The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Birds Aren't Real, Everest Poopsicles, Actual Flying Cars

Episode Date: November 2, 2022

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You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. 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. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Perbita Saha.

And I'm Corinne Iosio. Welcome to the show and Corinna's here. And what does that mean? It means we have a theme. I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but that's where we're at today. Yes, we certainly do. This is the high-themed episode in recognition of the winter issue of Popsie, which is high-themed.

And that does not mean that we are all on mood-altering substances right now, or at least I can speak for myself. What it means. Only caffeine. Only caffeine. It's true. Okay, so then I have to take it back. I just lied.

I'm sorry. It's an issue about big soaring ideas, both literal and figurative, right? What does it mean to have literally dozens or hundreds of space launches a year? What does it mean to try to engineer the atmosphere, to protect us from global warming. And also just really fun stuff. Like Pabito worked on a story about bats that sing really, really high. So it's a fun one.

I mean, they're all fun. We love all of our children. But it's definitely something that is very playful and speaks to what I think is the heart of the pop-side legacy, right? Like, let's talk about flying. Yeah. No, and I talk about psychedelic drugs again in this one. That's never happened before. I don't know what you're talking about.

But yeah, so listeners, don't forget, check the show notes or popsight.com. Of course, you can always go to popsight.com slash weird to get more info on the stuff we talk about in every episode. But if you want more info about stuff that's high, you know, literally, figuratively, whatever, you can just go to popsci.com regular type and you will be able to find access to this latest issue. But for now, we are here to talk about some particularly weird high things, some lofty ideas. So let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to

hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Corinne, what's your tease? I want to talk about when a Ford Pinto flew. Did it fly like two centimeters off the ground? We're going to all find out together. Okay, cool. All right. All right, all right. Exciting. I also feel like having it be like a random specific, very like capsule in time car. Like the Ford Pinto is really feels important. So I can't wait to hear more. No, you're picking up what I'm putting down.

Perbito, what's your tease? My fact is, not only are birds real, birds are perfect. I feel like opinion. Yeah, I was going to say Pervita definitely has a dog in this fight. But fair enough, we'll allow it. We'll let you make your case. I for one am thrilled to learn that birds are not fake. I was a little worried.

My tease is that I am going to talk about Mount Everest and it's many problems. poop-related and otherwise. So how shall we begin? I really want to hear about the Ford Pinto, honestly. I would love to just kick things off with that career. Sure. I curiosity gapped my way right into that one, didn't I? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I've worked at popular science for quite some time. And I very quickly came to realize that when I told people where I worked, their reactions and the images that immediately sprung into their mind were generally always the same. They flashed back in their mind's eye to all of those mid-century post-war covers, right? The ones full of boomer babies and optimism. And they see things like buzzing,

future metropolises and high-speed trains and jetpacks and, of course, flying cars. The flying car is probably one of the most pervasive things that we see dotting Popsie history, the Jetson's future that we've always been promised but that's never actually arrived. There are definitely more iterations of concepts and prototypes of flying cars in Popsize pages than I've been able to count. Some of them going all the way back to the inventions of the first automobiles in the 20s all the way up to today. For some reason, from the minute we had a car, all we wanted to do was fling it into the air. Make sense. It's like we knew at the beginning that cars are a very inefficient way to travel and we wanted to make it better. But that's a whole other

conversation. Of all of these concepts, though, none is quite as curious and ill-fated as one called the Mizar. This was an early 1970s hybrid between a Cessna and a Ford Pinto. And I mean, both of those things very, very literally. And also, I recognize that you can probably see where this story is going. In the late 60s, there were two inventors named Henry Smolensky and Harold Blake. They founded a company called Advanced Vehicle Engineers. And to be fair, Smolensky was a bona fide aeronautical engineer. He worked at a company called North American Aviation.

He worked on missile development at a big contractor called Rocketdyne. And when they founded the company to much, fanfare in the first couple years, they announced that they were going to create one of transis most sought-after vehicles. They'd Frankenstein together a car early on. The exact model was TBD and the wings and the rear engine of a Cessna. The driver would drive along in their car. Definitely sounds like it would be that simple.

Oh, absolutely. There's nothing. Just like Lego two things together. It will be completely fine. And it was a really alluring concept, right? And it was something that we'd seen in flying car concepts before, right? That you had a car that on the road was just a car. And then you would attach it to some wings when you needed it to also be a short hopper four-person airplane. So you back the car into the wings. You affix the two things together and you're flying on

your way to wherever the heck it is that you need to get so fast. Eventually, they settled on a plane called the Cessna Skymaster, and they decided to made it on a new model of subcompact car that Ford introduced in 1971, otherwise known as the Pinto. Now, what everybody thinks when they think of the Pinto is not wrong, right? A Pinto. We're talking about the same car that is now infamous for catching fire. the car for which Ford endured close to 120 lawsuits. To be fair, to our high-flying friends,

the first reports of the Pinto's penchant for just blowing up didn't surface until 1973. Okay. And the Pinto's main issue was in the way that the back of the car was designed. Its fuel tank sat between its rear axle and the rear bumper, which if you've ever seen a Pinto or read accounts of a Pinto, basically a vague inclination of what a bumper would be. I just looked up, to remind myself, I looked up Ford Pinto on Google Image Search,

and the fourth photo is a picture of one exploding. Yep. Yeah. Right on the nose there. Great stuff. Thanks, Google Image. But what this arrangement means is that it creates a very tight area that some people call the crush space on the car's backside.

And even at slow speeds, you rear end a Pinto and you basically set it on fire. But not ideal for a car. Suboptimal, for sure. So the Pinto notwithstanding, right, Smolensky and Blake's craft had other issues. Its biggest problem was probably its weight. The airframe on the Cessna model that they picked can lift 4,630 pounds. 2,800 pounds of that gets gobbled up by the plane itself. Right.

And then a pinto weighs around 2,200 pounds plus gas plus, you know, people. So we know that we have problems here, right? Despite that we don't yet know the lengths to which the pinto will just be a deadly and catastrophic failure for Ford. Things that Ford probably seems to have known we're wrong with the pinto early on. Despite all of this, right, nobody's doing this. math at this point. Everybody's just really excited. And the Mazar drummed up plenty of press before its test flights. And to be honest, I can't quite figure out how many test flights there were, if they were launching scale models into the air in some of the videos that are circulating around.

Things are just generally fuzzy. But there are two instances of this thing leaving the ground that I know of for certain. The first was early on in 1973. The inventive. Henters hired a test pilot named Charles Red Janice, who took off and eventually noticed that the mounting attachment that was holding the right wing in place wasn't hanging on so well. And he did the smart, prudent thing for the plane and for himself, and he landed it. He set the craft down in a beanfield, and fortunately he was in a plane that was also a car, and he drove it back to the airport. Handy.

marking the one time it was ever convenient to be traveling in this unholy marriage of car and plane. So, of course, Smolensky and Blake pressed on. On paper, their idea really did seem great, right? This thing could, by their math, hit a cruising speed, 130, 150 miles an hour. It could fly a thousand miles on a tank of gas. it could reach a ceiling of 12,000 feet. Also, because it had both the car engine and the plane engine, it could take off with not as much runway as you would typically need. And they said, although this was never tested, that because of the strength of the car's brakes,

it could land on only 530 feet of runway, which those of us who have traveled by air know that planes need many, many football fields in order to land and come to a full stop. It was also, you know, perhaps as planes go relatively easy to fly. They modified the steering wheel to basically act like a yoke, turning it left and right, controlled ailerons or basically flaps on the wings, tilting it up and down, controlled the pitch, which is how you change altitudes. They did add a couple extra pedals to give extra control over the rear rudder, but, you know, it all made sense. Was the engine, the engine was the Pinto's, yes. There were two.

They had the rear engine from the plane and the engine from the car. Got it. So the second test flight. September 11th, 1973, Janicey was not available, so Smolensky and Blake decided to take the car out for a test flight on their own. About two minutes after takeoff, the air traffic controller at the Ventura County Airport hit the alert siren. because he saw that the Mazar was going down. The accounts are that he saw the plane's right wingfold in. The craft twisted and fell and various bits and pieces and parts flew off of it.

Some other accounts say they saw it hit a tree. Some others say they saw it hit a pickup truck. Everybody agrees that the thing burst into flames. It went down and sadly did kill both of its inventors. on impact. Yeah. Now, after this happened, there was an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, and the official upshot is that the Mazar's airframe was overburdened.

The model that went down had, in fact, an even heavier engine than earlier test models and other reports cite that the construction just wasn't particularly good. There were bad welds and loose parts. and sadly for its inventors especially, that story of the Mazar ends there. However, despite what is perhaps... I love it, however. Despite what is perhaps the most publicly catastrophic failure of any flying car or driving plane, however you want to phrase that, the story of the flying car is really still unfolding.

The good news is that what we think they are and what they are manifesting as in real life is nothing like this. We don't have visions of basically cars that can replace an individual's family sedan or station wagon, right? These aren't meant any longer to be personal modes of transportation. And there are also things that don't really look at. anything like cars. They look like these tiny hybrids of airplanes and helicopters, things called vertical takeoff and landing craft. And they're functionally shaping up to just be flying taxis, right? Like rapid commuter services in dense areas and urban areas, a faster way to get into Midtown from the airport. And that's really the way that the vision has unfolded.

There are lots of companies that see the flying car future being just that, right? It's a replacement for an Uber or a yellow cab here in New York City, not how you're going to go visit Grandma on the weekend. And it really is how flying cars are coming into reality, right? Just in October, Delta Airlines announced a partnership with one of these VTOL companies called Joby Aviation to do just this, to ferry people to and from airports in New York and Los Angeles. And, you know, seeing that those mid-century future visions didn't come true, of course, is disappointing. But it's also heartening to see that we can let go when something clearly doesn't work.

And maybe I can get to the airport in less than 17 hours someday. Wow. Yeah. It's kind of, I mean, like, at some point, it's like, are we just making helicopters less unwieldy? Exactly. They're like tiny four-person helicopters. They're short hoppers, right? It's like it's like the way that a very wealthy person would get to the airport anyway.

Like, let's make that more accessible. And I'm totally down with that. Yeah, yeah. Well, and also just cars suck so much, you know. Anything I'm, you know, like, am I skeptical of our ability to, like, seamlessly add more air traffic? Oh, absolutely. But anything that gets more vehicles off the road and makes the road more for pedestrians and cyclists, I am very in favor of. So, you know, intrigued.

Also, you know, obviously the greatest hybrid vehicle of all times, you know, the greatest hybrid vehicle of all times. has already been created, and it's the boats that they use for the duck tours. Oh, the duck boats. Yes. When I saw that Elon Musk was making an amphibious electric vehicle, I was like, duck tour has been done, man. Yeah, and also, like, don't ruin my duck tour. Back off, Elon.

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Every good burger needs a layer of perfectly milty cheese and thick rich ketchup. We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz and Kraft. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk a little bit about Mount Everest. And like I said, it's many problems, abundant problems, some of which are related to poop. Others are just about crappy behavior, you know.

Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. What can I say? I'm a wordsmith and a poop smith. So let's start with some like basic stats just to like center us, put things in perspective. Mount Everest, which sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet, is the highest point on earth. Its summit is 29,031 feet above sea level, according to the most recent survey. That doesn't actually make it the world's tallest mountain, to be clear. Moniquea on Hawaii is about three quarters of a mile taller than Everest, like from tail to snout, as it were. But a big portion of monicaea sits below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, which is why if you are a tourist or an astronomer, you can like go up to the top of monicaea and not die, though it is very cold. it is always fun to see some particularly drive-by tourist show up in shorts and a t-shirt, and it's like 20 degrees up on Montakea, and it's like literally read about the place you're going,

bare minimum, among other things. But we're not here to talk about how problematic it is that we have an observatory on the top of Montakea. We are here to talk about Matt Everest. So to make things even more confusing, there's another mountain that by certain definitions, could also be considered the world's tallest, because Earth isn't a perfect sphere. It has bulgy bits. And Ecuador's Chimborazo Mountain happens to sit at just the right bulgey spot just below the equator to be particularly far from the planet's core. So the summit of that mountain is more than 3,900 miles away from the center of the Earth, which is almost 7,000 feet farther from the center of the earth than the summit of Everest.

I just need you to know that this is breaking my brain right now. Isn't it? So, spooky. It's wild. And Chimborazo isn't even the tallest mountain in the Andes by like more traditional measurements. So this is just how weird geography is. You can you can split a lot of hairs. But anyway, Mount Everest is the tallest in the ways that matter to us about being up high, feeling very high.

feeling very high up, you have climbed the tall thing is very impressive. And as of July of 2022, around 6,100 people had summited Everest some 11,000 times because a lot of people do it more than once. I don't know why they do that. The first known success was in 1953. It's possible that someone reached the summit in the 1920s, but no one made it back down alive from that journey. So if they did, we don't know. And, you know, one thing that's interesting about Everest is, while we should often, almost always, take the idea of a, quote, first expedition

by Western explorers with a massive grain of salt, if not an outright eye roll, Everest is so inhospitable to life that it is actually pretty safe to say that no one was wandering up there before, like, dudes with dreams of Manifest Destiny showed up. Nothing visible to the naked eye, lives at the summit. Most of the mountain, in fact, is bereft of everything but like mosses, some spiders, some microscopic extremophiles, and some transient birds. But like, no one, I feel pretty comfortable saying that none of the ancient peoples of the land were like, let's do it and then successfully did it.

Because it is not a wise journey to take. So just for a second, roughly speaking, what's the highest altitude y'all have ever been at? Yeah. Not in a plane. Denver? I forget how high Denver is. Yeah. So Denver is infamously about a mile above sea level.

So for anyone who's been to Denver, it is... Almost certainly there. I have been on Moniquea, which also was like, that's high enough to be like, who, you know, the air is thin. Yeah, I definitely got drunk very, very much more quickly than normal. Oh, yeah, in Denver. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that that elevation makes Denver's roller derby team, like,

monstrously difficult to beat on their home turf. People show up but are like, who, one time. the championships was held there. That was a rough, that was a rough time for everybody. Not that I played, but I watched a lot of people be very, a lot of the most athletic people I know be very winded. So yeah, the human body is like happiest at 490 feet of elevation or less. And higher than that, the lack of atmospheric pressures starts to mean there's a lower concentration of oxygen in the air. And that means it is. is harder for our blood to get enough oxygen to power our bodies. So of course, many of us

frequently visit or even live at spots that have, you know, higher than that ideal elevation. Denver is just one example. And luckily for the citizens of Denver and people who like to visit, over the course of hours, days, or weeks, depending on how high up you go, the human body is like pretty good at adapting to altitude, the body can like learn to function pretty normally again, thanks to some physiological tweaks, including more viscous blood. And as we have covered in Popside before, some Tibetans and Ethiopians who live around like 14,000 feet above sea level have actually evolved genetic adaptations to make blood clots less likely because, again, having thicker blood helps them carry more oxygen, which is important if you want to live like

happy, healthy lives that high up. Like anyone could adapt to that level and be okay, but it's like not ideal. Because the fantastic adaptability of the human form has its limits and Everest speeds right on past them. It's one of just 14 peaks in the world that stretches into what's known as the death is zone, you know, not, not worrying at all. That's at around 26,000 feet. And at that point, it is no longer possible for the human body to acclimatize. It is just literally impossible. And as you might recall, there's about another 3,000 feet to go to get to the top of Everest.

And again, this is not where it starts getting really hard. This is where it starts becoming impossible for the human body to survive. In a 2019 article by Weirdest Thing alum, Eleanor Cummins, a pulmonary expert named Peter Hackett put it this way, you're slowly dying at 18,000 feet. But when you get above 26,000 feet, you start dying much more quickly. That's pretty clear. Yeah, no, I mean, like, it can't really get more clear than that. That height obviously makes Everest super dangerous to climb. And that's why at least 310 people have died trying to make it to the top. It's not actually very difficult to rain.

Parts of it could be characterized as more of a walk than a hike, which is why the significantly shorter mountain K2, which has rougher paths and way less support for tourists and it's way harder to get there in the first place, is actually a lot deadlier. So like Everest would not be possible to climb full stop if it wasn't like that last really death zone stretch was essentially walking with like very little elevation on like a pretty chill terrain. And that makes people think, yeah, I should do this. But you need to spend loads of time acclimating to the lower atmospheric pressure.

as you head up. And then once you hit that death zone, it's like there's this balancing act where people are trying to go really slowly through the part that isn't like inherently deadly because the slower you go up, the better your body acclimates. And then you hit that point where it's like, this is bad for your body. You won't acclimate to this. And then you have to like get through it as quickly as you can, which is made all the more difficult by the fact that your body is shutting down. So that walk to the top becomes incredibly

difficult, even if you're in really good shape. Supplemental oxygen helps, but it pretty much just takes the edge off. It doesn't make this safe or easy at all. Also, a lot of climbers try to go without tanks, especially for repeat summits, because humans are just like absolutely unhinged. Like, don't climb Everest without oxygen. I really don't care what you're trying to prove. All you're proving is that you did a thing you should not have done. If you make it, all you've proved is that you're incredibly lucky and probably very rich.

You may recall that a few years back, there was a particularly deadly every season or at least one where there was a lot of news coverage of hikers dying. and there were some viral photos of people waiting in line. There's this bottleneck near the summit where it basically becomes single file and there's almost no room to stand at the literal top. And of course, everybody wants a photo at the top. So people who are literally actively dying have to like wait in this slow crawl line to technically reach the summit.

And so there was a lot of chatter about whether like people were literally dying off, like, as they got stuck in line and, like, the problem was the overcrowding. Good news, I guess, is that a 2020 study seemed to confirm that this is just, like, a statistical bias. There are more people going up in general, so more people are dying. Apparently, over the last three decades, success rates among climbers have doubled, and the death rate has stayed pretty level. This is probably because at this point there are so many companies that will help you get up

and people know a lot more about like what you're supposed to do and not do. But again, so many people are going that just by sheer volume a lot of people are dying. One fun thing I found while researching this is that there is a portable hyperbaric chamber called a gamal bag and they basically zip you into it and then pump you up like a balloon animal like eat or eat or eat and then that like relieves some of the altitude sickness while they drag you down the mountain and I don't know why I just find this. Wait hold on. Incredibly charming. I just want to make sure. So it's like a soft snow globe and you're like in this sack that then they pressurize. It looks like it looks like a sleeping bag or something. So yeah, it is it is a soft tube and they put

you in it and pump it with with pressurized air so that you have a fake little atmosphere to like get some O2 in your blood. Okay. As they bring you down. No, that's pretty much what I was picturing. I just needed to be sure. Unfortunately, it is so physically grueling to even walk once you're in the death zone that a lot of people in distress, like even if people try to help them, they can't physically.

They don't have enough oxygen or enough energy to save them. without dying themselves. There are a lot of the stories about semiters who have unfortunately perished. Part of the story is like, and then this person found them and tried to help them and like made note of where they had to leave them when they like ran out of extra O2. So it sounds to me just like incredibly traumatic and I don't understand why anyone would choose to do this. But again, people love going on adventures. So a lot of the bodies of people who have died, in fact, I think probably all of the bodies of people who have died in that death zone are there. And that remains the subject of intense

morbid curiosity in the media. And a few mountaineers have actually led efforts to like go up and push some of those really visible bodies off the main path. Because, a lot of them were used as landmarks. And that's just like obviously pretty macab and strikes some people as pretty disrespectful. So there's even one story about a hiker who passed away who supposedly while he was in distress, some people did stop to help him. But the story goes that a lot of people passed him by because he was so close to this known very old corpse. called green boots, named after his green boots. And so people assumed that's what they were seeing. So just like very, I don't know, I wouldn't ever want to put myself in a recreational situation

where I had to be desensitized to like people who had died tragically along the way of the same recreational expedition. Again, maybe I'm just, maybe I just, I'm really uncool. I don't get it. But on a lighter note, but a still pretty awful note, in addition to the bodies, we have left on Everest, we've also left a lot of trash and poop, like a really problematic amount of poop. So every year for more than a decade at this point, the Nepali government and a few NGOs, including one run by the Sherpa people of Tibet, they work on cleaning up the worst of the trash. there's like a season during spring when people will will do the summit. When, you know, avalanches are less likely, the weather is a little less inhospitable. So when the season ends, they go in and they try to clean up after the 700 or so climbers that have been in and the people who have supported them.

It's difficult to know exactly how much garbage there is because some of it is basically impossible to get to due to hazardous conditions. The department has literally brought in helicopters to like pick up trash. But just to give you some sense of scale. So in January 2020, groups estimated that in base camp two, which is two levels of a base camp, there were more than 17,000 pounds of human poop left behind just in the previous season. And one 2015 estimate suggested that more than 26,000 pounds of poop alone were left behind each year in total, which is to say nothing of like ripped up tents and empty oxygen tanks and all the rest of it.

And like it's understandable that people leave junk behind because they are like literally dying and racing against the clock. And I think probably a lot of the people who leave gear behind are at conscientious. going in saying like I will leave all my litter and in the moment it seems like just absolutely you know non-negotiable like they can't take this stuff they need to move on but the problem is that a lot of people are going in on like supported tour groups and these tour companies are like taking for granted that they won't get in trouble for not accounting for how to get rid of the trash and in fact they they know that the companies are like aware of this because those NGOs and the Nepali government have reported that, like, they will find tense and, you know,

receptacles with the logos torn off because the companies that left them behind knew, knew what they were doing. And then you'll have, like, up near the top, the winds are so, you know, intense that, like, it's just, it's a very bad situation. Furthermore, people who live at the base camp, rely on melted snow for their drinking water. And it used to be that the thing to do if you didn't have some kind of portable toilet set up with you, which is more of a thing sort of down at the lower base camps as you get further up, people stop really thinking you should be like

carrying around a toilet or whatever. The idea was that you would throw stuff into deep ice crevasses. The problem is that because of climate change, there are fewer deep ice crevasses around, and in fact, a lot of them are filling up with poop and trash. So people are leaving their waste in like shallower areas. And so it's more likely to get caught in the melting runoff and is actually, like, there are known cases of people getting sick from cancer. contaminated water at the base camp and around there. So that sucks.

The Napoli government has proposed making climbers pay a hefty deposit and then like getting all their gear tagged with barcode so that when they come down, if they make it down, they'll get charged for any gear they haven't brought back, which I think is like bare minimum seems fair. That's very, very reasonable. Yeah. People are fully opting into this. They should, the people who have to live with the environmental consequences should be able to demand basically anything from them.

And, you know, listeners, you should consider this your friendly reminder that you really shouldn't leave your feces or your trash, but your poop behind on any mountain, even like a chill one that normal happy people climb. You know, you can dig a deep hole if you're not close to a water source. But if you're on a rocky trail or one that's like really populated, you know, any of the trails off of like the metro north or outside of any other major city, you need to stop and admit to yourself that there is simply not room for everyone's poop to safely be buried in the ground. And you need to pack it out. You can Google how to pack your poop out. And listen, I know we're taught to really fear the feces. I get it. But if you just, if you just prepare a little bit, it really doesn't have to.

be an ordeal. And then you can know for sure that you are not giving anyone gastrointestinal illness or leading to a snowballing ecological crisis. So just something to keep in mind on your next hiking trip. One last Everest anecdote that does not fit in with any of the stuff I was just talking about, but I just really couldn't leave out. The mountain's name has a really complicated history that involves like several layers of colonialism. So one of the older known names for the mountain is the Tibetan Choma Langma, which means mother of the universe or holy mother. But apparently in 1849, the British Surveyor General of India couldn't find any commonly used local names. He said locals used a bunch of different

names and he couldn't figure out which one was fair to favor. They did try to stick with traditional names for several nearby mountains. So it does seem like unlikely that he just, you know, didn't, didn't want to give it a real name, but also who knows how hard he tried. Probably not very hard. So he suggested naming it after his predecessor in his role, Sir George Eversed, and yes, that is how he actually pronounced his name. But George didn't want that. He was, he was like making the extremely fair and valid point that his name was not easily written in Hindi, was not readily pronounceable for Tibetan locals. He was just like, it makes no sense to name this mountain Everest. Obviously,

his objections were ignored, and at some point, I do not know when. People started pronouncing his name wrong anyway. So now it is Mount Everest. So the Nepali name is Sagamatha, which means goddess of the sky in Sanskrit, but that was actually coined by the government in 1960. Ethnic Nepal was too far from the mountain for it to have been named in their language historically, but they rejected the Tibetan name because they were working to unify the country

as its borders currently stood. So a lot of people now use the name Sagamasa to show that they're like more in the know than other Westerners, but that name is not without its own. baggage, nor is the Chinese transliteration of the Tibetan name Chomalangma, which is also used quite prevalently. So I guess to wrap it up, I would say just that it is really important that climbing enthusiasts remember that the Sherpa people who help them get up the mountain, help them survive the mountain, and literally clean up their crap afterwards, have known and revered this

mountain for a lot longer than any humans had the means or desire to scale it, which is, I don't know why it's a thing we feel the need to do. So maybe this is a little bit of a downer. I mean, I do think it's good that there is starting to, you know, we have these, these NGOs that are like run by the Sherpa and like we're hearing more about people saying, you know, this is not right. Like we need to respect this mountain. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be dissuading people from doing the thing, but hopefully we will figure out a way to do it more respectfully. And also just like, listen, if you're thinking about it, I get it. it sounds very flashy and exciting, but like maybe think about doing something that's less

likely to, um, to kill you. Like skydiving. Like, literally. Literally. Um, that's my, those are my Everest facts. Learned a lot about the mountain that we ruined. Yeah. It's it.

You know, it's a bummer. I have a lot of, uh, I kind of, it makes me really like feel some feelings about like K2. remaining really inhospitable to tourism. And I mean, people do it anyway. But it's like good for you, K too. Utah. I'm like, good for her.

Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with some more facts. Wireless can feel like a world of traps. But not with visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot. Powered by Verizon for $25 a month. Taxes and fees included. Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month

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four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove's 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. Okay, we're back.

And Pripita alleges that birds are real. No. Tell us more. Oh, yeah. So my story will start with a mock conspiracy theory that I did not come up with, but it's quite surprisingly popular. And it will end with my verbal op-ed, as Rachel already called me out on. So the story begins in the 1950s in the United States of America.

And the U.S. is just coming through or still continuing on its red scare phase. This was the time when the CIA was really trying to surveil as many Americans as possible, again, under the premise of rooting out communists. And the civilian director of the CIA at that time, Alan Dules, he proposed to President Dwight Eisenhower that the U.S. government swap out some pigeons for birth. bird-like drones that apparently exactly look like pigeons and could fool any person into not thinking that they're being followed by a flying robot. So the CIA swaps out a couple of these birds. They like it. It's going well.

And then they realize that they don't really like birds in general. I mean, they're kind of a nuisance in cities. They poop on people's sports cars. They're loud. So slowly Allen Dules and the CIA grow drunk on power. And they decide to just kill all the birds and replace all of them with drones. And this goes on for a couple years, takes us through the 1960s. And by then, all avian life in the U.S. is just not actual avians.

It's all technology. It's all the surveillance state. Obviously, this history is not real. This is... What? I'm sorry. I was staring out my window, just like, hmm. It's actually funny.

There was a little fall migrant song version. also sitting on. Watching you close. Making sure you're not blowing the whole thing wide open. Brainwashing me. So anyway, this is the premise that the Birds Aren't Real movement

is built on. If you want to read the whole story, which I did not summarize completely, you can go to Birds Aren't Real.com. But the movement was started by a college student in Tennessee, Peter McIndoe in 2016. And I remember hearing about it because at the time I worked at Audubon magazine. So we, you know, I just had a RSS feed set up for bird news.

And Peter McIndo's tweets and Facebook posts were starting to pop up. People were laughing about them. They were just confused. They're like, what, what is this brand that is going around telling people that birds aren't real? And this college student, it was a one-man show. Like he was standing on street corners, holding up a poster, shouting, birds aren't real, and trying to tell people this CIA espionage story. So a couple years later, 2021, I see a New York Times article about the same movement.

And I didn't realize how big it had become. Peter McIndoe had recruited dozens, probably hundreds of millennials and Jenziers, to become part of this Birds Aren't Real Movement. They rented out billboards across the country. They held rallies. They hosted a protest outside of Twitter headquarters telling Twitter that they had to change their logo from the bird. They're actually having a rally in New York City coming up, which I may just lurk in just because I'm curious. And at first it seems like, A, a joke, B, a big marketing movement because they do sell gear, they put up stickers, places, all that. But what McIndoe and his supporters really say the movement is about is fighting misinformation.

They say that because their story is just so over the top, it draws attention to how real conspiracy movements, really dangerous ones like QNON actually get started and how they pervade families and get spread and have destructive capabilities on society. So I don't know if that's true or not. The fact that people who are part of the birds aren't real movement. They keep up this premise, but then also say that they're using it to fight conspiracies. It's, I don't really get that balance. But given that this is a science podcast, I would like to share some real bird science about why birds are so special. And in a way, birds are so unique as a life form that it's hard to, for example, people have tried for many, many centuries to create, you know, flying contraptions, maybe not surveillance drones, but other flying devices that perfectly mimic birds or mimic bird feathers or their bone structures. And it's really, really hard because they're just these, these.

wonderfully evolved creatures that are so good at what they do. But the fact that birds push evolution in certain ways, but then also have this very deep tie to like prehistoric animals, I think is really cool. So the first bird fact that I think is pretty widely known already. Maybe you've even shared on the weirdest thing before. But the point that birds are dinosaurs, living dinosaurs. I think that's super neat. So the reason people say this,

or paleontologists specifically say it, is because some of the dinosaurs that we had in the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous period are the direct early ancestors of birds. They had feathers. Some of them did fly. I believe some of them had hollow bones as well, which are all characteristic to modern birds and some of these ancestral animals survived the K-T extinction and gave us modern birds. So we're talking about really cool dinosaurs like archaeoprics, which is really thought to be the original bird. And even velociraptors, paleontologists think that they had very close ties to the avian class today. And, you know, when you think of velociraptors, you think of of the very famous scene in Jurassic Park with the kids getting chased. That's probably not what

velociraptors look like. They were probably covered in a very dense pelt of bird-like feathers. So one- Could they open doors? Some birds can. I really feel like you could teach crows or ravens too. So maybe. I think perhaps the way we imagine like the little kind of T-rex claws, well, velociraptors had like more reachy, grabby ones. That might be fictional in Jurassic Park, at least. Yeah, I imagine if they had feathers on their hands and towel. All right, I'm not going to, I don't know. No, no, no. It was a rabbit hole. I was just making a stupid joke. Okay, so evidence A for why birds are real. They've been around for millions of years in a way.

Also, I just really want to talk about bird cloacas. The word cloaca is derived from a Latin word that actually means sewer, which is very weird. And the reason it's called this is because it's really the only orifice birds have to do all of their business. So they poop out of it, they pee out of it, they have sex with their cloacas. So the translation to sewer is kind of on point there. But also what beautiful simplicity to just have one hole to do it all. I just love it. And then I would also like to say that in terms of biomimicry

and kind of how humans have used nature for inspiration to make technology, Birds are super key. We see a lot of robots and we've written about quite about, and we've written about quite a few of them on Popsai.com, where the morphology of how birds perch on a branch or how they take off from the ground, these are adapted into robotics to help robots gain new functions and, you know, move in more nuanced ways. We also see it in adaptation of colors. There's a bird called the Volga Corpse Bird of Paradise that you all, if you saw the photo, you would know exactly what I'm talking about because it was made really famous through some nature documentaries. But when you look at this, the male version of the bird, it just looks like a black hole. Like its feathers are so super black.

It goes beyond any black that, you know, Corinne's wearing black. right now. It's so much blacker than that. And looking at the structure of that bird's feathers, companies have been able to develop a super black, I think they call it super black paint that they then use on products or even infrastructure that, you know, just makes it more efficient in different ways. Or also just looks very, very cool. What I always think of when people talk about that, is it phanta black? Is that it? Oh, sorry. yes. Yeah, yeah. I think of one of the site gags in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where they have this sticker that you just like fling onto a wall and it makes a hole in the wall. That's always what I think of.

That's kind of what the bird looks like. I agree. Yeah. And for people listening at home, if you really want to question whether birds are real or not, you know, maybe you have a bird feeder in your backyard. One of the best things about birds is that everyone has access. to them. Right now, we're at the tail end of fall migration. So a lot of the cool birds we experience in spring and summer are passing through or have already gone down to the tropics. But this gives a really good opportunity for you to see new birds, different kinds of birds. And we've gotten to the point where we can even predict how birds are migrating and when they might show up around you.

So there's a website called Birdcast where ornithologists use weather, radar, and other data to give you forecasts of when the biggest groups of birds might be migrating through your area. So again, if you just want to experience birds firsthand and take a look for yourself on whether there's CIA issued drones or not, just take a couple moments at night in the morning to do a little bird spotting or bird listening around your home. There are plenty of tools for that. Or do we know where they're going to be because we're controlling them? I'm just saying.

Now the ornithologists are going to come after me. No, they're coming after me. It's fine. You can at me, bird Twitter. It's fine. I can take it. Yeah. So I don't have a pretty conclusion for this.

I mean, if you see the birds aren't real stickers in your hometown, maybe, I don't know, take a look for yourself, make your own decisions. But as for me, even if birds are a lie, I'm happy to go with it. It's fine. Wow. Well, you know, I love that you love birds so much that you can understand, believing that they couldn't possibly be real. I feel like something so magically perfect. We've talked about how like when the octopus genomes came out, all the headlines were like, they're practically aliens, say scientists.

And I feel, that's how like I feel about cephalopods is that I'm like, they are pretty off the chain. They are thrilling. They do make one say, wow. But that doesn't be them not real or that they came from space or our government drones. I mean, like, yeah, one of my, I'm most wowed by like hummingbirds, which actually has quite literally inspired a recon drone in the past. But yeah, they're just like how. Their internal gyroscopes. Fantastic.

That's all. I just look at them and how. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? A lot of individual facts for high. A lot more, a lot more darkness than we're used to. But, yeah, I don't know. That's true. We get pretty dark.

Yeah, sometimes we get pretty good. I mean, like the Ford Pinto story was pretty wild. So that's going to be, that's going to be sticking with me for a while. But then the fact that birds are real is also really plowed my life. I think for me, it's less that the fact that birds are, wait, birds are real. yes, that blows my mind, the fact that there's that much movement around the notion that they might not be. I think it's almost entirely a joke.

But then you never know, like one person in there could be really serious about it. And everyone else is so committed to the bit that any, well, okay. So birds being real slash not real takes the wind, soars away with it into the sunset. that everybody check out the high issue of popular science. You can find it on Apple News Plus or go to popside.com to find another ways to check it out. 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 popsye.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodey. 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.