The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Debunking Hymen Myths, Moving Corpses, Birth Control to Please the Pope

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

OB-GYN and author Jen Gunter joins us this week as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned range from the invention of the birth control pill to corpses that change position long after their time of death. 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 Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli 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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That's code Weirdest for 20% off. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice.

work. Now, Hank says, on line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Smashing the patriarchy one fact at a time. Yes. At popular science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not 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 Claire Maldarelli. I'm Dr. Jen Gunter. Jen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, of course. We are big fans of yours. Listeners, if you're not familiar,

our guest this week is a famously brilliant OBGYN with a real knack for explaining her field of expertise on Twitter. And now, in a book, The Vagina Bible. Yes. Yay. Do you want to talk a little bit about the book before we get into the episode? Sure, yeah, the vagina Bible. It's the vulvan vagina separating the myth from the medicine, and I've been an expert in Volvo vaginal health for about 25 years, and I would have women in my office say every day, how did I not know that? And I'd hear that online. How did I not know that? And I thought, how did they not know that? So I thought people deserve a textbook about vulva in vaginas, and I'm going to write it. So here I am. Awesome. Amazing. Well, we're really excited to have you.

on and we'll get into the show. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we came across in the course of reading, writing, reporting, perhaps publishing a book about vaginas and vulvas. And we 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 we decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Claire, would you start with your teas? Yes, definitely. I tried to keep it vagina-related, knowing who our guest was going to be.

So the week-long sugar pills that come in birth controls were created in part to persuade the Catholic Church to accept birth control. Love a good history of medicine and the Catholic Church on the word of the thing. So my tease is our corpses on the move. Oh, boy. That's it. That's the tease. That's all. And Jen, how about you? My tease is the hymen isn't about the penis. Yes. Wow. Well, that's amazing. And if you're comfortable, starting with your fact, I would love to hear more about that, ASAP.

Okay. So, you know, we don't really know why people have hymins, why women have hymins. But the theories that have been floated around online and by anthropologists are all very penis-centric. And it's always amazing to me that, you know, when we, We think about other body parts. We think about how we evolved to hear, how we evolved to see. We sort of think about how that helps us with survival and helps us perpetuate the species. And penises, while they do deliver sperm, are important for that. It's always amazing to me that this idea is that the hymen is there because it's supposed to break and be painful, which it's not for, you know, two-thirds of women when they have sex with a penis the first time, don't have any significant pain. And the other funny thing is the hymen has a very unreliable, you know, sort of virginity indicator. So you have these theories that sort of the theories are that if first sex is very painful for a woman, then she's not going to look elsewhere for sex.

So that's one theory. And the other theory is that if it's so painful to have sex that she will feel bonded with her partner in some way and won't, you know. And so these theories are, you know, interesting because obviously, you know, we were reproducing before marriage, that sort of the contract of marriage existed. And it's very interesting to me that these theories have been around for so long because if you look at childhood mortality, infant mortality, why would evolution be so invested in the first birth, right? because the first sex, you know, if you get pregnant, assuming in the days before contraception, you get, you know, you're young, you're fertile, you're now having sex, you're going to get pregnant probably pretty quickly. To be so invested in the first delivery makes no sense when, you know, you think about the number of infants that die. And it also makes absolutely no sense because why would girls have functioning clitoris? Right.

So why would you have this thing that can bring you such great sexual pleasure working, but then evolution doesn't want you to stick, you know, only one penis in there? Like it doesn't make any sense. And they want to wait for you to have a marriage contract with a man before you use your clitoris. But then why do you have the clitoris? If it was a, if it was to do with the first intercourse and keeping sex disappointing for women, because that's really great. Like, let's let's put the bar on the floor. That makes it easy for the dudes, right? Yeah. Sex is. supposed to be disappointing. So you have to start to say, well, okay, so let's step back from that and let's think about how we evolved. And so the vagina starts as a solid tube. It's completely full. And as we develop as a fetus, the cells start to disappear and they disappear from the top down to the bottom. And this last little remnant can be hyminal tissue. And we have lots of vestiges of things that we don't use anymore, right? Like lots of people, I have four wisdom teeth. Lots of people don't have that anymore. And so I started to think, well, maybe this was a leftover evolutionary vestige. Because if you think about how we evolved, you know, we didn't have clothes, we didn't have

garments, we would have spent a large amount of time sitting in the dirt being exposed to the elements. And if you look at women, young girls, before they're exposed to estrogen, estrogen brings upon all these protective mechanisms that protect the outside of the vagina. So you'd get fat pads in your labia with estrogen, the cells become thicker, and the labia, the labia minora get larger, you develop pubic hair, and then you get deposition of glycogen in the tissues, and that feeds the good bacteria. So you get all this sort of protective mechanism so you can have sex, you can go to the bathroom, you can do all these things. And we know that very young girls, if they get even like a grain of sand in their vagina, they can develop incredible inflammatory reactions. And in fact,

one of the number one causes of vaginitis for young girls is a foreign body. And so it sort of makes sense that when we were sitting in the dirt, that we would have a stronger barrier to protect the vagina from dirt and debris. And then as we evolved and that became less important, then that wasn't necessary. And that would certainly explain the wide range of hyminal variants that we see because it's not important anymore from an evolutionary standpoint. And it would also explain why it is a completely unreliable virginity indicator because that's not what it evolved for. Yeah. Well, that's super interesting and absolutely makes more sense because to me it's like totally illogical that that mechanism in the female would be successfully like perpetrated in the species.

Yeah, I mean, certainly there are many women who have pain with sex who continue to be sexually active. Sure, of course. Yeah. But I think it's sort of this idea that this investment in the very first episode only being painful, like that makes no sense at all. And certainly we know that many species evolved to have crazy competitive painful sex. Like, you know, like ducks and their corkscrew vaginas. And if anyone's ever seen a poor cat get flattened by a tomcat, it just looks like the most horrific thing ever. I saw that when I was eight and I was very traumatized. So, you know, certainly evolution sometimes doesn't care about that. But we are completely different. And I think sometimes people get all, tripped up by animal models, but, you know, there's, we menstruate and most animals have estrus, right? And we care for infants far longer than most other animal species. You know, we have an invasive placenta. They don't. So we're so different biologically. I just think that when you look at this idea about it being a virginity indicator, being like, oh, you're going to be bonded with your male partner. Like, really? Like a painful sexual experience is going to stop you looking elsewhere? I just, and it's not, and the thing is, is,

It's not even that painful. You know, when if two-thirds of women don't have pain with sexual activity the first time, and of the third who do, half of them reported as mild, it's obviously not a very, like, if that's what you're saying it's supposed to do, it doesn't even do that. So it's amazing to me how these sort of mythology has been accepted for so long. And if you just even stop to think about it briefly, you're like, wait a minute. How did you get away with that for so long? Yeah, that's like my question of the one-third of people who do experience painful. sex is it from the high like first time is it from the hymen or is it actually from other reasons well so some percentage of those women have been raped so obviously there's that and about the half that have

you know probably mild pain a lot of that may be sexual inexperience right you know if foreplay for you you know if you're having sex with someone who's never been sexually active you know you're two teens fumbling and if foreplay is twist a nipple and stick it in um you know that might be painful Sure. Right. So I think that some of that might be sexual inexperience and those things. But if you look at the people who have severe pain, you know, that first time, so that would be maybe about 12%. Well, you know, about, you know, anywhere between sort of two and six percent of women actually have pain with sex.

And so what that tells me is, you know, that might be a marker actually for people who truly have like a pain with sex disorder. And that, you know, what they need is they need an evaluation. They don't need a patriarchal myth, you know, push down their throat saying, oh, you know, sex is supposed to be painful. It's like because it's all about like the mighty sword, right? Like, you know, that it's so great. It's going to like cleave you in two, you know. And it's like, you know, no, it's not really. So I think when you start thinking about these sort of penis-centric myths and you start to think about like, wait a minute, like, wait, wait, were there any women in the room when this was being discussed?

No. Yeah, no, exactly, right. So in writing your book, were there other kind of longstanding myths like that? that stuck out to you as being particularly surprising in their longevity? Well, I mean, there's so much dogma in medicine. And, I mean, sometimes some dude wrote something in the textbook in 1950s, then everybody just keeps perpetuating it. I'm sure that's the same in all science fields.

Right. Yeah. And so, you know, most of the dogma I was aware of, but the historical stuff, I really wasn't. You know, I didn't know that using a female cadaver was not something that was really allowed for a long time. And then that sort of makes sense, okay, well, how do we know so little about human bodies? I also didn't know, like, one of the first clinical trials was done by Dr. Philopio, and it was about inventing a condom. So that was pretty cool. I think that was in the 16 or 1700s.

And then this whole idea about, like, I've become very obsessed with the genitals of Greek statues. It's become like a thing. And so I got very obsessed with this idea that if you walk into any museum, you see very elaborately carved penises. I mean, it's not. You can even see like a urethra. You can see foreskin like this is, these are, you know, really meticulously carved. Although interestingly, the penises are all on the small side. Yeah. Because, you know, the sexual thing was a big brain.

I'm like, man, can you bring that back? But so, and how the women are just these mounds that disappear into nothing with crossed legs. And clearly they could have sculpted labia. They had the skills to do it. And even some of the male statues have pubic hair, you know, or representation of it. It's all sort of wavy like waves. but still it's there. And so it's just really interesting to me that attention to sort of genital detail in men

and just this like absence in women. And I'd never really thought about that. And that actually is what got me thinking about every single fact that I wrote in the book, every single thing I believe about a woman's body. I need to step back and say, okay, how does that benefit the patriarchy before I even look at the medicine? Because the medicine's been informed by the patriarchy. Yeah, absolutely. And that's something we talk about a lot on weirdest thing.

Definitely. Yeah. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't we continue the patriarchy and the history of medicine theme? Yes. And you can tell us about birth control. Sweet, I would love to.

Just recently, I think it was the last year, birth control celebrated its 50th anniversary. Yes, very exciting. So I went down like the history of birth control and discussed. this interesting fact that I really didn't know. So a daily pill to prevent unwanted pregnancies had been spoken about for like decades before the 1940s and 50s when they started to really like get active with the research and figure it out. And it was all actually started by a woman named Margaret Sanger. So in the early 1900s, she sort of started this whole movement. And Sanger was born in 1979 and grew up kind of during a time when the Comstock laws,

which are later known as the Comstock Act, had just been passed and were basically in full effect. And the Comstock laws are known as the chastity laws. And these laws stated that contraceptives were both obscene and illicit and that it was a federal offense to sell or distribute them. So, yes, great times, great times. So Sanger, after attending nursing school, she started working at a hospital in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And she witnessed all these terrible effects of the lack of birth control firsthand. Women were experiencing the effects of too many pregnancies and were often resolved.

sorting to unsafe abortions if they did become pregnant. So she quickly became a very big advocate and public figure devoted to raising awareness for the currently available birth control methods. But still during this whole time, she had this idea in her mind for a better solution, and that solution was a sort of pill. So in the early 1950s, she finally found some, unfortunately, some guys to help her. And it was this doctor, researcher named Gregory Pinkis. and he was a researcher at Harvard University for human reproduction. And knowing that he would need more of a medical expertise, he was more of a researcher and didn't really have a lot of clinical experience.

So he knew he needed someone to help him. And he also knew he was a little more shy and introverted, and he felt like he needed, I don't know, an extroverted, unfortunately, guy who is, you know, good looking and good with the media to sort of help him out. So he found this guy named John R. Rock. John Rock was great. He was just really, really well-respected gynecologist in the Boston area, really devoted to his patients beloved by his patients.

From his New York Times obituary, they quote him as, Dr. Rock cut a figure of New England collegiate elegance, favoring tweet jackets and bow ties and sometimes smoking a pipe. So this guy was just cool. He was the cool gynecologist. The rock star. The rock star. Yes. And also, unlike Pinkus, he was a devote Catholic. So he strictly attended church every Sunday and believed in Catholic ideals surrounding sex and marriage.

At the same time, however, he was also a very, very strong advocate for the idea that Pinkus and Sanger were striving for. That he wanted there to be a form of birth control for women that was very effective. I mean, he had seen in his practice also what Sanger and what Pinkus had seen. So by 1960, the pair had created the first birth control pill, and it was approved by the FDA, and it was gaining popularity. But at the same time, for Rock, what he really wanted was for the Catholic Church to accept this form of birth control. And that would have been the real crown jewel of his achievement to get the Pope to officially accept the pill. So at the time, the church's main stance on birth control was that the only thing they really accepted was what's known, I think, still now is the rhythm. method, which is basically saying making a woman obsessively monitor her menstrual cycle and abstain

from sex during times that she is fertile. Is that a good description of it? It's always amazing. Yeah, it's like it's really timed abstinence. Like people, people always like de-emphasize the fact that there are, you know, days that you can't actually have sex, which I think would make it less palatable to a lot of people if you led with that. But yeah, so rhythm or natural family planning, depending on how you describe it. Yeah. But it's how, I'm I mean, first of all, it's all on the woman to track her period. And also periods are not exactly 28 days every single month. And so, I don't know, in your experience, how effective is it and how, like, easy is it to do?

Well, I think there's many different methods. And that's one of the big confusing things about it. So you can't compare, you know, you'd have to actually talk about each specific method and compare it. And so, you know, overall, for people who are incredible devotees who can have. of timed abstinence. They're fairly effective. Some of the methods, not all of them, but lots of people can't follow those instructions. Lots of people have irregular cycles. Lots of people, you know, just don't fit into that mold. Many women cannot say no to their partner. You know, there are women who have, you know, threats of violence or implied violence if they

don't, you know, so there's all these spectrums. And, you know, I'm a true believer in facts, and people should get the facts. And if there's something they feel they can follow, certainly it's better than not using any form of contraception, absolutely. And for devotees of very specific methods, it can be fairly effective, yeah. But not everybody can do it, like you said. Right. Or not everybody wants to do it either. Very true.

Well, I guess Rock had the rock star that he was, had similar ideas, but he thought that in creating the first pill, he essentially thought, well, let me make a product that essentially emulates this rhythm cycle. So he created a pill that has monthly long cycles where you take the hormones for three weeks, just essentially what it is now. And then you take essentially a sugar pill for a week at which time you get a period. And that's kind of how it was marketed at the time. It was marketed as, okay, you're going to essentially re-regulate your cycle. And then at the end of this three-week period, you stop taking it. You get your period.

And then you go back on this cycle again. But what really wasn't described then and, you know, is now, but not, I feel like, as popular as it could be, is that this period that you get isn't really a period at all. It's technically known as a withdrawal, quote unquote withdrawal bleed. And it's essentially just a reaction to temporary stopping the hormones. And as a result of this temporary stopping of taking the pills, your uterus sheds its lining. But there's no actual ovulation going on. So there's really no point to shedding the lining. But Rock thought, well, to make the pill seem as close to an actual period as possible, this is the best way to do it.

And the way he and Pinkus concocted the pill was to make it seem like it was just an enhanced, more full-proof version of the only birth control method at the time that the Pope accepted, which was the rhythm method. So let's emulate that with this, but make it better. Sounds like he was really good at PR. Yeah, which is why he was picked. He was truly the person for the job. So that's really his point that he drove home. And he actually became somewhat of like a celebrity in the 1960s. So when the FDA first approved the pill, he started appearing on all these talk shows from CBS to NBC and then in print and time like Newsweek.

And he even wrote a soon to be really widely read at the time in popular book called The Time Has Come, a Catholic doctor's proposal to end the battle over birth control. And it was actually translated into numerous languages. is unfortunately for him the plan did not work the Catholic Church did not and has yet to accept a pill as a form of birth control or to accept birth control at all so that didn't stick for him unfortunate but what did stick are these weekly sugar pills that women take and so the question is why why after 50 years and the only reason that this was done done was to help the Pope accept birth control and to make, you know, it seem as if it was more natural that this is like still a natural way. You're still getting your period. You're still

shedding your uterus lining. You know, why has this persisted now? And I think, you know, nowadays we do have better studies on, you know, the long-term effects of birth control. I wouldn't say that we have as many as we probably need or we want. But, you know, the question is like, why do we still have sugar pills, even though it's clearly not needed. And many women even, you know, skip them all together and just say, I'm just going to move on to the next packet. And a lot of doctors even accept that and know that women do this and are very much okay with it. And so, yeah, I would even turn the question to you. Like, what do you think of?

Yeah. Well, so actually, I know someone who was very involved with birth control research in the 60s and 70s. So in the 60s also, too, you couldn't go in. in and get a pregnancy test like you can today. So imagine not having anything to control your reproduction and then you're going to have to trust this pill. And so, you know, and the doses are super high back then too. I don't know how people took it. But, you know, if your alternative is eight children, you know, motivation, right? But so people were, the period was a sign that you weren't pregnant. So even though you can have a regular bleeding when you're pregnant and that could be mistaken

as your withdrawal bleed, it's still, you know, when women knew when their period came exactly when they were supposed to, at least they weren't pregnant. So I think in the 60s and 70s before you could walk into any drugstore and pee on a stick any day of the month, you could kind of see how people would need that reassurance. Also, when abortion was illegal and, you know, so you have a totally different time. So with the 60s, early 70s, that's a different time. But, you know, the idea was also floated around. I mean, I have this from a good source that they thought women weren't intelligent enough to not have like a Sunday start, you know, that for them to figure out like what day of the month to start. And so that's why it was four weeks and had to start, you had to start your pill on every Sunday.

And so there was a lot tied into how they really like were infantilizing women about taking a medication. So there's also that layer of the patriarchy. Wait, so they thought it would be easier if we like skipped for a week and then restarted. But if. Yeah, so that you couldn't handle like, you know, we now know if you want to go off the pill at any time of the month, you can. I mean, if you survey female OBGON residents, I'm going to tell you that probably only 3% probably have periods. Like, I've never taken the pill in any way to have a period with the understanding that some women can't take it every day. Some people start to get a regular bleeding and they do need to have a regular withdrawal for that. But so the majority of people don't need that.

But I think, you know, all the original pills came out as a Sunday start. Now we know it's best to start on the first day of your bleeding. So you started on a Sunday. And so if you want to keep people always starting on Sunday, it has to be four weeks. And how could women possibly manage if there were seven days where they didn't take a pill? How would they know to restart? How would those little women know to restart that pill? So seriously, like that's how people thought.

And like I said, I've heard it from someone who was involved in a lot of studies. And, you know, that's what the drug companies were saying. I mean, if you think about like how things were advertised to women in the 70s and 80s, right? So I think that that mythology, it's so hard to kill mythology, and we still can't get people to stop drinking eight glasses of water a day. And there's like there's no patriarchy involved in it at all. Right? So once people like believe something to be true and they've heard it like from their mom and their sister and maybe their grandmother, it's like so hard to like turn the ship. And then you still have doctors who don't even really understand like that you can start it on any day of the cycle.

And, you know, so I think there's unfortunately misinformation too. So that's kind of my longish answer. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. And do you think also it kind of begs the question of whether women actually need their periods? Does it kind of change the idea surrounding? I think for a long time, people thought that women needed periods in order to, you know, be healthy and whatever. But do you think that we either need more research on that or that maybe we don't need our periods technically to be healthy?

Yeah, we don't. I mean, if you look at reproduction, I'm sure. the year 1100, some people would be malnourished and wouldn't have periods, or they'd be ill with typhus or whatever, tuberculosis, whatever they had, right? Or they're pregnant or breastfeeding. So this idea that, you know, that you need to have a period as a cleansing thing is really one of the basic tenets of the patriarchy, right? Like the uterus is dirty, it's filled with toxins, and, you know, that's how we exclude women when they're on their period. So there's so many taboos built in with it that it's really hard, I think it's so hard to undo.

But when you're on the pill, it's you don't need to have a period. The uterine lining is just super thin from both the estrogen and the progesterone. And it's if you go off the pill for seven days, it's the withdrawal of estrogen that brings on the bleeding, just like with your own cycle without a pill. The withdrawal of hormones also brings on the bleeding. But menstruation for people not on the pill obviously can be a sign of health. But if you don't have a period for valid reason, then that's fine. And, you know, once I got into OBGYN or medical school, second year medical. school, I've probably had like, now I'm menopausal, so I maybe had like four periods after that. Like, why would I not have advanced period management? Why have your period when you're traveling? Why have your period when you're working? You know, and that's not a choice all women will make. But I think the more facts you give people, then the more choices they can make with their bodies. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then be back with one more fact that at least, if I'm remembering correctly, it has nothing to do with the patriarchy, except for how everything has to do with the It will all come back. We'll get it back there somehow.

I'm convinced. Okay, we're back. And it's time for my fact, which is about corpses on the move. How different. Yeah, yeah, so different. And it actually came by way of our weirdest thing Facebook group for listeners who are not aware. If you search weirdest thing I learned this week on Facebook, you can find our private group where we share weird facts with one another. It's very fun.

And every once in a while, someone will post something that. ends up on the show. So this was a very interesting press release, which required further investigation on my part. But the headlines going around about it are that bodies continue to move for over a year after you're dead. And I have this one. I said, never seeing this now. Okay. I'm excited. And I was like, okay. I mean, I can imagine how that might be possible, but I doubt it's the way these headlines are implying it is. So a little bit more about this. This is work by Allison Wilson, who's a med student in Australia. And it's out of the Australian facility for taffinomic experimental research, otherwise known as After, which is the Southern Hemisphere's first and only body farm.

They've been around for three years. Body farm. Yes, we've talked about body farms on your listening before. Claire, he fell right into that trap. So for Claire, and any listeners who miss these previous episodes, Body Farms, I guess it's funny. We still call them that. But there are research facilities where corpses that have been donated to science are put out in various scenarios, environments, situations, positions, so that researchers can track their decomposition. And we use this to help inform pathology and forensic science.

And really, you know, anyone who needs to understand what might happen to a body after we die, you know, we have to get the data from somewhere. and allowing decomp to happen naturally in a controlled environment takes a lot of expertise and attention. And so these facilities exist to provide an environment for this to happen in. And it's important to have them really all over the world so that we can have these different environmental scenarios. For example, so this one is the first one in the Southern Hemisphere. As I said, there are about 70 bodies there currently. So they've already figured out that all bodies, at least in this part of Australia, will mummify, which is not something they realized before the researchers that previously, if these had asked me if a set of human remains were found and they were mummified, she would say that that person was probably left outside in autumn or winter. And it turns out that like any time of year, you know, it is a drier area.

So that is, you know, the conditions that cause mummification to occur. But, you know, it still happens relatively slowly. So they're only finding mummified bodies when they've been out for, I would say, probably several weeks. But, you know, this is one of those things that you only find out when you have a body farm working in those conditions. Right. So in Australia, mummification is an all-seasons kind of thing. Wait, so how many body farms are there in the world? I know I said this in our previous episode.

I want to say there are like nine, definitely less. Okay. So there's not. Around and less than a dozen. Okay. So yeah, not a ton. There are a few in the U.S., though. There was one recently opened up in Florida that people were very excited about

because they were going to be doing some work on underwater decomp there and warm water decomp specifically. And like, we got to know what happens in swamps. Yeah, somebody has to do. I'm glad there is someone doing that research and that someone is not. me. Exactly. Yeah, a lot of it gets very, it does get very weird. We had a previous episode where we talked about deer's being caught on camera, eating human remains. And, you know, they did not know that was a thing deer would do. But, you know, another thing they do is they'll put up cameras and look at what animals so that they can then see, like, ah, yes, this mark on a bone

means that a deer was nibbling on it. This particular study was looking at time lapse footage, basically putting a corpse in a cage and putting a time lapse camera on them and saying, you know, if we take a picture every 30 minutes during daylight hours to study decomp, is that going to give us more accurate post-mortem interval estimation markers? In other words, time of death determination, then the traditional method of studying them, which is to check like once a day. Right. So very basic stuff. And actually, they found that there was no difference in, you know, having a camera. taking pictures every 30 minutes versus somebody coming out once a day, though they did say that they found the best time of date for the observations. So I know you're wondering where the moving corpses are. We are getting to them. So I'm getting that they did not predict that corpses would

move. This all just happened. They did not. Someone was looking at the video footage. That is absolutely right, Claire. Nailed it. A medical student had a very exciting year watching this corpse decompose slowly on time lapse camera. So yeah, that's the published work. But the as you yet unpublished finding of the same study is that in looking at these remains, which were from, I think, like, an older male, no particular physical trauma. So pretty, pretty like normal body, you would say. And in filming it for, I think, 17 months, the corpse moved a lot more than they were expecting. And, you know, this is like the first time someone's really sat with a camera to take this much photo data of a corpse. So it does make sense that if something like this was going on, this would be the

moment that we found it. So what they found is that they say the arms were significantly moving. So they say they started down beside the body and ended up out to the side and that there was some other movement of the arms. So they think this is, it makes a lot of sense. They think it has to do with the decomposition of various ligaments and bones are being tugged into different positions as various muscles and other tissues are shriveling, putrefying all the things that happen. Don't your muscles also kind of like freeze up upon death? Like, don't they become like, I don't know. So rigor mortis is you, first you get floppy, then you get hard.

Then you start decomposing. Good to know. And then you start drying up. So there's a lot of stuff that goes on. But I think it's that kind of final where the microbes have done most of their work. and your things are drying up that you would start to have an arm maybe curl up. I also, you know, again, this work is yet unpublished,

and so other experts can't comment on how profound the movement of the limbs were. So that's TBD. I imagine it happened quite slowly. I don't think it was like, I mean, though, I don't know, if you're taking photos every 30 minutes, I guess it's possible if some kind of ligament snapped, then you'd be like, oh my God,

That arm was not there 30 minutes ago. But I think most of this was probably pretty gradual. Yeah, this sounds like a trailer for a horror film. Like a grad student staring at the time lapse being like, let me just speed this up. Let's get this done. And all of a sudden, the dead body moves. Yeah, or like the movement like in the ring. Yeah.

Like, you know, like that contortion is going down the stairs. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So a representative from after this body farm in Australia said that, you know, she had not yet gotten to see all of the the images, but did confirm that she was aware of some movement in the early to mid-stages of decomposition caused by insect activity and gas buildup, and that even that had been more than what they assumed was possible, that it had actually changed the position of the body. Gas build up inside the intestines, do you mean?

Yeah, but probably not even just that. I mean, you know, there's the phenomenon called coffin berths, right? So you can... I don't know coughing births. The inspiration for this show was actually that I was like, oh, yeah, a coffin berth. And somebody else in the office was like, excuse you? Oh, yeah, coffin birth. Yeah. So I just had to bring it back to the vagina.

Yeah, please do. Please do. But yeah, so, I mean, you can get enough gas buildup in any tissue, right? So when you decompose, there's going to be gas buildup in your skin, in the muscles. So, you know, so it's really less of a bowel thing and more just different gases are byproducts of microbial metabolism. Oh, I see. And so that can even happen in the skin. the uterus and you can get this buildup of gas that causes, you know, if a pregnant person dies

to have the fetus enough pressure build up to actually have the fetus delivered. You also have to remember that obviously the tissues are weakened, right? The cervixes are, you know, things have already decomposed. So, you know, you're not, you're not coming out at completely closed cervix. And you know, and you don't know how much cervical dilation there might have been a death and those types of things. But yeah, so, and how much insect activity might have contributed to it. But yeah, So, I mean, you can get enough movement to have a fetus expelled. Yeah. Yeah, there have definitely been some archaeological sites where they find skeletons in such a position that it seems like there was a coffin birth that took place.

Yeah. And so, like, the takeaway is that the position that a body is found in might provide less information than is currently assumed based on, like, what we thought we knew about decomp. Obviously, if a body has been moved from a scene of a crime or accident, then scientists and police officers are already going to understand that it doesn't quite matter what position the body is in. But if you are looking at someone and saying like, this is the scene of the crime, we're doing a chalkout line. Maybe the chalk outline is not as useful as we thought. Yeah, exactly. And the gas buildup. Or maybe something that was in the person's hand has.

now fallen and rolled away. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So some kind of critical piece of information, you know, could be missed because of that as well. Yeah, that's a great point. So going back to the the actual published study about estimating time of death and how we can get better at doing that, it's just super interesting because, you know, our classical method is based on all of these different factors, cooling rates of the body and, you know, the progression of rigor mortis and and of various stages of petrification. And like some of those stages don't actually take place for every cadaver. The body fats upon aification, which I think I talked about with bog bodies,

which is where your fats basically turn into like soap. So that's not common in most male adult corpses, because they tend to have lower body fat. And there also needs to be a certain amount of humidity or water. Then there's maceration, which is tissue softening due to the present. presence of liquid. We only actually know the rates that occurs for fetuses that die in the womb. And there are all sorts of chronic diseases and metabolic characteristics and poorly understood and studied demographics that just like have different processes going on after they die.

So body farms can sound gross, but they are really important. So yeah, all of this is to say that we really still don't know a lot about how human bodies decomposed. And that's why you should support your local body farm. I think we can all get behind that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I'm going to go with the origin of the hymen because that theory really blew my mind and

makes perfect sense to me. So, yeah, I'm with you, Rachel. That was my choice. So we and our listeners will definitely be reading the vagina Bible to get more of those amazing facts. And thank you so much for being on. Well, thank you so much for having me. And I actually didn't know about like the kind of.

Catholic Church being as involved, I'm not surprised. And I didn't know that much about body farms. And so I know more about them now, too. So I feel like I've got some good cocktail conversations for tonight. That's what we go for. Thank you so much. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms.

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