The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Fatal Insomnia, Astounding Poops, NYPD Bees

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a plan to bring George Washington back from the dead to a solar storm that powered telegraphs with no batteries. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? Buy tickets to our live show in NYC! www.popsci.com/wtlive The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank. Can you imagine, like, if your hoop was so magnificent that people from all over the world came to, like, lay down on it? At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts. 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. And I'm Eleanor Cummins. You are running out of time to get tickets for our live show on September 14th at Caviat in New York City. It's at 6.30 p.m. It's going to be super

fun. Our facts are going to be especially weird. And you might even win a fun prize that you get to brag about. So please be there. Tickets are just $12 and you can get them at popside.com slash WT Live. That is popside.com slash WT Live and they're going to go fast. Buy one. And on that note, every week on the weirdest thing, we start by each teasing a little fact that we picked up while reporting, reading, writing, and then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene, and vote on what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, why don't you go first? I only have two words. Fatal insomnia. Oh no. I know. Good two words. Thank you. It's going to haunt me. Okay,

I'll go next. The New York Police Department has official beekeepers. What's up with that? That's mine. Do they wear bulletproof vass? to protect themselves from the bees? You know, let's wait. Okay. Until it's my turn. Get ahead of yourself. I found out that there are a lot of beaches that are renowned for their beauty that are

really made out of fish poop. So that's my tease. Amazing. Wonderful. Oh, gosh. It's a tough week. I want to hear more about the insomnia, mostly because if it's last, it will leave with me and haunt me for the rest of the day.

Great. Okay. Our story begins with Michael Cork in 1991. He was 40 at the time. He was a high school music teacher. He started having some trouble sleeping. At first he thought it was maybe his wife who snored a lot, apparently. Rude. I know.

And being the kind woman that she apparently was, she slept on the couch for 10 nights because he was, I guess, just really, really convinced that it might be her snoring. but he didn't sleep any better with her on the couch. And after literally months of not being able to sleep very well, he at some point went to a doctor because that's concerning. If you can't sleep for months, please go to a doctor. But none of the doctors seemed to really be able to figure it out.

He got diagnosed with all these other disorders. Like at some point someone diagnosed him with multiple sclerosis, which is not even a sleep disorder, but I think they were maybe grasping at straws a little bit there. And eventually he just literally could not sleep at all. Like he would go to bed at night and just like stare into the darkness. Can a doctor diagnose you with a curse? A witch has to clearly put this curse onto you.

That's your problem right there. Yeah. I mean like even sedatives, like you know, they tried sleeping pills and all these other methods that generally work even. I mean, sleeping pills do not really allow you to get actual healthy sleep. Right. But they'll shut you now. knock you out. Yeah, but they should be able to work on him?

No, like he just could not. It didn't do anything. And apparently during the time, like, I mean, so this is, this is all from a book called Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, who's a leading sleep researcher at Berkeley. He said that just during this whole time, it looked like, I mean, everything about this man looked like someone who had not slept in months, like just heavy eyelids looked like he just would give anything in the world to sleep even a little bit. Like that meme, like, I lay down right here.

I take nap right here. It's my favorite meme. I use it all the time. It makes me think of the movie, The Hunger, which is my favorite movies. The Hunger? Yeah, it's David Bowie, and he's a vampire. But he starts rapidly aging. That's another good diagnosis.

Have you considered the fact that perhaps your virulent vampirism has run its course, and now you are rapidly aging in the same? span of a day. In the span of a day? It was like over a couple days. But he watched David Bowie very quickly decay, which is very upsetting on a lot of levels. And he looks, you know, it's rough. Yeah. Because he like hasn't slept. He hasn't eaten. Can't suck any blood. So that's what I imagine this guy looked like. He definitely couldn't suck any blood. I can confirm that. So yeah, after eight straight weeks of literally not sleeping a wink, he just like completely degenerated. Like he could not walk properly.

I mean, he was a high school music teacher, so he tried to conduct his like student orchestra. It took him like many minutes just to walk up onto the stage to try to conduct. And after six months of no sleep, he is like totally bedridden. Like can't bathe himself, can't clothe himself. He couldn't speak. he started having hallucinations, which is like not uncommon people who have, you know, normal insomnia. Yeah.

Yeah. I was going to say like one night. And I'm over for me. Yeah. I mean, because it's basically like your body trying to dream, but you can't sleep. And so it's just desperately trying to process everything that has been happening to you. And all it can do is make you hallucinate because you can't, you can't be in the sleeping part of it. But at least it can try to like replay things that it's trying to process.

That is harrowing. Yeah. So a few months after that, he just, like, just completely shut down. Doctors tried to, like, put him into a coma so that at least, like, in some desperate attempts, like, maybe a coma would help him sleep. Maybe that would reset itself, but they, like, they could not get his brain to shut off ever. And then he died. This is the most horrifying thing I've ever heard in my life.

It will be, I hope, somewhat of a comfort to tell you that it is exceedingly rare to get this disease. See, that implies that. Someone else has had it. Oh, yeah. And that is two people too many. Yeah. I think like somewhere around 100 people like ever have been recorded to have this disease.

It's partly familial. So Michael Cork had fatal familial insomnia, which kills like everyone we've ever known who had in within 10 months. Wow. Oh, my God. Elinor looks so visibly uncomfortable. This is really painful. It's fairly horrifying. So it's caused, it's a prion disease, oddly, which I talked about on.

my last stint on this podcast and how terrified I am of prion diseases. She loves them. I just think the idea of like a misfolded protein. Like it's not anything outside of your body. It is just a protein that has misfolded in a way that spreads to other proteins. And I think that's wild. And it's usually, usually you get it from eating brains. Yeah.

Especially other human brains. Yes. And also genetic disorders like Kreuzfeld-Yacob disease. They're all horrifying because like they're just unstoppable. Like nothing that we know seems to be. able to work on them, and then mostly you die. This one is caused by a mutation in the very uncreatively named prion protein, PRNP. And in the case of fatal familial insomnia, it causes your thalamus to break down.

So like the postmortems that they've done on people, the thalamus just looks like a sponge. Like there's all these holes in it. And your thalamus is how you start the process of sleeping. Like it's basically the gate that says like, okay, now we are in sleep mode. And it sends out all the proper signals, like it shuts down your motor functions so that when you dream, you don't act out your dreams accidentally, like microbiglia. If your thalamus has holes in it, you cannot sleep. And there is nothing that anyone seems to be able to do to get you to sleep, which is just terrifying. You can also get this sporadically, which I find really upsetting, because at least if it were like a familial thing, you'd be likely to know.

Right. But yeah. But it can just happen. Yeah. And no one seems to be able to understand, like, why. Wow. That's devastating. Yeah.

And so in the people that it is familial, they are aware that, like, other family members have died this way? So I don't know that it's like a thing where if you have the gene, you definitely get it. Okay. I mean, I think it's so rare that we don't know a lot about how the genetics works. I feel like if everyone in your family died because suddenly they could not sleep. You would know what was coming for you. Yeah, I think you would know. So my hunch is that, like, the mutation doesn't.

does get carried in families, but if you have the gene, you don't necessarily stop being able to sleep. Right. But I would be horrified to learn that I had it. Yeah. I don't know what I would do. What I think is also interesting is that it took Michael Cork, like, months of no sleep to die. Right. Well, was he literally not ever sleeping at all, or was it just, wow.

Never. I can't imagine. Because most people who we have recorded, like, die from lack of sleep. It happens in, like, less than two weeks. There was one guy who stayed awake for 11 days to watch every single game of the 2012 European soccer championships while he was working his normal job. So he just stayed awake for 11 days. And then on day 12, he was just like found dead in his apartment. Right.

But that's, I think with those situations, it's like exhaustion leading to like cardiac arrest. True. Yeah. Like there was another one of a guy who had a seizure after not sleeping because he was an internet bank of America. Yeah. That was a terrible job. Around the world, there are periodically spikes of like. young people, especially in the finances, who just work themselves to death.

It's so scary. You need sleep. Like, I just don't, it's such a terrible work culture that you should just not sleep. The book, Why We Sleep, I have been recommending it to absolutely everyone I know because when I was reading this book, I started going to bed at like 9.30 every night because it was such a compelling argument for why sleep is just basically like the most important thing that you do every single day. Most people cannot tell when they are sleep deprived, and that is a problem, because if you're a person who thinks, like, oh, I get by on six hours of sleep every night, and I'm just used to that, like, you don't get used to it. You don't get better at sleeping. You're not more efficient. You're just not realizing that you're not functioning optimally. Yeah. Yeah, there was just an article from The Daily Beast talking about how there's like this phenomenon among CEOs in particular right to talk about how little sleep they get. And that it's like a popular, like, cultural meme to be like, oh, if you're a genius and

a hard worker, like, then you're, like, running off of four hours of sleep. So, there has been, like, some reporting, sort of, like, calling this out and being, like, first of all, like, that's probably not really possible unless there's something, like, wrong with you. Right. And also... Was it Elon Musk who just claimed that he, like, went, like, weeks without sleeping? Oh, yeah, when he was at the Tesla factory, he was like, yeah, I sometimes napped on the floor. And so... It's not good. Take a longer nap, Elon. Yeah, seriously. That's my take. it's a good way to avoid crying in a New York Times interview. She's well-rested.

Okay, that's true. Okay, there's a whole section of the book about emotional regulation and how incredibly important it is to get sleep so that you can, like your amygdala does not work if you don't sleep, which is why if you don't sleep or you get really bad sleep, you feel very emotional the next day. Like you're just like just crying for no apparent reason. Like stress feels way more stressful.

Like you just can't regulate your own emotional responses. I can't regulate my emotional responses on eight hours of sleep. So how do people do it on five? I don't know. Yeah. So I love this article, which was by Tanya Basu at the Daily Beast, was really great for laying out all the research. Because researchers are literally like, this isn't possible. Like a majority of them have to be lying if this many people are claiming that they're doing fine.

Because, yeah, like, not only do not have good emotional regulation, but it also, like, takes a toll in terms of, like, your response time and, like, your finer motor skills can be. Because during sleep, your body is replenishing itself in a lot of different ways. Like it is literally clearing junk out of yourselves and trying to bring everything back into homeostasis. And if you don't do that, quite literally junk accumulates in your body. And it is a terrible thing to do to yourself. Too much junk in the trunk. Of your skull. Literally.

There is a genetic mutation that is famous now where people sleep like less than six hours a night normally and are actually okay. Like they seem to have just a different way of sleeping. But it is like you are more likely to be struck by lightning than to have this genetic disorder. So if you're a person listening to this who's like, oh no, I can do it. I can only sleep four hours. It's not you. It's definitely not you. Please sleep.

You don't know how good it would feel. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back. At Outdoor Life magazine, we've never been easy on the gear we test, which is precisely why you can trust the gear we make. Introducing GuideLife, Performance, Products, and Apparel designed with the editors of Outdoor Life, made for backpackers, campers, hunters, and anyone who enjoys the outdoors. And like any great adventure, this one starts at Base Camp.

The collection includes tents, lanterns, duffles, sleeping bags and pads, and more. Available now on Amazon and olgidlife.com. And Eleanor is going to tell us about poop beaches. Hi. Sounds like a fair issue on like nude beaches, but poop beaches. We recently had you on talking about men attempting to chlorinate the ocean to get rid of poop contamination. This is true. I don't even enjoy the beat.

Maybe that's why I'm telling such horrifying stories about it. We got this book that is forthcoming, you know, sent to our office as often happens. And it's called Truer Pooh. It'll be out in October. And it's just a bunch of great animal facts. And one really stood out to me. And it's about the bumphead parrotfish. And so, sorry.

Oh, yeah. They have a funny name. A child. They have a funny face. Look him off. Is it bumpy? It's like, it. They have a very significant forehead.

A prominent brow. I'm sorry, I have to look it up. A bumphead parrotfish. A bumphead parrot fish. But the thing that's really impressive is their poop. So these little guys, I'm so sorry. I just looked them off. Oh, my God, wait.

Oh, my God, wait. I had just so Rachel. Oh, my God. That attractive. Oh, my God, they're so funny. Oh, wow. Okay, sorry. Whoever named them knew what they were doing.

I love it so much. They were like. We will have pictures for you on Popside.com. Yeah. They were like, you got to own it. You're ugly. It's your brand. You're the bumphead.

So yeah, these little guys, they're typically, like, they max out around 45 pounds. But they poop 198 pounds a year at their max capacity. And what's wild about it is that because they eat coral, it comes out as white sand. Whoa. Sorry, they poop sand? Yes. They poop the white sand that is, like, famous in the, the Maldives and in Hawaii.

Oh, my God. And so researchers have apparently calculated that based on the amount that this, you know, the populations in those areas are pooping, that probably 85% of regional sand is the Bumpet parrotfish poop. Wow. Oh, my God. Poop is amazing. I know.

Anyway, like, as a result, I feel like I got on a couple different tangents. Like, is there other good poop out there? Yes, for sure. Yes. That cube poop. Cube poop. Tell me. You know what I'm talking about the little animals?

The wombats? Wombats have cube poop. But like a bouillon cube? It looks a little bit like a bollion cube. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Why?

Are there sphincters cube-shaped? I think it has to do with just being like very compactable. I don't know. I find that impressive. I've just seen the cube poop fact a lot. Yeah, definitely. And truer poo, I believe, has a cube poop fact. There you go.

But yeah, I was just like the different ways that we use poop and animal byproducts is fascinating to me. I'm just going to go through a quick list, and then I'm going to move on to the real section that I wanted to share with all of you. It's not really about the beautiful poop of these fish. It's about just all kinds of poop. The civet coffee, right? Like the cat poop that people make into coffee, that has to be mentioned. Also the fact that honey is bee vomit, I think, should be mentioned. And then I also just want to give a shout out to sperm whales and their ambergris, which, yeah.

Yeah, you pull out and you can make perfume. But the real thing I wanted to talk about was body to poop ratios. Okay. So the fact that the bumperhead parrotfish is only 45 pounds and can produce 198 pounds of beautiful white sand poop every year got me thinking. How much poop do we produce? This is the game we're going to play. Okay. Okay.

Okay, so if I said that the average human man was like 190 pounds, like how much do you think he's pooping in a year? Oh, man. So most people are pooping once a day. Ideally. I have never thought to myself how much does that poop their way. So that's the part that's really tricky in calculating. It's got to be like a... I would guess like on the order of 150 pounds.

Oh, no. I was going to guess more than that. Not enough. Keep going. I was going to guess more like... Do you go like twice your body weight? That's closer, but a little down. Is it a pound a day?

It's nearly a pound a day. Wow. I was guessing like half a pound. Yeah, we poop a lot. 320 pounds a year is like the sort of rough estimate. And obviously this is hard to measure in a lab. But these are the conclusions that we've come to, that the average man is pooping about 320 pounds a year.

And 75% of that is water, which is also, I think, just fascinating. We poop a lot. Are there stats on female poop? Is it the same proportion? It is about the same amount. The science that I was looking at was basically saying that you can calculate it between 0.6 and 0.8 pounds a day probably. Wow.

And so then it's just like how you extrapolate from there. Wow. Yeah, it's a lot of poop. It definitely is, but it's not the most amount of poop. So one of the things that obviously that Jason and I, our producer, we're talking about being important, is how much does your dog poop? Because dog poop is ruining the earth. And so if I said that the average dog was about 40 pounds, how much do you think that guy

poops in a year? Oh, my God. Like at least three times at their wadi weight, right? Oh, so much more, Sarah. Oh, my God, really? Yeah. Five times? The research I was looking at was kind of pegging a 40-pound dog around 270 pounds of poop a year.

Wow. So, like, they're pooping like a significant amount every day. That's like, yeah, like, again, like almost similar to the amount that we're pooping, which is kind of horrifying. And so basically, like, all of this poop, then you wrap it in place. and put it in a landfill and it sits there forever, or you leave it on the side of the road to be washed away into the ocean or something. So a lot of poop, literally billions of pounds of poop just from American dogs every year.

Wow. Good Lord. It's harrowing. I'm not done. All right. If I told you that an adult African male elephant was 10,000 pounds. How much do you think he's pooping? 40,000 pounds a year. Oh, man.

So much more. What? I had to fact-tock this number like 12 times because I was like this unbelievable. Is it 100,000 pounds? It's 100,000 pounds, Rachel. Oh my God. What?

Yes. The San Diego Zoo was like an adult African elephant, like male, can poop as much as 300 pounds a day. And the smaller ones and the females are only pooping 100 pounds a day. So that, oh my God, male elephants are pooping more than a human, multiple humans worth of poop a day. It's too much poop. It's so much poop.

I found it to be incredible, but that's not the most that an animal poop. Elinart. When does it stop? It never does. Tell me when it stops. How much does a blue whale poop? Blue whales are real big. They're like the biggest thing.

300,000 pounds. Oh, my God. This is sort of a trick question, but I'm excited. Are we getting to the millions? They have never been able to measure it, but it's visible from a helicopter. Just like a plume of neon orange krill-colored poop that you can see from the sky. That's how much of blue whale poops. Oh my God, do we have a photo of that?

Yeah, I can pull one for the... Just sharding into the sea. Neon sharts. Oh, my God. It's incredible. So majestic. That was the fact that I really came here to share. Amazing.

While we're here, I have some other animal facts just, you know, to throw out there. A cow, they're clocking in around like 20,000 pounds of poop a year, which is incredible for like a 1,600 pound-ish cow. Cats, 109 pounds. They're doing their best. I have a cat, and that seems low. Yeah, really? My cat poops a lot. Well, there you go.

And my partner can testify. He is remarked to me. She poops a lot. That is a direct quote. I couldn't find any good data about how much bugs poop, but I just found a bunch of cool words for bugs. poop. Often it's called frass. That sounds like a fake, like a pretend

curse word. It does, definitely. That's a frass. Yeah. And also like queen ants when they start their colonies, they nourish the initial fungal deposit with their poop. Oh yeah. And then worm castings create vermiculture and they're super useful.

So I'm just here to say the poop is good, and especially in vast quantities. The more the better. Yeah. Where did you get this data. I pulled it from everywhere I could find any poop data. That's incredible. Yeah. What determines how much animals poop? The amount that animals poop is not something that I have the answer to. What I do think is interesting is that there was research that was like most mammals

poop in 12 seconds. I wrote about that. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's like you just have more mucus. Yes. If you are like a, if you have a longer digestive track and like need to get larger poops out into the world. Yeah. Then your mucus is just thick. Oh, I should go back and look at that paper and if there's, like, more poop data in there. Yeah. I'm sorry that I don't know why poop is so variable and why we cannot poop like elephants. I'm glad. I know.

Me too. I wish I could poop like that fish. Yeah. Make precious sand. Oh, my God. You could sell that. It's like so easily. People are just, like, waiting to export your beautiful white sand poop.

Wow. So is it that, sorry, I know that we're like really on a big tangent here. But do these fish only live in parts of the. world where white sand beaches occur? Like, is that what makes them, what makes certain parts of the world? Like a white sand area. There are different reasons that, like, white sand can occur, and I'm not super well-versed in what they are, but I know that, like, different types of, like, wind can contribute

to, like, white sands, like, the one, like, the dunes, like, in the United States, for example, that are white sand are not. Right. Because that's just, like, stripping from surrounding, like, quartz and rocks. Yeah. But, yeah, I think it's that, like, in the United States, like, it's that, like, like the quintessential tropical white sand beaches are all from these fish. There may be other sand that is very tail in color.

I love this so much. Yeah. Okay, I think we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more weird fact. It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet. On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories affect your daily life. New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google,

the play music, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then. Okay, and we're back, and it's time for my weird fact. So a few days ago, many people from New York, or just on Twitter, may have noticed that there was a giant swarm of bees in Times Square. It was all over a hot dog cart. Bees all those hot dogs. Yeah, there were many, many bees about 20,000 to 30,000 in the swarm, which is apparently

just a healthy swarm. That's not like an unusual number of bees to congregate on a hot dog stand. You forget how many bees can fit in a hive or on a hot dog stand. But the thing that people really got super psyched about is that the NYPD's beekeeper showed up. So the New York Police Department's beekeeper. And he just calmly vacuumed up bees in full beekeeper regalia. And people were like, oh, really? So the NYPD just like has a beekeeper on call.

They're like, yes. The hero we need. Yes, we do. We have two, actually. These are full-time cops. You know, they are not full-time beekeepers. At least since 1995, the NYPD has had a designated beekeeper. So are they just like cops roaming around and then if there's a bee emergency, they get called in?

Yes. If there is a bee-related emergency, they got to drop what they're doing. Go vacuum those bees. I think it probably depends. on what they're doing at that moment. And I was curious, I was like, why isn't animal control handling the bees? And, you know, I looked at New York's animal control website, and all they say about bees is that it is the responsibility of the property owner to handle any kind of bug infestation,

but that you can call 311 if you need to report someone who's not doing that, who should. You know, if it's like putting you at risk. Criminal be activated. Right. testing operation. That puns. There have been so many bee puns on Twitter this week. I'm sick of them and I love puns and bees.

Yeah, in New York at least, the bee swarm incidents such as the hot dog stand do fall to the NYPD. The NYPD comes in because it is considered a matter of public safety in some instances. And that's not because honeybees are dangerous. Honeybee swarms hardly ever hurt people, you know, the European honeybees that we have in U.S. are super chill. Yeah, they're just like pollinate for us and hang out being chill. And even if they're in a smorm, they're actually like less likely to sting you than if you encounter them by like a hive because they really only sting when they're protecting their turf. And they know a hot dog stand is not their turf.

They will share with the hot dogs. So the thing is that if you're in like a really hectic area full of a lot of people, it's more likely that something is going to happen that's going to freak the bees out and lead them or surrounding people to come to harm. And of course, in New York, there are a lot of places where a B swarm is potentially dangerous just because of the sheer number of people around. And Times Square is one of those places. Yeah, boy.

So a constant threat. Yeah. At the center. You know, I was curious about how this got started because I could not find any other police department that talks about having beekeepers around. If your local police department has a beekeeper, like, please let me know. Send it to us. I would love to know, but I was unable to find any information.

And I think it's just because there was this guy, Anthony Planakis, known as Tony Bees, who around 1995 was going through the New York Police Academy, and they told him to write his interests down on a little card, and he put down beekeeping. He is a fourth-generation beekeeper. Oh, my God. He used to bekeep with his dad. A sergeant came out to him one day, and I just look up and go, hey, Sarge, and he goes, bees? And I go, yeah, where?

Harlem. And I go, cool. That was it. That was the first job I handled. Oh, my God. And so, yeah, that was 1985. And he became the unofficial beekeeper of the New York Police Department. And as far as I could find, that was the first time somebody, like, regularly had that job.

There have been a few beekeeper replacements since Tony Bees step down. He now does, like, freelance. Oh, my God. I just can't get past how good that name is Tony Bees. So now it's a couple of guys who similarly, you know, they're all hobbyists who, you know, were already cops and, you know, just kind of submitted themselves as being someone who had the skills to handle beastworms. They use, like, really basic equipment.

It kind of seems pretty homemade. They have these buckets with vacuums attached. And I think a lot of the times they wear their own beekeeping gear. You know, they're not paid for it. It's just something that they volunteer to do. And like a Dyson vacuum, you know, like could I make a bee vacuum? Do you know, what's it required? I will link to some resources on beekeeping and bee vacuum specifically.

My weekend project. But it is, it's like a pretty involved. contraption to make sure that the flow is right, that you're not just like sucking the piece violently into a bucket. Because they're fine. Like they will be put somewhere else later for people unfamiliar with the bee vacuum. Right. So the bees, yes, that's a great point.

The bees in Times Square. First question, why were they there? Well, bee swarms usually happen because like half of a colony is going off to find another place to build a hive because things are crowded. It's time for a new queen, new greener pastures. So they probably came from, they're pretty sure these came from a beekeeper somewhere in this city, that they were not just like a wild swarm of bees.

And especially on warm, humid days, they're more likely to decide things are too crowded and head out on their own. Wow, another great thing about New York summers. I was going to say, and that was a humid day. It was. It was a swampy, terrible day. So I really cannot blame them. So then they form a cluster and they go looking for a good place to start a hive like a hollow tree.

Obviously, the hot dog stand was not a great place to do that. But it was like the first place they touched down to like rest and cluster together. And people were freaked out and called 911, which you are actually supposed to do if you see a swarm of bees. Not a family. In, you know, a trafficked area in New York. Don't call 911 if you see a bee in a park. But if you're like, if you're like, oh, my God, there are 20,000 bees on a hot dog stand, yes, the NYPD would like you to call 911 about that so that they can send their boys over with a vacuum.

That's good to know. Yeah, and then once the bees were collected, they brought them to some existing hives. You know, the NYPD, I think, has, you know, a couple. places they can bring them, including the actual hives of the officers who are serving as beekeepers since they keep their own bees as well. And these bees, they did not think would survive if they just kind of dumped them somewhere to go find a new hive. So they, how do you tell? I think it's because they were pretty certain based on where the bees had showed up that they had come from someone's rooftop beekeeping operation.

It was probably somewhere within a block of where they land in. So they're pretty sure they were not like living a great life somewhere in Central Park and somehow ended up in Times Square. So they were just like... They were Times Square bees. They were big city bees. They were like, just this time of year, it's safer to just collect them, put them in a hive. The NYPD does make honey, but they only give it to family and friends.

They do not sell it. Damn it. You cannot get police honey. It would be so cool. The NYPD beekeepers have been very active on Twitter to their many new fans. I watched a live stream that they put out, and their big message was to support local beekeepers by buying local honey because keeping bees is really important. Bees are great pollinators, and we need them. So support your local beekeepers.

I talk to a guy who specifically researches like city bees. once. And he was talking to me about how frustrating it is for people who, like, study those bees that often if people see, like, a hive in a park, it freaks them out. And so they call. And, like, the parks department often is supposed to, like, relocate the hive. But he, like, literally led a campaign. I think he was Canadian. I don't remember what city he was in, like, Toronto, like, one of the major Canadian cities. And he led this initiative so that the parks department, rather than coming to take the hive would just basically put up a perimeter and put a sign that was like, we know there are bees.

The bees are good for you. Please don't be alarmed. Yeah, which I thought was really nice because it's very important. Like you can't just, if you keep taking the bees away, they will stop coming back. Like that's really important that they be there. This is what happens when you watch my girl as a kid. You grow up to walk around and see, you know, be hives. In the live stream, somebody asked the NYPD beekeepers how to get over a fear of bees.

and one of them is like, get stung, it's not that bad. Face your fears. Zero people will take you up on that. But yeah, generally a honeybee swarm, you can observe safely from a distance. They're not going to bother you. If it's something like a yellow jacket or like an African bee, a killer bee, that's less good,

the NYPD does also show up for things like yellow jackets. And in those cases, a lot of the times they'll have to just exterminate them because it's that is actually dangerous for people which you know is a bummer but if you're a yellow jacket and decide to bring 5,000 of your closest friends to a playground on the upper west side like yeah you're you're going to get sprayed i watched a man get literally within one foot of a paper wasp nest at the brookin botanical gardens i think he didn't really i think he thought they were bees because i don't think he would be getting quite that close if he knew what they were but i was like you're going to die you're not going to die but that's going to be so bad i'm

bad for you? That leads me to... He was trying to take a picture. It was bad. I'm sorry. But that reminds me of the final facet of this fact, which I found at the very end of my research. A lot of people are familiar with the Schmidt Pain Index, which is, you know, a researcher who has in the course of studying various wasps and wasp-related bugs been stung by thousands

of insects. And he has created a relative pain scale to try to quantify how painful these various things are. This is not about Schmidt. This is about a man named Michael L. Smith, who was at Cornell at the time, and he made a paper where a sample size of one, the author, got stung on 25 body locations by a honeybee to determine which was most painful. Guess which body parts were... 25 body parts is a lot of body parts. Did he include his genitals? Oh, yeah, that's important. Yes. It's got to be the genitals. Right. So the least painful locations were the skull. middle toe tip, very specific.

An upper arm, all scoring a 2.3 out of 10, I believe. The three most painful locations were the nostril, the upper lip, and the penis shaft. Those are the words of the study. I would probably not ever use the phrase penis shaft. Those were 9.08.7 and 7.3 respectively. So the penis shaft was not actually the worst. Less than the nostrils. The nostril was worse.

Oh, my God. An unknown erogenous. zone apparently. The nostril. So, anyway, if you do think you are about to get stung by a honeybee, just protect your nostrils. And your takeaway there. And your penis shaft also, if you own one.

If you happen to have one, protect that as well. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I got to go with insomnia because even though you went first so that I could try to get around this. It's never going to leave your brain. It is still haunting me. I'm going to think about it for the rest of the day, probably for the rest of the night. the rest of my life.

And then for my whole life. Yeah. Wow. Which will only be 10 months long because I will die. You won't be able to sleep. This is a rare form of the disease where you just learn about it. You can't sleep after that. Wow.

Thank you. That was an honor. I was going to vote for the poop, to be honest. There were a lot of amazing poop facts there. Yeah. I vote for insomnia. Wow. Thank you.

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