The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Exploding Underwater Mountains, Boar Sex and Celery, Hidden History of Vaccination

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Contributing editor Kat Eschner joins the weirdos as a guest host. The weirdest things we learned this week range from the surprising link between pig sex and celery to blowing up a mountain underwater. 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 Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. 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.com. 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 share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Trodosh. I'm Kat Eshner. Kat, welcome back to the show.

Thank you so much. Kat is a regular Popsai contributor and has been on weirdest thing before, talking about very dangerous exploding rainbows in classrooms. Definitely recommend going back and checking that one out. So with that, let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found. in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc.

And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, would you like to start with your teas? I would. My fact this week is about celery and pig pheromones. Oh, of course. My two favorites math.

It was short and sweet. Yes. Delicious. Kat, what about your teas? So excited. My story is about what happens when an underwater mountain meets 1,400 tons of explosives. Oh, boy. More explosions. Yeah. Okay, mine is about the surprising history of giving yourself just a little bit of a disease so you don't get a lot of it.

Vaccines or worse? Oh, we're talking about pre-vaccines, so worse. It's another what you learned in history. history class was probably racist, weirdest thing. T.M. It's a common theme for us, really. Yes. We do what we can. I feel like we should start with the explosions, because maybe we should start on kind of a fun note and then maybe get into the sad racism. And then talk about some Zellar and Pig Paramount. I love the way you think, Sarah. There's a great arc to it. So, Kat, why don't you begin? Sure. Yeah, I actually have to start with some sad racism. I'm

I'm so sorry about that, but, you know, this is the world in which we live. It's everywhere. Yeah, it is. So before I get started, I want to acknowledge that the story I'm about to tell you takes place on the unseeded lands of the Wei Kai First Nation. I couldn't find their name for the mountain that I'm going to be discussing, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this was their territory. They didn't have a lot of say in what happened with the mountain, which was, by the way, called

Ripple Rock. and like all stories about British Columbia, which for my American friends, is a province in Canada, this is the story of when British Columbia blew up Ripple Rock. I wrote about this story for the first time a few years ago, and I've been thinking about it ever since, because while I grew up and went to university in British Columbia and actually not far from where this happened, I actually had never heard about this. and that is kind of shocking when I consider the fact that like literally this one time in the late 1950s Canada actually blew up an underwater mountain in order to clear a shipping channel to and from Alaska

and that act was and remains, here's a mouthful, I'm sorry, but it was one of the largest planned non-nuclear peacetime explosions ever. When it happened, they actually believe it was the largest, although it's hard to, you know, exactly track these things. So just to start out with, I want to tell you a bit about what Ripple Rock was. One USC researcher wrote this describing Ripple Rock. The hazard consisted of two underwater pinnacles, extending to width 9 and 20 feet of the surface at low tide, joined by a saddle 70 feet below the surface. Now, this rock, which was basically, it was an underwater mountain with two spikes.

Think like a bit like, you know the eye of, Sauron at the top of the tower and the Lord of the Rings. It was kind of like that, but underwater and made of rock. And it was located in a really narrow straight. So it had been a problem for navigators, basically since they started to take European-style ships through what's known as the Inside Passage, which runs basically between Vancouver Island and the mainland up northwards and then runs all the way up to Alaska. If you wanted to go that route, you had to take the Inside Passage because Vancouver Island,

which is the island where the city of Victoria is, maybe you've heard of that one, is really, really big. It's like about two times the size of Connecticut and bigger than all the Hawaiian islands combined. So going around it wasn't really a huge, like an option, particularly if you were looking to do shipping or trade or anything like that. But the peaks of Ripple Rock and the strong ties that surrounded them made it really dangerous. And I actually found an account from a First Nations chief who was talking about navigating that area, he said, yeah, we were always really careful around there, even with canoes and stuff.

because just the tides were like the tides and the currents were super dangerous. Over the years, lots of people died, and I'm speaking specifically here about colonial people, people who are colonizers, not First Nations people. We don't have numbers for how many people died, traveling around Ripple Rock, who were part of the area nations. But over the years, lots of people died because they wrecked their boats on Ripple Rock. The count that I've been able to find, and there are a few varying numbers, but it was about 20 big ships and 114 people. And by the 1950s, when this happened, the governments of British Columbia and of Canada,

so the larger country, had been trying to figure out what to do about it for a really long time. So they had a bunch of theories about what they should do about River Rock. For a while, they talked about using it, like not blowing it up and using it as a support for a bridge from the mainland. And there's always been sort of this tension between Vancouver Island and Vancouver.

the sort of surrounding area. Yeah, I know what's confusing. Vancouver isn't on Vancouver Island, but anyway. You do that just to confuse us. That's my take. I used to work. I grew up in North Vancouver. I grew up in part of Vancouver, and I used to work at a tourist restaurant,

and people would be like, oh, so we're going to Vancouver Island today? And I was like, oh, are you? It's like a four-hour trip. No, you're probably not going there for a day trip. Anyway, they talked about building a bridge using Ripple Rock as support. They never ended up doing that, and in fact, there's never been a bridge built, and that's still a live issue. But I think my sense from reading about this is that in this case, the reason a bridge didn't get built is because of the shipping potential of the inside passage and how much of an issue ripple rock was for trade. So I think it became kind of a political hot potato, and in the end, it was just easier to blow it up, honestly.

I actually looked in the Hansar, the minutes of parliament for 1947, so this is a few years before it was blown up about a decade before. And I found one member of parliament telling another it was his quote-unquote problem child. They were weirdly polite to one another, but I sense there was maybe some tension. And in the same debate, they talked about the option of blowing it up with a nuke. And the member of parliament from a local riding there was like, that's too close to my house. Like he literally said, in Parliament, that's too close to my house. You can't use a nuke there. And in the end, here is how they blew up Ripple Rock. And this is a quote from the local Campbell River Museum's page on this.

Obviously, it's quite an important piece of local history. They dug a really big shaft, and this is not near the rock, this is off land, basically. From the shaft, a 2,500-foot tunnel was driven to the base of Ripple Rock, where it divided into branches for the two pinnacles. So from vertical tunnels 300 feet high, they're extended a series of coyote tunnels into which the explosives were placed. 1,400 tons of Nitromex 2H explosives, which is 10 times the amount needed for a similar explosion above water or on land, were packed into the drilled rock. So that takes us to 1958, specifically one day in 1958 where they finally tried it.

And an interesting thing about this moment, and another reason why I'm really surprised that I'd never heard of this, is that in the late 1950s, so market penetration for televisions had gotten a lot higher, and many people had them. And the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, that's our national broadcaster, made the blowing up of Ripple Rock one of its first live coast-to-coast TV broadcasts. You can see it on YouTube, there's actually a couple of different things the CBC did with that footage, and I'm really hoping we can drop a link into the show notes because it's honestly, it's some hilarious vintage television. So I've seen a couple of different pieces of footage on this, as I said, and I tried to write my own description of it, but I actually really liked the local museum, the Campbell River Museum's description, so I'm just going to quote it here.

When Ripple Rock blew at 9.31 a.m. on April 5th of 1958, the site was stupendous. 700,000 tons of rock and water erupted in a blast that reached a height of 1,000 feet. The spectacle lasted less than 10 seconds before the debris was engulfed in a cloud of gas. So if you've ever seen photos of, for example, the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests, you kind of have a sense of what an explosion happening underwater and prompting these huge eruptions looks like. And it does look kind of similar, although obviously there's no... sort of nuclear cloud associated with it. When I learned about this originally, I was actually writing an article. My first thought was, wait, but what happened to all the fish? Oh, because

I've actually been to where this happened, and Campbell River is kind of in the middle of, like, it's not a place you would normally end up unless you had a reason to be there. Like everywhere along the West Coast, there's a lot of biodiversity and there's a lot of aquatic biodiversity, and there's, you know, tons of sort of vibrant underwater life. And I, I was kind of like, but what, but didn't you worry about the fish? What about the fish? What about the, you know, the corals and the sea stars and the stuff? Why'd you have to blow up their home?

I sort of dug in on this. So the Campbell River Museum, which I quoted above, they note that the fisheries department was doing a bunch of monitoring when this happened, which, you know, I was kind of like, whew. But they found that five orca, a school of porpoises, two sea lines, and one first seal seen near the area before the explosion, were all seen again afterwards, so they didn't blow any of them up, which is... That's good.

Which is, I mean, that's generally a good thing. But I, so I wanted this tangent afterwards trying to figure out if they had ever published any kind of report on the, you know, the environmental impacts of what had happened or if they had ever thought about it. And I'm sure they thought about it. I wasn't able to find anything specifically on this, but I did a bunch of reading on the effects of underwater explosions on fish, which is something that was pretty heavily studied in, especially the 60s and 70s because they started thinking about oil and underwater mining. And I think it's pretty safe to say, based on some of the stuff I read, that the detonation did a significant amount of local damage to the area of ripple rock. Sure.

So it would have destroyed the seafloor and these two pinnacles, which, I mean, as most people, most scientists who study the stuff know, anytime you have anything coming up in the ocean, it becomes like a little island almost, where, you know, the higher you can get, the species change because up near the surface, there's different light, there's different warmth, there's just a different climate, basically. So that sort of local ecosystem was completely destroyed, you know, it was blown up. But I think, and again, I couldn't find anything significant on this. I think it's probably by now, you know, more than about 70 years later. Wow. How did it become 2020? Anyway, sorry.

I think it's pretty safe to say that by 2020, it's probably, you know, the ecosystem has restored itself and there is life there again. It's just maybe a little bit different. Nature is healing. I don't know if I go that far. We are the explosion. Yeah, well, in this case, we certainly perpetrated the explosion. So just a couple notes to end on. The detonation had two long-term effects.

It opened up the inside passage for a lot more trade. and in the long-term cruise ships. I, like, having done some reading about this, I don't think that the big Alaska cruise, as we know it today, would look the same, if not for it, because that whole portion of the inside passage would be very different, and I don't think cruise ships would be able to navigate it.

The other thing is that the Ripple Rock explosion was a really big example of successful underwater detonation, and if you sort of look up Ripple Rock, this is where you'll see the most citations. It's still sometimes cited in literature, about underwater explosions, because it was really big, and for what they wanted to achieve, it was successful, and it actually did. I mean, again, it completely destroyed an ecosystem, a local ecosystem, but it actually did, you know, not cause any huge impacts. There was no tsunami.

There was no earthquake. I mean, a big thing on the West Coast is they often worried that big explosions would cause earthquakes, because earthquakes are always of concern out there. You know, it didn't do anything like that. And by all accounts, it wasn't even heard very far away. Like, it, in the nearby town of Campbell River, it was actually pretty quiet. I also just wanted to end on another historical note. When I was digging in on this, this is like one of those, I think it's called, considered like a Canadian heritage moment. And anytime there's a Canadian heritage moment, the CBC today, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, sort of covers the anniversary and stuff. And there's all this like stuff about it. And I found something from the 60-year

a few years ago. And what they're talking about, I guess they spoke to one of the guys. So one of the anchors who was present, his, like, his tech, and he noted that, you know, evidently at least one of the CBC broadcasters who were anchoring their live coverage of the explosion, and they were doing so from a bunker, like, nearby. He was a bit stressed out about having to cover this massive explosion, and he had a few too many the night before. Yeah, which, I mean, man, it was the 50s. It was definitely Like, I was reading that, and it was like, wow, okay, madmen. Yeah. And he actually woke up at, like, three in the morning having a panic attack that he had missed

the explosion and called head office in Toronto. So that's three-hour time difference. So it would have been like, six in Toronto, being like, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I missed it. And they were like, go back to sleep your drug. Or I can only imagine that's how the conversation went. But I guess the thing that sort of caught me about that is I was trying to imagine what the sound being right by this thing in a bunker.

must have done to his head the next day, like the poor guy. And then that's the story of Ripple Rock. Yeah, it's, it just, it sounds so wacky and to hear it went off so seamlessly, really, except for some local fish, who I'm sure were pretty bummed out and or killed. Yeah. But, you know, on the whole, a pretty successful operation. And it really didn't seem like it should be, you know. Well, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

Okay, we're back. And I'm here to talk about the racist history of medicine. Shocking. Has never come up before. Definitely not an area of interest of mind. As is the case for most of us, I think, and should be the case for all of us, I have been thinking a lot about systemic racism recently. And separately, I've been thinking a lot about vaccines and like the history of disease, no particular reason. And I was talking this morning to my partner Oliver, who loves to suggest topics for weirdest thing when I don't have one ready to go.

And he pointed out that he was like, you know, you always have these things that you know, so you think everybody knows a common theme on weirdest thing. And he said he had only learned about the history of pre-vaccination, vaccination, variation, which involves often rubbing pus on open wounds. He had only learned about that very recently. It had come up on an episode of The Great, which is a Hulu's show about Catherine the Great, which is delightful, though often historically inaccurate. it does not pretend to be to follow the true course of history at all, but does kind of hit beats that truly occurred in history.

And one of them is Catherine the Great's championing of variolation. And I was like, I mean, I remember being in middle school and going to like a Civil War reenactment area and a lady graphically describing rubbing smallpox pus into it. wounds to us. I was like, did you not have that field trip? And he said no. So I thought, wow, okay, I guess maybe I should talk about smallpox. And so where to begin? Because there are a few points in history we want to hit here. There's the point where Veriolation became the norm. thanks to some very powerful people like Catherine the Great. Though I will say that as the show on Hulu makes clear,

Russia was a pretty backwards place at the time in like the 1760s, and they were like the last country to get into this, frankly. It was actually already common in other areas. But the story of how it became widely adopted in England and a lot of Europe, and in the American colonies is really interesting and features and often ignored or glossed over black man and slave. And so that was totally new to me. And reading about it, it seemed like a really important story to tell. So I found this great piece in Undark, which is the science magazine from MIT by Lashira Nolan.

who's a medical student at Harvard Medical School. And she makes the case that this slave who was named Onesimus by his owner has really been, you know, written out or glossed over in this story and really deserves much more credit than he's given. So I'm going to go back even a little bit further in history. I know. Things existed before the 1700s. It's true.

Because one must ask, where does this practice of inoculating yourself against disease by giving yourself a little bit of it start? Because that is how virulation worked. You would, what became common in Europe and the Americas was this strategy of giving yourself a little cut or poking yourself with a needle. When I say yourself, it was probably a doctor, but you get what I mean. And that needle or what you were rubbing into the cut would have pus from the pox of someone with smallpox. And you would generally take that pus from someone who had had a mild form of the disease. Not everyone who gets smallpox gets horribly ill. Certainly not everyone who gets smallpox dies. And so you would basically be intentionally giving yourself a mild form of smallpox. So it wasn't like modern vaccination

where the goal is to not get sick at all. Obviously, that took a lot of work and research to make happen, but virulation was about building up your body's immunity to smallpox while experiencing as few symptoms as possible. And it wasn't without risk. Some people would still get seriously ill or even die, and, you know, most people it worked on. It's not like you had like asymptomatic smallpox and then walked around with immunity, like you were still sick for like a week, wondering if you would suddenly take a turn for the worse and then die of smallpox. It was not an easy, risk-free, or pleasant method of avoiding the disease, but compared to the really high fatality rate and, like, awful scarring and psychological effects, people could suffer

if they got a very bad case of smallpox. It was a huge innovation. It did a wonderful job. It's kind of incredible how something's. so simple could work so well. And there are two different potential origins for it, which I find so fascinating. So we know that in the 1500s, there were people writing about forms of inoculation in China and India. It's possible that they had existed for some time in those countries, but we don't have evidence of such. There is some very like shrouded in myth discussion of there being

inoculation in China among Taoist or Buddhist monks as early as like 1,000 AD, but there isn't a lot of text that's easy to evaluate from a medical standpoint about that. So it's hard to tell whether what they were doing was inoculation in a way that like worked the way we know inoculation works or whether there were just some kind of ceremonies that sort of featured aspects that were similar to inoculation we'd see in the future. But however early it started, we know by the 1500s it was being used in China and India. And in China, actually, they would take usually a powder from ground-up scabs from smallpox stores. and what I find really interesting is that part of the process was, according to one journal article I read, was that you were supposed to carry that powder around like on your person for some number of days or weeks

or treat it with like herbs and steam and that would have served to kill some of the viral particles in it to weaken the viral dose you were getting. But the way they administered it was, was that it was called insufflation where they would blow it up a patient's nose. Oh, no. So they would put it in a pipe and then blow it up the nose, and you would get a nice little dose of, you know, maybe some slightly herbaceous smallpox powder. And, you know, that smaller viral load would result generally in a less severe.

illness and then you would have immunity. And we do have evidence today. Sarah, you recently wrote a piece on this with regards to COVID that when you get like when you're exposed to fewer viral particles, you tend to get a less severe form of the disease. Yeah, I was just going to say that, but like this is, I kind of forgot this about like early quote unquote vaccines that like it is basically the same principle that just like if you if you can expose someone to a very small number of viral particles you give their immune system a better chance at like both killing it and creating a system to be like ah I know this this is smallpox I'm going to fight this off right and that's one of the reasons that face masks seem to work in kind of lowering the overall risk around

COVID because even if you're spreading viral particles, you're spreading fewer of them because more of your mouth and nasal droplets are getting trapped. So I thought that that connection was pretty cool. It's interesting, if I can butt in for a sec. It's interesting, too, that they use the nose method because I know with COVID, I was writing for Popsai on anosmia, like how COVID, having COVID-19 seems to make you lose your sense of smell. And one, of the scientists I was talking to was talking about how a lot of respiratory viruses really rely on the nose as a method of entry. So I know smallpox isn't just a respiratory illness, but that that's interesting that they had picked up on the fact that, you know, the nose was an effective way to give someone a virus. Yeah. And in fact, it may have been like too effective of a way to give the person the virus. Like there, a lot of the papers I read suggested that the reason, the method that was popular, in India at the same time, which usually involved creating some kind of cut and then introducing a pus from a smallpox patient.

The reason that that's what became widespread until the vaccine was invented is probably that it worked better, that it was a little less risky, which is super interesting. So, yeah, what we do know is that what they were doing in India seems to have. spread around Asia and the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East and into Africa, probably thanks to its use in Arab medicine and the widespread travel and trade. And one way or another, it ended up in Africa and was apparently quite widely used. And so that's how we get back to this man named Onasimis, who was kidnapped. I saw a few different claims about where he was from,

but he definitely lived in in Africa. I saw Libya mentioned a lot, but we know he was kidnapped and sold by way of the West Indies and ended up being bought for a Puritan preacher named Cotton Mast. and he was living in New England. And again, I got a lot of this information from the piece by Lashira Nolan in Undark, but I was also able to find a few other papers on Anismas. But to Lashira's point in her piece in Undark, you know, a lot of the academic work that exists that mentions an is is kind of like minimizing and condescending. So the story that often gets told,

is that, you know, Cotton Mather, who had, you know, he was a problematic dude. He owned slaves. He had also been a big part of the Salem Witch Trials, apparently, or at least a big supporter of them. And he gets credit for realizing that his slave is a pretty smart man and asking him about this mark on his body. and that realizes the brilliance of this inoculation that Onesmus says was very common where he was from. He said people take some of the juice of the smallpox, they cut their skin, they put in a drop. And in reality, we know from things that Mather wrote that he did not initially trust the information because he did not trust his the man he owned to be intelligent or know what he was talking about. And he seems to have distrusted it based on the idea that it might be, you know, like African witchcraft. And he also

firmly believed that he was obligated to convert Onesimus who resisted that reportedly for his whole life. So it, you know, we have this kind of trope in history of like, you know, the very smart white man getting a great idea from his buddy, the slave. And in fact, Mather spent, you know, some amount of time kind of ignoring this inoculation concept that he saw in front of him. But then in 1721, there was a huge smallpox epidemic in Boston. A huge number of people were sick. People were dying. And this was when Mather started really seeking out medical allies to spread the gospel of this inoculation method. So Zabdiel Boylston was pretty much the only doctor who really immediately got on board.

There were actually like satirical news articles put out suggesting how absurd this was. And on one level you can you can understand why people thought it was absurd to give yourself smallpox on purpose. But there was also a very racist. in xenophobic undercurrent, you know, people saw this as something that came from Africa and was probably not trustworthy. And in fact, there was, there were a lot of articles written suggesting that this was like a plot for slaves to give all of their master smallpox and then take over. And, you know, in history books, Zabdiel Boylston gets credit for collecting so much data that people finally listened, but, you know, the hundreds of people he infected to prove that it worked were slaves.

And that is something that does not get mentioned a lot. And, you know, as we've discussed previously on Mootus thing, that comes up again and again in the history of medicine that a lot of times when you needed to try something risky on a huge amount of people, they were trying on slaves. But, you know, inoculation did catch on after that in the U.S. And actually, meanwhile, in England, like literally around the same time, it was becoming popular, thanks to the wife of the British ambassador in Constantinople, which is now Istanbul, as you know, if you listen to, they might be giants. But Lady Mary Wortley Montague just like caught wind of the fact that everybody in the Ottoman Empire

used this and that it kept a lot of people from dying of smallpox. And she was like, we should do this. and people were skeptical, but a bunch of prisoners and abandoned children were inoculated. History is great, guys. Not upsetting at all. But it worked so well that actually then the royal family in Britain was inoculated using this method. Then of course, roughly 50 years later, Russia caught on. Good for them. Good for Captain the Great. And yeah, then it was not long after that that we got our actual smallpox vaccine, which was based on cowpox. So that was, you know, instead of using smallpox and hoping you got a weakened form of the disease, that was,

you know, infecting people with a form of pox that was not designed to infect humans. But we knew from experience that, you know, milkmaids would get like sores on their hands. And and then they wouldn't get smallpox. So that was ideal because people did not seem to drop dead of cowpox. And that really perfected this whole concept. But yeah, I mean, obviously that was just kind of a whirlwind tour that didn't even touch on most of the history of inoculation. But I just thought it was so interesting that people were so skeptical of it.

And also that, you know, we, we have this character in Onismus, who is really not given a lot of attention in medical history. And he did eventually manage to buy his freedom from Cotton Mather, but it seems like it was a real struggle for him to be able to do so. And Mather made that very difficult. So, you know, I think it's also important for us to recognize that Cotton Mather, you know, does not deserve. this trope we like to place on white men in history of being like one of the good slave owners.

He was bad. He owned a human. And it is thanks to that human that a bunch of people in America did not die of smallpox. So yeah. I was about to say, I can't believe I didn't learn that in history class, but I can't believe it, unfortunately. That's an amazing story though. Yeah. And hopefully we'll have some new vaccines soon for various diseases. is specifically one. But, you know, it's tough work to, you know, when you think about how far we've come in not that long. I mean, like 300 years is a long time in medicine, but not long in, like, the history of humanity, right? You know, we were still, like, trying to convince one another that smearing disease pus on you really was the lesser of two evils by, like, a lot. And now we have

vaccines so vaccinate your kids that's the end of my story better to have a needle than to be smeared with pus let's be honest yeah seriously in almost any scenario yes all right we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact okay we're back and uh Sarah something about celery and and pig sex I think yeah we're going to go in a very different direction it's going to hopefully be a little more fun okay celery and pig pheromones. So I feel like the first thing to cover about celery is that it's a pretty divisive vegetable somehow. Like I personally think that celery tastes like crispy water. It's like a little bit herbie to me, but I think it mostly tastes like nothing. But some people like absolutely love it

and think it is very flavorful. And some people... Because I was going to say it's crispy water, but I love that crispy water. Yeah, I mean, I like it. I'm cool with it. But some people are like, Ooh, it's so flavorful, and some people hate that flavor. Like, I have a cousin who just refuses to eat anything with celery in it. It's kind of like cilantro in this way, which I didn't know until recently. And you should also know that celery contains a hormone called Androstanone, which is a mammalian pheromone and also a human sex hormone, and also the active ingredient in boar mate,

which is the spray that farmers use to get female pigs going when they want to artificially inseminate them. Oh dear. So boars produce androstanone naturally. It's in their blood plasma and also in their saliva. And when sows inhale it, like it triggers this what's called a standing reflex, which is basically the position they have to get in so that a boar can mate with them. And it is also responsible for the boar taint flavor, which is the technical term.

Sorry, flavor? Yep. Bore taint flavor? I thought it was, could it be an anatomical thing? But it is not as, it is a flavor as in like a tainted meat. Oh. Yes. They should rename that.

I agree. Yes, it does sound like a specific part of a boar. But it is instead the flavor of meat that uncastrated pigs have, male pigs. So it's why that if you raise male pigs for meat, you castrate them, lest it get the boar taint. The hormonies. Exactly. So boormate the product, which is manufactured by DuPont Chemical Company, has synthetic androsanone.

But celery has natural androsanone in its cytoplasm, which we know, courtesy of two German biochemists who studied boar endocrinology in the late 1970. Dr. Klaus and Dr. Hoppin, and they only decided to investigate it because one of their wives, they didn't stipulate witchwife in the paper, but one of them said that the parsnips in her garden smelled of boartaint, which I guess she was familiar with. She said she was very familiar with because her husband always came home smelling of boartaint, and so she knew the smell. Oh, boy. So Dr. Klaus and Dr. Hoppin thought they should maybe look into that. And they found out that both celery and parsnips contain like very high levels of Androsanone,

like the same level as boars do in their plasma. Also, some kinds of black truffles have it. And all of this is the reason that celery and truffles, but more weirdly, I think celery, makes it on to like all of the, these listicles of foods to get your lady in the mood, like, foods that are supposed to get people going because it has Androsanone, I guess. Munch it on some ants on a log. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is, I guess, interesting because also, like, it's mainly a pig pharomode. So there's not really any evidence that human women would respond in the way that female pigs do. One would hope they would not, in fact. No, but I guess... Go ahead. Sorry, so I have a question. When female pigs have to get in...

What did you call it? Not the rutting position. It's the standing reflex. When they get the standing reflex, do you know anything about pig vaginas? Like, do they have, like, one of those weird, like, puzzle box vaginas that has to, like... Do I know about pig vaginas?

Let me tell you. I don't think pig vaginas have to, like... unfurl or anything dramatic like that. But I think it's more about sort of getting them ready because it's like pretty, bores are big. And you've got to sort of get on top. Right. And I'm also pretty sure.

I'll have to check this after to make sure just doesn't have to cut it. But I'm pretty sure that one of the reasons there's so much like work on getting female pigs in the mood is that like they, are one of the species that will not conceive unless they're like, you know, you got to set it all up for them. They got to be into it. Yeah, they do. They do have to be into it. And their fertility is much higher if they have orgasmed.

And so as a result, there is like a lot of agricultural work into how you get female pigs in the mood and also to orgasm. which includes, like, some farming workers sitting on top of female pigs' backs to mimic the weight of a boar and sort of doing what I think is sort of a slapping motion on their butts a little bit. Man, if only there was a huge subsidized, industrialized industry that monetized human female orgasm. That's all I have to say. We would know so much about human female orgasm. orgasms. We, yeah, it's astounding to me. I mean, there, there are men whose literal job it is, is to basically, like, get female pigs off. And I'm not knocking that. You know how few male

researchers there are whose job that is? Few researchers, period. Very few. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's a whole world. If you want to look that up on YouTube, or you can read about it in, in a Mary Roach book, whose title, I am forgetting. Bunk. But it's Bunk, of course. the one about sex. It is bonk. It's an incredible book. It's an incredible world of female pig orgasms. But yeah, I digress. It's interesting. But yeah, pig vaginas. I don't think they're like dangerous or intense in any way. I think just farmers are invested in getting female pigs pregnant and they'll do a lot to ensure that happens. So anyway, so the, so the The Androsanone in celery gets repeated like a lot in scientific articles about Androsanone generally, even though like literally only these two German dudes ever confirmed it.

It just sort of gets repeated because it's like a fun fact, I guess. But there was at least one study I found that investigated the sexual appeal of a symmetrical man's smell. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know of symmetrical men smell differently than unsymmetrical men. But either way, that study specifically forbade the participants from eating celery, like lest it make them sexier in an artificial way, as opposed to just their natural smell. Don't cheat your way into that symmetrical man smell.

I mean, it's an incredible paper, let me tell you. But as far as I can tell a lot of it's kind of BS, because humans, as far as we can tell, like we can smell androsstadone. But there's no evidence that humans respond to it in any kind of sexual way. Like we don't have a vamero nasal organ, which is the sensory organ that a lot of other mammals have that enables them to respond to pheromones. So pigs have one. So they respond to androsanone via the vamero nasal organ. People can smell it. So some people think it smells like vanilla and sandalwood. And other people think it smells like rancid urine. So it goes one of two ways. The two genders. Yes. Some people are completely anasmic to it, and no one is really clear why. There seems to be some genetic component to it.

I was kind of hoping that Androsanone was going to be the reason, like, some people love celery and some people hate it. Like, if you think it smells like sandalwood and vanilla, you're like, give me more celery and ants on a log. And if you think it smells like pee, you hate celery. But alas, it doesn't seem to have anything. to do with why people hate or love celery, and we don't even know why it's in celery. Like, why does it have a hormone that is in pigs and humans to begin with? It's completely unclear. I did learn that celery, like cilantro, is a thing that if you think you hate it, you could

learn to, like, at least like it, or maybe just the bar is, like, be okay with it. Like, cilantro gets touted as this thing that is just, like, it's genetic. You either are going to love it or you're going to hate it and there's just nothing you can do about it But apparently a significant part of whether you like cilantro has to do with where you first encountered Like this smell and that sounds a little bit weird because Salontra kind of seems to only have one smell and it's not a thing that you associate with anything else necessarily but like because it smells soapy to some people if you first encounter that kind of smell in Soaps and detergents

Salontera smells soapy to you and is therefore unappealing so like if you give people cilantro and they plug their nose. Most people don't really have a problem with it. It's the smell that becomes an issue. Whereas if you've had it in food first, like at a very young age, you tend to associate it with food, and so it becomes a tasty thing, or at least not something that you hate. It's not a totally hard and fast thing, but it seems to, like, be a combination of where did you first have cilantro and also, like, the smell of cilantro and also, what are your genes? Like some people seem to be smelling something that others are not. Yeah.

Well, when Claire talked about cilantro on a previous episode, and we talked about like, my family is such a perfect example of the like genetic plus environmental component because we really, I've always really hated cilantro. I've taught myself to be okay with it because I don't want to be a baby. I like eating food. But it tastes like very noticeable and very unpleasant to me. and I realized just a couple of years ago that my sister who loves cilantro, it goes on and on about what a bright and sharp taste it has, like I realize that if you taste cilantro at all, you're tasting the same thing I taste. That makes me hate it.

Like, you either think it doesn't really taste like anything or you think it has a really strong taste. And then my dad was like, yeah, I mean, it tastes like soap, but like I kind of like it. Soap, but in a good way, you know. Yeah, so we are just like three interpretations of the same taste because of our genes, which I think is really fascinating. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I'm a person who has always loved cilantro for as long as I can remember. You cannot put too much cilantro in anything for me.

But if you hate cilantro and you would learn to like to be just okay with it, you can learn to like it by like if you make a pesto and just add like little tiny bits and then you just slowly ramp it up. It's like anything, if you just start small and you just increase it over time, eventually you'll get used to it. I can't guarantee you'll love it, but you may not hate it.

You don't have to be that person at a restaurant who's like, no cilantro, no matter what. I'm going to start secretly putting cilantro in Oliver's food. He's not going to hear this episode for weeks. It'll be too late by then. I'm doing it for our own good day. I love that plan. Yeah, I support that plan.

So that's my celery story. Next time when you eat celery in like a potato salad, you just remember to tell everyone it's got some bore pheromones in it. Some bore taint smell. Some lovely boar taint. You know, I bet you those, like, taint the bodily area and taint the, like, boar taint. I bet you they have the exact same root. Oh, like, I don't know.

I mean, taint's not known for their good smell. So. I just, like, they just like, they have. up taint etymology. Oh, no. Does Google have anything for us? It's from the Latin tingerie to die, tinge. Interesting.

So taint the anatomical feature probably came later. Well, so I'm not, let's see. Okay, so, no, apparently the animatonical feature, which is slang, comes from a 1950s contraction of it ain't in humorous phrases referring to the perinium's position on the body characterized by being neither the anus nor the genitals. Wow, you know what I had heard that and I forgot. It ain't. Wow. Well, I was wrong. We all learned something today. Yeah, I was super real. Truly, that was the weirdest thing I learned this week. Yeah, I mean, honestly, the whole pig story really has it for me. Pig Taint's

smell that story about the lady being like, I smell pig tate in my partsnips. Who knew? It was a romp from start to finish. Thank you, Sarah. You are so welcome. 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.

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