Futility Closet - 142-Fingerprints and Polygraphs

Episode Date: February 20, 2017

Fingerprint identification and lie detectors are well-known tools of law enforcement today, but both were quite revolutionary when they were introduced. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe the memorable cases where these innovations were first used. We'll also see some phantom ships and puzzle over a beer company's second thoughts. Intro: In 1892, Bostonians realized that the architects of their new library had hidden their name in the façade. In 1918, a California businessman built a 7,900-ton steamer out of ferrocement. Sources for our feature on fingerprints and polygraphs: Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors, 2007. Jack Fincher, “Lifting 'Latents' Is Now Very Much a High-Tech Matter,” Smithsonian, October 1989, 201. James O'Brien, The Scientific Sherlock Holmes, 2013. Ian Leslie, Born Liars, 2011. William J. Tilstone, Kathleen A. Savage, and Leigh A. Clark, Forensic Science: An Encyclopedia of History, Methods, and Techniques, 2006. Benjamin Netanyahu, Criminal Justice: New Technologies and the Constitution, 1989. Kenneth R. Moses et al., "Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS)," in The Fingerprint Sourcebook, Scientific Working Group on Friction Ridge Analysis Study and Technology and National Institute of Justice, 2011, 1-33. Raymond Dussault, "The Latent Potential of Latent Prints," Government Technology, Dec. 31, 1998. Barbara Bradley, "Fingered by the Police Computer," Christian Science Monitor, June 9, 1988. U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, "New Technology for Investigation, Identification, and Apprehension," in Special Report: Criminal Justice, New Technologies, and the Constitution, May 1988. Thanks to listener Pål Grønås Drange for suggesting the Ken Moses story. Listener mail: Wikipedia, "Mirage" (accessed Feb. 17, 2017). W.H. Lehn, "The Nova Zemlya Effect: An Arctic Mirage," Journal of the Optical Society of America 69:5 (May 1979), 776-781. Wikipedia, "Novaya Zemlya Effect" (accessed Feb. 17, 2017). This week's lateral thinking puzzle was contributed by listener Tommy Honton, who sent these corroborating links (warning -- these spoil the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. If you have a moment, please go to podcastsurvey.net to take a very short anonymous survey about today's episode. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 9,000 quirky curiosities from an architect's acrostic to a concrete ship. This is episode 142. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. Fingerprint identification and lie detectors are well-known tools of law enforcement today, but both were quite revolutionary when they were introduced.

In today's show, we'll describe the memorable cases where these innovations were first used. We'll also see some phantom ships and puzzle over a beer company's second thoughts. and puzzle over a beer company's second thoughts. Two stories this week about the tools of forensic science. The first begins with a San Francisco police inspector named Ken Moses, who in February 1978 was assigned to the case of a 48-year-old murder victim named Miriam Slamovich. She had surprised a burglar in her bedroom, and the burglar had panicked and shot her in the face. Moses had no leads and no suspects in this case. He knew that the burglar was male since he'd been seen fleeing the crime scene, but the only sure clues he had

were three legible fingerprints left on the bedroom window and windowsill. Since Moses was the investigator at the scene of the crime, it fell to him to trace the fingerprints. If the murderer had a criminal record and a match could be made, police would be well on their way to arresting and convicting him. But in 1978, this was an unbelievably tedious and frustrating task. Moses would have to do what's called a cold make. He'd have to compare his three fingerprints by hand with the fingerprints that the department had on file from people who had been arrested. hand with the fingerprints that the department had on file from people who had been arrested. At the time, these were kept on 10 yards worth of file cards, 40,000 people and 400,000 fingerprints that he'd have to check one by one against the three that he'd found on the window.

This was such a daunting task that police in most major cities wouldn't even try to match crime scene prints manually unless they had some other evidence that could limit the scope of the search. It's just too big. More commonly, you just file your crime scene print and wait until you got a suspect, and then you could match his prints against what you found in the crime scene. Oh, just to help convict him. Which is another way of making the match without having to go through this huge mountain of archived fingerprints. If there were few major leads in a case, the main reason to take prints at all was to make the victims or their families feel that everything possible was being done. But San Francisco had

a policy of following up a cold make indefinitely, which meant as long as a chance existed that a fingerprint search could succeed, the file would stay on Moses' desk, which it did. So he had no alternative but just to wade into this horrible task. He started looking whenever he could steal time. He started in 1978, and he was still at it six years later, with another two years' worth of file cards still ahead of him. Oh, my gosh. And even then, he might find nothing. If the burglar had never been arrested and fingerprinted, there would be no prints on file to find. So he could spend years checking, right, for no purpose. And there was no way to know whether that was the case.

On this case, Moses and his partner were motivated to spend thousands of hours searching. The shooting victim had survived life in a concentration camp as a child, and the investigators were driven by rage at the thought that she could survive that, only to be shot in her own home years later. Moses said it was one of those cases you really wanted to solve. Now, in addition to being a cop, Moses was a former high school science teacher and a technology buff. And while he was grinding through these file cards, he began to hear that computers were learning to read fingerprints. In a technical computer journal, he read about new customized computers that could do years worth of manual searches in minutes. They were being used in defense installations, computer

labs, and bank vaults at that point. In the justice system, one major vendor was installing one of these computers for the federal government, but most rank-and-file law enforcement personnel saw it as potentially useful in the future, but hard to believe in today. It was too expensive, and almost no one saw its potential power. Moses did. He attended several technical conferences and became a crusader for fingerprint automation. Three years in a row, he got the San Francisco chief of police to add a computerized system to the city budget, but each time the mayor vetoed it due to a funding shortage. Finally, Moses got permission to solicit funds privately.

Community groups were always eager for free speakers, so he began volunteering to speak around the city. He talked about cases that would have been solved if the city had had a computerized system. He later said, It was a lot of money we needed, especially for that time. Back then, high tech was spending $1.25 for a new jar of black dusting powder. We were asking for $1.6 million. He said, We didn't raise much money, but we did raise the level of public interest considerably.

Finally, in 1982, his group got the issue on the ballot as a public referendum, and it passed with 80% approval. And two years later, this is now six years after the crime, the San Francisco Police Department had a $22 million automated fingerprint identification system, or AFIS. Moses feted the prints from his crime scene, and in less than 60 seconds, it produced the five nearest matches on file. The top-ranked hit had a score of 60,000, which was 12 times the score of the second-ranked hit. The prints matched those of a man named Leontios Solny, who was a computer operator who had once been booked on a minor trespassing charge. Solny at first denied having been in the Slamovich house, but when they showed him the fingerprint evidence, he confessed and pleaded guilty to first-degree

murder. He was sentenced to nine years in prison, a reduced sentence because he'd committed the crimes as a juvenile. That wasn't the only victory. Moses said, When we finally went online, we solved, and I am speaking literally, a thousand crimes overnight. We had all these fingerprints from murderers and burglaries and rapes, and when we started entering them, the system just went bananas. One out of five latent prints were hitting and identifying people from our 10-print database. Before, it had been a situation where we might have a fingerprint on a gun that nobody could do anything with. These prints were just lying around. But once APHIS went online for 24 hours a day, for weeks on end, we were scanning prints and solving crimes. In 1984, police solved 816 cases involving crime

scene fingerprints, a 13-fold increase over the previous year when 58 such cases were solved. The district attorney had to create five new positions to prosecute AFIS cases, and the conviction rate in burglary cases generated by the system was three times higher than in burglary cases without this type of evidence. So you had to hire five new lawyers just to handle all the new case they were able to prosecute. This whole thing is just amazing to me because this was in our lifetimes and you just don't, I mean, just to hear the difference that this made. This was only 40 years ago. It's not really that long. And the difference, it's night and day between comparing things literally side

by side on paper cards and being able to just blaze through thousands and thousands of them in seconds. The burglary rate plummeted in San Francisco at a time when it was rising steeply in other cities, and reporters, academics, and police departments around the world inundated the San Francisco Police Department asking for demonstrations and information. A computerized system is even more valuable in large jurisdictions. The state of California had 8 million fingerprints on file. Doing the work manually, it could take decades to match a single print. And each successful match resulted in a dramatic drop in crime because the average burglar was committing 100 or more burglaries a year.

So, Moses said, when you put 1,452 burglars in prison, as San Francisco did in 1984, you prevent at least 100,000 burglaries the next year. Also, defendants in these cases are more likely to plea bargain because there's very little defense they can make against a fingerprint match. When California installed a statewide APHIS, it identified serial killer Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker, making headlines worldwide. Within a year, nearly 50 APHIS systems were online around the country. The Houston police cleared more than 600 cases in the first year of APHIS.

Prince George's County in Maryland made 150 matches in the first nine months, and police in New Orleans tripled their success rate in matching prints and convicting criminals. Tom Wilson, a technology specialist specializing in criminal justice problems, calls the computerization of fingerprinting, quote, probably the biggest advancement in law enforcement since the automobile. After retiring as an SF detective inspector, Ken Moses started his own company, Forensic Identification Services. He's known today as the father of APHIS. The second story is about the origins of the polygraph. It's told in Ken Alder's 2007 book, The Lie Detectors. For several months

in 1921, someone had been stealing personal items from the rooms of College Hall, a woman's boarding house on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. Silk underwear had gone missing, as well as letters, jewelry, and cash. Evening gowns were discovered spread out on the beds as if someone had been estimating their size. A sophomore from Bakersfield had lost $45 that she had hidden in a book. A freshman from Lodi lost $100 worth of money in jewelry. And Margaret Taylor, a freshman from San Diego, had lost a diamond ring worth $400. It looked like an inside job, but the house mother couldn't get anyone to confess, so she turned to the Berkeley Police Department, which had been experimenting with new crime-solving techniques. The department assigned an old-time

cop named Jack Fisher, but there were 90 female students in College Hall, and he didn't have much evidence. His prime suspect was Allison Holt, a student who had been observed watching a victim hide her purse shortly before one of the thefts. Another woman, a student nurse named Helen Graham, seemed to be widely disliked by the other students. Her roommate told Fisher that she spent money out of proportion to her modest Kansas background, and she wore a diamond ring and a pendant with big stones. Fisher wrote, she is of the highly nervous type and has been suspected of being a hophead, a drug addict. There seemed no way to catch the culprit, and the housemother began to worry that the police's repeated visits would give the house a bad reputation. The residents of College Hall were 18 and 19 and came from good families.

She expressed these concerns to the police. Fisher called in his colleague, John Augustus Larson, a 29-year-old with a doctorate in physiology from the University of California. Fisher was currently working at Downtown Beat, though he wasn't much good at it, and he was still working at a university lab to develop new scientific methods to use in police work. A few weeks earlier, Larson had read an article entitled Physiological Possibilities of the Deception Test by a lawyer and psychologist named William Moulton Marston. by a lawyer and psychologist named William Moulton Marston. Marston said he could distinguish liars from truth-tellers by monitoring their blood pressure, and Larson wondered whether this technique might be applied to police interrogations. He designed a device of his own, a machine to monitor a subject's vital signs during an interview.

In addition to blood pressure, it monitored pulse and breathing depth, and it recorded these signs objectively so that the interviewer wouldn't be led astray by his own feelings. Larson called his device a Cardio-Numo-Psychograph, and he set out to test it in College Hall. He got permission from the house mother, and the women agreed to cooperate. On April 19, 1921, he began a test on 13 women from the house, four suspects and nine presumably innocent women used as controls. He began with Margaret Taylor, the freshman who had lost the $400 ring. She was a control. She'd served as a confidential informant inside the dorm for the police and was not under suspicion.

While the other women waited their turn, he brought her into the lab and seated her next to the machine. He wrapped her arm in a cuff, wound a rubber hose around her chest to measure her breathing, and told her to hold still. Then he asked her a series of questions. For example, do you like college? Are you interested in this test? How much is 30 times 40? Are you frightened? And so on. 18 questions in all. He interviewed all 13 women in this way, taking no more than six minutes for each of them. None of the responses were noteworthy until he got to Helen Graham, the student nurse whom the other women disliked. The ninth interview question on

Larson's list was a surprise accusation. The tests show you stole it. Did you spend it? When he said this to Graham, her blood pressure dropped, then rose, accompanied by skipped heartbeats and an apparent halt in her breathing. As he leaned forward to calibrate her blood pressure, she exploded with rage, ripped off her cuff, and tried to read the machine's readout. Larson later said, we forcibly prevented her from going near the drums, and upon going outside, she told Ms. Holt that if I had not had her tied down, she would have smashed Officer Fisher in the face and told another girl that she felt like tearing up the record. Just before leaving the room, she told all of us that the questions asked were perfectly atrocious and that she agreed with the housemother that such things should not be allowed. She rushed back to College Hall,

accused her roommate of betraying her, and stormed out of the dorm. No other student posed an objection or presented any anomalies in the testing. In the week that followed, Helen Graham returned repeatedly to the police station, protesting her innocence, then allowing that she might have taken the items in her sleep or in some possible mental disorder, and offering to replace the ring if the police agreed to end the investigation. Finally, she admitted taking the money, the ring, and some hose off a line. She signed a confession, withdrew from school, and moved back to Kansas. This was the first real-life

crime solved by a lie detector. It hadn't really caught the criminal so much as heightened her sense of guilt and incrimination, but it accomplished the same result. In fact, it's not clear whether Graham was really guilty or had merely felt guilty and been badgered into a confession. Some thefts occurred even after she returned to Kansas, and Larson's later experience in sorority cases convinced him that even innocent people could sometimes be tripped up by his machine. Larson's investigations here led to one permanent result. After the first test, he realized that the women he'd interviewed might have been reacting to the questioner, not the questions. In order to eliminate this factor, he went back into the laboratory with Margaret Taylor, the attractive freshman who had lost a ring. First, he asked her to lie to him, and then during their interview,

he asked her out on a date. A year later, the two of them were married. The man who invented the lie detector married the first person he ever interrogated. In fact, for years afterward, he kept the record of their first meeting in his files, a record of her heart rate, pulse, and breathing during their first conversation. Larson had been thinking of going to law school, but all this was so interesting that he decided to study forensic psychiatry instead. In time, and breathing during their first conversation. Larson had been thinking of going to law school, but all this was so interesting that he decided to study forensic psychiatry instead. In time, he became known as the inventor of the modern polygraph, a machine that monitors blood pressure, pulse, see better, but to stay clean and clear.

But if you've only ever worn ordinary lenses, then you know how many annoyances they can bring into your life. Like fingerprints, smudges, scratches, and glare from all kinds of artificial light. Thankfully, Kryzol no-glare lenses are life-tested to protect against all of those things, so they stay clean and clear. That means you don't have to worry about your lenses getting dirty when you take them on or off, or getting scratched when you clean them on your shirt. Kryzall no-glare lenses even make it safer for you to drive at night by reducing any reflection caused by the headlights of oncoming traffic. They also protect your eyes from harmful UV light, which can contribute to long-term damage like eye disease. And because

Krizol no-glare lenses stay clear and reduce distracting glare, your friends and family can actually see your eyes, not just your glasses. Look better, feel better, and most importantly, be prepared for whatever comes your way with clear vision. Go to krizol.com to learn more. That's C-R-I-Z-A-L.com and start living life in the clear. Brayden Shepardson wrote to say, Hi, Greg and Sharon. Thanks for making such a delightful podcast. I'm a longtime listener,

but recently I started going through the archive again while recovering from an illness. In episode 28, Greg described an incident of sailors in the Mediterranean seeing mirages and images of distant cities. It reminded me of an episode in the wonderful book Thunder Below by Rear Admiral Eugene Fluckey. It's a memoir of his time as captain of the submarine USS Barb in 1943-45. USS Barb in 1943-45. During his first and last patrols in command, the submarine is in the Sea of Okhotsk between Hokkaido and Kamchatka. In both patrols, the crew encounters strange mirages in the frigid still air. In the first patrol, they see an ice flow with fishing trawlers and head towards it, but the flow swiftly retreats and vanishes. Eventually, they reach the real flow, which was far over the horizon when they saw the mirage.

They are shaken by the strange mirages, which they were not expecting. On the last patrol, it's even more striking. They see a miniature image of a convoy on the near side of the horizon. The image is looking down on the ships, and they can see the wakes. They guess at the range and move to intercept and eventually determine the convoy was dozens of miles over the horizon when they spotted the image, which persisted for hours. These seem like well-documented cases of the sort of marine mirage mentioned in the podcast. I didn't know very much about mirages, so I tried learning a little more about them. didn't know very much about mirages, so I tried learning a little more about them. According to Wikipedia, a mirage is a naturally occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays are bent to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. And the type of mirage that

I'd previously heard about, where you see what appears to be water in, say, the desert or on a hot road, is called an inferior mirage, meaning that the mirage is located under the real object, such as the sky or a distant mountain. The marine mirages that Fluckey was reporting are superior mirages, which result from temperature inversions or having the air below the line of sight be colder than the air above it. This causes mirages that appear above the real object, such as seeing ships that are still over the horizon or seeing what appear to be cities in the clouds. And that's

the type that Greg had asked about in episode 28. Apparently, superior mirages are fairly common in polar regions. And the first recorded one was actually back in 1597 during a polar expedition of the Dutch explorer Willem Barents, whose party got trapped by ice and was forced to spend the winter on an Arctic island in the archipelago Novaya Zemlya, for which this type of effect is now named. They were trapped for the long polar night, and some of the crew saw the sun appear above the horizon days before it actually should have been visible. the horizon days before it actually should have been visible. This was recorded in a journal kept by one of the crew members, but the account was met with skepticism until almost 500 years later, when scientists in the 20th century were finally able to explain and demonstrate such a phenomenon.

That must have been terribly confusing. Yeah. And not only was it confusing, but like nobody would believe them. No, you couldn't have. And actually, Ernest Shackleton also reported seeing the sun during the polar night in 1915 in his last expedition to Antarctica. There's actually a related phenomenon that's been in my notes forever that I keep meaning to look into and haven't found time to yet. In his book, Out of the Blue, physicist John Naylor says that the same conditions that Sharon just described can lead to a phenomenon called looming, in which lands beyond the true horizon can become visible because light is refracted more strongly than normal toward the ground.

Apparently, one of the most famous examples concerns the Welsh mountain Snowdon, which is occasionally seen by pilots in Dublin Bay, which is more than 100 miles away. Interestingly, Naylor writes, it has been argued that looming led directly to the Norse settlement of Iceland, because Norsemen were able to see some of the coast as a superior mirage from the Faroe Islands. Later, Icelanders may have been similarly aided in their discovery of Greenland. Although most of the light from these distant shores is either scattered or absorbed by the atmosphere before it reaches the distant observer, the exceptionally good visibility brought about by the high-pressure conditions that favor the effect would just make them visible at distances of several hundred kilometers. So these mirages might actually have changed history at times, huh?

Yeah, quite significantly, if that's true. Sheila Mickelson also wrote to us to say, I just finished episode 114 with the puzzle about the Apple computer turning on the radio. It reminded me of a family story of ours. My grandparents, not all that computer savvy, had my uncle set up their new computer. On our next visit to their house, they asked us for help finding an annoying cricket that they had been looking for all week. My grandparents were exasperated. They had looked and looked behind couches, under tables, everywhere in the computer room for this annoying cricket to no

avail. That was when we realized my uncle had set up Weatherbug on the computer. Anytime the computer was on, the Weatherbug alert, a realistic cricket noise, sounded. We still laugh about their cricket hunt all those years ago. I love the podcast and the logo. Keep up the good work. And Sheila indicates in her signature line that she's a graphic designer. All props on the logo go to Von Glitchka, who we thanked before before but we'll thank again for doing such a brilliant job on our logo so thanks so much to everyone who writes into us uh we always appreciate hearing your comments feedback and suggestions i'm sorry that we can't always respond to everyone or read everyone's emails on the show but we are reading it we promise yes um and so if

you have anything you'd like to share with us, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. And thank you to everyone who's been giving me tips on how to correctly pronounce their names. Some people say that I can pronounce their names however I want, but I want to say that I think that might be a bit dangerous, so I always appreciate the help. It's Greg's turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. I'm going to present him with an odd sounding situation and he has to try to work out what is actually going on, asking only yes or no questions. This puzzle comes from Tommy Houghton who says, here's a new puzzle for you inspired by Dan Lewis's Now I Know. In 1983, two researchers

published a scientific article, and in response, a beer company made a change to one of its products. Why? Uh-oh, that sounds bad. Was it a study on the beer that the manufacturers make? Not on the beer, no. On something else, on something that affected the beer. You said the manufacturers made a change to their beer? No, made a change to their beer. No, made a change to one of its products. A beer company made a change

to one of its products. To a beer? Not to a beer. Okay, to some beverage? Not to a beverage. To a food? Not to a food. A beer company makes a product

that's not a food. Um, no. Just you need to be kind of specific, more specific than you're being, but they didn't change. Well, no, I'm trying to get out quieter. They didn't change a food or a beverage, but they did change something that they make

and they're a beer company. A container? Yes. Oh, good. All right. A can? No. I guess I do need to figure this out.

A container for beer? Yes. A keg? No. A case? No. You're closer at can. A part of a can?

No. What else does beer come in? A bottle. Bottle, yes. They made a change to a beer bottle. They did as a result of a scientific article that was published. Okay. Was this to do with safety?

Did I ever ask you that? No, you didn't ask me that. And no, it's not. But that's a good guess. Is it? So did it improve somehow the, what would you say, profit margin? You know what? I'm going to stop you after did it improve somehow because no, almost any question you

ask that goes that direction won't be right. The change didn't improve? I won't say it improved anything. All right. Okay, beer bottles is what they changed. Yes. Did the study have to do with, you said not the beer itself? Not the beer itself. With the beer. So the study, did the study have to do with the bottle? Yes. They published a scientific article and it had to do with these beer bottles.

About the, the material, about the glass? Are they glass bottles? They are glass bottles. And was it a study about glass? No. About the properties of glass? No. But does this have to do with the shape of the bottle?

Yes. Really? Yes. Uh, is it about the strength of certain different shapes? Nope, nope, nope. Nothing even close like that. The volume of the bottle in certain shapes? No.

Okay, I won't even ask that question. What do you change? The color of the glass? These aren't the things that they changed, but you're not even... Maybe it would help you to understand why the change needed to be made rather than what they changed, because I don't think that would help you if you managed to get what exactly they changed about the bottles.

Okay. But there was an important reason why the change needed to be done. But it wasn't safety or profit, and making the change didn't improve anything. Yes. I would say yes to all of those by what I think you're meaning on all of those. Okay. I'll give you a hint that the change

was not intended to help humans in any way. Did it help some other living thing? Yes. Really? Yes. Really? Yes. But it doesn't have to do with the contents of the beer? No, it has nothing to do with the contents of the beer. And it doesn't have to do with safety?

Right. Maybe very, very broadly speaking, but I was assuming you meant like human safety for the bottles. I was assuming you meant like human safety for the bottles. Tell me again what you just said. You said this doesn't have to do with the welfare of other... It has to do with the welfare of other animals. Other animals. So it's something to do like with wildlife? Some kind of wildlife specifically.

But when beer bottles are cast off? Yes. And this has to do with beer bottles that are cast off specifically. Yes. And break? No. Okay. So someone drinks with beer bottles that are cast off specifically, yes. And break? No. Okay. So someone drinks a beer and tosses it into the wilderness.

And something takes up residence inside the bottle? No. Okay. But the bottle becomes a hazard to some, apparently, species of wildlife out there. It becomes a problem. Hazard might not be the quite right word, but it definitely becomes a problem for some species, yes. emblem. Hazard might not be the quite right word, but it definitely becomes a problem for some species, yes. And this change was intended to address that? Yes, exactly. Birds? No. But you have something like that in mind, some specific creature? Yes, I do. I have some specific

creature in mind. What do animals do with beer bottles? Because I keep thinking like if they go inside them somehow and then grow or change and they can't get out again. They don't go inside the bottles. Does something eat beer bottles? No. Fish? No. What the heck?

And this would be something outside, like you said, like wildlife. People throw the beer bottles, you know, outside. And animals as opposed to plants? Animals as opposed to plants. Animals as opposed to plants. But, um. Mammals? No. Not fish.

Some kind of reptiles? No. Not birds, you said. Not birds. And not people. Insects? Insects. Insects.

And they don't go inside the bottles. You've ruled that out. There was some other problem that some specific insects were having with these bottles. Without going inside them? Without going inside them. What does an insect do with a discarded beer bottle? Something very unusual that you would never guess. It's not bees, is it?

It's not bees. But you're saying it's not a specific kind of insect? Yes, it was beetles, I'll tell you. It was a specific kind of beetle. Do they use the glass? It's not that they were using it. They're using an intact beer bottle for some purpose without going inside it. Yeah, it's not so much that they were using it.

It's that they were mistaking it for something else. A beetle mistakes a beer bottle. Right. But only about half the beetles, let's say. Like, say, male beetles? Yes, let's say male beetles, exactly. Mistake a discarded beer bottle for a female beetle? Exactly, yes. And the change... Oh, and that interfered with their life cycle or reproductive... Yes, they were trying to mate with the beer bottles. And the change addressed it. I still don't quite have it, though.

I don't understand what it was about the bottles that was attracting them. Well, and that's not it. I mean, it was... The bottles matched too much up to female Australian jewel beetles, basically. But they were bigger than the males. They were the same color as the females, as orange-brown color. And they had this dimpled pattern on the bottom

that matched the back of the females. Just by chance. The way it reflected light, exactly. Wow. So I figured you were never going to get that. But so these Australian jewel beetles were attempting to mate with the bottles. And Tommy says,

the researchers noticed the discarded bottles on the side of the road were covered by these beetles were attempting to mate with the bottles. And Tommy says, the researchers noticed the discarded bottles on the side of the road were covered by these beetles, firmly attached and refusing to move, even when attacked by ants or other predators. These were the Emu brand beer bottles. And after the paper was published, the beer company tweaked the bottles, replacing the dimples with smooth glass, which was enough to turn the Australian jewel beetle off of the Emu beer permanently. They actually, yeah, I looked into this and the entomologist, they found that if the bottles

had beer in it, the beetles left it alone. They really didn't like the beer. They just really thought, yeah, and these were these great female beetles that didn't move and didn't protest and let them mate for hours. So I read an article about this on Australian Geographic, and they said that the male beetles would continue to try to mate with the bottles until they starved or exhausted themselves and left themselves vulnerable to attack by predators. So it was very kind of the manufacturer to change their bottles. I guess they saved the beetle

species. Yeah, that's a bizarre coincidence. That is. So thank you, Tommy, for that puzzle, which had only possible insect fatalities. And if you have a puzzle you'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you want to specify which one of us should read the puzzle, feel free to go ahead and put that in the subject line. Sometimes that's a big help for us. And thanks, as always, to everyone who sends in puzzles. That's our show for today. If you have an extra minute, please go to podcastsurvey.net to take a very short anonymous survey about today's episode.

Again, that's podcastsurvey.net to take a quick anonymous survey. We appreciate your help. If you're looking for more quirky curiosities, check out the Futility Closet books on Amazon, or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample more than 9,000 grippy scraps. At the website, you can also see the show notes for the podcast with links and references for the topics in today's show. If you like our podcast and want to help support it, please see the support us page of our website. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by leaving a review on iTunes or other podcast directories. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and

performed by my talented brother-in-law, Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.