The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Animal Prostitution, Pavlovian Pee Responses, Painful Ginger Genes
Episode Date: April 17, 2019The weirdest things we learned this week range from monkeys selling sex to a physiological explanation of peeing involving bagpipes. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"?... 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! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- 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
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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 dummies and a lot more.
And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest.
It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box.
Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100 day satisfaction guarantee.
And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest.
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.
Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.
It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for burner gas grill on special buy for only $199.
And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499.
This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.
While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th.
U.S. only exclusions apply.
See Home Depot.com slash price match for details.
Then the male penguins were like, oh, you're here for sex.
And the female penguins like, uh, sure.
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 Learn this week from the editors of popular science.
I'm Rachel Fultman.
I'm Claire Maldarelli.
And I'm Jason Letterman.
So on The Weirdest Thing I Learn this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of factor story that we came across in the course of writing, editing, shooting video, for example.
And then we 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.
Jason.
Welcome back.
It's been a while.
I know.
I'm so glad to be here.
Great.
Why don't you start with your teas?
Sure.
I would like to talk about why some people have to pee the moment that they get home.
This has never happened to me, but it's happened to my roommates.
There you go.
Everybody knows someone who it happens to.
Until it happens to you.
Okay, Claire, what's your tease?
Redheads might need more dental numbing medication than other people.
Interesting.
My tease is that given the right prompting, monkeys will invent the concept of prostitution.
Yes.
I mean, how can you not go first with the teas like that?
Great.
So I first got the idea for weirdest thing, because I've always been a repository for weird facts.
A friend of mine in middle school actually referred to me as like the wall of random facts or something, which I think was a reference to some sports thing I didn't care about at the time.
But thanks, Mike Riggins.
Anyway, I'm often like surprised that people don't know these stories and facts.
I know.
But it's no one's fault.
I know too many of them.
And that's what this show is for.
So the other day I was getting a drink with some fellow roller derby officials after a practice.
And someone mentioned an old study where people gave monkeys money.
And I was like, yes, and then they invented prostitution, which surprised even me.
That's a fact I forgot. I knew.
So I decided to look back into this story and find out more so I could share it with you all.
So the first thing to understand is that monkeys do love capitalism.
They understand money.
In 2008, there was this study where researchers wanted to see how monkeys, not apes, could handle economic concepts.
So whereas apes like chimps are close.
closest cousins, evolutionarily speaking. They had common ancestors with us six to seven million
years ago. Monkeys had their last common ancestor with us 35 million years ago. So yes,
all primates are closely related, relatively speaking, to the rest of the animal kingdom. But
like, monkeys are very different from humans. So a lot of things that we assume apes will kind
of understand if we give them the right information, monkeys might not. So Elsa Addessi at the
Italian National Research Council in Rome.
She and her colleagues trained Capuchins, the very like quintessential famous monkey,
like the one on friends, to associate.
Marcel.
Marcel.
To associate valueless tokens, like money, of different shapes and sizes with specific foods.
So like a poker tip might have been representative of a piece of dried fruit and, you know,
a brass hook might have been parmesan cheese.
These are the examples that were.
I need so many brass huts all of this.
Just a pile of brass hooks.
And with very little training, these monkeys shopped with experimenters who gave them cheaper food.
Oh.
Interesting.
So they very quickly came to understand how to get a good deal.
Deal.
Yeah.
But actually, an even earlier study on monkeys and money in 2005 found out something a little freakier.
They have some great quotes from a New York Times article on the study.
So this is from Keith Chen, who was a Yale economist at the time.
and he and Lori Santos, a psychologist, were conducting this study.
And Keith said, a capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and sex.
You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want.
You can feed them marshmallows all day.
They'll throw up and then come back for more.
Same, though.
Yeah, really relatable.
Relatable stuff.
So they were able to get them to budget for, like, jello and marshmallows.
grapes with silver discs, and they followed market trends. They like, if there was a lot of
something and it was cheap, they would buy more of it. Like, yeah, they wanted to eat a bunch of
marshmallows and throw up. But like, if there was a great sale on Jello, they weren't going to
say no. And they also loved to gamble. The researchers designed like gambling games where they could
like either get a certain number of guaranteed grapes or they could like chance at getting a bunch
sure getting none at all. And they loved gambling. Again, same. Yeah. Oh, and here's one detail I
really love. There was one experiment around the same time where they used cucumbers as treats and they had
been cubed up and the research assistant happened to slice them into like discs. And so one Capuchin
picked up a slice started to eat it, but then ran over to a researcher to see if he could buy
something with it because there was a disc. He was probably really disappointed that he got
cucumber instead of marshmallow. But then Chen saw something.
that he felt really showed the monkey's true grasp of money.
In an observation that would live on in infamy,
despite the desires of Yale as a research institution,
Chen noticed that there were monkeys selling sex for silver discs.
The lady monkeys saw the market value of their sexual favors and acquired wealth.
So he felt that this show that they really did understand the concept of money.
If marshmallows doesn't.
And the monkey who was paid for sex would like immediately trade it for a grape.
Like they understood exactly what they were doing.
They were like, I am providing this service so that you will pay me and I can use it to buy grapes.
And this isn't a totally unique thing.
There was actually a 2008 study on long-tailed macaques in Indonesia where researchers saw monkeys in the wild trading grooming.
services for sex. The males would offer this payment of grooming up front as kind of a pre-sex
ritual, and they would spend less time grooming if they were more available females. Like,
the rate was lower because supply was above demand. There's no supply and demand. Basic market
economics. Yeah. But like, this is, you know, it's kind of debatable whether this is just like,
where do you draw the line between a pre-mating ritual that's designed to,
just impress a female versus like exchanging services.
Right, right.
So for the silver coins, they knew they were going to get a great, but the grooming is not necessarily a service.
Right, exactly.
And some people say that penguins practice prostitution.
Penguins, no way.
Yeah.
So there was a study, and this has been observed on numerous occasions, female penguins will sneak around on their partners, so to speak.
I don't like that we anthropomorphize and then slut shame them.
but suffice to say, some female penguins play the field.
And they'll go to unattached males.
And after they have sex with them, they usually will take a pebble from the male's nest or multiple pebbles.
And sometimes they'll just take the pebble and not have sex.
And sometimes researchers are like, actually, we think they were just trying to steal the pebbles.
But then the male penguins were like, oh, you're here for sex.
And the female penguin's like, eh, sure.
So it's kind of murky.
It may just be fevery.
Is it a scam?
Is it an aboveboard exchange of goods and services?
Who can say?
Researchers do point out that, you know, if the female is mating with the male,
even though it's not her attached partner,
there is a chance that she will have that penguin's offspring.
So it stands to benefit that male penguin that she is taking.
stones for her nest. So it may just be like, this is his small contribution if he may be
a penguin baby daddy, which is the least he could do, I guess. But yeah, apparently,
you know, some researchers do argue that this is a form of prostitution, but the number of
prostitute penguins is apparently quite low. Lower than the number of prostitute monkeys.
I'm not actually sure how common the monkey prostitution.
was in this research. But the grooming thing I mentioned from the 2008 study was very common in these macaques. Though, again, is a prostitution? I don't know. But it sure is interesting to think about economics and also sexual politics among monkeys and penguins. It's everywhere in the animal kingdom. It's the oldest profession. Indeed. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back.
Hey, weirdos. Hope you're enjoying this episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned this week. I want to tell you about another Popside podcast that you might enjoy.
It's called Techathlon.
Tech, A-T-H-L-O-N.
Every Monday, the Popside Tech team will join me, Jason Letterman,
to tell you all about the week's latest tech news
through games, trivia, and competitions
that you can play along with.
It's a crew of Popsie staffers you already know and love,
and we would love to be in your podcast feed.
Subscribe to Tech-A-A-L-N wherever you're listening
to this podcast right now.
That's Tech-A-T-H-L-O-N.
Now, back to the weirdest thing I learned this week.
Okay, we're back.
Yes, Rachel.
Please give us your fact.
Okay.
So if you recall, my tease was about people who need to pee the moment that they get home.
Yes.
So I wrote a little script.
D'aw.
For us?
Just for you guys.
And also for all of you out there in podcast land.
Some of you may be commuting and need to pee at this very moment.
Sorry.
If you don't now, you will by the end of my segment.
Great.
What a plug.
Go on.
So have you ever been on the way home and as you get closer, you notice a,
very sudden, intense need to use the bathroom.
Like you're putting the key in the door and, wow, you've never had to pee so badly in your entire life.
So it turns out that there's actually a term for this.
It's called latchkey urgency or latch key urgency incontinence.
I love terms for weird diseases.
I just want to say.
I'm 100% stealing Claire's beat because she always wins.
And I want to win.
My favorite thing is when I look up synonyms for various words,
and it turns out there's a syndrome with that word.
So I first came across latchkey urgency incontinence
or sometimes just called latchkey incontinence
in an article from Mel magazine, which I found via Reddit.
I love Mel magazine.
They're doing great stuff.
They are.
Keep it up, Mel.
Thanks, Mel.
And then I obviously went to the literature
and was able to find some stuff.
So I want to make sure to thank Professor James Malone Lee,
who authored and sent me a few.
for the papers that I read through. He's an emeritus professor of medicine at the University
College London, and he does a lot of research that focuses on urinary incontinence.
Thanks, dude. Thank you, James. So I'm positive that the term was coined before 1992,
but the first paper I was able to find it in was actually a master's thesis from the University
of Michigan in 1992. And since then, it's appeared in many books and papers, including
the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine beginning in 2010. Oh, wow, I've got to get my hands on that.
And every year or two, it ends up in a viral article and then in all of the articles that report on that article.
So it's becoming a lot more of a mainstream term online.
And there is a difference between latchkey urgency and latchkey urgency incontinence.
Right. One is where you pee yourself, I would imagine.
Correct. So urgency is just when you get to the door and you put the key in.
You're like, oh, my God, I have to pee.
And incontinence is when you do not make it.
Right.
I wrote down
A subtle but important distinction
I wrote down it's kind of in all squares or rectangles
but not all rectangles are squares situation
but with pee
True
Wow a poet
You know I try my best
For this show
So when you pee your body does two things
It squeezes the muscles around your bladder
To make it empty
And it also relaxes the sphincters within the urethra
So it's kind of like a biological bagpipe
setting the music free.
That's amazing.
Two cents.
I was particularly proud when I
wrote that line.
Wow.
So the articles that I found say that
the average person should urinate about
six to eight times a day.
It could be more.
I do not drink enough water.
It could be less.
I'm going to die.
I think I pee like three times a day maximum.
You got to stay hydrated.
You know, it's important.
A hydrated bladder is a happy bladder.
I like Jake Peralta in Brooklyn.
99. Like, actually, I start your drink water and I'm like, bored. That is the best Brooklyn
9-9 reference ever on any Popside podcast. And this is the third of three Popsie podcasts that I have
been on. Thank you, Jason. You're very welcome. Incontinance itself can be caused by several
different factors. It could be weakened bladder muscles. It could be an infection. It could be
medication or drugs. There's a lot of different things it could be. But the latchkey variety,
including urgency is a learned behavior, at least in some capacity, since it's the act of getting home that triggers the brain to tell you you need to use the bathroom.
And a lot of the sources that I've found compare it to a Pavlovian response because you're taught from a young age to associate the bathroom with urinating, which is like the correct thing.
It's just a different bodily fluid you're producing.
Correct. It's not saliva.
So your brain makes the connection that your bathroom is in your home.
And so when you're arriving home, you're arriving to the bathroom.
So if we go back to the literature again, you'll find that most of the papers that mention Lachke
incontinence are usually looking at overactive bladders.
And it makes sense that Lachkey urgency and incontinence is diagnosed as a form of overactive bladder because
you don't actually have to pee, but your brain is telling you that you have to.
So incontinence, according to the NIH, is more common in women than men and especially in post-menopausal
women, but that could be due to the way that studies are worded or that men simply don't go to
the doctor to be treated for urinary incontinence. And in fact, all of the studies that I read through
for this episode were self-reported. Right. Yeah. And self-reported studies are so tricky when
they're about things that are either potentially embarrassing or that, like, make you sound good.
So people self-reporting diet and exercise are almost always going to make themselves sound
a little healthier than they are. And people reporting things like incontinence will almost always
leave out a little bit of the incontinence.
Exactly, exactly.
Although I think these studies were pretty good.
They go through multiple rounds of Q&A.
And even one of the study found that one in five people with overactive bladder has lachkey
urgency or lachkey incontinence.
But don't worry if you're somebody who experiences this.
There are ways to retrain your bladder to reduce your latchkey urgency or lachkey incontinence.
Never use the toilet in your house.
True.
Ever again.
I should also amend this.
Never pee ever again.
Don't do that.
Don't do that.
Please urinate several times a day.
Yes.
Yes.
Six to eight times a day.
Okay.
Let's not get crazy.
I think some of our listeners are not that hydrated.
Okay.
Fair.
But do go to the bathroom multiple times a day.
So let me just amend this and say that there are ways to reduce your latchkey urgency,
assuming that there is not a larger medical issue that is ongoing,
in which case, please go see a doctor.
So these are some tips from the UK's national health service.
service, it recommends things like sitting in the car and tightening the pelvic floor muscles for
10 seconds. Pelvic floor. So those are the muscles that are like around your bladder. Yeah. They're
really important. They are really important. And once you are at your front door, stand still or
cross your legs as you open the door. Wait, really? Really. Comely put your bags down. Okay.
Comely. Calmly. Don't make any sudden.
And either stand or sit still and count to 60 before making your way to the toilet.
And then as you become more comfortable and 60 doesn't feel like that long, you can start to extend the time.
Okay.
Got it.
And that last tip is important.
Like, don't straight up try to go for an hour if this is something that you experience.
You will get some kind of bladder infection.
Right.
Small increments.
Baby steps.
Baby steps, exactly.
And then Shape also wrote an article about latchkey incontinence.
couple years ago, and they spoke with Dr. May M. Wakamatsu, who is a urogynecologist and the director of
female pelvic medicine and reconstructive surgery at MassGen. And she gave similar suggestions,
along with a few others, like try going through your house through a different door, since the
Pavlovian response that can disrupt the mechanism.
Get it. Trick that debris. Exactly. But some people may live in New York City and apartments that only
have one front door. Do not climb it through the fire escape. Instead, try to start
acting yourself with things like opening the mail or cooking dinner when you got home.
And the last thing you can do is pee before you leave your home or wherever you are going to your
home from.
Your bladder takes typically about four to six hours to fill up.
So if you have to pee after a 20-minute subway ride or even an hour-long drive, it's probably
just your brain tricking you.
Okay.
But if you pee every time before you leave, will that trigger like a pee before you leave
syndrome like needing that is that is possible i suppose yeah we don't want to start a new problem
fixing an old what's the uh leaving urgency right yeah that's a better term wow yeah i think an old
roommate that i lived with definitely had this and she would get really frustrated because i think one
of my the okay the only bad quality as a roommate of mine is that i take long showers and so sometimes
she'd get home.
She'd be like, darn it, Claire's in the shower.
I'm going to Starbucks to be.
You were helping her because you're trying to reduce her lachy urgency.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm going to text her that.
Yeah.
Really, you were just being a good roommate by taking long showers.
Okay.
So you're welcome Claire's roommate.
Wow.
Learned a lot.
On behalf of Claire.
Also, I recently wrote about the importance of exercising your pelvic floor for men and women.
And everyone.
otherwise and in between.
And you should all check it out.
We will link to it.
Popside.com.
It can help you not have to pee at awkward moments, I would say.
How does one exercise their pelvic floor?
Great question.
The thing is that women are told a lot more about this because people are like,
Hegel's.
So it's definitely a like, you want to give yourself the sensation of holding back urinating,
which isn't an exact thing.
There's a lot of debate about what the proper way to articulate the sensation you should be having is.
But it's definitely it's like a clenching, a holding sensation.
You're holding that for a few seconds, you know, maybe 10, 20 seconds if you can.
20 seconds.
That's too much. Sorry.
So and then you're-
Overachiever.
So then you're holding that for a while, maybe five to 10 seconds and releasing and then doing that a number of times again.
For men or people with penises in general, there's,
and even more debate about how to articulate it because it has historically not been articulated to them at all.
And one study I looked at for this piece found that the best description to give was to try to shorten the penis, which I don't understand because I don't have a penis.
I don't know what would go through your brain as you imagine shortening it.
But I think it's the same idea you're like tightening the public floor muscles, which are, you know, all these muscles that support your bladder and the, you know, like the sphincter around the urethra.
So, give that a shot.
Give it a go.
Yeah.
Let us know how it goes.
Love to hear.
Tighten those pelvic floors.
Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with Claire's fact.
And we're back.
And Claire, why don't you tell us about your dental pain?
Yes, thank you.
So this combines two interests of mine, I guess, my red hair because I have, well, I consider my hair Auburn, but whatever.
I also have a strange fascination with all things, dentistry, even though I have no desire to be a dentist.
I have a lot of friends who are either in the middle of dental school or have graduated.
And so I just hear about dentistry all the time.
So it has now become an interest of mine.
But also, as a redhead, which Rachel, I don't know if you being a redhead as well experience this,
but I'm told all these weird things about being a redhead.
Like, you're just different than other people.
I signed a lease yesterday for a new apartment.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And the landlord was like, wow, red hair and left-handed.
You are different.
Thank you.
Anyway, so one thing that stuck out to me that I was recently told about being a redhead was that you must have trouble at the dentist.
And I was like, no.
The dentist is my favorite place.
I floss twice a day.
Claire is really serious about teeth.
She has special dental floss.
I do.
It expands once it reaches between your teeth so that it gets extra plaque.
I finally got it and it's really good.
Rachel, you did?
Yeah. Oh my gosh. It's a way more satisfying flossing experience. It's cocoa floss, right? Coco floss. And there's also Dr. Tongues. They do the same mechanism. Dr. Tongs. I actually prefer Dr. Tongs. I know Joe Brown, our EIC, prefers cocoa floss. So I can give you a sample of Dr. Tongue. Great. Okay. I just use floss picks.
Wow. Your teeth are going to fall out. Way to live in the past. All right. So back to redheads and dental pain.
I was like, what?
And this acquaintance of mine went on to explain that he had heard that people who have red hair don't respond to the lytocaine used to numb our nerves before we get our teeth drilled into.
As it turns out, there's actually been a lot of data on this.
Studies show that on average, people with red hair tend to need more lytocaine than people with black or dark hair.
And this is really surprising to me.
I know that there's been a lot of research on redheads and pain.
but I never really found it in dentistry or I never really found the mechanism behind it.
So I was very curious about this.
And just because I love dentistry, I have a little side, fun fact about dental anesthesia.
The very first dental anesthesia was actually not lytocaine.
It was cocaine.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
Yes.
Dentists started using it to numb people's mouth starting in the late 1880s.
Prior to that, they didn't use any numbing tools at all.
Like it was just not a thing that you would use when you went to the dentist.
You'd just suck it up and deal with the pain.
Back in the good old days.
Back in the good old days.
I do have one friend who gets like a lot of cavities and she has never had like maybe one time.
The first time she had a cavity, she used anesthesia.
And after that, she's like, no, I just want to take the pain.
To like encourage her to not get more?
Um, I don't know.
That's a great question.
Alice Skeuse, get it back to us.
It wasn't until the early 1900s when they started using Novakane, which turned out to have a bunch of different side effects but was marketed so well that now we just think of Novakane as what we still get at the dentist today.
But it was actually later replaced with lytocaine, which is now the standard numbing medicine that dentists use.
But it was cocaine that started all of modern dentistry.
Wow.
Yes.
Anyway, back to red hair.
Researchers think that redheads tend to be more sensitive to the people.
pain associated with dental procedures.
So red hair is actually one of the rarest hair colors.
It only affects...
I literally wrote that.
Are you or someone you love affected by red hair?
Oh, boy.
Red hair is actually one of the rarest hair colors.
Only up to 2% of the world's population has this hair color.
And to have it, a person needs to inherit a mutation in a gene called the MC1.
our gene, which is responsible for pigmentation, and it usually gives way to the production of a
substance called fio melanin, which then results in red hair and fair skin. But that same gene is also
responsible researchers have found not just for hair color and skin pigmentation, but also for how our
bodies respond to pain. It turns out that this is one of the first times that differences in how
people respond to pain has been found in humans. In one paper, the researchers note that
Various animal species, including mice, nematodes, and fruit flies, all have shown some degree
of genetic variation that contributes to anesthetic requirements, but the same association has not yet
been established in humans. So for humans, whenever we need anesthesia, it's always based on age
and body weight, and that's essentially all they use. But what researchers are finding, anecdotally,
is that some people either need more than others or less than others. And so the question is why. And one of the
reasons could be this red hair mutation.
Wow.
That same study that started with the nematode and fruit flies example found that anesthetic
requirement in redheads was increased by 19% in their cases.
Wow.
That's a lot.
A difference that was so highly statistically significant that its P value is 0.004.
Oh, that's a good P value.
It's one of the best.
A plus.
For people who don't know in statistical analysis,
a P value of 0.05 is considered, like, statistically significant.
And if you ever see a finding and there's a P value that's higher than that, they're just making stuff up.
But the lower it is.
Oh, boy, the better.
The better.
So 0.004.
I mean, just make a cake.
So the results confirm anecdotal clinical impressions that anesthetic requirement is greater in redheads.
And it's not just in dental.
anesthesia either. This mutation in the gene appears to influence the body's overall sensitivity
to pain, although more studies are needed because the exact mechanism that gives way to this
hasn't really been found. But a 2004 study showed that redheads require on average about
20% more general anesthesia than people with dark hair or blonde coloring. And in 2005, researchers
found that redheads are also more resistant to the effects of local anesthesia. That's not just for
dentistry, but also for things like dermatology. How this mechanism unfolds, though, is still not
entirely clear, which makes me so mad because I just love mechanisms so much. But there really just
haven't been enough studies on this. They've only found, you know, anecdotal evidence. And it's only
been of recent that dentists and anesthesiologists have come together and said, okay, there is
something about people with this color hair that is different. But at least for now, the urban
legend has somewhat been cleared such that there's been a bunch of articles anecdotally about
redheads that journalists have written that say that people with red hair have all of this
dentistry anxiety so they hate going to the dentist because they obviously potentially feel
more pain than other people do and dentists you know if they hadn't realized this they
won't give them more anesthesia because they think that or more a numbing medication because
they think that they've given them enough because it's sort of like the standard protocol so going
forward being able to look at these genetic differences and say, you know, these play a role and it's
not just your weight or your age or sex that are determining how much anesthesia you need because
it's really important for surgery and cavities. Yeah. I personally, as a redhead, I think, I guess I
I haven't had too many dental procedures, but. Because you have that Dr. Tongues Floss. But, you know, I
think it's interesting, interesting to note, and I'll try to take note of it the next time I have a cavity,
which hopefully will be never.
Rachel, have you found this to be?
I don't know if A, you have had any cavities because you use Dr. Tongues and cogo floss.
I had one cavity ever.
Also, like, my natural hair color is red-ish, but I don't think, I'm not like a classic, like,
freckled redhead.
Right.
So I doubt I have.
of that gene mutation.
The mutation.
But, yeah, I certainly, I was fine with the lytocaine for what it's worth.
Yeah.
Also, I mean, thinking about the fact that there's so much research on how doctors take pain
less seriously when it comes from women, especially women of color, of course, but women
in general as well.
So I'm just imagining how many women, both who have the redheaded mutation and who
have, like, other gene pain issues that we don't know about yet, who even
if they know to say, like, please give me more, this hurts.
Right.
You probably don't listen.
Yeah, there was one really good article in the New York Times recently that basically
that was talking about pain and it basically said pain should be taken at face value.
That if someone says they're in pain, that means they're in pain.
You shouldn't think that they're not.
Yeah.
Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week?
I don't know.
I feel like having to pee when you walk through the door.
Yeah.
The Pavlovian pee response is definitely.
It's pretty great.
The Pavlovian pee.
So, yeah, I think, Jason, I think you have it.
Oh, thank you very much.
Oh, anytime.
That's not true.
We're going to beat you the next time you come on.
Yeah, I'm highly competitive.
Can't wait.
I'll come back with a good disease.
Mark my words.
And it worked.
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 iTunes.
It helps other weirdos find the show.
You can buy our merch, include.
including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.threadlist.com.
Our show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Thaltman, and our editors, Jess Bodie, and Jason Letterman.
Our theme music is by Billy Cadden.
If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing.
Thanks for listening, Weirdos.
Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.
At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.
fit for your ambition for citizens back.
Some follow the noise.
Bloomberg follows the money,
because behind every headline is a bottom line.
Whether it's the funds-fueling AI
or crypto's trillion-dollar swings,
there's a money side to every story.
And when you see the money side,
you understand what others miss.
Get the money side of the story.
Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com.
