The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Giant Sloths, Caged Babies, Spicy Horse Butts

Episode Date: May 2, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from Thomas Jefferson and giant sloths to Eleanor Roosevelt and suspending babies above Park Avenue in NYC. Who will win our to-the-death* competition and have their story voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? (*not to the death) The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: https://www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: https://www.twitter.com/schodosh Eleanor Cummins: https://www.twitter.com/elliepsies Popular Science: https://www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: https://www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: https://www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Here at Popular Science, we write and read dozens of stories every week. And though many of the fun facts we stumble across during our research make it into an article, something always hits the cutting room floor. But we still want to share that information with you. So welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week, a podcast from the editors at Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman, Popular Sciences Science Editor. I'm Eleanor Cummins, our editorial assistant. And I'm Sarah Cherosh, one of the assistant editors.

So this is the podcast where we just literally talk, about the weirdest things we learned this week. We'll start out by each pitching our weird fact or series of facts or Wikipedia spirals, as the case may be, and decide which sounds the most exciting and start from there. And once we've all had time to spin our weird science yarns, we'll reconvene to decide which was actually the weirdest thing we all learned this week. A fight to the death for the most interesting science fact. Yes.

And then you can tell us we were all wrong on Twitter. Don't at me. So my weird fact this week is kind of just a weird series of facts that starts with the history of testing chili pepper hotness and ends with something really disturbing I learned about horse's butts. Is that just the teaser? We don't get to know. Yeah, no, no, that's the teaser. Sorry, you don't get to hear more unless I win. Oh, God, mine's so much more straightforward. I didn't have a teaser. All right, well, I do now. My weirdest thing I learned this week involves babies being, like, imperiled on, like, the very top floors of buildings all over the world for, like, a hundred years as a medical treatment.

What? Wow. I know your fact already. Oh, my God. Okay. I don't have a teaser. I'm just going to go straight into it, and I'm going to hope that the fact is interesting enough you want to know more. Thomas Jefferson hoped that Lewis and Clark would find giant ground sloths out west. I do hope that, Thomas Jefferson.

Don't we all? Well, I want to hear more about giant ground slots. Do I win? Do I get to go first? Yes. Okay. So I found this fact because I wrote about giant ground slots today, which is last Thursday, as you guys are listening to this. I wasn't really supposed to be talking about Thomas Jefferson, but all of my research begins on the Wikipedia page because I think Wikipedia is just a great. like starting point for

all of the weird random facts related tangentially to the thing that you're writing about and like you have to go verify them but it's an excellent starting point and there was just a casual mention on Wikipedia about how there's a species of giant ground sloth that is named after Thomas Jefferson I'm going to butcher the name

Megalonix Jeffersoni Jeffersoni something like that Sounds like a really interesting startup Megalonix. Megalonics is absolutely the name of startup. Right now it exists already. So it's named after him because he helped discover it because did you know that Thomas Jefferson

helped to produce the first two side like paleontological papers about all of North America and that Thomas Jefferson is considered, quote, the founder of North American paleontology? Because I did not know that. I didn't either. That wasn't in Hamilton. No.

I think it's the worst for it, too, if only Linem and Mar Warranda had done more research about sloths. So, yeah, Jefferson found, he didn't find the bones in a cave because he was a rich white man back then. So someone else found bones in a cave, and he managed to procure them. And he then studied them and presented the findings of the American Philosophical Society in 1797. They thought it was a big cat at first, because why would you expect a sloth to be that big? But it turned out to be a giant sloth species. And he didn't understand how extinction works, I guess, and hope that he would find, they would find giant ground sloths out west. Also, apparently, this was like a thing for founding fathers that they wanted to promote the finding of very impressive giant animals in North America.

Because apparently, according to the theory of American degeneracy, which. which is our legitimate theory that was just like basically used to argue why America was terrible and the continent of Europe was superior in every way. And they felt that part of that was that we have like smaller bears. So they wanted to find like giant mastodons and giant slods. Just like they were hoping they were just sort of floating around there out on the west. And we would find them we would be able to prove ones and for all that America has the biggest, the best of all of the things. And all they found was gold.

That's rough. So, yeah, that's my fact. That's so wild. I would love to buy my way to scientific fame. That's the way to go. That's what Elon Musk is essentially doing now. You just kind of invest in the right places at the right time, and then you're the father of paleontology or whatever.

I mean, that's a society. We haven't really progressed that much farther against that model. Elon Musk wishes he could be the father of American paleontology. He does. You don't know that he's not going to buy his way to that title. He's actually just boring for giant sloths. Yeah. So, like, what do you think the over-under is on Thomas Jefferson actually doing literally any scientific analysis of that fossil?

I guess I don't really know what constituted scientific analysis back then because I think it could have just been sort of looking at bones saying like this is probably a tibia. Of a cat. Of a really big cat. And then probably it was roughly nine feet tall. Like apparently he was very into science. Like he was more into science than politics, which same. He seemed into politics. Yeah.

Think about how in. Just a little. When I was Googling around it, I found many articles about how into Macedon's. Thomas Jefferson was. He apparently like pestered other founding fathers about like trying to get his hands on like Macedon teeth. That's so beautiful. Yeah.

The least terrible thing I've ever heard about Thomas Jefferson. person, honestly. Yeah, I don't know. researching this gave me just some sliver of hope that he was like a nice, interesting person in the night, I think about all the rest of his life. So I have another question.

When, like, if this actually played out the way that he wanted and he sends, like, Lewis and Clark to their death, like what does he imagine our first encounter with the giant American sloths is like? I'm not really sure. I mean, I don't know how much. Given that he thought it was a cat at first,

I'm not sure maybe because I mean for all he knew sloths were basically what sloths are today which are like how would you get hurt by a sloth I mean they have very sharp claws that I think are probably full of bacteria They're moving at you like oh Yeah exactly

Eleanor is moving like a very You can't see this right now But she's doing a great sloth impression Still haven't made contact with Sarah It's exactly like that scene in Zootopia Exactly That's what he was looking for But taking place in the 1700s

And nine feet tall. So he probably thought that sloths weren't that dangerous, which, as it turns out, probably they were at least very hard to kill, if not dangerous. But Mazadon seemed pretty potentially dangerous. So maybe he just figured Lewis and Clark, they were going to go out there and they were probably going to die anyway. So, yeah, so you were recently looking at a study about humans interacting with actual alive giant sloths, right? So, like, what did they find? Yeah. So the study was basically about humans' tracts.

tracking giant sloths because they found like literally big sloth footprints and then small human footprints inside of those giant footprints, which just seems like a little bit cartoonish to me. But they literally found this. And so the authors of the paper were basically using that to argue that the humans were actually actually tracking the sloths in order to try to kill them. Because it's possible that humans hunted giant sloths to extinction. Sloth meat. Yeah. I'm not sure how tough and stringing a giant sloth would be. It doesn't seem especially tasty.

But yeah, not everyone who saw the paper agreed with it necessarily. Some people said, well, like, for all you know, these humans could have just found the prince and then just like little children following in their parents' footstuff just been like, oh, look, we're, we've got our little. little footprints in the big footprints. Has anyone considered that the humans and sloths might have been best friends? That's possible.

They did find evidence of the tracks that, like, when there were human tracks in the sloth footprints, the slaws, like, took evasive action and had, like, sudden pivots and, like, where it seemed to be trying to lose something, unless they were just playing hide-and-seek. I mean, that's what happens when I hang out with my friends. Face of action. Same. That's all I have about sloths. I loved every minute of it.

Thank you so much. Great. We'll be back right after this. Yeah. So this is where we would have an ad if we actually had real sponsors. So until then, we're going to do a little segment where we talk about our favorite science books or science adjacent books, as it were, given the book that I will be recommending today. I'm recommending The Secret Lives of Color, which was recommended to me by Eleanor, and is possibly also the book that she was going to recommend. She's now staring at me. Throw down. Were you actually going to recommend this book? Go ahead.

Book wreck. The Secret Lives, now I feel bad. You should explain what it is. We'll co-team this. Yeah, we'll co-recommend it. The Secret Lives of Color is essentially an encyclopedia of the histories of how we used to make colors. I think my favorite example is Indian Yellow, which was made from distilling yaks urine until a very neon yellow color brought about by feeding the yaks, a dye.

it only of, I think, mangoes. You could distill that into a cake and then sell it to painters who, despite the smell, really wanted a nice, you know, yellow that kept its color. The Secret Lives of Color by Cassia St. Clair. It's not as full of urine as it sounds from this recommendation, but there is quite a lot of urine. What I thought was really interesting about this book was how much of the history of art was filled with painters just trying to find good colors. think we kind of forget how hard that was to come by for a lot of art history. And also

how many of the pigments that people painted with don't look the same. So a significant portion of the art that you see in art museums does not look the way that the painter saw it when they painted it, which I just think is absolutely wild. There's like a whole subsection of museum science is not the right word. I'm sure there's a real term and someone's going to tell me about it on Twitter. But there's a whole subsection of museum science. It's just about restoring paintings and trying to figure out what they originally look like. So it's science adjacent, even though it's not explicitly a science book. It's called Heritage Science.

Is it? Yes. Okay. Took me a second. All right. This is why we're tagging me out. We killed that. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a great book. I can't top that Sarah and Eleanor collab, so let's just go back to the weird facts. I guess I'll go next. So I was looking into the Scoville scale, which is how you measure. the spiciness of chili peppers. Because I was thinking about it as like, it's a really interesting way that we kind of measure pain objectively.

Pain is a subjective thing, but we have this objective measurement of how hot a chili pepper is. So of course, it's all like relative to how much you can tolerate. There are people who can handle stuff at the, you know, high end of the Scoville scale and people who like can't do peppers at all. but it's still like this really interesting attempt to actually measure what seems like this really nebulous thing. So I was looking at the history of it, and I found out that actually it was created by a pharmacist in 1912, this pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville, and he came up with an organoleptic test, which is what you call a test that relies on sensory organs. So today, the Scoville test literally grinds up peppers and analyzes the amount of capcisein, which.

which is the chemical that makes them spicy. It interacts with receptors on your tongue that usually actually react to physical heat. So it basically tricks your body into thinking you're on fire, which is a really great evolutionary quirk for a plant to have if it doesn't like being eaten. But originally it relied on human guinea pigs, which I just thought was so interesting.

And it worked by, let's see, I actually have from the original paper, describing the process, mix well one gram of the powdered capsicum in 50 cc's of alcohol in a stoppered flask and macerate for 24 hours. Dilute 0.1 cc of the clear supernatant liquid with 140 cc of a 10% solution of sugar in distilled water. 5 cc of this solution swallowed at once will produce a distinct sensation of pungency. A sensation of pungency. Yes, a sensation of pungency. And so basically what they did is they just continued diluting the samples of the pepper in sugar water more and more until people can detect them. And I was like, who was this panel of like five people who were repeatedly, you know, trying hot peppers to try to like titrate pepper spiciness, which, by the way, it had nothing to do with eating peppers.

He was trying to standardize this muscle salve that his company made, which, because there was no standardization of capsaic levels, it had a tendency to maybe like burn people's skin because it would be too strong. Not a desired effect. Yeah, so he was figuring out a scale for that reason. He had no interest in eating hot peppers. This was before people did...

He was on the graham cracker diet. He was almost certainly on the graham cracker diet. Yes. Wilbur Schoville from Connecticut was absolutely on the ground for diet. All I could find was that in his paper, he referred to students. So it was definitely just grad students. Grad students just had to drink hot pepper water diluted with sugar to give us our first measurements of pepper spiciness.

Which is how we still do science to this day. I was just going to say over, under on whether we ever move on as a scientific community from just experimenting on like between graduate students and college students, like that's got to be a huge percentage of all patient subjects, right? 400%. It's ridiculous. grad students do terrible things in the name of science it's true yeah grad students are the real heroes absolutely as our grad student clenches her fish triumphantly big thanks to our grad student production assistant jess we love her thanks guys we would never make her eat peppers or like steady dilutions of peppers um so in researching this i came across

some other weird stuff. So I was looking at basically relatives of cap Cep Cesar that also produce burning effects. And one of them is, well, first of all, the one that's hottest on the Scoville scale, it's like 500 to a thousand times hotter than Capsicin. And it's called resiniferatoxin, which is found in some plants. It can inflict a chemical burn in microscopic quantities. 10 grams of it is likely fatal to humans. One millionth of a gram can cause severe burning pain.

Whoa. Wait, so what is this in? So it's in a couple different plants. I'm blanking on the exact names now, but... Not ones we eat. No, no, no. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so we would die. Yeah, no, these are plants that would like be considered toxic because of the presence of this compound. Yeah. Yeah, and the spicy plants in general, it's like a really cool evolutionary strategy that they have for making themselves unattractive. And, you know, they've adapted to target these receptors on our mucus membranes and, well, on all of our skin, but especially sensitive on our mucous membranes to protect us from heat. You know, obviously skin that's more delicate is going to need to be more sensitive to heat so that you're less likely to, you know, get horribly burned. If you put like a hot pan on your tongue, you would want to really move that very quickly. Definitely an experience.

A lot of people will ask, like, why do we have capcicin receptors in our butts? And the real question, a lot of people would ask that. The real question is, how did plants learn to mess with receptors that were already in our butts? That's, that's, wow, we are really asking the important questions on this podcast. I love it. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, any mucus membrane in your body should be very sensitive to heat because, like, don't sit on a fire. But, yeah, these peppers just trick our bodies into thinking that we are inflamed.

Are there any other animals that eat peppers for fun? Are we the only ones? I think we are the only ones that eat peppers for fun. I mean, I'm sure there are some oddballs out there. Monkeys like to party. Yeah, that's true. Well, that's what's what I'm thinking, honestly. Certainly none that have tried to breed peppers with, you know,

millions of Scoville heat units just so that we can say we did and then, you know, try to, there's this concept called benign masochism, which is the idea that people enjoy things like eating ridiculously hot peppers because we have this drive to, like, do things that feel like, they put us in danger, but don't actually put us in danger because it, like, is practice for when we're really in danger. So it's, like, the same reason you like going to scary movies or roller coasters. So, like, eating hot peppers is a thing that's, like, very physically upsetting and, like, gets all of your heart pumping, your general racing, whatever. Sweating. Yeah. So much sweating. So much sweating. So much sweating. So maybe the reason

there are so many idiots who go into, like, hot pepper eating content. or people who do done things like make videos of their colleagues eating the world's spiciest tortilla chip. Those people. You know, it might be because it's good practice to practice being in peril. So, okay, the thing with the horse's butts is, thank you. I feel God in this chilies tonight. So I was looking up other compounds that are related. to the ones in peppers.

And gingerol, which is what makes ginger spicy, is an interesting one because it becomes less pungent when it's cooked, but actually becomes twice as pungent when it's dried. So then I found this thing about gingering horses. Gingering? Ging horses. It is considered animal abuse in many parts of the world, as it should be. And in fact, at some horse shows,

they will swab the butts of horses to do. check for signs of gingering, but you apply an irritant, such as raw ginger, to the anus or vulva of the horse. In order to make the horse liven up and carry their tail high. No. No, I know. And then this gets worse. So, as you said, Wikipedia, Sarah, is a great resource, and then you have to fact check. And so according to Wikipedia, a subset of the gendering culture in horses was that people would put an alive eel in a horse's butt to make it act sprightly. And I tracked down the source, and there is a source, but it is a book written in 1785, and then it's follow-up in 1788, called...

Volume 2. Called a classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue. So I think this is just like the 18th century equivalent of Urban Dictionary.com. Wow. So I really want to believe that this guy named Francis Gross just made it up. Francis Gross is right. But on the other hand, humans do put live eels in their butts periodically. I have a friend who studies eels.

Oh, I thought you were going to say you have a friend who put an eel on the butt. Who? Not close. Sorry, Ian, your secret's out. No. I have a friend who studies eels. And for a while we had a running joke where every time one of these came up in the news, we would send it to each other. because every time stories about people putting eels in their butts yeah people put so much stuff in their butts

it's true they do but i've been missing the eels i'm in the wrong part of google news clearly it's like are they alive upon insertion yeah to specify do you this might be too much detail it can go very badly for everyone involved especially the eel do you put the head in first or does the head sort of stick out i think generally when it works it's because the head goes in first I guess they don't really go backwards, huh? Yeah. They're forward swimmers. Yeah.

And they're really, they're pure muscle. It's just a... It's a thing that happens when groups of men get drunk in places where there are eels. Wow. So... This was a takeout from, like, they edited it out of hangover or something. It's horrifying. Yeah, truly horrifying.

You really gingered him last night. That's going to be an urban dictionary tomorrow if it's not already. I feel like I've learned a lot, not just about peppers and about this guy Wilbur, but also about how long men have been turning gross jokes into cultural memes, apparently since 1785 at least. At least, definitely before then. Good Lord. I just never imagined we were going down this path when we began the podcast. But now that we're here.

I'm glad. I'm curious to know more about these receptors in your butt. So obviously when you're gingered, that doesn't feel great. But when you eat spicy food, can that also cause this like similar reaction on the way out? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. And in fact, when you eat the spiciest pepper in the world, which is like over a million Scoville heat units at this point, the Carolina Reaper.

People who eat it often say that they can feel it periodically all the way down. So like not just at the beginning and the end, but in the middle. When some of our coworkers did a video about eating chips that were dusted with Carolina Reaper, concentrate or whatever, one of them told me that like she eats a lot of spicy food, but the thing that really was new and weird and different for her was that she could feel it like in her intestine. That's so wild. What a way to learn about yourself. How fast your digestive tract moves along. It's like a little tracker. Yeah. But milk does help neutralize things. And in fact, Wilbur Schovel often gets credit for being the first person to put that down in the literature.

So interesting. This guy Wilbur did not intend to become famous for pepper heat. He like was a druggist at a farber. and he wrote something about how to compound medicines, and he was kind of a science journalist. He edited the New England druggist, among other publications. So, like, pour one out for all over. Milk. Yes. Pour one milk out, yeah.

Just one glass. A round of red of milk for me and the boys. Good Lord. I feel bad for those horses. Me too. I'm going to feel bad for those horses for probably forever. So was it like dried ginger? That was the deal. I'm picturing that crystallized ginger like from Trader Joe's, which I actually love.

They're a sponsor. This episode brought to you by Trader Joe's. Yeah, you know, I don't know. I think it's like oils or like pieces of ginger art. It's like a thing. Like don't go down this internet rabbit hole if you don't feel like you know what's coming. Because like there's a lot there. Rachel's

About ginger I've seen some things Reporting lives That's why we're here We go down the rabbit hole For you We report back from the bottom From the bottom

From the bottom From the very bottom Which is gingering horse's butts All right We're gonna take a quick break Don't put any ginger up your butt While we're gone Welcome back

I feel for in PR Eleanor's opening her file Which is literally labeled Top Secret Top Secret Using a silver Sharpie The Most Important Sharpie

Okay. The file is opening, but plot twist. The photos are covered in post-its for a big reveal. There are layers to this. I just want the listeners to know that she does have posts, but they are see-through, so they're not super effective. I love visual aids on podcasts. Yeah. My favorite is when podcast hosts reference things you can't see.

That's what I'm here for. All right. I want, yeah, I want you guys to imagine with me for a moment that it is 1906, and we're only Three blocks away from the pop-side office, New York City, East 36th Street, the home of Eleanor Roosevelt, my namesake. Do you have an exact address for us? I do not. That would be inappropriate. She don't docks Eleanor Roosevelt.

Do not do it. Right. So sorry. She builds a small cage, hangs it out the window of her townhome, puts her baby inside. The neighbors call the cops. I have just unveiled a photo that you cannot see. It'll be on Twitter. Of a baby in a cage on what I would say is maybe, you know, the 10th floor of an apartment building.

For a very long time, this was a very popular way of airing children. Children needed to be aired. Not because they smelled. They do. They do. That would be an accurate use of airing. This was because it was believed that exposing your child to cold air would make them hardier and help them grow and stay healthy. So this idea was first proposed in the late 19th century by a doctor of great renown who were on to page two now just so that all the listeners are following along.

We are. In the care and feeding of children, this guy, he's like, you know what you need to do. To renew and purify the blood, you need to put your baby outside. And he does not suggest doing it in a chicken coop. He's like, you know, take him for a walk. Treat him well. Make sure that they're, you know, they get out there and they, quote, toughen up the babies and make them better able to withstand common colds.

He also suggests maybe a cold water bath because who hasn't grown from that kind of an experience. The thing is, you know, at this time, the United States is rapidly urbanizing. People have less space than ever. Even Eleanor Roosevelt and her town home just can't find a place. to take her baby outside. So they decide that the solution is to build, you know, coops. And a lot of people, Eleanor Roosevelt included, just sort of do it on their own makeshift.

But in 1922, Emma Reed of Spokane, Washington, just two hours from where I grew up, this is a local story. She applies for a patent on a portable baby cage that becomes world famous and is used as late as the 1950s to air your baby. What I find fascinating about this is not only is it a very bizarre kind of example of how tight everyone felt their living quarters were as the world was urbanizing, but also like this fascination and like conviction that people had that like air was just the cure all and that you needed to put your babies out there, toughen them up, and that, you know, like if you expose them to the elements, they would be hardier and that, you know, air was the way to fix it. And that is the weirdest thing that I found out about.

It's kind of weird, like, given how polluted our world has been since the Industrial Revolution, that they felt that, like, that good, good city air was going to do the babies a lot of good. Yeah, I feel personally haven't walked in the same neighborhood we're talking about, like, the air is extremely bad for me. Yeah, I think our filtered office air is probably healthier than airing your baby would have been at that time. Yeah, definitely. And this was, like, also the alternative to just opening a window. which is also really wild to be. Like, that was an option.

One suggested in, you know, the air quotes literature on this topic, but people were just like, no, we have to go even farther and suspend them out there. So there are all these photos. If you Google, you know, like baby air cage, there are just all of these photos of people who just, like, put out often their naked infants out on, you know, these little ledges because obviously you didn't want to be protected from the elements if the whole point was to make it tough. Yeah. It's all about butts.

today. Genitalia need air. Thank you. Yeah, you don't want them to overheat, so. Got to stick him right out there. I have three thoughts. First, first thought, love it when old-timey doctors talk about purifying the blood.

Definitely doesn't sound like a potentially racist dog whistle at all. Second, I'm pretty sure there are still countries and cultures where, like, airing babies is a thing. I remember reading something a while back about, um, somewhere in Scandinavia where like it's still a tradition to like when you're going on your like afternoon stroll on the weekend because people actually have lives in other countries. You like park your baby stroller outside the like cafe that you're going into for your FICA or whatever. And the whole idea is that your baby's cold outside. Like that's the point because they're getting a nice fortifying nap out in the open. in air. And then my third thought is, you know, as to your point about how we could have just opened

up windows, is it maybe that Eleanor Roosevelt just hated her baby? And perhaps that there were many people who in fact just wanted to not deal with their children. And so we're like, could put them in a playpen, but what if it was not in my home? I mean, are we not considering the fact that maybe the baby air cages were just the past equivalent of sticking your kid in front of the TV? Just sort of out of the way. Go fight with the pitch. Mom needs a nap. And so you're just going to go in your air cage, get a lawyer.

I mean, that's entirely possible. I don't know anything about Eleanor Roosevelt's relationship with her children. But I do know she was a human rights advocate. So I hope that it's not an experiment in dealing with your kids. But yeah, I was also reading about the situation in, like, yeah, Scandinavian countries where they not only feel like it's very valuable, but also that it's, you know, safe to just leave your kid, like, you know, in a little lineup of children, because this is just like what happens. You can take a nap out there. That sounds relaxing as a parent. I'm not a parent, but I would imagine. I imagine abandoning your child outside. It's much more relaxing than bring them into the coffee shop. Yeah. Also, a nicer coffee shop environment for the people without children. Just putting that out there. Definitely.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like this really underscores just the general trend in America that we're way too protective of our children. Because if Scandinavians, where it is much colder, are leaving their babies outside, I think probably we can... Their babies are clothed, right? I would hope so. I guess that's probably... I think they're, like, quite bundled up because it's, like, actually cold, not, like, New York City, fall afternoon cold. There are definitely a lot of outdoor preschools now, like, all over the U.S., including in places that get cold in the winter.

It is a growing trend for, you know, people who can afford to spend a lot of money to send their kids to school. Yeah. Who are increasingly choosing these programs that, like, emphasize time outside or even spend all their time outside. And, like, periodically I see these stories and, like, what do we do in the winter? they wear coats, like, they're kids, not porcelain dolls. Yeah, I think that definitely the thing that was so shocking about it and why this still sort of like comes up every now and then is just the suspension aspect of it, you know? That's another level of danger to it.

You should take your kids outside. I think that that's a good parenting. Just maybe don't hang out of the window. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a fair point. I'm also, you know, I'm. I'm curious about how many accidents there were. None reported to my knowledge.

People knew how to set up a chicken coop, I guess. Out the window. DIY. Well, maybe this is like, you know, elevators. I was terrified of elevators as a kid. Lots of people were scared of elevators, but like pretty much no one has ever died in an elevator except a long time ago a, like, biplane crashed into the Empire State Building. And one of the elevators malfunctioned and did kill a few people.

But that's like the only time anyone's ever died. in an elevator because the elevator malfunctioned. Other than repair people. It's his own episode. Yeah. Shoot. I should say that for the next episode. Darn. Okay, so let's take a vote about which story was actually the weirdest thing we learned this week.

Ground sloths. Wow. Rachel and Elmore raising their hands. So I guess that wins. Wow. What were you going to vote for? I was going to vote for gingering. That was a wild ride.

Yeah. I just didn't expect it to end that. way is I think what really got me about that fact adventure. Wikipedia is a great place to go fact adventuring, especially if you trust but verify your Wikipedia sources, because sometimes the source of the fact is the greatest story. Yeah, I think Wikipedia is underappreciated just for being a place where people want to put the random facts that they have learned online, and so you end up with these throwaway lines in Wikipedia articles that lead you down fascinating, strange rapid holes

because someone once learned it and wanted to prove that they knew something on the internet. And we can harness that power for good. Yeah, I loved sloths, just because first of all, I love sloths. Second of all, I just love that, I loved that America was supposed to be less cool than Europe because of the size of our bears, et cetera, and that we thought we could fix it by just hunting down the bigger animals, which feels very American to me. It does.

And we've kind of continued the tradition of just having sort of the biggest, the loudest things and hoping that that makes us the best. It all goes back to our insecurities about the size of our bears. The theory of American degeneracy. Yeah. Yeah. Our poor bears. We have pretty big bears, though, let's be honest.

Yeah. And also it's like it's not the size of the bear. No, it's the size of the heart in the bear. Oh, that's true. Well, on that note, the weirdest thing I learned this week is a podcast by Popular Science. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, and make sure to buy some of our t-shirts from popsight.threadlist.com.

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