The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Brain Death Cocktails, Fur Seal Crimes, Fish Driving Cars

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

This week, Rachel talks about fish getting behind the wheel, Sara Kiley unravels the story of rodent DNA and a secret fur seal trade, and Sandra explains how cocaine might be the key to organ transplants. 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!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code Weirdest for 20% off. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice. work. Now Hank says a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets.

Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 Feldman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. I am Sandra Gutierrez. Welcome to the show. Yay! I am very excited. Listeners, Sandra is one of our beloved Popside team members. Why don't you say a little bit about what you do at Popsai? I know we've been planning on having you on Weirders thing for a long time, and it has not happened until now. We will remedy this again soon.

We want you in the rotation, but please introduce yourself. Yeah, so I'm the associate DIY editor of Popular Science. I clean stuff. That's sort of my thing. And I look into the little science bits of everyday things. So then you can know what to do and do things yourself. Yeah. You, like, I feel like saying you research the little science bits is really an understatement.

You are like the master of, you know, to quote a fine sci-fi film, sciencing the shit out of the problem. Well, that's part of my job description. So I'm happy with that. I'm happy with that. I'm going to stick with it. Awesome. So let's get into it.

On the weirdest thing I'm in this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, cleaning, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? And also listeners, FYI, we attempted to record this episode last week. And very embarrassingly, I had not checked in with Sarah Kylie. And we had done the same fact.

And Sarah Kylie has graciously, magnanimously, life-savingly offered to find something else to talk about. I bump into a lot of weird stuff. Now that I'm editing a bunch of stories every day, like, it's just, there's so much weird stuff thrown at me. But I'm really excited about this one. So my tease is that this is about how rodent DNA unveiled a 200-year-old black market trade. Oh. Spooky. I love it.

I love it rodent caper. My teas, which inexplicably somehow, even though it is not a new study, Sarah Kylie and I both initially planned on doing. But I will do my best to do it justice for both of us is that I want to talk about why scientists taught goldfish how to drive, which is the thing they did. Oh, they did. I am so very curious that both of you knew the answer to this, and I didn't. And now I'm like, well, tell me more. That's what weirdest thing is all about. It's just a then diagram of weird things we know, and most people do not, because no one needs to know this much weird stuff.

That's weirdest thing, TM. Dessandra, what's your tease? Okay, I'm very excited about this. I'm going to tell you the story of how illegal drugs might be the key to the future of organ transplantation sparkly emoji. Ooh. So many drugs it could be, just illegal drug. So I'm excited to hear more. What do we want to start with?

I can get us going as the goldfish did. We can hit the road. as the goldfish did. Oh, yeah. Press on the goldfish gas. Great. Let's do goldfish then. All right. So about a year ago, researchers in Israel published evidence that goldfish can learn

to drive tanks. Of course, I mean fish tanks on wheels. Though I do also love. Imagine. I was about to ask war tanks? So the researchers crafted what they called. FOVs, fish operated vehicles, of course, which basically amounted to fish tanks, secured to motorized wheels. The motorized wheel rig looks kind of like a DIY version of like a Mars rover,

like maybe something you would see in a very impressive high school robotics competition. And then the rig also included a little camera, which was hooked up to a Raspberry Pi computer very useful for DIY applications of course we talk about those on popsai.com all the time and it was pointed down into the water so that it could track the movements of the fish inside and then it translated them into wheel movements based on a simple algorithm so basically fish goes in the tank swims around in the center nothing happens but when it swims in a particular direction until it bumps up against the glass while continuing to face that direction, then the fish-operated vehicle will move accordingly.

So basically, to move the car forward, the fish is sort of like nosing the tank along like it's rolling a ball and the wheels are responding appropriately. The researchers placed a pink board somewhere in the room that they were doing the experiment in. the fish were given a food pellet the moment their tank mobile successfully tapped the target and after a few days the six goldfish who it feels very important to note or named after pride and prejudice characters. Yes. Oh my gosh.

I love that. Yes, I love that. The kind of detail I love. They all learned how to steer their FOVs to the snack zone, which is honestly like more than I have done behind the wheel of a car in many years. I love the snack zone, by the way. Yeah. Like I just, I just picture the goldfish like headbutting the wall of the tank and just like,

welcome to the snack zone. I just love that. I'm sorry. I have to hope the researchers, you know, had an appropriate amount of fanfare for the fish reaching the snack zone target. But we'll never know unless they decide to tell us. So the fish were able to navigate the vehicle. even from different starting points in the room.

So they weren't just like memorizing, oh, you know, swim forward for this long and then like turn your head this way. And that means to get food. They were like finding this pink target in the room. And they even managed to ignore false targets that were placed around the room using different colors. And they even were able to recover and redirect when their tank mobile bumped into walls. which, again, that's better driving than I've done in a long time. Apparently, again, this feels very important to note, Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley were the best drivers in the bunch.

Good to know. Of course. Of course. So when I first read about this study, some of the coverage I saw seemed to imply that the point was showing that fish could figure out like the mechanism of operating a vehicle as opposed to just swimming. And I found that very perplexing because like how could you prove that a fish didn't simply think its tank like got bigger every time it bumped its nose against the wall? Like you don't know what the fish is thinking.

So there's no way to say the fish understood that by swimming up against the wall it was operating a car. So you can't prove that the fish learned to like drive in a philosophical sense. Yeah, you can't do that. And that absolutely wasn't the point of the study. So that's not an issue. The point was to see whether goldfish have some innate sense of logic when it comes to the challenge of navigating a space. Like, is a fish able to execute a task like figure out how to get to the food place when the food place is not in an aquatic environment. It's definitely kind of like heady and philosophical, at least if you don't spend your

time studying fish brains, but it's still way more interesting and like tangible than can fish drive. The question is like, what does it mean for a fish to be able to navigate and like how many factors can you take out of that equation to try to prove they have some inherent ability to say like this is the space I'm in. These are the obstacles. These are the turns. And I'm looking for this thing in this space. Does that make sense? Again, it's kind of. It does make sense. I was actually going to say, well, that requires a very special Google Maps navigation tool to get around. But then you went into the whole philosophical thing. And I was like, oh, wow, this is much deeper than that. Okay, I'm digging it. Right. So not so much about the question of whether a fish can conceptualize a car,

which would be a very silly study, though if someone out there has tried it, I'm sure it was really valuable that you do really good science. But it's not what we're doing today. So yeah, the purpose of the fish operated vehicle was just to make it possible for a fish to navigate in a non-aquatic space. So it doesn't matter what the fish thinks is happening when it makes the tank move. What matters is that the fish is figuring out the best way. to get to an arbitrary target using extremely non-fish native wayfinding points like walls and

like tables in a room. And again, the perspective is going to be all warped because they're clearly not swimming through a room full of water. So yeah, to just summarize one more time, it's about taking away everything that makes a fish navigating in the water not have to do with like knowing how to figure out and navigate a space. Fascinating stuff. Wow. I've always like thought of it as a reverse submarine.

Yes. It's like, it's a very good way to put it. Yeah. It's kind of like what would people do if you put them in hamster wheels that were completely airtight and stuck them in the ocean? Oh, totally. They sunk somehow. Right.

Well, and like we would, it's, it is about like trying to. figure out how similar they are in in terms of what navigation means for them. Because like, yes, humans learn how to be particularly adept at like familiar environments, but also like the way our brain works is that the point of being able to navigate is that if you get dropped into like a totally unfamiliar, like even if you got dropped into a blank void, you'd be like, okay, how do I figure out where is where in this void? You wouldn't be like, like, you wouldn't be like, I don't know what physical space is anymore because I'm no longer in my familiar environment. Though your results may vary.

It's probably pretty freaky to get dropped into a void. And frankly, I think the fact that these fish didn't just have little existential crises and melt down in the corner means they did better on this test than probably I would have done. Good for them. Yeah. Good for them. I won their therapist number for sure. they were even able to approach their targets from like a wide variety of different angles,

which suggests that they had some internal representation of this strange world around them. And they got faster over time. So all of this helps support the idea that the way we navigate space, which we know has to do with parts of our hippocampus that are pretty similar in all vertebrates, including these little goldfish, has more to do with some innate inner mind mapping tool. tools than it does with like species specific ways of figuring out an environment, which is not to say we don't also have those because there are loads of animals who are really well adapted to specifically navigating the kinds of environments they live in, humans included. But we also have like an innate ability to like look around, become spatially aware. Your results may vary. I don't have very good spatial awareness, but it exists.

Me neither. There is that I'm aware that there is a space. Now, just one thing to end this is that there was a study published in 2019 that genuinely taught rats to drive little cars that they operated with toggles made out of copper wires. And the point of that study really was to teach rats to drive, not just propel themselves around in a strange new way. The idea was actually to show whether growing up in so-called enriched environments, which for a lab rat means like cages with multiple levels to climb on and interesting stuff to play with.

It doesn't mean the other rats were like actively mistreated or neglected. It's just that they were in like a standard, a standard rat enclosure. And the enriched environments were more like what you would expect someone to get for a pet rat. You know, there was fun stuff in there, not just stuff to keep them from being miserable and starving to death. relatable. Sometimes we must enrich our environments ourselves. So the question was whether growing up in an enriched environment made rats better able to learn stuff and less likely to be stressed out about encountering new things and having to learn a new skill, which obviously one of the reasons So looking into that is because there's a big question of how the environments we grow up in, you know, affect how our brains work and kind of our resilience and our intelligence and socialization skills.

So very, very obvious reasons to want to understand even in a rodent model how having fun stuff around and cool new things to do all the time might. change the way you grow up. So what's funny is that there didn't turn out to be much difference in stress level. All the rats apparently felt pretty chill about driving, at least like hormonally. So that's nice. I'm glad that they had a fun, had a fun time cruising. But the enriched environment rats were more likely to keep wanting to drive around, even when there was no food for them to win by doing so.

they just wanted to like mouse on a motorcycle it around the enclosure. Listen, listen, driving can be very relaxing for a lot of people. So I'm not surprised rats think the same. I would probably like driving a lot more if I got to do it around a little enclosed space just for fun. A hundred percent. With a cute little, not fun, a cute little DIY car just for me, sometimes getting a snack when I did a good job driving. Yes.

I think, yeah, you stop at the intersection. here's a little treat for you. Yeah, I think I'd be a very different driver, have a very different relationship with driving if that's how I'd learn. So anyway, that is why goldfish sort of learned to drive and rats really learn to drive. And I just love experiments where they have to make cute little rigs for animals to do human-y things so much. Okay, now my question is the rats and the goldfish when they listen. to Olivia Rodrigo, do they feel something?

Oh, do they feel the, I got my driver's license last week? That's the question. Can they relate? Can they relate? I don't know. I feel like having a car existential, existential crisis and understanding music probably are on the same level of brain power. So I don't know if the goldfish would. It's one or the other. One or the other, dude.

Amazing. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. And I can't have one right now because I have a new kit.

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I want to hear about some rodent mysteries, please. Yeah. Well, so actually, the rodents are kind of like, you know, like a feature, but they're not the star of the show. So the star of the show is fur seals. So we're still going to talk about animals because that's my favorite thing to do. But we're going to backtrack it a little bit. So about 150 years ago, sealers in New Zealand nearly brought fur seals, also known as Kekano, to extinction. So we're talking about 18th century-ish.

We're having some trouble with keeping the fur seals alive. Nowadays, they're doing a lot better. The last recorded count that I could find was 2001, and even then it was 200,000 of them. Little fuzzy, cute seals bouncing around the rocky shores throughout mainland New Zealand and parts of Australia and all of that. So they're doing better. Preface with a little positive note.

But before we dive into the ceiling, we're going to talk a little bit about the geography of New Zealand, because there's two islands and they're only 25 kilometers apart but they're quite different actually. So the North Island is home to the biggest city in the country, Auckland, and it's got a warm climate. It's got volcanoes and surfing beaches and all of that really fun stuff. The South Island is cold, quiet and where they filmed Lord of the Rings. So very different vibes. I know this for the episode of the TV show Rocket Power.

They did a surfing and snowboarding combo competition. New Zealand. That's all. Just felt very important to note. I mean, it is. That's probably the only, I didn't know anything about this. So I need a lot more rocket power, clearly. But we're going to be talking about the South Island, the Lord of the Rings Island, the Cold Island. And back in the day, fur seals were really dominant here. And because we have to, I'm going to talk about fur seals and give you a little description of what they are like. So they're really, really, really cute. They have pointy noses and whiskers. And they have hind flippers that, rotate so they can like wattle across land.

But if you're like a sealer or you hunt seals, the crucial bit is probably their double-layered coat of fur, because that's very valuable. They can get really big and chunky. An adult male can weigh like 330 pounds and be eight feet long, so they're gigantic. They're expert fishers. They chase after like squid and barracudas and mackerel,

and some females can dive 780 feet into the water and then hang out down there for like 11 minutes. So they're adorable and they're kind of bad. They're tough little flubbery creatures. But a century... I love that. Yeah, the seal baddies. I love them.

But a century ago, their story was very tragic. So as most of my stories go, we just go backwards and backwards and backwards until we can go forward. So we're going to go ahead and go backwards a little bit. So the hunting of these animals again of the Maori people, the folks that lived in New Zealand and the Cook Islands before Europeans arrived. They supposedly originated from East Polynesia, rowing over in waves of conditions. new voyages in the 1300s to settle in New Zealand. And their culture, as it does, over centuries of isolation became distinct from other Eastern Polynesian ones. But as the story of colonization often goes, by around 1877, they were forced to assimilate into Western culture,

and their social upheaval epidemics, and it took a toll on the population. Progress has been made to get these folks' social justice in their home nation, but of course that's hardly a simple story. And now they have about 900,000 of their people in New Zealand. making about 17% of the population. But fast forward. So we're going to go back to the like early days, the canoe days, 1300s. So we've got people on New Zealand and they need to eat and survive. And first seals, along with a smaller group of elephant seals make for pretty ideal prey.

And before people arrive, these creatures were all over the coast of New Zealand. But this naturalist Johan Reinhold Forster recorded that they make a quote unquote most excellent and palatable food. by far more tender, juicy, and delicate than beefsteaks. So, Jesus Christ. More delicate than beef steaks. They were a bit doomed to be hunted, not to mention all the other stuff that comes with them, including their seal teeth, which make for really great fishing hooks. So, yeah.

And so a lot of this came from New Zealand's government encyclopedia, which there's not a ton of recorded information about the first seal trade in New Zealand. So, you know, take everything with a grain of salt. A lot of these sources are from, like, the 17 and 1800s. So obviously grain assault with everything that comes from a couple hundred years ago. But according to that encyclopedia, in the first two centuries of settlement, the Maori were often more seal hunters than Moa hunters, which Moa were a big bird that also went extinct around the same time that humans showed up. And some records show that it took like a century to wipe out these giant birds. But back to the encyclopedia.

There's evidence of extensive sealing in the far north. However, by the 1700, seals were confined to the far south. So they're confined to Lord of the Rings area. And so fast forward a few decades. Europeans like James Cook are arriving in 1773. Cook spent time in the dusty sound, which was by fate would have it. One of the places where the seal populations were still like kind of bustling. And so next part is really sad, and so I didn't have it in me to like write it out in my own words.

So this again, come from the encyclopedia. But Cook's men shot or clubbed the seals for food and used their skins for repairing rigging in their oil for lamps. Their potentialist trading item was especially noted in Sydney. From 1788, merchants in the new convict settlement were seeking ways of paying for imports. The London firm of Sand Enderby and Sons, who were active in

transporting convicts to Sydney and had a license in the East India Trading Company, arranged for the Britannia to drop a sealing gang in Dusky Sound in November 1792. They were to peer skins for the Chinese market as payment for tea. But when the men were picked up in

September 1793, they had collected had 4,500 skins and had also built New Zealand's first sailing ship. However, the opening of Australia's based straight rookeries in 1797 diminished the attraction of New Zealand. So as things would go, people show up and we start clubbing the poor animals, which is pretty grim. And so this went on for a while. But a few years later in the 1800s, the rookies were exhausted and traders started to look to make business with England and they also still needed seal products.

Furfer has leather for shoes, seal oil for lighting. industrial processes, but by this time, things had gotten kind of sketchy. You can only, like, really, like, raid a island for their animals for so long without things getting a little question mark or a little bit legal. Um, mostly because the East India company's monopoly in the area, it wasn't even anything about like, oh, poor seals. It was just a monopoly. Um, so after the rush to the dusky sound happened in 1803, hunters moved around and they were being sneaky with their locations. American sealers hit the antipodes, bounty in Auckland islands. and there were years, where in three years,

140,000 seals were killed in the first island alone. And a few years later, sealers were back at a couple of other spots. Two years after that, there was an elephant seal oil rush in the Macari and Campbell Islands. By 1810, things were slowing down. There were only a few crows, like, still popping around sealing.

By 1820s, duties on colonial oil removed, and people needed seal skins again, so the rookeries bounced back. that faded. So it's kind of like an up and down roller coaster. And by that time, most of the workers that were doing this stuff were based on the shore. They weren't like coming over from somewhere. There were more Maori becoming involved. But there's some interesting stuff about who these people were that were sealers. And so if you didn't catch it before, a lot of the people that were sealers were coming from Australia, which had become kind of like a convict colony.

And so most of the ceiling was organized by Sydney companies, and they're almost all founded by ex-convicts such as Simon Lord. And remember that name for later. And there were like a couple of American ones, but the monopoly really restricted how much people could get in there. The encyclopedia called the men a tough breed of sea rats, some former sailors and other ex-convicts. And so some joined gangs after stowing away on ships from Sydney. So things are just bananas. And they were paid basically a hundredth of the take of the skins and oil collected. So they did not make a ton of money.

The life was hard. Gangs of men would be left on coasts of islands for months at a time, kind of like pirates. Like one group survived on this like rocky island for four and a half years before they were rescued. They'd live in caves and rocks and underboats that they turned upside down. Swarms of raps were everywhere. The men were constantly cold and wet. Fresh water was scarce and they lived off of dry cakes. seal meat or fish and suffered from scurvy a lot of the time. After his time as a sealer,

this one guy noted in his journal in 1820 that he had become changed from the delicate youth to about as rough a piece of goods as ever weathered the wide world. So it's really no fun for anybody. It doesn't sound like except for the people making a bunch of money. The seals aren't having a good time. The people that are doing it doesn't sound like it's a good time. It's a lose-lose situation for sure. And I would acquit that job immediately. Oh my gosh. I'm going to have to like kill animals and you're going to leave me on an island for four years. Like, it's not happening for me. No. No. But anyway, back to the timeline, 1830s, most of these guys had had enough blessedly. They were supplementing income with crops and timber and some of them even

transitioned to whaling. And sealing kind of became like a like a side hobby for whalers. Because I guess it is like kind of, what do you think about it? I guess pretty similar. Like you're in the open sea and you're like hunting for whale. You might as well just do this other thing. I guess. Like it's kind of, it kind of makes sense. And by 1875, the population of seals had shrunk so much that hunting was only allowed in the winter. And then 20 years after that, there were no more open sealing seasons except for two exceptions in the early 1900s. The last sealing, the last official legal one was in 1946, which ended up with about 6,000 seals killed. So that was the last time they were legally killed. So that's more information than anybody's ever wanted to know.

about the New Zealand sealing history. And now we're going to get to the rats or the rodents, should I say. So now we've powered through all of that. Time to get to the weirdest bit, the weirdest thing of my weirdest thing. How a rodent DNA laid bare an illegal sealing scheme between New Zealand and Asia. So beyond just physical difference between the North and the South Islands, the rats and mice are different on these two islands. And that's really weird because it's only 25 kilometers apart. Yeah, but I guess that's far enough for a rat to not swim it.

To not swim. Oh, yeah. Hashtag evolution. Yeah, it's enough, but it's still a little weird considering how much was going back and forth and back and forth. Right, like ships, you would think. Yeah, like, and the mice aren't doing any swimming, but they're stowing away, like the gang members on the ceiling boats. But a couple of years ago, a zoologist named Carolyn King, she was looking into the differences between the North and the South Island mice. As it turns out, the house mice on the North Island were descendants of hitchholt.

hikers that stowed away from Europe on the ships of British colonialists. So they're European mice. The South Island had a totally different mouse, completely different, related instead to the Southeast Asian mouse, a subspecies that is widespread in China, but it's never been found outside of Asia. So, little weird. A few years later, King and her team compared the rodent DNA with genetic material from 19th century rat and mouse specimens unearthed near Sydney's port.

and as suspected, the city mice also had European roots, but the Chinese transplant mice nowhere to be found. So basically these little creatures are scampering evidence of a connection between the South Island and China in the 1800s, when all the sealing business was going down. However, there's no historical records in English that show China and New Zealand were trading at the time. So it's a little bit mysterious. And so King recently offered up kind of a scandalous explanation, if you will. As reported by Hakai, Hakai was the only article I found written about this at all. So shout out to them for letting me read their page a million times. But the rodents basically arrived with the traders who sailed to China to illegally sell the pelts of New Zealand for seals.

And then they returned to the South Islands. In the 1800s, these seal rookeries dotted the South Island. So they were everywhere. and pelts were kind of the only thing that island had to offer at the time when it turned in turn of like commodities for trading and whatnot and in what was then called canton of bustling south china port city it was kind of the background of international trade these first eel pouts were becoming more and more valuable because sea otters and therefore were actually becoming scarce because people were doing this to animals everywhere and so if you were feeling ballsy enough to go ahead and do some illegal trade with these fur pelts. Like, you could make a fortune doing this. And obviously, if you're a sealer, life is already, like, really hard. So it's not that shocking people probably went a little bit around the edges of the law to make a little bit more money.

But yeah, at this time, again, with the monopoly that we were talking about earlier, the British East India Company was like, don't trade with China and India because I just wanted to keep things locked tight, which made seal hunting, like, you know, more like being like a little sneaky pirate or something. So apparently there is some rumor of who might have been doing this. So a historian in New Zealand actually said there's rumors floating around like 200 years after the deed. So apparently in 1806, colonial authorities busted Simon Lord, who we were talking about before. They caught him in Sydney for shipping 87,000 sealskins collected in the Antipodes Islands south of New Zealand to Canton via Sydney. So basically we just unearthed the true bits of this 200-year-old rumor thanks to little stowaway mice, which is the story for today.

Oh, I love that. I love that. I love when the tea gets spilled. What an adventure for those mice. Bless them. They're doing God's work. They're solving mysteries and being mice. Oh, it's really cute.

I'm imagining the mice solving. little crimes. It makes me think of those rescuers Down Under movies. Oh gosh. Yeah, I remember the Down Under movies. Rev it back up. We've got a new story.

Driving around in their little cars, Solvin Crimes. Solman crimes. I mean, of course. That's what they do. All right. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact.

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Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. All right, we're back. And I would like to hear about some illegal drugs, please. please of course i am very glad to oblige okay but first i want to tell you the story about how i came across this weird factory because it's it's sort of funny okay so this was right around this time of year so january 2022 that the world was celebrating the first successful seno transplantation of a genetically modified pigs hard into a human body which is awesome okay but the word successful here is a little bit ironic. So the surgery was indeed a success, meaning that the patient, a 57-year-old

man called David Bennett Sr., didn't die on the table during the procedure. However, he did die two months later in March, though apparently his death had nothing to do with organ failure. So yay, that's good news. Now, senotransplantation, which is the technical term for transplanting tissue such as organs from one species to another has been making a lot of progress in the last couple of years. And before Dr. Mohamed Mujedin and the medical team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine completed the transplant of the Picks Heart, another team at NYU had successfully done something similar with a porcine kidney in 2021. And, you know, like most people, I was completely in awe by this medical breakthrough. And as one does, I got absolutely obsessed with it, because of course,

why not. So I started consuming a lot about it. I was reading articles. I was listening to podcasts. I was diving deep into the deepest rabbit halls of TikTok. You name it. I was there. So one day, I was walking my dog and I was listening to an episode of Today Explained. When the host mentioned only in passing, which is baffling to me, that before the actual transplant took place, the pig's heart had to soak in a very special solution. This particular concoction, whose recipe is, of course, proprietary, contained a mix of around 10 different hormones, including some cortisol, a dash of adrenaline, and a very special ingredient, one gram per liter of dissolved cocaine. I knew it. I had a feeling in my heart. This is a Coke story.

Of course it is. I mean, you got little white powders in your kitchen for a reason. You know, little white powders here also makes sense. So this is funny because we, For years, doctors have turned down potential heart donors with a history of cocaine use, mainly because of the belief that the drug might affect the quality of the organ, making it unsuitable for transplant. So there are recent studies contradicting this belief and stating that there's not a huge difference between the hearts of donors who have never tried coke and donors who have a history of consuming the drug

in a non-intravenous way, so, you know, snorting it. But transplant centers routinely declined tissue from this type of donor due to the concern over cardiac complications. So, let's go back to the Coke brew. It was developed in Lund University in Sweden by Dr. Stigstein. I am definitely butchering his name, so my apologies. He has dedicated his life to researching organ transplantation, especially heart and lungs.

And he uses pigs because in case you didn't know, swine physiology and anatomy are very much like ours. So up to a certain degree, you can easily extrapolate, results from there and apply them in clinical studies with humans, which is cool, because you don't want to butcher people to save other people. It just doesn't make sense, although hashtag capitalism. Anyway. Also, hashtag the history of medicine. But I mean, of course. I'm involved from that. We're trying. We're trying. We're getting there. It's a long way off, but, you know. So in 2016, Steen publishes a paper on how injecting pigs with a solution he gave

the very cutesy name of brain death cocktail. I know, I know, this is insane. I read about it and I was like, wait a minute, you didn't come up with a better name for that? But anyway. I feel like that's the name of a mixed drink at like a really bad college bar. And of course it has, it has like a monster energy drink in it. Like it has to.

It's just horrifying. Yes, I wouldn't drink that. But anyway, the brain death cocktail could stabilize the pig's heart for up to 24 hours after harvesting so that they're still eligible for successful transplantation. And just if you're curious, the name stems from the moment when the brew was injected into the swines, which was 30 minutes after they were brain dead, like Mary brain dead. So it wasn't that this was the cocktail that induced brain death. Yeah, no, it isn't.

But again, God, like, you can come up with a better. Or can save your cocktail would be fine. Right. Yeah. No. Like, I don't, I don't know. It's like brain cocktail, brain brew, picks heart with a, you know, with a little umbrella. I don't know. There's so many possibilities. You could have come up with something better, Dr. Steen.

I'm sorry. But, you know, now in general, heart transplants are extremely delicate in that you need to put that ticker into the recipient's body within one to two hours after harvesting. Otherwise, the probability of the procedure going south increases way too much. and it's not even worth it, you know, attempting the procedure. At the moment, there's no research that shows that if Dr. Steen's Coke brew works in human hearts, but since the team at the University of Maryland was using a pig's heart, they decided to try the solution to give themselves a bigger chance at success as possible. So they imported the Coke brew from Sweden from a company called ExVivo,

which is giving evil zombie company from like a video game or manga, but that's just me. In an interview with science, Dr. Muhedin, who led the team at the University of Maryland, explained that the fact the solution contained cocaine created a headache because each time they imported it, they had to get the Drug Enforcement Administration involved and get a permit. Because, I mean, getting drugs into this country is not easy, whether you tried legally or illegally. So there was a lot of paperwork going on, and apparently it was really, really annoying. And now to the million-dollar question, because I bet. that you've been wondering this from the time I started talking. Why Coke? That is very weird.

So Steen's 2016 paper says that the preservation of a potential donor's heart should start with optimizing the blood circulation in the donor, meaning in this case the pig. So to do that, doctors try to increase blood pressure by injecting the system with a hormone called noradrenaline or norahepine. But the substance is not as efficient as it can be because the chemical changes that happen in the pig's brain post-mortem make it so that the body absorbs neurodrenaline way too fast, so it cannot do much. But good news. This is great. Here's where blow comes to save the day. It just so happens that the drug is a pretty good re-uptake blocker, which means it prevents noradrenaline from being absorbed, effectively helping normalizing blood pressure. Now, exactly how this translates into the brain death cocktail, helping keep tissue healthy and functioning for longer before a surgical procedure, we do not know. Trade secret. Yeah. And again, it's proprietary. So, I mean, we can expect more research, but we don't actually know.

So, I mean, not even Mohadine knows, Dr. Mohadine. So Dr. Muhadine said to science that the deprivation of blood flow and oxygen. when the heart is being removed from the pig's chest may somehow deplete the mitochondria in the organ's cells, and apparently the Coke brew might be able to help with that. But that's just a theory, and we need to wait until more research is done so we get more answers. In the meantime, the future of pig organs in human bodies, it is uncertain, but it is slowly progressing. So research is still ongoing, and there's a lot of bureaucracy involved, which is really a bummer. The medical team at the University of Maryland only got approval from the Food and Drug Administration to try this procedure on a specific patient.

So they'll have to do it all over again if another qualified candidate comes around. And because we're talking about organ transplantation here, that is a big, huge, tremendous if. But, you know, in the meantime, Dr. Muhadine and his team are doing tests on baboons, hoping to show long-term survival rates and get FDA approval for a multi-center trial to advance their approach in seno transplantation. And this could eventually make organ transplants safer and increase organ availability worldwide, saving millions and millions of lives in coming years. And that is all, well, not all, but at least in part, thanks to blow. It is great. Wow. Yeah, I'm so, like, you know, it's so interesting that COVID-

cocaine was the thing to go with, not like anything else. There's so many drugs, including ones that actually get prescribed for things. I'm just laughing about the DEA, like being at University of Maryland, like, here's your safe Coke professors. Can you imagine? I just imagine Dr. Muhadine's team saying like, oh my God, we run out of the concoction. We're going to have to order some again. Can you just call Phil from the DEA, Jesus Christ? Like, it must be so annoying. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure, well, of course it sounds like more research is needed. I'm sure if there was an uneasy substance to work with, they would have gone for it. Absolutely. Absolutely. But this is very good news. And again, the patient they try this on died after two months. But the fact that

his death was not due to organ failure is really, really good news. And here's hoping that they can make more progress. And again, this can change the whole organ transplantation game forever. I mean, I'm being very hopeful here, but, you know, this could be really good. So yay, blow. Absolutely. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? A lot of good stuff. I mean, I have to say, the cocaine was pretty weird. It's pretty white. So I think that's our winner. I think so too. We had the triple Cs.

We had cocaine crimes and cars, which is always a good. That's a great thing, an old grand theft auto episode of Weirdest thing. We love it. But yeah, congratulations, Sandra. And we hope to have you on again very soon. I hope so too. I had a blast. The weirdest thing I've learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel

Fultman, along with Jess Bode, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals, because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition. For Citizens back. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnyshade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up

your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on alolotion. You're welcome. Columbia. Engineer for whatever.