The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Harry Styles’ Nipple Count, Frankenstein’s Mom-ster, Madame Tussaud’s Macabre Origins

Episode Date: November 13, 2019

This week, we've got the first half of our extra spooky Halloween live show! The weirdest things we learned ranged from a ship filled with a collection of wax heads to Harry Styles' surprising number of nipples. 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!  If you want to see us in your town, click here to take our listener survey! Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses 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 Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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, weirdos. It's Rachel.

Just a heads up that the episode you're about to hear will sound a little different because it's the first half of our Halloween live show, which we held at caveat in New York City on Halloween, obviously. It was great. It was sold out as usual. So we will definitely be doing another live show event. very soon, maybe even with space for more weirdos or in a place other than New York City. If you'd like us to come tour near you and you have ideas about where we should do it,

please let us know. In fact, if you'd like to help make a live show outside New York City happen sooner, you can do your part by filling out a user survey that we're going to be posting a link to in the show notes and at popsai.com slash weird. It'll just help us figure out where there's interest, more details about where are listenership is and what they might be excited about seeing us do. So yeah, please take that survey. It'll only take a few minutes. It'll really, really help us out. As for the live show, you may notice that we reference visual presentations. We do a lot of odd Photoshop mashups for the show. If you

really wanted to see them, you should have come, but we will post some of them on popseye.com slash weird. You'll also hear reference to a drinking game because there was one. We'll post those rules on popsight.com slash weird as well. And you are welcome to play along as long as you are of legal age in the country you are currently in and you are not operating a moving vehicle. And of course, the sound quality will be a little different because we were in a live performance space caveat in New York City. Check it out. They're pretty great. Okay, that should be everything you need to know to enjoy part one of our super spooky live show. So let's get to it.

At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech articles every week. And while most of the stuff we come across ends up in our articles, some of the other weird facts we find just stay around the office. So we figured, why not show those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week, a podcast from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Jess Bodey.

Amazing. Thank you for joining me today, ladies. And thank you, everyone, a caveat. So we are here for, I believe, our fourth live show, and it is a special extra spooky one for Halloween. For those of you who don't know, on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we came across in the course of reading, writing, reporting, putting together a PowerPoint and doing a lot of Photoshop manipulations, 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, The weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Eleanor, why don't you start with your tease?

Sure. I would like to talk about how Madam Tussot's wax figures began as a macabre royalist hobby. Wonderful. Thank you. Spooky. Yes, topical, and isn't we appropriate. Jess.

Sure. I would like to talk about what 17th century witches and Harry Styles have in common. Oh. What don't they have in common? That's a great question, actually. I would like to talk about the ultimate goth girlfriend that most of you probably didn't know you already had. Wow.

Rachel, you should spontaneously start. You're right. Thank you, Eleanor. I know you're just so moved by my tease. So this is a story about Mary Shelley. I spent a lot of time putting that Hot Topic bag in Bauhaus poster. So please appreciate it. I only do Photoshop for the sake of these live shows.

So most people know Mary Shelley as the woman who wrote Frankenstein. I, for one, had some misconceptions about her. So I had learned in school that she wrote Frankenstein as like a horror story about technology because she didn't trust it. This is all a lie. And I'm going to start with a note about the book's really fascinating origin story, which is how I got into looking into Mary Shelley. So there was 1816, and Mary Godwin, which was her maiden name, 18, was on Lake Geneva with an intriguing cast of characters.

There was her married lover, Percy Shelley, and their young son. And they were there, according to some sources, because Mary's stepsister, Claremont, was trying to get back on the radar of their friend, Lord Byron, the father of her unborn child. And then also there was Byron's personal physician, John Palladoury, who is not on this slide. because I didn't realize until after making it that he was both important and also super hot, so I am sorry to this man, Don Pelladori, who is not on this slide. 1816 was known as the year without a summer. We talked about this on the podcast a couple times before. So the eruption of Mount Tambaro in Indonesia spewed clouds of volcanic ash into the atmosphere,

so it made weather unusually cold and gloomy even thousands of miles away. and 1816 people thousands of miles away did not know why this was happening so our young lovers were supposed to be like in a vacation a summer vacation spot and did not know why it was such a cold and gloomy July this is like the equivalent of when you get out on cruise ship and it gets stuck in the middle of the ocean yes everything goes wrong and lord byron's there eating only potatoes in vinegar which we covered in an early episode and also it must have been very awkward because he was not into Claire Claremont, who was pregnant with his unborn child. So, like, I think there was a lot going on at this lake house. So they coached by having a lot of, like, weird philosophical discussions,

and then Byron was reading a lot of German horror at the time, and he decided that everybody should come up with a scary story. Paula Dory, who again, I'm sorry, beautiful man, just not on this slide. You can pretend that he's Cardi B. That's close. And so he wrote a short story that would actually help inspire Dracula decades later. But Mary, meanwhile, had been having dreams about mad scientists. And so she ran with that and basically invented science fiction as we know it. Record scratch. Yep, that's me.

You're probably wondering how I got in this situation. Mary was not just any 18-year-old girl. And it's not surprising that she found herself in a goth cabin on a lake in Switzerland. Goals. Inventing science fiction as the Western canon knows it. So we're going to talk about what made her special. Okay. So this is a tombstone that will be important in a second.

This tombstone is her mother in more ways than one. Okay, so due to physician error and general uncleanliness, Mary's mother died just a few days or hours after her birth. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft-Gaudwin, who was a noted feminist and writer, and her father was a philosopher who basically mainstreamed anarchism by arguing that the government was a corrupting force but would be rendered increasingly unnecessary

and powerless by the spread of knowledge. Hail, hail. Yeah, and he also, he looked forward to a day when intelligence would basically make illness and maybe even death obsolete. So, like, all of this makes sense. And Godwin said in a few of his writings that he, like, felt the spirits of the dead around him in a very, like, natural philosophy sense. And he said, once, I would have the dead around my path and around my bed and not allow myself to hold a more frequent intercourse with the living than with the good departed. As a result, Mary spent a lot of time hanging out at the cemetery with her father and her mother, this tombstone. And she may have even lost her virginity there.

More on that in a bit. According to some scholars, she studied her parents' writings like a scholarly detective seeking clues to the significance of subcryptic text. So basically, Mary's father remarried to a neighbor who she found stupid and inseparable. And she was essentially raised by books in this tombstone. Meanwhile, she's reading all of these reviews of her mother's work, calling her a philosophical wanton, a monster, saying she wrote scriptures archly framed for propagating whores. So Mary Shelley was like, that's me.

And then she met Percy. Percy Shelley was 21 when they met. She was 16. He was married and had a child. But they took long romantic walks in the cemetery. which is not surprising. Eleanor, I believe you wrote about this once. I did.

People love to hang out in cemeteries because where else were you going to go? There were no parks. That basically was a concept that had not been invented for Victorians. Set up your picnic on grave of choice. Yeah. So I've seen the story about her losing her virginity on her mother's grave share before. And I feel like sometimes the subtext is like, fuck you, mom.

I am a grown lady who's going to have sex with. this married man, but in reality it was more like let's seance and chill in my happy place and that was their love story. They ended up going to France and traveling around with her step-sister Claire, which many scholars said was mysterious, but we now know is because Claire was probably also having sex with Percy, which is not mysterious at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes. And they only married in 1816 after Shelley's first wife committed suicide. Their family was extremely messed up. And for what it's worth, Claire Claremont's memoirs, which were only discovered by a researcher named Daisy Hay just a few years ago, she said that under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love,

she saw the two first poets of England by which she met Percy and Lord Byron become monsters. And this is what happens when poly people can't share Google calendars with each other, is my takeaway. But yeah, so the family was pretty dysfunctional, and then Percy died in a boating accident in 1822, which happens to be the same year that Mary finally released an edition of Frankenstein with her name on it. For the first few years, it was anonymous, and the introduction was written by Percy. So many people assumed it was his work. Boo. Yeah, exactly.

No, yeah, he was useless. That's him burning. Dump him. So he died in a boating accident and was burned on a beach because they, like, couldn't take his body home. I think they were in Italy at the time, and it was just like they couldn't drag him home with them. So he was surrounded by Lord Byron and all these other literary soft boys. And they brought home what they assumed was his heart. This is controversial.

Some people say that maybe it really was his heart and it didn't burn because he had tuberculosis when he was younger and it could have calcified his heart to an extent that it wouldn't have burned. It's possible was just a random lump of something. But what's important is that Mary Shelley thought it was the heart of her. late husband, and she kept it until she died. Also, one of his friends pictured here fought her for it, like told her he deserved it more because his love for Percy was worth more than hers was. But she won that. I think he got the skull instead. So. That's a plotline even the Kardashians haven't explored. And she actually, when she died, the heart was in her possessions and it was

wrapped in like the last poem he ever wrote. Extremely got. Metal. Give me a break. And And this is not that surprising, considering that people in the same era did a lot of like remembering the dead in ways that are pretty shocking to us today. There were pictures taking of people after their death because most people couldn't afford to take photos while they were living. Like you never knew when it was a good time to take a photo until it was too late. And they were like, it's not too late though. Prop them up.

So many photos like this. There was Momentumori jewelry. This is made out of hair. We've talked about that on the episode about selling human bone. art. This is much more ethical to buy than art made out of human bones, in my opinion, but you know, to each their own. And this is made out of teeth. So I think it's milk teeth. So this isn't from a dead person. This is like a mother's, a mother's ring. So Mary Shelley, one could argue that she invented sci-fi, and I think she's not given enough credit for this.

Now, that being said, there are examples of great science fiction like outside Western literature, fifth century BC, the Indian Hindu epic poem. Ramayana includes flying machines in space and underwater, definitely sci-fi. And then Aristophanes had air travel to other worlds. But there was kind of this long period where it was like, is it sci-fi, is it fantasy? And so there may have been stuff that was science fiction before Mary Shelley. But Frankenstein was definitely science fiction. And because of the way it's been adapted into movies, it's very often put in with horror. But in Frankenstein, the scientist is obsessed with alchemy and natural philosophy, but then rejects it because he hears about galvanization experiments, which were real at the time,

and this is what inspired the book, that basically people were using electricity to make dead muscles twitch. And Mary Shelley was like, what if you could do that with the whole body? And it wasn't about science being scary the way I personally was always taught in school. It was about how scientific endeavor taken away from like moral education. education and ethics could lead to disaster, which is what science fiction and speculative fiction is all about. And then I read this really, just to wrap up, to give us some parting thoughts in Mary Shelley, I read this really interesting feminist paper from the 1970s by this researcher Gilbert, who pointed out that the monster is a cobbled together creature without true parentage, it's a second-class soulless citizen that doesn't fit in, and that Mary was pregnant, confined, or nursing from the time she went off with Percy when she was 16 until the time she wrote Frankenstein. The first three of her children died before or sooner after birth,

and her mother had died in childbirth. So it was a horror story about creation and about birth. It wasn't a story about the horrors of science. And I think that's really amazing. And hail, hail, hail. Hail, hail. Yeah, that's it. Next, I don't know who could possibly be next.

Can you say we're going to take a break? Oh, you're right. We are going to take a quick break, and there's going to be some music. Hey guys, this is Jess, and before we get back to the show, I just wanted to share a new podcast with you from This Old House. Yeah, if you're a PBS fan like me, I think you'll really like it. So it's called Clear Story, and it sheds light on the surprising stories behind our homes. Host Kevin O'Connor digs into the systems, structures, and materials in our homes from unexpected angles. Like, why is the window the ultimate machine? And what can Las Vegas teach us about lowering our water bills? And a topic near, and dear to my heart, how did the great Chicago fire change the way we frame houses today? There's also plenty of just practical stuff like how do you build the perfect roof. You'll hear all of this from the This Old House experts as well as industry leaders, historians, and builders. You can find ClearStory and Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and you can learn more at thisoldhouse.com slash clear story.

And now we're back. Incredible. Okay, it's me. So as I said earlier, I would really like to talk about Madam Tussauds, who I recently learned was a real person, not just a brand. Unlike me. Yes. So this is her. Her name was Anna Maria Groschelts.

She went by Marie. And she was born in France in 1760. But her father died before she was born. And so her mom was raising her on her own. And they kind of go back and forth. They're traveling around. and then her mom gets a job as a housekeeper for a doctor named Philippe Courteous. And this is where Marie's story really begins.

So Curteous, you know, he's like a town physician. So whatever that entailed, like leeches, I don't know. But he had a side hustle in wax modeling, as we all do. And he started a wax portraiture firm in Paris. And he quickly got like really famous. People really wanted him to like make these sort of three-dimensional portrait. of famous people, the Kardashians of their era. And so he took a cast of King Louis X-15th mistress, Madame DuBerry,

and it was just like this big deal that he would make these sort of commemorative pieces. And so he decided to teach Marie, who called him Uncle, what he knew of the craft. And she actually really became like very, very good at it and very fast. So in 1777, when she's only 17 years old, she makes her first wax cast of the writer Voltaire.

who ended up dying the following year. She was, like, called in because he was sick, and they were like, we love him so much. Please make a copy of his face while he breathes out of straws. I know you're not feeling well. Yeah. Just. Can I please please up your face?

Exactly. That was her process. And so then from there, she went on to make casts of, like, the French politician Jean-Jacques Ropes Pierre. She also did one of Benjamin Franklin, founding father and friend of the show. We're always deeply respectful of founding fathers We would never speak ill on all of the terrible things they did

And so in her memoirs, which are very detailed And on Google books, highly recommend perusing, She says that she got really close with the royal family And as historians note, there is no real evidence of this But she says it was true, so we'll go with it Because she was apparently teaching votive design to the sister of King Louis the 16th, or as I like to call him,

Marie Antoinette's husband. And she's spent a lot of time at the courts, like, you know, in Versailles, hanging out, making art, seemed to have a lot of fun, ate a lot of cake, and you know where I'm going with this, the French Revolution happens. So you probably heard of it. But in the spring of 1789,

things change for Dear Marie and for the entire nation of France because they're tearing things down, they're starting over, like the Anshan regime is over. it's canceled. And in July, dear Uncle Curtius, he makes wax figures of the heads of Jacques Necker and the Duke to Orleans to parade around. And this is days before the storming of Bastille. And so it's a very charged time. And it kind of makes them look like royalist sympathizers, which is like not a popular way to be at this time. And so Courteous, Marie, and a bunch of other people who are accused of similar crimes, including Napoleon Bonaparte's wife,

Josephine are all rounded up and they're taken to jail, presumably by everyone's favorite revolutionary Marius himself. This is where I like to believe that Lena Zerob and Madam Chousseau intersect. We have no evidence. And so they're thrown in jail and apparently Marie's head, they went so far as to like shave her head down to prepare her for her own beheading. So things were getting serious. Traumatic. Yeah, definitely. She was having a hard time there. She was staring down the guillotine, but she was spared under like weird circumstances where it seems like, dear uncle courteous had kind of like business connections who got him out. So like a little bit of intrigue there.

But anyway, she gets out and she's like looking around and she's like, damn, there is an incredible market opportunity for my skills because everyone's heads are rolling and I know how to make copies of heads. So that's right. She, this is her impression of Marie Antoinette shortly after our converse-wearing queen was beheaded. Oh, my God. And this was just one of the masks that she made at this time in this very charged moment.

She also did Marie's husband, Louis XVI, and the political theorist, Marat, who was, like, assassinated in his bathtub. She took his death mask as well. And so she became very well known for this. And obviously, like, in a very weird and peculiar way, has, like, you know, preserved an important part of history. Like, we have to give credit. where credit is due. But at the time that this political upheaval is unfolding,

Curtis went and died on her, which I think is very rude. It must have been a very traumatic time. Big time. Yeah. Like, so anyway, that happens. But the cool thing is, is that he leaves his entire collection of heads to Marie. Cute. Yeah, which is so sweet. I love that for her. Yeah. Absolutely. So that's 1794. Marie Antoinette for reference dies in 1793. And then for some reason, this is like I find weird. After, like, living a very long life as a spooky single lady, she marries a civil engineer named Francois Toussou in 1795. Ah. Yeah.

And we don't, like, know much about him, and frankly, we do not need to. Because, seriously, this man did little else than give her two kids and her flashy last name. So thank you for that and nothing else, Francois II. They didn't seem very happy. They started living apart very quickly. And it's only now that, like, her source. story starts to converge with the Madam Tussos we all know. So in 1805, Tussot took her son, Joseph, and also all of the wax heads that she'd inherited or made. And I just like, they go to

England, and I just like to imagine them on a boat. And little Joseph, he's like six or something, and he's in steerage, and he's just surrounded by all these heads as mom carries around with her all the time. And they're on their way to the British Isles. And so because of the Napoleonic war, they were just going to be there for a while and like tour with their heads. And because of the war, they can't go back. They're like trapped in the British Isles. And so Marie decides that she might as well make the most of it. And they spend the next 30 years touring with these heads. And at some point, her other kid who had been left behind in France, like comes over after things have died down. And he actually like takes up the business, which was run by the family until the 1960s. Really? Yeah. Wild.

So they're touring around with all these heads, and it's only in 1835, when she's 75 years old, that Marie opens up her first permanent exhibition, which is what you can now see today at the Madame Dousseau's Wax Museum in London. Make this House of Hors a home. Yes, exactly. I'm sure that's on a cross-stitch somewhere. And so now, obviously, her empire is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. She's a super big deal. And what's kind of interesting is that, like, obviously we have so many new times. technologies and you can do like 3D printing and blah blah blah. But like there's still like wax

figures are still very much like intensive handmade sort of processes and like the sort of basic components of what she did are really similar. So today people are alive usually when Madam Tussos does this and they have consented to their image being used. So they take more than 200 measurements of a celebrity's body and then they make sort of like a hard model and then create a cast around that and then fill that with the wax. And then they just like pop the body out and then like assemble all the various parts. Apparently your head has to be, wait for it,

detached from your body so that they can put it on at the very end and move it and change it as needed. But yeah, they add custom eyes with like the colors, not only of your irises, but also of your whites of your eyes. They have different gradations and they'll match them to you. And then they do this thing too, I saw on the internet, where they like will take little strips of fabric and paint them on like they're the red like parts of your eyes.

So they just like... Like the veins? Like they make the veins out of this really thin material and then like painted on these eyeballs. Anyway, and then they obviously consult with like the makeup and wardrobe people and the celebrities team about the look of the statue. But I'm gonna let you hear from our special guest

the best and most intense part of the process. Then are for hair insertion. You know these guys insert all the hairs one by one into the wax heads while my best patience. This is the least charismatic Beyonce has ever sounded. Yes. So for those of you who didn't put it together, this is a video that Beyonce made when she still spoke in public. About how her Madame Tussotso's wax figure was assembled. What year was this?

This is... It's like early 2000. Yeah, this is from her crazy and love video. crazy and love video, I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. So, sorry, we have an audience answer. 2003 feels really right. Yeah, it does.

That belt? Yeah. So, you know, that was my story. We went from beheadings to Beyonce. Thank you. And we're going to take a really quick break, and then Jess is going to be in with her fact. Thank you all so much, Jess. Yeah. Okay, so where it all began. So a few months ago, I came across a fact that I knew was just like the fact for this live show.

And so I called dibs, like in the podcast studio and publicly. You were like, it exparted me. Here's record. Rachel. I'm so glad that I did because it just sent me down the best rabbit hole. So the witch's teat. What is it? The witch's teat is a thing that people just talked about a lot.

in the 17th century during the Salem witch trials. And just like, you know, this was the peak of witch culture in general. You know, it was not a great time for people. So during this time, people were terrified of witches in their midst and of people, mostly women, doing the devil's work. And like a lot of people genuinely were really scared, like, just because of the way things were back then. But a lot of other people used the hysteria and the paranoia of witch season

to get rid of people that they didn't like, or maybe like attain some power or make a lot of money. And those people called themselves witchfinders, not witch hunters, which sounds way better. Sounds like a bad dating app. Yes, 100%. Yeah. And these witchfinders like really sucked a lot. One witchfinder was this guy named Matthew Hopkins, and he lived in England until the mid-1650s.

This is him. Sassy. So he was a lawyer, actually, first. He was a really, really bad lawyer. He really, he didn't make any money. He was an impoverished lawyer. So instead he turned a witch finding to make some cash. So Towns basically would pay him to come and eradicate their witch problem,

which basically is just like, oh, we don't like this person. Can you come and like tell people they're a witch so they're out? So he made a ton of money. He became so powerful and rich that he named himself the wishfinder general. And his claim to fame was this thing you may have heard of called the float test. Ah, people know. So basically, if you think someone's a witch, you tie them up with rope and then you lower them into a pond. And if they sink and drown, then they were innocent and they were saved by Jesus and God. And if they float and survive, then, oh my God, they're a witch. In which case

you hang them or burn them at the stake. So they have to die either way. Totally. Yeah, which is, you know, that's convenient if you're trying to like get rid of someone. Yeah. But yes, not a super nice guy. But another one of his favorite things was looking for witch's marks. One such thing is a witch's teat. So back to the witch's teat, yes. So it was thought that if you were a witch, that you would have met with the devil and he would have put his mark on you, and that was like a permanent mark. Can confirm. Yeah.

Yes. And that was like a permanent thing to like seal your obedience and service to him. And I found some historical text talking about this, published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. And as one educated Scotsman of the period named Reverend John Bell put it, quote, the witch mark is sometimes like a blue spot or a little teat or little red spots like a flea bite. I myself have seen it in the body of a confessing witch. Others described these marks as like raised bumps or moles or warts. So skin.

Yes, yes, exactly. And they could appear basically anywhere many times on like the ribs or sides of the body. And so what Hopkins would do is if he thought someone was a witch, he would just like strip search them, and he would like look for these quirks. And really what the text described, like, as these like little marks could fall under a lot of different like dermatological quirks. And then I found this. This paper says that extra nipples were often seen as witch's marks, aka witch's teets, where witches and imps or familiars would come to suckle and gain power. Super numerary mipples.

Yeah, that's the official term. Yeah, it's cute. And honestly, like, this is kind of chill. Like, I wouldn't mind having an extra nipple. I meant that I got, like, a demon familiar. I am down with that. Like, check this out. This is a drawing that Matthew Hopkins created,

and he put in a pamphlet to advertise his witch hunting. And we see, like, the two witches and like a bunch of familiars. Tag yourself, I think I'm Vinegar Tom. Yeah, you are? Yeah, thank you. So yeah, this is basically just like a classic case of blowing things out of proportion

and a time of mass hysteria and paranoia. Peck in the crown. Yeah, a lot of layers here. I definitely saw that, I don't, I guess it says Holt. Yeah. But I definitely read it as hot in like a parochilded voice, hot. Yeah.

This is how I feel about my, which is familiar, so. Big time. So yeah, essentially, which is teat, not really a devil's mark, probably just an extra nipple. And they aren't even that uncommon. I'm like, yeah, they're technically classified as a rare disease, but some estimates say that 200,000 people a year in the U.S. are born with an extra nipple. And there isn't like a super well-agreed-upon figure for this, but I found another estimate that said as many as one in 18 men and one in 50 women have an extra nipple. Hmm, common. Yeah.

And so how do you know if you have one? Because everyone's now like, there are six categories, six kinds of extra nipples. They're all basically combinations of having like an extra nipple, extra ariola, and then like extra breast tissue. Like, for example, there was one woman who grew a whole extra boob on her thigh and it lactated. And a lot of people don't know they have an extra nipple until they have a baby and they start lactating from their big toe or something. Yes.

Well, because before that it just looks like a mole or something. Yeah, it could just look like a mole. Like what isn't an extra nipple? So, and you know, the bottom of the foot, lactation is another true story. And I actually have a photo. So close your eyes if you don't want to see a nipple on the bottom. of a foot right now. Okay, close

them. Okay, I'm changing it. There it is. It's only freaky because I know it's an extra nipple on the bottom of the foot. Yeah, totally. It just looks like it could be a birth mark if you saw it from far away. It has dimensions. Yeah, the thing that gets me is like the skin

around the aerial that's like puckering. Okay, I'll, okay, I changed it. Okay, it's safe now. You can open your eyes. So yeah, if you really want to know if you're weird moles and extra ripple. I mean, if it doesn't look like that, like, just see your dermatologist and they can tell you. And basically, these things happen, like, when we're embryos. So there's a part of development where, like, these two strips of skin thicken and become, like, what's known

as milk lines or mammary ridges. And basically, that's just, like, skin that has the power to grow a nipple. And during development, that, like, those strips kind of, like, regress, and you end up with the two regular ones. But sometimes they don't regress all the way. And so you just like get an extra nipple, a triple nipple even. And like when you're an adult or when you like are born, those like ridges run from like your armpits to your hips and that's why a lot of extra nipples end up there. But sometimes they can just spontaneously develop anywhere, which means just like Tony from Portlandia, Matthew Hopkins could be like, I feel a teed here, I feel a teed here,

I feel a teed here. So he could use that to prove like, business. are a witch no matter what. So basically in Hopkins mind today, many of us would be witches, including Chandler Bing, three nipples, three nipples. Mark Wahlberg. That's a third nipple. Has he spoken on his third nipple or did you analyze photos? Okay. Yeah, that was not my arrow, but yeah, thank you for, you know. I believe in your investigative ability. Thank you. Yeah, he said people like usually photoshopped it out actually. Wow, rude. I know.

Free in the nipple. Free the nipple. Tilda Swinton, three nipples. An actual witch, though, clearly. Timothy Shalameh. No. No, I'm just kidding. He has two nipples.

But. If you told me, I would believe any number of nipples you told me, Timothy Shamed. Me too. I was really hopeful. I really Googled it, but no avail. But Harry Stiles has four nipples. Oh, wow. Yeah, this is true.

So yeah, your favorite celebrity is probably a witch. And I wonder, I was thinking, like, what kind of familiar, like what kind of demon familiar would Harry have? And also, would he get two, like one for each teat? That seems only fair. I agree. So, yeah, we may never know. That's all I have.

Thank you. All right. So we're going to decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week was. and the audience will make the call. So please cheer for your vote and cheer loud, because if we have a tie, I have no recourse. So was the weirdest thing we learned this week that Mary Shelley is my got-girlfriend?

No, I know. It's fine. It's fine. You know, she's underappreciated. Whatever, I'm just doing the Lord's work. Was it that? Madam Chisot's son sailed across the ocean in a room full of heads.

Or was it the number of nipples that Timothy Shalameh and everyone else has? Wonderful. Jess, you get this vintage Congratulations. 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 iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing, t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.threadliss.com. Our show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, and our editors, Jess Bodie and Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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