The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Astrology’s Hidden Sign, Ancient Brunch, The Uncanny Valley

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

The weirdest things we learned this week range from eating poison oak to creepy animated babies.  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 Sara Kiley Watson: www.twitter.com/SaraKileyWatson Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- 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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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Hey, weirdos, Rachel here. Before we start this week's episode, I just want to let you know about a couple of pretty exciting pieces of news in the weirdest thing universe. First, you're going to see some changes in your weirdest thing feed. But don't worry. Don't freak out. Change can be good.

We are getting a brand new logo. So keep an eye out for a familiar yet unfamiliar new icon in your feed. We wanted to give you a heads up so you don't think weirdest thing has gone missing or you've accidentally downloaded some new bizarre thing. It's the weirdest thing. You'll find us. I trust you. You're smart people.

You know, the podcast has been around for a few years now and it's time for a little bit of a refresh. And now is the perfect time for us to debut a new logo because we are getting a new sister show. It's called Ask Us Anything and it features some of your favorite weirdest thing cast and crew members. Ask Us Anything is a super short, bite-sized, delicious, delectable podcast that dives into answering questions you have been asking for years and questions you didn't even know you had. Why can't we grow to be 10 feet tall? Is it possible to boost your immune system, etc? Anyway, ask us anything is coming into your world in just a couple of weeks

and to make things super simple for you and because we know you're going to love it, we are going to post the first episode right here in the weirdest thing feed. So keep an eye out for that and definitely give it a listen when it shows up. Okay, that's all the news for now. So let's get into the show. 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 Sarah Kylie Watson. So on the weirdest thing I learn this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in course of reading, writing, reporting, living thrilling quarantined lives, 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. Sarah Kylie, why don't you start with your teas? Okay, so mine is about the ice age origins of some of our favorite brunch foods. Oh. What's everyone's favorite brunch food? I feel like that's an important. I feel like I can't give mine away. Yeah.

Bloody Mary's. Oh, hell yeah, Jess. Bloody Mary's. True. I'm also, but like, I enjoy, like, in theory, a Bloody Mary, but it's been so long since I went to a restaurant where I didn't have to keep asking them to make it spicier and then, like, add a bunch of salt to it myself.

And there's something weird about putting salt in a cocktail, but with a Bloody Mary, it's necessary. Anyway, so we all drink our brunch that's established. Perbino, what's your tease? I will be talking about the black sheep constellation that's been forgotten for thousands of years that may change all of our horoscope charts. Ooh. Spooky. Intriguing.

My tease is that I recently saw a meme going around TikTok, as you may remember from our last episode, I spend a lot of time on TikTok now. I find it very soothing, which I know is not how many people think of TikTok, but it is when what you're used to is Twitter. So I keep seeing people being like the existence of the uncanny valley, which is where seeing something that looks almost human makes us uncomfortable, implies that we once had to be wary of beings that looked almost exactly like us. And it's always presented as like almost like a short horror story. And I'd like to unpack that. Well, why don't we start with brunch? Because that's always a great way to start.

Days, life, everything. Yes. I'm really excited about this one because it has two of my favorite things and at brunch and mummies. So I'm all about that. So what we're going to start with, so this story starts about 5,000 years ago. But we're really going to start talking about it starting in 1991.

So back in 1991, two German hikers, they were a couple on a little vacation, hiking up and down the Alps, and they found this creepy corpse up in the top of the Alps between Italy and Austria, and we're basically like, what the heck is this, and called the Italian police. The Italian police came and scooped it up, put it in a coffin, and took it to their pathologists. And it was a while before we realized that this corpse was actually a 4,000-year-old or older mummy, and it took an archaeologist coming in and saying, like, okay, like, he's got all these like copper axes and things like this is not somebody that went hiking

and got lost any time in recent history. So basically that's our beginning. So meet Otsey, the Iceman, who's one of our oldest naturally preserved mummies. And he's like the opposite of an Egyptian mummy because he got so cold that he mummified. Basically, we'll tell you a little bit more about him before we dive into his brunch habits. But he's like 45 years old. He's 5'3 and 110 pounds.

so he's like the size of like a 10th grade girl. And he, his group of humans, his tribe came over into Europe during the last glacial maximum. So they're more farmers and they've got domesticated animals and domesticated plants. But they still do a little hunting because it's really cold in the Ice Age anyway, but it's especially cold in the Alps in the Ice Age. So, you know, some domesticated animals just doesn't work all the time. So they do some hunting. And a little bit about Otzi.

he's kind of a fashion icon. Like we can tell that this guy was a big deal in his, like, world. He had this big jacket that was furry and striped. He had a bear cap, which was a big deal, and he had these goat leggings. So he's wearing all of this fabulous fur. He's got all of these, like, little copper things, like tools and so on. So he's an adventure. He's like a man out about town.

But what we found out is, so he was off on an adventure, trekking in the mountains. and someone actually did murder him. So maybe it wasn't like such a big deal that the Italian police got a phone call anyway because it was a crime scene. But he got stabbed in the shoulder or with like an arrowhead, you know, shot in, you know, thousands of years ago terms. And that was 5,300 years ago. And basically we've been fascinated with this guy ever since.

Because hello, who doesn't want to know what everyone was up to 5,000 years ago in Italy? Like, that's exactly what I want to know. And since then, scientists have been. kind of looking at all of this different stuff about him. He's covered head-to-tone tattoos, so that's fascinating. He had some weird parasites in his intestines that were always curious about. But the problem was we couldn't find his stomach. Scientists could not find his stomach anywhere until around 2009.

And what they found was that his stomach was kind of like pressed up where his lungs should be. So that's weird. But beyond just that, his stomach was full, like full, full. It's not digestive food. It's just chewed up, mashed up 5,000-year-old food. So he'd been eating on the go and then got... He had been snacking before being murdered. Got killed.

We knew exactly what he was up to before death, just, you know, having a little meal. And so basically the food that was inside of his stomach, they had to thaw him out and pull out like the freeze-dried half-chued food. So as fun as yummy as that sounds. Brunch. And basically brunch. And the first thing they did was look at it under a microscope to kind of say, like, okay, what are the things here? And basically they found three big things. And one was like some kind of carbohydrate or cereal, some kind of meat, and then a lot of fat, just a lot of fat. And so they said, okay, let's do some more tests. Let's do some DNA tests and et cetera.

And basically, so I'm going to start off with the meat. So there were two different kinds of animals that they found inside of him. One was a red deer and one was an ibex, which is a mountain goat. And the red deer. deer didn't lead, we didn't find out that much stuff about the red deer through all of this fun stuff. But with the mountain goats, which they're still in the Alps, so like these guys are still hopping around the mountains doing their thing. But basically, what scientists found was that he had been eating both the meat and the fat off of the elf of that animal. So there's, it's called striation. It's like when you see lines on meat, like when it's not cooked. So you could still see that, like, I don't know how in the world they could still tell that this had lines on the meat,

but they could still see that, so it hadn't been cooked. So basically, one of his snacks had been more or less bacony goat jerky. So basically, that was part one of this meal that he had been taking on his adventure before he died. So you've got your bacon, which is pretty exciting because he needs that fat to survive in the cold, gives him lots of energy for climbing up and down the mountains. And then the second part, which is my favorite part, and probably one of the main, my favorite French foods. The carbohydrates that they found inside of him were Eichorn wheat, which is like old school, old school ancient wheat. So not the kind that you, it's no Biscuit.

Like we're not talking about flour. Like this is not, mm-mm, nothing really delicious. And they found that in his stomach. And they also found bits of charcoal. And so we already know that the meat probably was not, you know, griddled up anywhere. It's likely been like air dried or maybe even smoked, but, you know, it's not been cooked in the same way. So that gives us little hints that this, you know, carbohydrate probably was eaten in the form of some kind of delicious or maybe not even delicious at all, bread product, aka a pancake. Wow. Yay. So, yeah. And there's other things they found in his stomach. They found, he had a little salad of poisonous ferns, which was interesting too. That's kind of the big hoopla is that the earliest kind of, I guess,

real-life piece of, like, possibly food from 5,000 years ago might have been an ancient pancake. And there's all this other interesting stuff, like thinking about how it could have tasted, because, like, we also know that Otsey was lactose intolerant, so there was no butter, there was no milk, there was nothing helping out with that. It was just, like, ground up weed, probably, and cooked in however, pancakes must have been done back in the day. And also, there was something else I wanted to add. I'm trying to remember what it was. Oh, and they didn't have salt.

So whatever the bacon tasted like was probably absolutely terrible because it was just, there's no salt in Ice Age Italy, apparently. Also, like, when I think of like, I mean, like, part of what makes pig bacon delicious is like pigs are pretty fatty, right? Yeah. I don't think of a goat as being that fatty. So, like, a mountain goat? They're always doing hit workouts. Yeah. They're always like planking, basically.

I know. It is mysterious, but apparently, like, that was the, his stomach was, like, coated in a river of fat. So whatever, he must have found, like, the fattest goat on the mountain or something. I've got lots of questions for Otsey. So when he, when he comes out of mummification, make sure to ask him about his favorite way to prepare. It's why goats are so fit today, because Otsey ate all the fat ones. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. They're like, okay, we've got to get in shape because if we have too much fat, then we look too delicious. So. So how do you think he stomached those poisonous ferns? Do they think that's how he died? No, so he definitely was just straight up murdered, like a landing from the face of the earth. But so these ferns, so I talked to one of the researchers, and he was basically like, it's kind of like a supplement, like almost like a side salad. So you know when you go to like a fancy little like French brunch place and you have your whatever, and then there's just some like dressed leaves?

I'm guessing that was his version of the dressed leaves, except that. If you eat enough of them, then it's like carcinogenic. But a lot of people were eating them back in the day. But there's also another theory that basically had his, you know, little snacks, but they were wrapped up in the fern. So it's kind of like a Ziploc bag that was also a salad. So we don't really know for sure. But he definitely was munching somehow on some poisonous ferns on top of his goat bacon and ancient pancake.

Just a little a zesty amuse bouch. I definitely know, I have known people to eat poison oak. That's interesting. That's definitely a thing people do. The gall. Well, I think poison ivy and poison oak are one of those things that it's like people, some people react to them and some people don't. Or like, stealing nettles too. So like, there are people who are just like, yeah, you can eat that.

What are you talking about? But it's not like everyone can eat it. Some people would have a really bad time. Anyway, now I'm going to, I did just Google, eat Poison Oak to make sure I wasn't making this up as a concept because I just remember it from my childhood, but it is a thing that some people do. So I guess he was just, maybe he liked, he liked feeling the burn. He just needs something green and that's all that was accessible, I think, an Ice Age alps. The only fiber supplement. It's not a lush force. There's no avocado toast around. He's got to get just much.

on some fern to get that green. But yeah, so he had a little balanced, but no salt, no dairy, no nothing, just dried meat and ancient pancake brunch. And before he was, you know, killed so that we could find him and dissect his stomach thousands of years later. I would, if it meant that, like, things could go back to normal and I could, like, eat brunch with people, I would probably eat one serving of goat bacon and plain pancake, like not more than that, but I would, I would eat that. I would do that for the planet,

is what I'm saying. I would end the pandemic that way. Yeah, I was, after a while, I was like, okay, there's got to be something today that kind of correlates this with this. And I think you can buy, like, iron corn, like, oh yeah, I've had iron corn wheat. So I'm sure, like, if you just, like, could, like, reverse, like, be like, can you give me whatever product before this, whatever it is before you even put it in the box to go to Whole Foods or whatever, like, I'm I'm very curious to see how that would taste griddled up on just a rock outside. Where did you say it's grown again? So basically the people that he came from, they're nowadays in more close to the Mediterranean and stuff,

and he was just up in the Alps like on a trek. So I'd assume it's probably still down there. And I mean, it's kind of like the great granddaddy of the weeds that we know today. This is all such good food fodder for paleo-dieters. Is that still a thing? I think so, right? It is. There have also been some books that have come out, like, trying to claim that Einkorn wheat is healthier for you than modern wheat. And there isn't, to my knowledge,

any really solid evidence on that. But I have eaten it. I've had, like, bread and cookies made with it and pasta while with people who subscribe to the idea that it was better for you. And it's like, it doesn't taste worse than whole wheat. It's just like a very, like, a very, It's like eating like spelt or something, you know? It's like it doesn't taste like a refined flour product, but it's not bad. But then like, you know, if you took away also everything else that makes a pancake good, like sugar, baking soda. Any other ingredients. Yeah.

I think that's the real clincher. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. and I'm going to jump in with my fact, which, as I said, I don't have a particular TikTok user to credit with this, because I saw it like four times before it stuck in my head as like something I could talk about on the weirdest thing. But there's been this video going around, a few videos going around that kind of like create a short, creepy little intro of the uncanny valley phenomenon, which many people probably already know, is that,

the idea that, like, as animations and robots get closer to being more human-like, they make us, like, more uncomfortable. Or, like, once they get close enough, we start to be uncomfortable. And so, yeah, I've seen a few TikTok users, like, very, um, ooh, implying that this means there must have been some, like, predator early in our evolution that, like, looked human, but you had to be able to tell the different. friends. And to be clear, none of these people are implying this is about Neanderthals, and we had sex with Neanderthals. We definitely, we were trying to avoid them. We did a terrible

job. But also denozovants, like, there are a lot of early human humans who are not the same species as us who are in our DNA. So, but no, this is definitely implying, like, maybe some kind of, like, alien predator or something that looked almost human. And I do want to start by saying that I absolutely love the short story or sci-fi horror movie potential of this idea. So I am in no way trying to diss people who found the suggestion like genuinely intriguing because it is. But it's also wrong. We have really good explanations for the Uncanny Valley.

Even though we don't know which is true, we have like a wealth of potential options that don't include aliens. And alien should always probably be your last guess. So a little back. ground. What's interesting about the Uncanny Valley phenomenon is that our study of it is very new. So it was first coined as a term in 1970 by a robotics professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology named Masahiro Mori. And he published like an obscure article in an obscure Japanese journal. And he hypothesized that a person's response to a human-like robot would abruptly shake

from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain a life-like appearance. And here's a little translated quote from the paper. He said, Climbing a mountain is an example of a function that does not increase continuously. A person's altitude does not always increase as the distance from the summit decreases, owing to the intervening hills and valleys. I have noticed that, as robots appear more human-like, our sense of their familiarity increases until we come to a valley. I call this relation the uncanny valley. So the idea for people who are maybe less familiar is that there are robots that are obviously robots,

like Cyberman on Doctor Who or Crow from MSC3K, you know, not human at all. But then they get more and more humanoid. We make them look more and more human. And, you know, if you get to, like, the reboot Battlestar Galactica sylons, those are indistinguishable from humans. They don't trigger Uncanny Valley because they're played by human beings. But let's imagine that there is progress between that tin robot man and that totally indistinguishable from human person.

And on the way there, you get, like, you know, there will be those, like, videos that come out periodically of, like, a Japanese, robotics teams robot and it's like a lady talking and it's freaky. That's, we're in the uncanny valley. We're in it right now. We are capable of making robots that are human enough to wig us out and we don't really know why that's how it works. And what's really intriguing about this to me is that researchers generally weren't paying attention to the uncanny valley's psychological, neurological, or evolutionary implications until like around the turn of the 21st century. But the idea did start to pop up much earlier, more and more, among people who

worked with robotics, and then people who worked with computer-generated animation, because as their work became more advanced, it became something they had to, like, actually work really hard to avoid. A really classic example that gets thrown around about, like, the Uncanny Valley in entertainment and how it can lead to some big, fails was the movie Polar Express. So the movie, the Polar Express, of course, based on the beloved children's book, came out in 2004. And it used, like, what at the time was pretty early kind of motion capture

technology. And the resulting images were like, they looked much more photorealistic than people were used to seeing an animation, but the eyes were like dead because there was no motion capture for eyeballs and they otherwise just like didn't quite capture expressions quite right. They got closer than people were used to, but they didn't do it that well. So people like, a lot of people panned that movie for that reason. They were like, it is uncomfortable to watch this like Uncanny Valley Tom Hanks train conductor for several hours. But yeah, you know, starting around 2000, like researchers started to be like,

oh, this phenomenon that is like there's enough anecdotal evidence to support it that animation companies and robotics companies are thinking about it all the time. Like maybe, maybe that's something worth checking out in the brain. So since then, there's been a ton of research on it. And in 2015, researchers from Emory actually tried to review. all of the existing studies on the uncanny valley to determine if it's real. And by that, we mean, like, not do uncanny things freak us out because they clearly do, but whether it's true that we actually get more and more comfortable with humanoid figures as they get closer to something that seems really human, and then suddenly we drop off into being totally repulsed by them,

and then that only goes away if they truly flawlessly mimic humans. So according to their analysis, the results on this are mixed, which might mean that the relationship between our uncomfiness with some CGI figures and robots is unrelated to their humanist or lack thereof, but it could also just mean that we need more uniformity in the figures we use to test the hypothesis because it's been kind of all over the place. And another interesting thing that they pointed out in that study is that this reaction seems to be pretty relative. So a really famous early example of the Uncanny Valley was when this 1980s Pixar short called Tin Toy came out, and it featured a baby that audiences hated

because they were like, it's too realistic. But let me show you guys what it looks like. I feel like this is going to be my nightmare. Wait, you said 1920s? 80s, 1980s. Oh. No, they weren't making anything that looked realistic in the 1920s. I'm sure they were creating really nightmarish things in other ways.

So yeah, I will post this on podcast. Popside.com slash weird for everyone to enjoy. Oh, no. But. The lips are so weird. This is the baby that people were like, that's just too realistic. It's creepy. It's not realistic at all.

I really, mm-hmm. Yeah, like, I don't like it, but it's not because it trigger, I know it's not because it's triggering the uncanny valley for me. I'm like, that is very clearly a fake child. that's going to be like with me for years. Oh no, you broke Sarah Kylie. It was kind of like the Renaissance painting of a baby where it like had a man had. Like I don't even, and its body was like a pear.

I don't really know. You know what? There were some animators in the 1980s who were very proud of that and then very disappointed when audiences were horrified by it. So whether or not our discomfort actually follows this kind of mountain and valley pattern that Masahiro Mori outlined in 1970, anyone will tell you that the discomfort we feel around the so-called uncanny is very real. Like, things are creepy sometimes, especially when they look like humanoid robots. So then the question is, why does this exist? And we don't know,

but it's almost certainly not because we used to battle like humanoid alien figures. For one thing, There's evidence that other species experienced this too. There was a 2009 study on macaques that showed they reacted more negatively to realistic virtual monkey faces than to either real or completely unrealistic virtual monkey faces. This is ironic actually because black macaques trigger my uncanny value response real bad. So actually I'm going to show you those because this is an ongoing thing for me. I think about them. Sometimes I just remember that they exist and I get freaked out. I need to find a good picture, like one that really, really disturbs me.

One sec. Oh, here's a good one. Okay. Oh. I just find, I look at them and I think that monkey has a soul and inner thoughts and I don't think they're nice. Anyway, yeah, that's, uh, macaques also apparently experienced the uncanny valley. Maybe I trigger it for them. Who knows?

But this by no means proves that the monkeys were experiencing exactly the same kind of squick we do with our uncanny valley. And it also doesn't necessarily mean that it's something that developed in like a common pre-ape ancestor. Um, but it does kind of refute the idea that we're dealing with the evolutionary relic of some creepy human doppelgangers, because if it's a phenomenon that happens among multiple species, I mean, maybe monkeys also had creepy alien doppelgangers. Maybe did we all have creepy alien doppelgangers? I don't know. Evolutionary psychology is really hard, usually made up. So as mysterious as the uncanny

valley phenomenon is, we do have some really, like, reasonable logical theories about why we might find almost human things unsettling. So one possibility is that it isn't really unique to something looking human at all, but that our brains are just uncomfortable with like category ambiguity, like when we don't know whether to put something in one category or another. So, for example, not being sure whether to register something as a cartoon face or like a living human who you're about to interact with. but there is this theory that like it's it's not specifically that it looks like a human it's just that your brain is like

we we have very different ways of proceeding with this interaction if this is real or not real and I don't know where to put it other theories hold that we might be freaked out because an imperfect robot seems like a human whose behavior doesn't quite add up like someone whose facial expressions seem ingenuine or like psychopathic. So a robot or animation that looks human enough might suddenly trigger something in our brain that like raises our expectations for its behavior. And that prompts us to look out for cues that it might be like masking its true emotions or acting erratically or otherwise just like doing things that should make us wary of it. Relatedly, it's possible that the more human something seems, the more triggered we are to

look for signs of possible illness because the closer something is to be in our own species, the more likely we are to be able to catch whatever it has. So if something looks like jerky or like kind of dead-eyed, we might be having a reaction that's like, I don't want that. And then related to this is the idea that all of these feelings might stem from our evolutionary need to be wary of corpses, not just because they might carry disease, but because the predator that killed them might be nearby. I read this really interesting paper from 2010 that I'll link to on poptie.com slash weird, which basically implied that the most unsettling thing for us is a freshly dead mutilated human corpse accompanied by sudden movement because when we see a freshly dead

mutilated human corpse, our brain tells us we better stay away from whatever killed that thing. And then when we see sudden movement, even if it's, you know, we're thinking with our lizard brain at this point. So even if it's the corpse, which is actually a Disney cartoon that's moving, our brain says, oh, God, the predator. So the start of every zombie movie ever. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, what's happening according to this theory, I think there's no way to prove any of these definitively really, but they're, interesting to think about. And they're all, like, pretty plausible. So I'm satisfied. But this one might be

my favorite because I love, I love ways that, like, our wires get crossed because, again, we think with, like, such really basic ancient parts of our brains when it comes to avoiding danger, avoiding death. Because, you know, we're doing things that have kept us alive for tens of thousands of years or longer. And so, yeah, this idea that, like, there is equation and it's like corpse plus freshly dead plus movement and that equals we are definitely about to get eaten. And so yeah, that would that would in theory explain why a robot that screams like almost human but kind of flat and lifeless and also moving makes us really unsettled and also of course makes me think of zombie movies. So yeah, just like fascinating stuff.

Again, no definitive answers here, but also it's only really recently that scientists actually started thinking about the Uncanny Valley because it's only really recently that we were confronted with how uncomfortable we are in these scenarios. And I think that's fun. I wonder if every time Boston Dynamics puts out a video of dog-like robots doing flips and tricks, people think it's so charming. But replace those dogs with human-like robots, I'd love to see. their reaction. Especially if they were still like scuttling. That just makes me think of like a resident evil. Like, I don't know.

I feel like there must be some human dog scuttling backwards in some video game. Anyway. I feel like they could have made like the Westworld show a complete comedy if they had taken this into account. Like this has been like, everyone is just freaking out all the time when Evan Rachel Williams or whatever her name is like walks on the screen. It's just like they do not know if she's going to eat her or not.

That's just the uncanny valley for you. Yeah, well, and that's the other thing is that like, you know, when we, it's always interesting when we have, you know, movies where life-like robots are played by people, because of course they are, because they're not going to trigger the same weirdness. We would feel in a real situation with a robot that, look that life like. And, yeah, lots to think about here. But probably not aliens. It's funny, when you were talking about how we look for signs of sickness in something human-like's face, I thought you were going to say, like, out of empathy so we could help them. But it's really the

opposite. Oh, yeah, no, unfortunately. There's also, like, there's been, you know, it's all, like evolutionary psych stuff, which again, like, there are some very brilliant evolutionary psychologists, but there's also a lot of really crap research in that field, but it's also just like, you can't go back and ask why people did what they did tens of thousands of years ago. So it's hard to really nail down any of those hypotheses. But I have read some interesting research about the idea that like a lot of our really like negative inherent biases, like racism and like nationalism and tribalism come down to just like a drive to like not let any outside germs in, which of course is not an excuse for any of those implicit biases. But, and in fact,

you know, a more highly evolved human could probably overcome them and, you know, wash their hands every once in a while. But I do think it is like that that feels like one of the more like plausible theories to me that like one of the reasons we're so um good at forming these really destructive little groups is that we're like the zone is contained no no outsiders cough on us now please it used to be really hard to be alive in a lot of ways we have it uh we have it really good so all right we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back for one more fact Okay, we're back. And Perbita, tell us about the stars. Ooh, the stars. Well, I'm going to be real and say that I'm very out of my element when it comes to talking about horoscopes.

I know why they exist and what my basic star sign is. And if anyone wants to give their interpretation on what that means for free, then I'll listen. But beyond that, I haven't devoted much brain space to astrology, especially because, because what we follow here in Western cultures is different from what Hindus and people in Eastern cultures follow, but that's a whole topic in itself. So I was pretty surprised by this visceral reaction I had to an icebreaker during a recent Zoom call. Basically, the leader of the call posted this flashy new horoscope chart that had a 13th sign on it, and that shifted the calendar for everyone, because you're adding another sign. and it's not evenly divided into 12 parts.

This was very triggering for people, and it took up way more of the meeting than an icebreaker should. But I was interested in the rumors that helped spark the creation of this chart. So first, just a little background, and you all probably know this, especially Jess, who I know has a Twitch streaming channel that has an astrology theme on it. Check out Jess' Twitch streaming channel. What's the name again?

It's just Capricorn since I'm a Capricorn. Okay, sorry. Thank you for the plug. I only like astrology memes, but I love astrology memes. So I can't say I'm not into astrology because like the one, like, form I like it in. I love it, so. Well, you got to add them to the meme Slack channel we have at work. Oh, yeah, it's true.

Anyway, a little background on astrology. Of course, it's based on the positions of the sun and the stars in the night sky. People have been tracking the celestial bodies and how they fall in the sky for millennia. This goes back to the ancient Babylonians, maybe even further back than that. And they did this not only because it was accessible to them, but because it helped them explain how the world worked. You know, while superficial me might look at my horoscope today, to explain why I ate a bag of M&Ms that was supposed to last me five days.

Back in Babylonian times, they were using the positions of the sun and the stars to know when the Nile River would overflow its banks and water their crops. So they could just have food to subsist. The charts that we use today, at least in the Western world, come from Greek readings of the constellations. So all the zodiac signs were familiar with, Capricorn, Aquarius, Leo, these come from Ptolemy and his astronomer buddies. So we have 12 signs, and that fits very nicely with most typical annual calendars. But if you track what's actually happened over the world, over 3,000, or even the last 2,000 years, the sun doesn't really fall on the constellations the way that our ancient beings used to see it. The Earth's axis has shifted slightly. I think that this has mostly affected

Leo and when in the year the sun passes through that constellation. So it's not the same timing that was chosen many millennia ago. And that means that some parts of the chart are already out of whack. Now, every few years, we get this buzz around a 13th zodiac sign on the internet that NASA has apparently conspired to hide from the masses. But last year, NASA finally put its foot down and issued a statement about this supposed 13th sign, which is really interesting because I feel like NASA is the fun aunt who rarely ever disciplines or corrects you. So you could really tell that this got on the agency's nerves.

But yeah, that explanation is actually pretty simple and controversial in its own way. In modern times, there's kind of been this. division between astrology and astronomy, with one being seen as more of a psychological interpretation of how people feel and how they relate to the stars and to nature, while astronomy is more about how the universe is crafted and how it works. So NASA's whole route was, we study astronomy, not astrology, but we're going to get to the bottom of this. The 13th Zodiac sign is what people call Opherson. This relates to an actual constellation we see in the night sky.

I looked up like the little line drawings, and it's supposed to resemble a male presenting figure who's wrestling a snake that's wrapped around his loins. It's actually very seductive as far as constellations go. Oh, ho ho ho ho. In terms of positioning from our earthly perspective, Ophiakas falls between circumstances. Sagittarius and Scorpio. So on the calendar, that would be November 29th to December 17th. Again, if we add a new zodiac sign and divide the year up into 13 parts. So the rumors of this, again, go back to the Babylonians. They had recorded, and I don't know if they called it Ophiakis or something else, because that sounds like a Greek name, but they had recorded this

in the night sky. Because they already had a calendar that was divided into 12 parts, though, they were like, well, we don't want to add a prime number in there, so let's keep it simple. They just pretended like Ophiakus didn't exist when it came to astrology and ended up only assigning the 12 zodiac signs. But if you go back and look at ancient Babylonian texts, this missing constellation pops up, and people wonder what that means. If you want it to mean, something in your life, that's great. But the NASA explanation is interesting because it also points out that none of these constellations take up an equal portion of the sky. If you're dividing up the night sky into 12 parts, it suggests that each of these constellations neatly fits in a slice. But that's

not the case. The sun might pass through one slice for 45 days versus just a week for another. So right off the bat, the horoscope charts are not all that mathematical. The fact that the Babylonians fudge the math and stuck to 12 signs for the night sky, does it really matter in the end? Okay, so I have a rebuttal. Ooh, yeah. Okay, so I've heard this debate a lot, especially on astrologer or TikTok, like with this 13 sign stuff. And people say that like the stars have shifted over thousands of years and your chart isn't what you think it is. But the astrologers say, basically what they say is that the system of stars for astrology is based on how they were way back when astrology was created.

So that's what they're going off of like this original interpretation of what the stars were back then. So they don't really care like where exactly the constellations are in the sky all the time. I think that they mostly pay more attention to like which planet is where in the sky when they write horoscopes. But really it's based on where the stars were when astrology was created. And I think that's like how the astrological community kind of like deals with all of this, basically. Yeah, that makes sense. I would say that the NASA rebuttal, which by the way, was posted on Tumblr, amazing. It was posted on Tumblr?

They said, this is our audience. We're going for it. Yeah, it does at that point about astrology that you know the practice has shifted its perspective over time. and that it is very transparent about going off of these historical placements and historical perspectives on the world instead of what's actually being seen up in the night sky today. So it's weird. You could go the mathematical approach if you want, but that takes out the wonder and creativity of astrology.

I don't know. If you want to go by what the Babylonians and the Greeks saw, then maybe it's worth considering a 13th zodiac sign. Yeah, that makes total sense, too, with what I've, like, seen on TikTok and what astrologers say. Like, if something resonates with you, like, you should go for that. And it's all about, like, your perception and what feels right. Also, I just know we're going to get feedback from some listeners being like, I can't believe you talked about astrology.

I didn't. Just clibored, disclaimer, just claim when your astrology isn't real. Let people like things. Myers-Briggs is just astrology for people. people who are more boring. So it's okay. You know what? This is my disclaimer. It's all okay. Like what you like. Leave people alone. Go ahead. Yeah. And the point is, and I also didn't think about this, but the constellations aren't really even there. I mean, stars aren't organized like that. It's just how we frame the galaxies from our tiny blue dot.

damn. And constellations are something that astronomers also refer to, right? So you can get into such a complex argument that way. Again, just let people like things. Let me have my garbage astrology memes. Oh my gosh. Nothing I love more. All right. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I mean, honestly, the uncanny valley is like sticking with me because now I'm also thinking about like what I put my dog through when I watched Air Bud and it was a similar experience. So I'm not able to stop thinking about that. Wait, Air Bud wasn't real? I mean, he, there's a dog that talked. So he got, he's a little not real. He's a little not real. It's just a tiny one, I guess. A little not real. Well, I really enjoyed learning about Aussie's brunch. So we're all winners here today, I think.

The real winner is NASA's Tumblr account. True. 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 us at popsye.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at

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