The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - George Washington: Swamp Ghost Hunter, Cockroach Chocolate, Science Scams

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Producer Jess Boddy talks about the science in Dark Souls' swamps, Rachel explains cockroaches giving sexy gifts, and Amanda dishes on scientific scammers. 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!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/WEIRDEST and get on your way to being your best self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100 day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

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 Feltman. I'm Jess Bode. And I'm Amanda Reid. Amanda, welcome to the show. Thank you. Jess is very excited. I'm very excited. Justin, so excited, why don't you tell our listeners who Amanda is? Amanda is my buddy from college. We go back. Yeah. Now she works here with us at Pop Sae. Amanda, I'll hand the specifics to you. Yes. So I first met the lovely, fabulous, Jess Bodey in a writing class and it was like an intermediate nonfiction class and Jess was doing her science journalism thing and I was like, Jess is such an incredible writer. I am so jealous of her. Stop it. Stop it. And so when Jess was in grad school, I was still doing undergrad. So we kept in touch. And then eventually I went on to be one of Jess's former volleyball teammates roommate who also was in that same writing class.

It's this tangled web. A tangled web. Shout out to you, Jenna. And then Jenna at one point casually was like, I am going to go play semi-professional slash maybe professional volleyball. It's professional, yeah, overseas. Yeah. Oh, my God. There's no professional leagues in the U.S.

So they're all overseas. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. Jenna was like, I'm going to go play professional volleyball in Germany. Would you like to foster my cat, Mink for a hot minute, since you have lived with Mink before? And I was like, absolutely, I would love to be her weird aunt. So that's the story. story. The world is very small, actually, fun fact. Yeah. But but now you do tell us what you write about. Yeah. So I work on the gear team here at Popular Science. So any doodads, gizmos, and

whatcha-macallit, if they're on sale, I'll write about them. If they're really good, I'll write about them and if they're not good, I'll be as nice as possible. Nice. What a lovely quality that is. Amazing. Well, Amanda, we're so excited to have you on the show. So let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I'm in 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, et cetera, and 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. Just, what's your tease? I want to talk about fire swamps. Yeah. Great. I have no idea what it means, but I'm excited for you. I'm excited to divulge. I am going to talk about how roaches are changing the way they have sex and how it's all our fault again. This has happened before. Wow. I'm intrigued. I didn't even know there were different ways that they could do it.

Well, there are now. Okay, sure. Wow. Amanda, what's your tease? Yes. So my tease is scientific scams, why they happen, and how to potentially spot them. Hmm. Intriguing. It feels very relevant in today's day and age.

I feel like there's many scammers. Yes. And actually there's a little bit of context of why I chose to delve into scientific scams, which should I just, should I just go? You can go first. Yeah, we don't usually have new people go first, but you're rolling with it. So why don't you roll right into it? Only for the comfort of the guest.

So if you would like to go first, we would love to have you go first. I would love to go first because I'm just so excited about this. So for context, I love reading about scams, grifts, heists. Like, if it involves lies and manipulation, I'm in there like swimwear. I get that. Yeah. There's actually a really wonderful podcast I listened to called Scam Goddess that you should listen to after you, after you listen to

weirdest thing I learned this week, that it's like my favorite podcast to listen to while I'm pairing socks together. Wow, that's specific. Yeah. But that is a good podcast pairing activity. Yeah, like laundry, laundry and podcast.

And if you have a really good pair of headphones, chef's kiss. So I wanted to see if there's an Ann and Delvey of Science, which led me down a big old rabbit hole because scientific scams are more common than we think. For example, the vaccines cause autism study. It's a huge scientific scam.

Sure, yeah. The deeply flawed original 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield was retracted, and he had his medical license revoked for it, but people still run with it and quote it today. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. It's true. That is a scientific scam. Wow.

It's just so, it's just plain sight. I didn't even think twice about it. Yeah. Neither did the investors of therapists. They were like, yeah. This blonde woman, I believe her. Her voice is. Compelling.

Yeah, like that Edison testing device was not doing anything magical with those finger pricks of blood. and now she's serving time for it. So what defines a scientific scam, aka scientific misconduct? This is from our friends at the National Academy of Sciences. I'm quoting and paraphrasing this definition from on being a scientist, a guide to responsible conduct in research, which they authored. The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy defined scientific misconduct as the,

quote, fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results. And then they go on to define these elements. So fabrication is making up results or data. Falsification is manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record. So, for example, photo manipulation with Photoshop, which, quick aside, if you know Photoshop, the world is absolutely your oyster.

Big time. It's true. At this point, if you even know Canva, the world is your oyster. That's true. Canva has really stepped up their game. Yeah. really opened up the scam market, I would say. Indeed.

Canva, don't sue me. I love your products. Absolutely. Not Canva, not just for scammers. Also for graphic design girlies. Also for graphic design girlies. If you need an infographic made, Canva's your girl. But like, I wonder, because the big thing with Photoshop, which we do not support, we are not endorsing this practice. but like bank statements you know i wonder if canva's trying to get in on the bank statement

creating game like are the girls getting those apartments that they're applying for right thanks to canva or is it probably they just unveiled the magic eraser tool so perfect yes there you go done deal so selfies and bank statements you can do it all through Photoshop or Canva so back to back to the terms so plagiarism uh is as we all know the appropriation of another person's ideas processes results or words without giving appropriate credit so some places is even add abuse of confidentiality in peer review, which is if it's not anonymously conducted or if the I see. If the peer reviewers know whose paper it is, which would bias them to be like, oh, yeah, this is big famous man's paper. It's going to be correct. That's my pal. So this is another fun. Yeah. This is a, yeah, this is a.

another fun thing that they consider misconduct failure to allocate credit appropriately in scientific publications so there's ghost authorship where the real author is not listed as an author and then there's guest authorship where someone who wasn't involved in the research adds their name mostly for credibility clout which is fabulous that's wild yeah well and so much of that is like it's So at least my understanding is that it's such a gray area because it's like standard practice, right, for the head of a lab to have their name on a study. Right. And of course, in most labs, your grad students, if they're doing a study, you're highly involved as their advisor. But like the extent of your involvement can vary widely.

And the extent to which people assume you were involved also varies widely. So I think sometimes you do have these situations where there's a more senior academic who like pretty much just was like, this is cool, good job on it. And then their name is on there for credibility, which is like, is that such a problem? Probably not most academics would say. But then it becomes a problem if you're using that to like grease the wheels on really shoddy research that that person didn't actually like verify was good. But yeah, it's like I can, I feel like that that one in particular is like a very blurry line in academia. Yeah. And then.

And then there's more. There's more. So not observing regulations governing research, failure to report misconduct or retaliation against those who report misconduct. Sure. Yeah. And this one with my understanding of how. submitting research to journal's works is kind of crazy because I know in journalism it's not like you can submit the same pitch at the same time to multiple places and you just have to be

really kind of open about it but in scientific research submitting to more than one journal at once is considered misconduct in some cases I don't remember why it's called that but I remember that's What is called? Wait, what is that? I've been a Ranski used to be like, you don't want to get the mingle finger. Oh my God. That just unlocked a memory. TVT grad school, NYU shirt.

But yeah, because it's like the reason it came up in our journalism class was that some scientists are, this is probably not so true anymore because I think at this point, all working scientists have a basic working understanding of media because like we all do. but at the time it was like some older scientists will think that they can't risk talking to you because if you broke the embargo, it would mean that their research had been, quote, published in another journal first, even though that journal would be like the New York Times. Yeah. So it was like, it's not actually breaking the rule, but he was like, listen, some scientists will be really paranoid about you covering their work when it's embargoed because of the ingle finger rule. And that's all I remember about it.

I remember it mostly because ingle thinker. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's going to be a lot of fun vocab in this segment. Great. So numbers time. Rachel, Jess, percentage-wise, how much scientific misconduct do researchers admit to? admit to?

Like versus what what gets found out without them? Yes. So like personally, like in their own little work. Oh, like they say I have probably bended those rules. Yeah. Before. Okay. I'm going to say like 15%.

Oh. I'll say, I don't know. Probably like 10%. I feel like nobody would own up to that. Yeah, that's probably fair. I probably guess too high. I don't know. I don't know.

You guys are right. According to a 2009 study titled, how many scientists fabricate and falsify research, a systematic review and meta-analysis of survey data, say that five times fast, around 2% of scientists have admitted to fabricating, falsifying, or modifying data or results at least once. 2%

Which you guys are right Not that many One to admit to it However Around 34% Have admitted to performing Other questionable research practices

What? Yeah I bet it's one of those things too where if you'd like describe the thing they do Without like calling it misconduct That like a lot of people will be like

yeah, I've done that. Yeah. Everybody does that. And then you're like, yeah, that doesn't the definition of plagiarism. It's like, oh, no, I told my friends, my research over happy hour drinks. Right. I am no longer allowed to be a scientist. Yeah, listen, there's a spectrum of poor behavior.

And I have to imagine it varies a lot by field. Yeah. Which we also will get into later. I want to know who the worst is. Yeah. So this study also put out a survey asking about the behaviors of colleagues. So when researchers are asked about their colleagues, admission rates were around 14% for falsification and 72% for other questionable research

practices. Damn. People are. Ruthless. Not loyal. Yeah. Wow. Shocking.

They have some stuff to work out. Yeah. I think so too. Interdepartmentally. I think the researchers should fight maybe. That's a good way to solve it. Yeah. With classic fisticuffs.

We do not condone violence on this podcast. But we do condone like classic fisticuffs. in like a consensual setting. Yeah. Like if you call them fisticuffs, if you wear like an old-timey strongman outfit while you do it, I can know that.

Yeah, absolutely. Same here. That's something I can get behind. So why does this happen? Scientists are people too breaking news. What? Crazy. And people do dishonest things to climb the career.

ladder and research is a competitive field. So David Goldstein, a physicist and Caltech professor, studies scientific misconduct and has identified three motives for doing it. Career pressure, naturally. Knowing the answer to the problem they were considering and believing that it was unnecessary to do the work properly. God. Come on.

That's bad. Essentially, arrogance. Your job. Just call it arrogance. Yeah. Yeah, like it feels a very seventh grade science fair to me. Like, oh, gosh, everyone's done the Skittles color distribution test. We all know grape is the one that is least included.

I'm just going to look at one bag, take some pictures and make up the rest of the figures. Right. To me, that's so much more, like, upsetting and problematic and, like, makes me suspicious of all. all of that person's future work than just like wanting to get ahead and be like, all be sneaky. The being like actually, I don't have to actually do science

to be a good scientist is like no, so bad. Alarm bells. Danger, danger. We will, we will. Someone bonk them over the head with a beaker, please. And those beakers are made of borosilicate

glass, which means they're pretty sturdy. I thought we don't kid own violence Only if it's something that would happen Like in the three stooges Yeah exactly With sound effects Yeah it's like that Snapchat filter Does anyone remember the Snapchat

Bunk filter with the little bong sound That's a vintage Snapchat I mean I don't know I guess people still use Snapchat Yeah It was like yeah a good vintage A vintage meme Anyway

So speaking earlier to what field does this happen the most in? So science misconduct is more likely to happen if they work in a field where data is not precisely reproducible like life sciences. Sure. And the data manipulation is more difficult to detect, which means it's easier to cheat. Right. You know, whenever you, I mean, like, this was a huge thing. nutrition research a few years ago. And it's like, yeah, because nutrition research is pretty much based on user surveys. And like those are already kind of messy data to work with, like,

pretty unreliable data. So then it's just like so easy to just like throw in some people who don't exist or like accidentally lose a few people. Yeah. And then there's all the statistical manipulation. Yeah. You can do. So wild. wild. So who or what keeps scientific misconduct from happening? Um, it kind of operates similar to the honor system, which might not work. Uh, so for example, study authors are expected to check their findings when submitting to academic journals, which sometimes people don't check their work and then they're just like, I'm done. Here you go. Um, misconduct investigations usually come from that person's academic institution, which is a rigorous and pricey process.

And if the person in question is a high up individual, there could be some conflict of interests and covering up happening. Sure. Yeah. Um, calling out misconduct is also on the shoulders of colleagues reporting their concerns, which means if you don't have that much skin in the game, you might not be comfortable expressing your. concerns when seeing scientific misconduct. So thankfully, preventing misconduct gets more concrete when you hit the journal level thanks to the Committee of Publication Ethics, which has clear retraction guidelines, but it's on the journal editors to spot it. Like there is no turn-it-in enterprise that journals use for articles they receive, at least

to my knowledge or research. Which is, which is, I feel that's very interesting because like as a college student, at least for me, like, making sure a research paper was plagiarism free was like a huge thing. So it's like, Turtitan was the friend. Yeah. The bomb. I also, I also feared it though. Yeah, absolutely. Like what if I accidentally do something that gets caught by Turnitin.com?

And then I'm like, what do I even do? And that never happened. But like what's my word against the robot? I don't know. Exactly. And what if I use Turn It In and Turn It In is like, okay, no plagiarism. Congratulations. Go on your married way.

But like if my professor were to check my paper, like, what if there's some secret plagiarism that Turnitin didn't check? This is so telling about the kinds of students. We were. I don't think this is the way everybody thinks. We just want to tell the truth. That's all we want to do. Yeah. So how do you potentially spot scientific misconduct?

So a 2016 study titled Linguistic Obfuscation, which fun vocabulary word, it pretty much was like covering up. Oh, okay. Linguistic obfuscation in fraudulent science. Looked to answer that question. The authors, Jeff Hancock and David Markowitz, looked at the archives of PubMed, a database of life and sciences journals from 1973 to 2013 for retracted papers. They identified 253, primarily from biomedical journals, and compared them to unretracted papers from the same journals during the same years and covering the same. topics. Their hypothesis was that scientists know they're committing misconduct and they skirt around their findings using language. Looking at the kinds of language they use can differentiate a

scummy paper from a legit one. Which... Like they use words like a little wiggle room or something? Yeah. So they rated the level of fraud in each paper using an obfuscation index, which calculated the degree to which the authors attempted to mask their false results. They created this index by looking at the number of casual terms used, looking at abstract language, jargon, positive emotion terms. So like, good, great, all that jazz. And they also looked at ease of reading score. So like, how easily can someone read this paper? Like, what is the great level? I feel like I want all of these things but to use for the dating apps. Yes.

Totally. I think that would help me weed out so many bad actors. Totally. I'm kind of surprised that nobody has done that. I definitely at the tail end of my dating app career, I started to notice a lot of people using scripts, which had not been a thing up until that point. I see a lot of like recycled jokes. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. Or like, fiends. Like, I love the office. It's like, it's okay. I'm happy for you. Yeah. And I also see a lot of going on TikTok that people just like, oh, that's a good idea. I'm going to do that. Yeah. The original, you know? Yeah. Anyway. I have some integrity. Yeah. With your dating app. The obfuscation.

The obfuscation of Tinder. That's a paper in itself. Like we've moved past dudes saying I'm six foot when I'm actually 5'8, you know. Listen, as a 6'2 woman, it's rough out there. I'm not going to lie. I recently watched a TikTok where a tall lady like picked up her small boyfriend. And I was like, Tall lady pick me up. Representation.

Representation matters. It matters. Anyway, back to the scamming. I'm sorry. Back to scientific misconduct. So, they found that fraudulent retracted papers scored significantly higher than those retracted for other reasons, and that fraudulent papers used 1.5% more jargon than unretracted papers.

So, scientific scammers. will cover their lives by manipulating language, like using fewer positive emotion terms to describe the data so no one looks into it. Oh. They're like, the data's fine. Yeah, it's good. We're reasonably pleased with it.

Don't look twice at it, please. Yeah. Please, look at our beautiful graphs that we may or may not have manipulated using Canada. So, could this be the basis of a research-based turn it in? Hancock, again, one of the authors of this study, isn't so sure that academia is ready for such a tool. He says, scientific fraud is of increasing concern in academia and automatic tools for identifying fraud might be useful. But much more research is needed before considering this kind of approach.

Obviously, there is a very high error. rate that would need to be improved. But also, science is based on trust and introducing a fraud detection tool into the publication process might undermine that trust. I kind of think

maybe science should be based on facts and evidence and not trust. Yeah, that might be part of the problem here. I do think that the point about the error rate is much more meaningful. Like any time you're

getting AI to detect something, you're going to mess up. It's going to end up detecting something else that's stupid. And you don't want to realize you're accidentally targeting like humble early career scientists who are trying to sound really impressive, but also not make their data sound too good. Yeah. So yeah, more research needed. But I would say that like eventually a tool to verify facts in or a tool to verify like trustworthiness in an academic paper would not make science less good. Yeah. Right. Right.

Unfortunately, we cannot rely on the values of trust and friendship to like make sure the science is happening. The power of friendship. The power of friendship. and it's just like two people in white coats cheersing beakers together. Right, right. So more scientific scam, fun facts. Retraction is a slow process or it can be a slow process. If you look at when a fraudulent paper was published and when it was retracted,

it can sometimes be a 10-year difference, which is a little concerning. That's a long time. Yeah, a very long time. And some of the retracted papers I looked at, like the paper was published in like 1983 and then finally was retracted this year. So it can even be longer than 10 years. That's a long time for like the like false data to just be like chilling. Yeah. Yeah.

I do think that it's the turnaround time has gotten faster. Yeah. the age of the internet. With a lot of those, I think it's that they got online and then someone was like, uh, right. What the heck is this? What's going on?

Yeah. Another scientific scam-pone fact, a 2013 paper suggests that men are more likely to have papers retracted for fraud. Hmm. No comment. No comment. No comment. And one retracted.

doesn't mean that all of a scientist's papers will be retracted. A journal called Respiration said in 2018 that it wouldn't retract a paper by romantic grifter and scientific scammer Paolo Maciorini after his personal and professional cons were revealed. But they said, JK in April 20, 23 and retracted it. Wow. I mean, listen, it is fair to be like just because this person is. is a lying liar doesn't mean they never endeavored to do a good scientific study. Right. You know, they're lying liars in every field.

And some of them do good work when they're not lying. But I'm glad that they followed up. Right. I'm glad that they came to some conclusions. Yeah. Anyway, if you want to learn more about specific scientific scams, there's a beautifully researched Wikipedia page on scientific misconduct that lists

a bunch of them and then you can also visit www. retraction watch.com which follows this subject super closely. They also have a leaderboard of who has the most retractions. That prize topping the

leaderboard is Yoshitaka Fuji with 183 total retractions. What? Very nice. What? What? one of the founders of Retraction Watch is the professor who told us about inglefingering. It all comes back to Sherp. Thanks, Ivan. Thanks, Ivan.

But I love your work. So the moral of the story is, watch for jargon, lies will catch up to you, and learn Photoshop or even learn the basics of Canva. There you go. Amazing. I loved it. Wonderful. 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?

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Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about roaches and how they have sex and how humans are changing it and messing enough. So a recent study showed that human interference may have had a big impact on the way German cockroaches romance one another. And this is not the first time that we've done that. God. So we'll have to start by talking about German cockroaches and German cockroach sex. So German cockroaches, which actually have African origins and in Germany are apparently called Russian cockroaches.

Oh, my gosh. Because it reminds me of like syphilis was like the French pox and but the French called it like, you know, the Swiss pox. It was, you know, it's classic, classic thing people do. Yeah. A geographic nightmare. Yeah. So they're the little brown roaches that city folks in the U.S. are very lucky to find in abundance in our kitchens, frequently.

Right. According to the University of Florida, and this is a quote, the German cockroach is the italics. cockroach of concern. The species that gives all of their cockroaches a bad name. Cockroach of concern. Wow. Which to me feels like a little unfair because they're not like inherently super

dangerous or destructive or anything. Like they can contaminate your food stuffs and carry pathogens the way any pest in your home could potentially. But most of the time they're not really going to do that. You might have an allergic reaction to them. They'll be you do the dust mites. But for most of the time. people. It's just like, it's an emotional thing. Right. Wow. Because I mean, we recently had Bethany

Brookshire on and she wrote a book about pests and how we feel about them. And that's really it. It's about how we feel about them more than what they do. So Truman Cockroaches, like, you don't want them in their house, but I would strongly prefer them to like having giant American cockroaches scuttling around. Yeah. I guess. The German cockroach is Wunderbar. Oh. Yeah. Yeah.

I think they're probably considered the biggest pest because they are like literally the most common cockroach species worldwide. And they're the ones most reliant on human habitats to survive. They like will not live if they're not living in somebody's kitchen. They're just little guys. They're just little guys. aren't we all? Right.

So they're the ones by far most likely to just like fully infest a building. So, you know, the University of Florida is right that like they cause concerns. And yeah, fun fact that I just learned today. Only around 30 cockroach species out of 4,600 are associated with human habitats. So not only are most cockroach species not pests, but most of them like are wild. They have a life completely separate from life. I had no idea. Wow.

Yeah, I knew there were some cockroaches that, like, are wild animals and don't have anything to do with the ones in my, in my apartment, despite my best effort. Those country roaches. Right. But it's actually, like, very unusual, the ones that have adapted to live with humans. Wow. Yeah. German roaches, back to how they have sex.

When it's time to do the deed, a male cockroach. cockroach will provide a quote nuptial gift which is a great euphemism to his female of choice um it's a solution full of proteins fats and sugars so it's actually quite a bit like giving chocolate to someone that you're trying to woo um if you secreted that chocolate from a gland under your wings i'm not going to lie that's kind of cute i kind of love that it is like it's it's sweet it is just Literally. Yeah, the goo contains maltose, which quickly turns into glucose when it hits a female's saliva. So the way that this works is that this very delicious gift entices the female to climb up onto her sugar daddy's back, basically.

Literal sugar daddy. And that gives him an opportunity to latch his, I'm so sorry, hooked telescoping, penis on to her reproductive tract. Ouch. But it's not, you know, it's not like a bedbug situation where it's like a wound. Like they do, it is intercourse as we know it. It's just that their little instrument is horrified. So it's like if somebody left a little trail of chocolates to the bed. Yes. And then they have a scary looking genitalia. That part, we we definitely want the metaphor to end

before that. But the chocolate leading up to the bed is pretty accurate. Yeah. And so then the cockroaches face in opposite directions. Like the female turns around as if to say,

ugh. And then they just stay attached at the bub and they stay that way for an hour and a half. Oh my gosh. And they say romance is dead. So how did humans screw up this process? So in the late 20th century, we messed it up because roaches love sweet treats, nuptial and otherwise.

And it's very obvious that like being into sweet stuff is a very important like evolutionary trait for that because that's part of their mating process. But then researchers created pesticides that contained glucose in order to tempt the roaches into poisoning themselves. And it worked so well that by the 1980s, there were these German roach populations in Florida that no longer sought out sweet stuff to eat. Several other populations have shown similar mutations since then. But basically, hijacking the cockroach sweet tooth was so effective that bugs with like weird sugar-hating mutations were just doing so much more baby-making than all the other rotos that this started to become like a pretty common.

quirk. Wow. And that is a real problem for amorous male roaches. Last year, researchers actually confirmed that females with this glucose aversion mutation actively avoided male nuptial gifts. So basically they'd like be tempted over by the smell of like the fat and the protein. But then as soon as they got it taste of it, they would run away from the mating attempt. They were like, bleh. It gave them and they left. This is all like very real

to realize. I know. So obviously that isn't something scientists. We're like, wow, we need to fix this problem because nobody wants

more of this particular kind of roach in the world. In fact, many people probably would have considered it like, wow, like if our pesticides aren't going to work as well as they used to, at least we've made them like

not, want to have sex anymore. That's right. A silver lining. They were however concerned about the fact that sweet pesticides like weren't working so well anymore. They still do work for like most roaches. But basically the way they caught wind of this mutation for the first time was that somebody in Florida was like no matter why two, these roaches will not die. And it was because they just literally had stopped eating what had up until then been a super effective baited pesticide. So yes.

Scientists are studying this because they're like, how do we keep outpacing the roach taste buds? Yeah. And roaches do adapt very fast. They're known for that. They're very resilient. They're, they're squirrely. They'll figure stuff out. They'll find a way.

And unfortunately for us, it seems like they have found a way to get around this glucose aversion sex problem. So this is from a new study published in April. And scientists showed that glucose-averse male cockroaches have, in some cases, developed two new traits to deal with this issue. First of all, they've started to secrete less maltose in their homemade chocolate and replaced it with a higher level of maltotriose. And that's a more complex sugar molecule. It takes longer to break down, like five minutes to turn into. to glucose versus a few seconds.

And actually, even when females don't have a glucose aversion, they seem to like this stuff better. I think it's actually sweeter once it hits, is my understanding. And because there's such a long delay in it turning into glucose, the female cockroaches that do have this glucose aversion, like, won't scurry off before the meeting starts. I see. The males also got faster in doing their, like, chocolate to genital bait and switch. Wow.

It usually takes the male, like, three to four seconds to lock on to their target. To dock on. But scientists say that the ones they observed had shaved around a second off of that time, which makes a big difference. Speed runners. Yeah, exactly. On top groch speed runners. Press VL to target and then go. And then meanwhile, the females seemed to be developing changes in their saliva that made the process of turning maltoes or maltotrios into glucose even slower.

So again, like the roaches that are successfully reproducing have these quirks that get around this new glucose aversion. One caveat is that all of these roaches were like lab populations. so it's not clear if this has or could happen like, you know, with the roaches in your kitchen. But it has, you know, they didn't do anything in particular to these roaches to make them adapt. They just kept trying to poison them probably. Yeah. But yeah, that's my whole story. You know, I was talking about this on Science Friday for the News Roundup and they were like,

Rachel, you wrote a whole book about sex and its evolution. And that is true. I wrote a book called Been There, Done That, Arousing History of Sex, which is on sale wherever books are sold. Hell yeah. Ooh, go buy it. We're gently asking you to do so, but not pressure you or anything. But, you know, they were like, how, you know, what do you think this says about the evolution

of sex? And it was like, it's a great reminder that, like, sex. sex is a process that is like the result of a bunch of environmental pressures over a long period of time. And yeah, it changes way faster than the roaches that it did for like our pre-human ancestors probably. But like it's a, it is true that like, you know, sex has not always worked the way it does now. And I think that's cool. It's a very like DIY process. Totally.

Sometimes it's got to change. And roaches aren't fust. They're just, they just do what they got to do. So that's my whole story. There's no toxic masculinity in the roach community. Absolutely not. There's no room for it. So like not only will roaches possibly survive a nuclear apocalypse, they will be better for it.

because there won't be humans trying to poison them and changing the way they bone. Right. Yeah, it's a fair point. It's time to leave them alone. No, I say that as I like, I'm reminding myself, it's time to replace the bait traps in my kitchen. Totally. Hope there's not too much evolution going on in my kitchen cabinet. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact.

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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Okay, we're back. Jess, fire swamps. Fire swamps. Okay, so once more, I was inspired to do this fact because of a video game. Are you surprised? Not surprised. So this is a Dark Souls 1 related fact. I was kind of doing a casual play-through of Dark Souls 1.

I played it for the first time, like two years ago. Not my favorite Souls-like Soulsborn game, but, you know, it's a classic, very formative for the genre, et cetera. I was doing as Vi-Hander, as Vi-Hander. this is a German themed episode, I guess, run of the game. It's a big sword. But yeah, anyways. I was playing Dark Souls and also my best friend, Lindsay has been streaming her first playthrough of the game on Twitch.

So I just had Dark Souls on the brain. And there is a fire swamp in this game. So basically in Dark Souls, there's this super notorious area and it's called Blight Town, which, you know, just off the bat sounds quite inviting. And it's notorious for being really. really sucky and really difficult and super jank. So this game came out back in like 2011, I believe it was, like on PS3, Xbox 360. It's an older game.

And this area of Blightown is this like series of rickety wooden platforms and scaffolding that are all attached to like the side of this giant cliff. And because there's so much data loading in like items and enemies and bonfires and chests and everything, the game just gets super framey and stuttery. And it's just like, you know, people have. called it unplayable. And it's, you know, it's better in modern consoles and the remastered version, yada, yada. But you traverse this, like, this very difficult area. You get to the bottom and you think, oh, God, finally, salvation.

No, it's a poison swamp. It only gets worse from there. It only gets worse. But yeah, the poison swamp is like a classic thing in these Soulsworn games. Like, last time I was here on weirdest thing, I talked about Eldon Ring. That game's got poison swamps. Darksult has them. Bloodborn's got them. They're everywhere. So you go through this poison swamp. It's a really cool, like, kind of bog area. It's kind of nice. You know, we love bog.

We love a bog body additionally. Yes, we've done bog bodies here, actually. Good times. But yeah, you get to the end of this bog and you find the boss and it's this beautiful, terrifying spider lady. Her name is Quaylog. Whoa. What a gorgeous, what a beautiful name for a girl. I love her. She's like this woman and she has long, dark brown hair and she's kind of naked. Like they don't show you her nipples, but like she's not wearing clothes.

Oh my God. But then like at the end of her torso, like from the waist down, she's attached to the top of this like giant grotesque spider. It has a bunch of eyes and it's kind of hairy and then it pukes lava and she uses a fire sword. It's a very cool boss. One of my favorites. But yeah. So then, you know, she's like a fire boss. And then when you beat her, you keep going down lower.

And it's a fire zone. It's like fire, magma, death, you know, all this fire stuff. So all of that, you know, thinking about like the swamp and then like the fire kind of oozing up beneath makes me think of Princess Bride as well. Yeah. Yeah. Which has the fire swamp. Which, again, kind of seems like a normal swamp. But then the jets of fire burst forth from the ground.

almost like there is some pool of fire and magma and death underneath. And I wondered to myself, are fire swamps real? And the answer is maybe kind of, sort of. So there have been instances in real life of people traversing swamps, either on foot or by boat and then poof, a plume of flames erupts. And this is where a lot of ghost stories and swamps come from. So there is some European folklore where these fireballs were thought to be like satanic sprites that could wield fire. Oh yeah. What is the name for them? They have a fun name.

Will of the wisp. Yeah. Will of the wisp. Yeah. And then actually there's another tale like old European folktale about these like lights in the swamp being the soul of a man named Jack. And he was denied entry to the underworld. And so he was like this grumpy old ghost. And he was holding. like this lantern. So it's like Jack a lantern. Oh. And apparently the lantern was supposed to be like a burning piece of coal inside of a carved turnip. All right. I don't know why. I mean, maybe they just didn't have pumpkins there. But, and we don't really know like why we use pumpkins for Jack lanterns. But, you know, the idea basically was that this like old like lost soul Jack was like luring travelers off the path and, you know, you'd get lost or you'd drown or whatever. So

You know, just little ghost things. Just ghost things. Just being flumpy and being like, oh, I'm so mad. I'm going to go lead someone astray and lead them to a swamp and then engulf them in flames. Yeah, exactly. So, okay, so let's say, you know, maybe it's not ghosts. Like, what could another explanation be? Maybe it is.

Maybe it is. But if it's not, could it be a scientific phenomenon? Well, Popsai actually did a story on this back in 2018. and the writer of that story, Benji Jones, interviewed a few folks about it. He interviewed somebody a microbial biochemist at Rutgers named Jeff Boyd. And Dr. Boyd said, unlike oceans and lakes, bog water is stagnant and oxygen-deprived. So this makes the perfect environment for anaerobic bacteria, which, again, I talked about in my elderly corpse wax fact.

But basically, anaerobic bacteria are just microorganisms that live, like, really well without oxygen. Like they don't need oxygen to survive. So they thrive in the swamps and in the bogs. And then in bogs, one specific group of anaerobic microbes can be especially present. And that group specifically is called the methanogens. That's kind of a sleigh name. Yeah, right, right? So you might be asking, you know, what is a methanogen? Well, these things, they eat dead plant material, they break it down, and the byproduct can be methane gas. Methane gas is very flammable. You probably know where this is going.

Farts. Farts. Yeah, well, yes, definitely farts. But basically, yeah, like all of these methanogen bacteria things, they are hanging out in these bogs making fart gas, flammable fart gas underwater. It kind of gets trapped down there. Sometimes it like jostles around surfaces and then. it gets ignited and it's a plume of flame. And yeah, this notion of the fire swamp isn't exactly new.

In fact, flammable bogs are a part of what some people consider to be the first American science experiment. Ooh. I don't know if that's like official, but like people kind of say that. So basically, here's, here are the deets. In 1783, George Washington, he was waiting in Princeton, New Jersey for the freshly signed treaty of Paris. He was killing time with his, with his pals.

by debating something. He was arguing with Thomas Payne and his soldiers about how these will the whips were formed. Apparently they were very well documented at the time. And so Washington and Payne were like, it's natural gas. Like, come on. It's that simple. The soldiers were like, no, no. Like, it's ghosts.

Yeah, something spooky. Yeah. So they took a boat out on the, I think it was the Millstone River. and it was a very bog, swampy area. And this is from Doug Evaly, another microbiologist at Rutgers. And he said that they took long poles and probed the mud. Looking for mud. And...

Looking for mud ghosts. Get out of the mud ghost. They actually held a flame over the water. So when the gas came up and it ignited a big flash. So they found the... their first fire swamp. So that's what people say is like the first experiment in America, which you know, experiment used loosely, but could be. And apparently, so this, I found this info from 2008 that like people reenact it. That's so much better than most

reenactments. I agree. Now I need to see if they keep doing it. I want to go hunting for mud ghosts. I'm with you. Rejoice people of New Jersey. You have a cool story. and like a potentially cool thing to attend. I feel like Jersey gets a lot of hate when we like, we should be taking that aversion to the state of Ohio. Listen, as someone who was both born in New Jersey and now lives in New Jersey, though two very different parts of the state,

I agree. New Jersey is great. Is it, you know, a trash state full of trash people? Yes, but so is the entire United States of our America, you know. It's got really great stuff here. So I'm a fan. Like the Jersey Turnpike, both the highway and the dance move. Oh my God.

Oh. We have Hogi Fest. So end of discussion. Well, the final piece here, coming back to the Will of the Whisp. So if this basically, if this. gas is getting like created and then dislodged like how does it get ignited if it's just by itself out there in the bog and you're seeing it from afar how does that happen so this is still somewhat of a mystery but there are some theories so one example is that anaerobic microbes can make

another byproduct when they're out there eating stuff called phosphine and that's a compound that is known to spontaneously combust when it comes into contact with oxygen so maybe this is another thing that they make when it comes to the surface hits oxygen, makes a little heat, makes a little combustion, lights the fart gas on fire. And by fart gas, I do mean methane, to be clear. And other people think that all these compounds in the bog, all these chemicals could be creating something called chemiluminescence, which is just a reaction that makes light instead of heat. And that is like what fireflies do when they light up their butts. and some people actually think it is just fireflies, which I think is bullshit.

Yeah. Like I think no offense to the, no offense to the bug, the fireflies. But like a plume of fire is. Yeah, something's going wrong with a bunch of fireflies. Yes. It's a brighter than just like, oh, look, it's a summer night in a field. Look, how beautiful, how quite how gorgeous. Yeah, I agree.

seems like something like some old like curmudgeon would be like you're crazy it's just a firefly you know like I don't know anyway a firefly yeah yeah so scientists basically think it's more likely that is the first situation of the gas and the phosphine maybe there's an explanation we don't know yet but fire swamps are thought to like have some kind of scientific explanation they're very rarely if ever caught on film though so oh wow. That's another like kind of question mark. But yeah, just some final fun facts before I wrap up. Over the course of researching, this fact, I learned that another word for swamp is quag,

Q-U-A-G, which is just like the name of that boss, Quaylag. I wonder if that's the same route as like Quagmire. Yeah. I didn't even think of that. That makes total sense. That's like a swamp of a situation, if you will. Right. Oh my gosh.

Wow, that makes total sense. Language is so cool, guys. Yeah. I love linguistics, actually. But yeah, and then the last thing is that bring it all back to Dark Souls is that like the ideas of fire and piromancy in Dark Souls are often associated with chaos. And I just kept thinking about how, you know, we have like a scientific metric for measuring chaos or at least kind of like, you know, measuring disorder is how these like entropy basically. Yeah. And how in Dark Souls, you know, if you think of like where the chaos magic and the chaos stuff is in Dark Souls, it's in like the fire and the swamp, which I think are traditionally very high like levels of entropy, which I think is cool.

Yeah. Yeah. He is a chaotic from a physical standpoint. Exactly. So yeah, I just love a little art meets science moment. Yeah. But yeah. I think we should. take a field trip to the river. Yeah, you guys come to New Jersey and we'll either, you know, find an official recreation or we'll just do it ourselves. Exactly.

It's just poking in mud. Yeah. Got some long sticks. It'll be a blast. It's like, all right. You hold the lighter. You poke the bog. That's what we're doing instead of the next weirdest.

thing live show. Just a bog-poken trip. Yeah. Amazing. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? So many, so many facts packed it. Wow. The real weirdest thing we learned this week were the friends we made along the way.

Exactly. And the scams we got away with. Yeah. The nuptial gift sticks out to me. Yeah, I'll be thinking about the like, disturbingly apt metaphor of giving someone chocolate and then how horrifying that metaphor becomes immediately. Yes. Danger. Yeah. Well, it was a good app. So we're all winners in my book. Exactly. I love that. Loved personally, I'm here for the fire swamp. Yeah. It's good. It's good. I love a

fart in bog. Yeah. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bode, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.