The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Blood Gourds, Tiny Taffeta Frog Pants, Dying for Weather Data
Episode Date: October 30, 2019The New York Times' Kendra Pierre-Louis—a former PopSci Editor!—joins us this week as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned ranged from gourds full of royal blood to frogs wearing tiny taff...eta pants. 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! Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on October 31st! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Behind every great man is a woman making him a tap on a frog pan.
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 Eleanor Cummins.
I'm Kendra.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you much for having me.
For our listeners who aren't aware, Kendra was once at Popular Science, now at the New York Times, always the best.
Oh, thank you.
So we are thrilled to have you here on the show.
And before we get into it, I also want to remind our weirdos that we have a live show coming
up tomorrow at caveat in New York City. Yes, it is a Halloween spooktacular. It's going to be
extra scary and gory and bizarre and unsettling. I would say unsettling is going to be the key
takeaway from the night. There will be costumes. There will be costume contests. They will be
pegged to episodes of weirdest thing. There will be candy. I have like literally $70
of candy that just arrived in my office. I don't know where I'm going to put it. So you should come
and put it in your belly.
Get your tickets.
There are probably a few left,
and caveat usually does have some standing room available last minute.
So check that out on popsye.com slash weird.
We would love to have you there.
So on the weirdest thing I learned this week,
we start by each offering up a little tease
about some kind of fact or story that we came across
in the course of reading, writing, reporting,
planning Halloween costumes, et cetera.
And then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.
Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was.
Eleanor.
Yes.
I would like to talk about why these frogs are wearing tiny taffeta shorts.
Great.
I for one cannot wait to have that question answered.
My fact is about a decorative gourd.
Because it's that season.
Heck yes.
And this is a decorative cord that's allegedly full of royal blood.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Gross.
Kendra.
Mine, I guess, is about sort of the, I don't know, what's another word from murderous?
Why do you need another word?
Well, I don't think anyone, like, actually killed these people, but these people did end up dead in the course of helping to develop something that we take for granted every day.
I'm intrigued.
Yes.
quite intriguing. What do we want to start with? I need to know about the shorts. I'm sorry.
I need to learn about this so I can move forward with my life. So my dad, who will be so delighted to be
mentioned on this podcast, he's a real weirdo. He sent me this photo of these two frogs having sex,
but one of them is wearing... Check popseye.com slash weird for the photo. Yes, but one of them is
wearing taffeta shorts. The frog has pants on.
So basically, my dad was traveling and he sent me this weird photo and like a caption for it and was like, how weird is this?
And I was like, very weird.
And so what we have to discuss here today is the history of in vitro fertilization.
All right.
I'm speechless.
So in vitro fertilization is really common.
It's a really a common way to conceive.
About a million babies have been born in the United States from IVF between 1987 and 2015, which is incredible.
Yeah.
It now accounts for one to two percent of all births in the United States.
states each year. So for those who maybe are not in the know, IVF is at a very high level
a host of methods that lab technicians can use to inseminate an egg artificially, like, you know,
in a petri dish or what have you, and then they can implant that embryo into a person's womb.
And it's popular for a lot of reasons. Like if you or your partner have a low sperm count or
difficulty producing eggs, you can still have a biological child, or if you want someone else's
genetic material to produce a baby, you can do that.
you can also put your embryo in someone else's womb through a surrogate.
That's possible too.
Kim Kardashian.
Exactly.
Kim Kardashian has done it repeatedly.
She's an IVF brand ambassador.
Just kidding.
That's not a thing.
Yet.
Yet.
Hashtag IVF have to spawn.
But this whole process, which like now is super common,
a really long time coming.
And so it started with this strange amphibious fashion forward experiment.
like 250 years ago.
So Lazaro Spalanzani.
Hey, spicy meat ball.
Was born in 1729 to a wealthy family in Scandinano, which is in northeastern Italy, which I just
say to validate my decision to say spicy meatball on this podcast.
And he studied every subject you could imagine.
He was a really interesting guy.
He was like really passionate about natural history and philosophy.
And then when he was 33, he became a priest.
and in 1768, he just got really obsessed with researching spontaneous generation, which I'm sure a lot of weirdos out there have heard of.
I'm sure that they're just like they have their own facts about this.
But the basic premise, starting like in like ancient Greece was that life could come from nothing.
So, you know, little annoying flies could be born of dust or like maggots came from rotting meat itself.
Like they just were born of the meat.
The phrase born of the meat is just accurate for most living things, but horrible.
True.
Born of the meat is real.
Spontaneous generation, not so much.
But at the time that Spalanzani was doing his research, people were like, yeah, this is 100% correct.
And it's hard to believe, but nobody, like the reason that they could believe this was because they still hadn't actually figured out how babies were made.
Right.
Like they were all like, you know, seven-year-olds whose parents were.
had to explain this to them. They just had not put it together. And so plenty of reputable scientists
believed that like sperm contained the homunculus, which we've talked about before. Yeah, pre-formationism.
Yeah, these little tiny men were like swimming around in sperm just waiting to be born and to grow.
So they had a really good grip on all of these things and everything they thought was right.
Spelanzani was an ovest. And so he actually thought that, yeah, a very forward kind of wrong
thinking. So he believed that the ova or the egg was like a complete embryo in and of itself and that
it didn't need anything else. Right. He compared it to like the human tadpole. Right. The like radical
feminist take on pre-formationism. Yes. Yeah. So still wrong, but nice. Incredibly wrong. But like,
slightly less wrong. Yeah. If I was alive at this time, I definitely would have been an ovest, like,
100%. So Spalanzani, he started messing with animal reproduction. And he was just like, I'm just going to
experiment on all the animals to try to figure out like why exactly my belief in ovism is correct.
So he was definitely working from a place.
That's all scientists worth the time.
Yes.
Yes.
He was just like, obviously I'm right.
And all of these people who believe in tiny men and sperm need to be disproved.
So he collected a bunch of frogs and he let them mate, except that the male frogs were
actually wrapped in tiny taffeta pants.
So basically frog condoms.
And while I have this photo.
While I have this photo from this museum in Italy that's dedicated to Spalanzani,
like he didn't actually ever draw what the pants looked like.
He just said that they were tiny frog pants.
So this has led to hundreds of years.
It's like that meme where you're like, if a dog wore pants, would they look like this or like this?
And it's like, do they go over the butt?
Yeah.
Or do they cover the whole belly and it cover all four legs?
Yes.
That's what if that's what the first?
frog pants. Nobody know. Why taffeta? I'm not really sure. That wasn't explained. Maybe just had some on hand.
Also, who stitched them? Another great question. Behind every great man is a woman making a taffita frog pants.
Exactly. Yeah, there are a lot of unanswered sartorial questions here. The thing is, what he was doing worked. So he put these pants on the frogs because he wanted to collect their semen. So when they were mating, they were not actually inseminating.
the female frog, it was all just getting caught in their pants.
And so, I know, sad for them. Awkward. And so then he would collect that demon and then he tried
to insert it into frog eggs artificially. And he successfully did it. Like, it worked. He made
frog babies. Wow. And so this is in the 1770s, and it's actually the first recorded case of
in vitro fertilization. But he didn't stop with frogs. He started working with other amphibians.
Basically, he put pants on anything he could put pants on.
He also, like, at some point, in this process, he also does, like, one of the earliest artificial inseminations of a dog.
I read somewhere that was cheekily, like, those didn't require pants.
Like, he didn't have to put the dog in the pants to collect their sperm.
So a lot of things I think through in terms of, yeah, his methodologies, but we don't have to dwell on that.
Thank you.
Yeah, yeah.
But he never gave up his ovest beliefs.
he was really truly believed that even though he himself had literally used sperm and put it in eggs to make embryos, he was like, nope, it's all in the egg.
So incredible commitment, cheers to him.
But I guess that doesn't matter in the long run because 300 years later in 1978, the first baby conceived through in vitro fertilization was born.
Her name was Louise Brown, and her parents had been trying to have a baby for nine years, but they couldn't because her mom had issues with her fallopian tubes being put.
blocked. So they were able to use this method. And Louise was called a test two baby, but for the
record, she was created in a petri dish, very different. And that's, I think, really nice that, you know,
now like one to two percent of babies are born this way each year. So thank you to those frog condoms.
Thank you to those frogs. Yes. Who probably had a very strange day. Yes. Yeah. Well, we're going to
take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.
Okay, we're back.
I can talk about some decorative blood gourds.
So I frequently just dig around in the last few years of history on subreddits like history or Ask a Historian and just find threads of people being like, this blew my mind.
And some of them have like super in-depth well-researched reports with like citations.
and some of them are actually things that are not real at all.
So it's like Wikipedia, a great starting point for curiosity journeys that can end up being great, weirdest thing, facts.
And I read one that was like, you know, there was this myth that a bunch of people after Louis XVIth was executed during the French Revolution,
that a bunch of people ran up and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood because people weren't, they did not have a lot to do.
There was also just a lot of people had a lot of feelings during the French Revolution.
Sorry to this man.
He needed some catharsis.
Yeah.
So first of all, no entertainment.
Second of all, a lot of resentment to the royal family.
So they were all there to see it happen and a bunch of them wanted souvenirs.
So believable.
But this comment on Reddit was like, yeah, and I heard that they actually found some of his blood on a handkerchief that some family had kept for all this time.
And so I decided to start looking into that.
And I opened this scientific study.
And the abstract, which is basically the summary, says a pyrographically decorated gourd.
And I was like, tell me more.
So I'm going to talk about that pyrographically decorated gourd and the great controversy over whose blood was in it.
Oh, God.
So for starters, here's the Gordon question.
I'll have photos on popside.com.
So when we say hierographically decorated, we mean someone has literally burned designs into it.
Fire.
Yeah.
And it's a dried, hollowed out.
Apparently, these were called gunpowder gourds and were not uncommon decorative item in a lot of parts of Europe and just in general.
I don't think there's like a particular era.
It's tied to.
It's just people love decorative gourds.
Go to Trader Doze.
You'll see it for yourself.
So then the question is, what's the question is?
so special about this particular gourd. So around 2011, this Italian family that as far as I know
has stayed anonymous, they were like, so we've had this gourd in the family for ages. It was a
gift to Napoleon Bonaparte, and we've just held on to it all this time. And it says a bunch of
stuff on it. In fact, a lot crammed onto that gourd. There's a lot of tiny writing crammed onto this
gourd with fire. And it said on January 21, Maximilian Baudelieu.
dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVIth after his decapitation. And there was no
handkerchief inside, but there was dried blood from the set henky. And so they were like,
you know, this family heirloom that they said that they knew had been given to Napoleon Bonaparte
had allegedly held the blood of this executed King of France. So they were like, now that we can do
all this genetic stuff, maybe you can tell.
us if this is a genuine
artifact. A genuine blood gourd.
Yeah, just this hollowed, dry
squash decorated with revolutionary war heroes.
And the researchers actually, who initially were given the gourd,
thought that it might be a joke.
I would.
Yeah.
When they were like, we're geneticists.
We have no historical context for this alleged blood gourd.
But then I guess they like did some Googling.
And we're like, oh, this is a thing that
purportedly would have existed, that, you know, that Europeans did love decorative gourds.
It would feel vaguely threatening without context to have this arrive at your labs.
Please test this gourd for the blood of King Louis XVI. Thank you.
And so they did some analysis, and this was all looking at the paternal line through the Y chromosome,
which at the time was like the only kind of genomic analysis that was available to most labs,
at least with like this kind of material.
It's easy to forget like just how recent most of our work in genetics is.
You know, we have been in the genetic age for a while now,
but it's only in the last few years that it's been like sequenced the shit out of everything.
We can do it any time we want.
So this one lab, you know, in 2013 had sequenced what they could.
And they were like, well, we can tell that the blood is.
is very old, so probably not a fake, not just like this Italian family poured some blood into a gourd,
sent it to a lap. So that's great. They also found that it probably belonged to someone with blue eyes,
which matched Louis the 16th. And they were like, yeah, yeah, checks out. And so there were all
these reports that the gourd indeed held the blood of Louis the 16th. And then they also were like,
maybe we can get a hold of his son's dried heart and test it with that because that heart is actually
kept in a crystal vase in the cathedral basilica of St. Dennis. So that's the thing they could have done.
Luckily, they did not disturb the dried up heart of a 10-year-old prince for the same genomic research.
However, they did use the mummified head of King Henry IV because that also actually had been, fun of fact,
stolen from that same cathedral by revolutionaries but was then recovered in 2008. And so by this time,
had been confirmed as the actual mummified head of King Henry, the fourth.
This is the best thing the Catholic Church has ever done, preserve all of these specimens.
And so using that, then, this study, they said with 95% confidence, they linked the blood
in the gourd as being a relative of the mummified head.
No way.
Correct reaction.
Oh, okay.
Because it was not true.
Oh, no.
So a later study then used blood from living descendants of the House of Bourbon.
So people that we know are related to Louis XVIth.
And they were like, our results don't line up with what these other people found.
Then finally, in 2014, researchers were like, we finally know how to do all this genetic stuff.
And so they just did the first, like, complete sequencing of the blood, not just looking at that paternal, you know, Y chromosome information.
And in looking at that, they were like, well, first of all, this guy had brown eyes.
My God.
Second of all, they did say, like, you know, wow, we don't know all of the genes related to height, which is true.
So it's good that they pointed that out.
They were like, you know, we do know the ones that tend to show up if you're unusually short or unusually tall.
And everybody talked about Louis the 16th being like the tallest man at court.
He was definitely over six feet tall.
And so they were like, we don't see any signs in this.
this blood that this person wasn't usually tall. Their genealogy didn't match up with Louis
the 16th. And they also were pretty sure that the blood was not as old as it should have been.
So they think it was probably the work of an 18th century fraudster. So the Italian family had every
reason to believe that this was real. But the person who had like put this item into circulation
as an artifact had just used some random blood in it, probably maybe just some other
unfortunate victim of execution.
Yikes.
Yeah.
And one thing I'd really like is this latest analysis in 2014.
They did say that they could not totally discard that the Gord sample belonged to Louis
the 16th.
So they've actually saved all the information from their analysis in case other alleged
relics are discovered.
Interesting.
And they also, there was a lot of talk about like all of the work they did.
to like filter the genetic data because a lot of the errors that come through with genetic sequencing
even now it's just because like there's DNA everywhere from so much stuff so I remember once there was
a study that was like we found the black death on subway platforms and then the backlash to that
study was like there were all of these fragments that they sequenced and then matched to
the best we know about the genetic sequencing of like other.
microbes and you actually can't just take a pile of random subway gunk and actually determine
the DNA of every single thing that's in there because we're just not that good at separating
the signal from the noise yet.
And the subway is that gross.
Right.
So like I kind of still believe that there's a plague in the subway.
Like I just don't need a DNA test to confirm it.
Yes, precisely.
I still, you know, I still wouldn't like lick any subway poles.
I think actually the guy who did the main like expert debunking of that.
I feel like I remember him saying to me or someone else, like, I still wouldn't go, like, licking subway poles.
But so, yeah, they talked a lot about the fact that they were like, this blood has been sitting in a gourd for years.
And there's been bacteria, fungi, gourd.
Who knows what else?
And so there was just a lot of work to do to just untangle the DNA of the blood in the first place.
So the fact that they added this caveat, just for listeners at home, if researchers don't,
mention caveats about how their findings might not be absolutely true. It's a good red flag
that their findings probably aren't true. So I did, I did find it very satisfying that this kind
of comes around to us finally understanding enough about genetics to know how little we know.
And to stop just being like, yep, definitely king's blood in that gourd.
Yes. Also, now I'm on a decorative blood gourd. It's got such elaborate portraits on it.
It says the word justice.
There's a, looks like a baby burning a crown.
I don't know.
It's great.
I really feel like your side hustle could be like teaching people how to make decorative blood gourds.
I would have to be able to make them myself and I do not have the artistic skill.
But it's something to aspire to, I guess.
I mean, it doesn't have to be limited to blood, right?
Like it could be like baby's umbilical cord.
And like, you know, there's like a whole suite of things that people enjoy.
Can store in decorative cords.
Right.
Baby's first tooth.
All of them, actually, if you want to get real quick.
This gourd is full of your teeth.
Have fun at college.
All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with Kendra's fact.
Okay, we're back.
Kendra, tell us about some murder, not murder.
I don't know why I'm having such a hard time thinking of a word that means like a thing that killed people.
Anyway.
Dangerous.
lethal.
Lethal.
Fair.
Thank you.
Crowdsource.
So a little bit of background.
This actually kind of started when I was still at Pops Eye when we did that story about Larson C breaking off.
Yeah.
And I talked to a researcher then and he was like, we're in this golden age of earth observation.
And it really hit home to me how much we take for granted sort of this bonanza of information.
Like, you know, you open your phone and you like know what the weather is going to be that day.
Or like, you know that a hurricane is coming.
in like five days, so you need to go to the store and buy bread and beer. Of course.
Very important things, right? So, like, in doing that, I kind of became obsessed with,
like, how we know, like, what we know about weather and how we know what we know about, like,
climate change, not just from, oh, the models say this, but from, like, well, what is the data
or, like, what is information that informs the model? So, like, oftentimes people talk about,
like, satellite observation records and how they date back to the 1970s, but, like, what nobody talks
about in which I'm, like, super obsessed with. And this is.
not my fact. It's just like a bonus fact. Is it like those early Lansat satellite used to film,
right? Like, hello? Right. So, like, they literally like put film in a camera and shot it into space
and then at some designated point in time when it ran out of, it took enough photos, it would like
fall back to Earth and they would like, go get it. That's amazing. Risky proposition considering
how much of the Earth is just like ocean. Yeah. So like exactly that. And it's one of those things
where you're like, well, when did we get digital cameras?
And you're like, oh, when did we get satellite footage?
And you're like, these don't match up.
So, like, it is a very like, oh, yeah, that makes sense thing when somebody tells you.
But, like, nobody talks about this stuff.
And so one of the other things that I'm really obsessed with is whether forecasting,
because the forecast, as much as we complain about them, they've actually gotten so much better.
Sure, yeah.
Even over the course of my very ancient lifespan.
And so I was researching something about that, like how we know.
know what we know, like atmospheric measurements and how, like, there are these actual monks that
take air samples, so we know the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, like that kind of detail.
And it came across this kind of interesting fact, which is we actually use a lot of airplanes
to take weather observations. There's something like 170,000 weather observations a day
done by commercial airplanes. And they feed into sort of our, yeah, exactly. Like we're on,
like, we're on these planes. Yeah, we're on these planes. So, like, you're flying the California for
vacation, that plane is taking weather observation and that weather observation gets fed back into
helping us kind of better chronicle weather data. And it makes sense because what happens
in the upper atmosphere is different than what happens sort of like down on the ground, right? So
like you want some opportunity to do that. And it makes sense because we fly all the time. But what I
didn't know is that like this weather observation, this airplane observation dates back to, it began in
1919. So what I didn't know until I started looking into it is that the National Weather Service
or back then it had a slightly different name.
But they started paying pilots in 1919 to take weather observations.
So they'd go up into the air and they would have instruments strapped to the back of their plane
and they would take these weather data.
And if you're thinking 1919 and you know anything about aviation,
this is actually before planes were pressurized.
And so a minimum height that the pilots had to go was roughly two and a half miles.
It's 13,500 feet.
And for every mile they went above that, they got paid an extra $1,000.
So there was like this incentive to go really far up.
Risk and reward.
And unfortunately, sometimes they would black out and die.
Cool.
And something like 12 died between 1931 and 1938.
That's a high rate.
Right.
For weather.
And it's like huge.
I mean, think about how many people die, though.
Like, so this is my passion, I guess.
Weather is my passion.
I love that for you.
So, like, yes, it is a high rate of people dying for weather.
And I'm not at all encouraging this at any point.
able to bring back depressurized planes.
But then you think about something like the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, which is often
considered one of the most deadly hurricanes on the record, and you're like, well, it's kind of
worth it because we don't have catastrophic hurricanes to that degree anymore.
And like the ability to forecast weather is just so life-saving.
And we don't often coach it in that way.
And the other thing that's kind of funny is when that Gaviston hurricane hit, the Keybans actually
knew the hurricane was coming.
So the American Mother Service was saying, no, no, it's not coming.
No, no, it's not coming.
But the Cuban weather forecasters were like a hurricane is coming.
But America had decided that Cubans were dumb and backwards because they were Catholic and brown.
And so they actually, the head of the Weather Service blocked off communication from Cuba to the U.S.
And they couldn't allow, they wouldn't allow those forecasts to come through.
And I was like, yeah.
So there are things like that that come.
There's a lot there.
Sorry.
No, that's, yeah.
Yikes.
And so I'm very grateful to these pilots, even if they may have been sadly motivated.
by money for the sacrifice that they made because it's just so important.
Yeah.
So that's kind of, that's a lot.
Sorry.
We're all betamalizing this information.
On a lighter note, it does remind me of we had an episode, actually one of our previous
live shows, ding, ding, buy tickets for the live show, where I talked about not one,
not two, but three historical balloon riots.
Yes.
People were, they went bananas for hot air balloons.
and one of the big proponents of hot air balloon use was this guy who was like, we can do experiments now.
We can go up into the sky.
And there was a famous one where, like, he went up with a scientist, like an early meteorologist,
and they went up so high that they like became hypoxic.
One went temporarily blind.
One went lost the use of his arms and he had to like shimmy around and like pull the rip.
with his teeth to save them, which I believe is now being dramatized in a movie.
Women don't belong in balloons.
Yes.
You know, this is one situation where I'm like, I don't understand why they had to make
this male character a woman and not just make them gay.
Yeah.
I would love to see some gay balloon drama.
Yeah.
It's amazing, like, too, like the military implications of weather and just like how important
it is to be able to take these observations all the time and like know what's coming.
and thinking of it as like a logistical advantage, right?
Like over your enemy.
And it's interesting because this researcher that sort of spiraled my obsession with like how we know what we know,
he was like really snarky about it because there was a real concern.
No, he was like there was a real concern at the time and it still somewhat exists that America would start or the United States would start defending some of its earth observation.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
And that's like hugely critical for weather forecasting and also a lot of countries depend on our.
weather forecasting because they don't have the financial resources to do it. And what's happening now
is that a lot of private weather companies are starting to move into that space. So like for a long time,
the relationship between sort of private weather satellite companies and public ones have been real,
or the government mandated ones have been really complementary because they were often providing services that
the government can't. Depending on the satellite, it only sort of circles Earth one time a day. And so if you
are like a shipping company and you really want to know what,
the weather is over the specific area, like satellite companies can help bridge that gap.
But there's increasing tension because, so the big concern right now is that they're putting
up sort of pretty high up in the weather service, someone who comes from ACUE weather.
Okay.
And they're very concerned that he's really going to push forward more weather privatization.
And we're going to have to start paying for this thing that's been free for a really long time
and that people will start to die because what they're, they can't afford to buy it or their town or
their community can't afford to buy it.
And then on a global scale, like when I was in,
India a few years ago talking to weather forecasters there, they rely completely on NOAA and NASA data.
I mean, they do a lot of the number crunching themselves, so to speak, but the actual raw data doesn't come from them so much.
It comes from us.
And there are lots of small island states and small countries where that's the case.
That was your 538 story, right?
About like the interconnection between, like, the idea that weather in India is actually related to weather.
The weather rush.
Yeah, yeah.
That one was so annoying because, like, the week after we published, this, like, the definitive.
study came at saying that like it was true and I could have used way more definitive language.
No couching words. Yeah. And that's kind of the underlying tension, which is that as things get
warmer because of climate change, weather is going to become or has already become a lot less
predictable. And so the idea that we're going to have less information, not more in a time
in our climate system and our weather systems are more unpredictable is incredibly dangerous.
Yeah. Wow. And indeed fatal. Yes. Though not murderous.
though could be.
I mean, I'm sure there's like some pilot intrigue because like pilots back in the day,
they were like, you know, sassy dudes.
Sassy dudes indeed.
The only kind we allow on weirdest thing.
So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week?
Blood gourds.
Oh, I'm going with frogs in tap of the pants.
So.
Yeah, I'm going with blood gourds.
I'm sorry.
Oh, my gosh, wow.
Yeah, absolutely.
On a week with frogs.
some taffeta pants and sassy male pilots.
Sophia Coppola has blessed you.
Oh, thank you.
Yeah.
So blood cords win.
All right, I'll take it.
Your prize is a blood cord.
Yay.
Oh my gosh, I can't wait.
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