Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Cockroaches Work

Episode Date: March 10, 2018

You've seen them in your home and probably squealed in terror, but now it's time to learn all about cockroaches. From their ability to run incredibly fast to the appendage that alerts them when you're about to whack them with your shoe, cockroaches are fascinating creatures that deserve your respect. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Howdy everybody, this is Chuck, and welcome to this weekend's Stuff You Should Know Selects episode. This week I'm picking how cockroaches work from August 15th, 2013.

You have heard Josh and I debate over the years about cockroaches, the fact that they are one of the few insects that I will stomp and kill with great enthusiasm, whereas I believe Josh is on the record as saying he will not, and he will try and relocate them. Crazy talk to me, that cockroach will do nothing but spend the rest of its life trying to get back

in your home to poop all over your stuff. So this is a good episode though, of How Cockroaches Work, enjoy it right now. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.Works.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark and Charles W. Chuck Bryant is with me. He's got his glasses on, he's got his hair shorn,

his fingernails are chewed down to the quick, he's ready to go. I was hoping we could open the show with Lukuka Racha playing in the background. Go ahead. Well. Oh yeah, we can't. I don't know if we can or not, well, if I can't.

No, there's no way we can. Well, hold on, let's hum it. We could probably do that, right? That's lame. People just imagine in your heads that you're sipping a margarita, and some Mariachi band is playing Lukuka Racha right now. Not to be confused with Tequila.

No. Which is similar. No. I always confuse the two. Really? Well, not when I hear them, but if I think of Lukuka Racha, I often think of Pee Wee dancing on the bar. Right.

Then I'm like, oh yeah, that's Tequila. Right. But you know what Lukuka Racha is about? I assumed cockroaches, but probably not. No, a cockroach who's lost one of his legs and is having a hard time. Oh really? Yeah.

Just found that out today. I did not know that. Look at me. I didn't either until just a few hours ago, Chuck. I was once like you. Naive to the way of Lukuka Racha. You're right. All right, so we talked about Lukuka Racha as you'd hoped.

You feel good? Yeah. Have you ever seen the X-Files episode with the cockroaches? I don't know. Oh, it is perfect. It's one of the top five. And it's not even like a part of the big picture ones. It's like its own thing.

Yeah, they have a name for those episodes. I can't remember what it's called. But when it's just about a shapeshifter and it has nothing to do with the overarching conspiracy. Yeah, it's one of those. And it's just about cockroaches and a cockroach infestation that may or may not exist. But at one point, it's getting really like the cockroaches

are everywhere and everybody's starting to go a little crazy and all that. And they digitized the cockroaches like crawling across your TV screen. Like obviously not part of the scene. And it looks like it was on your screen. So now it looks like there's a cockroach in your house. Oh, that's awesome.

It's a good episode. Yeah, I was late on the X-Files. I didn't watch it when it was out. And then when I moved to New Jersey, they started doing reruns. And Justin, I was living with the time, was like, you never watched X-Files? I was like, no.

And then it was on every night. So I just watched the crap out of it. Did you see the Charles Nelson Riley one? Where he's like an artist. It's Jose Chung's From Outer Space. I don't remember that. Where Jesse the Body Ventura and Alex Trebek are in it. Really?

I didn't see Chuck. I must not have seen them all because I was catching them in reruns. You didn't see some of the best ones. Go watch those two. I know you have access to them. All right. OK.

Done. So we're talking cockroaches here. And apparently also Jesse the Body Ventura. Did you know, Chuck, that cockroaches are extremely clean insects? Well, we said the same thing about vultures. They are personally clean. Apparently, they do track a lot of germs, spread disease.

They apparently leave a trail of fecal material everywhere they go because it's like a bit of breadcrumbs for them to follow back. Yeah, they spread bacteria, of course. Yeah. In that fecal material, there are proteins that set off up to 60% of allergy sufferers, allergies. Yeah, they'll eat garbage and waste.

They'll crawl on poop that your dog laid down in the yard and eat it if your dog doesn't eat it first. And yet, a cockroach itself is very clean because they're extremely intense groomers. Oh, really? First of all, they keep their antenna clean because they have a fatty secretion, or some sort of secretion, that if they don't clean it off,

will block their antenna from sensing things. So they constantly clean their antenna. But apparently, they also clean their feet and everything. And I read about a study. It was almost anecdotal. It was so outside of the scientific method. But they took a swab from a guy's hands who hadn't washed his hands for two hours.

And they took a swab off of the foot, or tarsus, I should say, of a cockroach who had been walking through garbage. And then two hours later, they took a swab. And they put it in culture. And the guy grew way more bacteria than the cockroach's culture did. I don't care. Which means that that man is dirtier than a cockroach.

I don't care. They proved it. I would still smash the cockroach with my flip-flop. See, I don't believe. There's a sect out there. And I don't know if it's Hinduism or Jainism. It's one of those two, where the monks of this sect carry little brooms, hand brooms, to brush everything off

wherever they sit, so they don't accidentally kill even the tiniest thing. That's great. And I kind of agree with that. I think everything is a right to life. Now, you have been on record on this very show talking about killing cockroaches, because of the way they skitter.

No, no, no, not cockroaches. I am down with killing mosquitoes and ticks. No, you talked about cockroaches, specifically. I don't kill cockroaches. You talked very much about how fast they are and how they skitter and how that freaks you out. I don't kill them. No, I don't kill roaches.

I'm telling you, I defy you to find the time stamp. All right, somebody please help me. OK. I will kill the crap out of a mosquito, a cockroach, and I will generally shoo a fly. No, I'll kill flies. I generally won't kill a fly, because they're not a big problem, but.

You don't have flies around you all the time? No. Like me? No. But mosquitoes and cockroaches, I will kill. And that's about it. Yeah. Everything else, right to life.

Cockroaches, you must die. So cockroaches are, I guess they understand, that Chuck wants them to die. Many people do. They're very disliked. Right, which has possibly accounted for them evolving to be really difficult to kill. For one, they're nocturnal.

So they're hiding away from us when we're up, because we're diurnal, which is the opposite of nocturnal. They have sensors, little sensors in there. Yeah, we'll get to that. Oh, OK. That's a spoiler. They run really fast. They do.

They reproduce extremely quickly. And there's more than 4,000 species of cockroach. So you would think the whole world would be infested with cockroaches. But not true. It's actually mainly just one species, the German cockroach, that is accountable for most infestations in homes around the world.

That's right. That is one of the four main species that you might see, the German, the American, AKA palmetto bug, which are big, creepy. There's one man in South America that's as big as your hand. Six inches long, one foot wing diameter, wingspan. The brown-banded cockroach and the oriental cockroach are the four that you're likely to come across in your life.

And the German cockroach and American are the ones you're going to see here in the United States. And they have been brought here by you, because they're not obviously going to fly from continent to continent. They hitch rides on airplanes and boats and get in shipping containers and moving boxes and grocery bags.

And they are ubiquitous. And like all insects or most insects, they do a service. Most of them are going to be out in the woods, like chewing stuff and pooping it out and being a part of the ecosystem. But it's the ones in the home that really freak people out. Right. And Chuck, I think one of the more fascinating things

and by the way, it just turned out to be pretty fascinating, even more than I expected. I just thought there were a few things that were fascinating. Were you creeped out like reading this? Or do you just? No, no, no. So it's not like that. You just hate them.

Yeah. I mean, it's like you previously talked about that you deny. It's the way they move and how fast they are is what creeps me out. And there's no greater fear than laying in bed and seeing one on the ceiling above you, just waiting for it to fall into your mouth. Yeah.

But apparently, they are pretty good at not falling off of a ceiling. That's true. And they've had a long time to practice this kind of stuff. They've been around for about 320 million years. What, longer than dinosaurs? Way longer than dinosaurs. They survived that extinction event?

They did. And well, let's talk about it, Chuck. Just how much of an extinction event can a cockroach survive? Can they survive a nuclear fallout, a nuclear war that would kill all humans? Could a cockroach survive as they are rumored to? Maybe. Sadly, it's like we don't know because that hasn't happened.

Oh, not sadly. Thankfully, that hasn't happened. Sadly. But the answer is some people say maybe. Some people say maybe not. What we definitely know is they probably could not survive the nuclear winter because they like warm, moist places.

Right. So a nuclear winter would not be good for cockroaches. Apparently, they're less susceptible to radiation poisoning than humans are, but more than most insects. So as far as insects goes, they might not be the best candidate. Right. Yeah.

So maybe, but probably not. I'm kind of on that side that they probably wouldn't survive a nuclear war. So we're talking about radiation, though, not like the blast. Obviously, that would kill everything. Sure. All right, so they survived the dinosaurs extinction event. They have been around for 320 million years.

They are very hardy little insects. Let's talk a little bit about their bodies. They're creepy little crunchy bodies. So most of them are between half an inch and two inches long. Yeah. They're brown or black usually. Yeah. And that length is minus their antenna.

That's just their body size. Sure. You don't count the antenna. And their heads point downward, like as Tracy Wilson who wrote this article points out, almost as if they're built for ramming. Yeah, or just searching for stuff. That's another way to look at it.

The males are the ones that have wings. Females may have wings, but they're vestigial wings. They can't fly with them. Males can fly. Not very well, though. Which makes them even more horrific when a palmetto bug, a big one, is flying at your face. Because he has no control.

Right, exactly. Yeah. Oh, man. It's sort of like the cicada. I don't think their wings were made for flying. But if they jump off of something high, they can help them a little bit to glide perhaps and not hit the ground as hard.

Right. Short distances, basically. And they're insects, which means that they have three main body regions. The head, the thorax, and the abdomen. They have an exoskeleton that they molt as they grow. And they molt a number of times, depending on the cockroach species over the course of a couple of weeks

or over the course of a couple of years. And their lifespans also are in step with that molting schedule. Yeah. But a cockroach will molt several times over its life before it becomes an adult. Yes. And when they molt, it's the same thing as when they're born.

They're going to look white. And that's probably kind of creepy looking. I've never seen a molted cockroach. It's like a skinless cockroach. It's like the lady in Hellraiser before she fully gets all of her skin. Right. And they're pretty susceptible to injury and death,

obviously, after they've molted before Bersacon, which is a hormone, makes their exoskeleton hard and dark once again. Then they have their little armor, which is no match for a flip flop. By the way, they can regrow lost limbs when it molts, which is pretty cool. And they can even put molting off for a little while

in order to regrow a lost limb. Right. In their head, let's go over their head, they have eyes and their antenna, which we've talked about, which we'll get into more specifically. And Tracy loves saying mouth parts. She writes a lot of these articles. Yeah, she will never just say mouth.

It's always mouth parts. Yeah, it's not a true mouth, apparently. It's a mouth part. Yeah. They do have brains, by the way. And they are. The brain is in the head. But the brain is not like a human or a mammal brain.

It's like it's not connected to a big central nervous system or anything like that. Right. There is a central nervous system, but it's not in the head. There's some sort of ganglia that allows the roach to continue living for up to a week after it loses its head.

Yeah, this is a pretty good roach fact. OK, I think. OK. So you can cut a roach's head off, and it will live for a week and do all the normal things that a roach does for a week. And then when it finally dies, it dies because of? Thirst.

Yeah. Yeah, because they actually breathe. They don't breathe through the nose and mouth. They breathe through their sides. There's little holes in their side called spiracles. And trachea tubes deliver the oxygen to the organs and tissues through their sides. So there's cut off the head, and it just dies of thirst,

which is my new favorite game. Actually, that's not true, because that's like future serial killer stuff. It is. Like you torture cockroaches, and you torture animals, and you torture humans. Yeah. Once you've moved on to chipmunks,

it's probably beyond the point of no return. You're a bad person. Jeffrey Dahmer tortured animals. Oh, yeah. He would lay down, and he would come across a dead deer in the forest, and lay down with it and spoon with it. That's like Johnny Depp and Dead Man. Did he do that?

He did the exact same thing. Oh, well, maybe he was a serial killer. I don't think he was. He was a killer, but not a serial killer. That just shows how messed up Dahmer was, though, man. Yeah. To like, that was a connection to him, was like holding this dead animal.

Mm-hmm. Well, the adventure is a very exciting one. And I love you all, BisÈde. So we love you. And I'll see you next week. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

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Uh-huh. Love relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts all right back to cockroaches so that's the head yeah

let's talk about their eyes their eyes are compound eyes so they see the world in a mosaic like a fly like a fly all right so we talked about their eyes I actually asked Tracy today I was like you wrote a bunch of insect articles yeah didn't you ever get sick about talking about the head the abdomen the thorax mouth parts mouth parts the legs they're all the same for insects what you say no they're not they all have these they're all the same but they all have different little adaptations that make them different I was like how did you not get tired of it she said she was fascinated the whole time she said

Xanax that's Tracy that's Tracy of stuff you miss in history class by the way yeah plug plug so we talked about the antenna they are movable and they are known as antenna flagella and they're actually tiny tiny little hair covered segments and like it's it's thicker where it attaches at the head and it gets thinner and thinner and thinner until it's just like a human hair almost at the end yeah and these things sense they smell sort of right yeah they they basically I guess sense pheromones yeah there you have it they sense pheromones they pick up odors I think they they're pretty finely attuned to the

environment yeah but that's like really how they're getting around yeah right like even though they have eyes isn't the antenna really the secret I believe so okay Chuck you want to talk about mouth parts yes they are a lot different than mammals as Tracy points out but they do have parts that sort of are akin to how mammals mouths work for instance there's a labrum and labium and they form the lips right mandibles there's two of those and they cut and grind things like your teeth might which is very important because roaches eat literally anything yeah and sometimes that's like wood and other stuff yeah

like they shouldn't be able to eat but they can that's right go ahead thanks to the mandibles and some other things that we'll get to right and then they have a stop then there's a couple of maxilla and they basically manipulate the food they turn it around chewing yeah like a squirrel yeah squirrel's arms or hands yeah or a dung beetle yeah the thorax which is one of the body parts that one of the three pieces of the body and that has the three pairs of legs and the wings and the legs are so named after the part of the thorax that they're attached to right so you get the pro the mezzo and the meta yeah so the pro is closest to the

head mezzo middle yeah the pro are like the brakes apparently right and the yeah the pro yeah that's they just do stopping yeah the middle ones can make the roach go forward or backward and then so that's the mezzo thoracic legs then the meta thoracic legs the ones in the rear yeah are the ones that propel the roach forward yeah and here's another good roach fact you take this one man is awesome they can move about 50 body lengths in a second which is up to three miles an hour sounds very slow to us yeah but think about this in roach terms that's right if that were a human being that would mean we'd be running 200 miles

an hour yeah that's why they look so fast it's because they are they are fast now like to us three miles an hour is not that much but very slow walk that equals 200 miles an hour in reality for us yeah and part two of that roach fact which I think is just horrifying when a roach runs really really fast sometimes it gets air and just is basically running on its back legs only but the front the other legs are still moving so that's just like my worst nightmare yeah they're coming after you exactly man so they the three pairs are all built the exact same they all have the same parts but they they are different lengths they

function slightly differently yeah and but they all move the same way it just depends on you know what the roach wants to do like we said the pro thoracic legs act as breaks yeah the mesothoracic can move it forward or back and then the meta push it forward and they apparently move like pogo sticks yeah down and back and forth and then back and forth to yeah and they work in conjunction to allow the roach to kind of walk over just about anything so when the the pro and meta thoracic legs on one side are moving the mesothoracic leg the middle one on the other side is moving yeah that's how they move which

apparently it's a little ATV it's like a four by four yeah yeah she also points out that there are the parts of the leg you can sort of approximate as if it were a human yeah they have a trachanter that's like our knees femur and tibia resemble our thigh and shins and then they have the tarsus which is the ankle and foot right and the tarsus is hooked in a roach which allows it to walk on the ceiling over your head most frightening thing ever and on walls sure and when a roach is on the ground it runs very quickly but when it's on a ceiling it moves much more methodically because it doesn't want to fall I'm

upside down yeah if three miles an hour equals 200 miles an hour to us yeah imagine what a 10-foot drop equals to a poor little roach well not enough because it lands flips itself over and then runs away again but it's humiliated that's true 27 times per second these legs can move back and forth so these are fast fast little boogers yeah which is why you previously talked about hating them because they were so fast I really I don't oh I'm gonna find it okay I'll bet I didn't say I kill him I'm not long advocated for Roach's rights all right so now we're the abdomen they do have a heart it is a tube like in structure and

does move blood along but it does not carry oxygen around so it a the blood is not red and B they move oxygen and blood around in other ways right through basically empty spaces called hemocles yeah it's pretty much the absence of a fact there yeah well it's an aorta carries blood around to the organs but yeah she says the blood just travels through these spaces right and then rather than having to worry about like a spare tire or something like that like a fat belly right they have a actual fat body yeah and it's just this little area where they store all the fat in their body yeah very smart I have

that same place it's between my chin and my waist yeah I guess they do have to worry about a spare tire but it's a very specific one yeah that's true you know okay so let's talk about digestion the digestive system is in the abdomen and it's really not super unlike it's just like a simplified version of our own or any mammals digestive system right but like you said they can eat things like in digest things like wood and cellulose so they do need some help from specialized parts yeah one of which is called a crop right that's it basically holds the food while a part behind it a toothy section in the

digestive tract so gross though that is gross and it's equal to like a an octopus having a beak oh yeah thrushing beak yeah they're squishy they're not supposed to have a hard beak in the middle it's crazy yeah it's called a proven triculous on the roach and that just pulverizes the stuff like wood or whatever it's tough to digest and then and then it pushes it back this this pulverized part to the gastric casia which houses enzymes microbes things that break it down even further yeah and all this is just the preliminary stuff this is like what we do in our mouth it's all this is going through this process in

a roach before it even gets to the part where it starts to digest yeah man this this is sort of gross like the digestion one of us we haven't said the word bolus yet no well we just did and then the Cersei that we talked about earlier these are the it sort of looks like short little antenna sticking out from the butt area on each side and this is what allows the roach to not get like whenever you go to get that flip-flop and you rear back and go to hit the roach and as you're coming at it just like darts out of the way you're like how did it know how did it know it's because the Cersei they pick up on airflow and they

can actually feel and sense that shoe coming so if you're if you're into killing roaches like me you have to be swift and stealthy and come at it hard and with vigor and with a I guess a paddle that has holes in it down there hey maybe so drag you might be on to something there oh no you invented sharknado so the roach paddle so I guess so that's a roach that's the roaches body let's talk about reproduction hey cuz they do reproduce depending on the species I believe the German roach can produce something in the order of like 80,000 offspring is that correct no way more than that the German produces three

the German cockroach and its offspring will eventually produce about 300,000 per year so a mother and her her kids yeah like that the family tree from that one cockroach will eventually number 300,000 in a year right but think about this then one of those kids and then her offspring will be another 300,000 now I think that counts I think that's the whole okay well then one of those 300,000 will have more kids and another 300,000 it goes exponentially kicks in somewhere exponentiality kicks in at some point yeah an American cockroaches only produce about 800 babies a year so I got something from believe it or not

the Orkan website has a lot of really good scientific information I saw that did you go look at it and they talked about female courtship they begin courtship it says by raising their wings and exposing their internal membranes and expanding their genital chamber hey boys check out my internal membrane exactly my genital chamber is wide open and ready I'm gonna release a pheromone hey man this is science this is science they release the pheromones to attract males and that's the calling position and then the males that that pick up on these pheromones approach the female they flap their wings a little bit to say

hey I like what you got cooking there and then mating commences it says when a male cockroach backs into a female cockroach and deposits sperm so little like you know it's from the rear to the rear you know I'm saying let's go back to reproduction yeah we used to be really good at stuff like this and by the way wasps will actually this is just a side note wasps will actually sting cockroaches and lay eggs inside of a cockroach yeah like baby wasps can be born out of a cockroach body right they incubate in the roach and I guess probably eat it alive from the inside out there's a movie I'm just gonna start

saying that about everything so there's a couple ways that a mother roach once her eggs are fertilized can produce offspring and a couple of them involve something with one of the worst words ever in my opinion the ootheca o-o-t-h-e-c-a yeah the ootheca you've never been to ootheca it's nice I prefer ootheca upstate ootheca so that's basically just like an egg sack yeah that the eggs develop in and it can either be inside the mom which makes her over the Paris over the Paris seriously that's the word yeah over the Boris Paris or it can be on the outside of her which makes her over Paris and if it's over Paris then she can

just kind of like abandon the sack yeah cover it up with some newspaper or something like that sometimes a good luck or some of them it depends on the species carry that around with them and then actually care for the young after they're born like a good mom should and then there's vivid Paris which is basically like eggs developing in fluid like in a human in the uterus and in Ovo Viva Paris and over the Paris I'm sorry Viva Paris yeah you confused yet no imagine following along with it just your ears I know I'm looking at words so it helps the eggs are born or the young come out live yeah they actually give

birth to little baby cockroaches right so like we said the German cockroach can produce 300,000 offspring the German cockroach and her offspring yeah can produce 300,000 cockroaches in a year and then the Americans 800 yes not many and we talked about nymphs apparently the nymph when it's born is fleck of dust size maybe oh really very very small and there's a bunch of them don't forget yeah so and they're white they're waiting to molt they're very easy to kill yes and if you're a common centipede you love to eat these things yeah imagine seeing that on a microscopic level a centipede eating baby cockroaches yeah

there's a movie for you that's also here's another good roach fact is some mothers that care for their offspring after birth some of them just you know either dump the the Uthica or they just have the babies and leave but some actually raised their little babies and scientists believe that they the offspring actually recognize the mother yeah I don't understand why that's so hard to believe well because it's an insect man it just seems like a very mammalian I'm a million just like it doesn't seem like something from the insect world it like gives them a heart that I previously didn't believe I know

I know yeah up with cockroaches I don't know it just puts a face on them that I never really considered as I smashed them right because you can't see their face that's right and cockroaches if you want to make them a little more human like a little more personable okay get my little hat and a cane they're social oh yeah they're not they're related to termites it turns out and actually I've read a fascinating fact I read one of the best magazine articles I've ever read in my life and I've read a lot of magazine articles yeah in the most recent issue I believe it was of harpers and it's about 10 ways to satisfy your man

no it's early it's an article about the early mycologists who discovered westerners I should say who discovered and making air quotes like magic mushrooms yeah and in between that time and the time they became outlawed right and then what happened after they became outlawed and how there are all these outlaw like fungal experts who all had like PhDs and doctorates but we're also like might as well have just been bikers growing these huge crops of mushrooms and there's a murder involved in all that but there's this it's an awesome article check it out right but there's this one fact in there that there's a

type of fungus that has evolved to mimic termite eggs so perfectly that it can fool a termite into thinking it's her own eggs and termites salivate on their eggs to keep them moist constantly and this fungus needs to be kept moist so it'll be kept moist by a termite that thinks this fungus is one of her eggs does that fungus then later on kill the termite probably okay because that would be I believe that's irony yeah even though we've been told we misused that bird thanks for the ride lady wow we should do one on termites okay well I say that because apparently rotates need to be kept moist as well yes they do I don't

know do they regurgitate on them to do so uh-huh okay they salivate on well another way they're related to termites are they they like to hang out together they like to live in groups where they differ is termites actually have sort of like bees they have very specific roles in their colonies and a social structure that's very organized cockroaches ain't like that they ain't like that but they still like to hang out with one another and they actually make decisions like collectively together on where they want to roost right you know which is an emergent system right I think so is that what that's

called yeah yeah they've done studies where they found like big large numbers of cockroaches if they don't have enough space actually divide up evenly yeah into like the smallest number of spaces they can go like well there's 200 of us so let's divide up into three groups and go to three different places right and you go you guys go there we'll go there and we'll go here right and there's always one dude the cockroach out it's like what about me that'll be a Pixar movie yeah that's a good one mm-hmm they're they're also social in that they follow one another although not necessarily a leader but I guess whoever

they think has the best idea at the time of collective conscious yes and there was a group of scientists that created something called ins bot and it is a robotic cockroach and they coated it with cockroach pheromones and introduced it to a colony of roaches that accepted it and then they started to mess with the roaches of course they had ins bot lead them out into daylight so that they abandoned their nocturnality they would wander out in the open following this thing he got him to move and he brought them fire oh really man I was like this is getting good there reminds me of the I know I talk about Errol Morris ad nauseam

but fast cheap and out of control yeah is the robot scientist makes robots that mimic cockroaches and other small bugs that's really neat and he said one potential application one day is to have like to imagine like thousands of these that clean things like these robot bugs that you own well you just like hit a button and like 200 of them will dust your television and then go back to their little place that's pretty neat yeah it's like scrubbing bubbles yeah or like the X files when it went across the TV yeah there which wasn't cleaning anything there what's scrubbing bubbles it's like a type of a cleaner it is

yeah all right is that a plug I don't think so okay it was just a free association all right so let's get to let's say you're like me and not like Josh and you don't want roaches in your home I don't want roaches in my home it's just when I see a roach I will I will gingerly pick it up with a paper towel and toss it outside I'm sure that doesn't injure that at all it doesn't okay no no I don't squeeze it at all I just very gently like all right what happens if that roach like gets free and crawls up your arm up your shirt yeah okay but I hopefully am doing it outside all right I just want to see where it stops I'm

trying to get a feel out your position fully um yeah if if it's injured if I accidentally injure it I'll go ahead and kill it okay well that's really you're quite the humanitarian or insectarian I'm an insectarian so let's say you you don't want roaches in your house which is pretty much everybody they say the first thing to do is try and seal it off yeah good luck with that because roaches can fit into cracks that are as small as one sixteenth of an inch yeah 1.5 millimeters and just show me a house that doesn't have or at least maybe some new houses you might have some luck but if you live in an old house like me

there's there's always cracks sure like animals can get through these cracks so if you realize you've got a bunch of cracks seal them up as best you can yeah but if that's still not doing the trick they say that you want to go with a bait trap yeah rather than a spray because you when you use a bait trap you become like a pioneer tracker sure you can put the trap somewhere and if it's not attracting roaches even though you know you have roaches yeah then you need to move your trap yeah and when you move your trap and start attracting roaches then you can tell where they're coming from then you can seal up those cracks

that's right you you come to know the roaches using the traps with a spray it's just like you're just spraying blindly did we do want to fleece or just ticks just ticks we need to do fleas too because I have battled fleas okay they say don't use like don't waste your money on those sound devices they say those don't work yeah that emit like some like sound that only a roach can hear right you want to keep your house clean yeah you keep your house clean anyway Tracy if you've ever seen the Simpsons where Marge and Homer lose the kids and have to go take a parenting class that's what this paragraph reminds

me of yeah yeah mop up after every meal exactly clean and seal all of your food or cover and seal it wipe down counters and tables after eating sweep or mop your floor after cooking eat only in your dining area I guess if you eat over your sink run the water afterward to clean out any crumbs that may have dropped out of your mouth yeah and as the last resort you could use poisons but I would never recommend that yeah putting poisons in your household you can always call your friendly neighborhood exterminator and they'll take care of it for you sure you know or you can call an ins bot and he can lead all the

cockroaches out like the pipe piper there are a few natural things though yeah some things have been shown to work yeah NEPA talak tone mm-hmm it's in two forms of catnip so if you have a cat you might just kill two birds with one stone here a Cineol Cineole also known as eucalyptus and that is in bay leaf yeah and then Osage orange oil and they don't know what in that is the magic potion but apparently that works yeah so if you're into natural you could try some of those things just put bay leaves and catnip all over the place yeah see what happens and orange oil and you'll never have a roach again or you can just clean up

your house I don't see many roaches it's good I mean I'm surprised with the amount of moisture and how old my house is and how like the fact that I eat all over my house and spill things everywhere you know right garbage laying around there's like gum stuck to your floor yeah but I don't see roaches much yeah when I do I have my friend the flip-flop I'm sure you do and coming soon the roach paddle yeah I see I don't feel as bad because especially after I saw those reproductive figures I'm not putting a dent in the roach population yeah I can tell you the ones that you're killing care I don't know it's hard to

tell with their brains and smashed on the bottom of my chest man well if you want to learn more about cockroaches you can type that word in the search bar at howstoveworks.com and they'll bring up this fine article and I said search bar which means it's time for message break on the podcast Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces we're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s we lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to

come back and relive it it's a podcast packed with interviews co-stars friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever do you remember going to blockbuster do you remember Nintendo 64 do you remember getting frosted tips was that a cereal no it was hair do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist so leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Gameboy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s listen to Hey Dude the

90s called on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass the hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road okay see what you're doing do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this I promise you oh god seriously I swear and you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you oh man and so my husband

Michael um hey that's me yep we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step-by-step not another one kids relationships life in general can get messy you may be thinking this is the story of my life just stop now if so tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts this is from an Englishman who went up a hill and came down a mountain a self-experimenter though when I was a

kid guys about 18 actually and notice that when you get water up your nose the effect is all-consuming can't seem to think about anything feel anything or do anything except think about that water that you just sniffed up your hooter he's English I had a similar thought about what happens to you both psychologically and physically when you get soap in your eye because that stinging sensation and the resulting fevered knuckling of the optic cavity for is for a short time the only thing in the universe so while it's laying in the bathtub with the refracted sunlight sparkling through the red tint of my

closed eyes contemplating this phenomenon I decided to run my own experiment I want to know which of these all-powerful sensations would eclipse the other so I got a nice big chunk of soap on one finger and simultaneously rubbed it vigorously into my eye and ducked under the water sniffing in deeply the result was as you can imagine quite horrific I must have looked like I was being fatally electrocuted I thrashed and rubbed and coughed and cried my final conclusion was that unbelievably both experiences behaved in some sort of quantum mechanical way where I was all consumed by two separate

all-consuming events at the same time so basically it sucked really bad if you share this information with the world however no one else will ever have to suffer this hitherto undocumented facet of reality right because the guy did that kind regards James Holmes not the maniac version well is it did he say that underneath I'll bet he does have a signature that was parenthetical yeah for Manchester England so James I don't know why you do such a thing sir but I raise a pint to you okay and thanks yeah isn't there like a whole movement like n plus one or n equals one the n equals one movement what's that it's like self

experimentation n is the study population and so if n equals one there's just one person you see yourself yeah I don't know about sniffing water and putting soap in your eyes but he was a kid he was only 18 right James right yeah James not the maniac version thanks James if you anyone else out there have a cool self-experiment that you've done we want to hear about that all the time cockroach story to sure let us know you can tweet to us at sysk podcast you can join us on facebook.com you should know and you can join us at our home on the web our website stuffyoushouldknow.com

for more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com on the podcast hey dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show hey dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces we're gonna use hey dude as our jumping off point but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s we lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it listen to hey dude the 90s called on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts hey I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips

with Lance Bass do you ever think to yourself what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation if you do you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life tell everybody yeah everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts