The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Chainsaws for Childbirth, A Poop-Weighing Hero, Pregnancy on Command

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a man who weighed all of his poop, pee, and sweat on a homemade scale to animals that can choose when they want to get pregnant. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jessica 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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That's code weirdest for 20% off. 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 oceanfront room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. 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 sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. And I'm Sarah Shrodash. Welcome to 2020. We've made it. It's the future. Congratulations. And isn't 2020 just off to a great start? Oh, we're having a great, great time.

But that's not what this podcast is about. No politics. Nope. No news. No world news. This is just a pleasant, fluffy void where we talk about weird things. And a little bit of housekeeping before we get started, what I'm about to say may sound like bad news, but it's actually great news. So Weirdest Thing will not be back next week. We will be back two weeks from now with the new episode. And we are switching to a fortnightly schedule, if you will, that's once every two weeks. And why? Well, as I mentioned before on Weirdest Thing, this podcast is something we do in addition to our regular jobs of popular science. And it really is a labor of love. And we do love to do it. And we love all of our listeners. But it's a lot of work. And in thinking about how we can make

2020, the best year ever for Weirdest Thing, we decided that just slowing down a little bit and giving ourselves more time to lovingly craft these episodes for you. In addition to all the other amazing things we make and do at Popular Science would be for the best for everyone. So we're really excited to, you know, take advantage of that little bit of extra breathing room to make weirdest thing as great as it's always been and even better. And, we hope that you will stick with us and, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. So I'm assuming you'll be so fond of us. Yes, yes, a whole extra week fonder.

And with that, let's get into the show. 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 found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, scrolling through Twitter over the holidays, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first than when we're. 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, your teeth, please. My fact is about animals choosing when they want to get pregnant. I love that. Same. Love that for them.

2020 is the year that we all start taking care of ourselves, including the animals. Hashtag, self-care. Your body, your choice. Claire, how about your teeth? Yes, I would like to talk about what the chainsaw and child. birth in the 18th century have in common. Oh, no. What don't they have in common?

I don't have 18th century childbirth in my garage. I hope not. Okay, my tease is a lot of the health data we love collecting today would not exist if not for a man who spent a ton of time sitting in a chair and also weighing all of his poop. Oh, wow. That wasn't where I thought that was ending. I love analyzing my health data. I know the more I learned about this one, Claire, the more I knew you would love it. Oh, boy. So should I start with my poop show? Okay, great. So this is the story of Santorio Centario, the Italian physician so nice. They named him twice. He was born in 1561, and he was a contemporary and friend of Galileo, Galilei, because a lot of... No creativity.

Those lasty-lasties. No, but I think it was fairly common in this period for Italian families to, like, give you a first name that honored your family surname. You had a lot of centurios and Galileo-Gelagoes running around, in this case, together as pals. So he was always obsessed with figuring out how to measure the human body. He was really like the original quantified self guy. Wow. Claire's eyes just... That's wide.

Claire's hero. Yeah, an OG, really. So he is credited for inventing a few devices from measuring different things. He's credited often with inventing the wind gauge and the water current meter. And he was also the first physician to implement the use of a pulse reading device, though some people say that Galileo had the actual idea for the concept. And it is a very Galilean device. You would take a pendulum.

and you would either use different pendulums with different lengths of strings or you would like use a system for nodding the string to change the length and you would wait until it matched up with the patient's heartbeat rate and then you would know based on the length of the string how many pulses that was a minute. Couldn't you just like you put your finger on it? Why can you just count the beats? Yes, you could but it was about it was also about like tracking rhythm and like changes.

Oh, so it's almost like an EKG, like the OG. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's so generous to them, though. I could have just counted them. Yeah. You have to start somewhere.

And he also wrote about Arab physicians using thermometers in medicine, and then he is often credited with both perfecting and popularizing their use. Because up until that point, at least in Western medicine, and to some extent in medicine around the world, there just wasn't a lot of quantification. Even schools of thought that involved really examining patients, which was not the case in all medicine. You know, we've talked to one weirdest thing before about how, like, there were many years and cultures and periods of medical thought where, like, you just studied kind of abstract

concepts and then applied those to your patients. And, you know, the doctors who were, like, tasting urine were always kind of the, like, change makers. They were like, maybe we actually need to. Actually, no, the urine was kind of a way to avoid looking at the patient, right? Yeah, because that's so much better than looking at the patient. We have a whole episode about the people who tasted P8 to examine their patients. But anyway, so this was like, first of all, physicians were just starting to want to personally examine their patients. And there really was not a system in place for, like, quantifying anything.

It was all still very Hippocrates era talking about the balancing of humors, but in a very, like, abstract way. And so Centario, it's not like he was totally throwing out that antiquated theory of medicine. He still believed in humors, but he was like, well, if we want to balance them, we have to know how many of them there are. Got to count those rumors. You need to know how many bloods and phlegms. Wow. So, yeah, he just, like, really loved figuring out how to better measure things. But his ultimate tool wasn't one we regularly used today, at least in the way he did.

And thank goodness. Because for 30 years, he spent as much time as possible sitting in a chair that was rigged up to a balance so he could weigh himself constantly. It was like the original fit bit, but for a man who didn't walk. Wait, he just sat in a scale all day. Yeah, I have a picture. So he was just basically sitting in a giant scale. I'll put this picture on popsye.com slash weird. So he's basically like, yeah, it is just like a chair suspended.

And then, wow. I love that he has this little meal here in front of him. Yeah, we'll get into that. That's important. So he never left the chair. He's like weighing himself as he eats. He didn't like live his entire life for 30 years in the chair, but he did. Looks like quite the studio apartment in there.

They do say that he spent like as many waking hours as he could sitting here so that he could get like constant reads on his weight. Because skills had been invented. during the Neolithic period for weighing quantities of stuff, but they were only just starting to use them to weigh humans. Because if you think about it, like, the weight you were wasn't really something anybody thought about for most of human history because, like, you were either eating enough or you were dead. And if you were able to eat so much that you were overweight, good for you.

That was really the general sentiment for most of human history. Because you had so much money. If you could eat, if you could eat enough to be overweight for most of human history, you were raking in the dough. Yeah, exactly. So, like, relatively speaking, your health was probably great. I mean, even if it was terrible, the people around you who were smaller were dying even younger than you were because they didn't have enough to eat and they didn't have money and they had to work themselves to death. So, yeah, really the connection between weight and health was just like not a thing for most of human history. Like I said, you either were getting enough or you were not.

The first diets for weight loss were only written about by physicians in the 18th century, and they weren't really popular until the 19th century. We've talked about consumptive chic and Lord Byron's diet on previous episodes, and those were really like, that was the beginning of people wanting to be thin for cosmetic purposes, at least at like a global level. I'm sure there were always pockets of places where it was chicer to be smaller. But in general, people, you know, wanted to eat as much as possible and showed that they had the money to do so. So scales for humans. It was sexy to be. To be. Yeah.

Plump and pale. Yeah. It meant you were hanging out inside eating. So doctors were definitely not, like, had no reason to weigh people because, like, what does that have to do with anything? Yeah, it is really crazy because now we, you know, for a while, we kind of put too much stock in how much people weighed. Yeah, I literally got woken up in the hospital in the middle of the night to be weighed. It was apparently so crucial. So yeah, he was really crafting the first, like, experimental system for being able to keep tabs on your weight for health reasons.

And he published his findings in 1614. Also, just one, I found a note from his description of the device. And he said the steel yard, meaning like the thing it's suspended from, is suspended from the beams above the dining room in a hidden place because of the noble. as it renders the room less appealing, and because of the ignoramus is, to whom all unusual things appear ridiculous. So he acknowledged that what he was doing was ridiculous. He acknowledged it was unusual.

And if you thought it was ridiculous, you were in ignoramus. But yeah, he wanted it to be something that, like, people could use in their homes. It had, like, in his mind, a very, like, discreet design. I love that because it's still hanging from the scene. Like, it just has been in seat.

But it would hover just above the floor, And one of his concepts for, like, widespread use was that you could calibrate it so that it would hit the floor when you had eaten the right amount of food. Oh, my God. I mean, that completely misunderstands, like, nutrition, but I love that. Yeah, and I just love the idea of someone, like, slowly sinking and then hearing the clunk and being, like, forks down. So his big takeaway from the 30 years, he spent constantly weighing himself. And according to some sources, he, like, you know, he would weigh himself before. and after eating. He would weigh himself when he woke up in the morning. Some sources say he would

weigh himself after having sex. Okay. He just wanted to get as many measurements as possible. He didn't know what humors he may have lost during the carnal act, I guess. And so his takeaway was that what you put out didn't equal what you put in. He found that, you know, his urine and feces on average weighed less than the food and drink he consumed. I think the number he landed on was that for every eight pounds of food he consumed, there were only three pounds of excrement. So yes, by the way, he also separately weighed his feces and urine. I mean, that's just scientific. Right.

So he was trying to calculate, like, what happens to the food. So what did he think happened to the missing five pounds? So, yeah, that's a great question, Sarah. He actually came up with a term for it. It was the perspiratione insensibilis. Wait, did he factor in him? sweat too? He measured everything that came out. So actually, yes, he also measured the sweat. Like, anything that came off of his body were out of it. So was the three pounds, is that just his

poop and pee or is that like everything? It was everything. Wow. Interesting. Everything that he was able to measure. So eight pounds for three pounds. Where were the five pounds going on? He can't have been gaining five pounds. Well, so. I mean, maybe he could. I don't know. Well, but when you think about it. Like, you're not, when you, like, eat a pound of kale, that's not like a pound of poop that comes out of your body. What he was doing was, like, the first ever basal metabolic experiment. Yeah. But I will get into that in a second. So yes, the persporeatio insensibilis was basically like the hidden perspiration, the insensible perspiration. That's beautiful. And so he thought it was an imperceptible excretion of moisture through which the body rids itself of harmful and

matter through the pores of the skin. I mean, he's not wrong, right? Because, like, you couldn't measure. Like, you sweat without realizing it. Right. And then there's, like, you know, the CO2, you breathe out. And so he was recognizing that this was all going somewhere. And it wasn't just, like, shooting through your body into poop. And he also noted that the ratio would fluctuate based on other aspects of health, on your sleep, on your environment, from person to person. So he has considered like the first physician to experiment on basal metabolic rate, which we now know is just the energy it takes to maintain your body while you're at rest.

And it's actually 60 to 75 percent of our daily calorie expenditure is just sitting. Yeah. I love that. I love that. So what he was recognizing was that your body is taking in the energy of this food and, you know, using it in ways that don't just, like, come out your butt. Your butt. And yeah, you know, now we know that basal metabolic rate varies really widely. If you have more lean body mass, it means that it takes more energy because it takes your body more energy to power and lift muscle than it does for it to just like maintain fat. But we also know that it varies between people, even if they have the same amount of lean body mass.

So we still have a lot to learn about it. But back in the day, this lasty, lasty named Italian man was due. some pioneering work by just sitting down. I love this because I'm skeptical of how accurate his scale was, but like I feel like it was Sophie who told us that during Thanksgiving, she and her family all have a competition to see who can gain the most weight during dinner, which I just think is hysterical because like, I guess, I don't know, I think it's funny to think about the fact that like whatever poundage of food you eat, like, temporarily. Yeah, it's just there.

It's just inside your stomach. It's like when you carry water on a hike and you like drink the water, you like make, you feel like you're making your load heavier, but you are still carrying it. Wow, I have never thought about that. I know. I think about it every time I go hiking. Oh, my God, that's wild. Now that we have taken this idea of like personal health data quantification and run with it,

you know, there are a lot of people who think a lot about their energy expenditure versus their caloric intake. I mean, I definitely do, but it's important to remember that most of the calories that you need in a day are just calories you would need no matter what you were doing. And it's actually there's a lot of research on the fact that, like, people who are trying to lose weight and who add in exercise often add in like more calories than they actually need to support that exercise. And that's why the weight loss isn't successful. But the counterpoint to that is that, you know, there are a lot of diet mindsets that make you feel like you have. to earn your calories, like you have to burn them off and, you know, just sit and live in burns 75% of your calories. Your brain burns lots of calories.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's important to remember that if weight loss is a health or wellness goal of yours, that making sure you're actually taking in a deficit is what's key, not just adding more physical activity, but counterpoint, like, don't obsess about burning off all the calories you eat because like your brain is burning. Yeah. It's burning.

Yeah. The reality is that people don't lose weight by exercising, which is good. It sounds like bad news because it's like, oh, like I'm doing all this exercise. You mean bad body mass by exercising, which means then you burn more calories sitting around. Think it. Yeah. It's all good. Love that.

Even if you lose zero pounds exercising, it's still good for you. Yes. That's the good news. Absolutely. Well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't you tell us your facts? Yes, I would love to. Okay, so like I said earlier, I would like to make the connection between the chainsaw and childbirth. Now, when I was researching this topic and I found this fact, I was like, I actually have never used a chainsaw

in my life. Did you pick one up for research? I Google imaged it. Just to be sure, I knew what I was talking about and it was correct. So if you haven't seen, you know, the Texas chainsaw massacre or, you don't log wood for a living, you can Google image it. It works fine. But yeah, so the chainsaw, if you didn't know, are these mechanized saws. And they have rows of really sharp teeth that rotate and carefully and precisely slice through things. Those things today are trees and lumber and firewood, stuff like that. But originally, as it turns out those things, were bone and flesh. Fun.

Really worried about where this is going. Yeah. So back in the day, we're talking late 18th century. Doctors didn't really have a lot of tools, tech, and medicine like we do now. So childbirth, well, even today, I would not call it a really rad experience. Childbirth in the 18th century was significantly less rad. Any time a woman had any complications, the pregnancy turned from dangerous to extremely dangerous because there just weren't many options for them when things went wrong. So for example,

if a baby was in a breach position, which is when the legs are out first instead of the head, making it likely that the head could get stuck, or if the shoulders are sort of trapped, there were no really options available like the cesarean section today that would safely protect the mother and the baby. And since there was no anesthesia then, doing something like a cesarean section was just really like not acceptable. So originally what doctors would do in that case would be to literally cut with a sharp knife, no anesthesia again, the cartilage and pelvic bone area that would literally open up the pelvis to make it wider enough for the baby's legs or shoulders to get through. Yeah. What? The same.

is correct. Yes, this procedure, if you could call it a procedure, I guess, was called a symphiostomy. So, yeah, that existed and doctors did it. Wait, so this is like a more extreme version of an apisiotomy, right? An episiotomy being the procedure that used to be super popular and isn't anymore where you, right, because like your vagina tears when you give birth because babies are too big. And so like the idea is that you just preemptively cut the vagina open to make room for the baby. So this is that but like bone. That with bone, because you're basically trying to open up like the pelvis to get that baby's legs and shoulder and head out.

Yeah. I felt physically ill. I was, I practiced this so I'm less ill now, but yes. So what doctors were realizing unsurprisingly that using a super sharp knife was painful and barbaric. They also noted that for them personally, it was also extremely time-consuming. as well. Oh, no. What a tragedy for them. Yeah. So these two surgeons at the time in Scotland were like we're going to come up with a better version of this barbaric procedure. So John Atkin and James Jeffrey developed basically

a chainsaw, which consisted of a long chain with a line of serrated teeth. And at the other end of that serrated teeth, the device had a handle that the doctors would pull. And they would insert that into a woman's pelvis and the chain would wrap around the pelvic bone and a doctor would pull steadily to tear at the bone. Oh my God, Claire. Okay, I'm almost done. I'm almost done. Okay.

This would make slices. So essentially what they said was that it was more accurate and precise so it would lead to less like bleeding complications. And for them it was easier. Yeah. So they patented that. And in a 2004 article in the Scottish Medical Journal that took a historical look at this, they note that Jeffrey explained that the chainsaw would allow a smaller wound and protect the adjacent neurovascular bundle.

While a heroic concept, he called it, symphyostomy had too many complications for most obstetricians, but regardless, his ideas still became accepted. So they still used it and they made a 100% switch from the knife procedure. to a chainsaw procedure. Yeah. Oh, my God. There's more.

Don't worry. Oh, okay, I also have a picture that I can pass around and put on pupsi.com slash weird. Oh, God. Yeah, so it looks, um, basically like a mix between a chainsaw and one of those really old-fashioned, like, egg beater. Oh, my God. It does look like that. I know that because I got one in my stocking for Christmas from my bed.

I hope you mean an egg beater. Not as a speater. the chainsaw? Oh, yes. No, egg beater. Oh, God. Yeah. So then they go on to note that the mechanized versions of the chainsaw were developed, but in the later 19th century, that was superseded in surgery by the giggly twisted wire saw, which is even worse, where it was basically like a very sharp wire that would do similar precise things. Oh, God, like a big cheese cutter? Yes, Sarah, yes. Oh, God. This just gets a. It really really does. Keep your kitchen implement and power tools away from my uterus. When did we stop literally just slicing women open? Yeah, I'm definitely getting to that.

We're near closing in on the finish of this chapter of history. So for much of the 19th century, the chain was the go-to procedure. Thankfully, once anesthesia was perfected, the chainsaw was replaced with C-sections, which are still, in my opinion, and many others, very traumatic. Not that I've had one, but yeah, I just think they're traumatic and have far less consequences than the chainsaw methods. So definitely safer, but still really like a severe procedure. And so if you're curious now when it switched from cutting pelvic bone to slicing through trees, it wasn't until 1905 when this guy named Samuel Benz of San Francisco needed to cut down some giant redwoods.

And he was like, he knew of this thing. supposedly this is hard to parse through. There were like many different origin origin, exactly. But this is how this one goes. And then the first portable chainsaw was developed and patented in 1918 by this other guy. So they made the grand switch to trees, which... Think how violent it must, birth must have been, that a man was like, you know what tool I could use to get down a redwood tree?

Yeah, is that thing we use to slice open women. Yeah. Yeah, so as I was, yeah, I was trying to think of like a good concluding sentence or concluding thought, rather. I was like, well, this would never have happened if there were women obstetricians in the 18th century. Yeah. Well, you know, we had like, there were like midwives who would like try to rotate a breach baby, which is like really painful, but sometimes possible. But yeah, like, you know, it was the, the like intersection of like surgery. and childbirth made for some really grisly solutions to genuine problems.

Yeah, I mean, birth is, it is like risky. Amazingly risky for a thing that we have to do to survive as the species. But, God. Yeah. This discussion was traumatic for me. I'm really sorry. But luckily today we have anesthesia for surgery. That's true.

Which is so much better. They'll knock you out before. So you just don't remember turning a chainsaw. you. Exactly. There's that. Although, do we use anesthesia during C-sections a lot? I don't think you do because I think you're awake for...

Yeah, you get a... What's it called? Epidural. Yeah. Which numbs you. That actually freaks me out a little bit more. The idea that you're like, I watched one once. And it was crazy that she was just like, awake.

And then you go on the other side of the curtain and you're like, oh my God, there's your intestines. Yeah. Go on that. Whoa. Birth is crazy. That was my fact for the week. It was great. horrifying and wonderful. Thank you for that, Claire. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with Sarah's fact.

Okay, we're back. And Sarah, you're going to talk about having a choice in when when one gets pregnant. Yeah. So, um, God. Yeah, so over the holidays, I was, uh, I was on vacation in Malawi, which is in southern Africa. And we went on a little safari, saw lots of animals. And as we were going around, our guys, our guys, was, you know, chatting to us about all little animals, telling us facts about him. And one fact that he just real casually pulled out is that Impala's when they're pregnant, if there's not enough food or water around, they just keep the baby inside of them for longer until it's at the right time. And I was like, hmm, that seems crazy, like possibly untrue.

And so I went home and I googled it thinking that it was going to be like, ah, this is a myth that everybody believes. And it turns out he may not have been exactly correct, but he's not that wrong either. You don't just Impala's, I actually couldn't find anything specific about Impala's, but it turns out that like more than 100 species of mammal are able to delay giving birth if they want to. It's just not happening at the end. Like they don't have like fully formed babies. Which seems it would be impractical.

Exactly. Why would be still needing all the energy that you would need? Exactly. Yeah. But it turns out there's tons of other ways that you can delay getting pregnant after you have had sex. So it's called delayed implantation or embryonic diapause. And there's tons of ways to do it. You can stash the sperm just for later use, keep it hanging around.

You can fertilize the eggs and then just keep them hanging out. You can even have like the zygote implant and then just go dormant for a while. Just keep it in there And for safekeeping And it turns out this is how Like many of the mammals That you know like mate and give birth in one season Like part of that is just like there is a mating season

And it's really simply short And so like the babies tend to be born at the same time But part of it is that a lot of those animals like Synchronize when they give birth So they just wait to get pregnant Even after they've had sex They wait for the right moment So that later

They all give birth. at once. It's just at the right time for me. So I just, I thought this was wild. Like, there's a bunch of reasons. It's not totally clear exactly why some animals seem to do it and some animals don't, but there's lots of good reasons to do it. Like, if all your babies are born at once, it means that if you were predators, we'll eat your babies statistically, because there's lots of them. But it also means that, like, you can really synchronize when you give birth and when you mate. Those are often, like, very closely tied. Like, you give birth and then you mate right away because all the animals are around, all the males are there. And then another reason

is like pretty much what our lovely guide told us, which is if there is not enough food, or if the weather sucks like winter is lasting in particularly long time, you can just delay when you get pregnant until it's going to be more convenient and more conducive to having babies running around. And it's also a way for, as we alluded to at the beginning, for the ladies to exert a little choice which they often do not have in the animal world. So how long can they delay it for? Yeah, so it varies a lot. And I was initially thinking, like, surely it would only be like a few weeks.

But some of them are like delaying for as long as their pregnancies. Like California leaf-nosed bat delays for four and a half months and then is pregnant for four. And long-tailed weasels delay their implantation for seven to nine months and then are pregnant for another nine and a half months. That's amazing. Which is a really, it's an incredibly long time. between when you got inseminated and when you actually gave birth to a baby. Like, who could even remember? Weasles have no idea who the dad is, I guess.

There were just some insane stories. So, like, I found one. Because, so sometimes the delay is that you basically, like, mate in the fall, and then you wait to get pregnant until the following spring. Because the winter is too dangerous of a time. Exactly. Especially if you are an animal that hybridates, like bats. So I found out that little brown bats, which is literally their name, that's not just me describing them, they hibernate during the winter and they mate just before hibernation.

And horrifyingly, a lot of the time, the females in their awake are quite promiscuous. They have sex with lots of other little Batman. That was intentional. But at a certain point they go into a torpid state because they're hibernating and so they're not really aware of what's happening. and a lot of the time the males are still active, and so they mate with whatever bats they want, which is great, which is great. Although, interestingly, 35% of their matings are with other males,

so they're really indiscriminate. They just go for whoever is there. Nothing personal. No, it's just, they're just finding who's around. And then the females store the sperm all winter, and then they get pregnant in the spring. But part of the theory behind why they might do that is that given that a lot of the time they don't have a choice

with what males they're mating with because they are basically asleep, that it affords them the opportunity to choose which sperm they want to use. So, like, they wake up and have lots of sperm, and they get to pick which one actually gets them pregnant in the end. So it's called cryptic female choice, because ladies are so cryptic. But it's, like, the general term for the various ways in which female animals can choose which sperm get to survive. And, like, sometimes it is literally choosing. So, like, red flower beetles have multiple little pockets where they can store the sperm.

and then the female just picks which one she wants to use. There's a type of nursery web spider that does that too, and she stores more sperm from the males that give her nuptial gifts. So your chances of passing on your jeans as a man are related to how nice you are to the lady spider. Also, on a sadder note, galatas, I'm not saying that correctly, but it's a type of monkey. If they mate with a dominant male and then that male gets overthrown by a younger male, they can voluntarily abort their babies partway through the pregnancy. The theory being that like if the new male has all these babies who are born from this previous male that he will commit infanticide.

So they basically like preempt that. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's not a great world out there for lady animals for the most part. So not every mammal does this, but there is a theory that every mammal could do it, that it's a conserved evolutionary mechanism. And maybe you just don't need to implement it, but you have the ability. So to test that, some scientists took some sheep embryos and then put them into mouse uteri. And like specifically uteri that were basically hormonally like unreceptive to being pregnant because mice can go through embryonic diapause, but sheep cannot.

I see. So by putting the sheep embryos in, they basically forced the embryos to go into diapause, even though they shouldn't be able to do that. And then when they took them back out, like days later, they could turn into normal sheep embryo seemingly. In some cases, the ones that go onto diapause, like, are actually healthier. Like, they seem to produce healthier offspring and, like, actually continue to go on to be babies at higher rates, basically. And you can do the same thing with rabbit and cow blastocystis put into mice, which I think really emphasizes just how small. just fertilized eggs are that you could put a cow blastocyst into a mouse. There's even, there's a case study they found of basically a human woman experiencing this as well.

Yeah, that was going to be my question. Can humans do it? Yes, there are like doubtfully researchers who think that humans could do it and that it might not be as uncommon as we think it's just like you so rarely know exactly when you got pregnant and then like exactly when. So it's hard to trace. but there was this woman who was undergoing IVF and got the OO sites transferred in November, and then at the end of November was confirmed that she was not pregnant. And she had had sex apparently once, like during that same period after she got the OOO sites, but before she was confirmed to not be pregnant.

And then at the beginning of January, they realized that she was actually pregnant because she kept calling the hospital basically and saying, like, I haven't gotten my period and I'm very nauseated all the time. And they were like, but you're not pregnant. Don't worry about it. And it turns out she was pregnant. She had like a normal pregnancy. It was just delayed about a month since she got the implantation.

Wow. And the theory was like it just like there was nothing wrong with the baby. It didn't seem to have actually been in development longer than normal. It was just delayed. Just a little late. Wow. Yeah. I love that.

I mean, that's uncommon. But like, apparently we might be able to do it. It might be more common than we think we just don't know. We can't track IVF because it's so regimented. Yeah. So the theory is like stress basically could have a really big impact on whether you actually can implant a fertilized egg. So there's like actually a lot of, there's some substantial research about how one of the things, like when you undergo IVF, it shouldn't just be like pumping you full of hormones. It should also be like reducing your stress because it massively increases your likelihood of getting pregnant.

Don't be stressed. don't think about the chainsaw. Don't think about how horrifying pregnancy and birth are in so many ways. Just focus on the baby. The sanity. Yeah. Wow. That's my tail. I love that.

Wow. Slightly happier than the chainsaw. Definitely happier than the chainsaw. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Mine was the chainsaw. It was so upsetting. Yeah. The chainsaw was quite upsetting. I'm sorry. Well, and I have to admit that I

I knew that chainsaws were invented for childbirth because a friend of mine who's in medical school, hi Josh, sent that to me a while ago. But I had never done any research on it. And it was so much more horrified than even I took away from just like the basic chainsaws were used in labor and delivery. So yeah, I apologize. It was the most upsetting. Congrats, Claire. Cool.

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