The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Cheesy Mummies, Ant Farmers, When Superstitions Actually Help

Episode Date: November 6, 2024

Laura Krantz returns to Weirdest Thing to talk about the power of superstitions. Plus, Laura Baisas explains ants literally farming, and Rachel talks about mummy cheese. 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  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/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 Thanks to our Sponsors! Get Up to 50% OFF @honeylove by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST #honeylovepod Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Try VIIA! https://bit.ly/viiaweirdest and use code WEIRDEST! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Laura Bises. And I'm Laura Krantz. Laura and Laura both. Welcome back to this show. It's been longer since we had you on, but you have another fantastic book. You've been on here talking about your book about Bigfoot and your book about aliens. And now you're here with another banger. Would you tell folks a little bit about it? Yes, book number three is called Do You Believe in Magic?

And now I have put a little musical earworm in your head that you'll have to the whole rest of this episode. Probably the rest of the month. Probably the rest of your life. Yeah, yeah, that will not go away. You can thank me later. This book is about the intersection of science and magic and how a lot of what we think of as being kind of silly and magical actually has some roots in science. And a lot of the sciences that are out there that we trust and, love actually have their root in some of these more magical practices. I say that in air quotes.

Nice. One of one of my favorite sort of like history of science facets. I love talking to like medieval scholars, you know, historians who study the medieval era, not not talking to medieval scholars, which I'm sure would be great, but I don't really know how to make it. Yeah. It's true. But I recently, for my other show, Science, quickly at Scientific American, I recently got to talk to somebody who studies astrology and astronomy in scientific history. Fun. One time we had, I don't know if folks remember the time we had Jonathan Sims, who to me, I was like, this is the biggest celebrity we've ever had on. He writes a horror podcast that I'm really obsessed with called The Magnus Archives and the Magnus Protocol. And he was also super into the history of

alchemy. So yeah, I would feel like we don't do this kind of stuff enough. on Weirdest Thing. And I'm so excited to read your book. I'm sure our listeners will love it. And as always, we're really excited to have you share some weird tidbits that you learned along the way. So thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me again. So let's just dive right into it. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, looking for Bigfoot, 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.

I almost slipped up and said and talk about what the weirdest thing we've learned this week actually was, which is maybe the edit I should finally make to this intro. I feel like it's a little softer. It doesn't imply competition. But anyway, it's whatever. We have fun. Everybody wins. It's true. Everybody wins when we're talking about weird things. So I'll start with my cheese, which is that I want to talk about mummy cheese. Mummy cheese? Like cheddar? It's cheese and it involves mummies.

Some very old dairy. Has everyone stop eating? Yes, yeah, yeah. I promise that this story actually is more appetizing than it sounds. Okay. Laura B. What's your tea? Ant farms are way more than just a toy. They're real. We are farmers. Well, now everyone has a new earworm.

Yeah, we knocked out the love and spoonful and put in a state farm jingle. A solid downgrade. You're welcome for that. And Laura Krantz, what is your tease? I am going to talk about how superstitions are actually scientific and it has been proven in a laboratory. Wow. Jess is so excited. I wrote a story in that with baseball and how baseball superstitions are scientific. Yeah.

I'm excited to hear your spin. Okay. I loved that story, Jess. I remember it fondly, especially because I remember when you pitched it and you were like, so it's baseball. And everyone was like, okay, okay. So like physics and you were like, no. Yeah, sports people are like some of the most like superstitious people out there.

Yes, yes. As one of them, I can classify. Why don't we start with ant farms? I would love to hear more about that. Okay, great. So everyone remembers those little plastic toys that we had. I believe they came out circa the 1970s where, you know, you had your little sand and your plastic windmill.

They sold pretty well and they were called ant farms. But it turns out that ants in real life, not just in that little plastic toy, are actually farmers. Many species are. And they acquired this agrarian lifestyle largely because of the asteroid that struck the earth and wiped out. You get it. Guess it.

The dinosaurs. Whoa. Yes. What a connection. What a connection. That's why science is great. did not see that coming. Neither did the dinosaurs.

Oh. Ouch. Too soon. Too soon. So, like, obviously the dinosaurs are kind of our poster children for what happens to life on Earth during a mass extinction event. What comes after the dust from an asteroid strike covers the planet and wipes out megafauna can actually, though, be a boon for tons of other organisms.

The rise of mammals came at the expense of the dinosaurs, even. the grapes that we love today for wine kind of saw their kind of increased and started to proliferate more because the dinosaurs weren't around. And ants were also able to take advantage of this new post-dino world. So according to a new study that was recently published in the journal Science, colonies of ants turned into fungi farmers after an asteroid struck the coast of Mexico about 68 to 66 million years ago. Famously, that is. as the one that took out the dinosaurs. All this devastation created the ideal conditions for various fungi to thrive.

And these crafty ants decided to cultivate the fungi and created this evolutionary partnership between the fungi that's still intact to this day. Pretty cool because we tend to think that humans are the only farmers when, and actually there are some other species that can be considered agriculturalists. But importantly, what even is ant agriculture? Study co-author and Smithsonian research entomologist Ted Schultz kind of explained it to me that fungus farming ants grow these little fungi gardens for food. The species can be considered agriculturalists, and they tend these fungus gardens underground in their elaborate and sprawling colonies that we saw depicted in the Pixar film A Bug's Life. And ants, that other one.

That's right. They came out like the same year. Which I actually, I really loved ants as a kid simply because I had it on VHS. I think objectively, anyone would say a bug's life is a better movie. But ants was the one available to me. And it did have the classic line, you to aunt, which just, come on. Beautiful year. I forgot that there were two animated battling bug movies in the late 90s.

So yes, they have these little fungi gardens in the. colonies that we can see in the films A Bug's Life and Ants. There you go. On these little fungi, on these little fungi gardens, they fertilize the fungus and keep it clean and free from disease. They are not entirely unique in this. There are a couple other non-human agriculturalists. There are some termites that are known to do this and also in Broja Beatles. Roughly 250 different species of ants throughout the Americas and the Caribbean are known to farm this fungi. And researchers organize them into these four basic agricultural systems. based on the strategies that they use to cultivate.

These most advanced strategies are known as higher agriculture, and that belongs to leaf cutter ants, which I think a lot of people are familiar with. You've seen pictures of them literally carrying leaves, like little palm branches, kind of. They will harvest small bits of this fresh vegetation to feed their fungi from the leaves, and this fungi then grows into food for the ants

that fuels these super colonies of leaf cutter ants that can number into the millions, which we also saw in both of those films. So in this new paper, a team of scientists from institutions all over the world analyzed the genetic data of 475 different species of fungi and 276 species of ants. From that, they found 288 fungi species that ants cultivate and 208 species that are known to cultivate fungi. So quite a few species on both ends of the spectrum as far as this partnership. So they use that genetic data to do that meticulous and detailed work of building evolutionary trees, which are kind of what they sound like. It's basically a family tree,

but showing the evolution of these different species. These trees not only show how different things adapted, but it can also serve as a timeline. And this helped them pinpoint when ants began to utilize a certain fungi. And sure enough, about 66 million years ago, it shows that that's when ants and fungi started to be intertwined right around when that asteroid struck and wiped out our friend, the T-Rex. As described, so speaking of T-Rex, is described so eloquently in Jurassic Park by Chattie Young, dinosaur enthusiast Tim. I always bring everything back to Jurassic Park. I'm just, I'm just pointing out. The finest movie ever made. I have one talent, and that is everything can relate back to Jurassic Park when you really try hard enough.

So speaking of T-Rex as described so eloquently in Jurassic Park by our chatty young dinosaur enthusiast named Tim, the cataclysmic collision of the asteroid in the earth filled the atmosphere with dust and debris. Sunlight was blocked so plants could not perform photosynthesis for several years, and roughly half of all plant species on Earth were wiped out along. with the dinosaurs. However, silver lining, this was a real boom for the fungi. In turn, the ants started to use this fungi for food, and they continued to rely on them, even as the rest of life on the planet started to rebound after the mass extinction event.

But it did take another 40 million years or so for them to develop the higher agriculture that we see in leaf cutters to this day. They got that really higher degree of cultural. about 27 million years ago when a rapid cooling period changed the landscapes all over the world. For example, present-day South America, there were these drier habitats and woody savannas and grasslands that kind of fractured off various ecosystems. And when the ants took the fungi out of the more tropical forests into these newer dry areas, they isolated the fungi from their other ancestral populations.

and this isolated fungi then became very dependent on the ants for their survival in those arid conditions. So kind of symbiotic-ish, it's not necessarily parasitic, but it's not necessarily like working hand-in-hand. They're still eating the fungi. And this is what set that stage for that higher agricultural system, this kind of constant changing after the asteroid strike and ants using the fungi, making little fungi gardens underground. According to Shultz, when he and I spoke, like most human farmers, they also have to deal with crop diseases. And which is, which kind of makes sense when you have a lot of fungi in a given area, but ants are kind of well suited to that.

There are numerous studies that have shown that ants really put the ant in antibiotic. How long I've been waiting to say that one? Your whole life. Months. Yes. They put the ant. Ants really put the ant in antibiotics and use their, they can. can use their saliva to heal their comrades' wounds and even control outbreaks on their farms with

an antibiotic herbicide. These herbicides are actually derived from bacteria that they culture on their own bodies. However, like with anything antibiotic related, they also can face increased antibiotic resistance if they're not careful. So over time, they have had to develop some new antibiotic strategies to deal with these types of outbreaks. Just kind of a nice comparison. in point. Humans, we've been cultivating crops for roughly 12,000 years and using antibiotics for less than 100-ish, ants millions of years. So as we continue to face that antibiotic, that growing antibiotic resistance, ants could be just another way to search for ways to cope with it and develop some new ones. So I just was really struck by this idea of not only animals, but I just was really struck

by this idea of not only ants being farmers, because that's just pretty cute and really just mind-blowing, but also just kind of how long and how they've, how they kind of have continued to come up with these new ways to not only take care of themselves, but in, you know, at the same time taking care of other parts of the planet. And I always like to end my segments with a question. It's just because I like to ask questions. So for you both, if you could go back and trace the evolution of any one organism, what would it be and why? Oh, that's such a good question. I got to say, I am now kind of interested in fungi because the way you described what happened with fungi after the asteroid impact sounds like the last of us. Yes. It's like for everything

living on the planet then. Yeah, I find that they're particularly fascinating fungi are and just like the way that they have survived and yeah fungi are so interesting it's if i had a big of favorite kingdom that would be my favorite kingdom but i have the thing that came so fun yeah they're just fun but the thing that came to mind for me was platypus i want to know everything about how you know god's little mistake happened almost almost any marsupial like they're just like yeah something something weird, something mind-boggling, something indefensible from an evolutionary standpoint. I want to see the play-by-play. I love it.

Also, is your thought finished? Because I have an answer for this too. Yes, Jess. I need to know about the Hirex. People follow me on Instagram. No, I'm obsessed with the Hirex. But they're, like, related to elephants and manatees, not like, you know, wombatts and whatever else. Really?

Or rodents, you know? That's good. No way. Yeah. I did. I did do an episode on it. it because I love them. And they sing for dominance instead of fight. They're perfect. I kind of love that. Along with the hyricks. I'm totally picturing, you know, karaoke bars where

that's where the assertion for dominance in these, you know, communities happen. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. I, I love those ants. Has anyone ever done a study on like what, you know, you go out in the backyard, you've got your ant farm that you bought, you go out to the backyard and you kidnap some ants, you basically abduct them, like aliens. Like, what is the emotional toll on the colony from something like that? And what is the emotional toll on the poor ants that are now trapped in this plastic thing with a windmill? Yeah. Yeah, there we go. Future scientists, please, there's something for you to do. Absolutely. Junior, junior Dr. Wilson's. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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building. Fit for your ambition. for citizens back. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to jump into my fact, mummy cheese. So we've talked a lot about cheese here on Weirdest Thing, infamously. And listeners already know it can benefit from aging, I'm sure. You know, I myself have a nice 12-month manchego or so, six-month or 12-month. I'm not picky, but I do understand that it's like supposed to, the manchego is not supposed to be new.

That's what they tell me. How about you guys? What are your favorite cheeses? I do love Manchego, but honestly, a really good cheddar. I feel like it's kind of hard to beat. I'm going to shamelessly plug a place. My favorite cheese of all time is the fresh ricotta from a little Italian specialty store in Lingcroft, New Jersey, called Aleo. Or Aleo, I believe. We always called it Aleo, but we were corrected.

It's Aleo. It is so good and so sweet and tastes amazing on Italian. bread. So fresh chocolate and cheese. Nothing is better. Can we take a lunch break and then come back? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, Bree, classic choice.

Bree is my everything. And also the fried cheese crates from Colvin. Yes. Oh, I miss Cole. I went to undergrad in Wisconsin, and Culver's was maybe one of my favorite parts of undergrad. Love Culvers. Well, scientists have found some cheese that's been developing its funk for

perhaps a little longer than it's ideal. It is 3,500 years old. Oh. Is there a best fight date on that? Not that they can find. But we're not talking trace amounts of fermented dairy found inside a pot, which older traces of that nature have been found before. But this is the first, this is, This is the oldest, like, chunks of cheeses that have been found. And this is a big deal for reasons I'll get into. But they were found somewhere somewhat surprising. They were smeared on the heads and necks of several mummies in northwestern China. I should say they were bodies that were naturally mummified by arid conditions, which also helped the cheese, I think.

Not helping it taste good, but helping it still be here. in solid cheese form, sort of 3,500 years later. So this story, like I said, starts about 3,500 years ago, but it also starts back in the 1900s, the 90s, in fact, which is when archaeologists first uncovered these naturally mummified desert burials. They all date back to between around 3,300 and 3,600 years ago, aka the Bronze Age. And at that time, they made note of smears of white stuff on some of the mummies. And they did think that the residue might be from some kind of dairy product.

They clocked that immediately. At the time, DNA technology was just not up to the task of identifying random dairy that was 3,000 years old. Now, I'm not an archaeologist, just playing on TV. Like, I'm amazed that dairy was kind of the first place that their brains went. That's kind of, that's kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And they said, you know, one of the researchers says it doesn't feel like cheese, the samples. They describe them as feeling like dense dust, which I guess is just like, you know, it's, you know, it's dried out. Otherwise, it wouldn't still be there. Right. But, you know, I have found some very dried cheese in the back corner of my refrigerator. So I can only imagine if I left it there. for three millennia what it would look like. So yeah, DNA technology has come so far in the last 20 odd years. It's kind of wild. And at the time, this was just a no-go. And but they took samples

from three different tubes and they, you know, put a pin in that. And thank God. I mean, that's, that's what Watson and Crick really were working for. Yeah. Seriously. What's the point? If we can't, if we can't dig into that cheese. So for this new study, which really just came out, Researchers, they took those samples and they extracted mitochondrial DNA for analysis. And that revealed the presence of both cow and goat DNA. So they were like, ka-ching. Blends. It's dairy.

Yeah. Though one interesting point they made is that while there was both cow product and goat product, they hadn't been mixed in the same batch, which was sort of different from what they know was going on dairy-wise in some other. parts of the world. That was very interesting to them. But they weren't making both goat milk products and cow milk products. And they were then also able to analyze the DNA of the microorganisms within the dairy samples, which confirmed that they were kaffir cheese. Now, modern dairy lovers might be more familiar with kaffir itself, which is a fermented milk product. It's kind of like a thick milk or a

thin yogurt, however you like to think about the viscosity of your fermented dairy. It's traditionally fermented at room temperature, and it yields this slightly fizzy, slightly alcoholic beverage. Though, unless you're trying to make it alcoholic, those levels are usually pretty low akin to kombucha. But consider this a PSA if you're trying to live like a totally zero-proof life temporarily or permanently and didn't realize kombucha and Kifir have a little ethanol in them. They do. And so you should check out the brand you're buying to make sure that you're comfortable with the alcohol percentage in there. And don't mess around with homemade stuff because that's like pretty much always going to have higher alcohol content, which can be a bonus if that's what

you're going for. But kifur is made by inoculating milk with so-called kifur greens, which are not grains at all. I kind of assume they were greens. I've never made it myself. I do like do a lot of stinky stuff in my kitchen, but this is one thing I haven't gotten around to doing yet. There are these rubbery little clusters of cells that like make a happy home for bacteria and yeast. So super similar to the scobie in a jar of kombucha or to a sourdough starter. It's basically, you know, the matrix in which the good microbes live. And when you pop these bad boys into some dairy, it'll keep it from spoiling, at least you know, spoiling it a bad way. And it'll turn it into, you know, this funky fermented beverage

in just a day or so. So not surprising that this was popular in ancient times. Of course, we already knew it was popular in ancient times. But yeah, Kifur cheese is basically like when you sort of like overculture it. So it's sort of the more approaching a yogurt than a drinkable yogurt. it becomes a soft cheese. But, you know, what is a cheese? What is a yogurt? What is a buttermilk? The fermented dairy spectrum, there's room for everyone.

And yeah, a few researchers have pointed out, you know, how cool this is because old dairy is really hard to sequence because you don't just have to worry about the DNA itself being old, which of course is a big deal. And again, was why we just couldn't figure this out at all 20 years ago. But you also have to worry about contaminants with modern microbes. So the fact that they were able to, you know, actually identify microbes here. And they, I'll get into this more in a second, but they specifically looked at them and compared them to modern microbes and they're different. You know, their species is identifiable, but you can see changes that have occurred in the past, you know, 3500 years. So, yeah, they did look closely at these microbes and compare them to their sort of modern counterparts. They seem to have showed their work and shown that they didn't just pick up random dairy

microbe contaminants from like somebody's lunch yogurt. Yeah, there are few, you know, in addition to the sort of just like incredible leaps and bounds in DNA tech and, you know, the skill of this research team, they also probably got very lucky with the burial site. These were at the Ziaulho Cemetery in Gen. It was once very lush. It was like along the banks of a river, but then the river changed course quite suddenly in geological terms, and it very quickly became quite arid. So the community had to move and the bodies that were left there dried out and naturally mummified. And just as those

conditions are, you know, better than damp for preserving human DNA, this chief. and its microbes were also probably better preserved thanks to those very arid conditions. But in addition to raising questions about why people were burying their loved ones with some cheese for the road. I mean, maybe that's obvious. That was my question. If I had you bury me with cheese snacks, lay me down on a bed of cheese snacks. The study has helped teach us more about the history of fermented dairy, which as listeners know for my recent tangent about Bonnie Claver I feel very passionately about. Basically, there are two major groups of lactobacillus bacteria, and lactobacillus makes, as you might be able to tell from the name, makes a lot of delicious milk products happen. One of those groups originated from around where Russia is.

and that one is the one most used globally for making yogurt and cheese pretty much everywhere. And then there's another group of lactobacillus from Tibet. And there's a long-held belief that Kifir originated in the North Caucus mountain region in what's now Russia. But when scientists took a closer look at this 3500-year-old yogurt, they found that the lactobacillus that was used to make it is actually more closely related to the Tibetan group. So, you know, they think that this is showing that there were probably like two independent geographic origins of kaffir, which makes sense because it's a very simple, it's kind of one of the most simple fermented milk products, right? It's like you, all you need is to like get lucky once or twice with the right bacteria and yeast showing up while it's sitting out overnight. And then you have your starter culture. So it's not shocking that, you know, different people came up with this in different places.

I wonder if there was a microbe trade, too, if there was any sort of, like, as people's intermingled, you know, thinking Silk Road and all of that, maybe there, you know, maybe like there was essentially traveling sourdough starter. Totally. I mean, I think, you know, we see a lot of, like, you know, human migration and trade routes influencing what kinds of foods people made and how people preserved food. totally. They also found some cool genetic changes that have sprung up in the last 3,500 years, basically compared to modern lactobacillus. They found that the ancient strains would have been more likely to trigger an immune response in human intestines, which makes sense when you think about it because our ancestors probably would have favored batches of kifir that like more people were able to drink safely and they would have used those cultures more widely. So it seems like that might have helped those bacteria thrive and sort of win out. And yeah, you know,

another important thing to remember is that while it's like wild that they were able to sequence cheese this old, it's not surprising that people were making cheese that long ago. We actually have pretty good evidence that cheese making was going on more than 9,000 years ago in Anatolia or the Levant. And that comes from the sort of like residue style remnants of cheese that I mentioned at the beginning of the fact. Humans have been fermenting dairy for almost certainly as long as they've consumed dairy because without refrigeration, it was just a necessity. Plus, until around 5,000 years ago, virtually all humans were lactose intolerant. It was the rule, not the exception. Almost no adult could properly digest milk. Then, you know, about 5,000

years ago, a genetic mutation that made people able to guzzle glasses of milk well into adulthood spread like wildfire in Northern Europe. But I think a lot of people don't realize, like, lactose intolerance is what, that's the default. And so we've been consuming dairy for at least 9,000 years. And for 4,000 years of that, for the first 4,000 years, almost no one could drink milk without a tummyache. So what was going on? Did they also develop antacids and tums alongside? I'm wondering, is lactate the next thing we're going to find with little pouches? Yeah.

Well, it seems that fortunately, fermentation was probably the answer. There was a really great Popside feature a few years back that I'll link to you on Popside.com slash weird. That was about how people in Mongolia are almost all. lactose intolerant, like 95% of the population is lactose intolerant. But they get like a huge portion of their caloric intake, sometimes as much as half or more, from various milk products from all different kinds of animals. And some researchers are very confident that the key is their absolute mastery of fermentation. They make so many different fermented products and they have like

ancestral heirloom starters for various fermentation. dairy products that they, I think the phrase that the person who wrote this story used is that like they'll care for it with the attention they'd give a newborn. And so they think that all of the microbes involved in all of those fermented products are ones that really help the gut digest dairy. And while they're kind of like on the extreme end of the spectrum in terms of how heavily they use dairy and how many of them are lactose intolerant, the truth is that, again, up until like 5,000 years ago, that was kind of the situation for everybody. And of course, there are parts of the world where dairy is less of a thing, but it's certainly been a very common food stuff.

There's actually one study suggested that maybe the reason lactose tolerance suddenly became so relatively common from being like basically non-existent. is that there were like particular stressors like famines or pathogens. So maybe anybody who already like had a little trouble with dairy was more likely to get sick, not be able to eat enough, get dehydrated so that the people who like could just, you know, house a bottle of milk without issue or were suddenly more likely to survive and reproduce. But yeah, that's my ramp. I'm so interested in the lactose intolerance thing.

I remember when that study came out saying, like, we were all lactose intolerant until five years ago, and we ate dairy for 4,000 years before that. I was like, relatable. I'm not actually lactose intolerant, but I'm like, I'm somewhere on the spectrum. I'm like, you know, I'm not going to drink a whole glass of milk. I'm just not going to do it. And I can really relate because I'm like, honestly, even if I was fully lactose intolerant, I, in my heart, I have so much tolerance for lactose. I would make it work. But yeah, that's pretty a story for today.

Like I said, hopefully you'll agree that it was less gross than the mummy cheese cheese made it sound. Way less gross. Also, I'm fascinated by the idea of caring for your, you know, your fermented, whatever, the same way you would a newborn. Because I carry my sourdough starter by feeding it once a week and putting it in the back of the fridge. Yeah. No, definitely. Yeah. So I should not be a problem, basically, is what that is.

Yeah. I think they're really on another level there. My necessity, because they just make this endless variety of a funky, funky dairy. And maybe all of our tummies would hurt a little less if we did the same. All right, we're going to take one more quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special by for only $199.

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Let's talk about superstition. Okay, I want to start by asking all of you, do you have any superstitions? Oh, for sure. I would say I'm trying to think if there are any that I like that really that I truly cling to is more than just a habit because I have plenty of that are habits

because like I'm half Italian and that Italian size is Catholic and Roman Catholicism is one of the wichiest. Yes, yes. Loaded to the gills in superstition. But yeah, I can't really think of anything where I'm like, oh, no, I would be genuinely like worried or creeped out if I didn't do that. But I do throw salt over my shoulder. Same.

People think I'm crazy. But I'm like, there's just something about that where I'm like, can't hurt. Can't hurt might help. Isn't that just superstition in that nutshell? It's like, can't hurt. It might help. Yeah. Yeah.

Don't want to risk it. Too scary. Yeah, absolutely. My mostly just has to do. Yeah, it's with swimming as with most things with me are I basically, and it's partially also just for my, you know, for my health and well-being while I'm in the water. So I will only eat oatmeal and fruit the night before a long swim. I will eat nothing else. I'm not really, oddly enough also part Italian and do not really love pasta.

So like pasta parties and all of that kind of stuff, not my thing before a long swim. It was oatmeal. And then it kind of became tailored into my performance when I slipped up once and had some sweet potato fries the night before. And Tum-Tum that morning in the river was not happy. So now it is only, again, shameless plug, Bob's Redmill. It's only, it's their steel-cut oats and some blueberries. And that is it. Okay.

Jess, do you have one? Not lately, but back in the day when I played volleyball, I would have the same ball bounce routine before every single serve. which is I guess like a thing with basketball players and free throw shots too. And when the Cubs were in the Running for the World Series in 2016, which they won, I wore my Anthony Rizzo jersey for every game. And like we said earlier, I did not wash it. And by the end, when they won, it was covered in like my makeup and my sweat. Thank God.

You did that. Why they won. It is. It is why they won. You get it. But yeah, I'm sure I have some today. But, you know, in those critical moments in life, the superstitions were helpful. I think mine are more habitual as well. It's the salt thing. I will knock on wood. Like, if someone says something like, this is going to work out, I'm like, we need wood somewhere. I need to pound on that. Like, you have just jinxed us. So, you know, the common ones are like walking under a ladder, opening an umbrella in the house, jumping over a crack so you don't break your mother's back. Sometimes I would step on cracks just every once in a while because my mom had really irritated me. It didn't work. So I don't know if I believe in that one. But some of the

them seem like totally rational. Like why would you walk under a ladder with the possibility of either getting something dropped on you or knocking someone off of it? That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. If I was working on a ladder and somebody walked underneath that, like, what the hell's wrong with you? Yeah. Also, the opening an umbrella in the house, it's like, well, of course, that's what a terrible idea. Like you're going to knock something over, you're going to poke somebody in it. Like, some of these just seem like common sense. Some of the other ones, like wearing the lucky sweater or the jersey or the jacket over and over again until, you know, your team wins or, you know, for every presentation you've ever given. I have a friend who would wear the same sweater to every single

test in college. And that sweater got a lot of use. It was pretty worn out by the end of the end of four years of school. You know, it's just, it goes back to that, you know, can't hurt might help. And this is something that we have done for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. And we've got evidence of superstitious behavior going back, you know, millennia. There was a book from the fourth century BCE written by the philosopher. I'm going to butcher this. Theophristus, do you guys know who he is? No. Yeah, me neither. I'd never heard of him. So if I got his name wrong, hopefully no one will notice.

Sorry to this man. Yeah. It's been dead a while. So it contained a series of 30 character sketches, one of which was about the superstitious man. And it reads, the superstitious man is the kind who washes his hand in three springs, sprinkles himself, with water from a temple font, puts a laurel sprig in his mouth, and then is ready for the days perambulations. Sounds very clean. Yeah, he sounds like a very clean man. Maybe, you know, there was part of me that was like, oh, this guy's a little OCD, maybe. Sure, yeah.

And I wonder actually where OCD and superstition intersects. That's not something I got a chance to look into, but that's sort of what brought that question to mind. But it's clear that Theophrstus is sneering a bit at the superstitious people out there, depicting them as silly and irrational and why would you do these kinds of things. And that sentiment is not one that has gone away. It's persisted very much into the modern day that superstitions are not scientific or rational. They have no bearing on the outcome of events. But we keep going around ladders and jumping over cracks and wearing lucky sweaters and wearing lucky socks and knocking on wood.

And why is that? Why do we persist in irrational behavior? Many psychologists agree that superstitions have to do with a feeling of control. I spoke to one psychologist is Dr. Stewart Weiss, and he's written a couple of books about magic and superstition and why we continue to sort of invest ourselves in magical thinking, even when even like truly rational, scientific people continue to do this, even though they know that on some level it doesn't have any effect. And he says, you know, it makes sense because people are trying to avoid the worst outcomes and conversely achieve the best ones. And in situations where we absolutely know that the outcome is certain, like there's no doubt whatsoever that it's not going to go exactly as planned, we're really unlikely to engage in superstitious behavior.

But at the moments when we feel like things are less certain, and that's where chance enters into the equation, those are the moments when we're likely to fall. back on the superstition. So will my sports team win? Am I going to pass this test? Will I nail this presentation? Like those are the moments where you're like, I don't know. And I just, I need a little boost. I need a little bit of help. But is there actually anything scientific about engaging in these behaviors? And it turns out that there might be. There was a team of scientists out of Germany who did an experiment. Now, this study's a little bit older. This is from like 2012, I think. But they were testing the effect of good luck superstitions on people's behavior. They didn't look into bad luck as much. And they designed an experiment to see how superstitions affected participants' performance

on a series of tasks. One of them involved, like, putting a ball into a hole. And what they would do is they would say, they would come up to some of the participants and they would say, this is a lucky ball. And other ones, they would just hand them a ball and be like, here's the ball you're going to use. And overall, the people who had been handed the lucky ball had more success in actually executing on this task. There was another one that was a motor skills test that was like you have, I don't know if you've ever seen these. It's like the boxes where you have to move the ball around and try to get it into the little holes. So they, it's like a motor skills. And they're, again, it was the kind of thing where if you said to the person, I'm crossing my finger.

for you, they would tend to do better than the people you're like, here is your task. So it's like this sort of weird little external boost. But the scientists also pointed out, you know, most of the time you're not getting that externality. The superstitions are very much internal. You're not talking about feeling superstitious. You don't want to voice those sorts of like crazy thoughts. So they designed two other experiments that were focused on more your internal emotional feeling. There were two tests. One was a matching game like memory. So flipping cards over and seeing if you could remember the pairs. And then there was a word game, kind of like the spelling bee, if you've ever done that with the New York Times, where you've got to create as

many words as possible out of a certain number of letters. And prior to these tests, the scientists called up each participant and told them, first they asked them, do you have a lucky charm? And if the person said yes, then they were told to bring it to the test the next day or later that week. If they didn't have one, they were excluded from the experiment. So this was very much focused on people who had superstitious feelings to begin with. Then, before each of these tests began or before each participant went into the tests, about half of them had their lucky charm taken away. And what the scientists found was that those who had been allowed to keep their lucky charms

felt more confident going into the tasks. Absolutely no surprise there. But they also performed better than the ones who didn't, almost across the board, which raised the possibility for the scientists that superstitious believes might actually make a person believe more in their own talents and abilities. So in other words, it might pay to be superstitious. So that's my fun fact. So not something to work against or to say, oh, logic will always win.

No, it could actually do something. It could actually help. Yeah. And they don't have a real good sense why. I think it fits in a little bit with like placebo effect and nocebo effect on the flip side of that where it's like you are priming yourself to think a certain way and then that provides a little bit of an extra boost. And even though you know like deep down, this is just, you know, a charm or a bracelet or a ring and it doesn't really have magical powers, there's something about

having it with you that creates a reaction within your brain and in the way you perform. Yeah, that totally, that totally makes sense to me, not just logically, but personally, because like the sort of, I don't have like, you know, a lucky, a lucky shirt or something, but I've definitely sort of like made, like, turn things into tokens. Like you have particular pieces of jewelry that I'm like, I do like just like intention setting where I'm like, you know, these, this ring helps me feel confident. And it's like, literally I'm just, like, saying this thing about this piece of jewelry and then reinforcing it by when I wear it. And I'm like, I feel really confident. I'm like, thanks, wearing that makes me feel really confident. And it totally works. It's a great hack. I recommend if you have a favorite pieces of jewelry, you start deciding what they're all for and then profit. Yeah. But I would love to see what the chemistry is. And I don't think that we have this capability yet of like what is chemically happening in your brain that triggers you to feel more confident

because you have a piece of jewelry like because I look at the jewelry and I'm like this is just metal this is just metal and maybe a stone hopefully not mined by some children in Africa it doesn't actually have anything lucky about it and yet the reaction I have to having it on like that sense of security you know security blanket probably plays a lot of the same role like yeah yeah wow i have more if if something bad happens if i get bad news and i'm wearing certain things i have thrown out or i've recycled or thrown out clothes when something if i've been wearing it like when something bad has happened i'll sometimes have that kind of a response where it's like not oh the clothes made this happen but it's more just like sometimes the memory can be so

you know, so like jarring when I see it, that if I have a bad association with that, I've definitely, like, remember the outfit I was wearing when I got laid off once and I have not touched it since. So that's like it's tainted or, yeah, yeah. Dark cloud on it. You don't want to bring that energy into. No, no. Yeah.

But if you give those clothes away at like Goodwill or something, do they still hold that dark energy? Have you, like, condemned a series of people to losing their jobs? The layoff outfit? Trash. That was, it was also kind of on its way anyway. But yeah, like that's, I find that that's like the other, like, more negative end of that spectrum, though, is like, sometimes things can then be, can then be tainted. And then what does it take to, like, re-swing it to the other end of the spectrum where something then becomes kind of lucky? Yeah.

The big one for me is, like, if people are talking about good outcomes and it's not certain yet, I'm like, don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. Don't talk about it. You're going to jinx it. Everything is going to go to shit. Like, you know, the other shoe is going to drop. I just, I, there's something about putting it, being like, yeah, this is going to work out where I'm just like, la, la, la, la, la, la. Yeah, I definitely like become a southern Italian peasant when people start talking about like bad, bad things.

I'm like, no, la, la, no. Spit on you and put you in a quarter. Berries and statues in the front yard. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So many. Well, and numbers too. I found the number stuff really fascinating. Like, you know, and it's different depending on the country. And Western countries 13 is terribly unlucky. But in China, it's the number four because it's pronounced the same way that the word for death is. Right. While the number eight is like super, super lucky. And people will try and get phone numbers with as many eights in them as they possibly can. And this is why the Beijing Summer Olympics were scheduled when they were. They were scheduled to start August 8th,

2008, so 888. So, yeah, auspicious. And again, a lot of it comes down to that, can't hurt my help. Yeah. Can't hurt might help. So pick those pennies up, people. As long as it's heads up, never tails. Laura, thank you so much for joining us again. And would you remind listeners what your book is called so they can find it? Yes. It is called, Do You Believe in Magic? and it is available pretty much anywhere online. And if you don't find it in your bookstore, ask if they'll carry it. And same as your library.

Always great advice. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, 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. Security program on spreadsheets, new regulations piling up, and audit dread? It's time for Vanta. Vanta automates security and compliance, brings evidence into one place, and cuts audit prep by 82%. Less manual work, clear visibility, faster deals, zero chaos. Call it compliance, or call it, compliance. Get it?

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