a soft, low click apparently gave the impression of quality.

The same is true of lighters, whose caps can be designed to make a more pleasing clicking tone, and of apparently every other product that you buy.

Of course, it also goes the other way: Sometimes companies get sounds wrong and wreck an otherwise perfect product. Just look at SunChips. They attempted to roll out a new, compostable bag that was eco-friendly, visually pleasing, and also made one of the most obnoxious crinkling noises I’ve ever heard. It seemed preposterously loud:

People hated the sound so much, SunChips had to discontinue the new packaging almost immediately.

If product designers are doing it right, though, you shouldn’t even be consciously aware of all the fine-tuning that happened before something hit the shelves. In fact, as the researchers of that condiment paper point out, the color of the Heinz baked beans can was designed to mesh well with the color of the beans themselves. Data shows that if you like the look of the packaging, you often think the product tastes better. This is why high-end, artisanal product companies invest so much in their packaging. And incidentally, even though Heinz is the most popular brand of ketchup by far, in blind taste tests it often ranks near the bottom. A study like that would lead many to believe that Heinz simply isn’t worth it. If it doesn’t really taste the best, why buy it? But the author of the paper pointed out something I hadn’t considered before: if the Heinz packaging makes you perceive it as better-tasting than it “really” is, what does it matter? It still tastes better.

Fact: In 1957, a volcanic eruption left a lighthouse stranded away from the sea

By Mary Beth Griggs

I was on vacation the week before we recorded this podcast, so the weirdest thing I learned this week was more like the weirdest thing I saw last week. I was in the Azores, a small archipelago of islands in the Atlantic featuring wild, stunning landscapes unmistakably shaped by volcanic eruptions.

In 1957, a billowing cloud emerged from the waves near the coast of Faial, one of the nine major islands in the Azores. The mixture of steam, gas, and small rock particles originated from an underwater eruption just off the coast, near a lighthouse. That eruption lasted 13 months resulting in ash buried houses, agricultural fields, and the first floor of that poor lighthouse. In the process, it created over a square mile of new land and effectively moved the coast.

Wind and waves eventually re-claimed most of that new land, but about 20 percent of it is still visible, along with the lighthouse, which is now part of a interpretation center at the site and sits decidedly inland. The eruption re-shaped the island in more ways than one, also changing the demographics of the island, and of parts of the United States. Thanks to legislation pushed through by a very famous senator (listen to the podcast to hear who it was) thousands of refugees from the island emigrated to New England.

As a bonus, I briefly talk about what was essentially my runner up for the weirdest thing I saw last week—the inside of lava tubes. Formed by lava flowing downslope, many islands in the Azores are strewn with them. Inside the ones that I visited, the floor is (cooled) lava, and the walls are coated with still-unidentified bacterial growths that glitter like silver or gold in the light of a headlamp, like something straight out of Annihilation. In short: volcanoes, they’re pretty awesome.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: smoke enemas, sneaky sound design, and stranded lighthouses appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Jonathan Sims. Best known around these parts for writing and starring in Rachel’s favorite audio drama series, he’s also the author of “Thirteen Storeys” and a tabletop game designer.

FACT: Bees can get jet lag (and probably know everything)

By Sara Chodosh

If you’ve seen the viral TikTok video about how bees perceive time, my apologies in advance—you’ll already know a lot of the information I dive into on this episode. If you haven’t, boy oh boy do I have a story for you. 

You might think that it’s obvious that any animal, not just bees, experiences the passage of time. But that’s mainly because, well, we can’t really imagine what it would be like to not perceive time. Scientists don’t care, though. Just because we have trouble imagining it doesn’t mean it’s not true, and by default we assume that less complex animals—like bees—don’t perceive time. Which is how some biologists ended up flying a nest of bees across the Atlantic Ocean, and then again across the US. 

You’ll have to tune in to the episode to hear the full story, as well as to find out what bees and humans have in common, time perception-wise. And as a special bonus, you’ll also get to hear about the UK’s truly bizarre beekeeping laws.

[Related: Bee theft is almost a perfect crime—but there’s a new sheriff in town]

FACT: Steam trains were once cutting-edge getaway vehicles for criminals—but the telegraph stopped them in their tracks

By Rachel Feltman

Around six or seven in the evening on January 1, 1845, Sarah Hart’s neighbor heard sounds of groaning and distress from her Salt Hill cottage—and saw a man known to be a frequent visitor leave the house. When the neighbor went in to check on her, she found Sarah almost unconscious and foaming at the mouth, and Hart soon died. It seemed clear she’d been murdered. But when locals rushed off to catch the man who’d last seen her alive, they just managed to see him boarding the train back to London. None of them knew his real name, and could only vaguely describe him—so unless they somehow beat the train to the city to alert the constable there, all hope of catching the culprit was lost. 

Luckily the Slough station was equipped with the absolute cutting edge of technology: a brand new telegraph machine. 

Listen to this week’s episode to hear about how John Tawell—a man “in the garb of a kwaker with a great coat—became the first criminal caught thanks to electronic communication.

This is generally considered one of the first murders involving hydrogen cyanide, which had only been discovered in 1782 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele; it’s also sometimes said to be the first known instance of a murderer using a steam train as a getaway vehicle. But it is definitely, absolutely the first case of a criminal being caught thanks to a telegraph—and electronic communications in general—and the media sensation no doubt contributed to the technology’s adoption around the world. Tune in to hear the whole sordid tale.

FACT: Sir Isaac Newton was a keen alchemist

By Jonathan Sims

Widely remembered as one of the fathers of modern science and credited with foundational discoveries in gravity, calculous, motion, light (and even the invention of a new type of telescope), Isaac Newton is considered one of the greatest minds in history with good reason. He also tried to use the power of God and Magic to turn base metal into gold.

Alchemy remains one of most fascinating fields of study ever devised, a mixture of actual chemical experimentation and religious mysticism tied up in so much secrecy and possible charlatanism that it’s impossible to truly say exactly what any of it meant. It remains a compelling example of how the modern division between scientific enquiry and religious or spiritual exploration was not always the case.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post What’s stranger than bees telling time? How we learned that they can. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s newest podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher, and PocketCasts every Wednesday, and it’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster.

Fact: Rich people ate other people—for their health—until very recently

By Eleanor Cummins

By and large, humans eating humans is frowned upon. But from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period, Europeans ate parts of other people. A lot. Medical cannibalism was the fairly-common practice of consuming human fat, blood, and (in Victorian England specifically) mummies to cure sickness and fortify their corporeal forms. Fat and blood pudding were widely considered panaceas. But any body part—especially if the corpse was newly dead and, therefore, more likely to contain “vital spirits”—was fair game.

The practice peaked in sometime in the 1600s, which is when King Charles II was drinking “the King’s drops,” a mix of human skull and alcohol. But interest in buying medical cannibalism products continued into the Victorian era which is, well, not that long ago. And some modern-day billionaires still kind of want your young, healthy blood. We might not use human fat in routine painkillers any more, but some things (gruesomely) never change.

Fact: A 12-century German nun likely wrote the first description of the female orgasm

By Rachel Feltman

My fact-finding mission this week began with inspiration from a new piece of music composed by J.L Marlor. So let’s start with that:

My sister Chelsea Feltman (who performs the piece above) commissioned it after falling in love with a letter by astronomer Caroline Herschel. She was a talented astronomer who lived in her brother’s shadow, as so many women did until recent years. She reflects on the forgotten women of science in her letter.

One of the forgotten heroes she references caught my eye: Herschel claims that Hildegard of Bingen, a German nun born at the turn of the 12th century, suggested a heliocentric solar system hundreds of years before Nicolaus Copernicus got credit for it. I’d heard about Hildegard before—she experienced so-called visions now thought to be migraines, and produced countless works of exquisite music, along with writings on medicine and astronomy—but this factoid was new to me. Was it true?

The answer is… well, probably not. But it’s hard to say. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear more, but you can read more about the text I reference (the stuff that could maybe possibly be about heliocentrism and/or universal gravitation) here.

Hildegard had such a wild life that I had to leave a few facts on the cutting room floor. My favorites: Once she’d taken over as magistra of her monastery, Hildegard told the Abott she’d received a vision telling her to pack up all the nuns and move to Rupertsberg. When he refused, she took ill and was unable to move—no matter what anyone tried—which she said was a sign from god. The abbot himself tried and failed to wrench her out of bed, at which point he relented and let the nuns move out. This wiley spirit didn’t leave her as she aged. In her 80s, she defied the pope by burying an excommunicated friend (who she said had repented before death) in the Rupertsberg cemetery. When the pope told her she had to disinter the friend, she instead removed all markings from the grave in order to hide it. She then petitioned until the pope changed his mind, and died not long after.

While Hildegard’s astronomical writings are the subject of debate, she’s also known for making impressive conclusions in medicine. She seems to have had some idea that boiling water could prevent disease, and she also appears to be one of the first people to connect syphilis to its sexual transmission. And of course, as we explain in the podcast, she provided a remarkably thorough description of a female orgasm.

Fact: A family in South Carolina has been recording the weather every day since 1893 on behalf of the federal government

By Sara Chodosh

One of my favorite things about being a science writer is that you get to interact with people who are just so passionate about their field of study. I know that sounds simple, but it’s such a joy to talk to people who love what they do, especially if it’s something that most people find boring. I think the climate is one of those things. The folks at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who spend their time tracking and analyzing climate data are crucial to our understanding of how the planet is changing. Someone has to be responsible for that process, and those someones also happen to run a fabulous blog called Beyond the Data. It’s literally just interesting things they stumble across in their research or find intriguing. I’m an avid reader.

Anyway, that’s how I found this week’s fact, which isn’t so much weird as it is heartwarming. There was a blog post about how Thomas Jefferson and the telegraph helped create a system of weather stations now known as COOP. I already knew about the COOP system, but I hadn’t fully appreciated how much of our climate data—dating back all the way to the early- to mid-1800s—gets recorded by volunteers. COOP stations have basic measuring equipment that allows the volunteers to record temperature, precipitation, pressure, and so on, which they do every day. Even back in 1895, there were at least 2,000 people running COOP stations all over the U.S., including in areas that weren’t officially states yet.

Some of those volunteers passed down the responsibility of running the station to their children or nieces or nephews, with the result that there are a handful of families that have been recording the weather on behalf of the federal government for 125 years. And it’s only because of them that we have such a thorough record of how every part of our country has changed climatologically. All hail the volunteers!

Got a weird fact you’d like to share with us? Check out The Weirdest Thing on Facebook. And as always, we’d be ever so grateful if you’d subscribe, rate, and review us on iTunes. Stay weird!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: wild weather, Victorian cannibalism, and the female orgasm (as told by a 12th-century nun) appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is all about the surprisingly weird world of play: Bog snorkeling, cheese rolling, baseball bat boning, and so much more. We’re celebrating our latest magazine issue, which is available as a digital-only edition for anyone who wants to read it. It’s all about the ways humans (and animals) have fun, and you can check it out for yourself right now. Here’s some more info on the weird facts we highlighted on this week’s episode:

FACT: Baseball players have a surprisingly scientific reason for their superstitious “bat boning”

By Corinne Iozzio

All professional sports are packed with storied superstitions, but baseball really knocks it out of the park when it comes to strange traditions. As Jess Boddy explained on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, this sport just seems particularly prone to superstitious tricks and bizarre myths. In the latest issue of Popular Science, which you can access right now from your phone, tablet, or computer, we examined some of the science and tech that goes into crafting a high-quality baseball bat. And somewhat to our surprise, that led us to what seemed like an extremely unscientific practice: Boning. No, not that kind of boning.

As we soon learned, baseball players historically used big bones (often cow femurs) to rub down their wooden bats. It might sound like some sort of attempt at dark magic, but at the time, giving your bat a good bone did have some effect on its performance. The force and friction helped compress the soft wood of the bat, and hitting with a harder surface means a ball will go farther. Compressing a bat also keeps it from wearing out and splintering.

However, as we explain on this week’s episode, modern-day boning practices aren’t quite as logical. Listen to Weirdest Thing to learn more.

FACT: Your favorite childhood toy (and sometimes snack) started out as a wallpaper cleaner

By Sara Chodosh

I was never a Play-Doh eater, but the fact that it’s basically just salt, water, and flour always made me think it must have vaguely culinary origins. Maybe some parents had given their kids a ball of poorly-made pie dough to play with, only to find it served as an excellent distraction. Or maybe a child “helping” with some baking figured out that a thick, floury paste made for a super-pliable toy superior to tough modeling clay.

But it turns out Play-Doh’s origins are far more utilitarian, and far less obviously child-safe: It began as a wallpaper cleaner. This is a product we don’t have a lot of use for today, but when you heated your house with a coal stove and your walls were covered in actual paper (unlike modern wallpaper, which is made with types of plastic), you really needed something to help lift all the black dust off your walls that wouldn’t turn paper soggy. That substance was Play-Doh—or, more accurately, a mixture of flour, salt, water, and boric acid that would later become Play-Doh. You’ll have to listen to the episode for all the details, but suffice to say we have one forward-thinking woman in particular to thank for this member of the Toy Hall of Fame.

FACT: Cheese rolling, bog snorkeling, and underwater ice hockey are all real sports

By Rachel Feltman

If working on the latest issue of PopSci taught me anything, it’s that people have come up with some seriously weird ways of goofing off. You can peruse the digital edition of the magazine for stories about folks who enjoy doing ultra-marathons in dark, freezing conditions and grown men who obsessively craft and race tiny pinewood derby cars. We also explore the concept of “Dark Play,” which finally explains, once and for all, why you loved to drown your sims in their swimming pools.

With that inspiration in mind, I decided to spend this week’s episode taking a closer look at one of my favorite bizarre recreational pastimes: Competitive cheese rolling.

The Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake is held every spring in Cooper’s Hill, England. It sounds simple enough: You roll a wheel of cheese down a hill and try to catch it. But that 9-pound wheel o’ cheese can hit speeds of 70 mph, turning it into a dangerous projectile capable of knocking you down (or out) like a bouncing bowling ball. Then there’s the fact that the 650-or-so-foot hill where the event takes place is quite steep and uneven, making it incredibly dangerous to run straight down.

The speed of the cheese and the perilous nature of the slope means that competitors don’t actually catch their prey; instead, the winner is whoever makes it down to the bottom of the hill first. But the sport isn’t just absurd. It’s also incredibly dangerous. In 2008, an article in the Sydney Herald—written because competitors come from all over the world, with Australia being no exception—described the event as “20 young men chasing a cheese off a cliff and tumbling 200 yards to the bottom, where they are scraped up by paramedics and packed off to hospital.”

You can find out more about this fascinating event and its controversial history in this week’s episode. And because cheese rolling just wasn’t weird enough on its own, I also share a long list of strange but true sports from around the world. Toe wrestling, anyone?

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Why baseball players ‘bone’ their bats appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Doctors used to smell and even taste urine to diagnose all sorts of diseases

By Rachel Feltman

Doctors often take urine samples to diagnose their patients. But before we had modern lab tests, physicians would have to visually examine, smell, and even taste their patients’ pee to analyze it. In this week’s episode, I get into the fascinating (and sometimes gross) details of uroscopy, or the clinical examination of urine. The practice dates back thousands of years, and persisted until pretty recently. Of course, every medical therapy has its detractors. Naysayers were particularly turned off by the fact that diagnosing diseases based on urine color had a low barrier to entry, which is to say that just about anyone could get their hands on a diagnostic color wheel and start charging for medical services. This led to some pee-related quackery, and one famous paper went so far as to refer to urine as “a harlot and a liar.”

See also: uromancy. Yes, people really tried to tell fortunes—and hunt down witches—using pee. History is a weird place.

Tune in to hear all this and more, including a rundown of all the different colors your urine can be and what those colors mean. Purple urine bag syndrome is my personal favorite, though I wouldn’t recommend having it.

Fact: Cats and cochlear implants have something in common

By Jason Lederman

The cat telephone might just be the weirdest fact I’ve found yet for this podcast. In 1929, a professor at Princeton named Ernest Glen Wever, along with his research assistant Charles William Bray, wanted to learn how sound travels across the auditory nerve. Naturally, they figured the best way to do this was to turn a living cat into a working telephone.

I’ll save you the gory details in this post, but the work was pretty fascinating, albeit morbid. And their results proved that analog sounds could be converted into digital files, laying the groundwork for cochlear implants.

I also discuss the difference between hearing aids and cochlear implants, as well as what hearing with a cochlear implant sounds like (the clip starts at 3:40).

I may not have won on this week’s episode, but I still feel like the cat telephone is the weirdest thing I learned this week, and maybe ever in my entire life.

Fact: A math problem that stumped at least 1,000 mathematicians has an incredibly simple answer

By Claire Maldarelli

In a 1990 issue of Parade magazine, columnist Marilyn Vos Savant published a brain teaser known as the Monty Hall Problem. It was based on a similar problem presented in the 1970s game show, Let’s Make A Deal.

Once published—with answer key included—it caused such an uproar that almost 1,000 mathematicians from universities across the country called and wrote in to tell her she was wrong. Spoiler: She was absolutely correct.

Here’s how it went: Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors. Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door (let’s call it door number one) and the host, who knows what’s behind them each, opens another door (number two). This one has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door number three?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice from one to three?

Most people think it would not be to their advantage to switch. Listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to understand why that’s wrong, why you should always switch, and why despite knowing they should switch, most people still won’t.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: doctors drinking pee and telephones made of cats appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is extra special: It’s the first half of our latest live show, which happened on October 31 at Caveat in NYC. As mentioned at the top of this week’s episode, you may hear hosts or audience members shouting “drink!” This is because we were playing a drinking game, which you’re welcome to recreate on your own time (assuming you’re of legal age and not driving while you listen). Check the bottom of this post for rules. And if you want to see us live in your city, help us out by completing this quick listener survey!

FACT: Harry Styles might be a witch

By Jess Boddy

Witch season hit its peak back in the mid-17th century. Thousands of people were accused of witchcraft, many of whom were exiled, drowned, stoned, or burned at the stake. Plenty of people in power used this extreme state of paranoia to oust unwanted people from their communities by flagging them as witches. To do so, they hired witch finders like Matthew Hopkins.

Hopkins, previously an unsuccessful lawyer, made a decent chunk of change this way—so much so that he bestowed the title “witch-finder general” upon himself. He’d use pretty much any physical anomaly he could find to diagnose someone as a witch, including something he called the witches’ teat. This, he argued, was where witches’ imps or familiars would come to suckle and gain power. As studies in medical journals later noted, these teats were often just dermatological quirks like moles—or extra nipples.

By some estimates, one in 200,000 people are born in the United States with an extra (or “supernumerary”) nipple. There are even six different classes of extra nipples, and they can take the form of an entire breast growing out of your leg, or a modest nipple on the bottom of your foot. Tune in to this week’s episode to hear more about the dastardly witch-finder general, how extra nipples form, and a short list of celebs with extra nipples! (Harry Styles has two!)

FACT: Madame Tussaud’s wax figures began as a macabre royalist hobby

By Eleanor Cummins

Madame Tussauds was actually a person, and a bada** one at that. She was born Anna Maria “Marie” Grosholtz in 1760. Marie started training in wax modeling when she was very young; she took her first cast—of the dying writer Voltaire—at age 17. But the French Revolution changed her life forever. Upon being released from prison (she herself was almost executed as a royalist sympathizer!), Marie saw an opportunity to make wax casts of dead royals, including Marie Antoinette. In this special live episode of Weirdest Thing, I talk about how, in this time of bloodshed and political upheaval, the international entertainment brand Madame Tussauds was born. (Featuring a special guest appearance by Beyonce.)

FACT: Frankenstein’s mom-ster doesn’t get enough credit

By Rachel Feltman

Most people know Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein,” but I for one had some misconceptions about her. I’d been taught in school that she wrote that seminal classic as a horror story about technology, because she didn’t trust science and all its flashy modern gizmos. THIS IS ALL A LIE. World, meet the real Mary Shelley: The nerdy goth girlfriend we never even knew we had.

Essentially raised by an absentee anarchist, a pile of feminist philosophy books, and a tombstone (not kidding), Mary Godwin shocked even her liberal father’s sensibilities when she ran off with a married father-of-one named Percy Shelley. They were still unmarried when they took a summer vacation to Geneva with their young son, Godwin’s step-sister Claire, and Claire’s on-again-off-again squeeze Lord Byron (also present was John Polidori, Byron’s personal physician, who was presumably there to monitor his totally bizarre diet). But this was no ordinary summer vacay: It was 1816, widely known as the “year without a summer” due to atmospheric disturbances caused by the eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia, and the spooky, gloomy vibe was just perfect for writing ghost stories. That’s where Mary Godwin (soon to become Mary Shelley) wrote her masterpiece.

In our most recent live show, I dug deep into the weird and angsty childhood that created Mary Shelley’s unique sensibilities as a writer. Check out the podcast for more info on a writer who was ahead of her time in more ways than one (and who definitely kept what she thought was her late husband’s heart in a drawer for years).

Drinking game rules!

Take a drink of your fabulous and refreshing beverage of choice whenever:

• A cast member says the word “weird” or “spooky”
• Rachel makes a joke about the fact that we obviously planned the live show in advance even though the podcast is totally spontaneous we swear
• Someone in the audience is audibly appalled (or just appallingly audible)
• Body horror or otherwise excessive mention of viscera
• You feel like it

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And if you want to see us live in your city, help us out by completing this quick listener survey!

The post The historical significance of Harry Styles’ nipples, explained appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: A jaunty foreskin trend may have influenced religious circumcision

By Rachel Feltman

While researching weird historical sex stuff (as one does) and trying to determine whether or not Prince Albert really had a penis piercing (he probably didn’t) I came across the fascinating phenomenon of the kynodesmē, which is Greek for “dog tie.” In Ancient Greece and Rome it was common—trendy, even—for young people with penises to grasp the ends of their foreskins, pull them up over the glans, and use pieces of sticky paper or strips of string or leather to fasten them shut. In doing so, they essentially bundled the glans of the penis snugly into a little goodie bag, ensuring it wouldn’t peek out to say hello while they were playing sports (or just plain playing) in the buff.

The preference for foreskin over the rest of the external sex organ seems to have mostly been due to cultural attitudes around sex and penises at the time. We discussed this a bit on a recent episode of Weirdest Thing, but to make a long story short, size was not everything in Ancient Greece. In fact, a smaller penis was considered a sign of self-control and intellect, while a large one—especially if it didn’t have a foreskin to hide demurely inside of—was a sign of barbarism.

One of the most famous examples of the practice is shown in the ancient bronze sculpture known as “The Boxer,” where the penis is not just secured within the foreskin, but tucked and tied up out of the way. But there are many pieces of art and historical texts referencing this practice (and the related use of metal pins to keep foreskin shut over the penis) in non-athletes. It seems to have been quite popular among male singers and performers, who were likely leaning into the belief that ejaculation diminished their artistic abilities.

According to some scholars, this trend even influenced the act of religious circumcision. According to a 2007 paper in Reproductive Health Matters, Jewish circumcision up until around 300 BCE required just the removal of the very tip of the foreskin. This meant Hebrew athletes traveling to Greece to compete could, as they say, do as the Athenians did: They gathered up their not-so-diminished foreskins and tied their penises up in little bundles. This allegedly didn’t go over well with religious authorities at home, especially since the young men often came back with foreskins stretched out by the practice—undoing the visual evidence of their religious practice. Supposedly, this lead to a demand that more foreskin come off during the bris.

FACT: Luxury department stores once sold rhino poop at a huge mark-up

By Ellen Airhart, host of the podcast Plant Crimes

Elephants and rhinoceroses are popular zoo attractions. But for a long time, they’ve provided a service beyond entertainment and education. Many city zoos have sold animal manure as “Zoo Doo,” “ComPOOst,” “Elepoo,” or “Zoo Poopy Doo” to city composting programs, farmers, and even Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. In this episode of Weirdest Thing, I dive into the stinky history of poop, every zoo’s least endangered resources. Excrement from herbivores, such as elephants, rhinos, camels, and giraffes make the best compost. Carnivore poop could contain diseases, and regulators ask managers to incinerate insect poop to prevent any concealed eggs from escaping the enclosures. Some zoos, however, employ rhinoceros beetles to roll other animal’s poop into easily packable balls. However they decide to sell and market the poop, zoos have turned what could be an annoying mess into useful fertilizer.

FACT: Dimples are a defect, but people want them anyway

By Eleanor Cummins

You hate to say it but… a dimple is a birth defect. Specifically, it’s a genetically-determined depression in what should be a smooth face muscle. Lots of people have dimples—and even more want them. In many cultures, they’re considered attractive (perhaps because so many of us idolize the chubby cheeks of youth). The desire for dimpling is so strong that in the 1930s, a woman named Isabella Gilbert of Rochester, New York, invented and marketed machine to give women dimples. It probably didn’t work and it definitely hurt a lot.

On this episode of Weirdest Thing, we poke a little deeper.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Ancient athletes did something truly shocking with their genitals appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is extra special: It’s the second half of our latest live show, which happened on October 31 at Caveat in NYC. As mentioned at the top of this week’s episode, you may hear hosts or audience members shouting “drink!” This is because we were playing a drinking game, which you’re welcome to recreate on your own time (assuming you’re of legal age and not driving while you listen). Check the bottom of this post for rules. And if you want to see us live in your city, help us out by completing this quick listener survey!

FACT: Ben Franklin invented an instrument that some thought could drive people insane

By Rachel Feltman

Anyone who’s been watching HBO’s new “Watchmen” series has already heard of Mesmerism. By total coincidence, I happened to bring up the creepy character Franz Mesmer in our latest live show. Mesmer—who’s where the word “mesmerizing” comes from—was a German doctor during the 18th and early 19th century. He invented the concept of “animal magnetism,” otherwise known as “Mesmerism,” which essentially boiled down to the belief that something—some sort of life force—flowed through all living things. By tuning into that flow and altering it, Mesmer believed, one could control the health (and mind) of any human subject. Most of his therapies and experiments centered around spiritualized versions of what we now might consider hypnotherapy.

Mesmer’s experiments were pretty quickly side-eyed by mainstream medical practitioners, and while Mesmerism had a decent following through the mid-1800s, it didn’t have a great reputation. So when Mesmer decided the glass harmonica (also often called the armonica) produced the perfect music to accompany his bizarre hypnotic sessions, the popular instrument actually suffered from the association. This may have contributed to the ethereal armonica’s downfall, helping to fuel rumors that it so affected human nerves it could drive someone playing or even listening to it to insanity—or even an early grave.

Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about Ben Franklin’s armonica. Franklin elevated the ancient musical water glasses made famous by Sandra Bullock into a delicate instrument beloved by composers like Mozart, who composed the piece in the video below (played by Dennis James, who pretty much single-handedly brought the instrument back to life in the 1980s).

Was the armonica’s disappearance due to its mesmerizing powers? Its high levels of lead? Its fragility? The fickle preferences of German art critics? All this and more in this week’s episode of the show, which you’ll find at the top of the post. Just try not to let us hypnotize you on your commute.

(If you’re curious to see the Fantasmagoria illustration mentioned in the episode, you can find it here.)

FACT: People ate people due to an etymological error

By guest host Ryan F. Mandelbaum

Medical cannibalism has already featured prevalently on the show, but in this week’s episode I take a deeper dive into the specifics of mummy consumption. Namely, the fact that people ate mummies—the ancient, mummified, stolen remains of other human people—because someone somewhere misunderstood what a word meant. Find out more by listening to the live show!

FACT: The 1904 Olympic marathon included doping with rat poison, hitch-hiking to the finish, and several near-death experiences

By Claire Maldarelli

I was just a few days out from competing in the New York Marathon when we recorded this live show, so the spookiest stories I could come up with were all about one thing: running. But trust me—back in the olden days of modern marathoning, races got plenty scary.

I’ll set the stage. In 1896, the Greeks decided to bring back and modernize the Olympic games, and they decided to include marathons—running for 26.2 miles. Now it’s 1904, and even though the sport of running as we know it is still in its infancy, a motley crew of male athletes both amateur and elite have gathered to undertake the endurance race in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s August, it’s hot, and there’s a single self-service water station (in the form of a well that may or may not have given runners the runs, depending on who you ask) right in the middle of the course.

Listen in to hear the entire saga—from champions intentionally doping with rat poison, to men literally tearing off their pants, to a would-be cheater rolling to the finish line in a taxi.

Luckily our understanding of the human body has come a long way, and marathons today are approached a lot more scientifically. Check out the tricks I learned while prepping for my first marathon—no rat poison required.

Drinking game rules!

Take a drink of your fabulous and refreshing beverage of choice whenever:

• A cast member says the word “weird” or “spooky”
• Rachel makes a joke about the fact that we obviously planned the live show in advance even though the podcast is totally spontaneous we swear
• Someone in the audience is audibly appalled (or just appallingly audible)
• Body horror or otherwise excessive mention of viscera
• Ryan finds an excuse to mention birds
• You feel like it

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And if you want to see us live in your city, help us out by completing this quick listener survey!

The post Ben Franklin invented a mesmerizing instrument with a deadly reputation appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: You may have a mysterious pouch inside of you

By Purbita Saha

All weird medical stories seem to lead back to Mary Toft, but this one covers plenty of ground long after 18th-century scientists debunked the mother of rabbits’ bewildering birthing tale. Originally discovered by James Douglas, a Scottish midwife and “physician extraordinary” to the sitting queen of England, the Pouch of Douglas remains a mysterious, little-known cranny in the female body to this day.

My own enlightenment on this wonderfully fluid space (sometimes called a cul-de-sac or an infinitesimal void) came from an unusual source: Australian standup comedian Hannah Gadsby. I won’t get into how she landed on the topic—all I know is that I couldn’t stop Googling it after security handed my phone back after the show. What I learned is that the Pouch of Douglas acts like a buffer for the female nether organs. It’s wedged between the uterus and the colon, so when either of those parts move and squish around, they have some space to slide past each other without sparking conflict.

Beyond that, there isn’t much medical research on the Pouch of Douglas. Studies in the past decade or two show that it could shed clues on really painful reproductive conditions like ectopic pregnancies and endometriosis. But until its uses are better understood, I’m happy to think of it as a built-in fanny pack that expands to hold all the secrets that my body unconsciously collects over the years.

FACT: We’re pretty sure knuckle-cracking doesn’t cause arthritis—thanks to one very dedicated cracker

By Claire Maldarelli

You’ve probably heard it from at least one well-meaning parent or teacher: Don’t crack your knuckles or you’ll end up with gnarled, arthritic hands. When I was growing up, my sister would drive my mom crazy by cracking every possible knuckle in spite of this advice. The threat of arthritis couldn’t stop her from enjoying those sweet pops.

It might not shock you to learn this connection is completely unfounded. One of the largest studies on the subject to date, published back in 1990 in The Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, looked at 300 healthy people of whom 74 called themselves habitual knuckle crackers. The rates of arthritis were exactly the same between them and the non-knuckle crackers.

Other, smaller studies over the years have come to similar conclusions. However, none of these studies have anything on Donald Unger. Listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest thing to learn more about the most dedicated knuckle-cracker of all time. Trust me: He lives up to the hype.

FACT: For decades, the hottest thing a woman could do was die

By Rachel Feltman

Things got very weird after the French Revolution (one example: there were balls open only to the grown children of people who’d been guillotined where dancers wore mourning clothes and pretended to roll their heads around violently), and through some combination of the glorification of aristocratic women sitting in their underclothes waiting to die, the simplification of fashion due to laws immediately following the war, and the absurd subcultures of grieving and traumatized young right people, it became very popular to wear extremely thin dresses regardless of weather. Enter the myth of “Muslin Disease,” which I discovered while perusing a list of supposedly deadly fashion trends. Women were so enamored of clingy dresses, the story goes, that they dunked their paper-thin muslin gowns in water to make them totally transparent. Apparently, contemporary physicians blamed the damp fashion trend for outbreaks of consumption, the unpleasant and often fatal disease we now know as Tuberculosis.

It turns out this probably wasn’t a real trend among European teens (though their clothing choices got plenty weird) but it did get me thinking about a very real trend that existed at the time: Making yourself look as close to death as possible.

Numerous scholars have opined on the era of “consumptive chic,” when the symptoms of TB—pale skin, protruding bones, bright eyes, and pink cheeks—were considered the height of beauty and fashion. Edgar Allen Poe waxed poetic on his young wives’ (plural—he married two different women with consumption, because he had a type) coughing of blood and wane appearance; Charlotte Bronte referred to the disease that would kill both her sisters as “flattering”; Weirdest Thing favorite Lord Byron bemoaned his misfortune at not dying slowly of consumption, which he was sure would make him even more popular with the ladies than his strict diet of vinegar and crackers. Until researchers finally identified the bacterium that causes TB, it was considered an aristocratic and elegant disease—one that women were more likely to get if they were beautiful, and one that made women suffering from it even more lovely by the standards of the day. This bizarre feedback loop had women poisoning themselves with arsenic (to lighten their skin) and belladonna (to dilate their pupils) in the hopes of emulating symptoms of a disease that was actively killing many of their friends and family.

But it’s not hard to see why a frail woman held so much societal appeal. A woman on the verge of dying was easy to control—and if she happened to be dying in a way that made her fit mainstream beauty standards, well, all the better. Check out this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing for more on the evolution of consumptive chic.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post There’s a secret room in the basement of the female body appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things chill and serene—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: Pee and ginger ale are both useless against motion sickness

By Purbita Saha

Humans have been trying to understand and combat motion sickness for millennia. In 2017, a trio of neurobiologists from Munich looked at classic texts like the The Odyssey and Siku Quanshu and found different descriptions of nausea and dizziness relating to ship, cart, and even camel travel. Entire battles were lost because warriors got too sick on the open seas. But no matter what, each culture connected the ailment to different body parts: The Greeks and Romans blamed their stomachs, while the Chinese blamed their livers and their brains. These are all technically correct, though the true root of motion sickness is in your cerebrum. When fixed on a target like an enemy fort or a TikTok sea shanty, your eyes think that you’re at rest while your vestibular system, located in your inner ear, tells your body that it’s moving. This mismatch grows even stronger if you hit choppy waves or stop-and-go traffic.

Because ancient people didn’t understand the cause of motion sickness, they used some pretty out-there remedies to try and cure it. Some would rub wormwood, wine vinegar, olive oil, and mint on their noses, or drink raindrops off the end of bamboo shoots. Others used poisonous plants like hellebore to clear out the stomach, and even drank pee from young children.

[Related: Video games can cause motion sickness—here’s how to fight it]

Today we know that the best way to fight the churn is to just get used to the turbulence, whether it be in hyper-realistic video games or on a birding boat trip. Modern medicine has also given us histamine-fighting solutions like dramamine and scopoline, but you can also try vetted prophylactics like soup crackers and apple slices. Just don’t chug a can of ginger ale—your stomach will have a tough time breaking down the sugars, and you’ll probably end up blowing chunks anyway.

FACT: Some animals really do sleep with one eye open

By Corinne Iozzio

In 2007, a group of researchers studying the movements and habits of sperm whales off the coast of Chile happened upon a pod of the ocean giants snoozing. Though their posture was odd—noses pointed straight up as their bodies bobbed lazily like corks—that wasn’t what surprised the crew.

As their crafts approached, the cetaceans remained stock still. That inaction upended what we thought we knew about how many marine mammals rest; as far as scientists had known thus far, some species of dolphins, whales, and seals literally sleep with one eye open. Called unihemispheric sleep, this wakeful rest is largely a survival tool, one that allows the animals to surface to breathe, keep an eye on their pods, and maintain lookout for potential threats. Trying to understand and map this ability to half clock out, also observed in some bird species, reveals the complex interplay happening in our noggins when we slumber. And subsequent studies trying to see if the same nocturnal limbo happens in humans also tip just how little we know about what counts as a good night’s sleep either at home or in the wild.

FACT: Humans might be worse for wildlife than toxic radiation is

By Rachel Feltman

Almost exactly 35 years ago, on April 26 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant became the site of the worst nuclear disaster the world had ever seen, or (thankfully) has seen since. While the accident itself only directly killed two people and led to the deaths of several dozen others due to acute radiation poisoning, the lowest existing estimates based on scientific models suggest that at least 9,000 people will ultimately die of conditions tied to radiation exposure due to the accident. 

In the immediate aftermath, a 19-mile radius surrounding the Chernobyl plant was roped off and evacuated, but the so-called Exclusion Zone would eventually be expanded to cover around 1,000 square miles of Ukraine, with some 350,000 people permanently relocated. 

Animals stuck in those highly contaminated areas obviously did not do well. If radiation that high doesn’t kill you outright, it can damage your DNA in a way that leads to all sorts of mutations in your offspring, not to mention all the cancers it can cause. So, it was generally assumed that the exclusion zone would devoid of life before too long.

But starting in the late 80s, researchers keeping tabs on local critters started to see them bounce back. And now some animals actually seem to be better off in the Exclusion Zone than they would be in surrounding areas. Radiation is dangerous at high levels—and in parts of the Exclusion Zone, it could still kill you quite quickly. But based on what we’ve seen in the Chernobyl Exclusion zone, the removal of human activity and interference might be enough to balance out a wee bit of toxicity.

You can learn more about the thriving wildlife of the Exclusion Zone in the latest issue of Popular Science. Click here to subscribe!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to check out the latest issue of Popular Science, on digital newsstands now.

The post People used to drink a very specific kind of urine to treat motion sickness appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Bananas emit non-trinary particles

By Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Neutrinos are produced pretty much every time atoms are fused together and when they are actively broken apart. They also get made when atomic nuclei naturally decay. This might sound like something that you don’t expect to be part of every day life, right? But in fact, if you are a voracious banana eater—or even just a casual consumer of the fruit—then neutrino production due to atomic decay is a part of your life.

Yes, bananas are slightly radioactive—but they won’t cause you any harm. Check out this xkcd comic to understand where they fall on the scale of radioactivity, listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to find out what the heck a non-trinary particle is, and grab a copy of my new book The Disordered Cosmos to take a journey into dark mater, spacetime, and dreams deferred.

[Related: Hungry for more banana facts? Check out our episode on the fruit’s flashy US debut.]

FACT: There’s a rare disease called “Jumping Frenchmen of Maine”

By Sara Chodosh

Ridiculous as it sounds, the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine is both a group of people (now dead) and a disease. It’s probably the strangest culture-bound syndrome I’ve ever heard of, mostly because it seems to have affected only a very small group of people at a particular point in time. 

You’ll have to listen to the podcast to learn about the actual Frenchmen and why they jumped so much, but first, some food for thought: culture-bound syndromes are basically diseases that seem to be specific to a certain culture or subgroup. Many of them are essentially cultural concepts of stress—depending on where you’re from, the symptoms of distress might present differently. Ghost sickness in some Indigenous American cultures, for instance, is a pretty understandable response to grief, while taijin kyofusho is linked to emotional trauma and fear in Japan. 

But the other thing all culture-bound syndromes have in common is that they’re all identified in non-white, non-Western cultures. Diseases amongst white Europeans are more often than not simply considered diseases, even if they’re not common elsewhere. It’s worth remembering, then, that what is considered normal versus abnormal, or sick versus well, is largely dependent on the people who write the medical textbooks. And because certain cultures—white, Western ones—have dominated the international medical field, it’s from that perspective that concepts of illness and abnormality are often judged.

(Looking for the TikTok star Rachel mentioned during the show? You can find him here!)

FACT: These sea slugs can chop their bodies off and start all over again

By Rachel Feltman

Speaking as someone with a history of body issues—physical, mental, and emotional—I have to admit that I have a complicated relationship with my own corporeality. This bag of mostly water does not always spark joy. As a human, the best way to deal with that is by finding a good therapist. But for certain type of sea slugs, well, there’s another option. When it’s time to shed toxic influences, these critters shed their entire bodies—literally. Like, they lob their own heads off, wiggle away, and grow new torsos to start fresh.

Sometimes animals simply shed parts of themselves and move on. This is called autotomy (not to be confused with autonomy), and it’s really common in invertebrates, but even some vertebrates do it—including a couple of mammals. If you’re a crested gecko, you might drop your tail at the drop of a hat thanks to some especially brittle cells around its base, allowing you to squirm out of a predator’s grasp and leave a wriggling tail behind to distract them. This is so common, in fact, that most adult crested geckos in the wild are tailless. At least two species of African spiny mice can shed and then regrow skin, sweat glands, hair follicles, fur, and cartilage as needed to escape trouble. And the invertebrate would is full of animals that give up parts of themselves only to regrow them (including sea cucumbers, which famously vomit up their internal organs as an offering to predators).

But certain slugs may put all previously studied autotomists to shame. A study came out in March showing that Elysia marginata and Elysia atroviridis, two closely related sea slugs, can decapitate themselves and grow entirely new bodies. Find out more about the kleptoplasty that makes this possible on this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Craving a radioactive snack? Grab a banana. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Your brain gets an actual scrub-down when you go to sleep

By Sara Kiley Watson

We’ve all heard of brainwashing, but usually in regard to someone joining a cult or falling prey to a conspiracy theory. As it turns out, our brains frequently indulge in a much more literal form of sudsing.

Our brains are constantly floating in vats of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), which serves to cushion these monumentally important organs as we go about our daily lives. Scientists have hypothesized for some time now that CSF also has a role in clearing out toxins.

In 2019 a team of researchers at Boston University figured out a way to image CSF inside the skull, then watched the brains and CSF of 13 healthy, young people while they slept. They found something truly bananas: When we sleep, our CSF pulses around in gigantic waves every 20 seconds or so, giving the brain a nice, nightly scrub down, scooping up toxins and disposing of them while we catch some shut-eye. It’s sort of like the brain is a loofah full of sudsy soap sitting in the middle of a tub and the waves are hands reaching out to squish it clean.

These waves may be powered by our blood flow. Neural oscillations, or brainwaves, change when we sleep, and they tend to move nice and slow during some phases. This means for a few hundred milliseconds on that brainwave loop, neurons go quiet and don’t necessarily need as much blood. When those brain cells hush down, the squishing of the loofah happens—and proteins like beta-amyloid are scooped up and flushed down the drain like the last suds of your of a bubble bath.

FACT: One of the world’s most beloved meteorites has a tragic and disturbing origin story

By Sara Chodosh

My second favorite room in New York City’s American Museum of Natural History is the Hall of Meteorites, but I’ve always found its centerpiece odd. A behemoth of a meteorite sits on a raised platform, unprotected by railings or glass—the sign even tells you that it’s okay to touch it.

It’s part of what’s known as the Cape York meteorite, and this chunk is called Ahnighito, which both is and isn’t a tribute to the Inuit people who originally used this hunk of iron to forge metal tools.

Like so many of the items in museums, it was “discovered” in the 19th century in the sense that this is when white academics first came across it. Ahnighito was being mined for iron for many centuries before that.

You’d think that this rich human history would make Ahnighito a precious item. At least precious enough not to want people touching it. It wasn’t until I read this fascinating Twitter thread from art crime professor (possibly the coolest title in the world) Erin Thompson that I understood why. The reasoning isn’t comforting, but it is fascinating. And it turns out, the story of Ahnighito is also the story of a young boy named Minik Wallace, who is possibly the most tragic historical figure I’ve ever read about. This week’s weird fact is pretty depressing—apologies for that—but it’s also incredibly important. Listen to Weirdest Thing to learn more.

FACT: Cuttlefish might have more self-control than you do

By Rachel Feltman

If you weren’t already aware, cephalopods—the class that includes octopus, cuttlefish, nautiluses, and squids—tend to be very smart. They have the largest brain to body mass ratio of known invertebrates, and have incredibly complex nervous systems. Some of them can even use tools:

Recently, scientists at the University of Cambridge marked a new milestone in the journey to understanding cephalopod intelligence: they showed that cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test.

First conducted at Stanford in 1972, the marshmallow test is a famous experiment on self-control and the ability to delay gratification by planning ahead. The classic study features children being given the choice between a small, immediate treat (like one marshmallow) or a larger treat after a waiting period (two marshmallows). Scientists would leave the kids alone with the single marshmallow for 15 minutes, promising to double the prize as soon as they returned, and the question was whether the wee subjects would get impatient and scarf down the initial treat.

This evidence of the ability to strategically delay gratification is certainly a feather in the cap of cuttlefish everywhere, but what does the original experiment actually tell us about human behavior? It’s probably more complicated than you think. Listen to this week’s episode to get the inside scoop.

(And as promised, listeners: Here’s a video of a cuttlefish going incognito.)

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post You get brainwashed whenever you go to sleep (and that’s a good thing) appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Ötzi the iceman ate a super primitive version of pancakes and bacon for his last brunch

By Sara Kiley Watson

The way we eat food has changed a lot over the years. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is that if you’re living in wintery climates like the Italian Alps, having a hearty meal of carbohydrates and fatty meats can put you on the right track for a tough hike. Ötzi the iceman, who roamed around what’s now known as Italy, met his unfortunate end 5,300 years ago when he was murdered on the icy mountaintops. His mummified corpse was found by hikers in the 1990s, but his stomach was mysteriously misplaced until a couple of years ago—and it turns out he definitely didn’t die hungry.

Inside his mummified stomach, researchers were able to find lipid-rich, almost bacon-like mountain goat meat. Additionally, they found fibrous bread and charcoal that points to a potential bread-like product cooked on a hot rock—more or less the earliest known iteration of a pancake. These definitely weren’t Instagram-worthy brunch dishes, but they did the trick in terms of prepping ancient humans for their prehistoric adventures.

FACT: Ancient people fudged the sky charts, which means all our horoscopes are terribly off

By Purbita Saha

Last year astrology fans went wild when reports of a secret new Zodiac sign started making the rounds. The rumors got so out of hand that NASA had to step in with a centering explanation on its Tumblr account (we know!).

The space agency started by clarifying that astronomy and astrology are in no way the same field and practice, then dove into a mathematical breakdown of why a 13th sign wouldn’t really change people’s horoscope charts. The supposed missing constellation, named Ophiuchus by the Greeks, was described in early Babylonian texts—but somehow never made it into the official Zodiac with Aquarius, Sagittarius, Taurus, and so on.

The likely reason? It’s easier to split the sky into 12 parts to match the months, even though there are countless constellations that come in all different sizes.

So yes, astrology seems to pick and choose what it wants out of the heavens. But in a way, don’t we all? The Earth is continually shifting its axis, which means the Ancient Greeks and Babylonians saw the sun, moon, and stars in another light than we do. Our views of the universe aren’t constant over time, and that’s a fact that astrologists and astronomers can both get behind.

FACT: The uncanny valley makes us feel uncomfortable around almost-human things, but not because of ancient human doppelgängers

By Rachel Feltman

I recently saw a meme going around TikTok where people claim that the existence of the uncanny valley—where seeing something that looks almost human makes us uncomfortable—implies we once had to be wary of beings that looked almost exactly like us. I’d like to unpack that!

In 1970, a robotics professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology named Masahiro Mori published an obscure article in an obscure Japanese journal where he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. Here he coined the term “uncanny valley.”

Researchers generally weren’t paying attention to the uncanny valley’s psychological, neurological, or evolutionary implications until around the turn of the 21st century, but the idea kept popping up more and more among people who worked with robotics—and then people who worked with computer generated animation—because as their work became more advanced, it became something they had to work harder to avoid. (One fun thing about looking back at the history of the uncanny valley is seeing how relative it is—some of the videos that famously sparked revulsion in viewers for looking too lifelike are now comically unrealistic.) Research on the subject has boomed in recent years, but results are still mixed.

As mysterious as the uncanny valley phenomenon is, we do have some theories about why we might find almost-human things unsettling.

One possibility is that this isn’t really unique to something looking “human” at all, but that our brains are simply uncomfortable when it’s not sure whether to put something in one category or another—like not being sure whether to register a figure as a cartoon or as a living being. Other theories hold that we might be freaked out because an imperfect robot seems like a human whose behavior doesn’t quite add up—like someone whose facial expressions seem less than genuine. A robot or animation that looks human enough might suddenly trigger something in our brain that raises our expectations for its behavior, prompting us to look out for cues that it might be masking its true emotions or acting erratically.

Relatedly, it’s possible that the more human something seems, the more triggered we are to look for signs of possible illness—because the closer something is to being our own species, the more likely we are to be able to catch what it has. And related to this is the idea that all of these feelings stem from our evolutionary need to be wary of corpses—not just because they might carry disease, but because the predator that killed them might be nearby.

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about our complicated relationship with ersatz humanoids—and why it probably doesn’t boil down to an ancient alien conspiracy.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Your favorite brunch foods are thousands of years old appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Eating tofu will not make you grow boobs

By Sara Chodosh

The myth that soy is feminizing is so pervasive that even I, a person whose job is to read and learn about science, was still kind of unsure whether it was actually a myth or not when I set out to research this week’s episode. I was pretty sure it wasn’t true… but there was some part of me that had heard it so often that I just wasn’t sure.

In some corners of the internet, you can still find folks harping on about how soy is bad for cis-men because it gives them boobs (the technical term is gynecomastia), or just that it makes you more feminine in some inexplicable generalized way. You’ll find plenty of articles on “soy’s negative effects” asking whether soy increases estrogen in males. The idea here is that soy has a lot of isoflavones, which are a chemical with a structure very similar to estrogen. Ergo, soy acts like estrogen in the body. Except that it doesn’t—at least not in any meaningful way.

It’s wild that we ever accepted this as any kind of fact, given that there are large swaths of the world that eat lots of soy on a regular basis.

Part of the issue may be that most people don’t realize how common gynecomastia is. At least 30 percent of cisgender men will get it at some point in their lives, and by some estimates, roughly 65 percent of cis-men could develop it.

There are a variety of reasons for this, and truth be told there are still a lot of mysteries about it, but for most men the condition eventually goes away on its own. For some, the issue is a hormone imbalance. Though we’re used to thinking of the sex hormones in a “testosterone is for men, estrogen is for women” kind of way, both sexes produce both hormones. Testosterone exposure during fetal development is what determines whether sex organs that are traditionally labeled as male or female develop, but biological sex is much more of a spectrum than we realize.

All of this is to say that having slightly elevated estrogen levels isn’t necessarily a cause for concern regardless of your sex or gender—hormone levels change over the course of your lifetime. It’s also to say that you should feel free to eat soy whenever you want. Listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to learn more!

FACT: 1.618… is the sexiest number in plastic surgery

By Purbita Saha

Ever meet a number so practical and perfect, you just want to marry it? That’s what some plastic surgeons are banking on when they sculpt their clients using a universal proportion known as the Golden Ratio.

First described by Greek mathematicians, this irrational figure (also called Phi) has been found in hurricane spirals, peregrine falcon dives, and nautilus shells. But when it comes to using it as a metric of human greatness, that’s when the topic gets sticky.

Some doctors say the Golden Ratio is the “formula for beauty”: the more proportional our parts are to 1.618…, the more attractive we are to other people. One 2019 study by neurologists at Johns Hopkins University went so far as to link the number with “increased species sophistication.” That might carry more weight than the crude celebrity rankings that Golden Ratio stans release each year—but according to Randolph-Macon College mathematician Eve Torrence, the argument is completely superficial.

“While it’s a fascinating number that pops up in deep, significant ways, we don’t have any evidence that it makes things more beautiful,” she says. “If you’re trying to sell people plastic surgery and you say, ‘I’ve got this mathematical formula,’ that’s just a gimmick.” Sorry, Robert Pattinson.

FACT: Potatoes have a surprisingly controversial history

By Rachel Feltman

Today I want to talk about why potatoes were considered poisonous in France until 1772—even though people ate them all over the world by then—and about the man who fought to redeem their reputation.

Like many new-world plants, potatoes spread around the world due to European colonization around the 16th century. At first, colonizers seem to have seen the potato as a food fit only for the indigenous people they were subjugating (and perhaps for animals back home). But in a few parts of Europe, peasants adopted the crop for themselves during times when wheat was scarce. King Frederick the Great of Prussia saw potatoes as a great way to protect his country from famine, so he actually mandated their cultivation in 1756 with the “Kartoffelbefehl,” or potato order, which is why some people call him the Kartoffelkönig, or potato king.

But the potato king is not the focus of my potato praise on this week’s episode. Tune in to hear all about the outrageous and controversial pro-spud exploits of one Antoine-Agustin Parmentier, a Frenchman who championed the starch as a nutritious snack worthy of a spot on even the most royal tables.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Eating soy does not make men grow boobs appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is all about thriving in the face of disaster. For more tales of resilience, check out the latest issue of Popular Science—it’s on newsstands now!

FACT: This animal can essentially live forever

By Sara Kily Watson

Living forever isn’t a real thing, and aging backwards is the stuff of fairy tales and unrealistic skin product ads. Or is it? For one tiny hydrozoan creature from the coast of Italy, avoiding death is something that just, well, happens—over and over and over again.

When stressed, injured, starving, or otherwise provoked, the pinky-nail-sized Turritopsis dohrnii skips the whole growing old and dying thing in favor of reverting to infancy. It repurposes its worn-out, grown-up cells and spurts out hundreds of fresh-faced identical clones in a jiffy.

Since these critters are pretty darn hard to kill—and reproduce like crazy whenever they survive a brush with death—the tiny beauties have invaded pretty much every corner of the world.

How the chicken becomes the egg again (or in this case, how the medusa becomes a polyp) is still a mystery. But don’t worry: there are brilliant minds, both scientific and musical, working hard to figure out the jellyfish’s anti-aging secret.

FACT: World War II almost killed the potato chip

By Corinne Iozzio

Whether or not the blessed creation that is the potato chip is an American invention is certainly in question, but what’s not in question is just how much we love those crunchy, salty, slices of deep-fried carbs. On average, a person in the US eats about 6 pounds of chips every year.

Yet there was a time when the future of the chip was not quite so certain.

During World War II, rationing of necessities like oil and shortening got the snack classified as (gasp) a “non-essential” food by the War Production Board. Fortunately for chips—and all of us—a Midwesterner named Harvey F. Noss was ready for a fight. Listen to this week’s episode to hear how chips triumphed in the face of certain disaster.

FACT: Pablo Escobar’s cocaine hippos might not be all bad

By Rachel Feltman

Pablo Escobar is a complex historical figure for sure, but one aspect of his complicated legacy is particularly surprising: his pet hippos.

In the 1980s, Escobar built himself a 7,000 acre estate that included, among other things a zoo, which included, among other things, four hippos—three females and a male bought from a zoo in California. The estate is actually now a theme park, but it sat idle and neglected for something like a decade after Escobar was shot dead by Colombian police in 1993. Authorities shipped most of the zoo’s occupants off to wildlife preserves or public zoos, but they decided the hippos were too large to deal with transporting. I guess they figured the hippos would stay put. Spoiler alert: the hippos did not stay put. And they had a lot of babies.

Today Colombia is home to an estimated 80 hippopotami—by far the largest wild population of the animals outside their native habitats in Africa. As invasive species, these critters must be wrecking their new environment… right?

New research recently brought that assumption into question. According to a paper released in March, the hippos might actually be filling an ecological niche that’s been empty for tens of thousands of years. By mimicking some of the behaviors of long-extinct animals like the region’s giant llama, hippos might actually be productive members of Colombian society.

That’s not to say the critters fit in seamlessly, or that they should be allowed to reproduce and spread in the area unchecked. But studies like these provide an important reminder of just how poorly we understand the planet we live on—and how careful we should be when we decide which human messes to clean up and how.

For more on the cocaine hippos, give this week’s episode a listen—and go grab a copy of the latest issue of Popular Science!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop. And for even more tales of stunning resilience, check out the latest issue of Popular Science—it’s on newsstands now!

The post There’s no stopping this immortal jellyfish appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Sometimes rain is made of meat

By Rachel Feltman

According to several news reports—including the New York Times—at around 11 a.m. on March 3, 1876, Mrs. Crouch was sitting on her porch in Bath County, Kentucky. The skies were clear, and she was minding her own business and making some soap. Then, without warning, meat started to fall all over her farm from way up above.

The incident, which is now known as the Kentucky meat shower, may have been a hoax—but it’s also possible there’s a less sinister (and more disgusting) explanation. Some scientists at the time suggested that Mrs. Crouch might have been hit by a veritable tidal wave of vulture vomit that left hunks of mystery meat scattered across her property.

Even though several scholars snagged samples of the sky meat (at least one of which is still held in a museum collection) we’re unlikely to get a better explanation than that without a time machine. We do, however, know one thing for certain: Sometimes meat really does just rain down from the sky. Whether living or long-dead, animals are so frequently reported as falling from the clouds that Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the “Rain of Animals.”

Rigorous scientific study on the phenomenon is scarce, but not all examples are mere hearsay. We know, for instance, of several occasions when fish and frogs have “rained” onto inhabited areas. In most of those instances, experts figure that the tiny critters get swept up in what’s called a water spout, lifted into the clouds, and then eventually dropped when the wind dies back down. Inanimate objects like golf balls have made appearances, too, and those events are likely due to water spouts as well. One town in Honduras claims fish rain as such a regular occurrence that its residents hold an annual festival to celebrate its arrival.

Other natural forces can cause unusual objects to drop from above, too. Many suspect that when lampreys fall from the sky (which has happened more than once) they’ve simply been dropped by birds who found them too wiggly to consume. And spiders sometimes seem to flood the streets when they engage in a behavior called “ballooning.”

So, while we may never know what really went down at the Crouch farm in 1876, we can say with quite some certainty that rain is sometimes made of meat. Or spiders. Or golf balls. Listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to find out more.

FACT: Professional sword swallowers played a key role in the development of modern gastroenterology

By Claire Maldarelli

Endoscopies—a procedure where a doctor passes a flexible tube down your throat and into your stomach and small intestine—are pretty common for folks with chronic gut issues these days. Getting a camera down into your innards allows medical professionals to see the inner lining of the those organs and identify any abnormalities.

I’ve always wondered how doctors came up with such a procedure in the first place, and as it turns out the endoscope’s origin story is quite a bizarre one. It all started with a 19th-century German physician named Adolph Kussmaul. He was interested in all aspects of medicine, but seems to have had a particular fascination with the idea of visualizing the body’s internal components. He constructed the first ophthalmoscope, which is a device that eye doctors use to look at the inside of the eye, but struggled with finding the proper amount of targeted light to use. The device never actually functioned properly, and its failure made him move on to another area of the body—the upper gastrointestinal tract.

Kussmaul knew that traversing the esophagus would be a fairly difficult task, so he sought help from those with experience in this regard: professional sword swallowers. According to historical accounts, he hired a renowned sword swallower and studied the technique he used to guide an extremely sharp and dangerous object easily down his throat. Kussmaul took particular note of the swallower’s ability to relax the muscle that allows food into the esophagus, and to straighten the esophagus to allow the sword to enter.

With all this newfound information, Kussmaul created a rigid device about a foot and a half long and half an inch wide that was equipped with an external gasoline lamp. Using his sword swallower as a test subject, Kussmaul was able to visualize the esophagus and fundus (the upper part of the stomach).

The endoscope has come a long way since that time. The modern implements are flexible instead of rigid, and uses fiber optics and powerful lenses to visualize our insides—making them not just more effective as diagnostic tools, but more palatable for non-sword-swallowers.

Be sure to tune into this week’s episode to get the rest of the gory details.

FACT: Kodak’s hungry cows (sort of) led them to discover secret nuclear bomb testing

By Stan Horaczek

During the 20th century, film manufacturer Kodak employed more than 150,000 people at a time. Many of those employees were scientists. But, according to the unofficial story from inside the Kodak factory, the company’s dedicated R&D wing started because of some cows—and would go on to make some truly fascinating discoveries.

Black-and-white photographic film is made up of light sensitive silver halide suspended in gelatin. Exposing the silver crystals to light creates a latent image that later develops when a chemical process turns it into metallic silver. Around the turn of the 20th century, Kodak founder George Eastman began getting some complaints about faulty photographic plates. After months of research, he reportedly discovered that the problems stemmed from changes in the chemical makeup of the gelatin.

Gelatin, of course, comes from cow bones. When the cows used to make the gelatin had a change in diet, it was enough to affect the makeup of the gelatin, which had a negative effect on the plates. Kodak lore says that was the beginning of the company’s research department, which started in 1912.

The company obviously employed an ample number of chemists, but a physicist named Julian Webb made one of the company’s most interesting discoveries—including one that almost compromised a secret government operation.

X-ray film is particularly sensitive to light and radiation, so in the 1940s, Kodak carefully selected its suppliers. Many packaging plants contained residual radium from creating machinery during the war, and the contamination was enough to ruin the X-ray plates.

But despite all that careful planning, some plates were showing up with exposed spots right out of the package. Webb investigated the phenomenon and traced the issue to two plants in Indiana and Iowa. Having worked on the early stages of the Manhattan Project, Webb eventually deduced that the radiation came from Cerium-141, the byproduct of a nuclear fusion explosion.

He had discovered far-flung evidence of the top-secret Trinity nuclear bomb tests: the fallout had made its way into the atmosphere, then fallen into rivers along with the rain before ending up in Kodak’s packaging material. Find out more about this government intrigue on Weirdest Thing!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post What really happened during the ‘Kentucky meat shower’? appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is all about voting, elections, democracy, and beer-guzzling goat mayors. Don’t worry—you won’t find any stressful news or policy debates in here. Take a break from thinking about the election by learning about the weirdest, silliest, and most shocking stories we could find from political history.

And when you’re done listening, make sure to vote! Here are ways to help the election even if you’re not eligible to cast a ballot.

FACT: The most rigged election on record featured hundreds of thousands of fake votes

By Sara Chodosh

If you think the 2020 elections are fraught, just wait until you hear about the 1927 presidential elections in Liberia. Incumbent President Charles D.B. King won in a landslide of 234,000 to 9,000—despite there only being 15,000 eligible voters in the country at the time. The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes the rigged event as the most quantitatively fraudulent election in recorded history.

Perhaps more interesting than the straight-up fraud perpetrated by King and his cronies is the history of the entire country of Liberia. I personally knew nothing about it until I became friends with a local, and I’d wager most Americans don’t know anything about it either, despite its deep ties to the US.

Liberia is Africa’s first and oldest modern republic, having been founded by freed Black people coming from the US in the early- to mid-1800s. Some of them were seeking a life free of prosecution, though many in the US viewed this repatriation as a pragmatic way to avoid slave rebellions, which is a less rosy motivation. As you might expect from participants in a 19th-century exercise in American colonialism, the founders of Liberia had little interest in the needs or desires of the area’s indigenous peoples. In addition to conflict with native tribes, the settlers faced harsh climates, scarce food, poor infrastructure, and high incidents of disease that gave the territory a record-breaking mortality rate.

But despite its troubles (and its ongoing corruption issues), Liberia also deserves a lot of recognition. The country gained independence a full 100 years before most of the rest of the continent, and have been electing their own leaders ever since—including the first female head of state in Africa.

FACT: Gerrymandering is named after a giant cartoon salamander

By Purbita Saha

Leave it to Massachusetts to be the birthplace of democracy and a deathbed for it, too. In 1812, then-governor Elbridge Gerry passed a law that would redraw the state’s voting districts to tip them in his party’s favor.

The Boston Gazette mocked the resulting map, and wrote that it looked like a reared-up dragon or a salamander (just in case a dragon was too much of a stretch of the imagination). The paper also came up with the portmanteau “gerrymander,” sealing the governor’s legacy in a common disenfranchisement tactic that still continues centuries later.

Voting districts should change with the times, of course, but only when there’s necessary data—which often from government-run censuses—to back up the new population maps.

FACT: A dog can run for mayor, but not for president

By Rachel Feltman

Lucy Lou was the first female mayor of Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, and ran on the campaign slogan “the b—- you can count on.” She was also a border collie. Her political sights didn’t end with mayorship, however. She also made a bid for president ahead of the 2016 election.

Mayor Lou was hardly alone: Lots of non-human candidates have run for—and been elected to—office. But Lou never actually had a shot at the White House, because all the animal mayors in the US hold purely ceremonial office. Unincorporated towns and communities like Rabbit Hash don’t technically have their own mayor—they’re governed as part of some larger group like a township or county. Many of these places still grant someone the title as a ceremonial position, and it’s become common for the “elections” to raise money for local charities or community initiatives. That’s how we’ve ended up with cats, dogs, goats, and other critters as “mayors” across America.

Non-human animals aren’t the only unusual politicians born out of these ersatz elections. One Minnesota tyke served for two terms before getting ousted at the age of five. Here’s Bobby Tuft reflecting on his time in office, during which he seems to have been under the impression that mayors can’t be arrested:

FACT: Some states have truly bizarre ways of breaking tied elections

By Claire Maldarelli

Good MCs of family game nights always have to prepare to handle a tumultuous tiebreaker. As it turns out, election officials do the same—and in surprisingly similar ways.

America has a long history of breaking election ties using random chance. In 2018, Virginia Republican David Yancey won a House of Delegates seat when officials drew his name out of a blue and white stoneware bowl, ending a tie and giving his party control of the house. And in 2014, according to the Orlando Sentinel, the Mount Dora City Council race was decided when the city clerk drew a candidate’s name out of a felt top hat. Other votes have been called by coin flips and ping pong ball drawings—lottery style.

Breaking a tie in this haphazard fashion doesn’t stop at the local level. In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore beat George W. Bush in New Mexico by just 366 votes. But if it had been a tie, state law says that the winner would have been decided by a game of chance, such as a single hand of poker. (Whether or not poker is actually a game of chance is a matter of much debate, not to mention at least one lawsuit, so let’s hope New Mexico never opens up that can of semantic worms on a national election.)

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post The story behind the most fraudulent election in history appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Egg yolk color is way overblown

By Sara Chodosh

I think it’s one of life’s greatest truisms that travel broadens the mind, but to be honest I never thought travel would teach me more about eggs. A trip I took to Malawi last year did just that.

I don’t want to spoil the episode for you, so for now I’ll just say that this week’s factoid will provide you with lots of fodder for showing up your most stuck-up, hipster friends who insist that their vividly yellow artisanal eggs are simply the best. While your brain might trick you into thinking a particularly colorful yolk tastes divine, the color itself doesn’t directly correspond to egg quality, chicken health or happiness, nutritional value, or any of the other selling points you’ve likely assumed.

Farmers, it turns out, in addition to being hard-working saints who do largely thankless work for increasingly less money, are also business people. They know exactly what makes their products sell, and consumers are generally happy to remain ignorant of the actual explanation for. Listen to the podcast for a deep dive into the actual science behind chicken egg pigmentation.

In the episode I also mention the fact that no cheese is naturally orange—here’s the article that I wrote two years ago with lots more detail! Now go blow all your friends’ minds with your new food facts.

FACT: Birds were used for subterfuge on the Underground Railroad

By Purbita Saha

Forced to spend long hours laboring in fields, swamps, and forests, enslaved people in the US became masters of their local landscapes. Their knowledge of edible plants, geographic features, and animal calls and tracks helped them survive as they fled slave catchers and bounty hunters. It’s a well-known fact that some escapees used the North Star to navigate, but did you also know that birds also served as essential signposts along the way?

Harriet Tubman, for one, was well-acquainted with the avian voices around her Chesapeake Bay birthplace. History holds that she learned to mimic certain sounds, like the barred owl’s and Eastern whip-poor-will’s, to secretly communicate with the scores of people she helped rescue until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Birds also provided a convenient cover for Canadian abolitionist Alexander Milton Ross. The doctor and naturalist would pull up to plantations in Georgia and Alabama and tell the owners that he wanted to conduct ornithological surveys on their properties—and it’s possible he did do a bit of birding while he was there. But once he had access, he would sneak into the slave quarters and share envoy times and locations for the Underground Railroad. Sadly, Ross isn’t an uncomplicated figure: His radicalism took a hard turn when he returned to his home country, where he started an anti-vaxxer campaign during the late-1800s smallpox outbreak. Find out more on this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing!

FACT: Angler fish went to surprising lengths to become the worst live-in boyfriends in the animal kingdom

By Rachel Feltman

When anglerfish were first discovered, scientists couldn’t figure out why they kept exclusively trawling up females—and why so many of their specimens came to the surface covered in strange parasites. Spoiler alert: Those parasites were the missing men. In addition to being some of the most foreboding-looking broads in the deep sea, female anglerfish have the unique privilege of carrying their mates along with them for life (at least in some cases). In certain species, a male anglerfish will latch onto his chosen female with a sexy bite, then release digestive enzymes to melt their flesh together. Some females will take on multiple live-in boyfriends, with her body providing them nutrients as they shrivel into lazy sacks of sperm to fertilize her eggs.

According to recent research, this freaky way of getting freaky comes at a high cost: The loss of the adaptive immune system. Researchers found that anglerfish species that go for the most permanent, multi-partnered version of this mating routine have basically no ability to mount an attack against a novel infection. The deletion of genes related to immune response has no-doubt been invaluable for anglerfish, since the female’s body would otherwise likely reject the foreign tissue of her attached mates. But how do they survive without those bodily defenses? Give this week’s episode a listen to learn more.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Egg yolk color doesn’t mean what you think it does appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Boar sex has a strange connection to your crunchy salad ingredients

By Sara Chodosh

To most people, hormones are just those chemicals that make puberty a nightmare. If you menstruate, you might also curse them for a few days a month. But hormones are much more than sexy strings of peptides, and they’re not exclusive to humans—or even just to animals. Plants, too, have hormones. In this week’s episode, I explain one particularly surprising example: celery happens to contain an unusually high amount of a particular human sex hormone that doubles as a pheromone in pigs. Some folks may even recognize the smell of celery as resembling the odor of “boar taint,” which has nothing to do with a pig’s backside, but is still kind of nasty. I won’t spoil here what role that hormone plays in celery, but suffice to say it’s nothing sexy. And because humans don’t react to pheromones the same way some other animals do, no amount of celery is going to get your partner in the mood (unless they just, like, really dig ants-on-a-log).

But that’s not to say that plants don’t use hormones—they actually have a ton of them. Most of these proteins would be totally unfamiliar to you, and most of them also have nothing to do with reproduction. Some control cell division or root production or bud formation. Others inhibit growth. You’re probably most familiar with salicylic acid, a hormone present in white willow bark that acts as part of the tree’s defense against pathogens. It also happens to work great as both a topical acne medication and as a painkiller. It’s so effective in that latter role that the pharma giant Bayer began processing and selling it in 1899 under a now very familiar name: aspirin.

Aspirin really has nothing to do with the pig pheromone I talk about on this week’s episode, but they’re both excellent examples of how a single molecule can play vastly divergent roles in different scenarios. Tune in to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week for more info on celery and pig sex.

FACT: Your Alaskan cruise is possible because Canada blew up an underwater mountain

By Kat Eschner, a freelance science journalist and editor based in Toronto, Canada

A few years back, I wrote an article for Smithsonian Magazine about a strange little story from Canadian history: The time the government used some 1,400 tons of explosives to obliterate an underwater mountain. The 1958 destruction of Ripple Rock represents one of the largest peacetime explosions ever, and was one of the first events televised live across the country by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The goal was to create safer passage for ships, which had a bad habit of getting torn up on Ripple Rock. It sits in a shipping channel known as the Seymour Narrows, which has infamously perilous tidal currents. Because Ripple Rock’s peak sat just 10 feet below the surface at low tide, it turned an already dangerous stretch of water into a maritime obstacle course.

There was a lot of back and forth on how best to shave some height off of Ripple Rock, and not a lot of certainty about how the process might turn out. Some expected the explosion to trigger a massive earthquake. Luckily, it all went surprisingly well—except for local fish.

FACT: Before we had vaccination, we had smallpox pus—and white Americans learned about it from their slaves

By Rachel Feltman

The history of variolation—a precursor to modern vaccination—is fascinating on multiple fronts. Its earliest origins, which probably date back to 16th-century China or possibly slightly later in India, involve the use of contagious fluids from smallpox victims to protect from future infection. In modern vaccines, we use dead or modified strains of a virus to introduce our immune systems to dangerous pathogens without actually facing risk of infection. That allows them to create antibodies that can fight off a live virus of the same ilk at a later date. Variolation was less sophisticated, but followed the same basic principle: You would smear a cut with a little smallpox pus or inhale some dried scabs that had been stored or treated with steam to render viral cells less potent, and in doing so stood a decent chance of developing a mild case of the disease. This method left a lot to be desired (not surprising, given that no one even knew what a virus was at the time), and some patients would get sick and die. But when the alternative was a disease as infectious and devastating as smallpox, a chance at protection was often better than none.

Catherine The Great of Russia is often cited as an early vaccine adopter, but by the time she received her controversial dose in 1769 the procedure was quite common in other parts of the world. In fact, variolation saw a crucial turning point in American nearly half a century earlier—and was already widely used in India, Africa, and Turkey by that time.

That’s where the oft-misconstrued story of Onesimus comes in. Kidnapped from North Africa and sold into slavery in Boston, Onesimus is generally just treated as a footnote in the story of the man who owned him. But as Harvard Medical School student Lashyra Nolen recently wrote for Undark, Onesimus deserves nothing less than a starring role in the history of western inoculation. The surprisingly controversial rollout of the lifesaving technique—and the unethical methods used to prove its efficacy—is an important reminder of just how much the history of science and medicine has been whitewashed (in more ways than one).

To learn more about Onesimus, check out Lashyra Nolen’s article. And for more on smallpox pus, be sure to listen to this week’s episode!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Pig sex and celery have a surprising connection appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Albert Einstein almost got conned into some serious sexual pseudoscience

By Hannah Seo

Psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich thought he had discovered the cosmic source of all sexual energy. This energy, “orgone,” was supposedly a life-force of sorts. What’s more, Reich believed that a looser view of sex would free society from the psychological hang-ups preventing people from reaching their orgastic potential.

He even started building and selling “orgone accumulators,” which he said could concentrate a person’s orgone energy when they sat inside them. Unfortunately for Reich, the psychoanalysis community shunned his outlandish claims, and scientists across Europe and America denounced his so-called science.

While Reich is pretty unknown today, at the time he was a huge figure, and his story intersects with a lot of notable figures: Sigmund Freud, J. Edgar Hoover, and even Albert Einstein. There’s also the Wilhelm Reich Museum, located at “Orgonon” in Rangeley, Maine, which was previously Reich’s estate—where he conducted questionable orgone research in the later years of his career. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more!

FACT: This beetle cheats death by making its enemies poop

By Claire Maldarelli

Normally, when a predator eats prey, that transaction is complete. But a team of biologists at Kobe University in Japan found that for one species of beetle, that’s just not the case. The scientists initially noticed that this species, called Regimbartia attenuata, had a habit of hanging out rather nonchalantly with frogs on paddy fields in Japan. This seemed strange, because frogs tend to eat beetles.

The team took the frog and beetle duo into a lab setting to observe them more closely. Unsurprisingly, the frogs did try to capture the beetles—and generally succeeded in swallowing them. But then, strangely, as little as six minutes later, the frogs would poop and the beetles would emerge, very much alive.

If you think this is the most—or the only—bizarre thing a beetle has done to evade capture, think again: Other sorts of beetles have been found to force frogs to puke. Then there are the aptly-named bombardier beetles, which can discharge noxious and boiling hot chemicals from their abdomens when under attack.

FACT: You’ll probably never eat more than 84 hotdogs in 10 minutes

By Rachel Feltman

We’ve talked about the four minute mile and we’ve talked about the two hour marathon, but this week I’m here to opine on another athletic feat—eating 84 hotdogs in 10 minutes.

In July, a veterinarian and sports scientist named James Smoliga decided to analyze competitive eating the same way he and other researchers have previously analyzed other competitive sports—by plotting out how performance has improved over time, and trying to use that data to determine where human abilities will peak.

As it turns out, competitive eating—specifically Nathan’s famous hot dog eating contest in Coney Island—has followed the same basic performance curve as most sports. First, things are amateurish across the board: Everyone is learning to play the sport at the same time, because it’s new, so no one is particularly good at it. Natural talent or physiological advantages might give you a slight edge, but even a prodigy isn’t going to master all aspects of a game they’ve never played before instantly.

From here, performance rises slowly and steadily. People learn to play, the game attracts new talent, and people start developing strategies. Then, suddenly, a boom: The sport has developed enough of a fan base to incentivize people to get good at it. Now people are training diligently, tuning their bodies to suit the needs of the sport, and otherwise dedicating their lives—and tons of resources—to being the best.

But that can’t continue forever, because human bodies have inherent physical limits. On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I explain why competitive eating has reached a performance plateau—and what it would take for a professional eater to reach the literal limits of human swallowing speed. And just in case you’re wondering: Yes, competitive eating is incredibly dangerous. But that’s not because your stomach is liable to explode.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Correction: A pervious version of this post stated that the Reich Museum is located in Orgonon, Maine. In fact, the Orgonon estate—home of the museum—is located in a town called Rangeley. We regret the error.

The post This scientist thought he’d found the source of all sexual energy appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

While you’re here, don’t forget to snag tickets to our next (virtual) live event, which is happening on September 15!

FACT: Spiders love to live in cars, but maybe not for the reasons you’ve heard

By Sara Chodosh

I don’t know much of anything about cars, but I do know that they’re not supposed to have spiders. So when I first heard the story about how Mazda6 sedans were apparently overrun with yellow sac spiders to the point of requiring a recall of more than 100,000 vehicles, I kind of accepted it at face value. 

Then I realized that I do actually know some things about spiders (a heck of lot more than I know about cars), and it seemed odd that an arachnid would be attracted to the smell of gasoline—the commonly cited reason behind Mazda’s fuel tank issue. Sure, some people love the scent, but why would a spider? As I explain in the episode, the olfactory explanation doesn’t actually pass the sniff test—which led me to wonder why a particular vehicle might experience widespread yellow sac infestations.

The major complicating factor here is that spiders are everywhere. Seriously. You don’t realize how many spiders are in and around your house right now. While the oft-repeated “fact” that you’re never more than three feet away from an arachnid is not technically true, that’s only because the world is such a heterogeneous place—you might be a few hundred feet away from the nearest spider if you’re in a mall parking lot, but there may be multiple critters within a few inches of you if you’re standing in the grass! The main takeaway is that spiders can be really tiny, there are lots of them in the world, and there’s bound to be at least one kind of eight-legged creepy crawler that enjoys living in any given environment—your car included. But don’t freak out: Spiders are generally helpful creatures.

You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out the strange journey I went on to track down the answer. For now, I’ll say that this was a big exercise in how a great story can become so pervasive that it seems true.

FACT: Racism and weather science once collided to kill thousands of people

By Kendra-Pierre Louis, Reporter for the new podcast How to Save a Planet

In September of 1900, a hurricane hit the bustling island city of Galveston, Texas and killed at least 10,000 people. As the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the storm gets plenty of attention—but most people present it as an unavoidable tragedy. No one knew it was coming, lots of people died, and these days we can do better.

But you don’t have to look too closely into the Galveston storm to realize those deaths were, in fact, completely avoidable. The city’s residents could have been told about the hurricane far enough in advance to evacuate, thanks to Cuban Jesuit priest and meteorologist Father Benito Viñes. He and the other priests at his observatory were particularly adept at reading the clouds for storm intensity and trajectory, and he tried to warn Texans about the incoming threat. But the US Weather Bureau had an aggressive policy of squashing Cuban forecasts—which they saw as backwards, unscientific, and liable to incite unnecessary panic.

FACT: The N95 mask was inspired by a bra cup—and the woman who designed it is also behind the greatest snack food ever invented

By Rachel Feltman

I’d like to talk about ribbons, bras, and N95 masks.

Born in Manhattan in 1917 to a pair of poor Jewish immigrants from Russia, Sara Finkelstein was a real 20th-century thinkfluencer right from the start. In her two decades as Decorating Editor for House Beautiful, she helped pioneer such concepts as the “family room” and living with a roommate to split expenses.

But her real impact started in the late 50s, when she set off on her own as a design consultant. Now going as “Sara Little”—she was 4′11″ and had frequently been called “Little Sara” in the early years of her career—she helped dozens of companies design and market products that people would actually find useful. That was more radical at the time than you might think: Up until that point, most mass-market products were designed based on what retailers said they wanted, not based on what consumers said they needed. Her accomplishments are astonishing, and we probably don’t know about most of the products she worked on. A few highlights:

1. She’s responsible for the first successful boxed chocolate cake sold in England, because she figured out that American cake products were flopping due to the differences between “cake” and “pudding.”
2. For Corning, she used materials developed for ballistic missiles to create freezer-to-oven-to-countertop dishes. She also developed the ergonomic lid tops that are so ubiquitous today—allegedly by watching how tigers grasped their prey.
3. She reportedly convinced a cosmetics company to sell matte makeup products after getting very interested in Geisha culture in Japan.
4. She once went to various prisons to interview professional lock-picks to help her design a better lock.
5. She helped create both Bacos, aka bacon bits, and Bugles, aka the greatest snack of all time.

But these days, Sara Little Turnbull (the professional name she adopted upon marrying in her late 40s) is best known for her influence over a now-ubiquitous product: The N95 mask. In this week’s episode, I dive into the myths—and fantastic truths—of her journey from working with gift wrap ribbons to reinventing the face mask. I’m ready to write the TV show about Turnbull’s fabulous career at absolutely any time.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Your car is probably full of spiders appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Rose Eveleth, host of the hit science podcast Flash Forward. You can learn more about her fact—featuring the story of a Soviet scientist who sought to permanently banish night using space mirrors—in her recent episode on a world without darkness.

FACT: During World War II, carrots were involved in a propaganda scheme to confuse Nazis

By Claire Maldarelli

Many of us grew up being told to eat carrots for the sake of our eyesight. Some teachers and parents may have gone so far as to suggest that eating enough servings of the vegetable could keep us from needing glasses and help us see in the dark. As wonderful as that sounds, however, the connection between carrots and eye health mostly comes down to wartime marketing.

This week’s tale takes us back to 1940. The world was currently in the midst of World War II and Nazi Germany had started what became known as The Blitz: a strategic attack on the United Kingdom in which Hitler’s military would bomb England under cover of darkness. One bout of these nighttime strikes went on for 57 consecutive days. To make it harder for Nazi air raiders to strategically drop these bombs, the British government initiated nighttime blackouts in London and other parts of the country. Once dusk came, they closed businesses and instructed residents to shut off their lights and stay put.

Overall, the strategy was a success. But living in darkness was hard to get used to. That’s where carrots came in, thanks to some quick thinking from the British Ministry of Agriculture. On December 22, 1940, the organization released some dubious health advice to its citizens: “If we included a sufficient quantity of carrots in our diet,” the statement read, “we should overcome the fairly prevalent malady of blackout blindness.”

Carrots are indeed high in vitamins that are crucial to maintaining eye health. But unless you’re suffering from an ocular condition due to a marked deficiency in those nutrients, no quantity of veggies will actually improve your vision. None of the carrot-centric recipes published by the Ministry of Agriculture would actually make it easier to see when the city went into blackout mode.

But the British government had an ulterior motive in promoting widespread carrot consumption. Their campaign had less to do with the potential health benefits of the root vegetable and more to do with confusing the German military—and concealing a secret technological advantage. Listen to this week’s episode to find out more about this carrot conspiracy.

FACT: Some moths have evolved evasive genital maneuvers to avoid bats

By Rachel Feltman

Moths have been trying to avoid getting eaten by bats for nearly 65 million years, which has led them to evolve to some intriguing anti-echolocation innovations. Researchers identified one such adaptation in a 2009 study, where they proved that a species of tiger moth called Bertholdia trigona was capable of literally jamming bat signals. Like many other moths, this species produces a clicking sound that turns predators off. But while many species seem to simply annoy bats with their clicks—or use the noises as a way to make sure bats recognize them and remember how bad their ilk taste—Bertholdia trigona manages to neutralize the sounds of a bat’s echolocation.

A bat locates prey by letting out super-loud, ultrasonic sounds that bounce off of solid objects and come echoing back. The bat then uses the speed and trajectory of the returning noise to “see” where dinner is lurking. But the tiger moths featured in the 2009 study use external organs called tymbals to produce 4,500 clicks per second, which appears to interfere with the bats’ ability to process returning echoes. The researchers found that this jamming technique lowered bats’ hunting success by ten-fold, making it the most successful anti-bat adaptation ever studied.

But it gets even weirder: In 2013 researchers found that another sort of moth has a similar sonar-jamming trick—only instead of tymbals on its thorax, it just uses its genitals to make noise. Sometimes you’ve just got to work with what you have! Find out more about the hawkmoth’s NSFW defense mechanism by listening to this week’s episode.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Carrots were once a crucial tool in anti-Nazi propaganda appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week, we’re highlighting a few of the best facts from a recent episode full of listener submissions. Submit your own weird fact by leaving a voice message on Anchor—it might just get featured on a future bonus episode!

FACT: Your teeth are held in your mouth by ligaments, and you’ve probably sprained them before

Your teeth don’t just sit pretty in your jawbone without any assistance: They have ligaments to hold them in place. And while it’s not exactly the same as the ligaments that attach your other bones and cartilaginous structures to one another, those tooth-supporting tissues can still get sprained.

Collectively called the periodontal ligament, or PDL, the specialized fibers that hold your pearly whites in place act as shock absorbers whenever you bite, grind, chew, or otherwise put pressure on them.

As this Vice article explains, the PDL doesn’t sprain the way a ligament in, say, your ankle can—by tearing or stretching in a way that impedes its ability to connect one bone to another. But you can still strain and damage your PDL to the point of pain, and many dentists refer to this as a tooth sprain. The sensation of stretching or tearing the PDL is often mistaken for a cracked tooth, and can be quite painful. Luckily, the pain comes from inflammation—there’s nowhere for the swelling ligament to go, so it presses up against your jawbone and your tooth—so anti-inflammatory medication can help and symptoms usually abate within a few days.

FACT: Scientists once put ants on stilts, because science

How does a wandering ant find its way back home? In 2006, one group of researchers did something that sounds awfully silly to help solve that mystery: They put ants in tiny stilts.

The point of the experiment was to test whether or not ants used internal pedometers to help navigate back to their nests. It was already widely accepted that ants scurrying across the Sahara desert memorized visual landmarks as a way of finding home, but it wasn’t clear how they knew how far to walk before changing directions. If the insects were counting steps, the scientists figured, having artificially lengthened legs—thanks to some carefully-applied little stilts—would make them overshoot their goal. That’s exactly what happened.

For more information on this ungainly experiment (and other indignities we’ve made ants suffer in the name of science), check out the episode embedded above.

FACT: Some male orangutans go through puberty twice—and it changes the way they have sex

In the orangutan world, it’s not as simple as being born a boy or a girl. While all males undergo what we would call puberty somewhere between age 8 and 15—their testicles drop, they get a bit bigger, and they gain the ability to reproduce—a few males undergo a secondary process years later.

For a few years post-puberty, male orangutans live a scrappy existence. They are mostly isolated and transient, and attempt to force copulation on any female they find in estrus. But for a few lucky male orangutans, this can change in their late teens or early twenties.

It’s not fully understood how or why this process is triggered, but some males see a spike in testosterone levels several years after their initial puberty. The result is a more significant increase in body size and the development of facial flaps called flanges, which female orangutans find extremely attractive. Once the flanges are out in full force, testosterone levels drop back to normal. These fully-developed males are now capable of maintaining their own territory, and females will seek them out for protection. They stay put with harems of willing mates, while the smaller, less-developed males can spend their whole lives roaming around and harassing females. Both mating strategies are effective, according to some research.

One study suggests that the flange-bearing males represent orangutans’ original male archetype, with the smaller, rougher males emerging as an evolutionary adaptation during a long period of scarcity; If food grew less reliable, flanged males would have had difficulty maintaining harems of female mates. This may have made it beneficial to be a smaller, sneakier male capable of hunting down fertile females, allowing what were once outliers to breed their way into a common phenotype of the species.

For more on this story and others, check out the bonus episode of Weirdest Thing embedded above. And don’t forget to submit a weird fact of your own!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post You can totally sprain your teeth (and you’ve probably done it before) appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: There are worms that eat their moms’ skin and salamanders as big as people

By Jessica Boddy

This Earth day, I couldn’t not mention my most favorite animals: amphibians. Back in the day (college), I took a field course in herpetology, which encompasses both amphibians and reptiles, and I’ve been infatuated ever since. And it turns out I’m not the only one. People have been obsessed with amphibians for hundreds of years, from the witches in Macbeth brewing up eye of newt (spoiler: not actually newt eyeballs), to ancient Egyptians worshipping frogs.

Most of our cool amphibian stories these days are more rooted in science. For instance, there are giant salamanders that grow to be six feet long! They lurk on river bottoms and slurp up prey by making a vacuum with their throats. And when they’re threatened, they release a milky substance that smells like pepper—their own personal pepper spray.

And then there are the caecilians. These amphibious worms slither and burrow underground like regular old worms, but are in fact vertebrates with spinal columns! Just as snakes evolved from long, burrowing reptiles with wee little lizard legs that grew increasingly scarce through natural selection, caecilians likely descended from salamander-like ancestors that found wiggling into the dirt more useful than crawling over the ground.

My favorite caecilian fact is that when some species give birth, the babies are born with teeny, shovel-like teeth. They use those teeth to eat a layer of skin off of their mother for nourishment. And the mom is totally chill with it! The practice is called maternal dermatophagy, and it likely evolved more than 100 million years ago.

While these two animals are about as weird as it gets, you probably have some run-of-the-mill amphibians right in your backyard—maybe a newt, a salamander, or a frog. These herps are crucial parts of our planet’s ecosystems, and many are what scientists call “bioindicators.” That means that if they get sick or die off, it’s a sign something’s gone wrong with the environment. Tune in to this week’s episode for more even more reasons to stan amphibians.

FACT: The biggest organism on the planet is probably a ‘shroom

By Rachel Feltman

I’ll be honest: It doesn’t take much to get me excited about mushrooms. But even for those of us without a history of studying mycology, the “humongous fungus” holds undeniable appeal: This is the colloquial name often given to a pair of positively ginormous mushrooms in Michigan and Oregon. Contrary to a fake photo that circulated online a few years back, this isn’t a single, larger-than-life mushroom that sprouts out of the ground and provides a tree-like shaded canopy. While the mushrooms in both Michigan and Oregon do, respectively, count as individual organisms—making them some of the largest, heaviest living creatures in the world—they only occasionally show up as normal-sized shrooms aboveground. Their true heft is hidden below the surface, where a massive network of root-like stalks of mycelium branch out for miles.

For our special Earth Day episode of Weirdest Thing, I take a deep dive into how this incredible fungus manages to grow so big. Don’t worry, botanists: Pando gets an honorable mention, too. Even a mycology nerd can admit that an 80,000-plus-year-old army of tree clones is pretty fantastic.

FACT: These massive boulders seem to race across the desert on their own

By Claire Maldarelli

Death Valley can be an odd and eerie place. An arid valley nestled within the Mojave Desert on the eastern border of California, the area is known for its scorching, unforgivable heat. It reportedly earned its forbidding name when a group of 1849 gold rush pioneers found themselves lost there. When they were finally rescued, before heading out, one man turned around and said, “Goodbye, Death Valley.” Unsurprisingly, the name stuck.

Perhaps because of its desolate, hot environment, there are plenty of strange and mysterious tales connected to Death Valley. But, in my opinion, there’s none as mysterious as the case of the sailing stones.

This story takes us to a region of Death Valley called Racetrack Playa. The area is a dry, flat-as-a-pancake lakebed with barely any vegetation or life. But streaked across the ground are distinct indentations of rocks that have seemingly been dragged from one spot to another. They move in eerily linear directions, then sometimes take abrupt 90-degree turns. Sometimes they move a few hundred feet, sometimes just a few inches.

But here’s the thing: No one is out there dragging those rocks around. And while some of these stones are tiny, often 6 to 18 inches long, others are giant, 700-pound boulders.

Over the years, these stones have generated loads of folklore and numerous theories, from the scientifically plausible to the extreme. Listen to this week’s episode to find out how scientists used tiny cameras and time-lapse video footage to solve this mystery—at least for the most part. Earth still has her secrets.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Welcome to Earth, home to human-sized salamanders and skin-eating worms appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Animal Crossing’s rarest fish is one of the weirdest animals ever IRL

By Jessica Boddy

The newest version of the video game Animal Crossing is wildly popular right now, and as a lifelong fan, I couldn’t be more thrilled. Since the original came out on GameCube back in 2002, the basic gist has always been the same: You (a human) live in a village and make friends with your neighbors (all animals) while paying off loans to a raccoon who will build you sequentially bigger houses. One way of making money is by fishing. And since that very first game, there’s been one fish that is the most captivating and elusive of all: the coelacanth.

How do you catch an in-game coelacanth? One word: Perseverance. Well, it also helps to fish in the ocean when it’s raining, but the critter is so gosh-darn rare you’ll really have to work at it. I understand why Nintendo made virtual coelacanths so hard to find, because the animals are extremely special in real life.

Long thought to have gone extinct alongside the dinosaurs, the coelacanth’s rediscovery in 1938 is considered one of that century’s greatest zoological findings. In addition to its mysterious reappearance, the species is actually more related to human beings than it is to ray-finned fishes like trout or salmon. Hundreds of millions of years ago, they swam with our aquatic ancestors.

Tune in to this week’s episode to hear my ode to the coelacanth—from their underwater lava cave dwellings to tales of their co-existence with T. rex. I’ll even throw in some tips for distinguishing the coelacanth’s shape from the sea bass’ in Animal Crossing waters.

FACT: Plague doctor costumes were surprisingly practical—sort of

By Rachel Feltman

Given my recent professional fixation with disease transmission, I’ve found myself increasingly curious about something I’ve always wondered—why did plague doctors dress up like freaky birds?

While it’s not clear how widespread the use of these iconic costumes truly was (and there were certainly entire countries that found them ghoulish and silly), they definitely got some airtime in Europe starting around the 1500s. While the 1347 outbreak of Yersinia pestis infections known as “The Black Death” is the most infamous instance of European plague, the pathogen actually kept cropping back up for a good 300 years. Sometime during that long period of trying to keep epidemics at bay, some physician or another starting suiting up in distinctly birdlike attire.

But as silly as the costume looks to our modern eyes, it did have its uses: The oiled leather material covered every inch of skin, limiting risk of exposure to infection. The goggled mask further insured this, while iconic walking sticks—which made the physicians look even more like ghastly harbingers of doom—could be used to gesture at or help undress an ill patient (or, in some cases, keep swarming hoards from getting too close). In many ways, it functioned as a sort of rudimentary hazmat suit—and it provided far more protection from pathogens than anything else doctors were wearing at the time.

The most fascinating—albeit misguided—component is the ominous beak itself. Physicians stuffed these leather schnozes with the stinkiest herbs and tinctures they could get their hands on. Their only source of air came from the mask’s two nostrils, so each breath was filtered through a bundle of medicinal plants, a vinegar-soaked sponge, or, in some cases, ground-up viper flesh.

This may have minimized contact with aerosolized droplets from coughs and sneezes (though, as is the case with modern medical masks, the patient being examined probably would have gotten more protection than the doctor donning the device). But 16th-century physicians didn’t know about that kind of germ transmission—and the bubonic plague is almost always transmitted via an infected flea bite, not from person to person. So what were these fowl physicians afraid of? Foul air. Instead of avoiding bacteria, they were working to avoid the “bad miasma” they believed caused illness. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about this antiquated (and stinky) theory of disease.

FACT: Too much migraine medication can turn your blood green

By Claire Maldarelli

The past few weeks have been anxiety and stress-inducing, to say the least. As I’ve done my part in social distancing, I’ve also found myself stuck in front of a computer screen for far too long. This much screen time, together with such little time spent outdoors and the overall heaviness of current events, recently landed me with a massive migraine.

As the day progressed and my trusted OTC pain relief products failed me, I spent the rest of the afternoon in search of relief—and landed on a most peculiar medical case report that I couldn’t pass up the chance to share.

It turns out that, in rare cases—as in, this was the only report I could find—taking too much sumatriptan (also known by its brand name as Imitrex) can turn your blood green. Chemicals within the drug build up in your bloodstream to change the hue of your (usually) red blood cells to a dark forest shade.

Don’t fret if you take sumatriptan for migraines: It’s highly unlikely that a prescribed dose could come anywhere close to turning you into Shrek. Listen to this week’s episode for more on the bizarre medical phenomenon.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Animal Crossing’s most elusive fish has a bizarre real-life backstory appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Coffee makes 30 percent of people poop

By Claire Maldarelli

I’m usually a coffee drinker, but as the news has gotten busier these days, I’ve steadily increased my intake. But annoyingly, that has kept me going in more ways than one. That made me wonder: Does intensifying your coffee consumption increase bowel movements in everyone, or just me?

It turns out that only about 30 percent of people experience lower gastrointestinal side effects from drinking coffee. And to make matters even weirder, scientists still don’t quite understand the mechanism through which coffee imposes its laxative effects.

In this episode of Weirdest Thing, I took a deep dive into our current understanding of how coffee gets us going. The answers will definitely surprise you.

FACT: Tumbleweeds are taking over the planet

By Sara Chodosh

Tumbleweeds are one of those things that I never really considered outside of movies. By the time I was born tumbleweeds were already so cliche that they were a visual gag in comedy films, not even a scene-setting piece of the backdrop.

I obviously knew that tumbleweeds were real, I just figured they were way more of a thing in movies than they were in real life. So it came as something of a shock to me to find out that not only are they a very real fixture in many people’s lives, but that they’ve been that way for more than a century.

All the credit for this extremely weird fact goes to CGP Grey, the YouTuber whose recent video prompted me to look more closely into this strange world of tumblin’ weeds. To those of us who haven’t been haunted by giant thorny brambles covering our houses, it’s a welcome look at just how strange this plant truly is. Enjoy.

FACT: Forceps were a family secret for more than a century

By Rachel Feltman

We see surgical instruments, improvised or otherwise, described as assisting in childbirth as far back as the 6th century BC. But for most of human history, using an instrument to help deliver a fetus was a last-ditch effort—and one that usually ended in death for the fetus, the mother, or both.

That started to change—for better and for worse—with the invention of the forceps. And as I explain on this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, this life-saving device has a surprisingly secretive history. Far from shouting the success of their obstetrical invention from the rooftops of England, the 16th-century “man midwives” behind the design (a pair of brothers who were, perplexingly, both named Peter) did everything they could to keep forceps proprietary. Whenever either of the Peters or their offspring (at least one of whom was also named Peter, but try not to let it bother you) attended a birth, they would carry their tiny forceps in a giant case to disguise them. They’d also blindfold the laboring mother, kick everyone else out of the room, and deliver the baby under cover of a blanket just for good measure. Bystanders reported strange bells, shrieks, and other noises that led them to believe the physicians were using some kind of intricate machine.

Forceps eventually became part of the standard obstetrical toolkit, which undoubtedly saved the lives of many babies and their mothers. But many experts argue that doctors relied on forceps even when they were unnecessary—ushering in a new era of medicalized childbirth that hasn’t been without negative consequences.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Does coffee make you poop, or is that just me? appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The Ferris Wheel has a shockingly sad (and short) origin story

By Rachel Feltman

The story of the world’s first and only Ferris Wheel starts as so many great stories do: With Americans desperately trying to outdo the French.

When Paris hosted the World’s Fair in 1889, entrepreneurs and engineers spent more than two years and about $1.5 million building a tower around 1,000 feet high—the Eiffel Tower, to be exact. It spent 41 years as the tallest man-made structure in the world, at which time it was just barely surpassed by the Chrysler Building in Manhattan.

So when Americans started prepping to host the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which opened in 1893, they were still smarting from France’s big success and needed a comparable spectacle.

Enter George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., born in Pennsylvania to the Galesburgh Gales. His family moved out to Nevada, but he wound up back in Pittsburgh and founded a company that tested and inspected the metals used on railroads and bridges. When a call went out for Exposition proposals in 1891, Ferris responded with a plan he said would “out-Eiffel Eiffel.” His concept? A very, very big wheel.

Now, Ferris did not invent the concept of putting people on a wheel and spinning them around. We know “pleasure wheels” existed as early as the 1600s in Europe and Asia, but these were small enough for people to crank by hand (and looked totally ridiculous).

According to many New Jersey publications, Ferris stole the idea for the modern wheel from William Somers, who put up three pleasure wheels in Atlantic City in the early 1890s. Ferris rode those wheels and definitely got his inspiration from Somers, but those attractions were only 50 feet high.

What Ferris wound up building—after spending some time convincing the World Fair committee it could be done, raising $400,000 for construction costs, and paying for the required safety tests himself—was a wheel 246 feet high. It was a feat of engineering in every sense of the word. When it was complete, it could hold more than 2,000 passengers at once for each 20-minute ride (which only included two rotations, but thrilled visitors nonetheless).

But Ferris didn’t live long enough to successfully brand the concept of a massive pleasure wheel, so the many iterations of his great invention weren’t truly his. Find out more about his tragic tale—and the explosive fate of his one true wheel—on this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

FACT: Animals of different species sometimes form friendships to hunt (and cuddle)

By Purbita Saha

Earlier this year, a video of a coyote and an American badger frolicking together in the Santa Cruz mountains stunned the internet. While Disney+ was presumably shopping the rights for a 10-part series about the pair, biologists pointed out that similar relationships have been documented many times in science, and for even longer in Navajo and Hopi storytelling.

But the friendship between the species isn’t just cute. It’s a tale of survival: In certain seasons and habitats, badgers and coyotes will tag team to trap squirrels, groundhogs, and other prey in their burrows. Between the badger’s digging power and the coyote’s quick feet, the two can crank up their hunting success rate by 9 percent. If all goes well, the partners might rendezvous multiple times—rounding out their feasts with some nuzzling to celebrate the end of a day’s hard work.

So, maybe it’s fair to say that the relationship isn’t just built on survival. Behavior ecologist Jennifer Campbell-Smith wrote an eye-opening reaction in High Country News that urges viewers to see collaborative hunting as an example of complex social behavior among animals. It’s something to consider—and study—in other surprising friendships in nature:

• Dolphins and whales blitz fish together. A 17-year-long study off the northeast coast of New Zealand found that pods of false killer whales and common bottlenose dolphins often mingle and forage together.
• Grouper recruit eels to prowl coral reefs. Swiss scientists snorkeling in the Red Sea observed the flabby fish leading morays to prey hiding out in nooks, sometimes using a “headstand” as a signal. The biologists think this is the first record of cooperative hunting in fish.
• Birds and humans team up to find treats in the forest. The Yao community in Mozambique follows greater honeyguides to giant, wild bee hives—and has likely been doing so for centuries. They’ve even created a specific rolling call that beckons the birds: brrr-hm.

FACT: You can totally hypnotize a chicken

By Jessica Boddy

The inspiration for this fact struck the last time I was home visiting family in the Chicago suburbs. We were reminiscing about the very first time our dog Zeke caught a possum. After marching around the yard with the beast in his mouth for quite some time, my dad finally caught him by the collar and made him drop his prey. The possum was apparently dead—frozen, stiff and drooling. Dad went inside to bring Zeke in and grab a shovel, but by the time he returned to dispose of the possum it had vanished. We thought it was dead, but it was just playing possum.

It turns out that “playing dead” is extremely useful in a survival situation, since a predator doesn’t usually want to eat something it hasn’t killed personally. It could be riddled with some disease. And it’s not just possums that take advantage of this instinct. The behavior is something called apparent death, and TONS of species use it as a defense mechanism—plenty of amphibians, iguanas, sharks, pigeons, chickens, butterflies, beetles, ants, bees, stick bugs… the list goes on.

Humans have found ways to induce this state in animals over the last few hundred years. And when they do that, they like to call it hypnosis. Adam Savage, Ernest Hemingway, Werner Herzog, and even Al Gore are all noted chicken hypnotizers. Like magic, the chickens just freeze solid for 30 minutes at a time (sometimes longer). How do the chicken hypnotists do it? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post There was only ever one true Ferris Wheel, and we blew it up appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Syphilis may have had a major impact on fashion

By Rachel Feltman

Syphilis, while nothing to be ashamed of, is not what you’d call a glamorous condition. It starts with painless sores followed by a rash, but left untreated by antibiotics, the disease’s tertiary phase can cause unsightly bulbous growths, necrotizing ulcers, and hair loss, not to mention more pressing concerns like heart and neurological damage. According to some scholars, these unfortunate side effects didn’t necessarily leave sufferers cowering in the shadows—in some cases, fashion may have evolved to help hide the signs of late-stage syphilis.

The most commonly cited example of this is the powdered wig, which didn’t become the sign of polite society we see in period films until the influence of King Louis XIV of France. Historians note that the wigs were of middling popularity until this young king began to don them during the 17th century. Louis XIV started to lose his hair around age 17, so it’s not surprising that he turned wigs into a fashion trend. But it’s quite possible that his hair loss—and perhaps that of his cousin, King Charles II of England, who also loved a good powdered wig—was due to syphilis. In any case, the royal love of fussy wigs provided a great cover for the truly countless number of syphilis patients running around Europe at the time.

Another, slightly more controversial theory: That codpieces served to mask the otherwise suspicious bulge created by medicated bandages wrapped around genital sores. Not all historians buy this notion, and the codpiece’s remarkably short-lived period of popularity means we know precious little about them. Too bad shoving stuff down your pants didn’t stick around.

Finally, our third potential syphilitic fashion moment: Sunglasses. Because, well, where else are you going to put your fake nose? Listen to this week’s episode to find out more.

FACT: Italians invented the quarantine as we know it

By Eleanor Cummins

Religious leaders, country doctors, and public health officials have been isolating the sick to stop the spread disease for thousands of years. Leviticus, for example, describes the Mosaic law of isolation, which involved a rabbi checking in on the sick at periodic intervals until they (hopefully) recovered.

But the modern idea of “quarantine” comes from the Venetians, who in 1377, decided to isolate ships and their crews for 30 days to stop the spread of the Black Death. The idea was that if everyone aboard lived, they weren’t agents of disease and could come on shore. And if everyone aboard died, well… what can you do? Eventually, the Venetians extended this period to 40 days, which in the Venetian dialect is “quaranta giorni,” the term from which we get “quarantine.”

Things have changed since then. People aren’t typically stranded at sea—though the coronavirus cruise ships are a recent exception. And patients receive medical care in isolation. But the practice of quarantine has remained popular, from Hawaiian leper colonies to the treatment of New York City’s Typhoid Mary. And it’s not always applied fairly: as we’re seeing with the coronavirus today, racial bias often seeps in.

FACT: To some people, cilantro tastes like soap, cat urine, or even Christmas trees—but why?

By Claire Maldarelli

Not all food is created equal, especially as far as our taste buds are concerned. When I first learned that Julia Child had mentioned in a 2010 interview that she hated cilantro so much that she would pick it out of a restaurant meal and “throw it on the ground,” I knew the herb was worth investigating.

To me, cilantro tastes like bland little leaves. But as it turns out, to some people, the herb resembles anything from dirty feet to soapy water. In fact, the garnish conjures such ill will in folks that there’s a defunct-website-turned-Facebook-group aptly named ihatecilantro.com that, among other methods of herb-bashing, posts haikus expressing ill will towards this garnish.

Below is an enticing sampling, but be sure to listen to this week’s episode to hear a full rundown of how a combination of genetics and neuroscience can put a benign garnish onto an herb garden’s most wanted list.

Soak your dirty feet / In lemon water and drink. / Tastes like cilantro

Cilantro you stink / You taste like a Christmas tree / In my burrito.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: One of the researchers behind MKULTRA had an ill-fated run-in with a tripping elephant

By Rachel Feltman

Can we please talk about the elephant in the room? His name is Tusko, and he’s on a lot of acid.

So, it’s 1962 and an elephant named Tusko is “the prize of Oklahoma City Zoo.” He’s 14, in his prime, a robust specimen weighing more than 3 tons, and scientists at the University of Oklahoma decide to shoot him up with LSD.

Why give an elephant a hallucinogenic drug? The researchers were ostensibly trying to incite a state called musth: a period of intense aggression in bull elephants where testosterone spikes. It’s likely connected to mating, but scientists didn’t know a ton about how it worked or what triggered it, let alone how to stop it. That posed a problem in zoos, where male elephants who were usually great with humans could suddenly turn dangerously violent. If sending a young elephant on a wild trip produced similar behavior, the researchers reasoned, they and their colleagues could use acid (which was still legal at the time) to create experimental scenarios aimed at controlling musth itself.

But instead of inducing rage or violence, the drugs led Tusko to collapse and start seizing after just five minutes. About 20 minutes later the researchers gave him a potent anti-psychotic, which did nothing to help, and then they tranquilized him. He died shortly thereafter.

On this episode of Weirdest Thing, we talk about what went wrong, why the U.S. government was so obsessed with LSD, and what happens when you give an elephant acid the right way.

FACT: If you have to poop whenever you enter a bookstore, you’re not alone

By Corinne Iozzio

Sometimes, there’s crap science can’t seem to explain. Literally. Social media, reddit, and confessional blogs are full of tales of something called the Mariko Aoki Phenomenon: a sudden urge to move one’s bowels when browsing bookstores. First documented in a Japanese magazine in 1985, the effect has no clear scientific explanation. But, naturally, that hasn’t stopped everyone from psychologists to physiologists from positing a slew of hypotheses. Do we have a Pavlovian response because we associate reading with toilets? Is there something about the smell of ink and paper that triggers our digestive tracts? Or maybe it has to do with the posture we use when browsing the stacks? We endeavor to get to the bottom of this bum-fuddling mystery.

FACT: Howard Taft never actually got stuck in a bath tub, but he did decide how to define whiskey

By Sara Chodosh

Maybe it’s the philosophy major in me, but I think definitions are fascinating. What makes cheddar cheddar, or ale ale? If it tastes like cheddar and it looks like cheddar, isn’t it cheddar? I think that’s why I’m tickled by the idea that our definition of whiskey (at least in America) is essentially the same one that President Taft decreed a century ago—and his decision is still causing problems today.

Definitions are all arbitrary, but the truth is that a lot of what you eat and drink is very precisely defined. It has to be. If you want to regulate food, whether it’s for safety or for honesty in packaging, you have to write down rules and stipulations about what can and cannot be in certain products. It’s the same for whiskey as it is for ketchup or cherry pie or frozen lasagna, because it’s all an issue of public health. It’s a serious matter, but it still tickles me that someone had to decide what ketchup actually is, or what percent of a cherry pie has to be cherries for it to count. Whiskey’s definition just had the fun bonus of being decided on by a sitting president.

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The post How much acid should you give an elephant? These scientists learned the hard way. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Horace Fletcher became a millionaire lifestyle influencer by telling people to chew as much as possible

By Rachel Feltman

In some ways, Horace Fletcher’s revolutionary diet plan from the turn of the 20th century sounds shockingly modern (and a right bit more sensible than plenty of actually modern fad diets). At its core, his philosophy sounded a lot like what we now call “intuitive eating”: Only eat when you’re hungry, and eat what you’re craving when you crave it, but eat those things in moderation, and stop as soon as you’re satisfied. Research suggests that following such guidelines is way more effective than, say, cutting out an entire macronutrient, or trying to live on a single food group.

But this self-taught nutritionist, who developed his method and published a hilariously named (and wildly popular) book on the subject after suffering from health problems in his middle age, promoted a decidedly unreasonable lifehack to make the whole mindful eating thing more palatable for the masses. They should “eat” anything they wanted whenever they wanted it, yes, but by “eating,” Fletcher really meant chewing.

Fletcherism, also referred to as the “chew chew cult,” told followers to masticate each bite of food for as long as it took to turn the morsels to liquid. Anything that couldn’t slip gently down the throat was unnecessary; truly devoted practitioners would just spit those mouthfuls out.

A researcher who aimed to test the method not long after Fletcher’s death claimed, unsurprisingly, that this ritual did indeed lead him to lose weight (and, in his experience, get better at chess, but frankly this is why you need more than one subject when you try to study literally anything). However, he also described a loss of muscle mass and what sounds like sluggishness and brain fog, which makes sense given that all Fletcherism does is minimize the amount of food you actually consume. It’s sort of like if you did a juice cleanse sans juicer. Who needs fiber when you can have low-calorie sugar water, and who needs a juicer when you’ve got a mouth full of teeth and a spittoon? Inspiring stuff. I hope this doesn’t need to be said, but Fletcherism is not a safe or healthy way to lose weight. If weight loss is a health or fitness goal of yours, research suggests that eating a well-balanced diet in moderation and getting lots of exercise is the best plan.

I was infinitely more delighted by the fact that Fletcher insisted his nutritional philosophy could be extended to interpersonal relationships and worldly possessions: If it is not easily swallowed after careful chewing, throw it away. Fletcherize your life!

Fact: A shocking number of at-home genetic tests return results that are… well, shocking.

By Eleanor Cummins

The ease with which consumers can now get their genes sequenced has had a few tricky consequences. Regulators have grappled with the fact that people may receive information from an online test that leads them to make drastic medical decisions. Law-enforcement agencies have used the databases to track down alleged criminals who never even swabbed their own cheeks, making consumers question how much privacy they’re sacrificing in exchange for knowledge about ancestry and genetic quirks. And as numerous journalists have reported on in recent years, many, many customers have found out that, biologically speaking, they’re not who they thought they were.

In this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I dive into just how common these surprising (and often quite upsetting) “non-paternity events” really are.

On a lighter note, we also debate just what constitutes a “zaddy.”

Fact: America’s favorite convenience chain has the cheesiest origin story

By Purbita Saha

Most people know the Mid-Atlantic for it’s highways, and for good reason. But nothing helps erase that Mad Max road rage like pulling of the highway and hitting a Wawa. With more than 800 stores between New Jersey and South Florida, the franchise is the East Coast go-to for hot stuffed pretzels, custom-built hoagies (or heroes), Voodoo chips, and data breaches.

More than a century ago, however, Wawa was nothing more than a modest dairy farm in, you guessed it, Wawa, Pennsylvania. The name itself has a beautiful backstory: It comes from the local Algonquian word for Canada goose. That explains why the company’s logo has a honking big bird splashed across it.

Well, the owner of this Wawa dairy farm just couldn’t stop making money, and pretty soon his “doctor-certified” golden Guernsey milk was hitting doorsteps across multiple counties. But with the advent of supermarkets in the 1960s, lukewarm lactose fell back in demand. The Wawa family decided to switch course, and soon, a chain of tiny food marts was born. Today, the original farm has been preserved under a local nature trust, where folks can hike, bird, and yes, even see a Canada goose (or six).

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The post The ‘chew chew cult’ is a Victorian diet fad that should really, really never come back appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The Elf on the Shelf is more nefarious than you might think

By Rachel Feltman

References to (and parodies of) the elf on the shelf are ubiquitous on social media this time of year. Here’s a short introduction: Based on a character from a 2005 children’s book, this little elvish doll is designed to help keep kids in line around the holiday season. The gist is that parents convince their kids that the figure magically poofs back to the North Pole nightly to report on behavior so Santa can make his naughty and nice list.

But a 2015 paper casts this practice in an incredibly creepy light. The specific qualities of the shelved elf—the fact that kids aren’t allowed to touch it or engage with it, but must follow its rules of behavior at all times for fear it might be surveilling them—don’t foster morality or respect in small children, the study authors argue. Instead, the scenario merely introduces wide-eyed tots to the idea that they should always behave as if someone were watching them—someone who doesn’t just think less of them or judge them based on their actions, but someone who could have them punished.

To explain why that totally sucks, I bring us back to a previous topic of discussion on Weirdest Thing: Jeremy Bentham, the man you probably know for spending his afterlife as a creepy stuffed doll. When he wasn’t making plans to be taxidermied, he also designed some deeply disturbing prison concepts—and they still inform the way surveillance works today. My story also features an Icelandic giantess who wreaks Christmas havoc with the help of her 13 Yule Lads (and a cat), but you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out how the great Gryla factors in.

FACT: Polar bear plunges are dumb

By Claire Maldarelli

It sounds like a dumb idea: In the middle of winter, strip down into your bathing suit and leap into ice-cold ocean water. Yet every year, hundreds of thrill-seekers around the world take part in this New Year’s Day ritual. In fact, Coney Island has an entire club—the Polar Bear Club—devoted to the sport, hosting the plunge multiple times a year. But the human body isn’t designed to dive into freezing water, which is why the activity can actually be dangerous if you go in with zero preparation. Check out this article for tips on how to plunge safely, if you really must. And listen to this week’s episode to hear how the whole thing got started.

FACT: Christmas disease is a thing, but it will not fill you with holiday cheer

By Sara Chodosh

When I started looking for Christmas-related topics on Google Scholar, I was hoping for something cheery and joyful—or at least something actually about Christmas. Instead I found Christmas disease, an ailment not marked by excessive cheer or red noses but by … well, I won’t spoil the surprise. Suffice to say there’s a lot of death in this episode.

BONUS: Torturous treadmills, champagne and balls, and the history of time itself

Need more Weirdest Thing to get you through the holidays? Check out our 2018 special, which features thrilling facts on the sadistic origins of your least favorite exercise machine, the infamous Times Square ball, the science of bubbly wine, and the history of modern calendars.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Elf on the Shelf and Krampus are more alike than you think appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week reaches Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like this article, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode breaks our usual format to dive deep into a recent package in our print magazine written by Eleanor Cummins—all about the mysterious, internet-driven phenomenon known as ASMR. Take a listen, and keep reading for a few select facts from the story.

FACT: We’re just starting to understand ASMR

Since it was first referenced in a 2007 forum post called “weird sensation feels good,” autonomous sensory meridian response has taken the internet by storm. The phenomenon, wherein certain sounds and other sensory stimuli produce a feeling of calm (or even physical shivers of pleasure), has spawned more than 13 million YouTube videos dedicated to inducing the effect in viewers. But the first scientific paper on ASMR wasn’t published until 2015. In fact, researchers working on the topic say that the sensation’s association with sensual videos and internet discussions made it hard for their studies to gain serious traction.

FACT: ASMR didn’t get its name from scientists

The name “autonomous sensory meridian response” was coined by a cybersecurity professional named Jennifer Allen, who formed a Facebook page for fellow enthusiasts in 2010. “Meridian” replaces the sexual connotation of the commonly used “brain orgasm” with a more abstract reference to some developmental peak, while the rest of the phrase describes tingles in vaguely clinical terms.

FACT: ASMR has an evil twin called misophonia

Misophonia is an intense aversion to certain sounds, and it can be so severe as to interfere with everyday life. But even though ASMR and misophonia seem like polar opposites, they often share common triggers: You might not be surprised to hear that the sound of a turning page makes some people happy, but it also triggers misophonic rage in others. And while most people could understand a distaste for the sound of a person chewing gummy candy, some folks who experience ASMR long to hear those wet mouth noises. Preliminary research suggests having one of these two conditions might make you more likely to have the other, and unlocking ASMR’s mysteries could help researchers find a way to give misophonics a bit of relief.

For more on ASMR and misophonia, check out this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing and grab a copy of our latest issue, on newsstands now. You can check out the ASMR feature online here.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Listen to this shiver-inducing introduction to the science of ASMR appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest James Harkin, head researcher for the TV show “QI” and cohost of No Such Thing As A Fish. James joined us in the studio while visiting NYC for NSTAAF’s latest tour to share the fascinating history of radium mania—the craze that had us turning everything from slippers to health tonics radioactive. For more info on the horrific aftermath of this trend, check out this article about the so-called Radium Girls.

FACT: Sweden has a long and complicated relationship with its favorite beverage

By Rachel Feltman

Coffee is a cornerstone of modern Swedish culture, influencing the country’s language and even workplace norms. In fact, Swedes rank among the top coffee consumers in the entire world. But this wasn’t always so—and not just because coffee comes from a plant originally grown in Ethiopia. Long after this stimulating bean found its way to Scandinavian shores, Swedish monarchs struggled to keep coffee from gaining a foothold.

Starting with a high tax on coffee and tea in 1746, King Adolph Frederick spent his life periodically implementing outright bans against caffeinated beverages. Likely motivations included a desire to protect the popularity of beer—which could be produced locally—xenophobia and racism against coffee’s earliest adopters, and a dislike of the sort of intellectual rabble-rousers who took to gathering in cafes. But as is so often the case, Frederick and his fellow coffee-haters hid behind a thin veneer of scientific respectability: The bans were often said to protect citizens from the drink’s deleterious effects.

That brings us to a story oft-referenced, but rarely cited. According to legend, Adolph’s son King Gustav III sought to make his father’s flip-flopping coffee bans stick by devising a sick experiment. He stayed the execution of two men sentenced to death, the story goes, under the condition that one drink copious amounts of coffee daily and the other stick to the same quantity of tea. Some versions of the tale say this “clinical trial” involved identical twins, which would be quite the advanced choice, scientifically (and would represent one extremely delinquent family), so I think it’s safe to say that detail at least is fabricated. Everyone sharing the story seems to agree that Gustav’s plan backfired, with the study subjects both living into their 80′s (long after the king himself perished) and the tea-drinker dying first.

In trying to confirm this story, I found several books that referenced it—and many articles that cited these books as sources. But where did the books themselves pick up records of the tale? That’s totally unclear. So while this story is a fun reminder that cherry-picking data to serve your own agenda will usually backfire, it’s also a fun reminder that books are rarely fact checked—and should never serve as your primary research source! Show me those sweet citations, nerds.

As for the verdict on coffee, it’s definitely not going to kill you, and might even do your body good. But caffeine is another story, so don’t overdo it.

FACT: Queen Nefertiti influenced (deadly) eye makeup trends in the 1920s

By Jessica Boddy

I was extremely jazzed when Glossier released their new eyeliner a few weeks ago. After picking some up and working on how to perfect my cateye technique, I began to wonder how many others throughout history have struggled with crafting precise, symmetrical lines around their eyes. How long has eyeliner been around, anyway?

It turns out, people were lining their eyes all the way back in Ancient Egypt. Essentially everyone—man or woman, rich or poor—used a dark, smudgy substance called kohl to do so. And it did more than just beautify Egyptians. Modern studies show it may have helped reflect the sun’s rays and repel dangerous bacteria.

When an egyptologist unearthed Queen Nefertiti’s bust in 1912, it sported her own signature eyeliner look, and she became an early influencer. Americans were obsessed with Nefertiti and King Tut, whose tomb was dug up shortly after. The 1920s were often known as Tut-mania, and trends of the decade had Egyptian influences. This, combined with makeup’s necessity in the emergent film industry, pushed wearing eyeliner, lipstick, and other products into the mainstream.

But such products were totally unregulated at the time—and some people went blind and even died before the FDA began (barely) regulating them. Listen to this week’s episode to hear some of the horror stories that ensued.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff) and fill out our new listener survey to help us bring our live shows on the road. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post Did a Swedish king really try to ban coffee with a deadly scientific experiment? appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Frogs wore tiny taffeta pants to help scientists figure out where babies came from

By Eleanor Cummins

Each year, 1 to 2 percent of all births in the United States began with in vitro fertilization. IVF is a simplified term for a whole host of reproductive technologies that allow scientists to inseminate an egg in the lab, and then implant those fertilized eggs into a womb.

On this episode of Weirdest Thing, I wound back the tape a few years to the time of Lazzaro Spallanzani, an 18th-century Italian priest-scientist. In 1768, he began researching the theory of “spontaneous generation” in earnest. Spallanzani believed that the human egg contained all the necessary ingredients to produce life on its own at a time when many scientists believed the opposite—that sperm cells contained tiny little men just waiting to grow. Both groups were totally wrong, and Spallanzani showed why in a delightful experiment involving these high-fashion frogs.

But Spallanzani didn’t believe his own findings. Even though he conducted one of the first successful in vitro fertilizations ever recorded he remained convinced that his ovist theories were correct. Fortunately, it didn’t matter what Spallanzani believed—only what he proved. More than 300 years later, in 1978, the first human baby conceived through IVF was born.

Fact: DNA analysis supposedly confirmed this decorative gourd was full of royal blood—then proved it wasn’t

By Rachel Feltman

Now that we’re in a world where we can sequence the genome of pretty much anything we want to, whenever we want to, it’s easy to forget just how far our use of genetic analysis has come in a very short span of time. Case in point: A pyrographically decorated gourd, dated to the days of the French Revolution, allegedly stuffed with a handkerchief dipped in the blood of King Louis XVI upon his beheading. The gourd—covered in whimsical war portraits and intricate handwriting burned into the dried skin—is a sight to behold. It certainly puts my tiny pumpkins from Trader Joe’s to shame. But does it really contain the blood of a beheaded king?

When the Italian family who’d owned this precious gourd for ages turned the specimen over to geneticists in 2010, they seemed to finally get an answer: Researchers concluded that the dried blood contained within was old enough to be genuine, and that it belonged to a blue-eyed man. A follow-up study took DNA from the mummified head of Henri IV, who ruled France two centuries before Louis XVI, and claimed to show the remains shared a genetic heritage through their paternal line. Voila, the world concluded: That gourd has royal blood.

Alas, twas not to be. In 2014, researchers armed with a much more comprehensive suite of genetic tests determined that the bleeder in question was actually brown-eyed, probably not particularly tall (as Louis XVI was), and didn’t seem to have the right ancestry to be a member of the French royal family. Mon dieu!

As I explain in this week’s episode of the show, we still can’t be entirely sure that this magnificent decorative blood gourd isn’t crusted with the bodily fluids of King Louis XVI. And that uncertainty is a reminder of just how much we still have to learn about the DNA that makes us who we are.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

The post Frogs in tiny taffeta shorts paved the way for human in-vitro fertilization appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week, Helen Zaltman of The Allusionst, a fabulous linguistics podcast that you should really already be listening to, stopped by to talk to us about the history of the word bisexual—or perhaps bisexuous? You’ll have to listen to find out. It’s a wild romp all the way through, and includes both bisexual oysters and space stations.

Here’s episode five!

Fact: The word “moron” was once a clinical term—and it has a dark history

By Rachel Feltman

My hometown is a weird place: Vineland, NJ is a failed temperance Utopia and allegedly the site of the first use of “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” in a murder case. But on this week’s episode I focus on a particularly disturbing aspect of the city’s history—and one that I used to hear tossed around as a joke. Vineland is where the word “moron” was invented, which sounds hilarious when you’re 12 but is a lot less funny when you find out how many Nazis were involved.

Founded in 1888, The New Jersey Home for the Education and Care of Feebleminded Children was, in some ways, incredibly progressive and well-intentioned. It was one of the first publicly-funded institutions for assisting people with developmental disabilities, and residents learned to read and master trades that could allow them to live more independently.

But at the turn of the century, most mainstream medical professionals in America were absolutely ravenous for the field of eugenics—the idea that humans could breed certain traits into or out of existence by promoting “fit” individuals and limiting the reproduction of the “unfit.” Doctors and researchers in Vineland were no exception. And during his time as the institution’s director, Henry H. Goddard produced reams of shoddy “research” in support of eugenics that had a direct influence on Nazi ideology. One of his most famous works was cited as evidence of the power of eugenics for years to come. As I explain on this week’s episode, it wasn’t just dangerous—it was also totally made up.

The American eugenics movement has come up a few times on Weirdest Thing: It featured prominently in my story about sideshow babies and, somewhat surprisingly, came up when we talked about Ben Franklin’s love of sitting around his house in the nude. The same pseudoscience that would fuel genocide in Nazi Germany was first popularized in the U.S., and it wasn’t on the fringes. People thought it was rational and irrefutable. Eugenics was completely mainstream. We shouldn’t let ourselves forget just how easy it is to normalize something dangerous and untrue, especially with the help of “science” cobbled together with a specific narrative in mind.

Fact: we repeatedly discovered and then lost the cure for scurvy over hundreds of years

By Sara Chodosh

I was re-reading this fantastic story about how wrong we are about the nature of obesity when, right in the opening paragraphs, I was hit by a revelation I’d been hit by before: for a couple hundred years, plenty of people knew how to cure scurvy, and yet hundreds of thousands of sailors died from it anyway. It’s one of those fact that I was sure must be right, because it’s so outlandish that no one would make it up. And yet…I don’t know, it just didn’t seem possible.

Scurvy is a horrifying ailment—you essentially decompose from the inside out—but it’s also a pretty simple disease. It’s just a lack of vitamin C. Being one of the essential nutrients that our bodies can’t synthesize, we have to get vitamin C from our food. We don’t need much (and certainly not the massive quantities you’re told to take for a cold, which by the way don’t actually do much at all), and it’s really a testament to how easy it is to get sufficient quantities that scurvy is associated almost exclusively with sailors. Vitamin C breaks down pretty quickly, so you have to get it from fresh meat or produce, two things that run scare on ships out at sea for months at a time.

Back in the Age of Exploration, basically every ship had scurvy. Up to half of a crew could be expected to die from it. And like I said, it’s a gruesome death, so you’d think that the second anyone figured out how to stave it off the news would spread. Yet the miracle of lemons and oranges, or even just fresh meat, seems to have eluded most ship captains for hundreds of years, even as multiple men in various navies figured it out in isolation.

You’ll have to listen to the episode to learn exactly why this whole thing happened—and how we eventually solved scurvy for good, mostly by accident. It’s somehow full of even more twists than I ever expected.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: the origin of moron, forgotten scurvy cures, and bisexual space stations appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show. Don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

Fact: Face blindness could affect as many as one in 50 people.

By Rachel Feltman

I’ve always been bad at recognizing people, but it wasn’t until a few key incidents in my adulthood that I realized I was really bad at recognizing people.

In this week’s segment, I give a brief history of our very-much-still-evolving understanding of prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness. Scientists are still figuring out exactly how and why some brains are clinically bad at recognizing or recalling facial features, but one thing is already clear: The condition is much more common than previously assumed. And as I explain to my co-hosts, not all cases on the face blindness spectrum are as extreme as the sort of tales you’d read about in an Oliver Sacks book. You can learn more about prosopagnosia here.

Fact: A colorful chemistry demonstration has injured more than 70 kids and teachers since 2011

By special guest and frequent PopSci contributor Kat Eschner

The rainbow flame demonstration is intended to show students the colors you can achieve when different metals salts are exposed to flame. If you’ve seen the first episode of Breaking Bad, you’ve seen a version of it. They all go pretty much like this:

But as I learned while reporting a story about fireworks for an upcoming issue of Popular Science, these bright displays have a dark side. Chemical and Engineering News estimates the demonstrations have caused 72 classroom injuries since 2011. And lots of people got injured before that, too. The issue is methanol, which can combust at room temperature. As I explain in this week’s episode, the experiment can cause serious harm or even death if performed carelessly.

Experts say it’s possible to dazzle your students with a flaming rainbow without putting them in peril, but following proper lab protocol is crucial—and ethanol is a much safer choice of solvent.

Fact: Watermelon snow puzzled explorers for centuries

By Eleanor Cummins

This week I talk about the history of watermelon snow, which sounds (and sometimes looks) way more delicious than it really is. This pleasantly pink precipitation may look like a nice summery (f)rosé, but it’s actually colored by photosynthetic algae. Learn more about this fascinating phenomenon—with a quick aside from Rachel to talk about Antarctica’s gruesome “blood falls”—on this week’s episode.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Deadly rainbows, face blindness, and mysterious pink snow appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Arielle Duhaime-Ross, who until recently served as Climate Correspondent on HBO’s Vice News Tonight. She’s now the host of Reset, a tech podcast from Vox launching October 15. Arielle joined us to tell the tragic and troubling tale of the creatures most of us call buffalo, which fell prey to the government’s targeted attacks on Native Americans and now exists in a strange state of not-quite-extinction. To learn more, check out this story on the bison’s plight from a recent issue of PopSci.

Without further ado, here’s episode three:

FACT: The history of capitalism has a lot to do with people pooping literal rocks

By Rachel Feltman

Most people have heard the phrase caveat emptor—Latin for “let the buyer beware.” Basically, this is the legal principle that unless someone includes a warranty or guarantee when they sell something, their buyer should not assume the product will do everything it’s supposed to. Luckily, that’s not how it works in most parts of the world these days. But in 1603, a man named Lopus learned the hard way that caveat emptor was indeed the law of the land. He sued Chandelor the goldsmith for selling him a magical poop rock under false pretenses—for the modern equivalent of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars—and lost. Not only did he not get his money back, but poor Lopus became part of an oft-cited legal precedent. About a magic poop rock. That’s pretty crappy.

Even though Chandelor, as a goldsmith, inherently knew way more about precious rocks than Lopus did, the court decided that it was totally fine for him to say he was selling a magical bezoar even if he’d never confirmed it had healing powers. These hard chunks of indigestible material—still often plucked from Asian porcupines for traditional medicine in modern times—were said to cure all manner of health problems, including deadly poisonings. When the poop rock in question failed to cure whatever it was that ailed Lopus, he decided it must be a fake. That wasn’t really anyone’s problem but Lopus’s, according to the verdict: As long as Chandelor never promised in writing that the bezoar was definitely real and would definitely work, anything he wanted to fib about in the course of his sales pitch was totally fair game. The onus was on Lopus, as the buyer, to assume that Chandelor would over-promise.

Is it a fair policy? No, of course not. But as commerce started to expand beyond the scope of small villages and close-knit communities, caveat emptor kept common law courts from being flooded with loads of consumer complaints. Let’s all be glad we live in an era of 30-day return policies—and medical treatments that don’t involve magical poop rocks.

FACT: Going out with wet hair won’t give you a cold

By Claire Maldarelli

Doctors and researchers have obsessed over the origins of the common cold for centuries. But we have yet to nail down any real cures. There are simply too many varieties of the rhinovirus. As such, folklore surrounding what causes the common cold persists. Who hasn’t been told at least once in their lives that standing outside in the cold with wet hair would give you a cold?

It turns out that there’s a scientific origin (sort of) for this supposed truism and it all starts with Louis Pasteur and some chickens. Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about him, and them, the common cold, as well as a research institution in England that paid people to get the common cold and walk around outside in their wet swimsuits for hours afterwards. You’ll never think about mucus in the same way again.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Pooping magic rocks, how we ruined bison, and lies you’ve been told about the common cold appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Dr. Jennifer Gunter. She’s an OB/GYN and New York Times contributor known for obliterating myths about sexual health on Twitter and elsewhere. Dr. Gunter stopped by our studio to chat about her new book, “The Vagina Bible,” and share some of the fascinating facts she learned while writing it—and a new theory about the evolution of the hymen that she put together along the way.

Without further ado, here’s episode two:

Fact: Corpses may be on the move

By Rachel Feltman

Special thanks to Olena Tkach, who posted an article about this study in the show’s sort-of-secret Facebook group! According to the press release Olena shared, scientists staring at footage from a body farm had discovered that corpses CONTINUE MOVING long after death. Like, long after. We’re talking weeks. Months!

I decided this was a weird thing worth learning more about, so I tracked down the actual study in question. It’s up to you whether this is fortunate or unfortunate, but scientists haven’t exactly proven that our flesh-husks keep grooving once we’re in the grave.

The study, led by a medical student named Alyson Wilson working at the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research (AFTER), actually set out to determine whether tracking decomposition with a ’round-the-clock bodycam would yield better data than the more typical practice of checking on a corpse once or twice a day. Like all body farms (yes, there are several) AFTER exists to help scientists, doctors, and members of law enforcement better understand the way our flesh and bones decay. Dropping a donated cadaver in a particular setting and tracking its progress yields valuable data. Until AFTER opened, pretty much all the info we had on human decomposition came from facilities in the northern hemisphere. Researchers had no way of knowing, for example, that bodies left outdoors in Sydney tend to mummify instead of rotting regardless of the time of year.

Taking a photo of a dead guy every 30 minutes for six months isn’t a very sexy experiment, and the findings—while valuable for forensic scientists—wouldn’t thrill most members of the general public (it turns out popping over for a daily check-in with your cadaver yields the same quality of data as a morbid webcam can). That’s why most of the articles about this new paper aren’t actually about the paper at all: they’re about the fact that Wilson saw her subject move. Arms reportedly moved from laying down beside the body to stretching out laterally, then back down again. This probably happened pretty slowly, and could presumably be the result of dried-out ligaments shrinking and snapping.

Because the researchers have yet to publish the corpse-mobility data for other scientists to evaluate, that’s about as much as we know for now. It’s likely that Wilson and her colleagues will be back with more information (and a new paper built around it) soon. Until then, we can say this: according to researchers at Australia’s first body farm, we won’t even get to sleep when we’re dead.

Fact: Birth control’s placebo pill week was created—in part—to make the Pope happy

By Claire Maldarelli

The hormonal birth control pill has now been around for roughly 50 years. Many of its original formulations included a week-long run of sugar pills at the end of each pack, which meant users would bleed once a month to mimic an average 28-day menstrual cycle. Many modern brands still include this placebo week. But here’s the thing: Those bleeding days aren’t real periods. They are simply the body’s reaction to withdrawal from artificial hormones, and, most importantly, they aren’t necessary. Many users simply move on to the next pill pack when their three weeks of hormonal pills are up, and there’s no indication that this causes any harm.

So why do the placebo pills exist? Back in the early days of birth control’s conception, one of its champions—a doctor and devout Catholic named John Rock—was desperate for the Pope to approve of its use. So he designed the medication to mimic a “natural cycle,” spinning the pill as a way to regulate menstrual bleeding and fertility instead of halting ovulation. At the time, the only birth control the church accepted was the rhythm method, where individuals had to monitor their menstrual cycle to make sure they abstained from sex while fertile. Even with modern-day apps and other technological assistance, this kind of fertility tracking is incredibly difficult for most people. The pill, Rock suggested, was merely a way to “regulate” these finicky and hard-to-track periods so that Catholics could reliably know when they should abstain. The problem, of course, was that the pill prevented ovulation and menstruation. That’s where the week of sugar pills—and the resulting not-actually-a-period-bleed—came into play.

Rock’s plan totally failed, but the week-long dummy pills stayed. Listen to this week’s episode to hear the rest of the story.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: moving corpses, birth control placebos, and the story behind the hymen appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

We’re thrilled to be back for our third season, and even more thrilled to hang out with you on Halloween. We’ll be at Caveat in New York City for another fantastically weird live show on October 31. Get your tickets soon, because our shows sell out so fast it’s spooky. Without further ado, here’s season three:

Fact: Trying to get your 10,000 steps in? Too bad that’s totally made up.

By Claire Maldarelli

We internalize so many rules passed on by our parents, teachers, doctors, and friends in the hopes of being healthy: Brush your teeth for two minutes twice a day, get eight hours of sleep, eat three meals a day—don’t ever skip breakfast—and, of course, get 10,000 steps a day.

We are so used to hearing these pillars of daily living that many of us never question their accuracy. Well, it turns out that making sure you brush each individual tooth is more important than hitting the two-minute mark and breakfast isn’t for everyone (though the eight hours of sleep thing still holds up). So those of us addicted to our fitness trackers would be wise to stop and ask whether 10,000 steps is really a good benchmark to hit.

I am currently training for a marathon, and on my days off, I rarely, if ever, hit those heroic 10K strides. But even the American Heart Association recommends it. Concerned that I could be setting myself up for athletic failure and perhaps even jeopardizing my health (dramatic, I know!) I decided to track down the scientific studies that first turned public health experts and doctors on to this golden number. As it turns out, there weren’t any—except for some recent research, all published after wellness wonks got fixated on 10,000 steps, asking whether the idea holds any merit. Instead of evidence, all I found was one very clever marketing campaign. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more.

Fact: Eleanor Roosevelt’s death is a medical mystery for the ages

By Eleanor Cummins

In 1960, doctors diagnosed Eleanor Roosevelt with aplastic anemia. The rare and, at the time, untreatable condition meant her bone marrow wasn’t producing enough red blood cells. But Roosevelt, known as the “First Lady of the World,” was determined to keep up with her work. She continued traveling the world until 1962, when she was too sick to continue. Wracked with fevers and a hacking cough, she went in and out of the hospital. Her doctors treated her anemia with a steroid and, suspecting she may also have tuberculosis, two different antibiotics. Upon her death on November 7, 1962, their autopsy report showed some surprising findings, which continued to arise decades later, when medical historian B.H. Lerner published his review of the case in 2000. To hear how the mystery unfolded, listen to the latest episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

Fact: There’s secret fake poop being used to perfect your toilet paper

Rachel Feltman

A few months ago I got an email I couldn’t possibly ignore: it was an invitation to visit the Procter & Gamble labs in Cincinnati and see all the secret tests that go into making a roll of toilet paper. Oh, and the fake poop. They also promised to show me their hitherto unseen fake poop.

As a long-time poop science enthusiast, I couldn’t get my butt to Ohio fast enough. And you better believe I learned a lot about paper, plushness, robots, balloon butts, and artificial BMs. Check out the inside poop scoop for yourself in this week’s episode and the video above.

*If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. And don’t forget to snag tickets to our extra-special-and-spooky Halloween live show!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: 10k steps a day is totally made up and Charmin knows exactly how you poop appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Today’s episode is our season 2 finale, and it’s one of our best yet! Now is the perfect time to binge all your old Weirdest Thing favorites. We’ll be back again in a few weeks.

Fact: America’s first celebrity athletes were competitive endurance walkers

By Claire Maldarelli

Modern-day Americans often express their love of sports with downright rabid displays of fandom. We design gear for the express purpose of tailgating, we build giant playing fields, and we bedeck ourselves in pricy memorabilia. But the big American sports craze of the mid-19th century had no stadiums, balls, bats, or helmets. It was called Pedestrianism, and it involved walking. A lot of walking.

The United States was fresh off the Industrial Revolution and experiencing a mass pivot to urban living. With many families leaving behind farming and other physical labors for factory work, leisure time was suddenly on the schedule. Many city residents took to walking as a free means of recreation. Some extremely ambitious folks took that one step further, turning meandering strolls into endurance competitions.

Competitive walking, as it was colloquially known, became the most popular pastime of the 1870s and 1880s. This gave America its first celebrity athletes, with spectators cheering their favorite walkers through feats of the feet. An elite competitor might walk for 30 days without breaks other than for sleep, or battle to complete the most laps around a horse track in 24-hours straight.

Journalist Matthew Algeo wrote an entire book about the rise and fall of this slow-and-steady sport, which he argues created our culture of fandom as we now know it: “This sport, known as pedestrianism, spawned America’s first celebrity athletes. The forerunners of LeBron James and Tiger Woods, Dan O’Leary was as famous as President Chester Arthur himself.”

In this week’s episode, I dive into the origins and rules (or lack thereof) of competitive walking. Side note: If you want to weigh in on our heated butt-related debate, take a look at the image we’re referencing right here.

Fact: The history of butter sculpture is feminist AF

By Rachel Feltman

If you’re not familiar with the concept of butter sculpture, I am thrilled to introduce you to this strange bit of Americana. And I have the perfect example to serve as your introduction to the noble art:

I don't know who needs to hear this but there's a commemorative Apollo 11 butter sculpture in Ohio https://t.co/FfxjgdzuHY/ pic.twitter.com/7nbwxJfaZQ

— Rachel "The Yellow Dart" Feltman (@RachelFeltman) July 23, 2019

Delicious.

Being reminded that this delightful midwestern pastime exists made me wonder about its history. Modern butter artistes work in the confines of refrigerated rooms, but the folksiness of the practice smacks of something that must have been born before the age of electricity. Like, butter sculpture must have evolved in a world where people didn’t have TV screens to stare at, right? It’s sculpting, but with butter. That’s a 19th-century invention if ever I heard one. That opened up a whole series of questions, mainly about how the first butter carvers kept their coveted creations from curdling into a melted mess immediately upon completion.

It turns out the history of this art form is as rich as full-fat dairy, and it all goes back to a woman from Arkansas named Caroline Shawk Brooks. Brooks was an amateur sculptor and a shrewd businesswoman. For starters, she worked with food, a domestic enough medium that she seemed far less threatening than other female artists of the time. She also leaned into a folksy, midwestern image, wearing ruffled aprons as she toured the country and speaking often about her life back home on the range—a wise move, as the Industrial Revolution had many Americans romanticizing the fading culture of family farms. She also tapped into an existing trend of using foodstuffs to build creative displays, which agricultural states used to advertise their bounty (and products for sale) at big fairs and expositions.

In addition to figuring out how to make a living as a female sculptor in the 19th century, Shawk Brooks was talented—and people in the art world recognized her as such. And, perhaps most incredibly, she toured the world with heaps and heaps of butter without the help of modern refrigeration. Her most famous creation traveled with her for six months before she decided to preserve it in plaster. Find out more—including why she continued to use butter in every piece of her art even after moving on to more traditional materials—in this week’s episode!

Fact: Algae giveth and algae taketh away

By Eleanor Cummins

Algae has always had a penchant for producing over-the-top crazy fast. But things are getting worse thanks to industrial agriculture and, now, climate change. Excess artificial fertilizer often runs off into nearby streams and oceans, feeding the voracious organisms. And climate change is warming the ocean’s temperature, which allows algae to thrive. That’s why we’re constantly bombarded with lakeside warnings to avoid algal blooms, and news stories about whales and manatees dying in red tides.

But in her new book Slime, author Ruth Kassinger offers up a different side of seaweed: a natural marvel that has fought tirelessly for its own survival—and helped humans live better in the process. In this episode, I talk about all the surprising industrial uses of algae, from Twinkies to wastewater filtration, and explain just how much our species owes this primordial ooze.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop. We’ll be back with more episodes soon!

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Feminist butter sculptures and America’s first favorite pastime appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is a recording of the second half of our latest live event at Caveat in New York City. Don’t worry, we’ll have another one soon. We can’t share all of our silly powerpoint visual aids in this article, but you’ll find the rules to the referenced drinking game at the bottom of this post! Enjoy the show:

Fact: Chickens are cannibals. Eyeglasses can help.

By Jessica Boddy

In the year 1842, Queen Victoria became obsessed with big and beautiful Shanghai chickens. She built them an aviary and spent afternoons there sipping tea. She bred them and sent precious eggs to her relatives throughout Europe. And just as it happened with Christmas trees and white wedding dresses, the Queen brought another one of her passions into the zeitgeist.

This chicken obsession, dubbed “hen fever,” quickly spread from Europe to America. Bostonians held an annual poultry show, where “hen men” (I swear that’s a real term and not a questionable subreddit) showcased their carefully bred chicken lineages. Soon enough, chickens became so popular that Americans would spend $1 on a single egg, or $120 for a pair of chickens. Today, that’s the equivalent of $30 per egg and $3,600 for two birds. Yeesh!

Eventually, chicken eggs became commonplace on American breakfast plates. Farmers began building coops and housing more and more chickens to keep up with demand. But to their horror, they realized stressed-out, overcrowded chickens were cannibalizing one another!

While improving living conditions does lessen cannibalism, some inventors also turned to eyeglasses to reduce bloodshed. The specs worked by blocking or disguising the sight of blood, which can enrage unhappy hens. One inventor even created rose-colored contact lenses.

For more juicy details on hen fever, and to find out how farmers keep their coops cannibal-free these days, give this week’s episode a listen.

Fact: Goldfish gulping used to be a competitive sport

By Corinne Iozzio

In 1939, spurred by a $10 bribe from his friends, Harvard freshmen Lorthorp Withington Jr. downed a live guppy—and got his picture in LIFE magazine, to boot. So began the great swimmer-swallowing craze of the late 1930s. Kids across the country began battling it out in an absurd game of one-upmanship, in which a student at Clark University eventually would down some 86 goldies. The shenanigans even bred an official governing body, the Intercollegiate Goldfish Gulping Association, which stated that in order for one of these “meals” to count the fish must be at least 3 inches long and must also remain in the competitor’s stomach for at least 12 hours.

The fad died within a year, but YouTube is still littered with its effects. Steve-O, of Jackass fame, attempted to complete the so-called “Goldfish Challenge” only to cough up the pair of guppies—still alive—moments later. Many folks continue to swallow live pets today. In one particularly gruesome case, a high-as-hell Dutch man downed a pet catfish, which became lodged in his gullet and required hospitalization to extract.

Wasted or not, this is all quite unpleasant for the humans involved, but it’s also a pretty brutal end for a pet fish. Our throats squeeze food on its way down, and even a stomach full of water is too hot for a little swimmer to breathe. There’s also a lotta acid down there, and digestive enzymes specifically formulated to break down protein. At best, a goldfish probably has just a few minutes to escape before all hope is lost.

Fact: There was once a man whose life-long, literally insatiable hunger drove him to do terrible things (including, allegedly, eating a toddler)

By Rachel Feltman

The story of the man now known only as Tarrare is tragic, mysterious, and impossible to confirm—but according to doctors of his day, there is at least some truth to the tale of this horrifically hungry boy.

Born in rural France in the late 18th Century, Tarrare was reportedly a pretty normal-looking man. Well, relatively normal. He had an unusually wide mouth, stained teeth, and pale, sagging skin (kind of like a blonde, French Babadook, I can only assume) and while his frame was of a typical size for his age, his belly frequently became grossly distended. Why? Because he ate… everything. Some even claimed he’d been kicked out of his childhood home for eating more than his parents could provide.

This voracious character’s short life had many twists and turns. He was a street performer, a soldier, and, very briefly, a spy—one who ate military secrets and then pooped them out on demand. Unfortunately, while Tarrare was fantastic at eating things and did an awful lot of defecating in his time, he turned out to be terrible at espionage. So instead of being remembered as a superhuman war hero, his biggest claim to fame is that—while hospitalized in search of a cure for his appetite—he may have resorted to munching on medicinal poultices, stray animals, blood, human corpses, rotting garbage, and perhaps even a live toddler. Most of the things that doctors wrote about Tarrare are probably embellished or even totally fabricated. But on this week’s episode, I get into the fascinating and horrifying details—and some possible explanations for the hunger that ruined Tarrare’s life.

Drinking game rules

Take a drink of your fabulous and refreshing beverage of choice whenever:

• Someone makes a pun (two drinks if it gets a groan!)

• Rachel makes a joke about the fact that we obviously planned the live show in advance even though the podcast is totally spontaneous we swear

• Unexpected butts

• Someone in the audience is audibly appalled (or just appallingly audible)

• A cast member says the word “Weird”

• Body horror or otherwise excessive mention of viscera

• If we try to declare a tie you have to finish your drink, so you’d better cheer loud for your fave

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: College students swallowed guppies for sport and chickens wore glasses appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Uranium glass was all the rage

By Eleanor Cummins

This is one of those facts that I can’t stop talking about. I’ve managed to shoehorn it into stories about Iranian nuclear weapons and Game of Thrones dragonglass. But there’s no end to my fascination with uranium glass, which somehow managed to be a household staple for centuries!

As you probably already know, uranium is a naturally radioactive heavy metal that nuclear scientists enrich into atomic weapons and power plants. But starting in the 1830s, with the Austrian manufacturer Reidel, entrepreneurs began using uranium to add new colors to their glass products. Specifically, a color that could generously be called green apple, or maybe just “radioactive glow,” but more honestly is best describe as “urine-ish.”

The style took off, and remained popular for almost 100 years, meaning plates and decorative bowls and cups capable of setting off a Geiger counter could be found in most kitchens. (Fortunately, the radioactivity was pretty negligible.) Even after its big heyday, it eventually evolved into something called “vaseline glass,” which had a milky flair. And the basic principle was reproduced for everyone’s favorite 20th-century ceramic: fiestaware!

For more of this strange history—and some tips on making it rich in the glass collectibles market—listen to the latest episode of Weirdest Thing.

Fact: A Victorian heart medication turned into a gay sex drug

By Rachel Feltman

All props to Alex Schwartz for this week’s facts, which I learned in the course of editing his fantastic Pride Month feature on the history of poppers. You can read it yourself or listen to this week’s show to find out more, but here are a few highlights: Yes, poppers—now a quintessential character in the past and present of gay culture—started out as a heart medicine in the Victorian era. One scientist even brought samples to conferences to let his colleagues take a whiff of the woosh-inducing chemical for themselves. And intriguingly, poppers were briefly blamed by many for the AIDS crisis—even though their use likely lowers risk of HIV transmission.

Fact: Doctors really wanted milk infusions to be a thing

By Marion Renault

We should be really grateful for the gift of clean, human blood when we receive modern transfusions. In the 1600s (and the centuries that followed), physicians injected animals and humans with everything from milk to urine, beer, sheep’s blood, saline solutions, and perfluorochemicals (a group of polymers similar to Teflon).

In the late 1800s, after about 200 years of messy, often-unsuccessful infusions of human blood—as well as of lamb, sheep, and calf blood—physicians deemed such exchanges undependable (we still didn’t know about blood types or blood-borne diseases or how to keep blood supplies from coagulating). “For a short time, milk seemed to be the panacea,” notes one medical historian.

The first milk transfusions took place in the midst of the 1854 cholera epidemic when a pair of doctors brought a cow into a Toronto hospital and pumped the animal’s milk into their own patients (don’t worry, the milk was passed through gauze and kept in a warm bowl). More doctor followed suit. A Dr. T.G. Thomas transfused milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine hemorrhage. Dr. William Pepper remained optimistic about the procedure even when his patients complained of headache, fever, and renal issues after their bovine infusions. Dr. J.S. Prout suggested a medical-legal use for milk transfusions, proposing they might prolong life to allow “the victim of an assault to identify his assailant.”

Dr. Joseph Howe of New York City was an especially adamant explorer of the procedure. In 1873, he injected 1.5 ounces of goat’s milk into a tuberculosis patient who was soon racked by vertigo, chest pain, and uncontrollable eye movement. Naturally, Howe doubled the dose; the patient promptly died. You can hear more about his egregious experiments on this week’s episode.

Strangely, a century and a half have passed since Dr. Howe’s futile milk experiments and there is still no safe, effective blood substitute approved in the United States or Europe. For now, artificial blood remains a holy grail of trauma medicine. Efforts to synthesize the substance have been—wait for it—in vein.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Victorian sex drugs and deadly milk injections appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Nazi physicians wanted their soldiers to eat warm camel poop

By Sara Chodosh

We don’t often picture burly soldiers crouching over with painful diarrhea, but the reality is that a massive number of them are—both right now and for centuries past. It was only in World War I that battlefield deaths exceeded those caused by disease, and far more of those than you might think are from diarrhea. Even today, Navy SEALS have attested that diarrhea is a common and serious hazard.

If this surprises you, try thinking of soldiers as travelers, and thinking of travelers as people who are suddenly exposed to new bacteria and pathogens they’re unfamiliar with. Soldiers get the runs for mostly the same reasons that other globetrotters do, just at higher rates since they tend to be visiting places with poor sanitary infrastructure.

This holds as true today as it was in World War II (albeit with better drugs in 2019)—and the Nazis were no exception.

Dysentery was a major inconvenience at best and a killer at worst, especially in North Africa, except for the local Bedouin fighters who never seemed to be ill for long. Their secret? Camel poop.

You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out how this remedy worked, but I’ll give you a hint: the answer probably isn’t what you’re expecting. I thought for sure I knew what was going on here at first glance—I was wrong.

Fact: Early pregnancy tests may have introduced a devastating fungal plague

By Rachel Feltman

Ever since a recent episode where I talked about doctors drinking pee for diagnostic purposes and charlatans using it to divine the future, I’ve been thinking about the history of more reputable piss-prophecy. There’s one modern use of urine that combines its ancient draw as both a medical and a spiritual tool: pregnancy tests.

We’ve come a long way since the earliest known use of pregnancy tests, which took place in Ancient Egypt and involved peeing on grain. But don’t roll your eyes too hard: According to one modern study, this method actually worked pretty well—or better than guessing, anyway. References to the practice show up as late as the 17th century. That’s not surprising given how long it took for anything resembling a modern pregnancy test to hit the scene. It didn’t happen until the 1920s, and it took a lot more fuss than just peeing on some grain. Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about the horny rats, dead rabbits, and potentially pathogen-carrying frogs that served to deliver news of pregnancy in the decades leading up to the first pee-on-a-stick style test.

Fact: Pregnancy can permanently alter the size of your feet

By Claire Maldarelli

A few weeks ago my mother told me something that I found strange. After getting her a pair of shoes and guessing on her size, she told me that she used to be a size 5 but now, after having two kids, is a size 6. “Your feet grow during pregnancy,” she said when I looked at her in confusion. “Everyone knows that.”

But does everyone know that? I definitely didn’t know that, and I’m a health editor and a hypochondriac.

It turns out that it’s absolutely true: Many people note a slight increase in shoe size after pregnancy. Researchers think this shift in plantar size is the result of a combination of added pressure on the musculoskeletal system and a surge in a hormone called relaxin (yes, that’s what it’s actually called). During pregnancy, the body’s production of relaxin is as much as 10-times greater than it is normally. The aptly named hormone is secreted by the ovaries and placenta, and its main job is to relax the ligaments in the pelvis and soften and widen the cervix.

But relaxin doesn’t just make ligaments in the pelvic area chill out; it relaxes just about every ligament in the body, including the feet. Combine that with the increased weight of a growing baby and the body it takes to support it, and the end result is a relaxing of the foot’s arch. That elongates the foot, making it bigger. That’s what researchers currently believe to be the cause, anyway. As we discuss on the podcast, there’s still a lot of research to be done on this phenomenon—and it’s probably not at the top of anyone’s list.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts (yes, even if you don’t listen to us on Apple—it really does help other weirdos find the show, because of algorithms and stuff). You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

The post The weirdest things we learned this week: Nazis ate camel poop and pregnancy tests spread a fungal plague appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.