The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - A Delicious Chocolate Debacle, IBS In Orbit, the Tuffy Saga

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

This episode celebrates our latest digital issue going live! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code Weirdest for 20% off. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice.

work. Now, Hank says, on line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Perbita Saha. And I'm Corinne Iosio.

Corinne, you're here, and that can only mean one thing. It is digital edition o'clock. Almost quite literally, the spring issue went live this morning, mere hours, minutes, seconds ago, depending on when you're listening to this and when you might have gone to popsight.com and been like, oh, there's an issue. It's called messy.

I'm messy. My life's messy. Maybe my desk is messy. I wonder what this is all about. And that's what we're here to talk about. Lots of really fantastic stories in there about what I call problem tunities, what we can learn by staring at the messes we make and the good things that we can make out of them. Yes.

Listeners, for those of you who have forgotten or have not yet learned, the weirdest thing I learned this week is a podcast brought to you by popular science, which is also a magazine. Yeah, and the messy issue is super fun. I mean, I love every issue. Corinne Perbita and I are all extremely involved in creating these quarterly magazines, and so each one holds a special place in all of our hearts. But messy, it's been a long time coming. It's a theme we've wanted to do for a while. Yes, and it is gone. This is now, actually the story that I'm going to talk about is probably one of the reasons that we refused to let this issue go. Yes.

This theme. And I'm really excited to talk about it. To pull back the curtain, Messi was originally going to be an issue in early 2020. It was going to be called oops. And we thought maybe it's not so good to have a playful issue about oopses at this time. but messes still exist and they still need to be cleaned up and that's what this issue is about. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by offering up a little tease that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, scrubbing our kitchens and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was.

Corinne, why don't you start with your teas? I want to talk about why marine biologists are really, really, really into a very particular kitchen scrubber. So one of my favorite stories in the magazine. It's also, we'll get into it, but it's very pretty in the magazine. So if you're going to access the digital edition, which you can do on Apple News Plus or Zinio, go to Popsai.com. to figure out how Tuffy is definitely alone makes it worthwhile. It's like a 90s Polly Pocket fever dream. That art.

I love it. It's tremendous. We'll talk about it. My tease is that I want to talk about pooping in space and how it used to be like a really big problem. And it's still kind of a problem. More complicated than pooping on earth, for sure. I guess that's all I'll say. That's my teeth.

I can't imagine pooping on earth is already so complicated. That's the problem I started out this journey with. I will get into it more. Sure. Poopin's not always easy no matter where you are. Perbito, what's your tease? I'm going to tell a story about why accidental chocolate rivers are public hazards. And when I mean chocolate, I mean real chocolate.

Right. No, that's good. Thank you for us. That's fair. Yeah. Well, why don't we start? Well, I'm trying to think. What do we want to start with?

I feel like the chocolate one is. I want to separate the chocolate and the poop if we can. Yeah. Yeah. Why don't I get, well, how quickly do we want to gross people out for real, though? Mine is definitely not gross and it's also pretty short. We'll ease into it. Let's start with the chocolate. Start with something delicious. All right. Well, this story starts in a very humble German town. And Rachel, I was thinking that I should have run some of these German words by you and your spouse, Oliver, but alas, I did not. So sorry to all the German files out there. I'm going to butcher this. But the town is called West Owner. It is pretty much off the map,

kind of on the northwest end of Germany. I think the closest big city would probably be ham. And the sad thing is, if you look up Westowner, both in news and images, all the articles link to one specific incident. And it happened in December of 2018. It was a few weeks before Christmas at the Drymeister Chocolate Factory.

So I particularly didn't recognize Drymeister. I think it's really just a kind of German specialty chocolate company. I don't think you can buy it here in the U.S., but their products look delightful. They make these beautiful, like, gold-wrapped chocolate discs look far better than the trash M&Ms I eat on the daily. But they have a small, little factory in Westoner and this a couple weeks before Christmas they had a valve malfunction

in one of their storage tankers and that meant all the liquid chocolate that was being held in this tanker which was not too much because it was a small factory maybe about like 2,000 pounds a ton oh is that all I imagine a river to be I mean go ahead no sorry go ahead No, I was not going to say anything of import. I mean, I'm not saying that, like, that's not a lot. I'm not saying that it's not, you know, in the grand scale of chocolate production, probably a small batch. Like, if we're talking about, like, an explosion at the Hershey factory, it's different.

But, like, 2,000 pounds of chocolate is a lot. Yeah, it's still a lot. And especially if it's a small, like, family-run company that was probably a big chunk of their chocolate material. Well, anyway, so it leaked out of the tank and went right into the streets of Westoner. And the thing about chocolate is that it's a very tricky chemical process

to both harden it and melt it. And Westoner, you know, its climate is pretty similar to us here in New York and New Jersey. In December, it would have been 20, 30 degrees, Fahrenheit, especially at night. So as soon as that chocolate hit the street, it hardened. And it was just like two inches of chocolate shell lining the streets of this little German town.

Wow. So as I can imagine the children in town just being like over the moon about this, but the adults, not so much. Basically the entire firefighting crew for the town and volunteers from neighboring towns had to come out and tackle this chocolate infrastructure calamity. And they had to basically just take out shovels and like hack away at the chocolate until they could like peel off the pieces from the street. They also took blow torches to it and just like burned it to a char. So it ended up being a lot bigger of a mess than

expected and all the whimsical headlines just like probably didn't capture how annoying of an incident this was. But the cutest thing to me was the Drymeister factory manager

the one quote that all the news stories had from him was like well at least it didn't happen on Christmas because that would have been a real crisis which is yeah that's that's definitely a silver lining if you want to see it that way um and just looking at the picture of it which probita shared with me and rachel yesterday it looks almost just like road surface the way that it just goes smooth and hard like on top of the asphalt it's just

looking at it you're like yeah that really looks like a paint yeah it's a second road but it's chocolate. You know, I could not make chocolate harden that well if I tried. Like, I've watched Bonavit Test Kitchen. I know how difficult it is to make chocolate do what you want it to do. Or even just trying to handle chocolate in an everyday kitchen scenario and knowing what an unbelievable mess you make, even if you're really good at it, which I am not, it's a disaster. One time I was making ganache at a friend's house and I accidentally dropped the bull. It was real. Oh, no.

It was a kind of just a to scale recreation of what happened here. It was pretty mortifying for me. Get out with the garden and trowels. We didn't need the fire department. We just needed my friend Claudia's dad to clean up there, beautiful home. Yeah, and the reason chocolate is so, so this process is called tempering, getting chocolate. Well, the thing is when you're cooking with chocolate, you have to heat it or cool it to multiple temperatures to get it to the texture and consistency that you want.

And the reason for this is cocoa fat. So the problem with cocoa fat is that it's like very complex structurally. So when it gets cold and when it crystallizes, it can take any of six different shapes, which is actually really interesting and fun to read about. And there's a lot of cool molecular chemistry research on this. So I definitely encourage readers to do that. But there's one particular crystal that like culinary artists really go. for, or even people just making ganache at home. And that is called Form 5 or Beta Prime, which is just such a funny name for a chocolate crystal.

But that is the crystal that gives like that smooth, smooth, shiny finish that you see in like a good bar of chocolate. But to get there, you really have to, like, you can't heat your chocolate too fast, which is pretty much what I always do. And it's just like, once you do that, like, you can't put liquid chocolate in things. It just, like, gets really, really gross. But then you also can't cool it too fast. Like, it's a very fine, like, range of temperature that you need.

And it's not that high either. I think it's, like, something between, like, room temperature or even higher than room temperature, like high 80s to like low 90s that you need to start with and then you raise the temperature from there. So yeah, not a process that I have finessed. That is for sure. But yeah, there's, I did, I was curious to see how many chocolate leaks there have been worldwide. I do not have a hard stat for you, but just a month after the Westowner incident, there was another chocolate spill in Flagstaff, Arizona. This was not from the chocolate capital of the southwest, clearly. Yeah, I don't actually know. So it came from a tanker truck. I don't know where the truck was coming

from or where it was going, but it was holding liquid chocolate again, heated to a precise 120 degrees Fahrenheit and the truck got you know the driver just got into an accident and the tanker flipped over luckily they were okay and I think about like 4,000 pounds of chocolate

ended up on this highway in Flagstaff Arizona and this time because it's Arizona it actually did not harden it was just like kind of sludge that the local public safety teams had to clean up. And it seems like they actually had a pretty good time with it. There are some good tweets from the local Flagstaff officials

where they're just grinning through these messes of chocolate while wearing hazmat ear. Something I would volunteer for is cleaning up chocolate often in. interstate. I just would worry that it would turn me off of chocolate, right? Even just the word, like, oh, it didn't harden. It was just sludge. My insides went, ugh. Yeah, chocolate sludge. I mean, again, like, comes back to how much we should appreciate tempering chocolate because the texture of the chocolate we eat and love is because of that, you know, beautiful cooking. I wonder what the stage is when it's like the chocolate's a little bit too old and it sort of gets that dusty sheen on the bottom of it.

I don't want that one, but I'll eat it anyway. When I was a teenager, I talked my parents into getting a little like tabletop chocolate fountain for special occasions. And the thing is with those, you need to use candy melts because there needs to be, it needs to be a pretty oily. chocolate concoction for it to move smoothly through that little, it's basically just like it, it has like a little spiral spitting in a tube so that it like, you know, creates a lift and that it spills out from the top. But we had a lot of misadventures with that chocolate fountain because the texture is so temperamental. And if the chocolate was not exactly, liquid butt viscous enough, it would just like create these very unappetizing, like little

like globs of chocolate, like kind of erupting from it. So anyway, that definitely, it is possible to have an unappetizing chocolate fountain. Fun fact. So I can definitely imagine being deeply turned off of chocolate by having to shovel. a bunch of sludge mixed with asphalt. Yeah, I sort of personally referenced the summer that I worked at an ice cream shop. And then it really ruined it for quite some time. It just gets everywhere. Yeah.

But luckily, currently the three of us all enjoy a career where we can just enjoy chocolate recreationally. That is true. Privilege. Absolutely. Yeah, speaking of people who don't enjoy chocolate, of course, reading about... My worst ex-hanted chocolate. What was that?

My worst ex hated chocolate. In retrospect, biggest red flag. Don't trust people who don't like chocolate. Bad sign. Well, I don't know if you're... I doubt your ex was the actor who played Augustus in the original Charlie in the Chocolate Back. No, but honestly, like some...

similarities for sure but I was I was after reading about these two separate chocolate accidents I was reading I was curious what that chocolate river like on the film set was actually made of and I think they definitely pushed some like child safety laws there because I've heard that about that movie in general I yeah I think so we should should do an investigation on that. But I guess the river was just a giant like trough that they dug out and filled with like kind of like tainted water. So definitely not chocolate. It was just dirty water. And they actually put this young actor in it. He had to swim around. He had to like be filled like he was stuck in a pipe that was filled up to his head with water. And I guess, like, the cast and crew would just also dump trash in this river, like, coffee grounds and stuff because it was already dirty. And they just, like, never cleaned it and made him, like, you know, have his little crisis,

chocolate factory crisis in it. So that's, yeah, he seems, he's done a few interviews about it and he seems traumatized by all that. Yes. Sympathy for Augustus. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off.

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That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Okay, we're back. And, uh, Corinne, I'm going to talk about, some some scrubbing. I'm going to talk about some scrubbing, yes.

This story, as we said before, is one of the reasons that we were so, so into bringing back the oops becomes messy issue. This is written by one of our regular Popsie feature contributors, a fellow named Ryan Bradley, who just brings us the most charming stories that are, deeply scientific that you just can't get anywhere else. It's just like he, I don't know where he finds this stuff, but it's incredible. Here we go. So there's an very unusual assembly line process that happens in a lab at the University of California at Santa Barbara, specifically at their Marine Science Institute. And in this lab grad students stand at their lab benches and

they've got in front of them these sort of spherical, globular, orangeish, yellowish things that are literally covered in crud. And what these grad students do is they take these spurious shaped things and they unspool them. And when they unspool them, they sort of become like a weird plastic fishnet stocking. And it's covered in gunk. So they take this stocking and they put it over a lab tray and they scrape the gunk off and then they rinse the stocking, they hang it dry, and then they ball it back up again and they zip tie it together to another one, and then it heads back out into the ocean to get more gunk. Now, the gunk in question on these little tufted, fluffy, cushy ball things is plankton, and specifically their larva from muscles, which

settle on their surface during weeks that they're spent, like out at sea, bolted to rocks on the ocean floor. Now, this odd procedure over time has become really central to researching ocean plankton, specifically over the last couple decades. So plankton collectively are the small organisms that get carried around in the tides and on currents, right? They're the ocean life that aren't fish, right? They don't really swim on their own.

and they settle on things and they move with the tides and the larva of mussels and barnacles are part of the animal type of plankton the zooplankton and these critters are you know often are really good food source for ocean dwellers right like krill is a type of plankton and krill as we know is what baleen whales eat they're also really crucial because they're a big source of oceanic data for marine scientists because plankton are very sensitive creatures. So even the smallest changes in ocean or water temperature, acidity, salinity, whatever nutrients are floating around in the water have a massive impact on their populations. And so we see shifts in these balances manifest in various ways, probably the one that we're

most used to in our current climactic situation would be the red tides, right, the algae blooms. Like those are the plankton signaling that something is very, very wrong here. So the tricky thing about all of this is that in order to really study these shifts and understand the relationships between the various types of plankton and the health of the oceans and our other waterways is you have to count them. and they're like really small and you need to get a lot of them to get a good sample. So this was the problem that was really bugging a marine biologist at Oregon State University named Bruce Menge. And it was really bugging him in the late 80s.

He needed a way to gather really big samples of both barnacle and muscle larvae so he could count them. Barnacles were kind of the easy part. You know, we've all seen enough like pirate ship movies. to know that these things really just collect on mass on, like slick surfaces like boat hulls. So he was able to create substrates like a medium to collect barnacle larva out of boat decking. That was really super easy. Muscle larva, though, was really, really tricky because what they naturally settle on are these like fibrous strands of green algae that kind of look like kush balls or they grab onto, you know,

the beards of other muscles and they kind of nestle on top of one another. So what he was looking for was some sort of standardized surface, right? Like what's the boat decking of muscle larva that he could attach and that would reliably be able to replicate that type of same collection surface again and again and again, right? He was looking for something that he could control. Aren't we all? I just want, I just want to feel like I'm in control of one thing. Just something. One thing. One thing. Just anything. But in this instance, like, it is a very philosophical notion out of control, but it is also like fundamental to doing good science, right?

So he was wandering around a grocery store and he was in the kitchen supplies and cleaning aisle and he saw this reddish, orangeish, yellowish, fibrous sponge thing and it was woven and it was tufted. It was called the Tuffy. So we thought, hmm, this might work. So he bought a few and he screwed them to some rocks in the ocean and kept checking on them. And over time, over a few weeks, the larva began to settle.

And so he bought more. And then he bought more. And it kept working and it became widespread. Before too long, this became the way for marine biologists to collect these samples and do their population studies. Dozens of studies over the intervening decades relied on this kitchen sponge. Marine biologists were buying them by the crate. They could not get enough.

And it wasn't just that it worked in the Pacific Northwest where Menge was. It worked. You know, there's studies that were done off the coast. of New Zealand off the coasts of Chile and the Atlantic and the Pacific. This was just, they were so into it. It was perfect. It was what they had never known that they always needed. The thing about the toughie is that whether or not it's actually good at its primary function is a matter of a little bit of debate. Some people really think it's the absolute perfect thing for scrubbing your cast iron without, you know, scrubbing your nice oil-sliked non-stick coating off of it.

But just generally, as a kitchen scrubber, like, people were sort of like, meh to this is not great. So that sort of helps explain what happened next, which is the Clorox Company, who's not the original owners of the Tuffy Spunge, but became its producers through acquisition, discontinued it. and they replaced it with a similar but totally not quite exactly the same sponge with a different weave, a different color, there were other changes. Suffice it to say it was just wrong. And folks, toughy devotees, people who loved it for their cast iron scouring, but more notably, marine biologists started just stockpiling these things. and they were buying them on eBay for many, many, many times their grocery store price is precious sponges.

And researchers like Jennifer Casell, whose lab at UC Davis is now doing this unfurling and refurling and cleaning and scraping and bundling procedure with the toughies, tried a bunch of alternatives. And she thought about trying some others, but then she stopped her. herself because she realized that if she changed their collection medium after all this time, after all these studies, that's a problem. It's not just because she loved the Tuffy. It was because all of a sudden she had created a new variable that would really,

really bork their data. And she was already okay with the reusing thing because when she took a step back and Ryan goes into this in the story, when she took a step back and. thought about it. The fact of like marine scientists specifically making plastic waste just didn't really feel super good. So the fact that like they were using toughies initially and then discarding them just gave her the icks. Sure. So good on her for instituting the reuse process before she absolutely had to. But yeah, just generally it was like not good. You know, So they're continuing to do that.

Bruce Menge, meanwhile, instead of trying to make use of toughies that are currently in the field, he decided that he was going to look back at patterns in the data that he gathered in the years that he did have toughies out in the field to really look back at what the plankton could be telling us, right? He was very curiously. So we know that the plankton express what's happening in the oceans right now. right, at that given, at a given moment. But he wonders, and he seems that he's probably right in a lot of ways that the plankton are actually bellwethers for what's going on in the ecosystem that we can't even see yet, right? Because if we remember that they don't move of their own volition, they move with the currents,

right? They're circulating through the system. So any shifts that they're seeing, even if they're subtle, might be indicators of some nasty stuff about to come down the line, right? Like ocean heat waves, which are now becoming more and more common. So small or even rapid changes in ocean temperatures or acidity, like before they happen, like looking at old data gathered with the toughies can help us really understand these things. And these are just marine biology, despite the fact that the toughie doesn't exist, right, is very much not done with it. Not like at all.

all. So that's that's the toughie, right? And the toughie is is so charming and it's a delightful little object when you see it in the magazine. It's colorful and it's vibrant and it looks like a piece of coral. I totally get it. Like muscle larvae. I see you. I understand. It's a very attractive sponge as such a thing can be. But it's also not the only example of like scientists really truly relying on something that was not intended for them at all. which is a very, as we know from the Tuffy, a pretty dangerous business to get into. A couple of my favorites, I'm glad you asked.

The Victoria's Secret Amber Romance scent is very popular because it is evidently an extremely good insect repellent. Interesting. Interesting. I can't remember that one. I remember Dream Angels. I have no idea what Amber Romance smells like.

Yeah, I know. I have no idea. That must make fieldwork more interesting, especially because, like, I don't know, I feel like you're pretty, you're kind of at your stinkiest doing fieldwork because of like the manual labor of being out there and also generally like not a situation

where you can shower as much as you usually do. So I feel like that plus a Victoria's Secret perfume must kind of, of being, I don't think that smells good, probably. No, no. And the thing is, I, you know, not to like be disparaging against sense that are marketed towards teens and tweens who frequent malls, but, you know, I'd imagine I probably don't like Amber Romance to begin with. Yeah. And I've also had experiences of people like opening those very pungent hand sanitizers from bath and bodyworks and that it just creates this mutant funk. So I hear. exactly what you're saying.

Was it the scent in itself or did they mix it with other things for the repellation? As far as I know, it's just the scent itself. And who knows, maybe they did figure it out by accident, right? Like maybe it was somebody taking like a French shower when they were out doing fieldwork just like spritzing on some stuff to make it better. And they went, wait, I'm not getting bitten. Cool. Or the bugs are so repulsed by the combination of body odor and ambromum.

Yes. Yeah, but you see other things like sifting bones with tea strainers or there's a certain type of waterproof paper that Kissel's lab used for note taking that was made by Xerox. And then Xerox changed the paper. And she was like, oh, crap. Because they're just like, it's not that research ground to a halt, but they like stopped being able to like make notes the way that they thought they, the way that they needed to. because they needed their waterproof paper.

But it's just an interesting thing to think about that you put science sort of in the crosshairs of the whims of consumer desire. And it's hard to change something once you've started using it. And there are whole economic theories about this that we go into the piece, but we do not have to go into right now because I will not do them.

justice. But yeah, at the end of the day, we always have the tuffy. I want to be a tuffy. I just want to catch plankton and waves and let that be my life. Sounds chill. It sounds like a pretty nice life. Until they like stretch you out and start scraping things off of you. Okay.

I'll tap out before that. It's like, it's what I go to like Korean spas for. So. Truth. Truth. Fair. It happens there. It's a good life for a toughie.

Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more messy fact. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

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that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Okay, we're back, and I'm going to talk about some space poop. I recently, I mean, I've always been interested in stories about poop. I don't know why. I think when I was working at the Washington Post, I realized people would,

get really, really up in arms about such a newspaper of record having a story about poop science. And so that just encouraged me to write about it even more. And now here I am some years later still writing about poops. So recently, some listeners may have seen trailers or even the movie itself. This movie came out called Moonfall. It's very silly action adventure movie involving the moon coming to us. It's a real romp.

Definitely recommend it if you like, you know, films that are not objectively like good, shall we say. But it's a lot of fun. And Mika McKinnon, who's a geologist and design. master researcher who does science consulting for film and TV, which is just such a cool side hustle. She reached out to me being like, you know, I'm doing the press trunket for this. And I'm really concerned that maybe no one's going to ask me about the fact that one of the characters, when he finds out unexpectedly that he's going into space, says he has irritable bowel

syndrome. And I was like, Mika, you're right. I am the person for that story. I absolutely want to talk to you and NASA about how you handle having IBS or just any poop problems in space. Because I was aware that pooping in space is kind of an ordeal. You know, even today with modern technology, it is done with the assistance of vacuum pressure. because the thing is that for most of us, particularly if we are relatively able-bodied,

going to the bathroom, while it may not always be pleasant, is pretty straightforward. Like the stuff comes out of you and gravity takes it into the toilet, right? Bless gravity. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, gravity. The thing is, there's no gravity on the International Space Station, just to name one example of a place you might be in space. And so even with modern technology, like going to the bathroom on the ISS involves like a vacuum funnel that you put on your person so that it can draw away the stuff that gravity usually takes care of plunking into the toilet for us. So I knew that and I knew that even that was like a big advance and that historically things have been more difficult.

For example, on the Apollo 10 transcripts, which I first, I read for the first time because I was pre-writing an obituary for a very famous astronaut. It's a very, a very awkward write of passage. If you work at a big newspaper, they have you, write up an obituary for someone who is not sick, not dead, just there's some concern that they might croak sometime the next five years. And so I had to call up people and be like, obviously, this will never run. This person you love very much will live forever. But supposing they died, what would you want me to say about them? And, um, So I was reading some Apollo transcripts, and in Apollo 10, you will find, and I'm looking at this right now, you can see it online. I will link to it on popsight.com slash weird, because

everything is recorded. There are references to a floating turd. And in fact, several floating turds because on Apollo 10, poops escaped. There were free floating poops, multiple instances of that. And so I'll just read some choice quotes. But again, you can examine this for yourself, see the primary documentation. Someone says, have you got the turd? And someone else says, you got a big mess. People are mad at you.

And I don't blame them. I don't care. Dadgum, I still think it's a little funny. First crap around the same. son. The first free crap in space. I'm skipping around just to be clear. These are multiple, multiple men speaking.

What? Did they redact the names? So they're labeled by like their role on the crew. So it's figure outable. But then also like this is a transcript from a recording from like the six So I think there are in a couple instances, it's maybe a little dubious who was actually talking. But you can you can suss it out if you so choose. I am just not outing anyone at this moment. I was just going to say that I very much am charmed and appreciate the like okay for public consumption earnest G rated swearing. Yeah, they do occasionally really swear. But they clearly, given the era and the military background of everyone involved, They clearly like make an effort to do more dadgum and darn it than anything else. There's that.

Then later in the middle, they're talking about, you know, being in space, they're doing very serious things. Oh, who did it? Who did what? What? Who did it? Where did that come from? Give me a napkin quick. There's a turn floating through the air.

I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine. I don't think it's one of mine. Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away. God Almighty. Nothing. That's enough for me.

Nice going there. No more turns are going to fit in there. So that's them dealing with the waist compartment. So how is this not a movie or a video game at this point? It should have been one. Absolutely. A video game though. Oh, my God.

And then again, one more time later on in the transcript, again, when they're trying to deal with being in space, suddenly they're in the middle of talking to like mission control. And then they're like, here's another goddamn turd. What's the matter with you guys? Someone says, well, babe, if it was me, I sure would know I was shitting on the floor. It was just floating around. And they're talking about the consistency. And they're just like no one zoning up to the poop.

So anyway, I was talking to Joseph Schmidt, who's a flight surgeon at NASA, which basically means he is the physician for astronauts. And he's been assigned to several space missions. So it's his job to make sure people are generally healthy and that they're prepared for any health problems they might face while in space. And then he just kind of works with coaching them through the process of acclimating all of the. all of that. And so he and I were chatting about the transcripts. He was like, yeah, you might, you know, there's actually like a, there was a poop incident. And I'm like, I know, man, I've read the Apollo 10 transcripts.

I'm not, it's not my first space poop rodeo. And here's the thing is that despite the indignation of the astronauts being like, how is this possible? Who done it? It was actually like very understandable for this to occur because the way that astronauts hooped during the Apollo missions was that they had these baggies that had like sticky stuff around the edge. So you literally stuck the baggie to your butt.

And they had the issue of like there was no gravity to make stuff. come away. So they added like an extra little like tab in the plastic so that you could manually, uh, manipulate things and get everything down into the bag. And then you would seal it and he would go into that compartment that they were talking about like not being a bowl or poop. And so if a sticky bag came undone either while you were doing your business or after you had tried to dispose of it, then it would just be freeborn. It would be the first free poop in space, as they said. So this probably like happened, you know, hopefully not every Apollo mission, but like,

it was definitely on the list of things that could go wrong. Hi, on the list, I would say. These days, there are like the Soyuz does have like a little, suction toilet, but it is like, as unpleasant as the experience sounds on the ISS, it is like a smaller facility when you're, you know, launching up. So they do offer an enema before launching. And I wasn't told how frequently astronauts take them up on that. But I would say probably most do because you really just like you want to avoid needing to go to the bathroom. And in fact, it's a problem where the position you're in when you're launching where kind of like your feet are above your heart, you get a lot of fluid pooling, which makes your kidneys, you know, get to work. And that makes you need to pee. And so a lot of people, like, they don't want to be hydrating because they don't want to have to pee so much when they're in transit. And, you know, flight surgeons like Joe really have to, like, fight against that because you don't want people getting woozy,

hydrated on their way to freaking space. But you are basically peeing into like a diaper. They call them like maximum absorbency garments, which is a very nice way of saying a diaper. And that is an improvement over like the pee condoms that used to be standard. It's what it sounds like and you peed into it. And once they had to kind of figure out absorbent garments as an option for people who do not have benuses, everyone was like, Okay, but that's better than wearing a rubber pea tube the whole time. So circling back to my initial inspiration, as a woman of a certain ethnic background,

I have tummy problems. And I have always wondered, well, now I wonder, what happens. if you have an upset tummy in space. And the thing is that you're sharing this tiny vacuum-powered toilet with like anywhere from six to like a dozen-ish people. And everything is really rigidly scheduled because everything has to be on the space station. Like you just, there's no room for lolly-gagging about. And so, you know, my thinking was like, what if you don't, what if your business

doesn't happen on schedule. What if your business happens frequently and uncomfortably? And the takeaway is that like while everything is scheduled, there is like kind of gray space and you can always choose to hurry up a task so that you have more free time to use the bathroom. So the answer is kind of if you need to use the bathroom a lot, that's something you know about yourself. You just need to learn to like work more efficiently so that no one will miss you while you go off to the ISS toilet. Of course, you still need to negotiate the use of that toilet with the people you are stuck in orbit with. So Joe from NASA did tell me that like everybody has trouble adjusting. So like the whole protocol for when you first go to space and every time you go

back, it involves a lot of like, first of all, coaching on what it's going to be like to use the toilet and also like a diet designed to help keep you regular. They're really obviously paying attention to all of your vital signs. So to me, the takeaway was kind of like it's almost simpler if you have an existing issue that you're aware of because then they can work really hard to like mitigate your symptoms as much as humanly possible while you're on the ground. And a lot of people who have never had an issue will like get up into space and be like pukin or having some other issue for several days. And so kind of like the fewer surprises there are, the better.

Also kind of my takeaway in this chat with the NASA flight surgeon was like, Maybe everybody with IVS should become an astronaut so that they get this much medical attention. Maybe all of their problems would go away. Maybe that's how health care should work. But anyway, I learned a lot about pooping in space, and I will link to the full story in the article for this episode on popside.com slash weird. but obviously the highlight was the free floating turd on Apollo 10 and everything else is just set dressing and I know that but hopefully you learned something oh I just I have so many

thoughts like when we were talking about the enemas all I was thinking was like your body's stress response right like when you have an adrenaline surge right poop in your pants is like literally just a thing that happens? Sure. Absolutely. Right? So I couldn't imagine saying no to the anima. Yeah. No, like I think you like look all things considered, you want an empty tank when you set out for space. Word. That's my advice to anyone, uh, about to head up to ISS for the first time. Uh, but yeah. Um, I think like, you know, it's so interesting to think about. Um, you know, it's so interesting to think about the way NASA and other space agencies troubleshoot on ISS because, like, I mean, talking to this flight surgeon, he was like, I can't just, like, write a prescription and have them

send it up. Like, yes, there are cargo deliveries, but they are not frequent. And space is at a premium. You know, it takes a lot of energy to send stuff up into space. So again, it's like, it's actually kind of better if it's like we know you have this issue and like we have all these months to get to know your body on earth and like figure out what medications really help and then you go up with all that stuff and if someone has a problem that has not been anticipated it's you know I mean that's like Apollo 13 scene where they're like taping the air filters onto the wrong shaped hole. Imagine that, but a bunch of doctors try to figure out how to get you to stop poop it. But anyway, they're prepared for many eventualities. One thing that Joe said that I really liked was that

he learned in his medical training that people who are quote-unquote normal just haven't been evaluated closely enough and that like, you know, there is no normal human. Everybody has some issue or another, which I think is very true and a little bit poignant and also, you know, definitely a good philosophy for a NASA flight surgeon to have because they really have to, like, imagine so many ways that things could go wrong with your body and try to prep for them. So all of that is to say, if you dream of going to the stars and you're anxious, because you have IBS. I got news for you.

Keep dreaming big, kid, because it's in reach. Beautiful. But that does make me think that as more everyday people go into space, like you still go through some, you go through many health checks and like physical training, but they're just going to have to, you know, be more open to like people with different,

conditions like going up there and they'll have to and when I say they I don't just mean NASA but like some of these commercial space companies they're going to have to troubleshoot like technologies and medications and such that are going to help people um you know make that couple hour ride so that's kind of exciting it's like when like women started going to space they had to like change up a lot of things about spacesuits and find something other than a pee condom There you go. But it's also, it's like really nice to think about how much space agencies and space flight and the people who are screening people who go into space, right? How far we've evolved since the Mercury astronauts who were all held up as these like peak perfect specimens of everything. And these are like absolutely the this is what normal is. This is the epitome. And now we're just like, that's what the standards were based on those. hearty white men. And you know what? They still poop their pants in space. They still did that. And one of the Mercury astronauts pissed in his suit on the launch pad. Right? It's just like,

this is what happens. Yeah. No, I think, you know, one thing that we talked about, that I talked about with the NASA Flight surgeon was that there is also, it's like, you know, there are, if you have a health problem that they don't feel confident about being able to manage in space. You know, that that may disqualify you. And, you know, I don't think I would want to be a person without health problem that can be managed in space and be in space. It's a very uncomfortable place to be. That being said, he did say that, like, if you're going up to ISS as like, you know,

like a cultural visitor, you know, which does happen. And like there are definitely people who are not part of the crew who go up or especially back during the shuttle program. That was pretty common. There would be people just kind of along for the ride. And in that instance, the threshold kind of changes because it's just like, are you going to be like at risk? Are you going to be in danger if we send me to space? Because like an astronaut, they do kind of, they have duties to fulfill. So they want to make sure you're going to be able to keep working fairly nominally.

But if you're just going to visit, they're like, I mean, you know, as long as you don't mind having to poop that much, that's fine by us, man. We'll figure it out, dude. That's how you want to spend your week in space. Go for it. And I think there will be a lot of that with commercial spaceflight. I think, like, you know, there will be a lot of being like, um, we, we haven't made this experience comfortable for you. But you can still do it if you want to. Everybody poops.

Yeah, everybody poops, including its face. Hopefully. Yeah, constipation is more of an issue. I didn't even get into that. You got to read about that on Popside. Atcom slash weird. So, um, anyway, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I'm going to vote for the chocolate river.

Well, not the chocolate river. I'm not saying that learning about Willy Wonka was the weirdest thing I learned this week. I'm saying the quickly hardening, perfectly tempered chocolate. catastrophe is pretty delightful. It truly is. And it's just, again, I think I'm so, and I encourage everybody to look at this and we'll link to it. The image is so like, it just looks like blacktop. Like, what happened? Is it a chocolate road? I'm also team chocolate road. Like, I think the space poop was the funniest thing I heard this week. Thank you. Thank you. But the chocolate

it takes the weird. Yeah. I will have to say Tuffy just because it's so niche and weird and wonderful and unexpected. But also I've been hearing Corinne talk about that story for like a while. So guess what? It might be over. You might not have to hear me talk about it anymore.

Except that's also a lie. All right. So listeners, definitely check out our latest issue. You can find links to it on Popsai.com. and if you're an Apple News subscriber, it'll already be in your feed and you should definitely check it out. Congratulations to Provida on the most delicious take on the messy theme. Go chocolate. Stop listening to this podcast if you don't like chocolate.

Yeah, absolutely. Get out. But it is the perfect mess to revel in. Yes, absolutely. And that's what it's all about. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirders find the show.

For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popseye.threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Caden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.

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