The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Evasive Genital Maneuvers, A Nazi Carrot Hoax, Eternal Daytime

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Rose Eveleth, host of the hit podcast Flash Forward, joins the weirdos as a guest host! The weirdest things we learned this week range from a Russian experiment that tried to make daytime last forever to moths jamming bat radar with their genitals. 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 Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jessica 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

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. 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. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and 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 sure 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 Maldorelli. And I'm Rose Aveleth. Rose, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. I'm sure many of our listeners already know, but for folks who don't, Rose is the host of an awesome show called Flash Forward. Rose, do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about that before we get into it? Sure, I would love to.

Flash Forward is a podcast about the future. Every episode is a different future. Some of them are likely. You know, we do things like facial recognition and antibiotic resistance. And some of the episodes are not likely. What would happen if space pirates dragged a second moon to Earth? And each episode starts with sort of a War of the World style audio drama and then gets into reporting where I talk to experts about that future, how likely it is, how unlikely it is, what it would be like. And it's just like a fun time.

Yeah. And it's also, I mean, like you said, some of the futures are pretty out there, which is, you know, very fun. But some of them are incredibly relevant. You did an episode about the 2020 census ages ago. and I've been thinking about it a lot lately. Yeah. I thought you were going to cite the pandemic episode, which was also four years ago or whatever it was. There was another one I've been thinking about lately too.

Oh, now I'm blanking on it. But, oh, I've been thinking about the episode about California seceding quite a lot lately. So, you know, always something to learn. Yeah, I was going to say this sounds like all of my dreams I've been having, like all my nightmares lately during this quarantine. all sounds like episodes on this show. That's pretty much what my job is, is to take your nightmares and turn them into audio drama. And we love it. So thanks so much for joining us.

We're really excited to hear some of the weirder stuff you've picked up in your adventures as a futurologist. And so on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of factor story that we found in the course of reading. writing, reporting, crafting, sci-fi, speculative fiction, etc., 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. Claire, would you like to start with your teas? Yes, I would love to. I would like to talk about

how during World War II, carrots were involved in a propaganda scheme to confuse Nazis. Wow. A humble root. My tease. Orange you glad it wasn't Nazis. Sorry. Yeah, Nazis pop up a surprising amount on weirdest thing. My favorite will always be the episode where I started out talking about how much Ben Franklin loved sitting around naked. And then at the end, I found surprise Nazis that I had to talk about.

So here we are again. Another week. Another story about Nazis. My tease is that I'm. going to talk about some evasive maneuvers that some insects use their genitals to execute. I can relate deeply to that. I love evasive maneuvers as a term. Right. Absolutely. And Rose, how about your teas? Sure. Mine is also actually historical, not futurologists-de, although I maintain that history is an important part of the future. And so this is actually a fact that relates to a future episode, a

flash forward. In the 1990s, a Russian scientist put up a giant mirror into space to light up entire towns by reflecting the sun back down to Earth. That doesn't sound wacky at all. Not super villainy in any way. Claire, I think I need to hear about carrots first. Oh, yes. I would love to share. All right. So first a shout out to a good friend of mine who is also a journalist. Chelsea Harvey, she is a climate science reporter for E&E News, and she gave me this idea for the fact over a recent Zoom brunch. We were talking about what we were eating, and it turned out that we were both eating massive amounts of carrots with hummus, and she mentioned that her dad told her that there's some conspiracy theory

with carrots and World War II. And that was all she knew. And I was like, oh goodness, this is a weirdest thing episode, for sure. So I will share with you what I learned. And it will definitely change your concept of carrots forever, no doubt. It will also surprisingly make you crave carrots. Well, let me know if it does. So, which I don't think is like a normal thing that people crave.

You watch like cooking shows about pie or pizza or whatever and then you crave it later. But surprisingly, I still crave carrots now after I wrote this script. So shout out to the root vegetable. Okay. We're all told to eat carrots because they're good for our eyes, right? That's what we've been told since we've all kids. That somehow if we eat enough of this root vegetable in our lifetimes, we will stave off our need for glasses and somehow acquire superhuman vision. Now, while it is true that we need vitamin A, which carrots contain for proper eye functioning,

the mechanism and story is far more complicated than simply eat more carrots have supervision. In fact, the connection between eyesight and carrots only came about as a bizarre propaganda campaign to trick the Nazis during World War II. So here's that story and how it's spread. Now, this takes us back to 1940, and the world is currently in the midst of World War II. Times were very tough. The Winter Olympics had just been canceled, and Nazi Germany had started what became known as the Blitz, which was a bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, in which Hitler's military would bomb London and other cities in England at night.

One bout of these nighttime strikes would even go on for 57 consecutive days. Because these occurred at night, to make it harder for the Nazi air raiders to strategically place these air bombs, the British government essentially called for blackouts in London and other parts of the UK. So once nighttime came, they essentially enforced everyone, including store owners, businesses, households to turn off all of their lights. Now, you might be wondering where carrots come in. Okay, I have a couple of facts to mention that we'll bring all of this together. First, carrots contain a ton of beta-carotene, a carotenoid that the body can convert into vitamin A. Vitamin A then enables our rotting cone cells to function properly, which allows us to see. So if someone becomes deficient in vitamin A, this can lead to an eye condition called night blindness,

where people have difficulty adjusting their vision to low levels of light. Second, back to World War II, overall, this blackout idea on Britain's part turned out to be a successful strategy. However, living in darkness every night was a hard thing for British citizens to get used to. In fact, nighttime car accidents, unsurprisingly, went up during this time. Third point, to further support the Nazis, the Royal Air Force had created a new secret radar technology called the Airborne Interception Radar, or AI, for short, which could be set up on board on airplanes and could essentially identify bombers before they made their way across the English Channel. And they started using this technology as early as 1939, but they tried their hardest to keep it a secret. If the Germans caught wind of their technology, they would likely change their tactics and the British would have to play follow-up.

Fourth, and a very, very, very crucial point. Carrots were cheap and abundant at a time when everything was being rationed. So, if anyone can see where all these things are going, enter the British Ministry of Agriculture. On December 22nd to 1940, the organization released a statement telling British citizens that, if we included the sufficient quantity of carrots in our diet, the statement read, we should overcome the fairly prevalent malady of blackout blindness. So essentially, they had heard all these things from citizens saying that these blackouts are so hard on my eyes, I can't see around, and they were like,

we've got it, carrots. So even before Twitter and all this other social media sort of, you know, came about, the news still spread fairly quickly. In fact, at December 23rd, so just a day later, 1940 New York Times article had the headline, quote unquote, London urges carrot diet for blackout blindness. And in some ways to the way news organizations, are providing one pot recipes, easy chocolate cake, and other ways to use food in your pantry during this coronavirus quarantine. Britain's Ministry of Food handed out pamphlets with recipes for things like, I'm not joking, carrot fudge, war and peace, yes, yes.

And it is just as you sound, it's like carrot puree with a lot of butter and sugar. And war in peace. I like those last two things. Yeah. Like I'm sure it tastes okay. It just I wouldn't call it fudge probably. Right, right. Okay, so then you both might like this last one then, which I was pretty skeptical of.

So there's Worn Piece carrot pudding. Also, just to mention steamed boil and braced carrots in case you wanted a variety of how you cook your carrots for regular meals. And then my favorite, quote, carrots, comma, savory. Now, these ingredients were carrots, of course, right, margarine, flour, milk, nutmeg, and salt all mixed together, which made it seem like it was going to be a carrot cake, but then I read further into the first line of the instructions which said, scrape, boil, drain, and mash the carrots into a puree, add all of these other ingredients that I just mentioned with the puree into a well-greased basin and steam for an hour. The instructions end with, quote, the dish looks most attractive if the mixture is set in a border mold and the center is filled with cooked spinach and other green vegetables. Yeah, so that's just a little side note on the British diet during this time to really ramp up their carrot eating. And I don't know if I'm going to be making carrots savory this weekend, but we'll see. Back to the war.

So everyone is hopping on this carrot band. wagon, they're making carrots comma savory, and word is spreading around the world that carrots will give us all this superhuman vision. But here's the thing. Even in wartime Britain, vitamin A deficiency was still really rare. And remember, like I mentioned before, carrots don't really do anything and vitamin A doesn't really do anything unless you actually have a deficiency. Without a true deficiency, carrots and vitamin A are just like taking vitamin pills and peeing them out. So obviously, there must have been a an alternative motive at hand. And it was. It was the British government. They had this idea to promote

the massive consumption of carrots. Now remember, to thwart the Nazis nighttime bombing raids, the Royal Air Force had developed their airborne interception radar technology or AI that they were trying to keep top secret. It was becoming really, really successful. British pilots, known as these night fighters, were becoming increasingly successful at taking down enemy planes before they were able to bomb civilians. So it was getting even more crucial to keep this a secret. So an attempt to conceal the secret weapon, the British government officials began telling reporters

that the secret to their success was incredible night vision made possible by a carrot-rich diet. Just an army of orangey parrot super soldiers. Yes, exactly. It was just, it's the carrots. That's all we can say. And one story of one night fighter really turned this propaganda into a worldwide carrot craze. The news media around the world sort of latched on to this one nighttime fighter named John, quote unquote, cat-eyes, Cunningham, who had a high success rate of spotting bombers. According to a news story in the Washington Post first later published in Atlas Obscura, on December 7, 1941, a Washington Post article,

gushed about Cunningham, describing him as a 25-year-old blonde and handsome enough to make a couple movie stars worry about their jobs. The article added that Cunningham's diet would motivate parents in Great Britain and across the Atlantic to feed their children carrots. According to most historical counts, though, it's unclear and mostly, probably unlikely that the Germans ever actually took this carrot idea seriously, and eventually the Nazis ended up developing their own radar systems to combat the British ones. But to this day, the idea that carrots can help your eyes had cemented itself deep in public health campaigns.

And it's likely that no one has ever seriously argued with this falsehood because, I don't know, I feel like there's just nothing wrong with carrots. I mean, I guess they won't give you superhuman vision, but they still are like a great fibrous vegetable, and they go in many things. I would argue they don't mix well, pureed with flour, nutmeg, with a center of spinach.

I don't know, though. Well, because I'm thinking about, like, pumpkin pie, sweet potato pie, both delicious. So now I'm like, carrot cake. Yeah, carrot cake also delicious. So why not carrot pie in the style of a pumpkin pie?

Okay, but carrot savory has to be boiled for an hour. That's true. It is. comma savory. Exactly. Just a nice suet British people were very into their steamed puddings, as I have learned from the Great British Bake Off. Oh, true. I feel like we could improve upon carrots, comma, savory, and maybe turn it into something not altogether terrible.

But should we? Another question entirely. Yeah. It's not going to give us magic night vision. Right. Yeah, what's the point. True. What's the point?

Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So this got me thinking, like, what is going to be the, like, food of coronavirus quarantine? And I was thinking chocolate cake. But I was going to ask both of your opinions on what you think the national coronavirus quarantine food could be. I mean, I have seen both big enthusiasm over sourdough bread. I did finally bother to make a sourdough starter for the first time in years just because

like I'm home and there isn't a lot of yeast to be bought. So why not? And I've seen both people enthusiastically babying and nurturing their sourdough starters. And I've also seen like a backlash of people being like, why am I suddenly expected to make sourdough bread? But, you know, I feel like it's like anything else. If you want to do it, do it. If not, don't.

But I don't know. I do feel that sourdough is very much in the pandemic zeitgeist. No, I love that. I think that's brilliant. All we need now is a carrot, sourdough. It's really. Purate first. It could be it. Yeah. Yeah, sourdough, comma, carrot, comma, savory.

Oh, yeah. Perfect. Just boil your sourdough like a suet. A nice. Alice and Roman, watch out. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back.

And I will get into my fact, which is about some evasive genital maneuvers. But I have a few things to say before we get there. So I'm going to talk about bats real quick. So bats are great hunters due in large parts their echolocation abilities. You know, they emit these incredibly loud ultrasounds. And it creates their own. own personal sonar detection. You know, those hounds bounce off of things and back to them. And they use that to interpret where their prey is. And then you have moths, you know, another winged

creature of the night. And bats and moths have been engaged in a sort of evolutionary arms race for more than 60 million years. They have played hunter and prey for that long, which is really wild to think about. But in 2009, researchers found some moths with a hitherto unknown method of getting rid of bats, getting them off their tail. They could literally jam the bat signals. So it had been known for a while that certain kinds of tiger moths made these clicking sounds with organs on their thoraxes called timbles that I saw one researcher say, It was kind of like when you take a soda can and you kind of like pop the tab back and forth and it'll kind of like pop in and out. So that that is how it was described.

I don't know how good that description is, but they are tiny little organs that flex and make noise. And so the generally accepted theory was that these noises probably just taught bats to recognize tiger moths because the moths are also really bitter tasting, which, of course, course, is another thing that they've clearly evolved as a defense mechanism, because if your predator takes a bite out of you and you taste real bad, they probably won't want to eat that same thing again. So the thinking was that a bat would take a bite out of a tiger moth and then it would come to associate this very horrible taste with the sound of their clicking. So then they would avoid other similar sounding moths in the future. So not super useful for like that one individual moth, but great for the species and similar species. And there were some

researchers over the last couple of decades who were like, what if something else is going on? What if these noises are actually interfering with the bat sonar? But it just wasn't widely accepted. So in 2009, there was this study that really looked really analytically at this clicking. Basically, they set out saying, okay, so if the case is that the clicking just teaches bats to avoid these bitter-tasting moths, then what we should see happen is that the first time a bat encounters these clicking moths, it wouldn't bother them at all. They would proceed, as usual. They would try to eat some of them, and only after they'd successfully munched on at least one tiger moth, would they come to avoid the clicking. There were also theories that held that the cliques themselves were just really annoying.

And so if that were the case, you'd expect bats to avoid tiger moths entirely. Just not when to go near them, even with no prior experience, unless the cliques weren't happening. So instead, when researchers took bats that had been raised in captivity and so had definitely never encountered tiger moths, and then they took a population of moths where some of their timbles had been removed, the bats, just like tried to hunt the moths as usual. But when clicking was taking place, regardless of their experience having previously bitten moths, they like had a harder time hunting the moths. They just had a way, a lower rate of successfully catching them.

And so the researchers realized that the super fast clicks were actually jamming the sonar. And it's just this one species they tested. Bertholdia Trigona makes their clicks at a particularly high rate. It's up to $4,500 per second. And those were the moths that seemed to be jamming bat signals, whereas other ones were perhaps only annoying or perhaps only making something for the bats to associate with their nasty taste. And it was the most effective defense anyone had ever documented against bats. it caused a tenfold decrease in bat capture success.

So, yeah, they think that the clicks were interfering with the bat's neural processing of the echoes. And they also think that it's because this particular species has such a fast click rate, but they're able to, you know, bat echolocation all happens so fast. So the argument is basically that the moths have to be able to react. so quickly and produce their clicks so quickly. Otherwise, they will miss the opportunity to jam the signal of the bat that is trying to find them. They have to hear the bat, you know, shrieking at them. They have to instantly start clicking and produce enough clicks to interfere with the returning echolocation signals. So that was obviously really cool. And for a brief period that

Tiger Moth got to enjoy being the only moth known to do this. But then in 2013, that all changed with the hawk moth. So there are actually three known species of hawk moth now that have been found to emit ultrasound clicks that have the same kind of result that they keep that from being able to hunt them successfully. And unlike the tiger moth that has these special pieces of their body on their thorax, the hawk moths seem to do it by rapidly moving their generals. So the males were seen very quickly grading these stiff scales that are on their claspers. So that's what they usually use to grab females during mating. And they use these scales to rub against their abdomen and make the clicking.

And females also seem to pull part of their genitalia inwards to make their genital scales rub against their abdomens. Also super effective. And yeah, it jams the sonar, which is just so cool to me. And also the second study that found, you know, the three species of hawk moths composed kind of a family tree to trace back the evolution of this tree. And they found that it evolved separately between the hawk moths and the tiger moth. But really close in time, basically the tiger moths evolved it, like just after they had kind of broken off from where hawk moths would have been. And it was more than 20 million years ago. So it's probably way more common than we thought it would be surprising if there weren't other moth species

that can do this. And one other fact I learned while researching this that is related and just really fascinated me. It had never, I never thought about it. So that's also practiced self-jamming because when they let out the noises they use for echolocation, they're incredibly loud. And so to avoid deafening themselves, they have this muscle in their middle ear that clamps down on bones called ossicles that usually act to actually amplify sounds. But when the muscles clamp down, it dampens the intensity of whatever they're hearing at the time. So as they're letting out the sounds that they use for echolocation, they dampen their own hearing,

but then they have to really quickly be able to release that muscle because they have to hear the returning sounds from their echolocating targets. So, yeah, it's really cool to me that they have this, like, super precise internal mechanism for not going deaf when they shriek at things in the dark. And it's also super cool that these moths have figured out how to interrupt it. And like I said, this is all relatively recent. I mean, the earlier study was still just about a decade ago. So I think we have a lot left to learn about how moths evade their predators and how

animals might have evolved to fight back against echolocation. Do the hawk moths do it more effectively than other moths? Like are they the superior moths? I don't think we have enough data to compare tiger moth and hawk moth efficacy. Fair. So that's a... I have a more lowbrow question. Oh, please. Go ahead.

Do you think that it feels good for the hawk moth? I mean, I've never been a hawk moth, but I mean, I hope it does. I guess. Like, that would be nice for them. It's like a win-win, right? Yeah. Avoiding predators just like having a great life. The bats would like, can you imagine if you're like,

nemesis had a way of always beating you and they also like got off on it? That would, um, yeah, that would make me really hate that more. I'm pretty sure that's the James Bond movie. Jamming the bat signal with your drum. Oh, man. Hawk woman, hawk moth woman. Oh, hawk moth woman. Cast me now.

I'm free. I have no plans. Excellent. All right. We'll take another quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Rose, it's time to hear about mad scientists mirror stuff. Yeah. So I am currently working on a book for Flash Forward and I was doing some reading for a chapter about a future in which we do not need to sleep. There's some sort of drug or genetic. engineering that makes it such that humans don't have to sleep anymore. And what would that be like? But there's a book called 24-7 by Jonathan Crary, which is super interesting. It's basically sort of sociological look at capitalism and sleep and sort of the theft of our time by bosses, et cetera, et cetera. But he sort of has this like aside in the book where he's like, oh yeah. And by the way, in the 90s, this Russian scientist put up this big giant mirror, like moving on. And I was like, excuse me, I need to know more about this. So.

So the project was called Zanamia, and it was the brainchild of a Russian engineer who actually worked on Sputnik and who was an incredibly good and talented engineer. His name was Victor Sero Miatnikov. I have practiced saying that many times now. I were going to say, really, you know. Rolled off the time. I believe it. I believe that's how it's pronounced.

Yeah, good. Excellent. I hope. I hope that's how it's pronounced. No, I did actually check with people who speak Russian. So he worked on Sputnik. He also actually is the person who came up. with the mechanism that we still use today that allows spacecraft to link up with one another.

So if you have two spacecraft that need to actually sort of dock, that docking mechanism, he invented it. It's still, it still works. I think it has had no failures at this point. It's like this incredibly good mechanism. So he's sort of famous, was sort of famous in late 80s in Russia because he was, you know, working on these things. He was well known as this really great engineer.

And what he really wanted to work on after working on Sputnik and these other things was a solar sale. So this idea that you could use the power of the sun to generate energy and propel spacecraft. So you don't have to equip them with fuel, which is very heavy, et cetera. So he was like, sweet, next thing, I want to do the solar sale. His colleagues were like, no, no, no, we have a different project. What we need to do now is sort of turn our attention to helping the Soviet people be more productive, which is a very Soviet kind of thing to be having your engineers working on.

And so he basically came up with a compromise where he was like, I really want to be thinking about solar sales and sort of. of the sun and how we might unfurl large sheets in space. So what I'm going to do is basically design a giant reflector that goes up and direct sunlight back down to Earth, basically a big giant space light. So you would put it up, it would unfurl in these big panels, and it would be a light that reflects the sun back down and can light up an entire city even in the dead of night, right? This is the idea.

And he's working on it. The Soviet Union fails. He continues to work on it. This becomes his sort of passion project. He talks about it to the media. The Moscow Times thinks this is like the coolest thing ever. Almost every story actually at the time. And this is now the early 90s.

Both Moscow Times, any of the Russian papers, but also when it got covered in the New York Times, all the Russians constantly talk about how bad and long the winters are. And like they will do anything to not have those. And so, you know, his quote to the Moscow Times is like, think of what it will mean for the future of mankind. And then he says, no more electricity bills, no more long dark winters. Those are like the two main things he's like thinking about. And so, you know, this idea, right, you could have this satellite. You wouldn't have to wire up, you know, rural parts of the country where you might want to put factories.

You could just beam light down to them. And of course, after the Soviet Union collapses, he does not have quite as much funding and the materials that he once had. But he sort of continues to work on this. A lot of people working on this project volunteered their time. Like this was the sort of like bootlegged thing. And the project was called Zanamia, and it went up the first sort of test version of this. So they had three, they had a plan for sort of three stages, a test one, a 65 foot one, and then an 82 foot one, and then a 230 foot one. So they were kind of going to work their way up. And then the big, like, final version of this was supposed to be a 656 foot wide space mirror installation that would go up into space. Obviously, you know, without as many resources, they sort of had to put up a test version that wasn't quite as,

well designed or as well constructed as they wanted. But they did actually put it up. So on February 4th, 1992, they did in fact unfurl the wings of a test version of the satellite out in space. And it did work, basically. It wasn't quite as impressive as you're probably imagining where like this big bright light gets beam down because it was pretty small. And also it was cloudy that day, just a small wrinkle in the plan. And it basically was the light, the same amount of light as a full moon. But he had proved the concept, right? So he was like, okay, clearly we can do this, we can put it up, we can unfur all the things, and it will reflect light to Earth if we could make it bigger and better, it could do the thing that I am saying.

Now, at this point, February 1992, he puts up this thing into space and all of the astronomers around the world are like, excuse me, hold on, what exactly are you doing? Because, you know, putting a giant beam in the sky is not great for astronomy. turns out. We're actually seeing a similar conversation happening right now, R.E. Starlink, right? That like satellites and astronomers are really worried that it's going to ruin their observations. Imagine like Starlink, but instead of it just sort of happens to be shiny because it's satellite, the entire point of this is to be shiny. Like that is the whole thing. And so people, astronomers are like, excuse me, I'm sorry, like, we need to talk about this. Biologists and ecologists are also kind of like,

this is not a good idea. We kind of sort of the very early stages of, of kind of having a field of light pollution research, right? In the early 90s, you know, people have known that light is bad for animals since the 1800s. The first telegraph wires go up and they start to see birds circling them, circling the lights on them and literally dropping dead of exhaustion. And so in ornithology journals in the 1800s, you have people sort of noticing this. So it's not new. But the early 90s is really when that field starts to really kind of solidify as an actual kind of discipline. So you have these people saying like, hey, this is not a good idea, right? And then also you have sort of like workers rights advocates being like, I don't know, maybe, maybe darkness is good. So we could sleep sometimes. You know, like the idea that you should just work literally all the time is maybe not great. The Russian press is covering it very differently. So the New York Times has this actually great piece. And if you, one of the, I should shout out, one of the really great pieces to read about this is on Vice by Brian Merchant. And there's some really cool pictures of like the sketches and the way that this looks and the sort of diagrams. And,

and then how it actually looked. But the Russian press is super excited. They're like, yes, no more long winters. In 1998, they ran a story with the headline Russian space scientists seek eternal light, which is like very cool. So again, they're like really down. They're very excited. And so even though a lot of astronomers and ecologists and biologists are sort of trying to convince him to stop and trying to convince people to not let him do this, Cyram Yatnikov continues on, He builds the next version of it. So Zanamia 2.5 goes up February 5th, 1999. It goes up to the space station mirror,

and they are going to sort of really show that this could work and really beam light down to Earth. Unfortunately, as they were sort of shoving the, it's sort of folded up and then you shove it out and then you unfurl it, right? But as they were sort of shoving it out of mirror, one of the mirrors got caught on an antenna and ripped, and so it sort of like didn't work, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on who you are.

And that sort of was a failure. It ends up burning up on reentry. And at that point, there is no more funding for Suryum Yatnikov and his team. And basically the project kind of dies. But it was a sort of moment where, you know, he was saying all these things about how, listen, like we're going to save all this money on power. We're going to be able to, you know, not have to wire out to really rural places or even just regular cities. You know, we're going to be able to solve the problem of lighting poverty, right? Which is something that people talk about. where lots of people in the world don't have the privilege of being able to complain about light pollution because they do not have lights. And so if you could just sort of like turn this big light on in space and direct it to a place, you could solve that problem without having to run electrical cables and get people lights and have them pay for power. And, you know, there's now the conversation about climate change and the way we use energy. And so his idea was like, no, we should just put these lights up in space and just beam them down and just light up entire cities this way, which is. sort of like make some sense if you don't think about some of the other pieces of it. Sure. But that was sort of his, unfortunately, his legacy is people now remember him as the guy who did

this weird space mirror instead of the guy who invented the docking system that we use for all of our, you know, space docking. But that's sort of what happened. And it reminded me of, again, like Starlink, where all these astronomers are sort of waving their arms being like, no, no, no, no, hold on, wait a second. Like, you can't just do this. And much like then, they're also talking about how most astronomers aren't consulted when there are launches into space because most of the time they don't need to know what's going up. It doesn't really impact them. So one of the things that Elon Musk has said is like, look, we applied for these permits.

Like this has been, there was a public comment period. Like, why didn't you say something when there was this opportunity to express these concerns? and a lot of, especially ground-based astronomers, were like, we don't look at the launch lists. It doesn't impact us 99% of the time. And this was the same case where, you know, Smyantnikov was able to put this thing up. And then all these astronomers and people on the ground were like, hold on.

No one asked us about this. And it sort of like illustrates some of the disconnects between some of these fields that I think many of us might assume are connected, right? Like astronomers on the ground versus people who are putting rockets up into space. You might think that they would know what's happening in the other field, but they don't because actually those are quite different disciplines in general. And so they don't always know what's happening. So it was sort of an interesting parallel to the conversation we're having now about the future of the night sky and the future of light pollution in space and the future of light pollution and the future of light pollution and the future of appears in for flash forward is one about a future in which we don't have any more darkness.

And we just sort of completely lose the fight against light pollution and sort of what that looks like. so that's my fact. Wow. I'm looking forward to that episode and terrified about it. It'll be fun. It's not going to be good, though. We should turn our lights off. I know. I was like, I'm looking forward to when the sun goes down just to appreciate it tonight. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, I'm thinking about, you know, over the last few years, how much increased research and conversation there's been about the disruption of our circadian rhythms and, you know, the stress we put on our body.

and minds, even just by, you know, I've definitely talked to researchers who argue that just the existence of the electric light has kind of messed us up. So thinking about like the scale we're talking about in terms of just beaming light on a city 24-7 is wild. I think if that had happened, there would be a lot of researchers very upset about it today. Yeah. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Right. And it is one of those things where like I think it's a great example of sometimes the ways in which engineers can try to solve a problem and in their mind have really solved the problem, right? Like, look what I've made. I've made this thing that can, you know, cut all electricity bills, can light things up for people, you know, can solve problems of sort of like access, but they don't always see the whole picture of what darkness is for. Right. Or they solve the problem sort of without thinking about the sort of like intersectional ways in which all of these

fields overlap, right? Not everything is a pure engineering problem, right? Like, that is not how you should look at the world in general. And it's sort of like this interesting parallel where we have someone being like, look at this great thing I invented and people being like, oh, yay. Please don't. Yeah. Maybe less of that. Wow. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Wonderful options. I kind of love this 24-hour sun. light. Yeah. I just can't believe that it was followed through so well without people being like, oh, maybe, no. I just, yeah, I love it as it relates to stuff in the news today. And I love just the idea of a truly brilliant engineer, clearly, based on, you know, what he accomplished,

saying like, here's the solution. It never gets dark. That's it. That's the solution. I love the, I love the simplicity of that from a clearly brilliant mind. It's a great reminder to all of us to be humble about where our expertise starts and ends. Rose, thank you so much for coming on and for your winning fact. I will say I would vote for carrots, comma, savory. Well, a close runner up then. And listeners, don't forget to check out, flash forward if you haven't already. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for having me. This was really fun. 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 Apple

podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popsai.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week.

We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.