The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Getting Green Blood, Animal Crossing's Rarest Fish, Bird-Like Plague Masks

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

This week, we've got the first half of our remote live show! The weirdest things we learned this week range from Animal Crossing's most fascinating fish to a man with forest green blood. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton.com. 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. Hey guys, it's Jess, and I have a quick note for you. What you're about to hear is the first half of our Zoom live show, which we did in coordination with caveat at the end of last month. It features facts from Rachel as always and also myself and Claire. You'll also hear Stan Horacek and

Prabita Saha chime in, too, since they were also on the live stream. It might sound a a little different since we're all perfecting our home recording setups, but I can assure you it'll be as weird as always. All right, that's it. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the interesting things we find end up in our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just share around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week, a podcast from the editors of Popular science. As I said before, on the weirdest together this week, we start by each offering up a little

tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. Claire, why don't you start with your teas? Yes, I would love to. So, if you take too much of a migraine medication, it can turn your blood green. Green? Green? Yeah. That's a cooler I would expect from what? Speaking, speaking for a friend, not for me. It is March. There are a lot of colors closer to red that I would guess. Yeah.

Yeah, it's not red. Before. Correct. Just green. There's multiple shades that it could be. Yeah. My fact is about the reason why plague doctors used to dress up as scary birds. Totally.

Oh my gosh. Did you say birds? Bird fans are deliq. And just, what's your tease? So my tease is that I want to talk about how the rarest fish in Animal Crossing is actually one of like the coolest, weirdest fishes in real life. Cool. Ooh, Animal Crossing, topical for these times.

Indeed, indeed. So what do we want to hear about first? Now that you mentioned Animal Crossing, I think you have to talk about Animal Crossing. Stan thinks I should go first. I concur. Okay. Well, in that case, I will begin. So I'm sure as many of you know,

Animal Crossing has been a pretty big thing lately, but for those who don't, it's the latest version of this game that originally appeared actually back in 2002 on GameCube, which I played, I loved it. I did not think it was going to get this big. But yeah, so that one was called Animal Crossing Population Growing. And this new one is for the Nintendo Switch, and it's called Animal Crossing New Horizons. And there have been a handful of games between those two, but the basic gist is that you're a human and you go to live in this village with a bunch of animals that you make for with. And there's this one animal named Tom Nook, a very controversial figure, one might say. And he's, so he's technically a Tanuki, which is the Japanese raccoon dog. And most people think

he's a raccoon because when it got ported to the U.S., the translation was that he's a raccoon. But he's technically a Tanuki. So, but anyway, okay, so Tomnook, when you get to your island or your village or whatever, Tom Nook sells you a house. And in order to pay off your loans, you have to make money. And a really good way to do this is by catching and selling fish. And in all the games, the rarest fish of them all is called the sealicinth. And it is the bane of a lot of hardcore players' existence because it's just like almost impossible to find. Like you can play for months and months and never find one.

And honestly, like, I kind of get why they made it that way because the sealicinth is a very special fish. So basically, in really, life, there are two kinds of cilicinth, two species. One lives near these islands between Africa and Madagascar, and the other kind lives in the waters near Indonesia. But for the longest time, we thought they were totally extinct, like gone, like nowhere to be found, because we had fossils that show they lived 400 million years ago. So we thought they just, like, died out like the dinosaurs did because they lived with the dinosaurs and the Cretaceous with like the T-Rex. That's just like crazy to think about. So we had fossils of them just like we had fossils of the dinosaurs and no one had

ever seen a seal akin to IRL. So we just like had no reason to believe that they're still around. But then one day in 1938, this museum curator in South Africa named Marjorie Courtney Latimer, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, she was doing one of her regular duties of heading down to the docks and she would kind of like sift through fishermen's halls to see if there's anything weird. she saw like a weird kind of fin and she asked to have it like taken out. And then this is what she said about it. Quote, I picked away at a layer of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen.

It was a pale mauve blue with faint flecks of whitish spots. And it had an iridescent silver blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy dog tail. So. Wow. That sounds like a way better description of my image of the sealicamp. I always think of it as like, I don't know, like a dead and dying creature. It looks really weird. Yeah. Like I remember reading about it and seeing it like in pictures and textbooks and I was like, no wonder people thought it was dead. It looks like it looks dead. It looks like a fossil because it kind of is. I don't know. We'll get more into that later. But basically Marjorie knew that like something was up with this fish. So she. And her assistant, like, they convinced this cab driver to put this huge fish in the back of his car so they could get it back to the museum. And this fish weighed, like, 130 pounds. Like, it was a big fish. So they got it back to the museum.

But Marjorie's specialty was birds. So she, like, really wanted, like, another expert opinion for Bita's smiling. She was like, I don't know fish. But birds. But, yeah. So she was, like, wanting another expert. So she dialed up this guy named J.L.B. Smith. and he was a museum curator of fish.

He said he would come look at it when she sent him some sketches of this fish, but she was so afraid that it would like break down and degrade in the weeks before he came to see it. So she tried to get the hospital morgue to store it so that it wouldn't like break down, but they said no. Yeah, they were like, hell no. Yeah, I guess that's maybe fair. But so she got a taxidermied instead. But anyway, so this guy, J.L.B. Smith.

gets there in a couple of weeks. And when he sees the fish, this is what he said. Quote, although I had come prepared, the first sight of the fish hit me like a white hot blast. I stood as if stricken to stone. There was not a shadow of doubt. Scale by scale, bone by bone, thin by fin. It was a true silican. So, oh my God. He was stoked. And honestly, like, it is, like, so crazy to think about. It's basically, like, finding a living dinosaur today. Like, people thought it was extinct for 66 million years. So, I mean, but the silicinth lived and it evolved. And then they named it, they named the genus of the silicinth Latimeria after Marjorie

Courtney Latimer, who discovered it, which I thought is a nice touch. But yeah, so back to that living fossil thing. Like, a lot of people say the celacinth is a living fossil, but it's actually not a super great term because the silicinth has evolved at least a little bit in the last 66 million years. So it's not like exactly like it was back then. And researchers at MIT and Harvard's Broad Institute found this out when they sequenced its genome. But I will say they found the silicent evolves much slower than other fishes do. And they think that's because the waters, these animals live in are like super stable.

They don't have a lot of predators. They just like don't have a lot of stuff encouraging them to evolve, basically. But still, the sealicons is like really weird. So here are some lightning round facts. When they have babies, they have huge eggs, but they have. They don't lay the eggs. The eggs are hatch in the mother's body and then they give a live birth. Ew.

Yeah. Oh, it gets weirder. Their skulls only have 1.5% brain and the other 98.5% is fat. And they can get as big as six and a half feet long and weigh 200 pounds. They live for 60 plus years. What? Yeah. They're so cool.

I want to be a CILA camp. Dude, totally. I'm obsessed with them. Yeah. They have these big scales that act like armor, basically, and they live in underwater caves formed by lava, and at night they emerge to hunt. So, yeah, they're really cool. But my favorite fact is that the Selequinth is actually more related to human beings than it is

to raefin fish like tuna or swordfish or salmon or trout or any of those fishes. They're more related to us. I love that. It's so cool. It blows my mind every time. And that's basically because celicons lived way back when our ancestors were still fish. So basically the celicinth's cousin was the first tetrapod that ever got out of the water and involved into mammals. So while the celicinth stayed in the water and evolved and then into the Latimerian sealicinths that we know today.

And while all that was going on, some other distantly related fish evolved into tuna and tilapia and pauper fish and all that stuff. I love that. Isn't it crocodiles who are like more closely related to birds than like any other reptiles? I don't know. Because they're they're from the like, it's the same situation where they were from the branch where like reptiles split off and then you had birds. But like there's the crocodile that's like up here and then all the other reptiles down here. I think that's right. But it's so funny because then you see I remember being at some kind of lecture where there was a picture of a crocodile with a bird on its head.

And it was like cousins. That's really cute. So a celicamp can't eat a human and a human can't eat a sealicamp. That's the rule, right? Yeah, that's the rule. I actually came across the fact that if you eat a celicentf, they have so much like oil and fat content that it gives you really bad diarrhea. The silicens revenge.

It's exactly the silicons revenge. I love that. But yeah, so basically that's my ode to the silicinth. And I think it's understandable now why Animal Crossing. makes it so hard to catch. But if you do want to try and catch it, I mean, seasoned Animal Crossing fans know this already, but I'll give some tips regardless. You can only find it when it's raining or snowing and only in the ocean.

And its shadow is a little longer and bigger than a sea bass. The sea bass. I hate the sea bass. It's just so common. And it's like a big fish. So you think it's going to be something really cool. And it's just the sea bass. And it sells like for next to nothing.

And they're everywhere. But it's fine. It's fine. Once, yeah. In this pond near where I grew up, there were like all these sunnies, but then there was one like bass that would, I think that someone just like put in there. And so it would like really scare me and my sister all the time. Like we would be trying to catch sunnies and this bass would like pass through. Oh my God.

Oh my God. So yeah, I always thought bass were really cool. So that really depressed me right there. But it's okay. Maybe I should give us sea bass more credit then. Yeah, for sure. I have a taxidermined bass in my hallway. Really? Wow. We have so much bass content. Bass fans. One of our sister publications for those

who don't know is field and stream and we share an office with them and there used to be a lot of taxedermy around and I was given the bass and then I felt like I could never get rid of the bass. So I have it forever now. That's great. I also also want to point out that this story is very uplifting. It's like researchers thought that it didn't. It was extinct for so long and now it exists. Now it's in a video game. Yeah. Yeah. Have you caught one, Jess? No, I haven't. I guess I'd hear about it on Twitter or some other social. You would. You would. Definitely see screws. You'll all know as soon as Jess catches one. The world will know. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. And we're back. And our next fact,

Let's do my fact. It's about plague, but not this plague. A different plague. You know, another, a plague from a simpler time. So plague masks. A lot of people are familiar, I would say. I'm going to try to screen share real quick. There we go.

Okay, can you see my plague man? Yes. Okay, great. Yeah. So this is a classic plague doctor. mask and costume. I'm going to stop the share. I love the shoes.

Well, speaking of which, I actually also found Walmart sells a sexy plague doctor which is not epidemiologically sound. And I will tell you why this woman is absolutely getting the plague. But rest in peace. Seriously. So the interesting thing about plague mask is that a lot of people say, oh, during the black death. You know, these plague doctors walked around with these spooky masks on. And I found a lot of well actually articles being like it wasn't actually a thing during the black death, but rather

during the follow-up influx of the bubonic plague some 300 years later. So just a little bit of background. The bacteria ursinia pestis causes three kinds of plague. That's bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic. But bubonic plague is the one we talk about usually when we say the plague. And it's an infection of the lymphatic system that causes swellings known as boobos, which found so much for fun that it is. It sounds like a Pokemon or something, but it's actually just like a very large swollen lymph. So that's not great. And so it's usually the result of a bite from an infected flea and it leads to fever, seizures, vomiting blood, gangrene of the extremities. It still exists as many pop cybrators can attest. There are cases. There are

of the plague periodically and they always end up on like the daily male being like teenager with plague but that's not actually surprising the bacteria is still out there you can still catch it luckily now we have antibiotics so for most people it's totally curable but at the time it mostly just resulted in death as you would expect from something that makes you vomit blood and start to have gangrene in your extremities so in 1347 the bubonic plague struck Europe and became the most deadly outbreak in history. It killed a third of European population, tens of millions of people. But we didn't actually start calling at the Black Death until the 16th century. At the time,

it was just called the Great Mortality or the Great Plague. But the plague did die down a bit. Unfortunately, it kept popping back up around Europe and the Mediterranean until the 17th century. So it's really wild to think about, really makes you appreciate antibiotics. You know, we have had some large pandemics. We are in the midst of one now. And obviously, HIV is all. also an ongoing global pandemic, but those are kind of the exception to the rule, right? Like generally, we don't see viruses or, you know, least of all, bacterial infections, like sticking around in a deadly way for pandemic levels for ages and ages.

The plague, for hundreds of years, just kept cropping up and causing these epidemics. And so, yeah, it's around the 1500s that we started seeing the plague doctor costumes. And it's this long cloak, these heavy gloves. this beaked hood with goggles. And it was made with oiled leather and covered in scented wax. In many regards, it was basically the first hazmat suit. It was designed to like completely cover your skin and like block the air from coming in. So you were just kind of in your own waxed leather bubble that probably smelled very sweaty.

All of the components, historians now say, probably had some kind of use. They always had like a stick, which just makes them look more like like kind of like a harbender of death because they're like hobbling around on their stick like a scary old death bird. But historians think that that was actually to allow physicians to point out symptoms or boobos by making gestures and pointing without putting their hands close to the patient. They would also use it to remove clothes from a sick patient or to shove away sick patients if they were crowding. Wow, I want one of those for today.

When people get too close to you, close to you. I feel like just the mask alone will keep. people go over. I don't know. It's New York. I feel like if you walked around in a play podcast, people would just think you were coming from like sleep no more or something. You'd end up in a lot of Snapchats is what you'd end up with.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and apparently a lot of physicians even claimed that they could take a pulse, like they could feel a pulse from the end of this one stick, which I think that's big. I'm just coming out now and saying, I did not see any researchers saying that was fake,

nor did I have any explained to me how it would have worked. so I'm saying that's fake. That was just a doctor making stuff up. Then there's the, you know, obviously the long cloak and the gloves that the use of that is very straightforward. You're limiting contact with sick people, you know, the same way we use hazmat suits or ICU scrubs. And then there's the beak, you know, it always looks like a bird and it's caught this giant beak. And what's up with that? So it would have two nose holes and the beak itself was stuffed with like very pungent herbs. Examples I found included wormwood, which is what Absinth is made of.

Ambergris, which is this waxy, fatty stuff made by whales that's used in perfumes a lot. It's got a very like intense musky smell. Jess doesn't like it. No, I do like it. It's really cool. I'm sorry. I was trying to keep my excitement to a minimum. You know, contain it.

They would also use bury it. which was like an ancient medicinal compound of more than 55 herbs and other components like viper flesh powder cinnamon, myrrh, and honey. So that was just like, I just picture that as being like a little like traded to a spice shaker jar that you would get. Imagine if these existed now and there was like Instagram ads for like artisanal blends of sense that you could put in your leg mask. Handcrafted. People would definitely buy it. Oh my gosh.

Yeah. Absolutely. Also, how many animals. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was just going to say how many animals were killed in the making of this suit? Oh my God, so many. That's just the history of this in this. Yes.

Apparently, Nostradamus as a plague doctor was really into treating things with, like, rose hips. He would give people rose hip lozenges. And he was very anti-bloodding, which I support. But giving people rose-hip lozenges to cure their bubauder plague is not better. Too far in the other direction. Oh, and apparently some people would just shove their beaks full of sponges soaked in vinegar, which seems like the cheap option when everything else smells so nice. But the idea was that the air would come through the two nose holes

and then go through all of these very pungent insertibles. And then the air you breathed in would be cleansed. And we're going to get into why they thought that would work in a minute. But I should say it's not actually clear how common these costumes were. Like so many fashion moments throughout history, most of the drawings we have at them are kind of satirical or at least exaggerated. So it's not clear like whether they were actually commonplace. Physicians were generally considered pretty ghoulish because they would actually be hired by

entire cities or towns to treat everyone because there was some recognition of the fact that you have to like give access to health care to even the pores or the, you know, disease will just keep spreading. But physicians were infamous for asking for additional payment. once they'd already had a contract. So there are a lot of reasons why people might have either made fun of physicians or just, like, believed that they dressed in these really ghoulish costumes, even though it was only something that one or two of them did. But it does seem clear that at least a few of them did.

There's this quote from a German visitor to Italy during this time that basically boils down to, we thought it was a joke, but they're really out here dressing like birds. I'm paraphrasing, but that is what the German man said. One definitely serious account we have of the costume is from Charles DeLorme, who was a physician in the French royal court in the 1600s. So because of that, many people credit him with the design of the suit because he gave the first, like, really detailed description of it that we see on record. But there's no proof that this was the first beaked outfit. And in fact, it probably wasn't. So the reason some physicians, who knows how many, were dressing up in this strange fashion, is the miasma.

theory of disease, which was very common before germ theory. We only figured out that germs, meaning microbes, cause disease in the 19th century. So there was a long span of time when like physicians existed. They were trying to treat diseases. They did not understand that they came from viruses and bacteria. And miasma theory was basically the idea that like bad air caused disease. So it didn't spread from person to person, but like you would all get the same disease if you were in the same bad air. And in some ways, it was kind of getting close to being right in the manner of so many medical theories that we talk about on weirdest thing. It was a recognition that uncluddliness could lead to the spread of disease. But since germ theory wasn't around,

they didn't know what it was about these, like, filthy, overcrowded cities that made disease spread so easily. It was that the water was full of poop and there were fleas full of plague everywhere. but they figured it was just the stinky smells. Is this also why Ben Franklin air bathed in the nude? I mean, it definitely had something to do with that. Oh, Ben Franklin loved to air bathe in the nude. He thought that baths were too harsh, but that sitting around in the cold air was a better way to get good air.

It probably wasn't unrelated. Okay. Sure. You know, if there's bad air, you want to get good air. Yeah, the bad air. phrase really made me like slingshot in me back to Ben Franklin air bathing. For listeners who haven't heard our weirdest thing episode with Ben Franklin being naked, I'm pretty sure something in the title is just naked founding fathers.

I believe that's what it is. Yes. You can track it down. It has Nazis at the end. It does. It takes a turn. So miasma theory wasn't all that bad. In July of 1858, there was a heat wave called.

the great stink. And this was in London. And it caused all of the industrial waste and poo in the river Thames to stink even more than usual. And so there was a lot of concern. Even more than usual, meaning even more than usual. It usually stinks. Yeah, yeah. For other reasons. Right. And at the time, it was so full of poop all the time. So it would always stink. Everyone was just used to it. Got it. But it got really hot. And so it stank more. And so there was a lot of concern. You know, this was right around the that Pasteur was doing his experiments. We were getting so close to germ theory actually getting figured out, but it was not yet generally accepted that microbes were a thing and that they caused disease.

So people were really concerned that the my asthma, meaning the literal visible lines of stink coming off of the river, we're going to cause a spread of cholera. Now that wasn't totally misguided because your river being full of poop will definitely increase the spread of cholera. And indeed it was. So it actually led to the development of a new sewer system in London, thereby diverting the poop that was causing the cholera outbreak. And they were like, great, we got rid of the bad miasmas. We're doing awesome.

But unfortunately, during the 17th century, bout of plague miasma theory didn't too much good. Charles II at one point had the Royal College of Physicians put out a pamphlet of advice on how to combat the plague. and it mostly just included instructions to like put smelly resins in the street and set them on fire. So it's all relative. Things can seem very uncertain right now, but at least no one's telling us to like light some nice Yankee candle company candles. So I think that is great. We've come a long way.

I wish I had a way of knowing what people will make fun of us for in 300 years, the way we can now make fun of Plague Dr. Kost. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with Claire's fact. Okay, we're back. And Claire, why don't you share your fact with us? Okay, great. So just a disclaimer for my fact. It's very much like a long tangent and explanation of what happened in the day of my life on Friday.

Bring it on. But it gets to, okay, great. Did your blood turn green? No, no, my blood did not turn green. But I found, yes, no. I found the fact because a lot of things happened on Friday. So we'll just dive right in. So last week, a doozy, just like the week before.

Yeah. So I've been doing my part in social distancing. And so I found myself, you know, just staring at a computer screen for hours and hours on end. I would finish my day job at Popular Science, which happened on screen. and then close that computer and open up my personal computer for fun time. And so it was just all computer screens all the time. And so by Friday morning, I had a massive, massive migraine. Like, it was bad.

Claire, have you seen that meme that's like, oh, work all day looking at bad screen? Go home. No, I must look at good screen. Yeah. No, but that is my life now. It's all of our lives, I'm sure. Yeah, for sure. I literally did a test Zoom.

earlier with my wife to be like, can you see my eye actually twitching from looking at screens so much when it's this long? Oh my God. She couldn't, but she's also blind. It was there, I'm sure. We're all doing fine. Yeah, it's great. So, yeah, Rachel and I checked in. She was like, you're not speaking clearly, so that's just hang up. It's really what happened. I think my words were like, I'm concerned about how bad your migraine is, and I think you should rest. But yeah, in as many words. Cool. Yeah. So I did what I usually do when I have a migraine. I took the most brilliant combination of drugs on the planet known as excedrin, which is aspirin, Tylenol, and caffeine. Those are truly the way to my heart. Whoever invented that drug was truly snubbed of the Nobel Prize

for sure. But sadly, it didn't work. And so we had a busy day, Friday, totally failed me. By 2 o'clock in the afternoon, I could barely look at the screen. My head was stabbed. I'm sure anyone who's had a migraine has felt like this. So I was like, Jess, you've got it. And she did. She finished the day strong for Popsi for us. And then I took, she really did. Yeah. And then I took Excedrin dose number two and went to bed. And then about two hours later, I wake up and I still have this throbbing headache. And at this point, I'm just like kind of going crazy a little bit. So I was really surprised. It did not kick in. I'm weird and delusional. So I go to my parents' medicine cabinet and in search of, you know, something to give me a sweet relief. And I find, I find it. I found a

10-year-old prescription for a nasal spray of sumatryptin prescribed by my childhood pediatrician. What? You didn't. I did. I did. Well, okay, let me finish. So, it gets better. Don't worry. And I'm here to tell the tail, so it's all good. I guess. You're supposed to see expired prescriptions? I didn't take it. Oh, okay. Okay. So there were two nasal sprays left. It's like one of those nasal sprays. You just like squirted up your nose. Yeah. Yeah. It was a pediatric dose. So I was like, I'll just take two. I'm really delusional. But obviously, I was concerned with the massive doses of caffeine, aspirin, and Tylenol that I had already taken. So I was like, maybe I shouldn't, like,

supersized this with a child-sized dose of sumatryptin. So I searched on Google. I went to my best friend Dr. Google and searched how much migraine medicine is too much migraine medicine. And that's where I found it. Today's fact buried deep on page three of how much migraine medicine is too much migraine medicine. I came across this June 8th, 2007 article from the new scientist magazine headlined patient shocks surgeons with green blood. Doctor suspect that the... I have a question. Yes. Was the patient Shrek? The patient was not Shrek and it was also not Spock.

It was a real... Yeah, I thought it would be. I have a note at the end for you, Rachel. Oh, does Spock have green blood? Yeah. Oh yeah, Vulcants have green blood. Yeah, that was the point. That was all I add. So, now what does this have to do with migraine? the deck, doctors suspected that the patient's migraine medicine caused the condition. I was like, oh, no. So don't worry, I didn't just read the headline like any good journalist. I read the entire article, and I read, it is possible the writer quotes the study author saying that our patient's arguably excessive intake of sumatriptin, which contains a sulfatamide group, caused his

sulfa hemoglobinemia. I was like, oh no. So I put the nasal spray down. I walked back to my bed and I took a really, really long nap and I woke up at midnight headache free. It was all good. I missed I missed Popsay happy hour. I missed it all, but it's okay. I survived. I didn't take excessive pediatric doses of sumatryptin and risk having green blood. So at this point, you know, my migraine's gone and it's midnight and I'm hyped up on caffeine. So I figured it was safe to read the rest of the article. So here's what I found for you.

In the journal The Lancet in October 2005, surgeons were operating on a 42-year-old man who had developed compartment syndrome in his legs. Now I advise you not to Google compartment syndrome. You almost certainly don't have it. It's not a good time. Yeah, you'll think you will. It's just not fun. Shortly into the surgery, they were shocked to discover that the blood,

coursing through his arteries was actually dark green in color. Like any quality doctor would, the team immediately sent his blood for analysis. Sure. Yeah, we're just like, it's a little bit that's interesting. Maybe this is like a new quirk of the human body. The testing showed that the blood discoloration was caused by what's known as sulfhemoglobinia, which occurs when a sulfur atom gets incorporated into the oxygen-carrying hemoglobin protein in blood. The question was how did the sulfur get there? And so after the surgery, the doctors inquired about the man's recent intake of medications or perhaps, I don't know, some essential oils, like anything that they could think of.

And he mentioned that he tends to get migraines a lot and he had been taking excessive, the patient's words, doses of sumatriptin 200 milligrams a day. As it turns out, sumatriptin contains a sulfonide grease. group, which the doctors believe was the culprit. So the surgeons advised the man to stop taking sumatryptin and they scheduled a follow-up exam with him a five weeks later to discuss both his surgery and also whether he had, you know, not had any more green blood. I don't know how they would figure that out. But according to the case report, he was found to have no sulfa-hemoglobin in his blood when they analyzed it. So the doctors went on to explain that this condition usually

goes away as red blood cells regenerate, but it turns out that in extreme cases, a person can require a transfusion, or in this guy's case, if you just take so much sumatryptin, which is also known as imitrex, as like a prescription dose, it can go so far as to turn their blood green for long periods of time. Yeah. So this was the drug you didn't take, right? And I actually later looked at whether my pediatric dose was at all near the 200 milligram threshold for green blood. And it turns out that, no, it was only 20 milligrams.

So I actually could have taken both. Could have gotten lit. But what if you accidentally took 10 squirts? Yeah. So just to ask, the green was, so where does the green come from again? It's when the red blood cell count is too low. Not totally. So apparently there's these sulfa ions in the Imitrex itself. And so when this kind of builds up in your blood, it links to your hemoglobin and it turns it green, whereas normal red blood cells are turned red from the hemie, from iron. I don't know if any of you were as stupid as I was as a child, but like I believed a litany of very stupid medical things. And one of them was someone told me that your blood when it's inside of you is blue. But as soon as someone told me that too.

Yeah, I totally believe that. Yeah. Because you can't, how do you just prove that? It's a perfect argument. Did you try and test it? Yeah, of course, but it came out. I can't look inside. Yeah, it's impossible to test, so it must be true.

The perfect calm. Yeah. Yeah, and also, Claire, this whole thing reminds me of the episode where I talked about different pea colors and how. Yes, I was thinking of that. Like, 11th century physicians would have like a pea wheel that was just like all different colors of pee. And so you would pee and they'd,

hold up the jar and be like, let me compare it to my pee wheel. You can have purple pee if you have porphyria. I'm sorry if I missed this, but was there like a description of the green? Was it like a shocking green? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, that is an excellent question. And I have a definitive answer. It was a dark forest green.

Hmm, a forest green. That's lovely. That's very on trend. Yeah. I love that. I want forest green blood. Same. Well, you can take massive doses of my. migraine medicine.

Would not recommend it. Popular science is the way of this week. Do not endorse taking massive doses of anything, really. You're right. I shouldn't have said I wanted to do it. Yeah. Thanks, Rachel. If your skin is pale enough, do you think it would actually change your complexion?

That's what I was saying. I already have like green veins like through my skin. Like I can see a lot of veins in my body. So you're a vulcan. You can see them here. Yeah. Yeah. I'm very pale.

So yeah, I feel like if my blood changed color, you would like see. get. This is probably a pretty tame St. Patrick's Day for everyone, and we have a whole year until next year is St. Patrick's Day, so I'm not going to recommend. I was thinking just really committing to my spot costume for next Halloween. It's going to less than. Great. What was, Claire, sorry, is your fact complete? Do you have? Yeah, my fact is complete. I had some parting words about not taking massive doses of medication, but you got to that. So I think we're good. Yeah, great. And we're both just worried about people running off trying to have green blood. Yeah.

Don't do it. Just follow your doctor's prescription orders always. Absolutely. So what was the weirdest thing we learned in this part of this week? I like the green blood. Yeah. It plays into my Shrek fandom very well. I had no idea you were so into Shrek, Jess.

Me neither. Yeah. Usually I hide it. It's coming out a lot today. I don't know what's going on. The quarantine is just. getting to me. That's understandable.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think green blood has it. So, congrats, Claire. Congrats, Claire. You did it. Thank you. I did not get green blood, though.

Correct. Thank God. Yeah, that's totally. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirders find the show.

For more information, on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsye.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsye. at Popsi.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bode.

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