The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Corpses Doing Yoga, The Loneliest Island, Biblical Quail Rhabdo

Episode Date: June 20, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from rhabdo, a potentially fatal medical condition first mentioned in the bible, to the most remote inhabited island on Earth. 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 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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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Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. 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 same. 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 tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other 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 Fulman. I'm Claire Maldorelli. And I'm Sarah Trodosh. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start out by each offering up a little tease of something we've picked up either while reporting, reading other people's great reporting, editing, wasting time on Twitter, talking about weird stuff, et cetera. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. And 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. And as always, if you agree or disagree with our verdicts, you should let us know on Twitter at Weirdest underscore Thing or hashtag Weirdest ThingPod. Sarah, why don't you go first with your teaser?

My fact this week is about the world's most remote inhabited island. Hmm. That's all I'm going to give you. Just lonely people. Yeah. Truly the loneliest people. Claire, what about you? All right.

Mine is about rhabdomylysis, which is a potentially life-threatening condition that often results from over-exercise. However, there is a particular food item that can also cause it, and it was first mentioned in the Bible. What? Biblical food, rhabdo. Wow, that started out as such a technical definition and they're really, really pure off. Which is how all great weirdest things begin. Yes. My fact is about dead people.

Cool. Duff. Specifically, dead people doing yoga and also something known as the resurrection riot of 1780. Now, is this riots of resurrected people or against the resurrection? Neither. Whoa. Okay. Interesting.

I kind of want to hear about the Bible food first. Yes, I think Bible rhabdo food is. Bival older, so it wins. It's like when you play monopoly. Yeah, exactly. Wow. All right, Claire. Awesome.

Okay. First, before I get into the Bible, what is rhabdo? It's basically where your skeletal muscle fibers break down. They get destroyed. then they spill all their proteins and their toxins into your bloodstream, then that goes, you know, through all of your liver, your kidneys and everything. And once it's in your kidneys, if you don't get treatment for it, you can die. And a characteristic trait of this is if you have brown colored urine. And that's because the kidneys are essentially unable to break down the myoglobin, which is a protein

that's spilled out in the bloodstream when the muscle fibers break down. It is incredibly treatable. you just get an IV infusion of basically saline and it just flushes through your kidneys. So really, really bad, but really, really treatable, which is great for medicine, I think. For potentially fatal illnesses, that's really the best you can do. It's the best case scenario. Definitely, if you're going to get a disease, get RAPTO.

I wrote about RAPTO this week. It was just basically a simple explainer because we were talking in our morning meeting and our online director, Amy, was like, this is a freaky condition we need to know everything about it. So I did. I learned so much stuff about it. And I realized that I was like,

when was the first instance of rhabdo? So I started Googling and I found these few case reports that really intrigued me. And they are titled, Unusual causes of rhabdomyalysis. An unusual case of rhabdomyalysis. And my favorite, which leads me to my... fact. The patient with rabdomyalysis, have you considered quail poisoning? And I was like, what?

Like literal quails? Just eating a quail? I shall explain, Sarah. Okay, I'm so sorry. The first case report of Rabdo, when I was looking at all these weird case reports, one scientist or researcher or a doctor or whatever, he took a deep dive and he found out that it was actually first mentioned in the Bible in the Old Testament. So from his report, this is his research, not mine, And as the Israelites wandered the desert, they encountered a quail migration and gathered birds to dry in store. Consuming large numbers of quail, the people were stricken with, quote, a very great plague. Later on, many more researchers and historians hypothesized that the toxins that produce a curare-like muscle paralysis can be found in seeds that the quail apparently eat, which is most likely hemlock seeds. And these toxins build up in the tiny birds and enter their bodies so that it's circulating in their blood and in their mussels.

muscles, and then when we eat them, we get some of that poisoning. So in large amounts, obviously, hemlock is extremely dangerous and can cause death. But in tiny amounts, the amount that is in a quail leg, they produce a neurotoxic effect, acute rhabdomyelysis, and obviously, after following that, renal failure. So apparently because this is so common in the medical community that it's been dubbed Caternism, which, and it has its own Wikipedia page, which I think, that was kind of cool. And it's actually apparently the most common in rural Mediterranean areas, which is where quails migrate to. And people are like, oh my gosh, quail. I love quail.

Let me eat all this quail. So it happens in like mass quantities. That's rabdo via quail poisoning. I have one question which is, yes, please. Like you can buy quail, not in your average grocery store, but you can buy quail. So is the quail that we raise for food fed something that does not, like not fed how Loxed Zay? question. So that's something all these researchers were trying to figure out. They were like, what is it, is it like a combination of the quail and our physiology, or is it just the quail happened to eat a ton of those hemlock seeds? And it's just, it's not the most common condition. So they're just like, oh, no. They think it could either be like genetic susceptibility, but then

that's also ruled out in some cases, because one guy ate quail with the rest of his family and none of the rest of his family got rabdo, just him. So it could be a combination of maybe they exercised that day, and they also have a genetic susceptibility. So there's all these different factors that can contribute, and there's just not enough people that have gotten rabdo via quail to really pinpoint what's going on. We need more data.

Wow. So how hard do you have to exercise to get rabdo? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it's kind of scary in that, yes, you have to exercise an extreme amount. You have to really work your muscles. But it's not so uncommon that like any normal person, anybody could get rabdo. And I think that's the scary part. And when I was doing my research, what I found was that one of the most common ways now that people are getting it is via spin classes.

So they're those like literal $30 classes in New York City and other. cities across the country where the instructors basically tell you to push yourself past your limits. And I don't know if either of you or any listeners have ever taken one of these classes, but basically you're in this dark room and all these people around you are really pushing themselves and your instructor is telling you to push yourself. And so what other kind of like peer pressure choice do you have than to push yourself past your limit? It's ridiculous.

It's not a good way to work yourself up to get good cardiovascular endurance. I took exactly one spin class in college because a friend peer pressured me into it. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know. If you like spinning more power to you, but boy, I hate every single time. Can I like exercise? I finally found a form of exercise I like, but boy, I hated spinning.

Yeah. Well, I feel like CrossFit gets a really bad rap when it comes to Rabdo. And like, I have my issues with CrossFit, but I've been thinking about, like, why don't I hear about spin classes giving people rabdo after reading your piece, Claire? And I think it's because CrossFit took the initiative to start putting up posters being like, fear the rabdo, like don't get rabdo. So now people assume that everybody who's getting rabdo is doing CrossFit. But I think that they just kind of took the initiative to realize that they were really setting themselves up for some kidney failure as it were. That's interesting.

Because I feel like spinning and CrossFit, and let's be honest, most of the other like fad exercise things, share that like CrossFit was found by people who knew what they were doing. And if you're, if you belong to a gym where they know what they're doing, like, it should be a reasonably like safe place to do exercise where they should not be telling you to push yourself so hard. You get wrapped up. Sarah, you wrote a piece this week about high intensity interval training for lifting, which is just lifting heavy, which a lot of people already assume is the best way to, you know, make gains. Get those gains.

Get those gains. Get wool. I feel like such a bro. but the thing that I thought was a really important takeaway there is that, as is the case with high intensity interval training for cardio, like, yes, it seems like you can get a lot of the same benefits as working out longer if you go more intense for a shorter period. But it's still really important to build up what your peak performance level is. Just because lifting heavy can be a really good idea, it doesn't mean you should suddenly be like, all right, like, how much can I deadlift literally once and fall over afterwards and feel like I'm going to die?

That's not what you're supposed to be doing. Because also, like, high intensity is high intensity for you personally. So, like, if you're going from not exercising, like, you should not be at the level that, like, someone who's been doing it for years is. And so it is high for you intensity. And if that feels slow to you, it's okay.

Your first time lifting heavy might be lifting five pounds. If that's heavy for you, great. You're doing high intensity interval training. Yes. Many people when they begin

doing lifting things cannot lift the bar and that is okay. You should not be lifting the bar if it's too heavy for you. Don't let your ego give you rabdo. Exactly. That's such a good slogan

for like anti-rabdo. Oh God. And the scary part about rabdo and like it's like not as intense disease which is just like Doms, which is delayed onset muscle, soreness. The symptoms don't occur until the next day.

And so it's like you can't know until the next day if you're going to get it. So you should just be careful now. So if you went to spin class and you're a real, real sore today, check out Popside.com. Yeah. And don't just assume it's doms. Think rhabdo. Check your urine. Assume Rabdo.

Until proven otherwise. I was shoveling during a snowstorm this past winter and I was by myself just with my dog at my parent's house. And it was an intense snowstorm. two feet of snow. And I came back in the house the next morning. I woke up. I was like, my arms really hurt.

Like, maybe I have rabdo. And so I just was like, okay, drink a ton of water and then check your urine. And there's really clear. The mental notes of thermal. Check a lot of water. Checking your urine is just good for your hydration, too. It's true. That is true.

You should always look at the color of your urine. That's what we say here. Popsar. Pay attention to your emissions in general. Your bodily emission. And we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back. Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can love it as a Facebook group.

Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. And we're back to the weirdest thing I learned this week. So my fact starts with a feature from the print magazine that is going to be up on popsye.com sometime today. And it's by Aaron Blakemore, one of my favorite weirdos. She writes a lot for popsai. And she emailed me a few months ago and said,

I have always wanted to write a story about these yoga instructors who hang out with corpses. The best lead to an email. Right. And I said, Aaron, we're going to make it happen, babe. I don't care how, but we're going to make it happen. And luckily, we had our growth to decay issue, which is on newsstands now. It's true that in Colorado, there is this place called the Learning Center of Human Anatomy, founded in 2014, where really anyone but mostly yoga instructors, massage therapists, physical therapists, people who work with living human body. but do not have medical degrees, show up and take these classes where they witness and sort of participate in dissections of cadavers.

I just think it's so interesting because we talk about bodies being donated to science, but most people, I think, just assume that means they're going to go to a medical school. And that is, in fact, often the case, but not always. The thing that I was curious about was like, where do these bodies come from? because some community members donate directly to places like the Learning Center of Human Anatomy. You know, you can participate in classes and bequeath your body to them essentially so that they'll then, you know, take you and embalm you and spend a year or so using you in classes. And then you can choose how your remains will be disposed of. After that, most of the bodies come from where all bodies for dissection come from, which is this. really like convoluted situation in the U.S.

We have basically brokerage companies that take bodies and then sell them to places that want them. Now you can... Wait, I thought you donated your body. Well, the people, the bodies and their families don't get the money. Who gets the money? That's the question, Claire. That's always the question.

There are middlemen making money off of bodies? There have been several investigations on this in the past few years because it's just really not a regulated industry in the U.S. in any real sense. There are laws that you can't buy and sell human bodies at all, but you can charge for the service of procuring, preparing, shipping them. Body donation is popular for many people because it means they don't have to pay for a funeral and a funeral home, et cetera.

And a lot of times universities can't give you a total free ride on that. They need someone to be responsible for transporting you, you know, taking care of your post-kidavre, remain life, et cetera. And so these companies have stepped in that can actually pay for the entire process and don't care about what state you're in when you die. and so they've taken on a lot of the donations and the thing is that then they make like a lot of money which depending on who you ask is maybe not the coolest thing

there was an investigation by Reuters a couple years ago and they found that science care had received 5,000 bodies from donors the year previously and from 2011 to 2015 they received at least 17,000 bodies and sold or leased more than 51,500 body parts. Whoa. That is a lot of body parts. Yeah. And, you know, most of those bodies are ending up at universities, like universities because they are not getting so many direct donations.

They have to use brokerage services. So it's not like most of those bodies are going off to nefarious places, but there is not a lot of oversight about where they adapt. So there have been a couple situations that was one by Reuters. and a few by, I think Newsweek did another similar investigation where they just bought a body part and were able to get it shipped to them because no one was really checking to see what they were going to use it for. And there aren't really laws about who can buy these things.

It's really only in the best interest for a company to avoid random nefarious body buyers because that would turn off potential donors. There's no rule that says science care has to be, super sure that no one's just buying your foot to like display it somewhere. That's crazy. Yeah, and they made $27 million annually, and that's just one company. Wow.

Yeah. So is there any way for, if I want to donate my body to science, is there any way to make sure that it goes to a medical school? Yes. You just have to go right to the medical school, preferably one in the state that you live in and plan on dying in. Gotcha. and that's much more straightforward.

And it doesn't even have to be a medical school. There are schools that do a bunch of crash dummy research and need cadavers, and you can go directly to them as well. Or, you know, if you're cool with being used to just kind of teach gross anatomy and don't care if it's literally for a medical school, you can get involved with a group like this one in Colorado. It is always so important to note this, that when we talk about body brokers and body donation,

it is only bodies being donated for research. This is not organ donation. So when you opt in as an organ donor, you don't have to be like, oh, I heard that they're just going to sell my organs and who's going to get them. That's not true. Organ donation is very important and highly regulated.

Very, very highly regulated. So you do not need to worry about that. Be an organ donor. It's fun, and you don't have to do anything. At all. Literally. Literally nothing. Check a box on a farm once.

A serious question. If someone is using a body for yoga practices, are bodies like rigid when they're dead? And how does that work for yoga? Because I can't even touch my toes and I'm alive. That's a great question. And I think the answer is that they are embalmed, but like lightly so. Interesting. And they certainly don't have all of the flexibility that a person would have in life. But they kind of, break them down into parts that they can then demonstrate flexibility on. So it's not so much like the whole body has to stay pliable as like we're going to take this spine and like move it to show you how different things move. I still feel like if my body was donated for that purpose, they'd be like, this one just

doesn't work. See, but they would love that. They would be like, wow. Teach your deceased body parts how to be more flexible. That's what they're learning how to do. And then they would all come out of it being like, I think of Claire every time I have a student who can't touch their toes. She taught me so much.

It's a lot harder than it looks. Okay. I don't know who else out there can't touch their toes, but you're not alone. In looking at this, I got really curious about how body donation started and like how we've felt about it throughout history. You know, human dissection started, or at least the first request. recorded one happened 300 BC. So it was certainly a really important way for us to learn about the human body before we had any imaging techniques, you know. But it had a lot of stigma, at least

once we get into more robust records in like the 17th and 18th centuries. And it was considered a great dishonor to the extent that the murder act of 1752 in England actually said that you could make a crime punishable by dissection. So you wouldn't just be put to death. The verdict would specifically say you were going to be used for dissection afterwards. And that was considered a huge deterrent to crime, like more so than dying because people thought it was, first of all, super rude. And second of all, they worried about, like, the implications for your immortal soul. They would even threaten dissection for, like, less heinous crime. And such as dueling.

So until around the 18th century, this method of just using criminals who had been put to death as dissection cadavers was sufficient. But then medicine became like a real thing. It's thought that around 1745, when the first formal course in anatomy

was taught at the University of Pennsylvania, that's when bodies really became a hot commodity. Wow. So enter grave robbing. Many people know that medical schools relied on grave robbing around the 18th and 19th centuries. There started to be a lot of grave robbing, but it was mostly poor people. It was mostly people who weren't white. As with any exploitative behavior, it was mostly the marginalized who were being exploited.

And so everybody else just kind of turned a blind eye, especially because medical schools really did need cadavers, and they had no other way to get them. It's kind of apocryphal at this point, but there's this story that in New York and seven 1788, something happened to make this anti-cadar sentiment boil over. However it actually happened, this started an actual riot. It's known as the Resurrection Riot of 1788 or the doctor's riot. And there was just like a mob. They took four students captive and they had to be rescued by the local sheriff. Three to 400 men stormed down Broadway toward the city jail, looking for medical students who were there for their own protection. They sacked New York Hospital on April 13, 1788.

And when the mob grew to 5,000, Governor George Clinton called in the militia, by the time the mob was stopped, three rioters and three militia men had been killed, and a lot of people were wounded. So New York passed its first law against grave robbing in 1789 and allowed judges to sentence dissection, as had been done in England. But the law still didn't provide enough. legal bodies, so people kept grave robbing. And really, grave robbing didn't stop until in the 1800s state started to legislate that unclaimed bodies of people who were like

died in hospitals or asylums or prisons would automatically be allocated to medical schools, which was a solution, but also just basically guarantee that if you were really poor, you were going to end up dissected. There was this huge stigma around it, not surprising, given that it had been like an actual punishment worse than death. We never actually really got past the stigma. It's just that now it's become so expensive to die that people are willing to seek out these services, some of which are arguably kind of predatory.

Advice, if you're looking to donate your body, maybe consider going directly to a research institution or at least like go in understanding what's happening. You know, if you feel it's a fair transaction, then great. but a lot of people are not aware when they sign up for these brokers that people are going to be making millions of dollars off of dead people.

Wow, that's crazy. All right, well, we're going to... Oh, sorry. No, please interrupt me to come on me. Well, we're going to take a quick break, look up some organ donation options, and then we'll be right back. It's Pride Month.

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Did I wear it every day? None of your business. It's really cute and comfortable. You should also check out our other threadless items, including a new weirdest thing t-shirt. It says weirdo on it with our little eyeball logo as the O. It's dope. You should get one. Get one for your baby.

There's a onesie. Your baby's a weirdo. And now, time for Sarah's fact. I have to first give credit for all of the fact that you're about to hear to Michael Kojel because he is an editor at I-Triplee. And former Popsai intern. And he sent me a message on Slack over the weekend and said that. his new hobby was looking at very remote islands on Google Maps. And he sent me the location of this island.

Tristan de Kuhnha, and I'm sorry that that is definitely not how you say it. It's a British overseas territory, and it is the most remote inhabited island in the world. So it is 1,750 miles from Cape Town, which is the closest land. It's like, I think a similar distance from St. Helena, the famous island where Napoleon, was held, so that puts it in the South Atlantic. And boy, is it just so, so remote. So there's like approximately 250. The last count I got was 254 islanders who live on this beautiful nation.

It was discovered in 1506 by a Portuguese admiral, whose name I will not try to say, but is basically the Portuguese version of Tristan de Kuhnha. I'm just going to call Tristan so that I don't keep butchering that. So yeah, it was discovered back in 1506 and it was on maps for quite a while until there was like the first definitely we know people landed on this island in 1643 by the Dutch. And for a while there was like quite a useful little landing spot because people had to, if they were, you know, you're traveling from Europe over to any part of Asia. You went down around the horn, around Africa. and even though this is not terribly close to Africa, it was apparently a useful stopping point.

The first time I could find it as like people tried to settle it was in 1810 by four sailors from Salem, Massachusetts, oddly. Oh. They attempted to settle, and then we're not really sure what happened, but three years later another ship showed up, and only one of them was left alive and said that the others had died in a fishing accident, like they just sailed away and never came back.

So that must have been a great... rimmed three years. Really hated him. They were just like, you know what? It's not worth it, we don't want to. And then in 1860, the British took possession of it because Napoleon was on St. Helena, and they were worried that the French were going to, I guess, use this island as a stopover point. And they also wanted to prevent Americans from using it as a base, which apparently we had in the War of 1812.

So how big is it? So it's about 80 square miles, which is like significantly, significantly smaller than Rhode Island, which is like 1200. It's very tiny because it is like, it is one volcano. One volcano unit large. One absolute unit. There is like, you know, much like in exactly the same style as Hawaii, like there's a hot spot under that part of the mantle.

So there's a couple or two other islands in the area. One called gauge, gau. I'm not sure. G-O-U-G-H. You said that like the last syllable was just a breath of the wind. Yeah. And the other island, there's also Nightingale Island and also inaccessible, which is the actual name of the island. It's just inaccessible.

Just a really cranky cartographer. Yeah, exactly. I thought Google Maps had just assigned it that name, but it's a real name. So it's very, very tiny, and it is basically just a volcano. And the volcano rises 6,750 feet above sea level. So it's quite steep. Like most of the island is just like sheer cliffs zone. Homey.

Yeah. But there is one flat area, which is where everyone on the island lives, which is called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. Ooh. Sounds nice. Yes. I mean, you can look at it on Google. There's one bar. There is one restaurant.

Uh-huh. Seems like a lot of bar and restaurant for a place. Yeah. Well, they're not open all the time. Like, I think the bar is only open when people and, like, cruise ships come. By appointment only. Exactly. I mean, you're not joking, but there's like a cafe. The cafe only serves lunch on Wednesdays. Just Wednesdays. During World War I, because it's like, it's a British territory. So for a while, the British Navy, I guess, would just like send a ship every once in a while, just see what's going on, make sure it's fine.

Yeah, exactly. But during World War I, that was, they didn't have a ship despair. And so they just stopped coming until July of 1919, when the HMS YMS Yarmes. Dartmouth showed up just to say like, hey, there was a war. Let me tell you what happened. And also, by the way, here is your mail from like the last five years. Yeah, because they have a British postal code. You can send mail to Tristan today. I'm sending a postcard from Popside. During World War II, it was the site of a top secret mission to monitor U-boats in that area of the ocean because why wouldn't you? You've got that. That's a whole reason the British still has those overseas territories. Today, it is a lot of, it is basically like 200, 160 people who like farm still like that is they have sheep and

pigs and potatoes. There's a potato patch that you can see on Google Maps. And also a canning factory, oddly, because they have the Tristan Rock Lobster, which apparently they send all over the world. The wildest story about this island is that in August of 1961, the volcano started exploding. There was like an earthquake and a landslide and an aqued. October 8th, there was like a fissure that started opening, and so they decided to evacuate to one of the nearby islands that wasn't inhabited. And then just like, by a stroke of luck, there happened to be enough boats that were like

visiting at that time that everyone could evacuate. They all got evacuated back to England, and the British government assumed that this was like a permanent deal, because why would you move off of this island to England and then move back? But two years later, the Royal Society did an expedition to go, like, see what was up with the volcano and determine that it was no longer active. and so it would be fine to move back. And all of the citizens took a vote,

and they voted 148 to 5 to go back. So they did, and they brought five more people with them because some of the islanders had gotten married to other British citizens and convinced them to come back to this very, very tiny island. It took them almost a month to get back because it's quite a long way. Oh, wait, four people, I'm sorry, four new husbands who were convinced to come back. All husbands? All husbands.

All husbands. There were four unmarried young Tristan ladies who procured themselves husband. I'm just amazed at these four people were like, you want me to go where? Yeah, I'm going to, I assume that they were women because, like, historically the idea was that, like, a lady would find herself a husband, even if it meant going off to, like, the Wyoming territories. Exactly. So I'm really happy that these dudes were just like. These four guys. Whatever you say, babe.

Let's go. We're off. Yeah. So it's just like, I think this is just amazing because, so the land on Tristan today is totally communally owned. So as an outsider, you are, you cannot buy land there and also, like, they can't sell it. Like, you'd have to sell the whole island because all of the people own it.

They all tend to the potato patch. They all take care of the livestock. They control the stock numbers, both to prevent over grazing, which was apparently a problem at one point, but also to keep better off families. from accumulating too much wealth. Because I guess with 260 people, it would be quite obvious. So it's almost like a mini socialist society. There's also only nine last names on the whole island, two of which were like new.

So most of them, so Collins, Glass, Green, Hagen, Lavarello, Repetto, Rogers, Squibb, and Swain. It's a very genetically homogeneous population, as you can guess. So they've been studied for that reason because it's very isolated. especially because 42% of the population has asthma, like serious asthma, even though they live in effectively no air pollution. They basically figured out like three of the original settlers out of probably like 15 total people had asthma. And so now it has just like propagated through the population and now they all have asthma, even though there's only one doctor on the whole island to take care of them. That's so interesting. So cruise ships do go to the island sometimes, which is one of the few ways you can get to the island.

It's like they're very weird cruises because there's not a lot down there. So it's a lot of ocean time because the cruise ships can't get close enough to the island to actually dock. So they have to send little boats. So sometimes if your cruise is going to be there for like two days and it's really bad weather because it's pretty far south in the Atlantic, you just don't get to go. But sometimes the Tristan Islanders will go on to the cruise ship to like tell you about their island. They are so excited about their island. If you look up, just Google it, they have a website that they run, which is astounding because like, there's no internet basically on the island.

There's like, I think maybe literally one computer. And that's it. And it's slow. And there's like, there's no cell service. I'm so jealous. I know. What a lovely life. It's just incredible.

But like they have a postcode so they can order things online if they want on this one computer, I guess. Does Amazon deliver to the island? That's such a good question. And I'm not sure, but God, I hope so. If anyone does, it's Amazon. Definitely not prime for sure. No, that would be quite challenging. But you can also like just like pay to get there yourself because there is a fishing boat that goes once a month.

It takes six days at sea. I love to spend six days on a fishing boat. And it doesn't sound like a big fishing boat because only 12 passengers can fit on the boat. Oh my goodness. And like if there's any kind of medical emergency, you get booted from the boat. Like literally into the water? No, as in like if someone needs to, if someone like has to get to the island or someone has to come like back and you are. I thought you were saying that they shocked you overboard

You at the beginning No that would be incredible That problem's taking care of But yeah so you can hop on the fishing boat if you want From Cape Town six days at sea It seems like a magical place In 2005 They forgot to load the Christmas mail onto the fishing boat

And so everyone got their presents late A month late Yeah a month late because they got there and were like we don't have it. Why hasn't anyone written a musical about this? It sounds so magical. Also, there's one store, like one place where you get any grocery items, although I guess you don't have a lot of grocery items.

Like, I just, there's one store and everything closes for three weeks around Christmas for vacation because why not? Like, you can just all agree. We're all just going to take three weeks. That's amazing. What about clothing and stuff? Like, is that what's sold at the store? They make some of their own clothing.

A lot of wool, I bet. Yeah. But over those three weeks, like, you just, you're on your own. There's nothing else. The store is closed. No one will be there to help you. They do, like, because they have sheep.

They have a reasonable amount of wool. And so they make clothing, which you can buy online. I think it's called 37 degrees south. And you can order it. But in order to order it, you do have to print out the order form. Fill it out by hand. Scan it in. email it to the store, wait for the store to confirm that they've gotten your order,

and then go back online and pay for the order. And then God knows how long it takes to get to you, because I cannot even fathom. Like, it's at least six days, for sure, because of the boat. Wow. I bet you they're super warm clothes, though. They seem very warm. You can also buy, like, hand-knitted penguin toys, and they have these little things that they call love socks, which you're just like,

does they seem like kind of the idea of a friendship bracelet, but a sock? You're like each take one sock. I'm not really clear. It seems really cute. I just love this place that has one store, one bar, and two churches.

Just think about how much of the world just like goes on without anyone interested in having any idea what's happening. Exactly. Because they don't have phones and they don't have the internet and there's no Twitter

and just like, it just must be so beautiful. beautiful. All right. I think it's time to to figure out what the weirdest thing we learned this week was.

I think the fact that there's rabdo in the Bible that's pretty cool. I'm just thinking about like swole Moses. The commandments

on the mount. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it must have been really heavy. Yeah. Maybe ate some quail before. The original weight training. Oh my gosh.

Yeah, I agree. That was a bad word of this thing. Yes. I still think Rachel's entire story was amazing. And now I'm just going to be super careful about my body when I die. Yeah, it's important to be... I mean, be prepared.

That's the moral here. Be careful with your body in life and in death. Yes. Yes. And move to Tristan. Yes, that too. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now.

And if you like the show, please tell your friends, and please rate and review us on iTunes. You can buy our merch, including limited edition Cy pride t-shirts and the weirdest thing I learned this week, tote bags, at popside.threadless.com. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden. Our editor is Jason Letterman. 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.

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