The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Death By Rainbow, Face Blindness, Watermelon Snow

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

PopSci contributor Kat Eschner joins us this week as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned ranged from how snow banks turn millennial pink to a dazzling yet dangerous chemistry demonstration. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on October 31st! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 always also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. I'm Kat Eshner. Kat, welcome to the studio. Thank you so much. For our listeners, Kat is one of our regular contributors on popsai.com and visiting us from the Great White North. Come on, man. Seriously? I'm from Toronto. I'm not from Nunavut.

Okay, okay, fair. Go on. And so we are so pleased to have you here on the show because you know a lot of weird things. It's one of the many things we love about you, so it's about time. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact we came across in the course of reading, writing, reporting, 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 live. learned this week actually was. Eleanor, would you start with your tease? Yeah, I want to talk about the science behind one of those biblical plagues where water turns to blood.

Oh. Ooh. Yum. Yeah, delicious. Love that. Okay, my tease is that most of the people I meet look pretty much the same to me. What's up with that? Unusual. Yeah. Interesting. Cat. My fact is about a colorful chemistry demonstration. demonstration that has injured more than 70 high school students and teachers in the United States since 2011 and injured a number before that. Wow. A menace. I love it. Must be stopped. Death by Rainbow. Oh my God. That's the name of your band, Eleanor, isn't it? It is, actually. Check out my mixtape. Really? No. Do you play Blakenspiel? I don't play anything. But now you have to learn. Just ideas. Okay. So what do we want to start with? I'm pretty curious about. faces. Absolutely. Great. So a lot of people are familiar with the concept of face blindness as like a really

bizarre impairment that keeps people from recognizing anyone. And I think there was a piece in like wired that was illustrated with like super blurry faces. And it's always presented as kind of this like fantastical, difficult to imagine thing that must be super rare. So, You can imagine my surprise when I realized that I have it. Oh, okay. And this is a pretty common tale, actually. So a lot of people know that Oliver Sacks, who was a famous neuroscientist and physician and writer, really beloved science communicator, one of my OG science writing heroes, actually the first

popular science book I read was the man who mistook his wife for a hat, which is very often referred to as being this like the classic. face blindness story. A man mistook his wife for a hat. It's all right there in the title. And so people talk about the fact that Oliver Sacks, not until his late adulthood, did he realize that he himself had face blindness. And I always heard the story as being like, it's so wild. You know, the brain we think that what we think of as normal is so normal that he could actually like work with these patients who had classic face blindness and never know. And the truth is that his lack of self-diagnosis is actually not surprising at all. And I'll explain why. So in the man who mistook his wife for a hat, this classic case study from Sacks, there's this character named Dr.

P. And he is totally unable to recognize faces, including his wife, who he famously tried to lift up from her shoulders. Oh my God. Because he thought that her head was a hat that he had walked in with. Okay. So I don't actually know anything about face blindness. And can you just Help me understand what actually goes on for people? So here's the thing, is that this classic case of face blindness was really not face blindness. It was visual agnaglia, meaning like the general inability to recognize objects for what they are. So in the same way that, you know, aphasia is where you'll say words totally disconnected from their meaning. You will look at an object and you can see all of its characteristics, but you can't put those together into knowing what the object is.

is. So, for example, Dr. P. famously was handed an object and was told to describe it. And he said, about six inches in length, a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment. It's not easy to say what it is. It lacks the simple symmetry of the platonic solids, although it may have a higher symmetry of its own than he smelled it. And he was like, oh, it's a rose. Oh, my God. And he was looking for his gloves, and he picked them up. And he was like, oh, That's five tubular surfaces interconnected into one plane or something like that. He just saw the world in like shapes. And his brain was terrible at processing how all of those surfaces came together to make a recognizable object.

So it's not surprising that faces were just as difficult as anything else to him. So he sees, you know, like a colorful mass on top of a rounded object. And he thinks it is his hat on a hat stand and it is, in fact, his wife's head. Okay. And now I see how this happens. Right. That's incredible. But the thing that I didn't even realize until looking back on this is that it's really not a classic example of face blindness.

It's a classic example of something. Totally different. Way more intense. So it is not surprising that in looking at this man, Oliver Sacks, wasn't like, oh, just like my life. I too try to unscrued people's heads. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, some recent research suggests that one in 50 people have some degree of face blindness. And it's one of those things that remains really poorly understood because it has to do with perception and the way you navigate the world.

And like any other issue of perception, there's a huge range of them. I mean, think about like synesthesia where people are, you know, processing one stimuli and like experiencing different senses because of it. You know, you like, hear color, you taste names. So a lot of people don't realize they have like less dramatic. form of synesthesia because it like doesn't come up and they just assume this is how other people process words and shapes around them. So I realize that I have some degree of face blindness not until a few years ago. And I happen to read a Wikipedia page for press up amnesia. So press up agnosia is face blindness. Pressup amnesia is the name that a few researchers have

given to a couple of cases. There are just two confirmed cases of people. who can see faces and recognize them but can't commit them to memory. And reading this, I was like, that's exactly what I have. But it was like, but there are only two confirmed cases. And I was like, oh, who do I think I am? Right. But looking at the body of research now,

it's clear that the reason there are only two confirmed cases is because most of them are lumped in with face blindness, which we are just starting to understand, is actually not that in common. So it's like part of the same spectrum of difficulty in perception and memory recall and recognition. So, yeah, by some estimates, one in 50 people have some form of this.

And face blindness in the historical record back pretty far, but it's only in 1947 that Joachim Bottamer, who was a German neurologist, published a description of a 24-year-old patient who had a bullet wound to the head. And so the earliest cases of face blindness that we actually see, talked about by doctors are all due to injury because that's a situation where someone knows what was normal to them before and knows that it's different after the injury. And they can report the difference. Exactly.

And so it's only in recent decades that people have started to become aware of congenital or developmental face blindness. Because if you grow up your whole life, just being like, well, I'm bad at remembering names or thinking that you're just like awkward. or just thinking that it's normal. That's, like, much harder for doctors becoming aware of. And I think it's really, like, in the age of the Internet, that people have become much more aware.

And I feel like that's probably true of so many more invisible, kind of small cognitive impairments that it's only once people start talking about, like, they're weird quirks, that we all start to realize how common there. For me, it was when I moved to the city and I started using online dating, and I realized that no matter how many times I looked at a picture of someone I was about to meet, I could look up from that picture and still have no idea who I was looking for in the bar.

I would just go by like hair color and look of anticipation. And once I realized that and once I started reading descriptions of face blindness that weren't like man who missed took his wife for a hat level bananas, I realized that this had always been a thing for me, that I would have to meet someone dozens of times before I could imagine their face when they weren't there or recognize them out of context. And it can be super embarrassing. I've definitely had people like come up to me and start talking to me and then be like super offended when I don't know who they are. People don't think it so personally. Yeah.

And so I've started actually if I know that someone who I haven't committed to memory is meeting me somewhere or is like, attending a show, I'll be like, just, you know, I'm super faceblind, so I will not know who you are. Yeah, introduce yourself. Please be like, hey, it's me. Right. Your friend. Do they know, like, why faces? Is it just that people get so offended that we pay a lot of attention to this particular sort of issue?

Or are faces something that we're more likely to struggle with? Yeah, that's a great question. And that's something that a lot of the research on face blindness is focusing on. So, like, face processing in the brain does involve a lot of brain areas working together. They're actually, I think, like, six selective areas of the brain in each hemisphere that are tied to recognizing a face. So it is definitely, like, something we use higher processing for than just being like, that's the table. And there's a lot of interesting work into deciding, like, why that is. obviously it's a pretty straightforward evolutionary mechanism to be able to recognize people as friend or foe.

And there's some evidence that people are better at distinguishing face types within like their close-knit groups for that reason that, you know, you're adapted to like really quickly recognize people who who might be like allies or enemies of you. Like machine learning. Yeah. Like you even had so much data. Exactly. Well, and then some people are like there's nothing actually special about the way we process faces. It's just that we see so many faces and recognizing faces is so important to human social life and survival that we just get so much practice. But it's probably some combination of the two.

So we know that face blindness can result from physical damage to some of these areas. And it seems like probably if it's congenital, it's that there's some kind of flaw in the network. And maybe it can occur at different stages of the processing that, you know, for me it's more about committing a face to memory. I can look at two people and tell you what's different about the two of them. But if then they turned around and you were like described their faces, I'd be like, they had a face. It was a man with some hair. Police sketch artists would not know what to do with that. Yeah.

No, I actually like, that would be a big problem for me. Please don't rob me. You'd identify the man in the lineup and you'd be like, oh. I'd have to make them a sing like that episode of Brooklyn Nine-N-N-N. And that actually leads me to a final point, Eleanor. Thank you that, and thank you, Andy Sandberg, that people with face blindness and problems with facial memory are known to rely on non-facial cues.

And this is definitely true for me. I am very reliant and take very intense notice of, like, what people are wearing. I'm very good with voices. I can recognize like any voice actor. But I often will be at a party and will be like, I'm so sorry. I have no idea who you are. My apologies.

And people are very offended about it. Even when I say that I'm faceblind. Oh, that's too bad. Some people don't believe me and think that I just don't care about them. And I'm here to tell you that maybe I don't care about you, but it's also a universal issue. So, you know, I try. Now you can just refer them to this episode. Yeah.

Honestly, that's my whole purpose for doing this episode is that I just want people to leave me alone about not knowing who they are. That being said, I mean, my facial memory problem is relatively mild. There are people with true extreme face blindness who, like, don't recognize themselves when they look in the mirror. Wow. And I definitely, in thinking about it, I'm like, I think maybe the reason I hate pictures of myself so much is that I'm kind of like, who's that? Like, I have a very hard time, like, retaining a mental image of what I like. look like. So that's my story. I loved it. Thank you. Wow. Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. I am a medical marvel. What can I say? No, but I'm really, I'm really glad that they're starting to

be more research on this. And if anyone is trying to do a study specifically on facial memory, please get me up, study me, I'm fascinating. Thank you. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Eleanor, why don't you tell us about blood? Great. Okay. We've, we've, we've... all been warned to avoid yellow snow, ew. But what about watermelon snow? Watermelon snow. It sounds delicious.

Yeah. Okay, here it is, guys. This is watermelon snow. Oh. Yeah. Huh. Right? Upsetting. Strange.

Yeah. Strayations. No one likes it. Everyone's making gross faces. Are we going to talk about the blood falls and Antarctica? Wow. Well, you should. So, watermelon snow is a naturally occurring phenomenon.

It's in alpine and polar regions around the world, especially in the summer, and the snow turns pink. And not just vaguely pink, as people saw in this photo that I showed in the studio, it's like real full blushing pink, looks like rosé or like the cover of the idiot. But Elie Batuman, a novel you should all read. But in the United States, you can find it in several mountain ranges. It's in like the northern part of Colorado and then also in the Sierra Nevada, a little farther west. And the question for thousands of years has been what causes it. So the first known recording of this phenomenon actually comes from Aristotle. Shout out to my home boy, who wrote in his history of animals that, quote,

living animals are found in substances that are usually supposed to be incapable of putrefaction. For instance, worms are found in long, lying snow, and snow of this description gets reddish in color, and the grub that is engendered in its red as might have been expected, and it is also hairy. So that was his theory of what was going on, is that there were just, I guess, like, hundreds of thousands of dying worms and snow everywhere, because, like, it can cover whole fields. That's what made it. Yeah, that was what he thought. Spoiler, he was wrong. But others speculated, again, wrongly, that the color was maybe leaching out of nearby rocks, like ones with iron deposits that would sort of oxidize and that would kind of paint the nearby snow.

But watermelon snow's profile rose ever higher in the early 1811. hundreds because at that time the English were searching for the Northwest Passage. They just really couldn't let it go. And they were convinced, right, that there was going to be a waterway that would allow them to travel around North America through the Arctic. Unfortunately, at that time, anyway, there was lots and lots of snow blocking their path. That's no longer true. You can get along the Arctic pretty well now.

In 1818, Sir John Ross of the Royal Navy sets out in the HMS Isabella and he's like right by Nunavut in the Canadian Arctic. dick. And so he's like, I'm going to find this way through. And he fails. But at least he didn't die, like those guys in the terror who like really died. A lot of bad horror stories that y'all should Google. But he basically really didn't accomplish much. The only things of note that he was able to return to the homeland were one. A mountain chain he thought he'd identified and named Croker's Mountain in Lancaster Sound just beyond Baffin Bay. But oops turned out to be a mirage. And his reputation was ruined over it. Wait, wow, what an idiot. Yeah, he was like, oh, these beautiful Crokers Mountain I have discovered. I will tell my fellow Englishman. And then it was like, dude, that does not exist. Dude, stop eating the canned food.

Yeah, he was struggling. But two, he also brought home a vial of watermelon snow from Greenland. Or as the Times of London pointed out in an article on the discovery, snow water. It had melted. So the paper's complete account talks about how he brought the snow water. he submitted it to chemical analysis with a why, and that in order to, you know, they were trying to discover the nature of its coloring matter. Quote, our credulity is put to an extreme test upon this occasion, but we cannot learn that there is any reason to doubt the fact as stated, except for the fact that this guy misidentified completely non-existent. Otherwise, totally reputable source.

Totally reputable source. Sir John Ross did not see any red snowfall, but he saw large tracks overspread with it. The color of the fields of snow was not uniform. but on the contrary, there were patches or streaks more or less red and of various depths of tint. The liquor, or dissolved snow, is of so darker red as to resemble red port wine. Whoa. It is stated that the liquor deposits a sediment and that the question is not answered whether that sediment is of an animal or vegetable nature. It is suggested that the color is derived from the soil on which the snow falls, in this case, no red snow, can have been seen on the ice.

And so this obviously got the scientific community into a tizzy. So a few days later, the Times of London publishes this follow-up where they're like, some doubt has been expressed as to the red snow observed by Sir John Ross and his associates. And they're saying that basically this guy has determined that it's meteoric stones that occasionally fall in more southern latitudes that have given the snow its color. So he was like, all of this is wrong. It's aliens. Well, he didn't say aliens, but he did say meteors. People love their space explanations. But that obviously wasn't right either.

Today, we know that the real cause of watermelon snow is, okay, any guesses? Is it cyanobacteria? It's algae, yeah. So it's called clammy de monis nevalis, which I practiced saying yesterday because I didn't want it to sound too much like chlamydia, although they both sort of start the same way. Well, technically a green algae, clammy demonis, has these red pigments inside its body.

I actually have a picture of its red pigments. So, like, it's really beautiful. Oh, that's so pretty. Isn't that nice? It was kind of like baloney. Yeah. I was going to say it looks like a pizza. Yeah.

Jess thinks it looks like a pizza. It's like a very beautiful pink pizza for millennials only. And so when the algae is disturbed, these red pigments actually sort of like flood out of the algae and color the surrounding area. It's similar in a way to the red tide off of Florida or the mats of green algae that are always destroying New York City Ponds every summer in the sense that these deposits of Klami de Monis are algae. blooms. Like they go 10 inches deep into the snowbank in some cases and they can cover, you know, miles of land. And so the thing is about these guys is when it's really cold, the algae are dormant and they pile up alongside, you know, the snowbank. But in the spring, they're activated by the warmth and so they start to germinate and spread. And that's really problematic because they speed up

snow melt. So, of course, white snow reflects light, but the darker the snow, the more light it will actually absorb. So when this watermelon snow starts to blossom, it's just pulling in tons of sunlight and warmth. And it's basically responsible for accelerating snow melt in like ice packs all around the world. But you know, at least we have an explanation for it, right? And so it's not the only algal mystery that I discovered. Here's a little bonus fact. And then it sounds like Rachel has another fact, too, about blood falls. Yeah, I love those blood falls. The thing I was going to mention is that there's something called blood rain. And so going back to Homer's Iliad in which Zeus reigns blood down upon the soldiers to warn them of an ensuing massacre. Thank you. Zeus. Very cute. Hail Satan.

Yes. But occasionally rare bursts of this red colored rain have been reported all around the world about a few hundred of them. And for obvious reasons, it was long considered a bad omen. It was thought to be a sort of mystical origin, which like, same. Yeah, understandable. Yeah. Very understanding. animal. And it features in like all of these epic stories. Like it's said to be one of the inciting incidents for Richard the Lionheart, the King of England and his like path to the throne. Anyway, some thought it was evaporated blood raining down again or sunspots that were altering our perception or maybe some suggested dust from the Sahara blowing into Europe and pigmenting the rain. And it was only in 2015, which is so recent, that researchers were finally able to definitively conclude.

include the true cause. There was a spattering of blood rain in Kerala in India, and so they took samples from that, and they identified it as Trentafolia, a microalgae that lives on tree trunks and rocks and occasionally emits these red aerial spores. So here's a photo of the Kerala blood rain, which really does just straight up look like rosé. Yeah. Yeah. Like sell it at Trader Joe. Rebranded. Rose rain. So just these little bits of algae all over the world have been an inspiring myths for literally millennia. I love that. You know what else has rained from the sky before?

Our blood-sucking lamprey fish. No, thank you. Whoa. How? No, no, thank you. I guess I'll just have to talk about that on a future episode. Do you want to tell us about the blood falls? I do want to talk about the blood falls. I wrote about the blood falls a few times a few years ago because there was just like a bunch

of exciting research about them from back to back. So this is at the Taylor Glacier in Antarctica. And we can link to some photos, but it straight up looks like the glacier is like bleating. It's just this gash of bloody liquid. Wow. I'm going to show you guys. Do they know the source of it? They are pretty confident about the source.

Okay, so here are the blood falls. Yeah. Whoa, that's gnarly. I don't like that. Yeah. Mine is cute. That's like this really an emergency room visit. This actually looks like the earth is bleeding.

So it is, part of it is oxidation of this very salty brine that's coming up from under the glacier. But in recent years did actually determine that it also has microorganisms that probably contribute to the color. And it's very exciting because it's one of those areas that could potentially show us what life might look like on other planets because, you know, the microorganisms that are oozing up from warm pockets under a glacier are not very earthly. They're pretty alien. And they look like blood. Yeah. So I love that. I hope we find many alien worlds that just look like they're covered in blood.

That's my hope. Hail, hill. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with Kat's fact. Okay, we're back. And Kat, it's time to tell us about some deadly rainbows. Yeah, well, so Eleanor kind of jumped the gun when she said rainbow, because what I want to talk about is actually called the rainbow demonstration or the rainbow flame demonstration. I'm proud of myself. So I ran across this when I was doing an interview for a story I did for an issue of popular science that's upcoming on fireworks. And the expert I was talking to said, oh, and you know, you might. run across something about the rainbow demonstration in, you know, your research. I just want you to know that it can be very dangerous. You can get more information online. And I just said, okay, and sort of moved on, because we weren't really talking about high school class demonstrations. We were talking about fireworks. But I went and did some research later, and I discovered that this is actually, I don't think the demonstration itself is intrinsically dangerous. Like, I think the impression that I've gotten from the research I've did is that if you use proper lab practices and you observe basic chemistry, like chemistry,

safety and etiquette. That doesn't sound like high school to me. No, me neither. Well, and so this was one of the reasons I got interested in this, but I think it is possible and certainly I'm not the only one. The like several different chemical associations have said it should be possible to do it safely if you just do these things. And I'll get to those in a minute. But the other thing was just like, yeah, I remember I never took high school chemistry. I took biology, but I do remember my high school had like one infamous chem teacher who like, I think he periodically set his desk on fire. These may have been rumors. So if he's listening to this, which he probably isn't, I'm so sorry, man. But, you know,

he periodically, like, set his desk on fire. And I certainly saw him and his students blow some stuff up at one point. You know what I mean? And I remembered other stories like this. So, just back to the rainbow flame demonstration or the rainbow demonstration, which you, if you've ever seen the first episode of Breaking Bad, Walter White actually is doing a modified version of this in the first episode. That's the only episode of Breaking Bad I've ever seen. The Rainbow Flame demonstration, or just the rainbow demonstration, is intended to show students the colors you, can achieve when different metal salts are exposed to flame. It's historically a fairly popular classroom experiment, and my understanding is that you can find

in a number of chemistry teacher manuals, although I suspect that's changing now. The demonstration gets a bad rap. Basically, every rainbow demonstration involves three components. So different metal salts, a flammable solvent, which is usually methanol, and of course, fire, because you can't make a flame without a spark. Oh, that's beautiful. Sorry, I just had a bruce spring. I think, yeah, I was like, I started a fire with...

Without a spark this guns for higher. We're just dancing in the dark. We're 100% going to get sued by his estate. Anyways, so I'll just explain how the demonstration works, and then I'm going to sort of unpack the problems with it. Okay. So in the rainbow demonstration, every variation is basically a variation of the experiment I'm about to describe. So the demonstrator, so, you know, the science teacher,

lines up a series of like seven watch classes, so these are the little glass dishes that they use in chemistry classes, and they each have a small amount of a different metal salt in them. So these are the same metal salts, usually, that are used to give fireworks their colors. Interesting thing I found out about fireworks, actually, doing this story,

which isn't in the story, is that all fireworks used to be white. Like, the first fireworks were all white. They were just, like, fancy white explosions. And then someone got the idea of adding metal salts in the, like, 1700s. Anyway, so the colors, common metals to use the metal salts

are strontium carbonate for red, calcium chloride for orange, sodium nitrate for yellow, barium chloride for green, and copper chloride for blue. So after the demonstrators place these dishes out, they pour a small amount of the solvent, so this is usually methanol, like I said, into each dish, and then they ignite them, often using a benson burner. So in theory, the solvent dissolves the salts into a flammable substance, which they can then set on fire. And so far, so good.

They all light up and make pretty colors, I imagine. For some people, they turn off the lights at this point, and everyone goes, ooh, and ah, and the kid in the back is texting. And it teaches students about some of the stuff you can do with chemistry. Like, this is really a cool way of showing kids why fireworks work. You can see a lot of these rainbow demonstrations on YouTube as well, if you're interested. But again, like, this is a potentially very dangerous experiment, so don't try this at home. And, like, the American Chemical Society would like you not to try it at all.

I read a bunch of different accounts about accidents from these experiments. Chemical and engineering news estimates that 72 injuries have occurred because of rainbow demonstrations since 2011. and one of the stories I'm talking about that's really bad happened in like 2006 long before that. So the issue, because like basically this doesn't sound like a huge deal at this point. And one of the reasons I was interested in this is like, okay, so you got small amounts of things and controlled scenarios. This should go fine. Yeah. The issue is the methanol.

If you're performing this experiment in the safest way possible, this is like gold standard. Everybody in the room is wearing safety goggles, so all your kids are wearing protective gear like they should be. You have a barrier between students in the experiment. you can get like clear explosion proof and like everything proof barriers for chemistry classes. And you're doing it under a fume hood. And you're only bringing like the smallest amount of methanol into the experiment area. So you're only bringing what you need, which is basic chemistry. Like that's basic scientific practice.

You don't bring like the whole jug into the experiment area. And you pipette like you use like a pipette to drop just like two like just enough solvent into the dishes. And then you put the rest of it like if you have extra, you put it elsewhere. And then you do the experiment. Away from the fire. Away from the fire. Yeah. But for a lot of people who did this experiment,

so a lot of science teachers, it seems like you were saying, this doesn't sound like high school chemistry. It seems like they got a little casual. So they did in their desk in front of the classroom or on the front lab bench, using the whole jug of methanol, bringing it into the experiment area with the fire.

And for some people, like they also added more methanol to the dishes while they were on fire to keep the flames visible. Oh, no. Yeah, it's, yeah, no. I know. And it's one of those things where, like, thinking about it, I guess I can see how this happened. And I can't imagine anybody who accidentally caused these terrible injuries is, you know, feels good about that. Right, right.

But also, like, you know, you just want to show the kids some, like, cool rainbows. Yeah, yeah, I get. I do get it. I do. So there are two big issues here with the methanol, and they both burn people. Methanol has a really low flashpoint, which means it can potentially, like, ignite at room temperature. Like, the whole jug can ignite. Wow. So in 2006. Playmon.

No, thank you. Or don't. In 2006, a woman named Kaleigh Weber Bieri was 15 years old, and when she was burned over 40% of her body during one of these days. Yeah, no, this is no joke, one of these demonstrations. And she's become a campaigner against them. She actually appeared in a health and safety video talking about her experiences years later and stuff. And what happened to her was that her teacher had the jug, and she tried to pour more methanol on the flames during the demonstration. and the jug exploded because methanol has a low flashpoint.

And, you know, she was hit by the worst of the blast. And she says that it was just a terrible experience. And, you know, I have to really credit her that she has campaigned against this demonstration a lot since she has. You know, it can't be enjoyable to be the public face of something terrible. But she has really put herself out there to try and prevent this from happening again. However, unfortunately, it has happened again because I think, Like, I'm pretty sure the rainbow demonstration, like I looked in some chemistry teacher manuals. It's still around.

You know, when people have seen it, people think it's fine. It happened in my classroom. Oh, hello. It's Jess. Hi, Jess. So this happened in my, or a variation of this happened in my classroom in high school. But my chemistry teacher would put, like, the solvent in the metal salt, like, on, like, a spoon or something. Or something like that.

And then they would put it over the flame, and then it would, like, become the color, like, over the bunsen burner directly. And that was cool. But I can't imagine, like, a row of, like, a row of, burning rainbow. Like that seems way more dangerous. Yeah, again, that's a more, because there's a small amount of solvent. Right.

A small amount, like, everything is more contained, it sounds like in that, although, like, Yeah. It's still, like, scared me a little bit. And the teacher did it, like, at his desk. Right. The Bunsen murder on his desk. Well, and I think that's part of it is,

I don't know, my husband's a teacher, and there definitely is an aspect of performance to it. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. That's cool. Did he, like, show the whole rainbow of colors, or was it more just, yeah, neat. Yeah, or maybe not like every single one, but there were like a series of different colors.

And he turned the lights off and everybody was like, wow. Like it was really, it was awesome. All we did in my chemistry class was make fake banana flavoring. Yeah, totally. Anyway, so another notable incident happened in 2014 when a student named Alonzo Yaines. And again, I'm saying the names of people who have appeared publicly about this. There have been a lot of other victims, some of who have also been quite badly burned. And, you know, I want to respect their personal privacy.

Sure, yeah. He suffered burns over about 20% of his body, and it seriously damaged his face. It burned part of his ears off. Like, it was really bad. Yeah. It's crazy. One of the things that Kaleigh Weber-Bierry says in the, like, health and safety video she's in is like, look, I want students to know if you feel unsafe during a demonstration, you can say something or you can leave. You know, don't just, if your, like, little alarm bells are going, she said, it's okay to just leave.

Yeah. You know, or even to say something and, you know, say something later. But, yeah, so it's, there are safe ways to do this kind of experiment. So the Royal Society of Chemistry in Britain recommends using ethanol rather than methanol, which has a higher flashpoint. And again, only bringing the amount you need into the experiment area and, like, using other basic chemistry safety practices. And they say, okay, like, if you do that, it should be pretty safe. Yeah. And there is really no particular reason why not.

And like this isn't the only risky chemistry class experiment that I read about. Sure, yeah. I encountered a few more. But like they all kind of have the quality of an urban myth at this point, I think partially just because these are things people saw in high school or heard about in high school, like the teacher at my school who used to set his desk on fire. And then the other one that I found interesting. And I was curious if anyone actually experienced this one because I think I have seen it before, although not in high school, was the exploding pumpkin? Nope. So basically you mix two chemicals.

You can accidentally make the pumpkin explode way too soon. Bad news. Yeah. Well, and there's a video of it happening on like a talk show and it like wails the woman in the face with a chunk of pumpkin. That's funnier than being burned. Yeah. Yes, I would agree. Please cut my insensitivity.

Yeah. I mean, but it is kind of funny to be hit in the face by a pumpkin. Yeah. If you're okay. If the pumpkin doesn't injure you. Yeah, it's funny. That's funny. That's a good gag.

Anyway, guys, use a, use a. femalehood, be smart. And I don't know, I was really trying to wrap my head around the sort of the bigger takeaway here, either than be safe, you know, be safe. And it just made me think about high school and like all of the weird science stuff in high school. And I think a lot of it has a lot of value for students. Yeah. Like there's a lot of evidence that experiential learning and seeing things in action actually makes people more engaged with science. But at the same time, it's just like, how do we do this in a safe way? Yeah, for sure. And I think like, you know, maybe the takeaway. is that since it is maybe easier said than done for teens to, like, be like arbiters of lab

safety in school, maybe like teachers, parents. Yeah. Consider, consider that. Consider that maybe things are being set on fire and that's okay. And maybe sometimes things are being set on fire in a not okay way. Maybe that's the big takeaway, Rachel, you just found it. Not all fires. Not all fires.

Hashtack. Fascinating. So what was the weirdest thing? we learned this week. Speaking of weird science lessons. I think for me it was face blindness, a spectrum. Yeah. It's very common.

There was a season of American Horror Story where there were like five men and the point was kind of that they all look sort of alike because they were all men, Lady Gaga's character was attracted to. But before we got to that plot point, I was like, are they trying to alienate me from this show? I literally just realized these men are five different characters and it was incredibly frustrating to me. At Ryan Murphy. How dare you, sir.

Explain yourself. So yeah, that's great. I win doubly for my weird brain. Thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popside.threadlist.com. Our show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, and our editors, Jess Bodey and Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. 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.

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