The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - An Innovative Erection, Secret Oyster Rules, Nuking Hurricanes

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

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Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. 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 Sarah Kylie. Watson. And I'm Laura Krantz. Laura, welcome to the show. I'm excited to be here. So listeners, Laura is the host of a show called Wild Thing and is here to share some of her wildest facts with us. Laura, would you like to tell our listeners a little bit about the show and where they can find it? Yeah. So Wild Thing is a podcast about all the sort of strange and interesting things that capture our imaginations and this place where science, intersects with society and all those questions that we have that we might not be able to answer. And you can find it pretty much anywhere you can find podcasts. Apple, Spotify, Google, other places that I'm forgetting the names of.

But there are a lot. And I think I'm pretty much on every platform. If I'm not, let me know. And I'll make sure that I get there. Awesome. Your first season was about Bigfoot, right? Yes, it was about Bigfoot. I can remember that being really fun.

I got to go back and give it a re-listen. Yeah, my grandfather's cousin was, I found out after he'd passed away that he was the preeminent academic expert on Bigfoot. Oh, wow. And also a fairly well-known physical anthropologist in his own right. So I was kind of wondering about this question of like, how can you be a hardcore scientist and also be out looking for Bigfoot? And maybe there's more to Bigfoot than I originally thought.

So that was kind of the genesis for the whole thing. I love that. That sounds really cool. So listeners, definitely go check out Wilding. But in the meantime, on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, 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. Sir Kylie, what's your tease? So I'm here to talk today about the 4,000. year old origins of one of the most controversial oyster eating rules. Oh my. Is this like the months that end in R? Are those months 4,000 years old? Well, you'll see.

But yes, you're on the right track. My tease is that I want to talk about a night in Las Vegas and an erection that changed the course of medical history. I thought what happened in Vegas stayed in Vegas. Not this time. Laura, what's your tease? Yeah, so mine is, in the wake of World War II, the U.S. government was looking for peaceful ways to use atomic power,

and one of their programs was called Project Plow Share, and they decided to use nuclear explosives to build public works projects, like harbors and canals, and extract natural gas. Interesting. What could go wrong. It seems totally fine. Let me a little bit spooky there.

I love that because we, just a few episodes ago, well, a season ago, you know, that's how making a podcast works. But in my heart, just a few episodes ago, we talked about nuclear gardening. So I am excited to hear more about how the U.S. government tried to be like, no, no, no, no, this thing is really good for lots, lots of stuff. It can do everything. It can do anything. Cool. Okay, so let's see.

Why don't we start with Sarah Kaila? Let's start with yours since we have some guesses as to what it might be about. Also, I love oysters. Me too. I'm a big oyster girl, so this one is a fun one. But so in some parts of the world, in some parts of the United States, it's pretty much gospel that oyster season only truly happens when the months of the year have an R in it. So y'all got that. And while the validity of that is contested, hello, who hasn't had a oyster with a glass of rosé in the summer sun?

It apparently has some very deeply seated roots in the native populations of what nowadays is the southeastern U.S. And so speaking of the southeastern U.S., it was my dad who actually inspired. this, so I wanted to give him a little shout out for his oyster knowledge and, of course, his oyster cooking skills. But before we dive in, a lot of this has to do with the life cycle of oysters. So we're going to talk a little bit about oyster life. So oyster spawn or baby oysters beginning their little oyster life. It starts in the warm summer months of May through August, except in places where it's really warm 24-7. Environmental cues such as water temperatures at around 68 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit and high salinity tell adult oysters is time to spawn their eggs in sperm

and voila the miracle of life. Those fertilized eggs then drift away in the water currents and they float around for two weeks maturing and growing and once they hit around that two week mark, they hit the pedigidger stage or when they have a little foot. So I thought the little foot stage. They hit the little foot stage. They can start getting pedicures. Just one little foot. And the foot helps them attach to a nice hard location to grow, typically another oyster shell. If you've ever seen oysters, they are always in this big clomp. And then they attach to that and they form what's called a spat, which is their foot attached to there.

What then will happen is the spat will feed and grow on calcium carbonate, growing their own recognizable oyster shell. According to the University of Maryland, oysters reach juvenile stage at about year one and are fully grown at year three, growing about an inch. every year, but in higher salinity waters, they can grow even faster. So that brings us to the R rule. Spawning oysters just aren't very tasty to begin with. They can be kind of fatty, watery, soft, and lack flavor versus the mature, less sexed up oyster and chili months that have firm texture and briny flavor that many have come to love. You got to grow up and get firm and

briny. You got to get firm and briny. Yeah. None of this sexy time. oyster season. And not to mention, there's also Vibrio P. I'm not even going to try that. Vibrio bacteria, which you probably have seen her word about, which causes illnesses in harvesting areas throughout the summer and can cause people who eat oysters to vomit, have diarrhea, and all of that fun stuff. Cooking oysters does solve the Vibrio problem, but the CDC also has noted that, and

I quote, this is one of my favorite things I've ever seen the CDC say, but says, quote, hot sauce and lemon juice don't kill Vibrio bacteria. Drinking alcohol while eating oysters doesn't kill Vibrio bacteria either. Well, that's unfortunate. I know. Like, okay, so good to know. Moving on. But humans have been eating oysters for literally thousands of years,

way before we knew about bacteria and hot sauce. So oyster shells have been found in these shell rings, which are littered across the coasts of places like South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. and these shell rings are circular or semicircular middens, which are just piles of shells, pottery, bones, soil, other funky things that have just been gathered up throughout people living in these areas. And they're big.

They can be anywhere in size from about a meter to three meters tall, so they're pretty hefty things, and 22 to 83 meters across. So if you're thinking about like the biggest one ever, it's like nine feet tall or 270 feet wide. and they're, yeah, so they're these big circles of basically prehistoric trash. Is there like a percentage that are oyster shells? I think a lot of them are oyster shells.

So, I mean, you think about oysters. You know, it's not a ton of food you're getting out of one oyster. So if you're having a feast and, you know, throwing out your oyster shells, you've got to go through a bunch of oysters to really be feasting. But there's a couple of hypotheses. So these shell rings were believed to have been created during the late archaic period, which is 4,200 to 3,000 years ago. So pretty old.

And there's a bunch of hypotheses about why these are here. Some folks think that they could be early examples of year-round occupation of the southeastern U.S., I guess. Some say they could be seasonal camps that people may be popped in and out, like going places. Some could even say they're the site of some seriously epic ceremonies or feasts and kind of have some social hierarchy dynamics involved. So lots of ideas about these big, you know, ancient trash circles. Nevertheless, these things are big, and the population estimates of who was using these could range from 20 to hundreds of individuals.

So we're not really sure how many people were using these things. And some researchers hypothesized that there are even more rings, like possibly even smaller ones, that are located deep underground and we could maybe find them using radar technology. So how common these are is still a little bit up in the air. But moral of the story is when it comes to the populations of humans living in the southeast at this time, we know for a fact that they liked munching on oysters. And just a couple of years ago, two researchers from the Florida Museum went up to St. Catherine's Island off the coast of Georgia, and it's home to a really big 230-foot-wide 4,300-year-old shell ring, so a giant old one, to do a little bit more research, and this time on how mature the oysters were before they

met their delicious end. Not so delicious for them. Not so delicious for them, but for the ancient folks in Georgia, I'm assuming it was pretty tasty. So, you can actually age really old oysters pretty easily, thanks to a

parasitic snail that latches onto oysters called Bunia Impressa, which is also known as the impressed odysomes. So these are teeny tiny snails that also like to eat oysters. So they latch onto oyster shell, poke a stylus through the shell and then slurp up the inside of the oysters. So, you know, who can resist?

These little creatures grow up to like six millimeters long, and they have about a year life cycle. That's pretty predictable. So you can kind of guess when the snail dies based on its size. And then you can kind of guess when did the oyster die. So the size of the snail, more or less, can tell researchers what time of year the oysters were added to the pile. So we've got different sizes. It's like, okay, the snail's life cycle, the 12 months-ish, okay. So it's like a little snail-y calendar almost.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so we love that. We love all sorts of snails telling us what time of year it is. And so the researchers compare the snail, the snail and oyster fossils to living samples to estimate the timing of oyster eating season 4,000 years ago. And what they found is the islanders living on St. Catherine, were largely foraging or capturing oysters in the cooler times of the year, aka the R months. Why they did this is still a mystery.

Maybe it was trial by error of getting sick. Maybe it was a tastiness issue. But one of the authors suggested it could also be one of the earliest records of quote-unquote sustainable harvesting. Because leaving the oysters to spawn in the summer helps guarantee a replenish stock for the next season's big chowdown. So yeah, the whole R-month thing has thousands of years of history. behind it. But a lot of stuff has happened since then, especially when it comes to science and technology, when it comes to the climate, all of that. So one of the big ones is refrigeration. So nowadays you can get your oysters at any time of the year, farmed specifically with exposure

to hot summer air and water, which really is what makes the bacteria problem a big problem. When that's under control, you can get them whenever you want. Even in places where it's warmer, like the Gulf of Mexico or Chesapeake Bay, if oysters are able to see, stay completely underwater in their natural environments, they should be okay to eat, as long as they're harvested in the coldest hours of the day and then refrigerated immediately. But there's also some funky science, of course, beyond just making sure that your oysters don't get exposed to summer air. So another way that you can help make oysters edible or, you know, as edible as possible

year round is making them infertile. So a scientist named Standish Allen, who was over. retired faculty member at the aquaculture genetics and breeding technology center at William and Mary's Virginia Institute for Marine Science. Lots of stuff going on there. He's invented a way to make triploid or oysters with three chromosomes two times. So he's figured out how to make basically these three chromosome oysters two separate times and people love them. So without needing to spawn or reproduce, these oysters can put more energy into big, plump, juicy oysters and they never go through the not-tasty phase.

And they can also be harvested earlier and avoid some of the diseases that have traumatized certain harvesting areas throughout the years. And so nowadays, a lot of these farmed oysters are triploid. According to a story from the Atlantic back in 2014,

diploids are the two chromosome oysters are regularly found in the wild, and they tend not to be as picture perfect on the half-shell as triploids. So those guys typically end up in like soup or other processed products. And since triploids technically can show up in the wild, they are not even considered GMOs. So that's a very interesting little fun fact.

I was wondering what happens if they escape from the farm. Yeah, well, I can get into it. I'm so excited. So the first edition of triploid breeding required applying fertilized eggs with a toxin called cytocococalin, which has been used to induce polyploidy in plants historically. So it doesn't affect the oyster meat, but the other way is much more common now and consists of breeding tetraploid or four chromosome set oysters with diploids to make the beloved triploid. These tetraploid oysters were from the miracle of a few fertile triploid oysters created in Allen's lab. So most of the time, the triploid ones aren't fertile, but they are, you know, the miracle that is science, that is oyster science, there are a couple that can make these four chromosome sets.

And so these handful of ones has basically made all of the oysters that lots of people eat these days. So very interesting stuff. But to wrap up, the moral of the story is that if you hear the R month thing when it comes to oysters, it definitely has some merit, while the ones in a restaurant likely are fine year-round because of all the scientific advances and brilliant research that's gone into modern history. If you're literally scooping oysters out of the banks of South Carolina, your best bet is probably to wait for those R months though. And of course, don't forget the vinaigrette and hot sauce.

So important, even if it's not helping to make them safer. I love this because I love eating oysters and I only like eating them raw, at least as far as I know. And I only got into eating them as an adult. and I had never heard about the R rule. And then someone said it to me in a very like gotcha way when I was like enjoying oysters on a not R month. And I was like, I don't know. I mean, we live in New York and this very expensive restaurant is selling oysters. I sort of think that probably if it was universally known that we shouldn't be eating these oysters,

this wouldn't be happening. And then I like investigated a little and I definitely was like, okay, so this rule doesn't really apply anymore. But I still didn't quite understand like what had happened that made all of that okay. So I feel like I've learned so much. It's definitely a southeast thing. I'm from North Carolina. And my dad, he does go get the oysters himself. Like they're not farmed.

They're fresh. And so yeah, he will not let us have an oyster roast in the summer. even though I'm like, please, I would love to just like have a yummy oyster. He's always like, no, like if we can wait until Thanksgiving. And I mean, I guess he's, he's kind of right. Yeah. My best friend in college, she was doing geology, but for whatever reason, her summer job was to go down to Florida and count the bacteria that they found inside of oysters. And she came back and she was like, I will never eat another oyster as long as I live.

Yeah, I bet that'll that'll do it. Yeah, and Sarah Kylie and I actually, through work, did a volunteer day at the Billion Oyster Project on Governor's Island, which is a really cool organization. Listeners, you should definitely Google Billion Oyster Project and check it out. But the long and short of it is that, as we've previously discussed on nursing, actually, way back in the day, Eleanor had a fact about how New York City used to be absolutely surrounded by oyster reefs. And it was like it kept the land together.

It fed the population, both indigenous and then like early colonial Americans. And then we just like really, we mess that up. We went too hard on the oysters. And so the Billion Oyster Project is working to remediate that and like help these young oysters grow and thrive to protect New York Harbor and help clean the water and they collect shells from a bunch of restaurants in the New York City area to use as like the growth mediums because the little larvae need grown-up shells to grow on. So anyway, definitely if you like oysters and you sometimes go get them from restaurants,

you should check out whether there are any eateries you can patronize that are sewing the seeds of future oyster generations. Also, I definitely like literally bled creating some oyster habitat. Oh my gosh. Those shells are sharp. It's not a game. Well, we were just working with like metal building like the little cages. they put the baby oysters in so that they don't just like float off to see, I guess.

Into the ether. Yeah. And it was just, it was very pinchy. It was a very pinchy process. But I was happy to give, you know, my lifeblood for baby oysters. Maybe that I will eat one day. Who knows? Hopefully not the New York Coast.

Circle of life. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some 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 to Dreamland. And I can't have one right now because I have a new kit.

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now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has Delta 9-THC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code Weirdest. That's code Weirdest for 20% off. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to share my fact about the erection in Las Vegas that changed the world. It is a fact. from my recently published debut book, Been There, Done That, A Rousing History of Sex. I promise, next episode I will do a fact that is not from my book.

Jess is saying, no, no, no, no, no. But, you know, I, uh, anyway, I wrote this whole book about the history of sex, and I'm very proud of it, and I hope listeners will buy it. There's also an audiobook. And actually, I did finally get some preliminary sales data. And while I don't want to talk about how the book is selling, quote unquote, they did tell me they were surprised at the high ratio of audiobook downloads to physical book purchases. And so I have to believe that that is because our weirdos want to hear my stupid voice for nine hours of audiobook content. So keep it coming.

We love to see it. All right. So this is a story about a man who, whenever people ask me, like, what is like the most amazing thing you learned writing this book? And I'm like, well, I know a lot of weird stuff and I learn a lot of weird stuff all the time. Most of it is useless. But it's hard for me to keep track of like what stuff I didn't know when I started researching this book. But Giles Brindley definitely I had no idea. I had heard of him and I had no idea that this man was going to become one of my greatest living heroes.

Just absolutely incredible. So to give a little bit of background, in the 60s, this UK native, he made a neuroprostasis capable of restoring some sight to the blind. He casually invented an instrument that he called the logical bassoon. It was just a more logical bassoon. I don't play the bassoon. I do play the flute. But I will say that the bassoon has always struck me as a pretty absurd instrument. So I can see where there might have been some room for improvement, logically.

And according to this profile of him in 2014, in a neurology journal, in his 60s, he was like taking up marathons and relay racing. last I was able to find of him. He is still alive at the time of this recording. And the last update I could find on him, he was in his 90s and studying the origins of falsetto. So like a man of many varied talents, you know, a polymath, if ever there was one. But as I write in my book, if he wanted to be most remembered for his life-altering work, in prosthetics or his sexagenarian sportsmanship or his endeavor to create a more perfect bassoon, he shouldn't have flashed a roomful of people in Vegas one time because that is what he's remembered

for and that is what he's in my book for. So we're in Vegas. It's 1983. I assume there are a lot of shoulder pads, a lot of rhinestone sequence, more even than usual in Vegas because it is the 80s. And it's the annual meeting of the American Eurodynamic society. So, you know, like people who study urethra's and the stuff that comes out of them, like cream of the crop in that field, very glamorous stuff. And this was the final scheduled talk for the day. So actually, according to some people who recount this event, people were like informal wear and some attendees had brought their dates with them

because they were all going to the reception after this talk. So like imagine like high hair sprayed hair and like gowns, like some taffeta, a big bow. I just... The claw. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So Giles Brindley, takes the stage and he begins to present his latest findings.

And I will explain what those findings were in a minute. But what is the reason this night went down in infamy is because by the end of Brindley's talk, he would have pulled his pants down to display his penis, his erect penis. And this was not like him having a psychosexual breakdown. That would not be a fun silly story I would be telling in my book. This was him showing evidence of his amazing, groundbreaking medical findings. So at this time, erectile dysfunction, which we now now affects loads of people for all sorts of reasons, some more physical, some more mental, many, some combination of the two.

at the time, it was really considered like a purely psychological problem and a like stigmatized one at that. So not only did doctors generally assume that if you could not maintain an erection or couldn't get one when you wanted to have sex, not only did they assume that that was like totally in your head, but they would then be like, and like gross that you have that problem, seems like, silly thing, which really blows my mind because, like, given how common erectile dysfunction is, so many of the professionals who were talking about it that way must have occasionally experienced ED. So I feel like they had to really, that keeping this long con going must have required a lot of men pretending that they could just get erections whenever they wanted that worked perfectly,

which if you can, good for you. But most people who have penises, at some point or another, that is not how it will work out. So there were some medical intervention options, but they were like very serious surgeries with very marginal payoff. In the 70s, for example, there were like these inflatable silicon rods. And it was like a very frequent source of infection and also like didn't really create like a pleasurable erection. So, It was not ideal. Brinley had been working on neuroprostetics, and he had actually ended up thinking quite a lot and quite a bit more compassionately than most of his peers about the problem of erectile

dysfunction, because he was working with a bunch of patients, specifically a lot of military veterans who had spinal cord injuries and who wanted to be able to have. biological children with their wives. And so in this situation, it was very clearly a physical issue. These were men who were paralyzed. They had mobility issues. And in their specific cases, they were not able to get erections and ejaculate, or at least were not able to control how that happened. And also, Brindley was like, obviously these patients, um, deserve compassion and respect and help. Like, these are people who have fought for their country. And in a lot of cases, literally all they want is to, like, be able to have children. And so it was a

situation where just to him, it was so clear that, like, this is a problem we can solve and it is worth solving. And he was able to use, like, electro-stimulation to actually very successfully, several of his patients. Their partners went on to have healthy children as a result. And this was all great. But that's, you know, kind of shocking a penis into cooperating is not really the same as like helping the average person like have pleasurable sex. So, but it being in that scenario seems to have really put him in a position that no one had

bothered to be in before in terms of like really deciding it was worthwhile to try to figure out this problem and that there was probably some physical intervention that could help. So he tried out some stuff. I, in researching my book, I wasn't able to find like an exact count of how many years he spent or like how many things he injected himself with. But there was definitely like some trial and error and self-experimentation and he landed on this relaxant called phentolamine. So it loosens the walls of the smooth muscle that make up human blood vessels. And in a penis, that means there's more room for fluid. So blood rushes in,

bada bada bada buma, boom, erection. And this was the finding he was presenting in Vegas. And this really was groundbreaking. This was like the first time that someone had demonstrated, like, there is a straightforward, simple, safe thing you can do that makes a penis get erect. Wow. He was showing this in the slideshow, and the slideshow showed the process of like, here is Felicity, here is the injection, here is tumessence. but he was like maybe you don't believe me maybe you think that like somebody helped me get this erection off camera you know pictures a fluffer could be faked yeah a fluffer exactly and then he was like well no one could possibly be sexually aroused by giving a urology lecture which i have to say

giles untrue definitely someone could be probably lots of people but he was assuming that obviously his colleagues would know he was not sexually excited by giving this lecture. So he said, here I am. I have just injected myself. And voila. And he turned to the side. He was wearing track pants. The idea was that the track pants would be thin enough to show tenting. And according to various accounts of the event, he like shuffled around a little bit, trying to be like trying to get the track pants to display what they were meant to display. And then ultimately gave up and pulled his pants down. Now, some account of the event will have you believe that there were like gasps of horror,

but others and I kind of find this more plausible are like his colleagues were like, oh, fascinating. Can we get a closer look? Like, wow, he's really done it. And suffice to say, however the initial reaction went, like this was a groundbreaking find, it did lead to, you know, the use of injectables as a treatment for ED. And he certainly was not like drummed out of urology circles. So I have to imagine that the way it played out was a lot more like consensual and enthusiastic than some of the more. over the top

dramatizations that have been written down of that night. Though if you want to imagine one woman in Taffet address screaming and fainting, like I think that's fine. And so yeah, of course, these days we have luckily treatments for erectile dysfunction that do not require

self-injection like Viagra, which we have talked about on the show previously. But Giles Brinpenter's Lee's work and his commitment to sharing it, I think was a really important step in changing the way that his colleagues thought about the problem of erectile dysfunction. And these days we know there are so many reasons why your body might not physically cooperate even if you are like, I really would like to be doing this physical thing. And of course, the mental side of that is important. And sometimes when you investigate that

mismatch, you might realize you're actually, like, you don't really want to be having that kind of sex or sex with that person or that kind of sex with that person right at that moment. But sometimes you investigate it and you're like, no, I do. And I think one thing I really try to, to get across in my book is that what's important is that you're like compassionate with yourself and your partners and communicative and curious and really as as non-judgmental and non-catastrophizing about this stuff as possible even though it can definitely be frustrating because, you know, just feeling bad or making other people feel bad or trying to push through things not really working the way they're supposed to. That's just going to send you into a spiral.

So instead, you know, take a beat, talk, laugh, maybe get some Viagra. If you need it, talk to a doctor. That's fine. It's all good. And, yeah, we have Giles Brinley to thank. Thank you, Giles. Thank you, Jiles. I'm still stuck on the fact he was wearing sweatpants in a room full of tap it away.

Yeah. I'm like, wait. You must have known something weird was about to happen if, like, a man looks like he's going from the gym at the function. at the function. Right. And everyone else is in their taffat dresses and their tuxedos. Exactly. There was an especially sharp contrast.

Did he have a tux shirt on top, like a tux on top and track pants on the bottom? You know, off the top of my head, I don't remember how the rest of his outfit was described. I will, on the, in the article for this episode at popside.com slash weird, I will link to some of my favorite kind of accounts of the night because I do think that some people did describe his whole outfit. I'm picturing like a like a track suit like Florida retirement speedwalker style, but I'm not sure how accurate that is. So that might just be what I, what I, the head canon I created along with the one fainting lady in a taffin a dress. Okay, cool. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back and Laura, let's talk about blowing stuff up. All right, so

a little bit of backstory here. For the vast majority of Americans and pretty much for the world, we didn't know anything about nuclear energy until August of 1945, which is when the American military drops two atomic bombs on cities in Japan to bring about an end of World War II. And so that's kind of a hell of an introduction for a lot of people. And there's really two parts to this. One, you've got the immediate effects, horrifying levels of destruction and death. You've got cities that have been flattened. People are dead and burned and sick and getting sicker in some cases. So you can understand why when scientists and the government wanted to get people on board with harnessing atomic energy for peacetime purposes, the public was understandably a little bit skeptical.

The other part of this equation comes to light shortly after the war, and that's the incredible secrecy that surrounded the Manhattan Project. We spent a lot. $2 billion and thousands of people had been employed by this project, but other than the people who are working on it, nobody knew about this until August 1945. That makes sense. We're fighting a war. We don't want the Nazis to know what we're doing, you know, that whole defeating fascism thing. But that kind of secrecy in general makes people uncomfortable, as we well know here in conspiracy-ridden America. And one of the historians I spoke with, a woman named Sarah Roby, who teaches history at Idaho State University, she pointed out that it was profoundly anti-democratic. And after the war,

the need for that kind of secrecy is not as pressing. Plus, we're really trying to emphasize American values, transparency, government by the people, et cetera, in contrast to the Soviet Union. So if you're going to make this turn into using nuclear energy for good, you've got to address both those problems. And the president at the time that all this is going down is Dwight D. Eisenhower, I like Ike. And he and his administration realized that they needed to be more transparent. And this is what leads to the Adams for Peace program, which kicks off in December of 1953 with a speech at the UN by Eisenhower. He spends much of that time talking about the dangers of atomic weapons and his concerns over the threat they posed worldwide.

But he emphasized that he wanted to declassify many of the things. the secrets that had been kept during the war and establish an international agency that would help advance peaceful uses for nuclear energy, like abundant electricity, medical uses, transportation, and then there was a program known as Project Plowshare. And now we're going to have a little Bible verse, Isaiah 2.4. They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war. anymore. It's a little disingenuous because we were definitely still pursuing war and building all kinds of bombs and artillery, but the meat of this is the swords into plowshares part.

Project Plowshare was essentially a plan to turn our swords, or nuclear explosives, into plowshares, by using them to create big public works projects. So the commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission, which is the precursor of the Department of Energy, went so far as to say that pound for pound, nuclear explosives not only produced more energy, this is true, but they were easier and safer to place and handle. Probably also true. I mean, you know, dynamite wasn't like super easy to maneuver and it was pretty delicate. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, but it kind of ignores the back end of things with the radioactivity part of the equation. Yeah, I read that and I was like, hmm. Yeah. You don't have to like bury dynamite for 10,000 years hoping nobody finds it. Yeah.

Right, exactly. And, you know, if you're in the blast radius, you might get hurt, but if you're outside of it, chances are you're not going to get poisoned unless there's, like, arsenic in the ground, maybe, and it ends up in the water supply. I don't know. Anyway, so the other argument for plowshares was that if the U.S. didn't do it and help other nations do it, too, then the Soviet Union would step in and lend their services. And the Soviets had just offered to help Egypt build the Aswan High Dam. So there was really, there was a lot of concern about this. And in fact, the Soviets did start their own version of plowshares in 1965. So you can also think of plowshares as sort of a soft power exercise, except one using kind of hard power. Yeah, it's a delicate line that they're trying to walk there. The program's champions envisioned a world in which peaceful nuclear explosions could be used to excavate harbors and canals, extract oil and gas, create aquifers, that'll be safe, and build roads.

among many other things. And the biggest goal of the whole program was to create a new Atlantic Pacific Canal, or at least widen the existing Panama Canal. That canal had started to be less than useful in the then modern era of shipping. You know, ships were getting bigger. There was more cargo going through. So if the U.S. could come up with an alternate route or improve the existing one, this would be a great way to highlight the potential of project plow shares to the rest of the world. However, a little problem here. Detonating nuclear bombs, even for peaceful purposes, doing that overseas wasn't going to be all that acceptable

unless the U.S. could demonstrate the effectiveness of doing it at home. So first, we had to do some projects here in the U.S. And with that in mind, one of the first projects on the Atomic Energy Commission's docket was in 1958. It was called Project Chariot. And it kind of illustrates the arrogance and the hubris around this whole idea. The AEC drew up a plan to bury and detonate multiple hydrogen bombs to create a harbor at Cape Thompson on the Chukchi Sea in northwest Alaska. Theoretically, because of all the coal and the oil in the region, the harbor would be ideal for exporting those items. Practically, there would be a boatload of problems.

The coal-bearing regions weren't all that close and would require building an expensive transportation system, The harbor would be iced over at least half the year, maybe nine months. The indigenous populations used that area as their hunting and fishing grounds. The blast itself would have been incredibly destructive to everything in the surrounding region. The science on the release of radioactivity was unclear. That to me seems like a big one. And the scientists and the bureaucrats pushing the project had no real understanding of the ecology of the region. Of course they did it.

No, they didn't. In fact, the guy who was pushing this was. kind of a jerk and I'm forgetting I'm blanking on his name right now so I'll have to look that up it doesn't really matter because when someone said to him hey this is an area where the indigenous population does a lot of fishing and hunting and he's like I don't care that they're hunters or fishermen I'm going to turn them into coal miners oh yeah um-hmm winner winner chicken dinner that guy was awesome for some reasons yeah um so and then the other issue is that rushes is pretty close by. They can see Russia from their house, to quote Sarah Palin, and things

weren't exactly sunshine in rainbows with the Russians at that moment in time. So, you know, setting off bombs in that area might have sparked some real problems as well. So in short, this whole thing was completely impractical and it was not the benefit to humanity that the AEC had touted it as. Eventually, the project is halted in 1962, but it takes four years to get this thing shut down. And like the AEC was. was fighting for it the whole way. Wow. So then there's a proposal for something called Project Carriol, which would have used 22 nuclear explosive devices to cut a channel through the mountains of California to help build the interstate and move the Santa Fe Railroad to a different location.

All total, those 22 devices would amount to about 1.7 megatons of explosive force. For contrast, Hiroshima was 15,000, about 1% of that force. according to the AEC's calculations, it would be much cheaper than excavating by conventional means. Again, like, not really factoring in all the costs, maybe. Like, sure, cheaper than digging it out by hand, but maybe not as much, I don't know. That their math, their math seems a little off. They're leaving things out of their equation. And then they said that 90% of the radiation would be trapped in the debris.

Well, the rest of it would just settle back. to Earth within a five-mile radius of the blast site. So, you know, magic. Debris, which famously goes nowhere. Yeah. What's debris? Radiation. Yeah.

Radiation never washes downstream or there's no prevailing winds that might blow it somewhere. Just lands gently, like a little bit of glitter. Like rain, like a soft, glowing rain. Oh, my gosh. So, I know. Then in 1963, the U.S. signs the nuclear, test ban treaty, which bans nuclear tests that could lead to radioactive debris crossing international borders. It prohibits testing in the atmosphere, the ocean, and above ground. Underground

was okay, which they did keep doing. They did a lot of underground tests, but only if nations could guarantee that none of the radiation would escape. So this kind of brings an end to Project Carriol, the project to cut through the mountains, and then really kind of kills the idea of the Atlantic Pacific Canal because there's no way you're going to be able to keep radiation from crossing borders with something like that. But even if the plan to build things with nuclear explosives was dead, the AEC still had great ideas. Americans' energy needs were going up, and the oil and gas industry wanted to meet growing demand. What if we could use nuclear explosives to extract natural gas and oil from deep underground? This is a good idea, right? Mm-hmm. One of these

experiments took place in Colorado, which is where I live, it was called Project Rulison. And in Rulison, Colorado, scientists detonated a nuclear bomb underground to free natural gas trapped in the rock. This is sort of like the precursor of fracking. Right. Yeah. It worked, but the gas was so contaminated with radioactivity that it couldn't actually be used. Oh my word. Who could have predicted that? I did not see that kind. So these are only a handful of the projects that were considered over the roughly 20-year period that this was going on. All total 27 actual devices were detonated as part of the program. And near as I can tell, the gas extraction ones were the ones that could be considered the most successful.

Although scientists did learn some things from other tests, including that the Beringer Crater in Arizona, which you can visit, was caused by a meteor and not by a volcano. They could tell this from like patterns and explosions. Ultimately, Project Plowshare proved too difficult and perhaps more than a little half-baked. The whole thing was defunded in 1978, although similar ideas still crop up every now and then, like the time a former American president, I'll let you guess which one, repeatedly floated the idea of nuking a hurricane to prevent it from making landfall. This wouldn't work.

Yeah, I think we actually wrote a news item about why we can't just nuke her. games. Yeah. A real era of writing things like, no, you shouldn't drink bleach. Great times. Really fun. Yeah. So that's, that's, that's my story.

That is so wild. I mean, you know, obviously, like I understand conceptually that we knew so much less about nuclear fallout and. decay than we do now. I know we really put the cart in front of the war crime horse with that one and we really were just like trying to figure out what this stuff did and how it worked. But even so, like it boggles the mind to imagine ostensibly rational people being like, well, yeah, we'll just use it for all the other stuff we use to blow, like that we need stuff

that blows stuff up. And also, we'll then extract gas that's full of nukes and we'll burn that in our cars and homes. And that'll be great. What could go wrong? Yeah. I'm just like going to yeah. I mean, I appreciate, I appreciate the enthusiasm they had. And I know that many of them, like their hearts were in the right place. They really wanted to find useful uses for this. Sure. Yeah. For this stuff. Because it was so powerful. And pound for pound, it was so much more efficient than a lot of the other fuels out there. But yeah, it was really wild west at that time period. Um, no pun intended. And they were just, they're like, let's, let's see what we can do with this. Like, I mean, there were discussions about nuclear powered airplanes. Oh my God. There were like,

there's just all kinds of bonkers ideas that like, you know, a few years later and like millions of dollars later, people are like, huh, well, that didn't work. Okay. Next. Well, and I guess, Right. Yes. And like, you know, it was all also, you know, happening in the context of the Cold War, which was definitely strikes me as like a no bad ideas era. Because they were like, we got to, look, we got to be the first to do a bunch of cool stuff. And we don't even know what the cool stuff is going to be.

So just, let's just spitball. Yeah. We just, we want to make sure the other countries like us more than they like those guys. Yeah. You know, there's things we got MK Ultra. There's a lot of stuff that it's just like literally why did you think that was going to work? No one knows. They just, they were like, we can't say it won't work.

Maybe we'll be able to control minds. Do you want to be the guy who said no to the experiment that would have made us able to control minds? So. What if we'd been able to do it? Yeah. Then how would you feel? So what was the weirdest thing? we learned this week.

I mean, nuclear bombing like half of Alaska really is going to sit with me for a while. Yeah, that's fair. It's really just that is on a whole another scale and really says a lot about the history of American

innovation. So I'm with you. Laura, I think you are this week's winner. Yes. I feel so special. You are special. Thank you so much for joining us. This has been great. And listeners, don't forget to check out Wild Thing wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much for having me. Hey! 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 read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find.

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