The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Feminist Butter Art, The First Celebrity Athletes, The Secret Lives of Algae

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from butter sculptures' feminist origins to the cutthroat world of competitive endurance walking. 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 Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess 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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At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learn this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Claire Maldarelli. And I'm Eleanor Cummins.

So it is the season two finale of The Weirdest Thing. I learned this week. And it is also the last day that Eleanor is a staff member of Popular Science. She's setting off to write even weirder things than she does now as a free agent. But don't worry, Eleanor will continue to appear on Weirdest Thing regularly. I know we just lost like half of our subscription base. I'm out. You guys, I'm here.

You can't get rid of me. Yes, good. So a momentous day here. Bittersweet. If I don't win, I'll burn it. down. New beginnings. And just one more note before we get started, we have loved the surge in reviews on Apple Podcasts. So please keep going to our Apple Podcasts page, even if you don't listen to the podcast through Apple. If you leave us five stars and a nice review, an honestly nice

review, I hope it will help other weirdos find the show because of algorithms and stuff. And we really want to kick off season three with a whole bunch of new weirdos. As always, we're going to use the time off to find super strange facts, go to exciting places, do exciting things, figure out weird new formats for the show, and your voice messages with your facts or ideas for the show on the anchor app or website, your five-star reviews, your tweets at us at Weirdest underscore thing, they will all help make that happen. Okay, so on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about a factor story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. And 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 what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Oh, no pressure. I would like to tell you every weird and important fact I learned about algae. Algae. An underrated topic, if you will. Wonderful. Algae rules the world. It does. We're going to get into it. Yes. I have one word for you. Algae. Algae. Claire, what's your fact? America's first celebrity athletes were competitive endurance walkers. The most honest sport. I'm here to talk about the great American feminist art of butter sculptures. Oh my God.

This is one of my favorite topics. I love that. Oh, my gosh. Wow, that was a better reaction than I had even hoped for. What do we want to start with? Butter. Start with butter and with butter. That's how I live my life.

So this all started when I got an email a few days ago from the American Dairy Association. As many of you know, we recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. Very exciting. We had a lot of great stuff on Popside.com. You should check it out. And the American Dairy Association did not want to be left out of the fun. And it turned out that the extremely top secret subject of this year's Ohio State Fair butter display was the Apollo 11. moon mission.

Whoa. I have some pictures. As seen through butter? Yes. It is a butter sculpture. Oh, my goodness. And there's also a cow. There's always a cow.

I'll get into why there's always a cow. Jumping over the moon. Wow, so it's... No. It's just there. They really got the details intact here. I have not yet seen the photos. Okay.

Passing it along. Okay, I'm ready. Oh, Lordy. This is haunting. They have large almond and eyes, but no pupils or any inner detail. Well, that is the most Billy Elish take I've ever heard on a butter sculpture, so kudos to you. A few facts about this amazing butter sculpture before we delve into the topic.

It involved 2,200 pounds of butter and took 500 man-hours to carve. 400 of those written a 46-degree cooler. It features a life-sized sculpture of Ohio native Neil Armstrong and his footprint next to a flag. I love the footprint might be my favorite part of the butter sculpture because it kind of just looks like somebody stepped in butter. The entire crew is also there in another portion of the display along with a giant mission patch. And there is the traditional butter cow. There's always a butter cow. Always?

Yes. I love that. In state fair, I mean, I can't speak for literally every state fair, but it is a thing. The American Dairy Association expected 500,000 fairgoers or more to stop by to see this display. I love that. Yeah. And so I'd been vaguely aware of butter sculpting as a Midwestern pastime. Thanks entirely to a movie about it with Olivia Wilde's Hugh Jackman, Alicia Silverstone,

just to name a few heavy hitters. It's called Butter. I don't recommend it, but I don't not recommend it. I have never heard of it either. I recommend it solely for the glimpse it gives into the competitive art of butter sculpting. But that got me thinking about the history of butter sculpture, because, like, how did it work before refrigeration. Why butter? Insert other question. Yeah, you would think why butter? Like, why butter is such a high commodity? Like, why would you create a sculpture unless you're

going to eat it afterwards? But it sounds like these people are not eating it. They're just wasting their butter. Well, and it turns out there's a really interesting answer to why butter, a feminist answer. So technically butter sculpture has probably existed as long as people of means have had butter. There are a lot of fancy Renaissance banquet tables that are cited as being butter sculpture. You know, it's just molded butter. Made to look nice when it goes on the table. There's also a whole other kind of butter sculpture invented by Tibetan monks, which I'll touch on briefly at the end of this. But the carve it out of butter and take it to the fair kind of butter sculpture is a purely American invention and comes from or was at least popularized

in this form by a woman from Arkansas named Caroline Shockbrook. So around the 1860s, Brooks, who had no training but was very artistic, she made little sculptures and portraits out of the butter. Her husband sold just as like a way to get more money for them. And this was pretty common. If people were selling their butter often, they would mold it into some pleasing shape. But Brooks was good enough at doing this that people were like buying them specifically because

they look so cool, not just as a bonus. What's interesting here is that butter was women's work. You know, they took great pride in it. The men were like generally in charge of raising the cows otherwise running the farm. But once there was milk, it was usually the woman's job to make the butter and make it nice. And once your family was fed, the rest was usually sold. You know, different families relied on that more than others. But for a lot of people, it was a real point of pride. And in fact, as the industrial revolution and refrigeration made it possible to scale up butter production and turn it into a big business run by men, And also as margarine was on the rise, this only increased personal pride in like old-fashioned homemade butter. Yeah, you can't sculpt margarine. It's not the right consistency. Right. So there was definitely a sense that like there was this kind of like weird, rich cultural history of American women and their butter, sometimes involving molding it.

And this woman, Caroline Chalk Brooks, was a really good butter molder. And we were reaching a time when. in the modern world seemed to be putting away those days of women churning butter and molding it. And Caroline Shockbrooks represented a more genteel era. She's like the original one woman Etsy. Right. She was like my artisanal goods are here to stay. Exactly.

And so around the 1860s, Brooks is making these little sculptures. But then she read this play, King Renee's daughter, and she sculpted the story's heroine Yolanthi. And this portrait, apparently she was like really proud of it. She like took it on a family trip. And her family members, so I think we're from more of a metropolitan area. We're like, we got to share this butter art with the world. And she ended up like taking it on tour and making quite a bit of money for the time. She made money?

Yeah. People would pay a quarter. It is. People would pay a quarter to see the butter art. They had literally nothing else to do. That's very true. They were staring at a single flame in their single room home. So then in 1876 at the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, she got to show Yolonghi

and was like featured in a lot of guidebooks for the centennial. Is this the same event where they debuted the banana? Is this the Philadelphia? Yeah. On an earlier episode. Oh my gosh. What an incredible platter art? Yeah.

Popcorn as well. I wish I was there. I wish. That sounds like a really exciting time. Putting the first piece of popcorn in the Americas into a butter art. That would have been extremely rude. I think Caroline Shockbrooks would have killed you. She had maintained that piece of butter art for six months, which I'll touch on.

How do you do that? Doesn't better go rancid? I will get to it. It probably was rancid, but people were too late to say. He's carrying around the sweaty, stanky butter art. The thing I love is that people evaluate it really seriously as, art because they were very impressed that she'd been able to carve something this intricate out of fucking butter.

Yeah. And it's beautiful. And people would say, like, it's more translucent than alabaster. Like, only butter could have crafted this majestic glistening heroine's face. And people were really impressed by the way she did it. She did some, like, demonstrations. And she basically just used, like, butter paddles, little cedar sticks, broom straws, and camel's hair to just, like, et cetera.

out little details. This is like the original, you know, they always make cakes that look funky now with fondon, but she was like the OG with butter. She's the butter boss. Yeah, absolutely the butter boss. TLC. And she, and she. Ace of butter.

The true Mrs. Butterworth. So, yeah, I loved that, that people were talking about how amazing her crafting was, that they weren't just like, oh, here's some lady with her little butter dish, which is, I imagine is how people were talking at the Centennial in Philadelphia. Tell people talking to Philadelphia now. Don't tell me otherwise. Okay, so crafting something out of butter and taking it to a fair. While the butter thing was new, it was not as weird in the 1800s as it sounds now.

People were really into, in the Midwest, celebrating their agricultural abundance and advertising their agricultural crops by building things out of them. So there were corn palaces. That was a big thing. You would just build structures out of corn for people to come visit. But someone, one historian referred to this as serial architecture, the trend. Oh, wow. And I love it. Yeah, there would be things like Liberty Bells made of oranges, a California State House chingled with almonds, a life-sized night fashioned from prunes.

So food art was the thing to build for a fair. Too bad they didn't. Yes. Leslie Nob. Oh, yes. Where is the butter sculpting episode of Parks and Recreation? That's a great question. There really should have been one.

I bet there were some great butter sculptors in Pawnee and some terrible butter sculptors. Absolutely. Ron was probably the worst because he just couldn't adapt to the medium since he's so used to sculpting wood. So Brooks moved on to bronze, plaster, and marble, but she always modeled in butter first because she said it was more responsive to the artist than clay. She remained the butter woman. And actually when she wanted to preserve her most famous first work, she decided she would cover it in plaster so that she would. she could cast it. And she didn't actually know how to do that, but she figured she would try to teach herself. And it wasn't like there were any instructions for how to put plaster on butter. So she just did it. And it ended up working really well. The butter boiled away so that the plaster

negative was actually greased and ready to go. Wow. And she made like a beautiful cast of it. Though she was very like self-deprecating. She was like, I didn't know enough not to do this and that. So I had a really hard time like getting these details in. But she actually patented. using butter instead of clay for modeling and casting. Wow. She sounds amazing. She sounds like a businesswoman. She really was.

In addition to an artist. Yeah, she absolutely was a businesswoman. In fact, I read this paper by historian Carol Ann Marling, which argued that sculpting food into pleasing shapes was similar to sewing a means of personal artistic expression that seemed close enough to a domestic chore that women were allowed to pursue it. So many female artists in more cosmopolitan parts of the world were like. putting on pants to make it easier for them to like climb up and sculpt and paint stuff and we're you know in the salons and you know just acting totally untoward and brooks were like roughly aprons

and kept talking about her life on the farm back in arkansas even though like she and her husband were separated and she was touring the country not like milking cows on the farm and she really created this image of herself as like a wholesome Arkansas girl thought that she wasn't but she it was a brand she understood that the reason she was being accepted as an artist is because she was working in this medium that they saw as being like appropriately homie and womanly. Butter did go on the decline. It hit some snags. Butter sculpting or butter? Butter has never hit a snag. Right, that's what I was wondering.

How dare you? Both. Because first there was like butter rationing. Oh. So that kind of made it hard to have enough. butter to sculpt. And then, like, Margin was getting better and more popular. But then actually, that became a reason for the resurgence of butter sculpting because now they're all sponsored by places like the American Dairy Association. So we've come back to our serial architecture era of

giant food productions to make people interested in butter. But one of my initial questions was, like, how does it not melt? Totally. You know, today when you see people doing butter sculptures, they do it in, like, refrigerated rooms, usually all glass. So people. people can come watch them at the fair. But for Brooks, the answer was just lots of ice. She modeled her images in flat metal milk pans. So the circular edge served as a nice frame. And then she put that in a bigger pan and just constantly refilled it with ice.

She, like I said, she carried that first one around with her for six months before she decided she should preserve it in plaster because I guess she was tired of just like literally round the clock ice replenishing. And, you know, this had its limits. In 1878, she wanted to go from New York to Paris with a butter. sculpture for the international exhibition. But she had to wait until she found a ship that was carrying enough ice that the sculptures could survive the whole journey.

What year was this exhibition? 1878. So this is the one where the creepy taxidermy was made. Really? So many exhibitions on weirdest thing. Amazing. Well, but she did not actually get to go. She finally arrived in France with 110 pounds of butter, according to customs officials.

They were like, no. But she was too late. And even though she had paid for her space in the exhibition, the people in charge were like, nope, you can't come in. Oh, my gosh. So she, like, found another space to display it. She stayed in Paris a year because, I mean, that was like a long trip at the time. She wasn't going to just turn around and go home. And basically spent all her money, traveled steerage home, presumably Sands 110 pounds of butter.

She turned out fine. She spent the rest of her life doing art, making art, selling butter sculptures, et cetera. But the ice thing was a problem. And then the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, which has maybe not been on weirdest thing, but is in the musical assassins. So at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, it was completely electric, which meant it had refrigeration. Here, here. Yeah. So Minnesota commissioned John K. Daniels, a sculptor who usually worked in, you know, not butter, for $2,000.

And they asked him to make a replica of the new state house. He and his assistant, who was also his brother, spent six weeks in a glass box, told to 35 degrees. They worked 15 hours a day. And it was 11 feet long, 5 feet, 4 inches tall. So once refrigeration was on the scene, you could really sculpt anything you wanted. And now it wasn't just a way to advertise butter. It was also a way to advertise refrigeration and electricity. The people loved it.

So a couple more things. It's not solid butter. surprised me. But then once I thought about it, did not surprise me. You take a wire frame and you smush and mold the butter like clay on top of it, which saves a lot of butter, but also if part of it melts, it's way easier to fix that part. Is this how everybody does their butter sculptures? Apparently, once at the 1906 Utah State Fair, a sculpture spent five days carving a 40-inch dairy made out of solid butter, presumably just to prove he could. But then someone left the door open and he had to rebuild her neck. And apparently he was able to do it,

but he had to use so much extra butter that she looked really bad. So yeah, what a history, what a life. And I promised I would talk about the other totally independent butter sculptures real quick. I will just say Tibetan Buddhist monks would take yak butter and color it with various pigments and shave it into flowers, animals, meaningful symbols. These sculptures are known as Torma and they're made for prayer festival. the new year. It's just a beautiful thing. You've got like burning lamps for the new year, also full of yak butter, and then you got these beautiful, colorful dairy sculptures. And the point similar to like a mandala is that they don't last forever. So they are not used to advertise

refrigeration. Very different results. Very colorful and beautiful. Yeah, totally different artistic trajectory and motivation. But The takeaway is that if people use something a lot and it's squishy, they'll probably squish it into shapes. Truth. And that is what it means to be human. Thank you. I love it. All right.

We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And Eleanor, you sure look ready to talk about some algae. I am. Okay, so for our most recent issue of the magazine, a journalist named Mallory Pickett went to Florida. to report on this ceaseless red tide on the coast. Rachel, you edited the story, right? No, I edited the other ocean story, which was about putting antibiotics on coral reefs.

Amazing. Florida is going down. Unfortunately, my favorite state. So, yeah, it's all very bleak. An algae called Karenia Brevith started growing really rapidly, and it had all of these terrible effects. And Mallory went down and was out with this crew that collects dead sea animals for necropsies. And while she was there, this is like the start of the story.

They pick up the 209th dead manatee of the year. Wow. And it's guts are spilling out because, as you probably know, from watching videos of beached whale explosions, just like me, their decomposing bodies bloat up with so much gas that they literally rip open. And on top of that, there are these huge economic losses to beachside businesses. The air quality itself drops dramatically because this particular seaweed called Karenia Brevis actually emits airborne toxins.

And then when you inhale them, they cause respiratory irritation. including difficulty breathing. So, like, asthma almost. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like literally from this thing it's emitting. That's so scary to me. And, you know, algae has always had this penchant for producing over the top crazy fast.

Like, it's just growing, growing, growing, growing. But things are getting worse because of one industrial agriculture. So we're just like pouring all of these nutrients into the ocean. And so what happens? Algae feast and algae grow. But also climate change is making oceans and other bodies of water warmer. And algae is able to thrive, even though. a lot of other species are not.

So it's kind of a mess. As Ula Krowak reported for our site recently, there's actually a giant belt of sargassum, a brown algae that smells like rotting eggs, that stretches across the Atlantic from Africa toward Mexico. Wow. Like one, or no, just, no. Yeah, it's crazy.

You should look at the map. I did not know this. It's just like a cool continent of sulfurous algae. And do they just like stick together? Like they form this like microscopic, microscopic or like they are microscopic right but they like congregate into like these big tangles yeah like the Pokemon tangola but all across the Atlantic ocean and so you know if you're reading this news and it seems like there's like a new red tide like algae belt of death every day

it's pretty easy to have a negative view of algae I myself am very scared of them yeah I sure have a negative view right now yeah but I picked up this new book by Ruth Cassinger called slime, and it changed my whole view. The subtitle is literally how algae created us, plague us, and just might save us. Isn't that good? That's great. That's great. Slime me up. So you know where this is going. Algae can also save the world. Yes. Just butter. Yes. We need it all. So basically, you know, she starts out by describing the origins of algae and then moves on to its historic and future uses as a food source and an essential ingredient and all of these amazing inventions

and how its role is changing with climate change. But I want to focus on some of those inventions. First, though, I think we should lay some basic groundwork. So there are three types of algae. The first is cyanobacteria, which is a single-celled blue-green little blob. Then there is microalgae, which is also single-celled but invisible.

And together, microalgae and cyanobacteria are called vital plankton. So that's what we're referring to when we talk about plankton from SpongeBob. That was my immediate image in my head. Absolutely. Love him, a little maniacal man. And then there's also macroalgae. And so that's the stuff we call seaweed and that we like eat and can see weed. Oh, no.

I am so sorry. So algae started bubbling up about three billion years ago. And it did this unusual thing where it actually excreted oxygen as waste, which is very rare. We do not do that. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, we do the opposite. We take in all the oxygen and then we fart.

So that's how our planet was actually oxygenated. And today, Kastinger writes, at least 50% of the oxygen you inhale is made by algae. So like this next breath you take is like half because of algae. So for every breath I take, I was just saying, I should thank algae. Absolutely thank algae. So what happened was not only are they providing the very basic tenets of our atmosphere, but about 500 million years ago, a type of green algae that evolved in the oceans migrated onto land. And as Kessinger writes, evolved into all of Earth's plants.

And like, okay, I have an alum intolerance, which I've written about before, and it's basically, I have an allergy to onion, garlic, scallions, leaks, green onions, like all of those things. It's very tragic. Yes, it is so tragic. And the thing, the reason that they all make me sick is because once upon a time they were all just one plant, the alien plant. And then that has been, like, humans have selected for all of these different features. So you get all these different plants. So I feel like I spend a part of my day, like three times a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, thinking about, like, this err plant that ruined my life. But the fact that every single plant then goes back to algae is still just like insane to me.

I mean, how powerful. And good thing you're not allergic to algae. Seriously. I would just eat meat. I would be. Paleo all the way. Literally. Just me and my meat.

So the point is, you know, algae has always been important. The market for seaweed is worth billions of dollars. It's a major source of omega-3s, especially in East Asian diets. And this I did not realize. So if you eat wild fish for their omega-3s, the reason that you're getting those nutrients is because fish are basically just a middleman for the seaweed. Oh, yeah. So they just eat so much seaweed that they're like packed with omega-3s. And so basically, yeah, you're just like the top of that trophic chart.

Amazing. And recently, humans have found ways to make it more so. So these are just a few of the ways that modern seaweed inventions have changed the world. So one, using it as a fertilizer, it's actually like really powerful for sort of. speeding up the growth of plants. Another is animal feed. So in this book, Slime, Cassenger actually talks about the Scottish sheep that have been living off seaweed since 5,000 BC. No.

Yes. And so they just live on this rocky shore. And then at low tide, they go out and eat the seaweed. That's amazing. Yeah. And they're like totally healthy. Like it's a completely viable thing. And she like writes about how, like, if you try to offer them grass, they're like,

oh, no, thank you. That's disgusting. They love their seaweed. It reminded me of this more recent experiment from 2018 in which scientists that you see Davis added seaweed to cattle diets, right? My alma mater. Yes. What is your mascot? The Aggies.

What's that? You know, it's like a general term for agricultural school. I see. But we do have a horse also in there somewhere. A noble steed. Yeah. Amazing. So UC Davis, the Aggies.

They added seaweed to this sort of experimental group of cattle in their diets. And they found that it reduced their burps, which they found are a source of the very potent greenhouse gas methane. So very exciting work going on there. Another thing I did not know about at all is that algae is actually a very common food stabilizer. So you can extract these gelling agents from algae. One of them is called kerogenin and the other is called a phychocoloid. And both of these, according to Cassinger, end up in like anything you can think of. from like twinkies to toothpaste.

Yeah, algae in it. I remember Carajin was one of the things I wasn't allowed to eat on Whole 30, which was really annoying. And I'm really mad to hear that it's just algae goop because that seems like it is extremely Whole30 friendly. One of the things she talks about in terms of Carajan is that, you know, after World War II, all of these companies are sort of interested in finding thickeners and food stabilizers. And so they start researching. I love when food is as thick as possible.

Yes. So there was a corporation in Maine called the Algin Corporation, and they were trying to come up with ways of extracting Carajina from Irish moss and then developing new uses for it. And so their researchers, I kid you not, were known as the pudding boys. No. Because they were working among other things on, like, putting like substances. The wooden boys. Yeah. And so then like they ended up, their work ended up in serenoling. and Betty Crocker and hostess and craft. And that literally, as far as I can tell from the internet, is like the only reference to these pudding boys was like this book by Ruth Kassinger called Slime that you have to read. So, yes, a food stabilizer.

You can also extract agar, which is a really important tool for growing biological cultures. Yes. It, like, incubates them. Another thing is it's a major ingredient in glass, which I didn't realize. And I love glass. So I feel like I was really in the dark on this one.

So apparently if you burn kelp, Cassinger says you're going to be left with potash and soda ash. So all you need is potash and soda ash. Sorry. It's ridiculous. But all you then have to do is add sand and fire. Like you're on your way and making glass. Isn't that exciting?

From algae, no less. Thrilling. I'm not even done. So it can also be turned into a plastic polymer and into foam. So Vivo Barefoot has this partially algae shoe. I got the press release. What's the deal with it? Oh, I thought you would.

No. Okay, I do. I didn't open the email. It's like 50% of the plastic polymer in the shoe is actually made from algae, which is pretty substantial given we're at the very beginning of trying to look for like fossil fuel alternatives to plastic polymers. But yeah, like apparently this company that is manufacturing a lot of algae for these purposes is also like putting it into underarmour products. Billabong surfboard foam is partially made of algae. Bicycle helmets can have partially algae. foam. So, but like, Cassinger writes in slime about how this group that is working on the plastic polymers and foam, this manufacturer, they were like looking for the type of algae they needed and

there wasn't enough of it. And so they were like apparently on Google Earth or something, like looking at images and they noticed that like Alabama or Georgia or something was like totally covered in green. And it's because of their catfish ponds. So they started taking the excess algae out of those ponds and using it for these industrial projects. So it's, yeah, it's, yeah, it's. It seems like an exciting time when people are really only just starting to unlock, like the potential. It's also used as fuel. It can be used as a filter. It's really common to use it in wastewater treatment facilities.

So it's just, it goes on and on. And I think the thing was is like algae blooms are obviously still a terrible disaster. Like they cause manatees to explode and they poison the air. And it's just, it sounds like a nightmare. And we should definitely do everything we can to stop them from happening. That being said, you know, as much as I fear slime, I also. now respect it. And Ruth Cassinger's book is definitely something I would recommend if you're interested in this eternal red tide season, the flip side of this natural phenomenon. Yeah, I for

one am anti-exploding manatee. Absolutely. Same. Same. Anti-exploding manatee. The image in my head is not good. Pro pudding boy. I don't know if I am pro pudding boy. I guess I'm pro-putting boy. But one of my favorite algae stories recently on Popsie was somebody working on a prototype for producing food on the International Space Station or in space light generally. The very, like, clicky version of it was that they were making food from astronaut poop. But what it was was that you had this kind of, like, dual tank setup where you could put in human waste, i.e. poop. And you would have, like, a growing algae colony. Whoa.

And it was designed so that, like, the nutrient gases would feed the algae. That's amazing. I love that. You could just have as much algae goo as you wanted and then poop and make more. Imagine your poop being worth something. This is the future. The more you poop, the more money you make. If you live in the Boston area and are a healthy pooper, you can make more than $10,000 a year.

That's true. I definitely don't qualify. Wait, 10,000, me neither. Yeah, no, I honestly don't know anyone who, I guess if you have really good poops, you probably don't talk about it. I only know people who talk about their poops. So I assume I don't know anyone who had great poops. You should you should defo don't I. Please call anchor.

Jess is raising her hand. She has great poop. How do you make $10,000 with your poop? You donate it to young poohy. You donate it so someone else can put it up their butt. Yeah. So fecal transplants, it's basically, it's what it sounds like. You take some fecal matter from a really healthy person.

You transplanted into someone with very unhealthy poops. In some cases, if it's done properly, it can solve a lot of problems. It's only currently approved, I believe, for C diff infections, which caused, like, debilitating diarrhea. So there are a few banks where you can donate your poop, but kind of the most famous and reputable is Ubiome, which is in Boston or the greater Boston area. And, yeah, at least a few years ago when I first wrote about it, you could make $13,000 a year if you were donating as often as you were allowed to. That's amazing. And it is harder to get accepted there than at Harvard. Wow. Like the top 1% of poopers.

Yeah, the winkle-of-eye of pooper. Which is really important because there was very recently a death because I was going to bring that out. There was e-coli that took root in the sick person's gut. You know, the people getting these transplants have very vulnerable GI systems. And so even people who seem to have very healthy bowel movements may have some bacteria that doesn't bother them because in their gut, it's like negligible but can really hurt or even kill a recipient. So that's why really rigorous fecal testing is important. And that's why you can make so much money doing it.

Rip and poop. Go poop for profit. Is this going to be like that time that I won for a fact I mentioned on the side? The Jeremy Bentham Head incident. Maybe. We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to get into Claire's fact. Yeah, it's not over. It tilts over.

Okay. Okay, we're back. And Claire, it's time to talk about walking. Oh, yeah. These boots were made from walking. Right. Okay. So, originally, I was hoping to do my weirdest fact about something totally different.

And I just happened upon this weirdest fact, which I think is the best possible scenario. It's what I dream of for the show. So I was on vacation with my family and my brother-in-law was like, you really need to look into the history of performance enhancing. There's truly some crazy facts in there for your digging and your show, which he is a listener of. So I began my search and in an article on Medscape.com called Faster, Higher, Stronger, History of Doping in Sport by Neil Chezzanau. He begins a section by describing when stimulants were first used. And he writes, stimulants were routinely used by endurance walkers to keep awake. I was like, endurance walkers.

Tell me more, and he did. So you heard it right. Endurance walkers was a sport devoted to intense, purposeful walking, and it was literally all the rage in Great Britain and the United States. It was officially termed pedestrianism, but it was known to die-hard fans as competitive walking. So this sport takes us back to the 19th century when both in England and the United States, there was this mass urbanization in Industrial Revolution, and it was actually the 1870s and 1880s,

so right around when butter was happening. So these new residents of cities around the United States started to have like all this leisure time on their hands. And this was before America's now favorite pastime, which is baseball, became popular. So there's no Babe Ruth, there's no Mickey Mantle, no Joe DiMaggio, we're just bored in the city. Where have you gone, Georgia Maggi? Exactly. You're not even there yet. But yeah, so this is way before baseball was popular, and Americans were born.

They were looking for something to do. And so they all just kind of started walking. And I really tried to find the exact origin of this competitive walking, but it seemed to just come up randomly in cities. And then there would be these, like, famous endurance walkers. And then they would compete against each other in these, like, endurance walking, events and people started watching and then it just like became a sport. What are you enduring? Okay.

So there are rules and that's my next paragraph. So really good question there. So from what I could find, the rules seemed to vary in length between various walkers themselves. They would set their own rules and then various races would also set their own rules too. So some of them had really long lengths like 600 miles or 1,000 miles. and then other ones had multiple days where you just had to walk for days. Sometimes you were allowed to sleep for the night.

Other times you were not. Some had a cutoff date where it was simply like the last man standing, like the last man walking. One of my favorite books when I was like 13 was a Stephen King book. It was written under his pen name Richard Bachman, which is what he used for his really dark stuff. Yes, the running man. Well, there's the long walk, which is I guess a different one, which is literally like a dystopia. book about young, it's like pre-Hunger Games, Hunger Games, where it's just teenage boys have to walk until everyone's dead except one of them.

Yikes. It's a great book. He must have read about competitive walking. That's terrible. I was like, I'm going to turn this into a horror story. Yeah, so in certain cases, running was allowed, but in others it was completely banned. And then many historians have noted that running actually was not really an effective strategy because if you were in it for the long haul, why would you run when you can walk more

efficiently for longer? So I think many new competitive walkers would try running, but then quickly realize that they needed to just walk. Walk. And walking just being bending your knees less? Like what is? Yes. So you would have to, even in competitive walking today, like in the Olympics and there's like track and field events that have the speedwalking. What? What? does that look like? One of my friends, there's a lot of hip, hip movement. Okay. You have to have at least one foot on the ground at all times, right? Yeah, exactly. So you can never lift up. Like in a lot of times, like, when you see a runner, you see them almost like floating because both of their feet are up at the same time. But yeah, so you have to have one foot down before the next foot can be lifted up. So in the Olympics and in any track and field event that has speedwalking, there's like officials that watch your feet and make sure. There's always so much elbow movement and hip movement. Yeah. It's actually, like, incredibly hard to do. A lot of people, like, laugh at it and see it looks like you're trying to just, like, run to the bathroom really quickly. But it sounds like you're doing the samba in slow motion. Exactly. One of my friends actually, I think, was for a time, like, the reigning champion in New York City speedwalking.

Wow. Yeah. And I think that she now has hit problems. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah. But I've never actually taken the time to look up what speedwalking is. So now it all makes sense. Yeah. So, I mean, it was so popular back then that there's all this, like, data and stuff. about it that this journalist named Matthew Algeo wrote an entire book about the sport titled Pedestrianism when watching people walk was America's favorite pastime. Yeah. We were such idiots.

So he writes in the 1870s and 1880s, fans regularly packed massive arenas like the first Madison Square Garden and Chicago's interstate exposition building paying 25 or 50 cents apiece to watch people walk in circles for days at a time. As one newspaper pointed out, a great walking match was as talked about as the weather. That's terrifying. You could get a banana. You could see a butter sculpture. You could watch people walk. It was a better time.

The 1870s, man. Today, all you can do is watch that show Jess was telling us about on Netflix called Awake, where they make you count quarters until you die or something. Yeah. Yep. Torturous. Everything's fine. I think I'd rather walk for days than count quarters for 24 hours.

Please make the competitive show about butter sculptures, thank you. Yes. While walking. While walking. So he also mentions that this sport spawned America's first celebrity athletes. So the forerunners of LeBron James and Tiger Woods, Dan O'Leary, was as famous as President Chester Arthur himself at the time. What? What a scam. The top pedestrians earned a fortune in prize money and endorsement deals.

The swore opened doors for immigrants, African Americans. Americans and women affording those underprivileged groups, unprecedented opportunities for status and walls. So it was really just like anybody could, like the American dream was to become this competitive walker. And the American dream was yours. That's how it's always been. Yes. So there were tons and tons of these races that I found online. But the most famous of all the competitive walking races in the United States that I think, based on my research, was one that took.

place on November 15, 1875 in Chicago's Interstate Exposition Building. And it was the great walking match for the championship of the world. So the two main competitors were this guy named Edward Payson, Weston, and Dan O'Leary, as mentioned before, who later became incredibly famous. Weston was kind of like the man to beat. So he wore these flashy outfits. And according to one article, he had already walked 1,200 miles from Portland, Maine to Chicago in under 30 days in another competition. So this one was just like an easy win for him. He was warmed up. Yeah, exactly.

He was also just like kind of from old money. So he like represented old America. Whereas this other guy, Dan O'Leary, was born in County Cork in Ireland and he arrived in United States with no money a decade earlier. And he didn't really have a job but found that he was just really. good at walking for long periods. He was like, come to America. These idiots will pay you to just walk. Amazing. Exactly. Exactly. So he was like, I'm a damn good walker. I'm going to make a living out of this. And so he soon excelled in the sport, even though he was relatively known. And within two years, he walked an astonishing 116 miles in under 24 hours. And that really established himself as America's working man's hero. And he was Weston's obviously big

rival and so the two of them competed and the rules of this event so the rules change for everyone so for this competition in particular you had to walk for 500 miles and whoever hit that 500 mile mark first was the winner running was not permitted in this one and like we had mentioned before you had to keep one foot in contact with the ground and you don't get any breaks you get no breaks what about crawling over the finish line sobbing so but you do get to so this is a six day event and you did get to sleep at night. So for this one, actually, yes, you did get breaks. Sign up. All right then. I would love to become a competitive walking billionaire, which is I assume what it's worth now with inflation. Yes. Seriously. And it was all on a track, so you would have to do this

on the track as well. Oh, never mind. No. No, that's boring. It took place on two concentric tracks made of pressed mulch, which was apparently all the rage for tracks back then. Wow. Yeah. But the men had to adhere to one more rule under no circumstances. Is could the race continue beyond midnight the following Saturday? So at the time, Chicago and a lot of other cities in the United States had blue laws. So you couldn't do anything on Sundays. Bergen County, New Jersey also still has blue laws. So if you want to go shopping in Bergen County on a Sunday, you can't.

So it's like Chick-fil-A. So the race had a hard stop for Jesus. Yes, hard stop, hard stop for Jesus. Don't we all? So they really had to get it in. They were nervous that they wouldn't reach. this 500 mile mark by the sixth day because if they didn't then the seventh day they rested all these yeah and so everyone was watching they were getting to the end and it would really be like a bust of a race if they had to just stop it and wait a full day but o'leary really just pulled through in the end it was kind of neck and neck throughout the entire race but he ran over 500 miles and uh didn't run or thank you he did not cheat he mall walked 500 miles he walked 500 miles 500

hundred miles. Hips sashing this way and that. Correct. So he was the winner, America's hero. Everybody loved him. There were spectators out the doors. I mean, it was really like the World Series in baseball now. I would love to see a movie about this competition and this rivalry. Yeah. And what I can only assume was off the charts, homoerotic tension. Yes, absolutely. It's called the greatest game. And yeah, absolutely. There are some great pictures that I would love to include online, or not pictures, but, you know, art about the day. Proof of the homerotic tension.

Correct, correct. And then I would also like to mention that there were women who walked. So, yes, it was mostly a man's sport. Oh, yeah, these burly bros. But there was one woman in particular. The most famous one was Ada Anderson, and she was a Londoner who performed. singing while walking. I love her. And she did all these different like pranks and stunts and stuff. So she really kept everybody entertained, whereas the men just walked. So then as time passed,

innovations were made and people realized that instead of walking, every bear, you could bike. And then you could turn biking into a race. So why walk when you can race while biking? So that was it for competitive walking until it had its big comeback. in the Olympics for speedwalking, but 1870s to 1890s was the true peak of competitive walking. Now, I would like to end this on this journalist. He wrote a little piece about O'Leary, and I just think it's beautiful, even though I'm nervous that I have a running injury.

O'Leary stayed true to the sport till the end. When asked for exercise suggestions for weekly men and women, O'Leary's response much was a quick as it was inevitable. Walk. Do not take strels. Vigors breathing is what builds up a healthy life. So I guess he just meant, you know, like get your steps in or whatever. I love that.

Also, I just have to say that in this sketch of these men walking, one of them appears to be wearing shorts on the outside of his pants. That was probably the one who, the O'Leary's competition. A wee diaper? He was known for his eccentric outfits. Okay, so I think that... Fact check. Jess, our producer, pointed out that actually probably this man is not wearing shorts. It's just shading on his beautiful buttocks.

Which has carefully shaped through competitive walking. He really got his steps in. Are we sure that Kim Kardashian isn't just a competitive walker? No, those are pants. You can see the stripes. Yes, but what is the discoloration? Are they short? It looks like

It looks like It looks like he has pants on But then he is also wearing some type of diaper underwear diaper situation Over the pants Or it's very very clever shading To expose his bolbizor butt We'll look into this

Rachel you have to make the determination It's ambiguous but the fact that they're similar shading At the knee crease Yes that's what convinced me It makes me believe that it is just butt shading. And wow, what a well-defined butt. Kudos to that man. Kudos to the artiste who understood this posterior needed to be captured for

posterity. Amazing. Wow. Fantastic. What was the greatest thing we learned this week? Hmm. Endurance walking. Yeah, the butt was crazy for me. All right. See, I told you. It's not over. It's not over. It's over. That's what Dan O'Leary taught us. Right. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast.

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