The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Bears in Ejector Seats, Nobel Prize for Giving Patients Malaria, The Secret Origins of Beer Yeast

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the Air Force testing ejector seats with black bears to a doctor winning the Nobel Prize for infecting his patients with syphilis. 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 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/CorinneIOZO Mary Beth Griggs: www.twitter.com/MaryBethGriggs Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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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there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. 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 Feldman. I'm Corinne Iosio. I'm Mary Beth Griggs. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we offer a little tease of some kind of story or fact we picked up while reporting, reading, writing, wasting time, reading angry emails, etc. And then we decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. 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. And of course, you can also vote for your favorite on Twitter or

Facebook. Corinne, why don't you give your teas first? Okay, so lager, which is the world's most popular style of beer, is not Bavarian. It is not German. Some people think it might be of Argentinian origin, and other people think it might actually come from Tibet. But one thing is for damn sure, it is so not German. Wow. Intriguing. Very. Mary Beth, how about you? Okay, so I recently learned that to test supersonic ejector seats, the Air Force drugged black bears and strapped them into planes. Oh my freaking God. What? That is every few. I never knew I always wanted in one sentence.

It's so many things to end up there. Wow. Wow. Well, okay. Are you even going to try, Rachel? There are no bears in my story. Only, okay, well, we'll get into this in a minute. But my tease is in 1927, a psychiatrist won the Nobel Prize for giving a bunch of his patients malaria. Why?

Well, that's the back area. I'm sorry, bears, please. Please, I'm dying. We literally can't draw out the bear story. We need it now. Okay, okay. So bears. Bears, planes, just everything.

So the year is 1962, and the Air Force has a problem. Jets are going faster than they did in the past, and old ejector seats didn't work on new planes. The one that they currently had in development was the B-58, also known as the Hustler. Okay. That's a very 1962 name for a plane. I know. It's fantastic. So what's amazing is that when you are ejecting,

a plane, you are trying to get away from the plane. And that can be very difficult to do when a plane is going very fast, particularly if it's going at, you know, supersonic speeds. And so today's ejector seats have a 90% success rate, but back then they were still trying to figure out a way to get pilots out safely. Sorry, success is measured by, are we catapulting the person clear of the plane? Yeah, surviving. Okay. Surviving. Okay, surviving. Okay, surviving. is the metric. And I imagine that when it goes wrong, the idea is that you want to avoid getting like sucked into any jets or landing right back on the plane, et cetera.

Exactly. And so what happened, they realized this scope of this problem very early on. In 1942, there was actually a British Air Force pilot who ended up trying to bail out of his plane during a test flight and ended up very great. gruesome, very gruesome story, but severed limbs ended up hitting part of the plane and not being able to deploy his parachute in time. And people really started realizing at that moment, oh, we really need these ejector seats. We need a way for people to get away from the planes very quickly. And around that same time, the Germans were actually developing the very first

ejector seats, which started being used during World War II. But in 1962, you're a few decades out from that. You've already have ejector seats. The problem is that planes are moving faster now than they did during the air battles of World War II. So it's this kind of really interesting safety situation and people are trying to prevent pilots from getting killed. But in order to prevent pilots from getting killed, you need a way to test whether or not these mechanisms work. Because in order to get somebody away from the plane, you have to use a lot of force. And the way that you use a lot of force is you basically have a rocket underneath the seat that propels you up and away from the plane. And you don't necessarily want to just put a human into a seat with a

rocket strapped to the bottom of it that hasn't been tested yet. Why not? Yeah. I can imagine what can possibly go wrong with this accidental jetpack plan. Yeah. So they decided that, well, what is about the same size as a human, as an adult human man? And it turns out that black bears can be about the same size and weight and have a fairly similar physiology. Yeah, I know. There are just grimaces. There's just grimaces all around the room at this. So what they did is they would sedate the black bears.

And there is a video of this, which I happened upon when I was reading Reddit's today I learned. And that was what kind of sent me down this path was that there. is this video of the bears actually getting put into these capsules, which were basically like clamshells. Like you would have to close them up over yourself. And so they would close the bears into these capsules and then once the plane reached a certain altitude, they would fire them off and test it and see how it worked. For the most part, it worked really well. The bears only suffered maybe a few broken limbs, but it was not fatal. This part wasn't fatal to the bears. unfortunately, they were euthanized.

I shouldn't be laughing at that. It's more nervous laughter. Yeah, it's uncomfortable laughter. Yeah, it's kind of upsetting. But this is what the process was. They wanted to make sure that they weren't missing any internal injuries or anything like that during the process. And one of the bears, this was kind of heartbreaking and funny at the same time, was named yogi. It was, where was a yogi bear that participated in these studies?

No, I know. I always seem to have really depressing facts, which is kind of upsetting. But it is fascinating. It was really interesting to me because the need for ejector seats, it was inspired by a lot of tragedy. The first patent for an ejector seat was actually given in 1916 by a guy named Edward Calthrop, whose buddy Charles Rolls, who was a co-founder of Rolls-Royce, actually died in a biplane accident when he couldn't bail. out fast enough. And so that's where this idea got started, which was pretty interesting. And I mean, I don't know, it is, it is really interesting to me how much these animals kind of played a role in the military. And this isn't even like the first time that bears have been kind of a part of military endeavors, which I thought was really fascinating too. My favorite story, which is much happier, I promise, just to leave us on a happy note. There was a Polish Army brigade that was released from a prisoner of war camp by the Soviets during World War II. And they came across a Syrian brown bear cub when they were going through Persia or Iran.

And they traded food for the bear cub. And they named it Vytec, which means like happy warrior or someone who likes war. and they raised him on bottles of condensed milk and they took him with them as they traveled through Syria and what was in Palestine and Egypt and he grew up with them. He grew up to be like six feet tall, 485 pounds.

They started giving him a beer ration because he was just like one of the guys, which I thought was amazing. And then they were stationed in Egypt for a few years. And then in 1944, they realized they have to go to Naples for more of the war effort. And animals were not allowed on the ships. And so what did the humans do? They dressed him up as a man.

So close. So close. They did give him a rank in serial number and made him an official member of their group. And so he traveled with them and he actually carried a lot of supplies. for them and ended up like scaring off thieves. He was this, and he ended up living out the rest of his life in Scotland, which was the last place that they were stationed before they disbanded. And so he was at the Edinburgh Zoo up until the 1960s when he died.

I wonder if it was awkward for him to be like in a zoo with other bears. Seriously, where are your medals? Yeah. Well, and he is. He's actually still on the medals of this particular battalion, which, because they they kind of, he was part of their company. He apparently did, like, wrestle with the guys, though, and so there are definitely some great pictures of bear hugs.

I have a question about the ejector seat bears. Is there some kind of, like, Air Force Bear Memorial I can visit? I don't know, but gosh, that would be nice if there were. Because there's something similar for space animals, right? Yeah, I think there are. Did the bears have parachutes? Yeah, the bears, the cats. The capsule was such that the capsule has a parachute.

I see. That deployed. So what happened was it gets shot out of the plane. And the rockets fire. You're measuring at the same time the tilt and tumble of the capsule. And a parachute comes out from behind and deploys and catches it. And they ended up during this testing, they figured out, oh, based on when we're flying at these higher speeds, the rocket is actually firing for longer and, you know, starting to catch on some of the parachute.

And so you end up having developments in terms of using less flammable materials for the parachutes after these tests. There were a lot of adjustments that were done to make this safe for humans. Right. And they were, so there was a pilot and the bear was in the jump seat, for lack of a better term, because I can't think of what the, like the wingman seat behind the pilot is. What was goose in Top Gun? Is that where the bear was? Yeah, it's a little bit of a different situation because of the layout of the plane. And so they're each in kind of individual.

It's not like they're all in the same. Cockpit. Yeah. Yeah. And so you have different sections that each had their own ejector seat. And you can watch the video. We'll have that posted on popsye.com. And you can read about that and watch the very long 17-minute video of this.

Is it just a series of bears? popping out of planes. Yes, with 1962 narration. Wow. Which is something to see. And it is fair warning. It can be upsetting for people to see like sedated bears getting carried out. So like, you know, fair warning on that.

If you don't want to see that, that's okay. But it does exist and it is part of our history. Man, I'm so happy all the advances we've made in test dummies, loading them up with all kinds of sensors. There's a company in England that I just read about a couple days ago that is remodeling their crash test dummies to better match the anatomy of baby boomers as they age because your organs kind of shift and stuff like that. And as the population gets older, they want to make sure that all of their tests are measuring the way that humans are increasingly shaped and proportioned and all the different physiological changes that happen. So, oh, gosh, it's so much better. It is so much better.

In all ways. Yeah. In all ways. And it's definitely something that they were trying to figure out with this too. The only reason that they weren't using dummies back then was that the dummies didn't have any of that stuff that you're talking about. It didn't have the advanced sensors. You didn't have any of the stuff where you could actually figure out where the forces are. And even today, 20 to 30 percent of people that are shot out of these planes in ejector seats end up having back problems later in life because it does put a large toll on your body to.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Get shot out of a plane. Yeah. Saving your life can hurt. Airbags hurt. Exactly.

But they're very important. I think we're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back with more weird facts. Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. All right, we're back, and now Corinne is going to talk to us about bloggers.

Yes. This came from a story that I was working on for the next issue of the magazine that's all about tiny things. I was working on a story about tiny organisms, specifically yeast, because yeast is the wonderful fungus that makes things ferment. People have been, you know, fermenting with yeast to make beer for, you know, millennia at this point. But what's interesting is that until we really understood in the 20th century, microbiology and really started to look down at all of the different species of yeast, we really didn't understand the differences between the different types of beer. So there are primarily two yeasts that we've used for a very, very long time to make beer. There's the ale yeast, and I'm going to preemptively say that I'm sorry to yeast people for the pronunciations that are about to come out of my mouth. Please don't at me.

Ale yeast is sacramoices seravisia. And for a long time, we were brewing lager with water. Lager yeast, which is Sacramoisies, Pastorianus. And in the 80s and the 90s, when we started to be able to sequence the genomes of these things, folks discovered that lager yeast was actually a hybrid. It was two different yeasts. It was the ale yeast, and they didn't really know what else. They're just like, what this?

We don't know. So people spent a lot of time looking around. And then in 2007, a team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison started an effort to try to figure out what the mother yeast was. Because the thing that's the primary differentiator between ales and loggers is that loggers are cold tolerant. They brew in like the 40s or the 50s degrees Fahrenheit. The yeast kind of takes its time. It's nice and chill. It just works.

It hangs out on the bottom. Ale yeasts hang out on the top and work sometimes a little bit faster. It all depends. You can do all kinds of different things in the fermentation process. But again, lager is the most popular beer in the world. Cores, bud, all of these beers are fundamentally lagers. They've all used the same kind of yeast. They knew what half of it was.

They knew that half of it was the ale yeast. And then eventually they sequenced it down and they were like, okay, there's something else going on here because the ale yeast isn't what's allowing this to brew cold. So this team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison had a team all over the world, five different continents, scraping trees, popping little postules on the sides of stuff trying to find a match, something that made up for the other part of the genetic code of the yeast that we've been using for such a long time. And the first guy to have a hit was a guy named Diego Libby. who is also not German.

He, it was in Argentina in Patagonia. And he had scraped the sample off of a beach tree. It was sequenced. And they're like, holy hell. This is, makes up for 99.5% of what we couldn't account for in the, the logger yeast before. So they were like, we found the mother. We found the thing that lets the logger work, that lets the logger brew cold.

And they called it Sacramoosi. Eubeneas. This was great. We knew where the origin of lager came from and, you know, it wasn't Germany and nobody, people started to try to account for how exactly this made it back to Bavaria because the folks in southern Germany were fermenting their lagers in caves, which were obviously quite cold. And the yeast had to somehow apparently have gotten from Patagonia to Germany. The prevailing theories were, well, it was obviously Columbus. Like it was clearly just a white guy who brought this over here. But again, people were looking on five continents, and it turned out maybe not so true.

So that was in 2011 is when the Argentinian discovery happened. In 2014, a group of Chinese researchers found a eubeneas yeast in Tibet. And not only did they find that, but in their paper they sort of laid out. everything that they know about all the different yeast strains, and they said, we seem to have more of the parentage of yeasts, more varieties, more genetic diversity in Tibet and the southern provinces of China than you could possibly have from the new world, as it were, the new world, the old world, depending on your perspective, the always been their world. And they also, you know, very calmly pointed out in their paper, people have been making logger-style beers

since around 1400, and as we all know, Columbus in 1492 sailed the ocean blue, so clearly something doesn't add up here. Thank you very much. Tibet is where the logger style yeast that we have comes from. This is all super fascinating, but I personally find it very validating because the strain of yeast that you use can actually impart a lot of flavor into your beer, which to me is just such a wonderful thought because I hate hops so very much. I hate hops. Hate them. This is an anti-hops podcast.

This is an anti-hops table to take a step back, kind of the general way that beer gets brewed. And again, this is a massive oversimplification. Please don't at me, beer people. You start with your beer base, which is your malts and your grains, and you break them down. Often they're crushed. They get boiled and then separated from. the water and that gives you what's called a wart, which is like the mash. That's basically the yeast food. And then you put the yeast in and the yeast does its business, right? It starts chomping

away. It's eating at all the sugars, all the maltoses and the sucroses and all the yummy stuff that you've made for it. And as it eats, its byproducts are alcohol and carbonation. We love yeast. That's good. Yeast is so wonderful. This is why if you've ever been in a brewery, it smells a lot like you're in a bakery because it's pretty much the same thing going on. What also happens when there's a lot of acid in these mixes. So when the acid meets the alcohol, you get what's called an ester. And an ester is kind of all of that wonderful fruitiness that you can get from different strains of yeast. And once you start to understand the parentage of the yeast, you can start to hybridize it and really choose, be very, very selective about what kind of yeast

you're going to use and what kind of flavor you're going to get from it. For example, I was reading today about a pear logger from a brewery called Devil's Backbone. And the brewer of this particular batch was just like, you don't need hops, right? So the hops you would normally put in when you're boiling the wharf, right? When you've separated the water from the mash and then you bloom the hops. The hops is where the bitterness comes from. It's where a lot of the floral notes come from. And again, it is also disgusting. Terrible. So bad. I just, I agree. So yeast is the new hops is what I'm saying. Like, brewers are being, especially microbrewer, they're being a lot more open about the

yeast that they're using. They're experimenting more. Like, I think that perhaps we've hit the hops peak and now it can just go away. Now we're getting into sours. I love sours, funky beers. And there are places that are working with the eubeneas yeast, the Tibetan yeast. Heineken has a beer out called H-41. They're calling it a wild logger.

on the Patagonian strain of the Eubeneas yeast. They found Eubeneas yeast in Wisconsin, and the food science team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is working with a local brewer to make beer from that. Awesome. And I want all of it. Yeah. And it's interesting with yeast.

I mean, it is so important to the brewing process. I know that there are some brewers that are even trying to preserve their yeast and make sure that they can keep their species that they're using that are important for their recipes safe by keeping them not all in the same place. So there are places that will actually stock and care for yeast so that if something disastrous happens at one brewery, they can restock, kind of like a seed bank, but for, you know, this delicious fungus. I had a really amazing ice wine up in the Finger Lakes last year, and they had like a batch had accidentally been fermented by wild yeast,

just like in the, you know, one day they left it open in the air. There was suddenly a whole bunch of wild yeast in it. And they decided to just let it go and see what happened. They won so many awards for that wine. And there's like a very limited number of bottles because, you know, they can't. They can't replicate it. It's so exciting to me. Exactly.

The people are really working with these wild yeast. There's a research institute in Finland called VTT. It's an acronym. I don't know what it's an acronym for, but I'm sure if I did, I wouldn't be able to pronounce it anyway. And they're working with the Eumenias yeast, but they're also working on hybridizing it for people to make wines and ciders

and to use the cold tolerance to make some cool, new delicious things. I'm sorry I didn't bring any beer. Yeah. That would have been good. I drank it all. It really is delicious. The Heineken beer I have tasted. It's quite good.

Like if I closed my eyes, I wouldn't have known that I was basically just drinking, like, almost the simplest lager you could possibly have. Like, this is the lager from the mother yeast. And it tasted like a Belgian-style ale, like had a baby with a hepha vison. But it was still, like, light the way that, you know, we associate, like, an American lager to be. And this was a beer that had been made with the eubonais. Yeah. So Heineken was. the first to market with these, and it's H-41. You can't get it in bottles yet, but it's available

on tap in a bunch of cities already. Cool. Cool. Well, I think we're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back with one more weird fact. Hey, pals, looking for super cool popular science merch. We've got you covered at popsai.threadless.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, and mugs with iconic vintage covers and illustrations ripped from the magazine. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite shows like last week in tech and the weirdest thing I learned this week. That's popsai.threadless.com. P-O-P-S-C-I.thudlis.com. Okay, so we're back with time for one more fact. My weird fact, in fact. As I said, there was a psychiatrist who in 1927 won the Nobel Prize for giving his patients malaria, many of his patients. So, brief overview on syphilis.

We can't know for sure when syphilis first merged because STII, are older than our species, and the written record is very spotty and confusing on the subject. For example, we know for at least some span of time that syphilis and gonorrhea both existed, but were conflated as the same thing. So, you know, when you look back and see people talking about symptoms, it's really impossible for a long time to know whether they're talking about STIs and if so what they're talking about. But in the late 1400s, it became a big problem.

King Charles the 8th of France led an army of like 50,000 men into Italy, and they developed an outbreak of the Great Pox in very short order, as Voltaire wrote a few hundred years later. On their flippant way through Italy, the French carelessly picked up Genoa, Naples, and syphilis. They lost the other two, but syphilis was there to stay. And at the time it was a really brutal disease. It was very unlike the STI we know today.

People had like bone aches. They were suffering terribly in this very acute fashion. but gradually it went from epidemic to endemic, which is to say an absurd number of people had it. And because people had developed immunity, the symptoms became more what we're familiar with today. So you get these like kind of hard, sometimes painful sores, you know, various unpleasant symptoms along Dermint period that is often followed by more serious symptoms later, including neurocifilis, which is when the bacteria of has infected your brain and is affecting the tissue, and that can cause insanity and death.

So for a lot of people around the 17, 18, early 1900s, neurocophilis was a big problem, and it was the way a lot of people died. And for a long time, the best so-called cure was mercury, because taking courses of it seemed to help that period of primary symptoms. but boy did it suck because mercury is really toxic. So you would kind of just be this like, you know, aching, lethargic, heavily salivating mess for as long as you were on your mercury cure. And a lot of people now think that it did not actually do much to cure the disease.

You know, it's apparent efficacy may have had to do with how little we understood syphilis. it's possible that like people's primary symptoms were just coming to their natural end. And that then when they would get neurosyphilis later, it would be mistaken for like a second infection or a totally different disease. So people maybe thought mercury worked even when it didn't. And if it did work, it probably worked in the same way that like chemotherapy works, that it was like killing a bunch of stuff, including the syphilis. So did they understand at the time that mercury was also poison? They did. Yes.

But syphilis was real bad. So they were like, and also there was so much, you know, moral stigma attached that I think there was also kind of this sense that like, you know, of course the cure for syphilis involves suffering because, you know, you big slut. It was not a good time in the history of medicine. And so in 1906, this guy named Paul Ehrlich, who was a German scientist and considered kind of one of the founders. fathers of chemotherapy, not surprising, came up with an arsenic compound that he called a, quote, magic bullet against syphilis. And compared to mercury, it was pretty great because you could take like low enough quantities of something with arsenic in it that it wouldn't just completely wreck you. But again, still very poisonous. You can see our episode about deadly wallpaper for more information

about how poisonous arsenic is. He won the Nobel Prize in 1908. There were several Nobel prizes for syphilis because it was a big deal. But people were like, you know, do you have anything less like deadly? Because remember, penicillin didn't come out until 1943. So, you know, there was mercury, there was Ehrlich's magic bullet, and those were great compared to nothing at all, but they were not things you wanted to put in your body, and they did not work that well. Um, So, enter malaria therapy. In 1917, Julius Wagner Juregg, I probably said his name wrong, but don't feel too bad. He was a Nazi sympathizer, not a good man.

He noticed his patients with neurological symptoms seemed improved after fevers, and so he started injecting neuropsychilics under his care with plasmodium Vivex, which is the parasite most commonly known to cause malaria. Basically, quinine had been a known cure for malaria since the mid-1800s. So an unpleasant potentially fatal disease seemed benign in comparison to syphilis. And he basically had, again, he'd noticed that some of his patients, he was a psychiatrist, not an internal medicine guy, but he noticed that some of his patients seemed to have high fevers and then have their symptoms improve.

And so he became really convinced that the secret to curing psychiatric illness was in curing some kind of organic problem. And he thought that maybe fevers were the key to that. But he couldn't figure out what the best way to induce a fever was. He tried a couple of, I think he tried, like, tuberculosis, but I didn't always give you a fever. There were a few instances of that where he, like, tried things that were easy to get a hold of and easy to infect patients with and didn't immediately kill you.

And they just were not ideal. The operative word in that sentence being immediately. Yeah, exactly. You'll live a little longer. But then in 1917, a soldier with symptoms of malaria was admitted to his clinic. And then somebody with basically neurociflis was admitted to the same clinic. And because there was, quote, nothing to lose, he obtained the soldier's blood and injected it into the arm of his patient with neurosophilis, as you do. He was pretty unscrupulous about his methods of testing this.

There's a picture of him injecting the first patient who was not particularly in their right mind, given all of the neurosyphilis. And it doesn't seem like he even, like, checked for blood type or anything. He just, like, took blood with malaria in it and started injecting it into people with various psychiatric symptoms. Here's the thing, is that it might have worked. It seemed to work well enough that he got a Nobel Prize for it. It seems so horrifying. It is.

And basically, you would just give people, he would give people like, sorry. So basically he would inject people with malaria and allow them to have three or four rounds of high fevers and then give them quining to kill it. And this didn't always work. admitted that about 15% of the patients he treated died from malaria and there was no like rigorous clinical trial so it's possible that more people died however we do know that some people came out of it not only with their syphilis halted but with the the neurological decline halted as well which was really miraculous for the time you know there there was like they'd never see anything like that so it's not surprising that people got excited about the treatment but in hindsight

we have very little information about how well it actually worked. We don't have numbers about how often it helped people versus how often it killed them. We only have his own notes and, you know, who knows how reliable those are. Again, he was a Nazi sympathizer and not a good man. So, yeah, but it did work sometimes. And the question is how? So syphilis bacteria is sensitive to temperature and the disease doesn't generally involve the fever, or maybe when it does, you just don't get syphilis, I guess. But the hiccup there is that syphilis

only, like, cooks, so to speak, if it's in, like, 106 degrees for six hours. Oh, God. Wow. That's so very, you're going to die fever. It is. It is a very bad fever. So, but according to the notes on so-called pyro therapy, which is what it's called when it's not malaria therapy, which I really like, the remission rates were low. in people that had had kind of like the most dramatic spikes in fevers. So it's possible that that it was that simple, that it was just a question of like cooking the syphilis out of you. It's also possible that malaria and syphilis have some kind of weird interaction in particular,

but it might just be the fever. We don't know because then penicillin was invented. And guess what? It's better than any of these other options that treating syphilis. So people stopped being obsessed with finding another cure. Though, of course, with antibiotic resistance on the rise and syphilis on the rise right now. Wait, say what? Yeah.

It's particularly among men, especially gay men, and especially in cities. So it's not like in all demographics it's on the rise, but it's getting, it's, you know, gotten worse over the past few years. And it's definitely a public health concern. It reminds me of when there were all kinds of stories a few years ago of STD and STI outbreaks at retirement communities. Everybody's like, what? I'm not going to get pregnant. It was like, yes, but you all have gonorrhea now. Yep. Use condoms. They're great. And so we do have to be concerned about whether we will be able to rely on antibiotics to treat our STIs forever.

There's a lot of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea going around right now. So prevention, as I say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. So wear a condom. And one last note about pirotherapy that I found really interesting. So Henry Heimlich, who's known for the Heimlich maneuver, he really lost his reputation in the later years of his life. And one reason was that he was a big advocate for the use of malaria therapy to treat AIDS and also possibly Lyme disease.

Really? Yeah. And apparently there were a couple of studies on this in China that the greater medical community was just like horrified by because giving malaria to someone who is extremely immunocompromised is very different from giving malaria to someone with syphilis because, you know, syphilis, neurocifilis does not compromise your immune system. You know, you can be an otherwise healthy person whose brain is rotting because of syphilis. So yeah, giving malaria to a person with AIDS is a terrible idea, even if it

sometimes worked, which does not seem to be the case, but in any case, it would be really unethical to test it. And so people were pretty, most people, I should say, were pretty horrified that Heimlich was advocating for this, but he really passionately advocated for it. and, you know, his reputation was not so great as a result. And so, yeah, pyrotherapy was kind of killed by antibiotics, you know, other than these periodic kind of it crops up as people being like, what if we gave people malaria again? That worked once.

And then people are like, no, it didn't. Only compared to mercury. But it's also like you can find little remnants of it. in that, you know, Electroshock was kind of born out of that idea, that there was an organic thing that could be fixed if you had a psychiatric problem. And of course, Electroshock was, like, really misused and abused for a long time, but it's still used in some cases today, and when it's used properly, it can really help people. So kind of this understanding that brain chemistry and the physical truck,

of the brain are involved in, you know, maybe not all mental illness and cognitive decline, but some, you know, is a really cool and interesting idea. Though, again, the guy behind malaria therapy was a Nazi sympathizer and a real bad dude. So, boo. Boo. Also, booed injecting your patients with the blood of a guy with malaria. Yeah, that just doesn't really. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week?

Bears, bears. The bears have it. All right. This is awesome. This is the first time I won. Yay. Bears. Oh, bears.

Poor bears. Bad news bears. Oh, it is bad news bears. Everybody, you know, don't try to hug a bear, but appreciate bears. Maybe watch the bear cam if you're feeling like you need some nice live bears. Hug a bear in your heart. In your heart. far away.

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