The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Falcon Sex Hats, #HumanBones, Sleepy Muscle Twitches

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a hat made for romancing falcons to a booming bone trade on Instagram. 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 Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by: Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman 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

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we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learn this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldorelli. And I'm Sarah Chodosh. Just so you guys know, Sarah is Skyping in from her apartment in the Netherlands. So please excuse any subtle sound differences. We're working on getting our remote set up perfect, but this is our first shot at it. 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, being on the internet, you know. And then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we

reconvene and decide about the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, why don't you start with your tease? I will be speaking about Falcon sex hats. Wow. Yep. Didn't know they were a thing. Yep, neither did I. But boy, am I glad that they have come into my life. I know that the like band name joke is kind of played out but that is that is a great band name. The falcon sex hats. Yeah. Yeah. I love it.

I'm going to call dibs now. I can't. I have no musical talent, but I'm going to call it. I believe in you. Claire, what's your teeth? We might have a leftover evolutionary adaptation to prevent us from falling out of trees when we sleep. I mean, that seems useful. Yeah.

Totally. My tease is that it. is legal to buy and trade human bones and the business is booming on Instagram. Oh, no. Wow. Yet another beautiful thing that social media has wrought. Yes. I really want to hear more about falcon sex hats.

Same. I fear I will die if I do not know more immediately. The story of the falcon sex hat begins in the 1950s. Peregrine Falcons were declining rapidly. The population was dying out because we. We were just spreading DDT absolutely everywhere. And DDT weakens the falcon eggshells, and so the little baby falcons don't make it. And so by 1960, there's basically no Peregrine Falcons left in the wild and only to the west of the Rockies.

And so all these falconers were trying to repopulate the Peregrins, and falconers are of passionate people, is I think the best way to describe them. Like, I don't know if you've ever read anything about falconers, but I recently read H's for Hawkins. which is, I guess, not really falconing. It's hawking, but still. I took a class at the Ireland School of Falconry. Did you really? Did you get to have the falcons sit in your arm? Yeah, I did. And then one of mine wouldn't come back to me, so we dangled a dead chicken head to get it back. It worked. I personally always come for a dead chicken head. Yeah, so falconers are very passionate people, and they were determined that they were going to save the Paragon Falcons.

but the way in which you save peregrine falcons is you know you have to go into the animal husbandry world which is to say that you have to learn how to do artificial insemination on birds we do it a lot for like farm animals like cows and pigs and things we've been doing that for a long time birds are a little challenging especially like birds of prey who don't love being manhandled but the falconers were determined and boys there are a lot of details about how it is that you get a falcon to reproduce. So two falconers, James Weaver and Tom Cate, they took it upon themselves. They got falconers from all over the country to donate their falcons, not knowing whether

they would ever be returned again. And they figured out, essentially, how to jerk off a falcon is really what it boils down to. Wow. There's a description, which I feel I must read to you. Proceed. So it says to collect semen. the male is caught, wrapped in a towel, and taken to a well-lighted room.

It's not clear to me whether that's like the falcons preference or the men's preference, but it's well-lighted. And he has placed breast down on a foam pillow. In Ithaca, we like to use three people. Some other places, I guess, get away with two. One's person's sole responsibility is to hold the falcon and assure its safety. This leaves the others free to concentrate on the massage and collection. So you spread the falcon's legs and you just give it a little massage. You do like the lower back, you get the belly, you get the sides, and then you apply some light

pressure on the pubic bone, and then you use your thumb and your fingers to expose what is basically, it's not really a bird penis, but it's like the analogous structure called the papilla, which is inside its cloaca, and you just use that to sort of squeeze it on out. Wow, the band jester Sarah's making are really. Yeah, you're missing out. really subtle and yet horrifying. So wow. Yeah. So where are the hats?

Yeah. So surprisingly, this was not a super popular way to get a falcon to reproduce. That's good. You know, it takes three people. It only takes three to five minutes to get a falcon off. But a man named Lester Boyd from Pullman, Washington. He was a falconer. He decided that there had to be a better way. And so he invented, it's more properly termed,

the copulation hat because they don't like to call them sex hats. But, you know, the falcons didn't like being held down physically, I guess. And so instead you can court the falcon with a hat. Because basically... Can really romance it with the hat. I mean, you're joking, but like you have, you do. Yeah, no, I assumed. Yeah, no, it doesn't work on wild falcons because you have to get them to imprint on humans.

Like, that's part of, as I understand the process of, like, just being a falconer is that you have to get your hawk to accept you and adapt to you and not treat you like you're a bird. So it's like any relationship, it takes work. Yeah. You have to like wear the same clothes. Like it's advised that you wear like the same jacket every day. And you have to wear the hat at all times around the falcon so that it just thinks that that's how you look all the time. And birds get very accustomed to like their hat.

So like you can't change hats on them part way through. And you spend some time getting to know the falcon. hanging out with it, and also importantly, acting like a falcon. So, like, you got to make falcon sounds. You got to know the right chirps to make. You can use your arm to pretend that you're like a birdhead, like your hand is the birdhead. And you make sort of like little bobbing sounds. They do this, like, bobbing thing with your head.

And there's a video, which I will post, which is incredible, of just making a sound that is apparently called e-chipping. E-chopping. When you're ready, you make the E-chopping sound, you turn your back to the male falcon, and then if the falcons into it, he flies over, and he lands on the hat, and he shudders in a really upsetting way, and he ejaculates under the hat. And then you can take, it's like a really small amount of semen. So you can use like a little capillary to basically like a little pipette, and you just take it off and you pop it into a lady falcon. You also have to romance the lady falcon. and then your job is done. That's quite the job.

Yeah. I actually found a beautiful quote from Brad Wood of Olympia Washington, who like is one of a handful of people who actually makes his living, artificially inseminating falcons. And he said, you know, I lead a fairly normal life, meaning I have a family. I have a wife. I value my human relationships. It can be difficult to act like a falcon every day for three months.

You can't just casually do it whenever you want. to. So, yeah, breeding season is three months long, and it sounds like Brad Wood just spends like literally every day romancing falcons. And you got to like, during breeding season, you have to, like, keep getting them to mate with your hat because otherwise they sort of like lose the mood. So you got to keep them going. You got to keep them in the mood. Why do you have to do artificial insemination? Why can't you just let like, I guess, they don't want to leave it to chance or? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, because I know with horses and cows and things, well, especially with horses, that like it's about a safety thing because it can be like pretty violent. You don't want the lady horses and cows to get injured.

Maybe with falcons, it's just faster. That's my guess is that you can get them to mate more often and inseminate more ladies. Efficiency. Yeah, it worked. I mean, they bred 4,000 peregrine falcons that way. and the Peregrine falcon came off the endangered species list in 1999, just because these... All because of a hat. Three men, three men in a falcon and a hat.

I mean, they repopulated North America. Like, there are 50 Peregrine Falcons in New York City alone. Oh, wow. Wow. So we should all thank the Peregrine sex hat. That's amazing. What a tale. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back.

And we're back. And I'm going to jump in with my fact. about bones on Instagram and buying them and selling them and trading them. This fact actually comes from a book excerpt that we published on Popside.com recently. It's from Skeleton Keys, The Secret Life of Bone, by Brian Sweetek. It is a really fun book. I have not finished it yet because I left my copy in Europe, but it's a hoot. All things bone, all the time.

Birds boning, and now here we are. All bones all the time. That's us. That's our brand. Yes, exactly. Yeah, so in my episode about where corpses end up when they get donated to science or otherwise, which was back in season one, I talked a little bit about how human remains are surprisingly easy to buy. And that, like the legality of that is more dubious if we're talking about like someone's severed leg or brain or something. bones, however, except for a few specific protections.

Like Native American remains, for example, are protected under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, of course, because for a long time they were very much disrespected and disregarded. So there's a lot of work to make sure that those bones, if they're found in the market, are returned to their descendants so that they can be treated respectfully. but other than that, you pretty much can just like buy bones. There's none of the same potential legal trouble of like, you know, getting organs, for example. Why would you want to buy bones? Well, I don't really know, Claire, but a lot of people too. So, yeah, in this chapter of Brian's book, he talks about the fact that buying and selling bones has been banned ostensibly on a couple of sites, including eBay and Etsy, just because that Etsy? You can buy bones on Etsy? Well, they banned it. Etsy does not want you to buy and sell bone, human bones.

Good. Good on Etsy. But people still do it anyway, which I'll get to in a minute. The reason eBay and Etsy tried to ban these bones is that it was like, icky. You know, they were like, where are they coming from? Can we really be sure that these are like ethically sourced human bones? So they just banned it out. Right. Instagram is fine with it, I guess. So people advertise for like selling and trading. First of all, just like human bones in general, like whatever you want them for. But also there's a lot of like art being made out of human bones, which I'll embed some examples of on popside.com, which for what it's worth, I am not encouraging you to buy the bone art. Bone art. Please don't buy human bone art. Does this mean that there are people on Instagram who were like one FEMA, 30 bucks? Literally. Link in the bio. Yes. Oh, my God.

And there have been a few studies on this. One that Brian mentions in the book is the Louisiana Department of Justice tracked the sale of 454 human skulls on, I believe, eBay, back before the ban. And they found that 56 of those 454 skulls were either of 4154 skulls. were either of forensic or archaeological interest, so they should not have been listed for sale. Those bones belonged in a lab or possibly in an evidence box somewhere. So the paper was so disturbing that that was when eBay changed their store policy. It was like within a week. And now all human remains except for hair are banned on eBay, which at first really freaked me out.

But I assume that's because, like, there are extensions and wigs made of real human hair. I think you can't really ban human hair. But then also there's like a bunch of really cool Victorian art and jewelry made out of human hair as like a momentum morey thing. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. People would make like chokers out of human hair and like locket. That's a reminder that they're going to die? Well, it was to remember people who had died and also to remember that you would one day just be a locket made out of hair, I guess. Victorians were very strange.

But those things are like weird and gross but also beautiful. And like as long as they are from that era when they were actually being made out of like family members' hair, you know, it's very different from like buying someone's skull that's been carved into an art piece. So I get it. Hair very different from bone. But also don't like non-consensually take some random person's hair and turn it into jewelry after they're dead. That seems rude. Yeah, hair is only meaningful if you know where it came from. Exactly. I don't want just this random hair I found on the street.

There's a big gap between a locket with your grandmother's hair in it after she's died and like buying some stranger's hair and turning it into jewelry to sell on Etsy. So there's a lot going on here. So are people buying, are people buying like individual bones or like? All sorts. All sorts of bones. What's the most popular bone purchased on the internet today? You know. Also, where are these people finding all these bones? All great questions. There's this study that Brian mentioned that I had to read more about. It's called the Insta dead, the rhetoric of the human remains trade on Instagram. It's by Damian Huffer and Sean Graham. And this was published in 2017 and was looking at, I think they focused on like 2013 to 2016 in their data collection and like a really exhaustive analysis of all of the posts they could find related to buying, selling,

trading human bones and analyzing the language in them to figure out kind of what was happening here. And they did see a huge uptick between 2013 and 2016. Is that just because the world got darker? Bones sellers were like, oh, wow, I can use Instagram. Right. They're like, it either became more common just because like people saw that it was working. They're like, it's probably not actually becoming more common that people want to buy bones. It's just that people are less nervous about trying to do it on Instagram and are having more success doing it on Instagram. And of course, now that like Etsy and eBay are not friendly places to your bone art, Instagram has become the hot spot. So there were three posts from 2013 that totaled approximately

$5,200. And then 25 posts in 2014 for almost $10,000 altogether. 61 posts in 2015 for $30,000 and 77 posts from 2016 totaling almost $60,000. I was scrolling through hashtag human bones, which is one hashtag of several that will lead you. Hashtag human bones. Yeah. Hashtag human bones. There is a wide range. There are people who are basically selling like anatomy lab specimens, you know, like a fully articulated set of foot bones that you might imagine seeing on like a podiatrist's shell.

Or like there's a guy who is wearing a necklace just made out of human spinal column. Like it was a big necklace. Whoa. That actually sounds pretty cool. There was one lady who had like her hair. Instead of a hair tie, it was done with vertebrae. So vertebrae are definitely popular. Wow.

But I think skulls are the most popular. And I get why because like a human skull is, it's one thing that you can put on your shelf. You're not like, here's my pile of bones. it's a skull. Also, it's immediately recognizable. Like, if you put a femur up there, that could be any femur. Right. You want people to know you got human bones. Hashtag human bones. Emphasis on the human. Yeah, you're not a, you're not a hunter. You went on Instagram and you bought a real live human skeleton, not live, a real dead human skeleton. A walk and talking skeleton. Wait, so $60,000. You said there was 77 in that year? Yeah. That is $7,8.000.

$80 on average per piece. That's a lot of money to pay for a human bone. I don't know. How much do you want to pay for a human bone? Do you want them to be cheap? I don't think that's good. I mean, I guess that means that people are buying them like as art. Right. These are investment pieces. Yeah. One of the things they found in this paper that they were really fascinated by was that there was this whole like subgenre of human bone trade that was like artists making stuff out of human bone. Skull is a very common word in these postings, but oddities, oddity, and macabre were then the next three most common words in these postings. Once you removed like common words in every sentence like A and the and whatever. Also like curiosities, taxidermy, goth, hand-painted, crafty.

Crafty. And yeah, so one thing that Ryan talks about in his book and that's discussed in this paper, that I think is really important to think about now that we are all thinking about human bones on Instagram, is that there's all this language about them being like antiques and curiosities and, you know, goth oddities. And the authors of the paper suggested that this language is like effectively dehumanizing the bones, that people are, first of all, adamant that they're authentic, but also very often adamant that they come from like the early 20th, century. Like, they, they want to make it clear that these are from a time when it was, you know, these other people stole these bones from someone. The bad thing has been done. We can't undo it. So let's make art out of the bones. Wow. It's weird and upsetting that we're just, we're cool

with wearing untrading human bones just as long as it's old enough. Right. But it is like because it distances you from what you know is a bad thing, right? Like, we know it's not great. Yeah. that people who very almost certainly did not intend for their remains to end up on a necklace. We know that's not great. I'm sure even the people selling the art know that that's not great. But the further you can distance yourself from like the actual theft of the bones, the more okay it seems. The study authors and Brian make the point that this is really similar to the way archaeologists used to act about human remains. which is why we got into such a gross place with the way we acquired and collected bones that belong to people from other cultures and other parts of the world.

And like archaeology has mostly gotten away from that. You know, there's certainly still some weird, like, private collections or even bones owned by research institutions that, like, we should all feel gross about because they were stolen. But for the most part, the academic community has been like, yeah, No, like let's not steal bones from people. We've come such a long way. Yeah. So yeah, it's really interesting. Just like a fascinating glimpse at the lengths people will go to to feel good about wearing stolen vertebrae on their bodies.

What's the conclusion here? Don't buy human bones on Instagram. Don't buy them. Don't do it. Yeah. Just normal jewelry, please. If you're making your living selling human bone arms. I respect your craft, but suggest that perhaps the bones of another species might be a better

option. You know, some not endangered species, bones not like stolen from another country. You know, there are so many bones in the world, so many types of bones. So many bones. So many bones. There's so many bones. So many bones that you know were never taken from a person who wanted to keep all their bones in one place. because they're not human bones. So maybe make and buy art from those bones. Thank you. And good night.

It's as simple as that. Just don't buy human bones. Great. I'm glad we solved this crisis. I'm glad no one will ever buy human bones again on the internet. I feel great about myself. And Brian should feel great about his book. We're going to take a quick break.

And then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey, weirdos. Looking for awesome popular science merch? We've got you covered at Popsai. Threadless.com. Pick up T-shirts, notebooks, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite P-S-I-S-I-S-I-T-LadLest shows, like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at Popsi.threadliss.com. That's P-O-P-S-C-I.threadless.com. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't you tell us about falling out of trees?

Yes, thank you. I would love to. This all started a few years ago. I found that as I was falling asleep, just when I was about to be in, like, deep, relaxing slumber, I would have some sort of, like, muscle or limb twitch that would, like, aggressively wake me up and force me awake and really, like, startle me. My boyfriend at the time was like, wow, this happens every night, and sometimes you don't even realize it. And I was like, oh, gosh, there's something deeply wrong with me. But that was like a few years ago, so it wasn't at my like peak hypochondria. So I was like not as obsessed with my bodily functioning as I am today. So I think I just ignored it for a bit. And it went away, I think anyway.

That's the best strategy for dealing with like most new health problems is just like, well, see if it sticks around. Yeah. Just see if it's either going to get worse or get better. Only time we'll tell. Anyway, so it stopped, so I never thought about it again until a few months ago when it all started again. And I was sleeping at night and I would fall asleep or almost fall asleep and then I would randomly like twitch awake. And then it was also happening at my desk at work.

I would be in like deep writing mode. And then my like left leg or my right leg would like twitch. And so that's when I decided that I was diseased. Definitely going to die. Just how every Clairefax. I know. I really need to get off the hypochondri be just for my own, like, same sanity. I know. It's just not good for you. Right. So as any good health reporter would do, I skip the doctor and went straight for the internet and the medical literature pub med. As it turns out, I'm super normal. Human bodies are weird and unsurprisingly, we still have no idea what causes this. But I will tell you, everything I learned. So what I was experiencing and if any of you all have experienced it,

Rachel. I have. Yes. It's the feeling like when you're going to fall kind of, right? And you're just like, yeah. Yeah. I get that too. Yeah. I always feel like I'm either falling or I feel like it's like a huge leg movement, but then it never is. Yeah. I'm always like, oh no, I've woken up everyone asleep everywhere and then it's just me. I have been woken up by my partner's twitching. He's a very violent twitter. Oh, interesting. But you have never have been awoken by your own aggressive. Oh, no, I get waking up by my own eyes. Just also Steve's test.

Twice. Cool, glad I'm not alone in this. So essentially, what we are all experiencing is what the medical community has named Hypnic Jerks, or my particularly favorite term for it is, quote-unquote, normal startle jerk. It sounds like a variety of person. Yeah, it's great. It's like an insult, a normal startled jerk. Totally an original jerk. Just as I described earlier, they are these sudden contractions of one or more body segment occurring mostly at sleep onset.

They are highly sporadic and affect all ages and both sexes with the same prevalence. And wait for it, between 60 and 70% of the general population. Get this. I have never been more feared by something that affects more. percent of the population before. I was like, wow, my hypocondria is at its peak right now. One study even found them to be a frequent, underestimated sleep-related motor phenomenon, meaning that we don't study it. We didn't even realize that 60% of people had it. Maybe it's as much as 90% we really don't know. Apparently, people don't care as much about their muscle jerks as I do.

Now, before I dive deeper into the physiological specifics, I've been thinking a bit about all these diseases that I present to everybody. So I just wanted to make it clear that if this is what it sounds like to you, you're probably normal. But if you have like weird muscle twitches, go to a doctor. Don't do what I do. What's a weird muscle twitch, though? Okay. Like, you know, if your muscle is like twitching in pain or if it's doing it all the time, not just at night, as I'm describing. If you have other weird symptoms, don't be like, oh, I heard this on weirdest thing.

Claire says I'm fine. Yes, exactly. Just go to a doctor. It's much better. The whole office uses Claire as a doctor for the record. So as common as they are in humans, we still don't really understand what happens, but we do have a few various hypotheses, ranging from boring to super interesting, that have been proposed for the ideology of hypnic jerks. One of them states that these jerks are a natural step in the transition from alertness to sleep made via the reticular activating system where some of the nerves of the hand and legs misfire.

Another theory states that it's a basic protective reflex. Complete relaxation of the muscles is interpreted by the brain as falling. And in order to prevent this, the brain orders the muscles to twitch. Now, a related theory with that that's been proposed by a couple of evolution. biology researchers, and especially by one group at the University of Colorado in a paper entitled The Effects of the Tree to Ground Sleep Transition in the Evolution of Cognition in Early Homo sapiens. They surmise that it could be a way for primates to readjust their sleeping positions before falling asleep so that they didn't literally fall out of a tree and badly injure themselves as they

try to get some sleep. So imagine way back in the day, even primates apparently still do this, that we're falling asleep, we're falling asleep, and we might fall out of a tree, so we jerk ourselves awake. It's like when you're sleeping on an airplane and you're sort of like slowly leaning over, but you still have like that little bit of like muscle tension to keep you up and then you really start falling asleep and you fall and jerk yourself back awake. It's like, Like that, except all we're doing now is keeping ourselves some like drooling on a stranger. Right. Totally. Yeah. So that I was like, okay, that makes sense to me, just evolutionary mechanism. But then I was like, why did it do it to me so often a few years ago, then full stop and then extreme back again? Apparently it can also be aggravated by anxiety and stress, caffeine, exercise, or sleep deprivation. All things. All things. Journalists do. All things I do. Well, hopefully you exercise.

but all things pop-side journalists do. Yeah, so if you, and I think at that time I was probably very stressed looking for a job, if I recall. And so that could have aggravated it. And then now I drink a lot of caffeine and exercise a lot. So I'm thinking that that's explaining all of my muscle twitches. But muscle twitches as you're falling asleep are different than muscle twitches that you get during the day. ones that you get during the day are often caused by like fatigue or sitting for too long or even vitamin deficiencies like magnesium or B12. So if you are just twitching all day long like I do, so maybe I need to see a doctor that it might be from these things or just from being too tired.

But this one that happens when you fall asleep is likely an evolutionary mechanism to prevent us from dying. Wow. Yes. Wow. That makes sense because I guess if you were like back in the day, if you were really stressed and anxious, like you'd probably going to sleep would be a dangerous time of the day for you. That's true too. Wow. I had muscle twitches like this really, really badly when I first moved to Holland and was quite stressed.

And now I know why. See? See, you don't need a doctor. I mean. But use my disclaimer from before. And I just think it's like in crazy how violent it is. Like, I don't know, I would be almost asleep and it would literally wake me completely up. And it almost feels like it's like this whole body reaction.

I don't know how bad yours are, Rachel. Yeah, mine are very violent. And honestly, I think if it happened while I was sleeping in a tree, I would fall out of the tree because of the twitch. Because I always, I feel like I'm jerking really hard. And then my reaction to that is to genuinely like jolt up because I'm. like the hell. Totally. Yeah.

I wonder now with all these like sleep trackers that we have that will get a better understanding of hypnotic jerks. Yeah. But that's it. That's my fact. So if you have nighttime twitches, rest assured you're okay. Rest. Nice. Thank you.

Okay. Great fact this week. What was the weirdest thing we learned? Bones. Salcan sex hats. Yeah. Salkin sex hats. Wow.

I make a triumphant return. I'm so happy. For me, it was the bones for sure. That's really upsetting. Thank you. It's upsetting, but I am going to have to go on Instagram and find them. I know. I can't believe, like, hashtag human bones is going to be in my Instagram history now.

Just don't buy any. No, no, looking only. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, T-shirts, tote bag,

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