The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Flying Toad Butts, High-Speed Uteruses, Lemurs Picking Noses

Episode Date: December 14, 2022

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Lauren Young. I'm Beaux. I'm Beaux. I'm Beaux. I'm Bethany Brookshire. Bethany, welcome to the show. Oh, my God, thanks for having me. Listeners, Bethany is one of my favorite science writers. Excellent on Twitter, excellent on her own podcast. And now, excellent, wherever you buy your books. Bethany, tell us about your book.

Oh, I bet you say that to all the humans. So my book is called Pests, How Humans, How Humans Create Animal Villains. It's coming out on December 6. Please buy 10 copies. I always tell people to buy 10 copies because I feel there's probably like a 10 to 1 conversion rate. So if I say buy 10, people will buy one. Yeah, but it's about why we hate some animals so very, very much and why we love some animals so much that often we just can't bring ourselves to face any problems that they might cause for things like biodiversity or for a other. are humans. So yeah, I was interested in kind of looking at why we call things pests and whether

or not we should. I'm so excited to read it. I haven't yet, but as soon as I saw the announcement for the book you were writing, it reminded me of this thing. My mom has frequently said, it's a weird thing for someone to frequently say, but she has, where she's like, everybody thinks roaches are gross and like baby seals are adorable but if you had a thousand baby seals pour out from under your sink you wouldn't think they were so cute um which i have to say that's a way better thing than the thing my mom usually says my mom's usual tagline is life sucks and then you die oh yeah you know so the baby seals is way better so on the weirdest thing i do this week we start by offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading,

writing, reporting, making books about bugs, et cetera, and then 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. Lauren, what's your tease today? Okay, so I'm glad we have an animal pest person here or like changing people's ideas on animals. So I-I's, a visually striking species of lemur, have these particularly long, spindly fingers. I love them. Yes.

Yes. Okay, great. I-I fan here. And so recently, though, it was found out that these specialized middle fingers of IIs can reach deep down into their noses, dig around, and then they eat their snot. Oh my God. Oh, I love them even more. My eyes are two-year-olds.

Yes. Okay. Just so that I don't totally derail the top of the show, I will save all of my thoughts on how adorable that is for when we get into your fact. Amazing. Bethany, what's your teeth? My tease is that scientists in Australia are throwing poisoned toad butts to predators to save their lives. amazing. I'm so intrigued. I love that, you know, even at my big age of 30, I still have not learned enough about Australia

to not still be floored by every new piece of information I receive about Australia. I mean, I've written an entire book about pests and Australia features very heavily in this book I bet. For many reasons. And I'm still just constantly floored by Australia. Just like everything about Australia. Ooh, that's fantastic. I can't wait.

Okay. My fact is that I want to unpack this extremely pervasive internet factoid about steam trains and uteruses. I didn't know there was a common factoid about steam trains and uteruses. I need to hear this. Well, I'm happy to begin if we want to just roll right through that one. Go for it. Roll through steam train.

See what you did there. Yep. So a couple years back on Weirdest Thing, I talked about how the invention of the modern bicycle led to all kinds of moral and medical uproar about why women shouldn't ride them. It was our episode with Bill Nye, who loves bicycles and had a lot to say on the subject. And in my recent book, Been There, Done That, I talk about the history of the term hysteria, which was once this fully serious medical belief that the uterus wandered around the body, following exciting smells in many instances, like some kind of feral rodent and thereby impacted

the health of people who contained such organs. I have this beautiful idea that my uterus, like, gets as excited as I do whenever it smells bacon. Listen, Galen would have said, sure, checks out. I actually can't remember how Galen felt about uterus is. He may have been, like, the one guy who was like, no, these don't snorful around. But most, most learned men for most of history thought they were, like, little critters. So, great stuff. But anyway, telling both of these stories at different times, both prompted friends and readers and listeners, et cetera, to say, you have just got to talk about how when trains were first invented, men thought that moving at such speeds would make a woman's uterus go flying right out of her.

This has come up many times in the course of me hosting this podcast and writing the book I wrote. been there to that history of sex, buy it wherever you buy books. So I've attempted to do this episode actually multiple times. But my research efforts always came up short. So I would always be like, I'll look into this more later. And having now looked into this more later, I feel fairly comfortable saying that I think the problem is that I'm not sure anyone ever actually said that, which is not to say that the people who suggested I look into it were making it up. There are many listicles on the internet that talk about this, but I don't think any old-timey man actually said uteruses were going to go flying out of people.

This all ties into something that has become a surprise meta-narrative on the weirdest thing I learned this week since I wrote a book. Because, Bethany, like, before. Before you got into writing a book and being in a world where you knew lots of people who were writing books, didn't you assume books were fact-checked? At least at like some point in your life? At some point in my life, yes. Yes, I did. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And so it, you know, listeners have heard this a billion times before already because they have heard me talk about how lucky I was that I had a fact-checker and how I owe her. probably my first born for all of the very silly mistakes she caught. And the thing is that most nonfiction books even today are not fact checked. If they are usually the author has to pay for it. And before the internet was like what it is today, I don't think really anybody was paying for a fact checker. So this is not to say that you can't trust. stuff that's in books, but you should only trust a book as much as you trust the author who wrote it as a person. And their fact checker. I would just like to say shout out to my fact checker, Kyle,

you're a prince. Yeah, like you need to both trust the person who wrote it as like a fairly reasonable level-headed source of info and the kind of person who would care about engaging a fact-checker. So a lot of times when I was trying to track down the source of like, some particularly pervasive sort of like listical style factoids about history, the end point would end up being like a book from the 90s. And I would be like, oh, that it just didn't happen. If that's the farthest back I can go, like the safest assumption is that this person made it up in the 90s, pulled this from nowhere. And of course, that is not literally always true. But for the kinds of things I was researching where it was like somebody says that Cleopatra made a vibrator

out of bees and the first time anyone can find someone mentioning this is a book about sex from the 1990s. I'm like red flag. That is one of the fact toys that I loved most from your book, though, was the vibrator of angry bees. Because let me tell you, nothing gets you in the mood, like being like, yes, here I am holding a jar of angry bees. Yeah, you know what? I mean, like it totally checks out. Why wouldn't I believe that somebody found a paper confirming that? And then it burned in a fire. The 90s never to be found again. Anyway, anyway. So all of that is to remind listeners that there's kind of this like, there was kind of this particular era of internet. Like, let's call it Web 1.0, where the internet was the Wild Wild West

and things that came from books or quoted directly from people were the good information, not to be confused with like kids writing stuff on message boards. I don't know. And then stuff got kind of grandfathered in as being like, oh, because this is, you know,

in a scanned PDF that was on the internet in 2007, it's a trustworthy source. And I'm just here to tell you, not true. So these days I spend a lot of time kind of untangling those sorts of early Internet lore. Sorry, this turned into a big ramble. I also just love the myth, though. Like I love the idea that somebody was like, oh, my goodness, these steam trains, the uteruses just aren't attached. they're going to come up. And I'm sitting here going like, well, if you think that something

internal to a woman is going to go flying, what do you think's going to happen to a dude's testicles on a train? Wow. Excellent point. I mean, those things aren't even attached. That is an excellent segue into where I think the uterus thing seems to have come from. in a 2011 interview with a technologist from Intel, you know, famously primary sources in Victorian era history, in her defense, she was paraphrasing historical attitudes around various technologies, including trains. and in my mind reading the text, it is clearly like off the cuff and meant to be a bit hyperbolic. Like the quote is, there was some wonderful stuff about railway trains too in the U.S. that women's bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated at that speed.

So that's, that seems to be the quote from whence this now often shared belief came. And again, in this Intel technologist's defense in 2011, I do not think she was trying to plant a flag and put a solid literal factoid on the internet. And people really have latched on to that literal interpretation that Victorian men thought organs were getting ripped out of bodies. And like I said, I found tons of listicles and, you know, blog posts. whatever where it was either, you know, thrown in as an aside or even as like a whole entry, like a thing that we just know is true. That doesn't pass the smell test, right? Like, I just love the idea that somebody was like, oh, yeah, that totally seems like a

thing that Victorian men would believe. But like, surely people have seen women fall off cliffs and fall long distances and have noticed when they land that the uterus is not separate. Like, I feel like that's a thing that life circumstances would teach you. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we do have this longstanding tendency to really, really dunk on the victorious. I also feel, yeah, like this one, it's like a case of it's not so much, too, about, like, the fact and who said it, but, or like the rumor or who said it, but, like, how much people latched on to it. that speaks

It speaks volume. Yeah. I also really agree about the whole like dunking on the Victorians. I think that's definitely and I feel like that was kind of a thing that rose in the nine days, right? Like it became very fashionable to be like, ah, ha, ha, those Victorians, they had no idea what they were doing. I wonder if it's like the existential fear of realizing you're living at the turn of a century,

you know? The existential fear of looking back on 2022. and being like, oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. They thought that Elon Musk would be a reasonable owner of Twitter. Anywho, I did find the closest thing I could to an actual statement like this in the historical literature. And it was an article in the New England Medical Gazette from 1870 where a doctor fussed quite a bit over the,

strong vibrations of the bench of a train. So the benchal woman might sit on while riding a train and how those might delay a menstrual cycle and or cause, quote, uterine flexion or dislocation. Of course, the important context here is that people still believed in the whole hysteria thing whereby the uterus shifted around the body and got into hijinks. A lot of physicians by this point had come up with much more like modest and modest and reasonable amounts of motion that uterus could undertake because they had been able to look inside the body and be like, it's attached to things, but they still generally thought it was an organ

prone to ending up in the wrong spot. And they blamed a lot of different stuff on that. So someone saying that they are worried about the uterus being dislocated is very different from saying that they thought trains would like shoot the uterus out of the vagina. But again, if you're not familiar with that whole how hysteria worked, they thought physiologically, I can understand that that nuance might not seem as important. I also just love the idea of a uterus getting up to hijinks. And I have decided that after this, my uterus is going to participate in a heist. Absolutely.

Yeah. Talk of, you know, Oceans 8, part two. And that's not to say that Victorians were chill and reasonable about either uteruses or railway trains. According to papers from the 1860s, which was a few decades after passenger steam trains first became a thing, consumers had apparently been worried about everything from suffocating when they went through tunnels to fainting. in the exhaust fumes. And when the medical journal, The Lancet, solicited research on train travel in the early 1860s, doctors wrote in blaming it for everything from miscarriage to brain congestion. So in hindsight, we can see the clear rise of a moral panic around real way travel. So in the 1860s and 1870s, train travel became way more ubiquitous. So even as doctors were

writing very confidently that fears of asphyxiation had been super unfounded. Because most people were only just starting to have regular access to trains, there were starting to be all these accounts of totally healthy people getting on trains and then being driven to violent insanity. And this got loads of media coverage, which may have made people who were kind on edge, more prone to having that sort of breakdown when they were on a train because they were like, oh my God, what if this vehicle makes me lose my mind? Totally like, you know, very reasonable that people started to get really spooked. People also started to write stories about how patients from mental asylums could just pop onto a train and you'd never know and you'd be stuck with them,

which is something that really puts the concept of UberPool into sharp perspectives. for me. Because, yeah, when you think about it, this was kind of one of the first situations where a sort of average everyday person who wasn't like getting on a steamer ship could just be surrounded by anyone. The classes could mix. Anarchy. Indeed.

Indeed. And yeah. So the Victorian Railway bylaws actually said that you had to put insane people in their own compartment, which I'm sure was really useful. and, you know, not creepy at all. There was also a lot of debate over something called Railway Spine, which I found really interesting. It referred to the long-term physical distress reported by survivors of the first passenger train crashes. Because these railway crashes, when you think about sort of the number of people traveling at speed on average up to this time, they were,

catastrophic in the damage they caused to like vehicles, buildings, people, psyches. Because suddenly, again, the speeds these trains were going were, you know, nothing compared to your average high speed rail today. But still, like a crash could be really bad and could hurt hundreds of people at once. And that was just not really the kind of thing that had happened regularly in the world before outside of like acts of war. So you started to have these like very high profile crashes and legal fallout around them. And railway owners thought that obviously the passengers of these trains were like faking problems for money. But doctors worried that something

about the high speeds of rail and the resulting force of the collisions could be creating a whole new illness they'd never seen before. Now, looking back at what they characterized as a railway spine, it seems pretty clear that they were dealing with like traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, or sometimes both. But the belief that there was something special about trains that made them particularly dangerous may have led to that general sense of panic around them. Because again, there was this period of time where there was a concern that maybe something about the way trains moved meant that if you were in a collision, it could do something kind of like arcane and terrible to your body, which we now know

is just what high-speed collisions can do. So not entirely off base. Speaking of high-speed collisions, did you know about the origin of like watching a train wreck? No. Do you know where that comes from? Oh, so we were talking about, you know, trains and how they run into things at high speed and this is really devastating. Well, people in the 1880s and 1890s not only found it devastating, they found it entertaining. And so they would actually host train wrecks at like county fairs and stuff. And you would and you would like sit on like a hillside with your picnic and they would run two trains at each other. I'm serious. Wow. I don't have you. These trains did not have people in there.

them, to be clear. Okay. Well, that's good. These were not people to trains. Though sometimes, like, the conductor who, like, started it didn't necessarily get out in time and that was really not great. Gosh. But, yes, I mean, people really did, like, gather to entertain themselves by watching train wrecks.

Yeah. Trains were obviously not our first moral panic over technology. And I just want to talk a little bit about moral panic in general because, I don't know, feels kind of relevant to our times. So ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates groused about how writing and reading were a slippery slope into laziness and anti-intellectualism because obviously the natural way to learn new information

was to hear it in person from one smart guy and then just remember it perfectly for the rest of your life. You know, don't take shortcuts. My favorite about that is that the Romans, you know how people will always go around being like, oh, you know, things aren't like they used to be. You know, they're referring to like some perfect golden afternoon in 1953 when everybody was out in their like little like flyer wagon or something.

The Romans did that too, except to them, like, men were real men, women were real, women, horses were real, horses, only in the time of the second Punic War. And after that, it was just a total moral decline. I love that. It makes me so happy. and I often actually have this ongoing joke with my partner where we're like, man, you know, things have just been going downhill since the second Punic War. Yeah.

Well, and we see this again and again. Like people thought telephones would electrocute them, which I can like understand that fear of like bringing a new, a new kind of device into your home at a time when wires were kind of fast and loose. But they also thought that the concept of a telephone would take away any reason you had to leave your house and that people were going to become like little goblin hermits because of their telephones. I wonder how they'd feel seeing millennials and Gen X now who are like, please don't make me use the phone. Please don't make me call somebody. Totally. Zippers may have been associated with laziness and moral decay because it was too easy.

to get in and out of clothes. The printing press was going to allow for false prophets to print satanic Bibles at a scale that allowed them to, you know, spread the bad word, and that was going to cause the downfall of society. And in the 1700s in particular, reading popular novels was going to rot young people's brains. I think this was also quite pervasive in the 1800s. But yeah, just any book that was popular, just anything new, it was like, uh. I mean, that persists now, right? Like, you see that with like the disdain for things like Twilight. Right. Oh, like, oh, it's just rotting girls' brains,

this crap. But yeah, it's also so funny to me that like many of the things that are now like storied classics in the canon, like parents at the time were like, who's out here writing books? Why do we need more books? We have plenty of books. I don't trust it. You don't want to read this, this Wuthering Heights crap. Do you know? Never.

Oh my God. Wuthering Heights is like dangerous. But people were like, your brain's going to fall out of your head. For real. So I found this 2020 paper by a Cambridge University experimental psychologist named Amy Orban called the Sisyphian cycle of technology panics that I really enjoyed and I will link to it on popside.com slash weird. And Orban points out that adolescents are often at the center of moral panics around New Tech. Obviously, with trains, it was a little different because it tended to be

adults riding them. But we see in a lot of our moral panics that teens are the focus. That panic over reading addiction in like the 17 and 1800s was followed by an early 20th century obsession by pediatricians with the concept of radio drama addiction. And it's kind of understandable because American radio ownership had surged from just 6,000 units in 1922 to more than a million in 1923 and then 44 million by 1940. So, like, truly taking America by storm and parents were concerned. There was a New York Times piece that considered whether listening to the radio too much would harm children and lead to illness because the body needed repose and could not, this is a quote, be kept up at the jazz rate forever. Wait till they find out about smartphones.

Oh, my God. The jazz rate. That's great. Yeah. And then the director of the Child Study Association of America noted that radio was way worse than any media that had ever come before it because, quote, no locks will keep this intruder out, nor can parents shift their children away from it. There was also a parenting magazine that published this quote. Here is a device whose voice is everywhere. We may question the quality of its offering for our children. We may approve or divorce. deplore its entertainments and enchantments, but we are powerless to shut it out. It comes into our very homes and captures our children before our very eyes. So that is an incredible reading. That was fantastic. Thank you so much. I really thought it deserved. I felt transported. I would actually listen to like that kind of dramatic reading style as like a like a sleep podcast kind

of a thing, you know. It was stately, as well as that. Don't tempt me. You should do another version of your audio book in that voice. That's just a sleepy time. Thank you so much. I'm blushing. So, of course, we've now had similar, almost to like a T, you know, similar discourse around

television, comic books, Dungeons and Dragons, video games, internet chat rooms, social media, gender affirming health care, among other things. Orban argues that moral panic around technology has always existed, but that increasingly we have ceased to view technology as like a tool that we control and started to see it as its own unstoppable force that has to be reckoned with, which I think is really interesting and rings very true to me. And as for the focus on adolescence, you know, adolescence is a pretty new invention. We didn't use to worry about what 14-year-olds were doing with their time because they were like dying in factories or dying having babies or both. And technology is

evolving faster than ever. And adolescence, with generally speaking more free time than in previous eras of humanity, their openness to new things, they're more nimble. ability to adopt new tech and learn new ways of interacting with the world. It's not surprising that they often seem to their elders to be on a runaway train into moral decay, et cetera. And Orban points out something that I'm going to end on that I think is really, really important because I see it a lot. In our modern era, we've been able to loop in scientists to this question, like looking for data-driven answers on how something might impact our youth. But she, and again, I'm going to link to this on Popside.com slash weird, gives a bunch of examples

of how these studies are almost always flawed. They make huge generalizations about who uses the technology and how. They assume that all people using it will use it the same way and be affected the same way. And most of the studies go in with this negative bias. like they're they're trying to figure out how this dangerous technology will hurt kids. And do I have an answer on how to fix that? No. But I do think there's a lot to think about when we talk about stuff that's new and fret over how it might be bad. Listen, there are a lot of things that are in the world that are bad for us. And I think it's really important to remember

that like there was a time when nobody thought cigarettes were a problem because everybody had always smoked. But a lot of those same doctors were apparently telling parents to make their kids turn off the devil box radio. So listen, new doesn't always mean dangerous. Old doesn't always mean safe. And trains don't make your uterus fly out of your body. And that's cool.

That's my story. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more, and you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit, and, you know, I definitely miss it a little bit. But maybe you can have a weed gummy, and you can get one at mood.com.

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because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. Okay, we're back. And Lauren, I would like to hear about my favorite little snot-eating goblin babies. Amazing. Okay, so I'd like to start my fact by kindly asking our listeners to check out what the Madagascar I-I looks like if you do not know what it looks like. If you haven't seen it before, it might be a little shocking at first, but really like after you kind of just revel in the natural beauty of this creature, you'll, I feel like you'll change

your mind. Exactly. They're very, very splendid and wonderful. So, you know, some people might be kind of appalled by this peculiar looking creature. They have this kind of shaggy, wispy, black and gray fur, really large triangle ears, bright, yellow orange eyes that seem to like pierce into your soul. At least that's how I feel. Honestly, to me, they kind of look like one of those like half-nude, long-haired chihuahuas, you know? Yes. There you go. They kind of do. Nothing to fear. They have fewer snagglet teeth. Fewer snagglete.

There you go. Amazing. One of my favorite descriptions of the I-I was by a scientist at Duke, at the Duke lemur center in North Carolina, Megan McGrath, who said they kind of look like a mashup of a bunch of different animals. So they have like very bushy tails that are nearly as long as their bodies that kind of look like a wolf's tail and they have those triangle ears that sort of look like a bat's ears. But I-eyes are actually a type of lemur. They're not wolves. They're not bats. And they're native to Madagascar. The animals are actually famously depicted in the movie franchise Madagascar. They like to move it, move it.

Indeed. And so they're about 15 inches long, five pounds. They're like kind of no bigger than a house cat or maybe those patchy chihuahua dogs. But they're one, if not the largest known nocturnal primates in the world. And those bat-like ears I mentioned earlier are used for echolocation so that eyes can find prey in dark. And I love this fact. I found out that they have incisor teeth that never stop growing like rodents. And I also didn't know that about rodents. So that was very fun. That is absolutely a thing. And if you have a rodent that needs braces, which is something, it happens. Is that real? I have

like dental work for rodents. So, so, well, no. So you can't put, I mean, I suppose you, if you really wanted to, you could put braces on a rodent. But yeah, so their incisors just grow, grow, grow, grow, and they need to chew. But if they have like twisty incisors that like desperately need braces, they can't chew effectively and they'll just keep growing. And this can actually harm them. So you have to go in and you have to take a little pair of bone cutters and you have to trim their teeth. Oh my. I have done this. It does not hurt them at all. But boy, are they drama queens about it. Oh, gosh. Wow. I, my, I love that I'm learning so much through this wonderful creature. It's just opening up my world into rodent.

rodent facts. That was great. So, okay, so despite the perhaps initially terrifying looks that they have, I actually find them really wonderful. It seems like both of you agree. And they're also really fascinating. One of the reasons why IIs have like won over my heart is because of their very cool, also specialized long fingers. So IIs in general have very strange hands. recently actually researchers found out that they have six fingers. It was like a few years back. They identified that they have an extra tiny pseudo thumb on each wrist. And researchers think that they might have evolved that tiny little thumb to climb and grip things since their other fingers are very, very long. So might be helpful. I love that. I feel like every time somebody tries to

add an extra finger, they always put it on the pinky side. And like, that's pointless. If you're going to add an extra finger. Put it on the thumb side where it matters. Yes. Exactly. Grab you grab. The Ii's fourth and longest finger accounts for more than two thirds the length of its hand. So like if you imagined our hands and if we had a finger proportionally like the same size, like our finger, that finger would be like a foot long. So imagine a world where we had a foot long finger, all the possibilities of it's like the hot dog hand world. Yes. everything everywhere all it was. Immediately the thing that I thought of.

I love that. I have a lot of questions actually about this finger. So like, I've seen it, like stretched out. I've seen this huge long finger. Where do they put it when it's not stretched out? Like, does it just flop down against their wrist? Did they have like extra joints that make them curl it into their hand? Like, how do they put it away?

How do they put it away? That is a great question. The most I could find about like the actual joint is that it sounds like it's a kind of typical ball joint socket. At least that's what I read, although that seems to be debated among some of the researchers. But in general is a flexible finger and actually pretty dexterous. Like they have relatively good control over the finger and fingers in general. So the primary or one of the specialized functions of the fingers is that they use them to tap on like bark and wood to basically get, you know, insects to move and also to have those vibrations bounce around. And then they

listen and see if, you know, there's any food that they want and they grab the food with the very long finger. And they also, apparently, um, the Duke Lemur Center, which is this major wonderful hub of all things lemurs and IIs. Check out their website. It's great. Um, they also found that they can drink water with the finger and also like eat fruits. Like, you know, like kind of all different types of things. It's really, really interesting. Um, so that leads to this latest study. And it made the news, like, very recently back in November. It turns out that not too unlike us, they actually use that incredibly long, specialized middle finger to pick their nose. But they don't just, like, scratch the surface or go even just a tiny bit in.

In this study, in the Journal of Zoology, a researcher at the University of Byrne who worked with, you might have guessed, the Duke Gleamer Center. They watched and filmed an I-I-inert the entire. length of this tiny of this of this skinny middle finger into its nose before proceeding to lick the you know its finger clean and eat the snot essentially um so it's like it's like going to the the ear nose and throat specialist and getting one of those like spaghetti cans down your throat i was going to say was there an x-ray of this like where did the finger go did it go like okay so there is an x-ray because i need to know yes okay amazing you all are like i love this this is so much fun. So they did find that this behavior is like not a one-off thing. So it seems like they make a habit

out of picking their noses and eating the boogers. And yes, one of my favorite things about this study is that, of course, they had to get a better look of what's happening. So they got museum specimens of the head and the hand of an eye-eye and took CT skins of the nasal cavity to basically understand where all that finger goes. And keep in mind, this finger is like three inches long. So relatively significant when you think about the size of an eye-eye. And the scans show that it likely reaches all the way down to the throat. And yeah, the scans are fascinating and it reveals so much. I highly actually just recommend checking out the visuals for this entire study. It's great. But the next natural question might be, okay, so why eat boogers? And there is actually

a scientific term that I found out, again, through this wonderful study. It's a called mucophagy, which is the act of eating on mucus. I feel like this probably warrants a whole other weirdest thing fact episode, but from my very brief foray into mucophagy, it seems that it's most commonly associated with fish and vertebrates feeding on mucus. But what I found really interesting in this latest study is that only 12 primate species have been observed to pick their nose, whether it's like they're using their fingers or sticks or tools. And that includes humans, gorillas, chimps, but, and now I-I's. And for whatever reason, I thought that this number was like, was actually kind of surprisingly small. I don't know. I just thought that nose picking might have

been a little bit more common, but apparently it's a little bit more rare. I don't know. Maybe that's just me. But no, I'm also, I'm surprised there aren't more pregnant. I also admit I figured the number would be higher. Yeah. So, um, so as, it's just such a sophisticated of military core. Exactly. We should all, yes, exactly. We're such advanced, uh, advanced creatures. Um, so as far as why the IIs are really any animal picks and eats their boogers, it unfortunately remains up in the air. The researchers did point to some past studies that suggest that humans may have evolved ingesting boogers to boost their immune system or, that like the slime and material coats their coats our teeth and prevents bacteria from sticking,

which might improve oral health. But um, these, I also feel like the components of mucus, like they're long carbohydrate chains that produce mucus. So I feel like that has to have some caloric value, right? Like yeah. Yeah. Any port and storm. Exactly. Yeah. Maybe I maybe it's just taste and nutrition. Um, yeah, but I feel like, so the, none of the findings though, unfortunately, past research has been like super concrete and there are also other studies that contradict that booger eating is good for you so for instance there are experts who say that you know picking your nose in general can spread you know harmful and introduce harmful bacteria to your nasal cavity there were one of our reporters actually recently wrote a breakdown on pops eye about a series

of really misleading headlines that picking your nose could lead to Alzheimer's it doesn't it does do not be alarmed. Please read the story. And so I know it isn't necessarily like a satisfying answer as to why this behavior is happening in both IIs and humans and other primates and things. But I do think it's just an interesting fact to know that we have so many like primates share so many very interesting behaviors. I also hope that this like helps turn people's initial shock and fear of IIs around. They're really not going to harm humans. They live pretty solitary lives up in their trees. IIs unfortunately get like a really bad rap because of their appearance.

And there's actually a certain, yeah, folklore that the Ii is a sign of evil and a bringer of death. And some of that folklore actually is tied to that long skeletal big booger picking finger. It has actually. Yeah. It's a freaky finger. It is a freaky finger. Exactly. I love them anyway too.

But yeah. So there's, unfortunately, IIs have been killed in the past because of that, and they are endangered due to habitat loss. Although scientists in Madagascar have found that, like, not all locals have this negative perception of IIs. Some people have actually found that they could be a beneficial form of pest control because they like to eat bugs that infest sugar cane crops. So hopefully, like, there's more research and studies that come out about them and these fears and misconceptions can turn into appreciation and wonder. And I feel like here on the weirdest thing, we are champions of the oddballs,

champions of like the weird. So I think that IIs are kind of like this wonderful, perfect example of that. That is my platform for IIs. Aw, I love them. Yeah. I mean, like, listen, if I like unexpectedly encountered an IA,

like in the middle of the night, it just like dropped out in front of me, yeah, I would be pretty freaked out. They're pretty freaky. But I, they're adorable in their weird, snotty goblin way. Yes. And even if they weren't, you know, they, they still deserve our respect and protection. Indeed.

I just feel like this little fact just made them all the more relatable. Yeah. Just, I don't know why it's so charming. It just is. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special

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Actual prices may vary, time offer. Okay, we're back. And Bethany, tell me what's going on down in Australia. Actually, there was a very good, Lauren gave me a great segue, actually, because she was talking about how IIs can actually maybe control pests on things like sugar cane crops. And that actually goes really well into my weird fact, because the reason that cane toads were a thing in Australia is because of sugar cane. Sugar cane causes so many problems. It also, because it produces sugar, it also solves many problems, particularly my emotional

problems. But anyway, I want to take you back mentally to Australia in like the 1930s. So time travel with me. And at that time, people in Australia were trying to grow sugar cane. And in doing this, they ran into a problem. and the problem was the cane grub, which is a beetle that in its grub stage eats sugar cane. This was a problem. They started looking for something to do to try and get rid of it.

And what they came across was this study that was done in Puerto Rico where a scientist fed, like put a bunch of cane grubs in front of a cane toad. And the cane toad was like, ah, thank you for lunch. And so they were like, oh, look, cane toads will eat cane grubs. That's great. And everyone went, wow, this sounds like a really great opportunity for biocontory. So they dispatched a dude to Hawaii to bring back the cane toad. And he did. He brought back 101 cantoes.

101. Yes. And you know, you would think it was originally 102. One died in transit. So you would think that, you know, if you're going to institute biocontrol, what you would do is you would say, okay, well, we're going to start like on an island somewhere, like a small island and see how they do. We're going to see if they really eat the cane grubs in C2. We're going to, you know, maybe check them for disease. We're going to like do a whole bunch of things and see what happens. No, no, no, no, no. The scientists did none of these things. Like, you're telling me that in the 1930s, scientists just did a thing without checking first. Did it. They just released the toads. There was actually a small kind of pilot where basically the question was, do the cane toads breed in Australia? And the

answer was a resounding yes. And so they released the toads or the land. And then they began to realize their terrible mistake because cane toads, it turns out, do eat cane grubs, but only when they can get to them. And that is the problem. Because you see cane grubs are grubs. They live under the soil. And cane toads live on the soil and do not dig. And then you see the cane grubs become beetles.

And beetles have wings. And they fly. And cane toads do not. And so there was this brief period of time where the cane beetles would kind of be able to launch themselves into the air and the cane toads would be able to eat them. But no, no, this was just not going to work. But the cane toads could eat loads of other things in Australia. And so they began to proliferate. And this sounds like a classic invasive species issue.

In fact, it's slightly more complicated than that because the problem with the cane toad is not what it eats. The problem is what eats them. So cane toads look real delicious to a lot of native predators in Australia. And Reader, they are not delicious. And that is because they have these giant poisonous shoulder pads on the back of their shoulders. And I mean, I think this really tells us something about shoulder pads as a fashion statement, which is just never, just never. So these poisonous shoulder pads basically mean that any predator that eats them,

if they eat a large enough toad, it finds itself eating its very last thing. Like, that is your final meal. Sorry. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. And so the cane toads began killing off the coals and the crocodiles and the snakes and the guanhas, which are monitor lizards. And of course, the toads also bred well. And so they spread everywhere, which is another problem because, of course, they are toads.

And they look like toads. And humans just don't like that. They're just not, Toads are not classically cute. And so this has been, and continues to be a huge problem. No one has ever stopped the cane toad advance. Like, they haven't. They have tried. They have clubbed them over the head.

They have frozen them in freezers. They have done all sorts of really horrible things to Toads. Yeah. To know. Years ago, when I was at the Washington Post, I actually covered a study that was like a scientist being like, this is it. the most effective and humane way to kill a cane toad. And I was like, this is fascinating that this man set out to like really figure out this issue because they have to do something.

And of course, so many of my U.S. readers were like, what macabre sadistic nonsense is this? So those people should never move to Australia because sometimes you just got to pick up a toad and put it in your freezer. You got to yeat that toad into the sun. I mean, people, they actually did used to kind of, it was like a Boy Scout thing where they would like send teenagers off into the forest to grab toads and stuff them in sacks. It is still, volunteer groups still do do this. But I mean, you know, that's a thing that occurs in many other places as well. So, for example, there are loads of people in the United States who volunteer to go and pull out the common read, fragmites, the invasive common read. there was a massive campaign in China in the late 1960s to kill off every single Eurasian house Sparrow in China.

Didn't work. Anyway, there have been all sorts of these campaigns throughout history. And, you know, the cane toad just happens to be one of them. But you know what? Life finds a way. The cane toad persists. And the cane toad is adapting to Australia. So, for example, now they lose less water through their skin because Australia is dry.

The invading edge of the cane toad wave as they continue hopping westward can actually hop further than the cane toads that follow behind. Wow. Also, they are like cannibals. And when times get tough, they'll eat each other. And this is actually like a useful adaptation for being an invasive cane toad. Wow. And I have to say, I just have to put in a plug for my absolute favorite nature documentary that has ever been made. It is the 1988 documentary Cain Toads and a Natural History.

And apparently Jessica knows this. It's so good. It's so good. This is a masterpiece of cinema. I am serious. And you can find it. It's free on YouTube. Oh, I'm, this is what I'm doing tonight.

I know what I'm doing with my night. Exactly. You know what you're doing tonight. And is watching cane toads in a natural history. I mean, it is fabulous. There is, like, a little girl who has a pet cane toad and is, like, giggling creepyly while she cuddles it. There's, like, this dude who's, like, driving a van swerving across the road trying to hit all the cane toads. And my personal favorite is this dude who's wearing, like, one of those sleeveless white undershirts, right?

And thick glasses and notes emotionally how much he loves to watch cane toad's mate. Wow. It's so good. It's so good. I forget sometimes that we're on a podcast and people can't see my expressions. And my eyebrows just constantly being like raised and my jaw just constantly being dropped. Yeah, cantoes in a natural history like did not get the accolades it deserved. Anyway, so it turns out that the cantoads just are unstoppable.

And at this point, scientists are not even really trying to eradicate them. there's just no point. They are only trying to kind of control them and also to help the predators adapt to them. And predators are actually already doing this on their own. So there are snakes in Australia already who have evolved smaller heads because a small head cannot eat a big toad and a big toad is deadlier than teeny toad. They have also evolved some resistance to the toad poison. I love evolution. It's amazing. But the other thing that scientists are doing is they're trying to teach these predators not to eat poisonous toads. And this is where the poison toad butts come in.

I had forgotten that they were flying butts involved in this story. That's how in it I am. So you have to teach the predators not to eat the toads. So you can feed the predators something that looks like a toad, something that tastes like a toad. Something that tastes like a toad. something that is part of a toad, but it has to be something that will not kill the predator. It just has to be the worst thing the predator has ever had. This is an adaptation of the concept of condition taste aversion, which basically takes you back to like the last time you had food poisoning. And you know how it's never the last thing you ate that gave you food poisoning, but it's the last thing you ate that you'll never eat again? Right? Yeah. Yeah. Because it's just too associated. Yeah. So that's what condition taste diversion is. And they are doing it with these

predators. And so depending on the predator, some of the predators will eat Toad-flavored sausages, and the little Toad-flavored sausages are made of Toad, and they are laced with a chemical called lithium chloride. And lithium chloride is completely harmless, sort of. It absolutely cannot kill you, but it can make you feel the worst nausea you have ever felt in your life. And so you give a predator a little sausage laced with lithium chloride, and it's like, okay, I'm avoiding Toad's forever. I'm. just, I'm done. Anything that tastes like a toad, anything that smells like a toad. Put me off the toads. Put me off the toad diet. The other options, of course, you have animals that are not as

smart and can't really like make the leap from sausage to toad. And so freshwater crocodiles are one of those. And in this particular case, what you need to do is you take the back half of the toad. So all the poisonous bits have been removed. You stuff that with lithium chloride. and throw it to the crocodiles. This is amazing. I'm like, imagine this lab must, like, it's like half kitchen, half, like, towed butcher shop. It's very, like, odd. That's kind of the vibe.

Yeah. In my mind. Except this is also taking place in the Australian outback. Amazing. So during the dry season. And so, for example, I talked with a scientist, George Ward Fear, who is out there in the dry season trying to save the freshwater crocodiles with the power of poison toad butts. And the final way that they do this is actually with a tiny thing called teacher toads,

which are baby cane toads. And so they like breed the cane toads and they release the babies into the wild. And the predators eat the baby cane toads, which are not as poisonous as the full grown large cane toads. Right. And so they won't all die. They'll just go, oh, that was a bad idea. And it's actually really been very effective. So without all of these methods, about,

90% of predators in a given area will die off when faced with the invading cane toad. With them, that drops to 50%. Wow. Which is really quite good. I mean, it's still terrible and like, it's carnage when the cane toads

arrive. But, I mean, it's still better than nothing, and that's the power of cane toad butts. I love that so much. This is, this is, that's like, I don't know, I, I still can't get the image of, um, butchered toad butts out of my brain.

They're kind of gross looking. Also, just imagining, like, a crocodile with food poisoning. I mean, like, mm. This actually leads me to something that I did not look up for the book and I wish that I had is whether or not crocodiles can vomit. Oh, yeah. I know. So, for example, vomiting is not universal.

Like, a lot of animals can't. So, for example, rodents. Rodents cannot mice rats that can't puke. humans obviously can. I did end up going down a rabbit hole for the book as to whether or not elephants could vomit. It has been observed. They do not do it frequently. But it has been observed.

And this is what you do when you write a book. You go down every single rabbit hole, including whether or not an elephant can puke. But I never looked up whether the crocodiles could puke. And now I want to know. Um, that's amazing. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Because I learned a lot of weird stuff. Um, me too. I loved cane toads. I think the cane toads win for me because I thought I knew about the invasive katoan problem and I had no idea the lengths that, uh, scientists have gone through to. Yes. I knew, I knew about the erratic efforts and how wild those have been. But the stories of preparing little froggy hors d'urves for little toad hors d'urbs, rather, for hungry Australian critters is really fascinating and charming to me.

So, Bethany, congratulations. And I will tell you, thank you. And I will tell you right out that that is not the wildest thing that Australians have done to try and get rid of invasive species. and to find out more about that, you're going to have to buy the book. Yes. What a plug for the book. Bethany, you remind our listeners what it's called and where they should go looking for it?

Yeah, the book is called Pests, How Humans Create Animal Villains. And it will be on sale where all fine books are sold on December 6th. I've also been informed by my publicist that it's the sort of book that everyone will get their dad for Christmas. So if you have a dad, it's a great opportunity. Perfect. 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 read and review us on Apple Podcasts.

It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsai.threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodey. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.