The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Elephant Pranks, Ghost Armies, Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Silkworm

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

Sophie Bushwick and Claire Maldarelli join the show to talk about silkworms in tea and ghost armies (though not the kind from Lord of the Rings). Plus, Rachel talks about a prankster elephant. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get an additional 20% OFF the @honeylove Holiday sale by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at: https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. I'm Sophie Bushwick. Ah, it's so great to have you both back. Long-time listeners know that, I mean, Claire, you have been on fairly recently. But of course, long-time listeners know you are a weirdest thing. thing, OG. And Sophie, it's been years since we had you on, so it's so great to have you back.

I'm so pumped to be here. Yay. Reunion. Yeah. It's an absolutely a reunion episode. So let's get right into it. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, except there's not a winner anymore. Now everybody wins. It's fine. Everyone gets a trophy. It's been so long since I was on that last time I was here, there were winners, and I was very contentive about it. We just had too many three-way ties. I, you know,

it's, yeah. Honestly, it'll still be delightful without a trophy. Claire, what's your tease? Yes, I would like to talk about the connection between paper machet and World War II. Ooh. Ooh. Arts and crafts. Love it. Love it.

Sophie, what's your tease? My tease is about how a worm falling out of a tree changed the course of human history. Wow. Wow, that's big. Yeah, and small at the same time. Yes, yes, exactly. Would you still love me if I was a worm that fell out of my tree? My tease is that I want to talk about elephants using tools and possibly playing pranks.

Maybe. I love that. I'm happy to start. I'll dive right in with elephants. So this story is about three elephants at the Berlin Zoo. Mary, Pengfa, and Anshali. Marys this handsome, respectable woman of 54, and Peng Fah is also an adult. I want to say she's in her 30s.

Don't quote me on that, though. And then Ancali is Peng Fah's child, 12 years old. Little Rapsgallion, we'll get into that more later. So this all started because as part of their morning routine at the Berlin Zoo, these elephants were showered by keepers with a water hose. And then they had access to water all day to drink and to spray themselves. But the hose would only be turned on while the zookeepers were using it. And researchers who were hanging out watching these elephants for interesting reasons I will get to later.

Turns out they are a very special interesting group. But they noticed that Mary wasn't just spraying herself with water using her trunk, which is something elephants do when they have access to water. They do lots of grooming. They do lots of stuff with their trunks. They'll give themselves like little dust and mud baths. So that's not unusual at all. But they found that she was also taking the hose and holding it in her trunk to give herself showers,

which is not something they had ever seen an elephant do before. Basically, when the hose was turned on, she would pick it up on average within five seconds. And then she would shower for an average of seven minutes. Yeah, she was like, it's shower time. Yeah. Yeah. And seven minutes, which like I feel like for an animal that doesn't shower, seven minutes is like, that's a luxurious shower girl. I understand. Like a morning rush for me, seven minutes is a little bit of a shower. And I let the water run a little before I get in, so it'll warm up.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, good point. This water is almost certainly bracing. And then when the water was turned off, she would like drop the hose. She would like, okay, shower done. And she had never been trained to do this, and nobody knew how she had learned. And what's cool is that once they started looking at her, they found it wasn't even as straightforward as like she has learned to pick up the hose. and put water on herself, she would actually change her grip depending on what part of her body

she was targeting. Like when she was like going on her side and she would be like lifting her legs to like reach all the all the crevices, but she would be holding the hose in her trunk again. There's a video. It's really adorable. I'll reference the video multiple times. I really recommend everybody go watch it. I'll link to it on popside.com slash weird.

But she would like, you know, wrap her trunk around the hose very close. close to the head of it. So she would be using it like, similar to how you might use, like, a handheld shower head where you're really directing the spray. But then when she wanted to shower her back, she would move her trunk to further down the hose. And she would flip it up like a lasso so that it would flop down her back and shower her there. And the researchers were like, this is a non-trivial difference in tool use. You know, one is a very straightforward pickup, use the applied direct.

to burn, you know. Right. And the other is entirely different movements. It's like high velocity. She's using the flexibility and the ballistics of the hose. And then she would frequently, after flipping down her back, she would like drop it. She would just go, like, who. Yeah, she was done. And hoses in particular, the researchers of this study were saying, are considered pretty tricky tools. Like they're long and flexible. So, you know, they're more noodley than, say, picking up a branch, which elephants have been seen to do to sort of swat bugs off of their backs. Also very cool, but like a much more sort of straightforward tool than that giant noodle. Also, the water flow adds a bunch of physics and like dynamic movement that an animal has to take into account if they're going to use that as a tool.

And yeah, the researchers were quoted as saying elephants are amazing with hoses, but the way they'll be willing to use hoses, like varies a lot from animal to animal. And he said, quote, elephant Mary is the queen of showering, which I love. Incredible. Incredible. I want that title as well. Right. Yeah. And they think, like, you know, there's no way of knowing. But what they think is happening here is that even though they've never seen an elephant do this, there is something intuitive about using a hose to shower for an elephant because that's how they use their trunks. So they're saying, you know, it's, so they're saying, you know, it's, so

they're saying it's super plausible to imagine an elephant, like looking at the hose as their zookeepers using it and being like, oh, it's a thing that does the thing my trunk does. I should use that. Seems chill. Seems like a nice way to save energy and not constantly be spraying water on myself using my own air. And yeah, we also know that like elephants are really big on skin care. They do a lot of stuff to take care of their skin and to regulate their body temperature. You know, those like mud and dust and water baths. Yeah, I love it too. In fact, they cited a study that said that 80% of tool use that's been observed in elephants has been body care related, which I love. I love this for elephants. Yeah. Good for them. Yeah, good for them. And another thing that they noticed that they said,

you know, was evidence that this was tool use and should be considered tool use. To me, there's no ambiguity. This is clearly an elephant using a tool, but, you know, whenever you read an behavior paper and they're saying this is tool use. They're like, and how must we define a tool? And what is use? They're being very careful to show their work because I think, you know, nobody wants to have appeared to anthropomorphize and put meeting into something that was like random. But the girl is showering. I think if you've named your elephant the queen of showers, then I think that. Yeah. Yeah. But they also pointed out that she exhibited what they call tool use specific lateralization, which is this thing where research shows that tool use promotes the development

of what we consider handedness. Like most animals, when they're going about their day-to-day lives, when they're like climbing stuff, they don't have a real dominant hand. But once they start using tools, you see it's more and more likely that they like they favor one hand over the other to use those tools as opposed to like just ambulating. Now, elephants have been shown to have trunkedness when they're using tools. They can be left trunked or right trunked, and it often seems to have to do with sort of the direction in which they are most dexterous in twisting their trunk because they make these little twists to, like, you know,

handle small objects. And so sure enough, Mary showed a. preference for her left body side when she was using the hose, which lefties. Lefties, yeah, which was actually the opposite of how she would hoes herself down when she was using her trunk. So they were like, see, she's like, you know, she's doing, she's making choices about handedness to be more dexterous with her shower hoes, which gets a little in the weeds, but I thought was, you know, an interesting point. And also I just love thinking about, you know, a left trunk elephant. They also found, because

they were like, what tests can we do to explore what's going on here? And one of the ones they landed on was like, let's see what she does with different sized hoses. So the standard zoo hose had a diameter of 24 millimeters. And then they also started sometimes presenting her with a thicker one. It had a diameter of 32 millimeters. And then a narrow one that was only 13 millimeters. Did they all have like the same? Did they futs with the water pressure to make sure they were all like, because like I think if you broaden the diameter, right, the water is going to come out at a different pace. Yeah, that's such a good point. And I think the point, part of the point was that the water pressure was going to be different. They were like, it was less about the size specifically and more like, we want to alter the function of the tool and see how she reacts. So not a perfectly controlled study, more like, what can we throw with this elephant to see what she does. And they found that she did prefer the one that the zookeepers used. And when they gave her the wider hose, she was like more often to just use her trunk. And she was most likely to entirely abstain from showering when they gave her the 13mm water hose, which again, this is complete anthropomorphizing. But I can just imagine

her being like, what the heck is this useless thing? Like, I'm done for the day. I don't want to shower anymore at all. So yeah, really interesting stuff about like this. elephant who has taught herself this really innovative thing, hashtag self-care. We love that for Mary. But I also promised pranks. And this study also features some shenanigans. So they noticed that, you know, Mary was the only of the three using the hose to shower. But on Charlie, the 12-year-old showed what they called complex hose manipulation behavior at times resulting in brief disruptions of water flow to Mary. In other words, Ancelli was messing with the hose to stop Mary's showers.

And they have with these videos, you can see her. She's standing there watching Mary and picking up the hose in her truck and like twirling and twisting her trunk to kink the hose. There's a slow motion video with arrows like pointing to the kink in the hose and then to Mary's shower to show that the kinked hose is, you know, acting like a kinked hose. Does Mary make that connection between the change in the water and like this. prank? So I don't know that they, I think they were very careful not to try to infer the moods of these elephants. Because they already were like, there were several moments in both the paper and in press releases where they were like, we'll admit, to us it looks like they're having a prank war. But like, we understand.

We can't know for sure that's what. happening. So for this round, I don't think they focused on Mary's reactions. And it was always very, like, brief interruptions. You know, the water would like spurt. But they did say that they noticed, like, antagonistic behavior between the two of them leading up to and after this, like, Mary would kind of slap at Anshali with her trunk, which to them sort of added to the evidence that this was part of, you know, that they were trying to annoy each other. But again, we can't know. We do know that Anchali was definitely up to something with this hose

because in addition to the, like, kinking, which they pointed out required, like, quite a lot of force. It was really unlikely that she was just sort of enjoying twirling this hose and accidentally kinking it sometimes. They also saw her do something that they're calling a trunk stand where she put her trunk down on the hose and then pressed some of her body weight into it. Like stepping on it, but with her trunk?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Gymnastics. There's an interesting thing about that. I'll talk about it in a minute. Why was she not stepping on it? So this trunk press, not typical elephant behavior.

They were like, what is she doing? And then they realized that she was actually applying force to the hose. And they were like, oh, so like she for sure is trying to mess with Mary's shower. Though, again, they were also quick to add the caveat. We can't know that. But you can, like, feel the researchers giggling throughout this whole thing. And I, watching the videos, I was like so delighted. I was surprised by how delightful I found it.

It's really hard not to project like this little scam is interrupting this woman's shower and she is pissed off. And the interesting thing about the trunk stand, which again really got to me, they pointed out that these elephants have been trained not to step on the hoses because it interrupts when the zookeepers are doing their work. and they're so the only training related hoses they have received is don't step on them and so they were saying maybe unchali is like okay I'm not allowed to step on the hose so like what can I do instead and that's why she invented the trunk pressed to be like no feet here I'm not breaking the rules not against the

rules yeah which I again I love that and we know that elephants have really complex social bonds and like very complex emotional lives. So well, of course, we like can't be sure that our projection of what this looks like to us is real. It's also, it's totally reasonable to suggest that that might be what's happening. Elephants get up to nonsense for sure. And they hold grudges. Like, they for sure hold grudges.

So the idea of an elephant prank war is like not far-fetched. They did perform some controlled experiments to see, like, is on Charlie really? trying to disrupt Mary showers. And what they did is they offered her two water hoses. Like one was closer to her, but the other one was the one that Mary was actually using. And they were like, she didn't show any preference. In fact, she tended to go for the one closer to her. But they also pointed out, they were like, we don't know that she could see that that hose wasn't the one Mary was using.

Like they were like, this is not, we don't think this is conclusive evidence that this was not a prank. And yeah, in fact, they pointed out. like she got better at disrupting the water flow over time, which makes them think that was her end goal. She did this repeatedly. It was like very complex maneuvers requiring a lot of pressure and force. So they're like, yeah, listen, we suspect this was her being a little shit. It's kind of sounds like it.

Yeah. It really does. Oh, yeah. And so one other thing just to wrap us up, I don't know for sure that this is why the researchers were looking at these elephants. But I did find that Pong Fah, who's Ancali's mother, was previously the subject of a different study because her caretakers at the zoo noticed that she had learned to peel bananas, which is not a standard elephant thing.

And they were like, you got to come look at this elephant. She keeps peeling bananas. Oh, my goodness. When the researchers came, they kept giving her bananas, and she was eating all of them whole, which is what they normally do. They were like, is this fake where the zookeepers trying to like start an international sensation around their elephant peeling bananas?

Then they realized that all of the bananas they've been offering her had been perfectly ripe. And they were like, interesting. What if, what about different ripeness? And they found that it was specifically when a banana had a very spotted peel. She would not always. but almost always remove it.

And this also has video that I'll link to. It's adorable. She's so efficient. I love this. Maybe efficient isn't the right word because I think she probably leaves a lot of banana on the peel, but she very quickly, like, you know, kind of crushes it out of the peel and then eats the banana that's left. And so they're like, maybe she just doesn't like the taste of the, like, more overripe banana peals.

Or maybe it's just that it's easier. And, like, it's a... Because it's over right. Yeah, exactly. like slips out more easily. But yeah, they almost missed confirming this, you know, describing this wild behavior in a study because they hadn't considered an overwrite banana. I mean, I wonder if it's at all similar to like, you know, you find some cheese and you're

like, oh no, there's mold on it, but only on one part. I could just let us scrape that off. Yeah, yeah. She's like, the skin sure is spotty. I'll just take it off. Exactly, exactly. So relatable, so understandable. versus like a kind of green banana.

You're not going to waste your time trying to unpeel that if you're an animal that can eat a peel. Yeah. That's silly. And you don't even have fingers. So like, why are you going to spend time doing that? And similarly with that one, they were like, how did this elephant learn this? No one trained her to do this. But they did note that as when she was young, she had had like very one-on-one care.

I think she might have been at some kind of nature reserve. and her, like, main caretaker had often peeled bananas in front of her and handed them to her. And so similar to the hose thing, they're like elephants watch stuff. They see humans do stuff. And, you know, they don't necessarily go like that humans got those weird pair of stubby trunks and I don't so I can't do that. They just figure out a way to do it on their own. And I love that. This study, again, very delightful video that I've done.

will link to. And I just love the idea of these three apparently very talented elephants using their amazing cognitive abilities to very different ends. One for self-care, one to eat bananas and one to cause trouble, which is just wonderful. Yeah, these elephants sound like the opposite of a pleasure to have in class, like a disruption to having class. Absolutely. I don't know. I would want a classful of these elephants. They sound delightful.

Yeah, agree. Yeah, yeah. Would we get much done? Probably not. No, but you'd have a good time. So true. So true. Yeah, there was one of the researchers behind the banana paper.

The day it came out, they, like, posted a video on Twitter that was, like, you know, having many celebratory bananas with Pungfa. And, you know, a video was showing, like, three bananas in a row that she, like, very quickly peeled. And then the last one, she just ate whole. And you could hear the researcher like cackle. She's just a contrarian. Anyway, yeah, we're going to take a quick break.

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I'm eyeing mood.com's delta-9 THC buttercream caramels because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also mellows me out and sends into Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has delta9 THHC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Okay, we're back. And Claire, Tell me about paper mache and great war. Yes, yes.

Okay, so I feel like I made a bigger deal about paper mache than the rest. I think any of paper machine being involved in the story is a big deal to me. But it's still a good fact. I just wrote the teaser last minute. So I just threw paper mache in there, even though it's not the focus. But anyways, don't hate me later for that. So I was doing research earlier this week on Annecoic Chambers, which are the those like silent rooms that you go into and you can like feel your heart rate and it's

I want to go into one of those so much I have never been in one either like a lot of journalists have and like people have written about it before and I think the one that's in Minnesota you can pay like $75 an hour or something to see how long you last. Wow the blood running in your veins right that's what I've heard yeah yeah like your heartbeat like the blood swishing through your ears and wow. Yeah, it sounds lovely. So yeah, that that sounds great as well. And I was doing a little bit of research on like the history of them. And I came across an article in the New York Times Magazine is a recent article. And it talked about like where these anechoic chambers came from, like how they came about. And it turns out that during World War II, the United States Army was trying to,

you know, pull out all the tactics. could to win the war as you do. You know, you have your army and you have all the things that usually go along with war. But they're pulling out all the stops. So they come up with this idea that they call the quote unquote ghost army. And it is, it is spooky, Rachel. And it consists of essentially this idea that we are going to create like a almost fake military base and fake soldiers and fake weapons and artillery and set it up and make it seem like instead of there being 1,000 soldiers or 10, like 100 soldiers, there's like 30,000 soldiers. We're going to trick the other side and disillusion them to think that there's like a bigger

army and weapons than there are. Like large-scale toy soldiers. Quite literally. And they use all these like enormous speakers that would make it sound like there was a cacophony of man and machines. This must have been so much fun to set up. Right. Truly. I mean, like you're in the middle of war and you're like, this all sucks.

But at least I got to try this like cool stuff. So they had. But the problem is that they're trying to create this like massive, massive amount of sound. And they were like, where in America can I do this without disturbing people? And they were like nowhere. So let's create a room that tests the loudness of these of sound. And that's how partially how anarchoic chambers came to be. That is a cool fact in and of itself.

But then I was like, wow, ghost army. So weird. So I went down a rabbit hole and this is everything that I know. and that you will now know about the ghost army of World War II. As I said, it was this brainchild of a group of army, not soldiers, but higher up than soldiers. And they were like, we need to create this illusion that there is a bigger amount of soldiers and a bit, like, we want it to seem like that the other side should go towards this direction. and instead they're going to go, we're going to, you know, bring them, we're going to disillusion them, essentially. So, Ghost Army arrived in England in May, 1944, as D-Day preparations were being finalized.

And the Ghost Army engaged in its first large-scale deceptions in the summer of 1944 as it deployed 50 dummy tanks and positioned sound trucks within a few hundred yards of the front line during the siege of the French port of Breast. And as part of Operation Brittany, the Ghost Army, deceived the Germans about the location of General George Patton's third army, which eluded the enemy and raced eastward across France. So, yeah, this was just like an entire fake army of dummy troops that were able to act like they were way larger than they were. And they helped to save a lot of American lives because they tricked the enemy. And for a while after the war, this was all like a big secret because they were sworn to secrecy both during and after the war ended. And it wasn't until a couple of decades later that these members of the Ghost Army were able to talk about their experiences. And it would be so hard to keep that secret. I would want to tell them out about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Like they weren't even allowed to tell their families. like their families knew that they were soldiers in the war, but they didn't know what they were doing. And I did a little bit of research on like how they got people to join this special force. And it seemed like it were like all the people that were just like maybe like kind of similar to these elephants that were just like not able to follow directions. And they were just like, no, like just not the pleasure to have in class. And so they're like, okay.

Exactly, exactly. Like, go make a bunch of noise. Yeah. And so they were like, okay, we were going to put you in this, like, quote-unquote special army and you can use paper mache and all these various things to create. That's the only army I want to be in. The paper-machie crafty army. Truly same.

Just a bunch of theater kids and class class. But literally, yeah. So it comprised of, like, artists, architects, set designers, painters, and other engineers and skilled creatives to create this ghost army. We'd all have been in the ghost army. Like truly. And now to this day, we have the anechoic chambers, which test out all of our sound that we use from like hair dryers to dishwashers and everything

to thank for. We have the ghost army to think for this. So yeah, it changed my, both my idea of war. I was like, okay, people were way more creative than I thought and way more weird as well. There's this really great video game that I played and never finished called We Happy Few that takes place in an alternate history where the UK surrendered to Germany in World War II. And there's, I won't go into details because it is part of a major plot point, but Ghost armies are involved. and that I didn't realize that that was a thing that America did too. Goofy.

And then let me find, I finally have found the spot where the paper mache comes in. So this was from when they were finally able to talk about having been in this special ghost army. This is from an article in the New York Times. Quote, we were told to make the Germans believe an American attack was coming through the Arden to hit them. Accordingly, we put on a demonstration of strength by bringing up a quote, pretend division made of paper mache. It reminded

me of a production by Cecil B. DeMille, only we had fewer extras to carry spheres. I love that. Incredible. Again, I really feel like this would be such a good movie. I would absolutely watch this movie. Slapstick.

Yes. And if you just like Google Ghost Army and maybe you can share some of these pictures, too for this story, but you can kind of see they, like, they just create these big giant trucks that were all made of paper mache or they're like blown up using like balloons. Oh my God. Because they don't want to use actual trucks that they need for other areas. That is a great question.

Right. Like you're, I wonder if they had to check, yeah, like the air quality. Like, what's the weather today? Can we pull off this? Can we have our balloon tanks? Yeah, do we need the balloons to stand down today? We need more flowered water. Yeah.

Quick, more strips of torn up newspaper. Wow, I love that. Absolutely incredible. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Sophie, tell us about some worms. Yeah, so let's start just imagine that you are a worm, okay? And I mean, people call you that, but really what you are is a larva and you live in this tree.

and it is your life's goal to turn into a moth. So you take these thin filaments and you start pulling them from your head. You're producing them from these glands. And they bond together into this one long thread that you wrap around yourself and it gets glued together into this cocoon. So, okay, so far so good. You're all wrapped up in your cocoon. You're going through the process of becoming a moth.

And then tragedy strikes. You fall out of the tree. You fall and you land in a lanko. literal hot water. So you are about to die, so you're never going to realize this. Yeah, sorry. I'm sorry. I've made you the worm and then I killed the worm. But the good news is you have just crashed into history. And more specifically, you've crashed into the teacup of the legendary Chinese Empress Lezu. So, yeah, while you're dying, your cocoon is also falling apart around you. Sorry, you put in all that work. Whatever. Your part in the story is done now because

Lezu notices like this weird. Wait, that's it. You're dead. You're dead. I'm sorry. You're dead, but you're going to live forever and I'm going to tell you how. So Lezu notices that there's, that this cocoon has become like these threads and she's like, I wonder how long this thread is. So one of her ladies in waiting picks up the end of the thread and sort of like steps back and then steps back again and that she keeps going and going and going and it's this one long thread and she has a very long way to go because a silkworm cocoon can form a fiber that's a mile long and this little larva was a silkworm. Okay, so dying for fashion. Dying for fashion but also like a whole lot else. So I read this story or this either history or legend depending on how you think about it in the

book, The Insect Epiphany by Barrett Klein, and it just captured my imagination, because silk is such a cool material. In science journalism, we've covered a lot of stories about researchers like, oh, I'm going to do a cool thing with silk. Like, let's make this silk fluorescent. Let's make a patch out of this silk. Let's use three droplets of silk hydrogel to make a battery, which is a story I edited recently. And it's just, silk is just a super cool material. It is very strong. It's very lightweight, but it's still very durable. Like our oldest, the oldest samples of silk that we have are from almost 5,000 years ago, and it still exists. It makes really good clothing because it insulates well, it's easy to die, it's smooth, and it's got that beautiful shine.

And it also has military applications. So it used to be a component of early body armor, like bulletproof vests. Yeah. And it can also, when it burns, it sort of burns completely up without leaving a trace. So that made it really useful for weapons like guns. You know, you'd put gunpowder charges in these little bags made of silk. Yeah, and even before that, you know, silk was this very desirable material. And China, for a while, kept it as this state secret.

You know, you couldn't explain or share these silkworm eggs or larva under a pain of death. And then eventually, I mean, this. couldn't last forever. It did eventually get smuggled out, but the smugglers had to get really creative. So there's one story about a Chinese princess who was being married off into a different kingdom, and she had this elaborate headdress, and she hid moth eggs in it. And then there was another case of monks hiding either silkworm eggs or silkworm larvae in these hollow bamboo walking canes. And they brought them to the Byzantine Empire. But even with all the smuggling going on, silk was still primarily produced in China and the final product made its way to the rest of the world

by a little trade route that came to be known as the Silk Road. So, aha. The source of most of my favorite quizzes. Yes, yes. So this is this big network of roads in Europe and Asia, mostly in Asia, and it connected the ancient world. So it allowed for the transfer of silk, but also, yes, all of these different foods, spices, perfume, tea, paper, gunpowder.

And then, of course, there's, there's, like, culture and religion and scientific ideas. And it's all possible because of this trade route, which is being used really heavily for silk. Yeah, my favorite, one of my favorite restaurants in Manhattan is called Farida sponsor me. And there, it's, is Becky Food. And on their menu, they have, like, a giant page that's like, why is it like this? The Silk Road. Because it's true. They really have the best of everything.

They got like, you know, they got dumplings. They got Borsh. They got dumplings and meat on cures. Yeah. Amazing. And, you know, so like the Silk Road was enormously influential on human, the course of human history. But, I mean, even after it was no longer playing as much of a role, it still affected world events. So in particular for Japan, Silk was this like destiny changing.

technology because in the late 1800s, Japan was modernizing and its main export was silk, raw silk. And because of that industry, the country was able to sort of transform itself from a farming society to this military world power. And it played a huge role in Japan's role in 20th century politics. So the Sino-Japanese War, World War I, World War II. And silk was actually also used in those wars. So yeah, like the bulletproof vests with silk components, that was from the era of World War I. In World War II, there was this one case where there were these British prisoners of war and they wanted to escape. And so they had these various tools to help them escape were smuggled into them. And among the tools were these maps made of silk because it was lightweight

and it was super durable and you could like fold it up and hide it in something else. And so this was smuggled into the prisoners of war to help them escape captivity. Wow, that's crazy. Yeah, and so we have all this amazing impact from silk. And if you believe the story, it's all due to this like one little larva of the moth species is called Bombix mori, and it's bad luck, but our good luck when it fell into that cup of hot tea. Yeah, it just kind of stinks for that one larvae because it died and then didn't know it's legacy. I mean, it also kind of stinks. It kind of stinks for the rest of the silkworms too, though,

because first of all, we've been cultivating them for so long that they can't really live independently anymore. And the other thing is just like making silk, the process kills a lot of silkworms. Yeah, so unfortunately, it's maybe not so happy for them. But I mean, the fact is that this species is still existing because in part of our human domestication of it. In a different timeline, I would have been born a silk area. I actually, my family was on both sides of these historic, basically some of the first, like, labor protests that led to unionization were in Patterson, New Jersey around the silk factories.

Yeah. And the vast majority of my ancestors were people working in sweatshops. And in fact, some of them did work in the silk industry in Patterson. But my great grandmother, yeah, my great grandmother, her father owned one of said silk factories, and then they lost everything, which is like probably fair, you know, if you're on the wrong side of the first union riots. But yeah, what I've always been told is that during, I think, World War I, maybe World War II, he was told to switch over their looms to nylon to make parachutes. was like, no, it'll ruin the looms. Like, well, why should I do that? And then he was like, blacklisted. Though also maybe because they were Jewish, because like, you know, who knows. But anyway, yeah, that is my connection to the world of silk. Both sides of the Patterson,

New Jersey silk industry. And a fat lot of good it did it. That's funny. Okay, it's, it's so weird driving through Patterson now because all of that is like pretty much, you know, gone except for, it's like a really, really fancy Burger King that is clearly like built within one of those like silk factories or one of the factory. And it's, it's just like legitimately the fanciest Burger King I have ever been. And I'll have to go. I'll be like connecting with my my family legacy in the Burger King. Yeah, silk is so interesting. I feel like they're also so many studies about like scientists trying to replicate how good of a material silk is and like spider silk in particular. Remember those goats they like engineered some goats? That's right to produce

spider silk in their milk. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard about those goats in years. I wonder how they do it. I wonder how sticky they've gotten in the interim. Thank you both so much for coming on. This was a great app. Learned so much about World War II and otherwise. Always a pleasure to have you both. I hope we can do it again soon. Me too. Yes. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff.

If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.