The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Disney’s Military Tech, DIY Mummies, Forgotten Female Scientists

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from monks that who themselves into mummies to the tech transfer between the military and Disneyland. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses 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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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 Learn this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Corinna Iosio. And I'm Eleanor Cummins. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact that, we found in the course of our editing, reporting, reading, writing, et cetera, 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 decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. So, Corinne, welcome. Hello. Would you like to start with your teeth? Okay. I'm going to talk about something that Abraham Lincoln, Lightning McQueen, Yeties, and the United States Marine Corps have in common. I mean, what don't they have in common? Seriously.

Eleanor. I want to talk about all of the ways that women's contributions to science have been discounted and discredited or maybe just three. Right. All of them. This is one podcast, my friend. Okay. Mine is about the cheapest way to DIY mummification. Oh.

Whoa. So start there. Please, yes. I'm putting my papers down. Okay. So my fact comes as several of my upcoming facts probably will from a recent trip to Germany where I went to see a few local sites. One of them were some bog bodies in northern Germany. And I was familiar vaguely with the concept of a bog body, but I don't think I'd ever seen one in person.

and they're naturally made mummies found in bogs, as the name would suggest. And they're in like various states of preservation in this really interesting way. One of the ones I saw was like totally flat. El Dorr, I think I immediately sent you a picture on Instagram. It was a revelation. It looked like a bearskin rug but made of human. Or like, you know, those blowy, windy things on top of a used car, just, yeah. Lifeless.

So I was a little shocked by that one. And then others looked just as well preserved as, like, Egyptian mummies. You know, you can still see some, like, rough features articulated and the skin is dried out. And so I was like, wow, natural mummification. How does it work? And so that got me also thinking eventually about mummification on the cheap. And then I finally landed on the most haunting form of mummification of them all, a real DIY method, if you will, literally, because you must do it to yourself, to your. own body. Let's begin with natural mummification as a concept. I found this great article on the

subject by Nicholas St. Fleur for the New York Times. When a body decomposes naturally, your cells are basically digesting themselves and tissues start to break down because tissues are made of cells. So usually that decomp will set in about four minutes after death and will continue and really ramp up a few hours later depending on various conditions. But this process requires liquid. So if a body can dry out sufficiently before the decomp really gets underway, you can prevent it. And this can happen in various extreme environments, namely deserts, obviously. Egyptian mummification likely got started in the natural way where they just noted that body is left outside or in like particularly salty areas or just, you know, pits of sand would be pretty nicely preserved. And so they were like, how can we improve on this?

But it's not just dry regions. Interestingly, immersion in water or very moist conditions can also cause mummification because a body's fatty tissue will basically turn into soap. And water is required because it interacts with your body's fatty acids to make this process happen. This makes the pH level of the body drop, so it keeps further decomposition from happening because the bacteria enzymes are not happy and thriving. A bog is basically, it's like tanning your hide while it's still on you. So there's this enzyme found in decaying peat moss, which you will find a lot of in bogs. It reacts with enzymes from those decomp bacteria. So it serves to basically halt their progress while also leaching calcium from bones, which makes them kind of like rubbery.

Hence the very flat man I met. Okay. It also expels water from soft tissue by way of humic acid. So it's doing all of this stuff to create this very, like, shiny, hardened, leather where your skin was. And that preserves you to varying degrees of success because it is just a bog. So your results may vary. And then, of course, there are ice mummies. Ice mummies are basically just like extremely freezer-burned pieces of steak. So their preservation is dependent on the cult. It is not mummification in the same sense as removing the ability for these bacteria to do what

they do. But then, in the course of researching this, I almost always start on Wikipedia to give myself an overview of a topic, and then I know what papers I want to dive into and what primary sources I want to tool around in for a while. Sometimes there's something in the Wikipedia page that I'm just like what, which is why you start with the Wikipedia page. I saw the section called mummification and rank, which totally changed my understanding of Egyptian mummification. It's based on writings from Herodotus, the Greek physician, and he wrote this in the 5th century BC when he supposedly got to take a look see at some mummification processes. I don't know about you guys, but in school, I was taught about that whole laborious process

where they like scrape your brain out of your nostrils. I was going to say all I remember is the brain hook. Right. Wow, I'd repressed that. Sorry. It's coming back. Welcome back, Eleanor. It's great.

And all of the organs in different jars and that it took like days and weeks. And there were so many rules. about the various substances you used, and it was so fastidious. And that probably was used if you were rich. Wikipedia's notes on Herodotus's notes about expensive mummification were extensive because the process was. According to him, there was a lot of, like, removing things and cleansing the body cavity. It was all about minimizing, first of all, the stuff that was there to rot, but also the

bacteria that were there. And then, of course, there was a long drying process. So it was all about, you know, removing that moisture and halting bacterial progress, as any mummification process should be. But then we get to the method that avoids expense, which Herodotus described as being used by middle class people or just those who wish to avoid expense. So, like, I guess if it wasn't your favorite uncle, maybe you wouldn't go for the Cadillac of mummification. Mummification on a budget. Apparently, in this method, again, according to Herodotus, and I will get to that in a minute, you would take an oil derived from cedar trees. You would inject it into the abdomen with a syringe.

You would need to insert a rectal plug to prevent the oil from escaping prematurely. This is important. So this oil would liquefy the internal organs instead of somebody having to, like, cut you open and pull them out one by one. So it was not that whole like fussy, putting them in jars, individually mummifying all the organs. it was just like, nope, get it out of there. Then they would put the body in like a salty dry area for 70 days. And then they would remove the cedar oil by taking out the rectal plug. And with the body dehydrated, everything was good to go.

The mummy was mummified. But then there's the inexpensive method. If that cedar oil injection is too dear for you, Herodotus says that you would just clear the intestines with, some kind of unnamed substance, maybe cedar oil, maybe something else, injected as an enema. So just skipping a step, just letting it all come out at once, and then you dry the body out and you got a mummy. There is some controversy around this. In 2013, a study analyzed 150 mummies, and they found all sorts of irregularities. The team found that rich and poor people alike often had that slit in their abdomen, which suggests that somebody took their organs out and didn't.

inject them with something to liquefy them. And only a quarter of mummies had their hearts left in place, which is another common trope that the heart would be mummified and then like kept because your heart was important. Also, a lot of the brains were left in place. And I was always told in this very weird orientalist way, like they thought all the thinking was done by the heart. The brain was useless. So they cast it away. Apparently, sometimes they did not cast it away. I have to say that like if I was an Egyptian mummifier and I had the obviously, of lying to people and telling them that I would go through the butt-plug tree resin process. But really, I just scraped the intestines out that I think that that would be the more appealing option.

That brings us to the most DIY mummy of them all. I'm scared. It was a little scary. And I have to admit, I had heard about this once at some point in my life. And I guess it had spooked me out so much that I had kind of made myself forget. Because as soon as I read it, I was like, oh, yeah. This was an uncommon practice among Japanese monks of self mummification. So it was an effort to emulate one of their predecessors who had supposedly not died but kind of meditated himself into suspended animation.

People were trying to make that happen again. And a very important part of this was making your body not decay once you died. Because then they would be like, okay, he's. He's definitely dead. He's decomposing. But if your body maintained a somewhat life-like appearance, then you could be considered in this very special group of monks that had managed to purify themselves. So totally. So between 1081 and 1903, according to this Atlas Obscura article, there were at least 17 monks who managed to mummify themselves.

And the process is really fascinating and to me kind of spooky. So you would undergo these thousand-day cycles of eating this really restrictive diet of all foraged foods. So you were really taking a lot of the fuel for bacteria out of your body, first of all. And also just, you know, dehydrating yourself, losing weight. So all of the muscle mass and body fat that you're losing is stuff that could have been food for bacteria when you died. Some people would do this for just a thousand days. Some would do multiple cycles on this diet. Then they would switch to just water.

And some say also a tea made from toxicodendron vernuculum bark, which is a kind of sumac and it has the same kind of toxic compound that makes poison iv poisonous. It would have, first of all, slowly killed you probably, but it would also kill a lot of bacteria and parasites in your gut. Obviously, there would still be microbes inside you. There are many microbes inside all of us, no matter what we eat. It was really minimizing the amount of microbial activity going on. Then when it was time to die, they would basically be buried alive but with an airway.

Their fellow monks would pack charcoal around the box that they were sitting in, which probably served to, like, further draw moisture away and had anti-microbial properties. And they would meditate and ring a bell. And once they stopped ringing the bell, their fellow monks knew that they were dead and would cover up the air hole. Wow, I don't love this. No. Yeah, it is spooky, you know. And so then they would wait a thousand days and check to see if there was decomposition. And if there was, then they were like, oh, yeah, no, he's just dead.

Imagine putting in all that work and then still just being dead. So much effort. It's really amazing. But these were men who had spent their whole lives learning how to meditate. So if anyone could do it, it was them. If they seemed to have preserved themselves, then it was deemed a success. and they were said to have entered this separate state of being that left them primed to, like, resurrect at some point. You can still go see some of these today.

They look kind of uncannily between natural mummies and Egyptian mummies because they are very meticulously created in their own way, of course. So the level of preservation is pretty high, but they're, like, sitting in lotus positions and their facial expressions are facial expressions. facial expressions people would die with, not what someone would compose their face into before mummifying them. So it's really fascinating and now very illegal, though the last person who did it in 1903 did it illegally. But no one since then, as far as I'm aware. What were they going to do? Put him in jail? Right. It's true. Like mummies, man, way more going on there than just the Egyptians and even the Egyptians. Sometimes there were rectal plugs. Who knew? That was great. I did not know. It was really great. I'm going to be haunted by the notion of like human sock puppets for a while.

You know, those kite used car dealership guys. I'm making the arms for people who don't, we can't see me, which is everyone. Yeah, I don't really know where to file that in my brain. Well, that's what I love to hear. Okay, we'll take a quick break and then we'll be back. And we're back. And Corinne, why don't you? dive in with your fact. To refresh everyone's memory, my tease was a string of seemingly unrelated people and characters, including Abraham Lincoln, Lightning McQueen from the Pixar movie Cars, Yetis, and the United States Marine Corps. I'm going to start by talking about Abe Lincoln, specifically a bust of Abraham Lincoln that was on display in California in 2017. This bust wasn't

exactly what you would consider typical statuary. It wasn't marble. It wasn't plaster. It was a very realistic lifelike silicone mask wrapped around an animatronic head. Oh, no. This robot does such a good impression of

a human. There are between 30 and 50 emotions that this Abraham Lincoln robot can express. That's all the emotions. Literally, I couldn't, I don't even think I could list 30. 47 more than I have. And there are 45 motors in this head. There are four for each eye and 12 just for the lips.

The thing that's most remarkable about this particular Abraham Lincoln is how smooth and lifelike all of the movements are. And it's actually orders of magnitude smoother than the animatronics that we're used to seeing at theme parks, which typically move at a rate of about 32 frames per second. We're used to seeing things move on screens at 30 or 60 frames per second or up to 120 on more advanced TVs. So 32 is a little bit what we're used to, but also not necessarily what we're used to seeing in real life. This guy moves at a thousand frames per second. Oh, wow. Which is actually even faster than the human eye interprets on average. We net out around about 150 frames per second is our normal refresh rate for the world that we see around us.

So we'll never see him coming, is what you're saying. No, and it's alarmingly real, and it's bordering on that Westworld real, which also makes us have feels. He probably has the feels that we're having right now because he has such a broad range of emotions. So this guy made the rounds on the internet in 2017 when the production company that made him was promoting him. They had a display with him at a bunch of his friends.

out in California. It was covered by Fast Company, Enkizmodo, and Atlas Obscura. I actually started getting creeped out by this guy, though. The year before that, when we were all in that Westworld spiral, like homicidal humanoids are going to destroy us all. I was reminded of it this week because I'm super-duper excited that I'm going to Disney World for the first time as a grown-up.

And that brings me to my point, which is we're used to seeing animatronics like this in those types of settings. And the guy who runs the production shop that made this particular Abraham Lincoln is a gentleman named Garner Holt. His production house, Garner Holt Productions, is the number one animatronics producer

practically in the world, as far as I can verify. Something like 3,000 animatronic critters flying around. Like they've done the cars, like Lightning McQueen, for the exhibits at Disney World. They make Chuck E.

Oh, the original animatronic. The original. And what I talked to Garner Holt about when I first spoke to him was how far we were away from that Westworld nightmare. And he assured me for reasons that we don't need to get into right now that it is several decades away so we can table that particular nightmare. Just several decades. And then it'll be here. So along with Abe, the shop made a Mark Twain, a Benjamin Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Hey, my namesake.

And a Thomas Edison. They had all these guys on display, and they were really pitching them as sort of a plug-in-play solution for theme parks who wanted new super-life-like animatronics. Like, we made these things. They have all these motors. They can express all of these emotions. We even made a programming language to make it easier for you guys to control. Like, this is a plug-and-play animatronic solution, which is sort of a crap ton of R&D for them to have put into something just to say, hey, we can do this. But they didn't actually put all that R&D just into making a proof of concept.

A demo model, this technology was originally developed for military training exercises. Holt's production house designs and builds animatronics based on this technology, full bodies, head to toe. They don't actually move, so they're still bolted to the ground. They're not bipedal or anything. So we can also just take a little breath there. But they're then cast as enemy combatants. in training exercises in the infantry immersion program at Camp Pendleton, which trains military

persons for both the Marines and the Navy. And in these situations, the robots join human actors as townspeople in what's a staged enemy territory. And the trainees go through these environments and they need to actually read the faces of these animatronics to decide if someone who might appear benign is about to become hostile, which is why all of that emotional articulation is so important. Right. These guys can really be made to look like anyone. The motors are positioned the same and you just take a different silicone face and, you know, just slap it on.

Like a life cast that you would use in a special effects makeup shop. Or a death mask. So this whole project, which includes the aforementioned Yeti is as its demonstration model. The Yeti also has really excellently articulating hands to the point where he can communicate. with people using American sign language. That's so cool. This whole project is called the expressive head project, which, okay. I use some work.

Yeah, I think we could workshop that one, guys, but you know what? They're pretty good at the robots. We'll leave them alone about the words. And eventually, we're looking at a world where these characters will be able to make eye contact with people and, like, lock on to you and track you around the room with their eyes. I don't want that at all. People are predicting a future world. where they get deployed at theme parks.

And because we all now have RFID in your theme park tickets, they won't actually even be able to follow you around. They'll know who you are. I just want to turn back to our friend Abe because this guy, he's not yet in the park, but there is a really long history of the Abraham Lincoln animatronics being on the bleeding edge of what the theme park attractions are able to do. And it all starts with the first.

animatronic Abe, which was built for the World's Fair in New York in 1964. Walt Disney was always a serious Abe Lincoln fanboy, so much so that he wanted to include him in something called the Hall of Presidents that he was going to put on Main Street to be renamed Liberty Street at Disneyland in Los Angeles. The scale of the project was super-duper huge, and it was going to take them years and years and years to get through it until our friend Robert Moses, Eleanor. Bum, bum, bum. Eleanor, would you like to tell us quickly who Robert Moses is? Robert Moses was basically this, like, man shadow puppeting, the entire development of New York City in the first half of the 20th century.

And you should read this book about him called The Power Broker by Robert Caro and be very upset. As such, he was sort of the producer, the carnival barker for the 1964 World's Fair in New York. And he was at the park checking in with Walt about some stuff that he was helping them build. and he happened to meet an early stage version of the Abraham Lincoln that was supposed to go into the hall of presidents, and he shook hands with the robot and became so enamored with it that he demanded that it be made ready for the world's fair. Bob. So the Disney crew tabled everything else that they were working on and focused on getting this guy ready. And he debuted to much fanfare.

People were very impressed. He was the most life-like robot anybody had ever seen. could raise his eyebrow. And eventually he became part of an exhibit called Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln that is still part of Disneyland today. He's been upgraded a couple times over the years, always as the demonstration of the latest and greatest in what Disney's Imagineers are able to do with their animatronics. The last big update was in 2009, which is when they made a big switch from using like hydraulics and all kinds of other levers and pulleys to move the animatronics to using motors, which are cheaper, faster, and also smaller, which is, again, how you can end up cramming more than 40 of them into just one little giant Abe Lincolnhead.

But all this got me wondering about how much military technology might actually be lurking elsewhere in Disney World and Disneyland and all of the theme parks that we hold so dear just because there is such a clear. tight relationship between these two things, and I found some stuff. First off, also in the early 60s, Disney was working with rocket scientist Werner von Braun, or if we're being completest about it, Werner Magnus Maximilian Freire von Braun, who was working with Walt on a series of educational films around the time that they were working on this giant installation called the Tiki Room at Disneyland. And the Tiki Room is a pretty large experience and it would have human hosts. It's where the birds sing words and the flowers croon. Exactly. Whoa. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's 23 birds, to be exact. The designers were

extremely concerned that the birds were going to look really janky next to the people because they weren't super hot at their movements and their programming for all these things. No one's exactly put words to how this tech transfer happened. But when the Tiki Room opened, the birds were controlled by the same guidance systems, which is basically a magnetic tape with programming running through a machine that guided some nuclear missiles. Oh. So that was one that I was just like, oh, okay, totally cool. The same thing that is like launching nuclear rockets is also making that bird sing.

Rad. Normal. Americana. But then I found out that the tech transfer goes both ways. Oh. So you remember our friend Abe from the 1964

World's Fair? The Navy was super interested in this and in 2014 some memos surfaced where the Navy wanted to work with Disney to develop an Iron Man suit. Iron Man suit is what I'm using is modern parlance for like

make superhuman for me please. They wanted him to be able to live thousands of pounds and run faster, jump higher, all that, you know, Captain America stuff. But actually Disney didn't take them up on this offer. The Disney side of the memo just has a giant no written in hand by Walt on the top. Eventually General Electric got that contract and did some stuff that we don't really have to talk about right now. But more recently, in 2011, nukes have kind of made a little bit of a reappearance in terms of some Disney tech transfer. the Navy has this new launch system that it uses to shoot drones and jets off of aircraft carriers at speeds up to 240 miles just in the span of 300 feet, lest your expensive military, shiny plane thing, fall into the ocean.

This is based on the launch system at the rock and roll coaster at Disney's Hollywood Studios. Wow. Well, that coaster, again, because there's humans who aren't wearing all kinds of flight gear and helmets and stuff, goes, hits 60 miles, hour in 2.5 seconds, but it uses this fancy, basically like electromagnetic rail gun to just right off the line. It's really creepy and also not at all surprising that we're looking at all of this really advanced robotic technology to surprise and delight because it has to get paid for somehow. Wow. I'm amazed. Definitely have a lot to rethink about Disney, you know? Yeah. The Tiki room one really threw me for a loop. All right. Well, I don't know what more we can say.

So we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with Eleanor's fact. Okay, we're back and Eleanor, it's time for your fact. Thank you. So I wanted to talk a little bit about this phenomenon that repeats itself all the time where women develop expertise in something that is discredited or discounted by the establishment. So I just wanted to take on the establishment today. One example that I've been really fascinated with for a few years now is the idea that Harriet Tubman was actually a really accomplished naturalist. And so this is something that's been kind of mentioned every once in a while in more recent reporting on her life. For example, like mental floss described her really succinctly as a nurse, spy, and scout, all of which

were true. There was also a really great NPR piece that was talking about how her use of food was part of her work on the Underground Railroad. And so one of the things that I thought was really interesting was conceiving her as someone who knew a lot about the natural environment and used that to her political ends. So as a kid, Harriet's father was a lumberman. So he like knew the woods really well and she grew up participating in that and kind of following him around. Later in her life, she actually like chopped wood to make money. And according to Diane Glave, who's the author of Routed in the Earth, reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage, She says that Harriet at this time learned a lot about the sort of natural environment and how to use it to her own ends.

And so that like showed up on the Underground Railroad in really interesting ways. So obviously this was the effort that was led by Harriet Tubman and a lot of other people to try to move people secretly from their status as like enslaved people in the southern United States north to freedom. It wasn't really a railroad at all. There was like no machinery. They were doing this literally under the cover of night. relying on their knowledge of the environment and their experience along these paths to go from, you know, places like Georgia where it could be, you know, still really warm in the winter, all the way up into Canada where freedom was assured. And you could, you know, be traveling between like 60 different

degrees worth of weather and you would be moving at night because people weren't out and it was a better way to hide. But some of the things that she did were really interesting. She baked bread, for example, with laudanum, which is a kind of tincture of opium, and that's what they had to feed to the babies in order to keep them quiet, because if they cried, people heard that, and they could be discovered. So that was one of her main inventions. Another thing that she did a lot, and a lot of this is gathered from both the medicine of enslaved peoples in the South that they brought over with them from Africa, as well as things that they learned from Native Americans about the sort of natural environment in the United States. So they used sassafras, which actually now we know as an

oil can be deadly in very small amounts, but they used it medicinally. One of the things I thought was really cool was like the use of black cherry, which the antioxidants today, we actually have some research that suggests that they protect muscles and arteries. But it was used because it was really good for insomnia. I kind of put you to sleep sort of the same way that laudanum would, so a lot of experimentation with that component of the underground railroad needs. Another thing that they used was this thing called American Pawpaw, which I never heard before, but its scientific name is Asimnia Tribola. And the idea is that it's this native tree to the North America. And it has brown fruit that kind of looks like a really seedy banana. But you could use it

medicinally as well. You could also make ropes out of the core part of the tree. So a lot of people like fashioned their own like ropes and nets from the pawpaw. And so she did all of these things and more. During the Civil War, she worked as a nurse, and as I alluded to earlier, she was also a spy. She was working out of South Carolina, and she apparently prepared remedies from local plants that helped soldiers who were suffering from dysentery. I just really think that adding this additional title to her long list of things that she did from, like, abolitionist to spy is a really interesting idea, and one that's really validated by all of the research that's been done about her life. And, you know, there are tons of other examples of this. I think one

that's maybe more mainstream is that idea that, you know, midwives were the primary people delivering babies for most of human history. And it was only really recently that doctors got involved. As part of doctors trying to stake this claim to this pretty lucrative opportunity, they sort of professionalized and said, oh, well, midwives don't know what they're doing. Like, we have to be the ones to intervene here. But another example that I would, appreciate us on sort of a personal level is the story of Madam C.J. Walker. And so she has often been called the first self-made female millionaire. It's not entirely true. It seems, according to the New York Times, that at the time of her death, her worth was more like $600,000 instead of a million.

But she was a very wealthy and well-respected person for the work that she did developing shampoos and hair care products and early cosmetics. So I was actually able to talk to one of her descendants, Alia Bundles, who's a historian. And she said that literally a few weeks before I'd called her, she was talking to a friend who called Madam Walker, her ancestor, a chemical engineer. And she said that she'd never thought of it that way, but that she does have, like, the recipes for how she developed these products. So she told me a little bit about the history there. And basically, it came from a very personal need. Madam C.J. Walker, as she was known later in life, was born Sarah Breedlove. And she had this problem, which a lot of women had at the time,

where she would get infections in her scalp over the course of the winter because you didn't have indoor plumbing and there was no heat. And so it was kind of just best to go as long as you could between showers. And then obviously your hair would get like oily and matted down and it created these like scalp infections. And so she decided to start working on products that might be able to intervene. And there were a lot of products on the market that did this, but most of them were made by white-owned companies that actually created.

very intentionally racist stereotypes in their marketing materials, which is completely self-defeating. So African-American women would not buy it for obvious reasons. And so Madam C.J. Walker was sort of able to fill this void by creating a reliable product that was by and for black women. And so she developed a vegetable-based shampoo and something that she called her wonderful hair grower, which the FDA did not like. It ended up being called Madam Walker's Hair and Scout preparation. And according to the original recipes, she created her own mix of petrelatum, beeswax, copper sulfate, precipitated sulfur. And then she added violet extract, perfume, and coconut oil to sort of mask that sulfurous smell. And these days manufacturers have sort of moved away from sulfate and sulfur as in shampoo.

Like you can get sulfate-free shampoo, right? And people talk about that all the time and like everything on Instagram is a sulfate-free shampoo. So it was kind of revolutionary at the time for her to be putting sulfur in her shampoos. It was something that goes back in these ancient formulas and textbooks back to ancient Egypt as being documented for being good for different kinds of hygiene issues. But at the time, it wasn't necessarily that common in modern shampoos on the American market. And so she added this in, and it had a great effect, according to her clients, right, who were all really excited and gave her a lot of money for these interventions.

And, you know, today she would definitely be called a chemical engineer. Yeah, absolutely. So I just wanted to, yeah, talk a little bit about these extraordinary women. Wow. Okay. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Disneyland being basically just like another military station seems pretty crazy. Yeah.

Self-momification is definitely up there, though. Sure, sure. But, like, bog bodies are everywhere. Disney really blew my mind. I don't know how to feel about most of what I learned. So. Well, I'm still looking forward to my trip. And have a great time.

I'm going to be doing so much actually. In the tiki-tiki war room. 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

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