The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Head Transplants, Criminal Koalas, Sneezing Sponges

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

Welcome to Season 7! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Your music deserves Bose. Find your perfect product at Bose.com. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman.

I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Brandy Scalachey. Brandy, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Listeners, you may be familiar with Brandy's work from a promo we ran recently for a project of theirs called Peculiar Book Club. But would you like to tell our listeners a little bit more about what you do and what's so peculiar about it? Oh, I so would.

So peculiarity is a specialty of mine. And I'm a writer. I'm a writer as well, a published author, and I edit a journal. I like absconded. I'm a PhD, but I absconded from academe. Like I ran away as much. Those are our favorite kinds of PhDs. Yeah.

I did it for a long time. And I was like, no, I don't like this. So anyway, I'm a freelance author. I write for the public. I write history, history of medicine, history of science, history of weird stuff. And my last book was about, you know, a human head transplant. as things like that are. And I launched in the middle of the pandemic,

and I thought, wow, this sucks. So how do we reach people? And I thought, well, who would read my book? And the word that came to mind was like, well, really peculiar people who like kind of weird science would read this book. And I thought, well, gosh, there's a lot of people like that, right? There's people who read Mary Roach or even, you know,

even Ed Young's work, right? There's a lot of this that works together. People like Rachel Feldman. People who read Rachel Feldman would like us. So I thought to myself, what if I made a show where we feature authors live and the audience can live chat with them? And of course, we launched during the pandemic, so it was a live stream. And it just took off. And so it's not just, it's not like talking heads.

It's not, you know, where you've seen like, I'm an author at a bookstore talking about. But it's much more dynamic that we have claymation. For instance, puppets, comedy, sketches, live music, and the author. And then we quiz the author. We forced the author to take a quiz that has nothing to do with their book, which is fun. It has something peripherally to do with the book. My producer and co-host, like last night or on Thursday, we did a show with Timothy Caulfield, and it's his book, Relax, Dammit.

And the book is also called Your Day, Your Way, and it's also called Relax. So depending on where, what country you buy the book in. So the quiz was, what are movies that had multiple names? So it's just kind of related. That's so fun. It's like, wait, wait, don't tell me style. Yeah. I love those.

They're always so pleased with themselves with those sort of adjacent quizzes. Well, you know, our show is sort of like if Mortisha Adams had a book club and the Muppet show got involved with some of the characters from like kids in the hall. That's what we have. That's what the peculiar book club is. Yeah. Having appeared on it as an author, I would say that that description feels really accurate to me. And it was so much fun. It was by far the most dynamic virtual book event I've done.

And among the better, like, shows I've gotten to participate in, period. Thank you. Yeah. I definitely recommend it. The club members make it. They're so zany. Like, the whole conversation's going on in the side that don't have anything to do with what we're doing, but are fascinating.

And we also have a Facebook group where that zaniness continues. we've got to discord. The peculiars themselves, like we have, I think, 2,000 members or something. They can't get enough of each other. So there's lots of avenues for all of the weird.

Definitely lots of potential overlap between the peculiars and the weirdos. So I feel it. I'm sure some who are in the middle of that Venn diagram are already listening. But for those of you, you are still on the wrong either side of it. Get into the intersection.

Get into the center. Join us. We're like a big family if your family was real, real weird. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. And of course, this is such a perfect fit because you love weird facts as much as we do. So I'm very excited to see what we're going to get to get into. So on the weirdest thing I learned 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, writing. reporting, putting on a puppet show, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear

more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, how about we start with your teas? Okay, I'm excited. So I'm here to talk about how one of the oldest multicellular organisms ever sneezes since it's, you know, getting to be cold season. Amazing. I love that. I didn't, I was like, I wrote a bit about some very old multicellular organisms for my book about the history of sex. I did not expect this to be about them sneezing. So. Sex sneezing. Like, eh, how different. Yeah. You know what? A lot of similarities, honestly, physiologically speaking. But Brandi, what's your tease? Well, there's so many, you guys. I'm reading stuff all the time. I had for a while. So obviously my last book was on head transplant,

and I have to say the weirdest thing I learned at that time was that we had done head transplants, that there was a successful head transplant in the 1970s was just that was news to me. But probably the weirdest thing I saw this week was an article arguing that technically your mother may have left some of her cloned genes in you when you got born.

So you could be like part of your mom's clone and I really need to follow up on that. Wow. I can't wait to hear more about head transplants. Okay. My tease is that I want to get into the fact and the fiction of an urban legend about a criminal koala. Oh. I hope he has herpes.

Well, yes. Guas often do have chlamydia. Oh, clemedia, that's right. Sorry, wrong ST. Listen, almost everything gets herpes, so it's a very easy mistake. Climedia and herpes are the two old ones. You find it everywhere. I remember.

Everyone's headed. Yeah, I remember one researcher I talked to you for my book saying, like, there is chlamydia in the ocean. And for some reason, this was her way of being like, it's so old. And, like, that's really valid. The ocean has chlamydia. That's a fact. I was about to say that exact sense.

Listen, if there's one thing people take away from my reporting on STIs in my book, it's that like birds do it, bees do it, educated fleas, get herpes and comidia. So it's nothing to be ashamed of. But we have a lot of... I know, but I just wasn't expecting like promiscuous waves or like, you know, whirlpools of desire. I mean, I see. It works. It works.

I just wasn't there yet. So I can start. with criminal coales since we're already going off the rails. Okay, so we're going to start with a supposed fact that I will say up front is just not true because I don't want to risk someone hearing me tease this and then be like, oh, I can't believe Rachel has fallen for this big story. So anyway, and I've heard and seen a few folks over the years allude to this incident in the 90s where a spate of robberies turned out to.

have been committed not by a human, but by a koala, because these animals have fingerprints so similar to our own as to confuse police. Interesting. This is very rumored. Yeah. And now, like I said, there haven't actually been any koala capers as far as the record shows. So if there are koala criminals, they are too good. Officially documented.

Chihuahua criminals. But I have seen this like reported as a weird fact by individuals in lots of places, like on Reddit threads of people sharing weird facts. People have referenced it being talked about on podcasts. Check your work, people. But then it also gets like alluded to in popular science articles in the way that people clearly think they can kind of get away with not having a good source to link to. But they're just like, people say it's this. Everyone knows. Lots of people are saying. So I tracked this back.

It seems to have been inspired by the statement of a scientist back in the 90s who pointed out that Kuala Prince could, in theory, confuse police at crime scenes. And he figured someone should probably look into that. That was what he was saying. And in terms of purely theoretical happenings, he was not wrong. You could, depending on your mastery of fingerprint analysis, presumably confuse a koala's fingerprint with the humans, which is wild when you consider how mysterious fingerprints are to begin with. And how mysterious koalas are to begin with. Well, yeah.

I mean, those marsupials, you don't know what they keep in those pouches. I don't trust a marsupiars. This is true, full of secrets. So let's zoom out from koalas for just a minute. because yeah, fingerprints themselves are pretty mysterious. So what are they and why do we have them? Ongoing question. What they are and sort of like how they form much more straightforward.

They're still like more complicated than I think most people stop and think about. Our fingerprints are made out of ridge skin. It can be found on our hands and the soles of our feet. And several mammals actually have it on different parts of their body, the same kind of like raised ridge skin. and they come in three major pattern categories called loops, whorls, and arches. Most people know this from like elementary school fingerprint dusting activities. But the idea that no two fingerprints are alike comes down to the really tiny shapes and changes in the characteristics of the lines within those figures.

And those are known as minutia. And that's why the forensic reliability of fingerprints is actually a lot more hotly debated. than you might think, given that they've been a ubiquitous part of crime scene investigation since the early 1900s. Because the differences in fingerprints come down to loads of tiny, tiny little features, some of them like literal, like fine-lined artwork. And it's very possible for an unscrupulous or biased analyzer to call something a match when another analysis would show that it wasn't a match because those little points

of variability are so small. It's kind of like superficially, many people have almost identical fingerprints. So, you know, it's a little more complicated than I think most people assume it is when they say, oh, yes, a fingerprint, my unique snowflake pattern of identification. Right, because we use it as a metaphor even that, you know, for unique. Now I'm wondering if there's a koala out there with my fingerprints. I will get into it, I promise. The answer is probably not, but maybe. So, yeah, there aren't even very good standards for how fingerprint analyzers decide which minutiae to, like, focus on. So it's actually this incredibly murky field, which is not to say that fingerprint analysis is totally fake,

the way some aspects of forensic science have turned out to be totally fake. But it's really not the like be all and all irrefutable thing that I think a lot. lot of people assume that it is. Definitely room for user error, interpreter bias, all of that. And of course, now a lot of it is analyzed by algorithms, but those algorithms are programmed by people who have certain criteria for how they mark up a fingerprint. So the bias continues. Fascinating. I did not know this, actually. I really thought, like, I'm sure I've used that metaphor. Now I'm like, it wasn't quite right. It's still a good metaphor, because This is a great segue. Thank you. Because while we can't actually say with certainty that no two people have ever had the same fingerprints, that's only because it's like more of a statistical question than a biological one, there's nothing inherent about a fingerprint that is destined to be unique. It's just that the sheer number of tiny variations that are possible in the formation of a fingerprint make it nearly, if not literally impossible for two individuals to end up with the same set.

The trickiness is in how good we are at actually distinguishing those tiny differences well enough to be sure we can always identify one person's fingerprint from another. So identical twins have more similarities between their fingerprints than fraternal twins do, and the discrepancies increase out from there as your relations get more distant. And so it's clear that there's a genetic component. But even identical twins have differences. Basically, the general vibe of your fingerprint is quite heritable, but most of the minutia aren't. And that gets us into how fingerprints form, which is kind of wild. When a fetus is like seven weeks along, its hands and feet start to form little humps

called voler pads. And then a few weeks later, the fetus's limbs start to grow quickly enough that those bumps just sort of fade back into the palms of the hands and feet. And the shifting pressures of growing tissue seem to cause folds to form in the skin. And that's how we get our whirls, arches, and loops. Which one you get of those three depends on when in your fetal development and how quickly your voler pads get overtaken by your growing hands and feet. and that timing is very much determined by genetics.

So families tend to have the same general type of fingerprint. But the formation of minutia, which again is what makes fingerprints unique, is way more arbitrary. It can be impacted by everything from the viscosity of your amniotic fluid to like how much you punched your mom's kidneys in utero. So seriously what you interact with tectially as a fetus does have a big impact. And there's probably a lot of other potential influences we are not yet aware of. That's okay. So voler pads. I'm sorry, we have to come back to voler pads for just a moment.

Like in my brain, I'm seeing, you know, the foldy fingers of geckos? That's what my head went to when you said voler pads. They do kind of look like that. It's, so I was not familiar with this stage of embryonic development because it's a pretty, a pretty like niche moment, I would say, hasn't come up in any of my research before. But yeah, it's basically just like the pads of the fingers almost seem to like swell up. So like they're a little like, it's for a little while when our fingers are barely finger like, because of course this is very early. in fetal development. So they're really just starting to be long things instead of a paddle.

Yeah, it's just like you suddenly have like a round ball at the end of your finger. And then the rest of your hand. You have like froggy fingers. Yeah, it's very much like little froggy little gecko fingers. And then yeah, the rest of your body catches up and that just becomes normal finger size. So why does that happen? I don't know. I'm going to link to a paper about the actual embryological process of this on popsy.com

slash weird, but I did not have time to become an expert on fetal phalangee development right this second. So that's what I've got. It's my band name, fetal phalangies? Yeah, fetal phalanges. Now, there are few congenital conditions that include the lack of fingerprints as a symptom. And in fact, there's one where it's the only obvious symptom. In fact, the only symptom we know about. And this condition is called a dermatoglyphia.

Just five extended families in the whole world have been shown to have it. And in fact, it's even been nicknamed immigration delay disease because one of the few known cases came to light when the patient tried to travel to the U.S. and found out they were like functionally fingerprintless, who was suddenly a problem. Also, A nightmare. Yeah, right? And intriguingly, there's this one cancer drug that seems to cause several skin reactions, one of which can make your fingerprints disappear.

But fortunately, studies suggest that they reemerge after the treatment is over. So most people who have fingers have fingerprints. Pretty standard stuff. But why? What for? Scientists have yet to land on one concrete explanation for why fingerprints evolved. Their best guesses come down to improving our grip strength by creating friction. Those bumps are known as friction ridges.

Or making us more sensitive to tactile information. So there's some evidence that the ridges of our fingerprints increase the vibrations we feel when we touch something. One 2009 study suggested that fingerprints might actually amplify useful vibrations, while dampening others to kind of help specialized nerve cells interpret surface texture. I will say that when that paper came out, a lot of news outlets crowed about how the urban legend that fingerprints exist to improve our grip strength had been debunked, but that is really far from true. And I don't think the authors of that study wanted people to write that headline, but it was 2009, which I can say from personal experience, was prime clickbait era. As recently as a couple of years ago, researchers were continuing to explore how friction ridges might affect our ability to grip things, particularly when our skin is moist due to sweat. It seems to have a particular impact on moist skin.

some experts have even pointed out that an improved sense of touch could contribute to better gripping abilities since it would help you realize when something was slipping out of your grasp. So both benefits could have been involved in kind of like one mechanism of fingerprint evolution. But for now, we have no definitive answer. And we may never. Sorry. But we'll come back to koalas now because I promise koalas. So as for our cuddly buddies down under.

So back in the 1990s, a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist named Machi Haniburg, who'd recently come to work at the University of Adelaide, was working with some koalas at a wildlife refuge. And then he got to looking at their digits. And he was like, why is no one talking about this? because he had never read or heard anything about koala fingerprints, and when he looked at them, he thought, wow, these really look quite human-like. So fingerprints show up in other primates, but of course, koalas are marsupials, not primates. And to his naked eye, you know, at first blush, he was like,

I think these might even look more like human fingerprints than gorilla fingerprints do. So he was intrigued, curious, and, again, surprised that he had never seen anything. in the literature about this. So he and his colleagues were able to find some recently deceased specimens, and they scanned them with electron microscopes. And their study showed that they did indeed have a lot of similarities with human fingerprints. That's exciting. And strange.

Yeah, very strange. Because, again, they show up in other primates, but koalas aren't nearly as closely related to us as chimps and gorillas are. Marcy Bule is branched off from primates more than 70 million years ago. So this seems to be a case of convergent evolution, meaning for listeners who don't know that what worked for primate fingers also happened to work for koala fingers and evolved in them independently. Coalas do, after all, do a lot of climbing.

So they need grip strength. There's that whole tree thing. Yeah, they love a tree. And they're also very particular about what plants they eat. The reason they have such delicate microbiomes is because they need these special little microbes to help them digest eucalyptus, which is super toxic. So they're very picky of their plants. So tactile sensitivity would also be really important to them. And we see convergent evolution a lot in nature.

Bat wings and bird wings are super similar. They don't come from a common ancestor. And yeah, it's a great reminder that evolution is the result. of pressures from external stimuli. So often when the same problem needs to be solved, a pretty similar solution will arise. Sometimes a very different solution will arise, but it can be done.

So Hennepard never actually set out to catch a koala on the lamb, nor did he ever suggest that the police should actually go looking for koala criminals. But he did point out in a couple of quotes to me, outlets that a crime scene could potentially be contaminated by koala prince and of course the rest is history. So I have just a few closing thoughts on how this story got so out of control because it does. It's funny. It's funny, I promise.

So I think part of the reason that they sometimes get shared as like an anecdote about actual crime scenes rather than some very cheeky reporting on the 1990s. study by the UK newspaper, The Independent, which now always just makes me think of Ted Lasso, but I digress. So they ran the headline, koalas make a monkey out of the police, which is a great headline. Oh, my God. I understand. It's a real, it's a real Leslie Knope headline, and I understand why they went for it. But the story included a local anecdote from 1975.

when Hertfordshire police raided several zoos, they used the term rated. I would like to think they called up and asked zookeepers before, but anyway, they took prints from a handful of chimps and orangutants. The guy who ordered the exercise was quoted in this 1996 article, and he said it was because cops used to refer to ambiguous prince as, quote, monkey prince.

So, sure, an idiom is. a great reason to interrupt a zookeeper's day and dust a chimp for prints, I guess. On the bright side, zookeepers recalled that the chimps were really happy with all the attention and were totally fine with getting their prince dusted. So that's good. No harm came to these chimps and they were not prosecuted. It resulted in them being like, oh, okay, these aren't actually similar enough to human prints that we need to worry that. We need to worry that primates are doing crime and humans are getting put in jail for it. So chips somewhere going, I'm being profiled.

Yeah, seriously. That seems to have been the entire goal of this very strange use of resources. So if anyone knows more about how this actually went down in 1975, let me know. And yeah, this very strange side quest showed the police force that the prince were similar. but not so similar as to trick a trained eye, which is likely the case with koalas too. Like a couple of people, I've seen a couple articles where experts reacting to the kind of like

runaway clickbait version of Hannaberg study say like, that's ridiculous. No one would ever, you know, mistake a koala print for humans. And like both is probably true. They're probably uncanny from an evolutionary standpoint. And also anyone. who actually really knows human fingerprints would be like,

this is a weird one. What's up with this person? Don't they have kind of small hands? I mean, you're thinking like that's a very, very small criminal who is. Also like their grip direction, like their fingers are not in the same like positioning.

That's what the zookeeper quoted in the 1996 independent article was like, you know, their fingers don't face the same direction as human fingers when they grip something. And I'm like, I just really feel like, this wasn't actually something that needed to be debunked in this study. I don't think that was the point of the study. And I do have to dunk once more on the independent, circa 1996,

for this one line in particular, which I think is at the heart of the persistence of this urban legend. Quote, The Chimp File is likely to be re-examined in the light of new evidence yesterday that criminal investigations in Australia may have been hampered by the presence of koala fingerprints at the scenes of crimes. That is based on quite literally nothing.

That was said by any of the sources quoted or referenced. And I'm pretty sure that is what has given people the idea that primates and marsupials were under active investigation for decades. So I'm here to set the record straight for koalas and chimps, everywhere. And for this poor scientist who did a really interesting study of koala fingerprints. And yeah, so that's what I got. That's my story. I like it. I like it. I just looked up a picture

of koala hands. It's really, really weird. Their feet look more like our hands than their hands. So it's like they have two thumbs. Yeah, they've got very weird. They definitely have very, very grippy, very grippy feats. Like it looks like, I don't know, there's all these pictures now that I'm looking at where it looks like a koal is trying to shake my hand, but it has two thumbs. Well, I will definitely post some pictures on Popside.com slash weird of their flam G's. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot of cannabis dummies and a lot of, lot more, and you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. I'm not a

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. And Sarah Kylie, tell me about sneezes. Yay, I'm so excited. Very small sneezes. Very small sneezes. Little sneezes.

Yes, okay. So, y'all, it is sneeze season or sneezing. If you prefer, if that's what you celebrate. Choose the sneezing. Now I'm surprised I've never seen that on anything. But, okay, let's. Just making a note for my tea public shop, but go on. But anyway, it's sneezing for me, like, all year except for, like, maybe, like, two days in the summer.

So, and even anyway, with, like, COVID and all of that stuff, making less of a headline this year, maybe, like, a year or two ago, there's still plenty to make you sneeze out there in the world. COVID, duh. Cold, the flu, allergies, you name it. Lots of stuff. But humans aren't the only animals that sneeze. Obviously, we do it with such flair and uniqueness that sneeze. kind of gives you this like human image at first thought, you know, the Kleenex and everything.

But lots of animals do it. Elephants, pandas, seals, puppies. Puppies are really, really cute sneezing. You get the gist. So before we dive into the most interesting part of my story, which is the animal that sneezes, that you would never think sneezes. I'll do some explaining on the mechanism of sneezing. So a lot of it has to do with the nose, duh.

A physician Pamela Georgson wrote this great explanation in scientific American, so I'm just going to give you guys a little bit of that. So the nose provides the main route through which inhaled air enters and leaves the lower airways. Because of its position, it serves numerous functions. The narrowing passageways cause inspired air to flow with increased turbulence. This turbulence, in turn, increases the interaction between the airstream and the nasal mucosa, the lining up the nose, allowing for heat and moisture to be exchanged and for suspended or soluble particles from the air to be cleared. So, yeah. Yeah, what happens when something like that you don't want up your nostril goes up there?

Sneezing. So sneezing is a physiological response to the irritation of the respiratory epithelium lining of the nose. So basically like an infection, like a filtered particle allergen or even like a physical irritant, like a smoke or some kind of pollution or cold air. How about perfume? Yeah, stinky perfume will get you. It'll get you sneezing. It'll get you in an elevator with somebody. Mm-hmm.

So if something like that goes up there, basically what happens is the sneezing process starts with a release of chemicals, like such as histamines or leukotrinines, which are manufactured by inflammatory cells and mass cells, which are found in your nasal mucus. If you're allergic to whatever got stuck up there, then the mucus also requires immunoglobin E to come into action, which is what causes like snot leakiness and congestions. And then really fun stuff. And then your nerve endings also get in on the fun, which is the itchiness. And once your nerve endings are stimulated, a reflex goes off in your brain like, ah. And nerves in your head and neck, then like happen, do that thing. That basically makes the sneeze happen. You've all been there.

It's a face orgasm. As some may call it. I remember, so a while back, Clara Maldorelli talked about. what people who have the reflex where they sneeze after eating. And I have the photo sneezing reflex. So I sneeze when I look at the sun, which when I was a little kid, I thought that meant being allergic to the sun. I thought that's what that meant, which is one of the more adorable things I thought as a child. But yeah, no, I still, I get uncontrollable sneezes if I look at the sunshine.

I'm a little sniffly vampire. Yeah, so your sneezing is summer, I suppose. All the time. All the time. When the sun's out. And so if your sneezing gets out of control, there's a bunch of drugs out there to help you with this. We've all probably tried once or twice in the midst of a particularly lucky or unlucky cold. So antihistamines, block histamine receptors, decongestion, stimulate receptors on blood vessels that cause the

constriction. And sometimes nasal steroids can come into play if it's really bad. but not all animals sneeze. Sharks, for instance, if they get, they've nostrils and everything, but the nostrils don't link to the back of the throat. So if they get something stuck in their nose, they have to shake it out, apparently, which is. I have never thought about this. Which is hilarious.

I did a whole episode about how rats don't vomit, and it didn't happen to me. There are other orifices you might want to get stuff out of. Okay, exactly. So let's imagine a hammerhead shark right now, okay? So you've got a hammerhead shark, and he gets something stuck in. he's going to shake his head. Can you imagine, like, just the velocity that you would work up, shaking that head around? Taking down ships with the natival whirlpool.

Like, causing a tsunami because there's like... A shark NATO. Like, if that tells you a shark nato. I mean, this is just another reason not to put plastic in the ocean, guys. Like, you don't know what will happen if it gets stuck into somebody's nose. Like, there could be a shark nato. But, yeah, I mean, aquatic, and snakes, not snakes. sharks really aren't the only ones there's a lot of aquatic animals that don't have the advantage of like having air on hand to like push out stuff in their nose so yeah if you're if you're swimming around it's not a you gotta do more of the shake so I'm sure there's some videos of a shark out there doing this I'm gonna look but oh my gosh oh yeah but in August there's a study about how one aquatic animal in its own little way

sneezes to get rid of junk that clogs up their internal filter system. And it's sea sponges. Yay! We love sea sponges. So there's some of the oldest creatures out there. They have a fossil record dating back 600 million years ago to the earliest period of Earth history. And so I have a very cute description of them from Jennifer Fraser, who's also wrote about it

in Scientific American. So stay tuned. So you're a bunch of sister cells looking to get together. and form the world's first animal co-op, a place where you and your buddies can all live together in a little socialist utopia and specialize in doing one chore rather than trying to do everything at once

like those foolish single-cell rugged individualist protists. What might this look like? Well, it just so happens it probably looked a lot like a sponge because they are something very like them were likely the first. So, exciting stuff. Really one of the first multicellular organisms out there

and they have a little sneeze. but before we realized they get sneezed like a long time ago, scientists kind of classified these guys as plants because they don't have organs, they don't move, and they have these little cute branches. But around the 18th century, scientists started to change their mind. So they basically started to notice animal characteristics of sponges, like the diameter of their central cavity,

their creation of distinct water currents. So I guess plants don't do that. That's a special thing for us. Zoologist imagined that sponges occupied, an isolated position in the animal kingdom, but molecular testing has now proved that sponges are in more complex animals, even like humans, developed from a common ancestor. So way back there somewhere. And for example, some other things that make them, you know, animals and not plants. Their skeletons are made from collagen, which is in people's tendons and skin. And so, yeah,

there you go. So that's a little update about sponges. in case you didn't know. But back to sneezing, back to sneezing. The sponges are wonderful filters for the water around them. They scoop up bacteria and they process carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. So they're basically slurping up all this stuff around. But everybody has to get rid of stuff they don't want in their body. If you're a shark, if you're a human, if you're a panda, if you're a sponge, you've got to do it.

So enter sponge sneezes. Does it spark joy? It doesn't, yeah, exactly. We all have to get rid of stuff sometimes. So obviously sponges don't have noses. We thought they were plants for a really long time, so they're not like running around, like smelling stuff in a nose kind of way, at least. You know, sponge experts, if they smell, please let me know.

But they have all these like little pores that suck in stuff from the water around them, which they use as food and nutrients. And so just like when you get a whiff of stinky perfume instead of fresh air, sometimes you just like need to eject immediately. and sponges can't move. So if their area becomes like really gross, like if you again get stuck in an elevator with the stinky perfume,

like it becomes a lot of like eject, eject, eject, like I don't like this. I need this out of my system. So what they do, instead of letting out like an achew, their little water inlets that release these mucus over time. Basically, those little pores,

they build up this kind of mucousy snot stuff on their surfaces. And when that becomes too much, the sponge tissue contracts, like the whole thing, contracts, it pushes the waist snot into the water. And so I've seen a video of this happening. It's basically like pimples popping themselves. It's like the only thing that I can like really like visualize.

So if that's your thing, like this is like a whole new world for you guys. Yeah. And then another key difference between obviously our sneezing, you know, animal sneezing in general or even, you know, shaking stuff out of your nose. It takes half an hour for sponges to sneeze. So this is a long process. And so the sped-up sneezes are the fun ones to watch if you're like a pimple-popping person. It's pretty gross.

But yeah, it takes a longer time, obviously. But it took us a half hour to sneeze. Like, that would be crazy. I would never get anything done. I would just be like, you know that brain freeze? Oh my gosh. I'd be in the brain freeze zone like 95% of the day. But yeah.

So, and it turns out that the fish like to eat the sponge knot is food. Also, another fun grace fact, which kind of makes sense, I guess. Like, fish eat weird stuff. But, I mean, I've never seen a fish eat anything that came on my nose. Fish love a goo, you know. They do love the goo. They love the goo. And so, so far, scientists have only seen this go down, like the sneezing in two kinds of sponge.

There's one Caribbean tube sponge. And then there's an Indo-Pacific one. However, the scientists that did the study back in August think that most, if not all, sponges sneeze. So it's kind of like a one size fits most situation because there's like almost 9,000 sponge species out there. So like it would take a really long time to watch all of them sneeze, especially if it takes 30 minutes every time. But yeah, so one of the authors in a press release when the study came out said there are a lot of scientists that think sponges are very, simple organism, but more often than not, we are amazed by the flexibility that they show to adapt to their environment, which is pretty cool. Go sponges, go sponges. So at its core, sneezing

for both us and sponges is a way to get rid of icky stuff that enters our body at the same point of entry. And they both involve snot. Nobody's like really assessed what makes up the like sponge sneeze snot. So that's research for somebody else. There's someone out there. right now being like, this is for me, this is, this is where I'm going to make my mark. I would be fascinated to see a side by side look at human versus sponge snot. Because it's got to be, there's got to be some kind of similarity. I don't know. Maybe they've done that with other species.

That's, again, a Wikipedia hole for me to fall down into after this. There's a whole hagfish snot thing that they're trying to use hagfish snot for textiles. Have you seen this? Like, they dry the hagfish snot and then. Yes. I mean, so I'm very familiar with the. the beautiful mysteries of hagfish slime and its ability to just absolutely multiply in volume. So I hadn't heard that people were trying to use it as a material, but like that does make

sense because like once you've got a little bit of hagfish slime, you can get a lot of it. You get a lot of it. Yeah, it's amazing. It's like they produce more volume that you're like, your body is this big. How did you make six buckets of snot? I do not understand. They contain multitudes. It's not.

Okay. Yeah. That is good to know. That is good to know. It's a really good response. They were just like, okay. Yeah, that's a thing we know now. Thanks.

Yeah. Well, I love this. And I'm so glad you mentioned the like plant animal thing because I recently wrote a newsletter about weird sea creatures that are. arguably multicellular, arguably single-celled, et cetera. And I ended up on the Wikipedia page for that old-timey, now defunct category of like plant slash animal thing. And there's an illustration of like a sheep growing out of a stock of wheat because they were like, it's possible animals could grow from the ground. Listen, I am, I'm sure there are things we believe today

that are going to seem just as ridiculous in retrospect. I am so biting my tongue on a political comment right now. Yeah, me too. But you know what? I still, I will accept my right to lovingly make fun of the scientific illustration of a lamb growing out of a flower. Like that sounds awesome. That's also going on my list of things to find. And all of this was because of how confused they were by like sponges and stuff.

They were like, how can you explain that? If you can, if this could be real, maybe there's a plant that a lamb grows at. I just like that there was like a section that's just like a live question mark. Dot, dot, dot. Like, living. Living? Love it. Excellent.

Thank you for, thank you for giving sponges a well-deserved spotlight. They always deserve it. They are working really hard to sneeze right now. Spending so much time sneezing. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, much shorter than a sponge sneeze, and be back with one more effect. 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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Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Okay, we're back. And let's talk about head transfers? Yeah, I think we probably should, you know, because... Someone has to. to. It's a weird, it's a weird situation because I, um, thought it was fake news and it's, it's not. And so, uh, the, when I encountered this the first time, I was asked by a friend of mine, a friend of mine is a neurologist said, oh, I got something I want to show you and it's in the

shoebox and I don't know, something a little creepy about being handed a shoebox by a neurologist. They're like, maybe there's a brain in there. So I open it up and it's this old notebook and the notebook is like covered in these it's all this writing and it's got little gray or brown flex in it and I was like what are those he's it was probably blood like from what he's like oh this is the guy now here's the sentence okay this is from the guy who did the head transplant in the 70s and your brain goes there's several things in that sentence all happening at one time that I really processing blood and processing head transplant in the 1970s like yeah how do you have this So, yeah, how do you have the good question.

He didn't share that. So I began investigating this story, and I ended up writing a whole book about it actually because, astonishingly, this is another one of those tales that has kind of a micro and a macro of you. So on the one hand, there is the fact that somebody took the heads off of monkeys and put them on the bodies of other monkeys and that those monkeys then lived. and that that was a thing that we did and that science supported and that got like national grant funding in the 1970s. Like there's a lot going on there.

But it's couched in macro view. This whole question. So the whole reason this happens is not because somebody was just like, oh, Franken Monkey. Yeah. It was about we didn't have a definition for brain death. So the big discussion is, when are you dead? Right. Yeah.

And that's a weird one because did you know. no, there is a legal definition of death, but there's not actually a medical definition of death that everyone agrees on. I did know that, but only because I'm into some real weird macabre shit. I interviewed someone who studies death as a social and biological concept once, and we talked a lot about the change. milestones of how doctors defined death and how it's not universal and it could always keep changing because it's basically like, yeah, once we figured out how to tell that the heart

stopped, it was the heart. And once we thought we knew how to tell the brain stopped, it was the brain. But do we know? Yeah, yeah. It's a real strange area. And I'm a death researcher, too. This is how I met the neurologist, because brain death was our connection. Brain death is our connection. It was a friendship base in brain death, you know. So anyway, that's how all this started. So basically, before we had respirators, if your heart stopped, you died. And of course, that sounds like, duh, but it's not duh.

It's not duh. Because your breathing, so your heart is actually like your heart beats, it's on the autonomic response, right? So it's just doing stuff in there. But your breathing, you have to be like, hello, I'm here, and I'm breathing. And that's why people end up on ventilators like in comas and things like that, right? So you have to have something to ventilate you because your lizard brain can control your heart and your blood pressure and other stuff but doesn't help you breathe. Okay. So if we didn't have ventilators, then when you had a heart attack, you died.

Like when your heart stopped, it was it because there was nothing to ventilate you. With the advent of ventilators, they created a problem. And literally doctors are at conferences going, so we ventilate you know we're basically this guy is being using a machine to breathe but we don't think there's anything going on in there

and is he dead? Like what do we do with him? Like if we took him off this thing he dies but like if he's on it he's alive is he alive? And this was a question that was ongoing and people weren't sure about and in the middle of all that

they performed the first kidney transplant and then shortly after that the first heart transplant. Okay so now people are going ooh we can take hearts out of people who are very recently dead or still kind of alive and put them in other people's bodies

and save their lives. This is fascinating and good. Where are we going to get these hearts from? Because it can't just be from cadavers, right? Well, what about people who are brain dead, they said? What if their bodies are being kept alive on these machines and respirators, but technically there's nothing going on in their brains?

can we then harvest their organs because they're technically dead. Technically dead is a complicated term. Like, do you remember the Princess Bride, like mostly dead? Like, I don't want mostly dead to be the reason. Like, I don't want to be the one who I'm like, she's mostly dead. Let's, we'll take it. It's fine.

That's a problem. So there was an argument at a conference. This is an honest-to-god true, I quote from this, where one doctor just stands up and goes, like, I'm not going to wait around for you guys to decide whether someone's, dead. He looks dead to me. I'm going to take the organ. And obviously, that's a bit of an ethical dilemma. So, um, you know, as it were. So that is the backdrop of all of this. And then there's this doctor who goes, well, we really need to figure this out. We should, we, you know, there's

several people asking these questions. There's a Harvard commission. This gentleman, Dr. White, is not on the Harvard commission. He's friends with the guy who's sort of heading it up over there, Dr. Murray. and he thinks to himself, well, what if we ask the question the other way around? Okay? Not what is brain death, but what is brain alive? What is, can we isolate what brain life is outside of the body? Now, it seems like a reasonable question, but what he's actually asking is, can we keep a brain alive outside of a body?

What would that look like? Jan and a pad. Does anybody else have a... Jan and a pan? Mystery of science, theater, childhood. So, believe it or not, that, that, that... I mentioned that in the book because some of the stuff he does actually influences several beat movies, in fact. So it's not even, yeah.

It's really true. So he decides, okay, what I want to do then is figure out how to keep a brain alive without its body. Now, I'm going to ask your listeners to go on a little journey with me for a minute because this gets really messy and really upsetting in terms of animal rights. So right now we're going to think of cartoon. monkeys, okay. This is just a cartoon brain that we're envisioning in our head for a moment. Okay. So if you want this brain to be alive, what does it need? It, it, what do you guys think it needs? How do you? A body. Aiming too high, Sarah Kiley. I mean, I mean, I would say like, electricity. Okay. Okay. So some liquid. Liquids, oxygen. Oxygen is a good one. Right. So

brains are super, super, super greedy. Like, they have. to have lots of oxygen. And if oxygen goes away for even like a second, you know, bad things happen. So basically you start to lose brain cells at it. I mentally at this moment can't recall the exact number of seconds, but it's not very many. Right? Your brain cells start to die. So, okay, nice oxygen needs blood to carry that oxygen. Got to have some fluids. It eats. Your brain eats. I know that's a weird thought, but it consumes sugars. It metabolizes. It's a thing. So he's like, all right, I know all the stuff that it needs. So let's see if we can't, like, get a brain out of a monkey without killing it.

And he thinks, well, what's the best way of doing that? So his first idea sounds like almost like a weird lemonade machine, you know, like circulating stuff. But then he ultimately realizes that there's a much better machine for this. And actually, Sarah's not wrong. It's a body. So he thinks, what if I hook up a body, an actual monkey, regular monkey over here, monkey A, and we hook monkey A's various venous fluids and things up to monkey B and then just

start carving away at monkey B and like get down to the cartoon monkeys, cartoon monkeys, I know. Right. I'm dry. Go to cartoon monkeys. So he basically takes this monkey B donor body monkey. It's very like Fury Road, right? And is venously feeding this head that he carved away. And he ends up with just a just the brain. which is a little bulb of brain. It's sitting on a little platter, and it's being bathed in the bloods and fluids and sugars

and all the stuff that it needs from the other monkey's veins. And it's alive. It's not dead. They hook it up to EEG, and it's like, did it, it's thinking. So it's still in there. The monkey's still in there somehow, and is thinking, and it's just a brain.

So, okay, that's brain alive. So his point is, okay, that's brain alive. In this trash can over here, we have the body that, belong to that brain. So this is clearly a brain-dead body now. It's the brain is the brain is alive, you know. If the brain is alive, you're alive, and if the brain is not alive, you're dead. And he defined this as like the activity that you see on the screen, the little blips on the paper. There's other, um, there's actually a whole set of criteria for determining

brain death and it revolves around reflexes and, you know, um, whether or not you can feel pain and it's just a whole bunch of different things. So he publishes this paper, and he's like, ta-da, brain alive. And so this should answer our question about brain death. And everyone went, we don't believe that that monkey brain was alive. Like, interesting story, interesting technique that you have there. But, you know, dots on a paper. Maybe it was a glitch in the machine.

And he's very upset about this. He's like, I cannot believe this. So how do I prove to these people what I'm trying to get across? He'll do it again. Well, he decides to go to Moscow, to Russia. And which I ultimately ended up having to go there as well because I was looking for the two-headed dog. You know the two-headed. Yeah.

DeMikov's two-headed dog. Hmm. No? Okay. So another doctor in Russia was also practicing all of this, but he decided to take the whole head and like stick it on the body of another dog. So he had this dog. And the other, and Shavka was the little dog. And they took Shavka's head and they stuck it on Brunyenko's body.

And so then they named it Seberus, but like really only a two-headed seboris. So I don't know, Seberi, maybe. But anyway, so they made the two-headed dog and it lived and it could drink milk and do other like things. They don't live very long, though, because if you're not giving them anti-rejection drugs eventually. Actually, I don't really know if it's appropriate to say the body rejects the head or the head rejects the body, but something goes wrong. There's a lot of rejection. There's a lot of, yes. There might be co-rejection.

I don't know. So he looks at that and he visits Russia and he meets Vladimir Demikov over there and he's like, okay. And I could tell you about my trip, but that's a whole other story. But he's like, all right, I just need to keep the whole head alive. That's what we need to do. So he decides to basically that the experiment will go better if instead of having a head over here and a donor monkey, you just took the donor monkey's head off and put this head on that body. so that, you know, I mean, because it looked like a long telephone cords of blood, like, between the body and the head, and they were like, this is, it's like, you remember the old dial phones with, it's like it's an unplugged phone, right? So, then you have to shorten everything down, and then they like re-bolted the neck to the collarbone area thing and stuff. So he performs this experiment. You have a head monkey on a B, a monkey is now on body B, and he waits. So they perform this surgery, and it.

It takes hours. You guys, like, it's late. They've not slept. And everyone's been, it's a huge team of doctors, like, preparing all this stuff and, you know, monitoring. And now they're just waiting. They're waiting for it to wake up, to see if it wakes up. And by the way, there's just smoking, a lot of smoking going on. This is hilarious.

This is the 70s. Like, he's got this pipe in his mouth. There's these pictures of all these people in the operating room and they're smoking. And it's crazy. And then one of the students, who I ended up interviewing one of the students who was still alive, was there and was like, Like, hey, hey, guys, guys, this is something's happening over here. It's blinking. It's something else.

So they run over to the monkey. And the head, like, wakes up and blinks its eyes and looks around and it's like, well, this is bad. Because, of course, it can't control the body it's sitting on. It's paralyzed. You separate the spinal cord. That's what happens. So this monkey is just there looking around and it's angry and it's upset. And it tries to bite the doctor.

Yeah, I would be too, right? Extremely reasonable. Extremely reasonable response. But it's successful. It lives for nine days this way. And so he uses this to publish to be like, okay, this helps us understand, you know, brain death and brain life. The body is not the point. The body is unnecessary.

The body is not even there in this case. Just the brain is life and the body means nothing. I don't agree with this at all because I think the body does mean a great deal to who you are as a person. He couldn't ask the monkey. But this was why he published this. and the result of publishing this paper is not everyone going, ah, yes, we have solved the problem of brain death. Thank you very much.

No, the result is like PETA, like a lot of people are very unhappy that he's taking the heads off of things on like NIH money. And it doesn't happen anymore. Like he does several of these and then people are kind of like, this is, we're not, this is not great news. He, he, he's been chased at one point by people in guerrilla suits, animal activists and gorilla suits and he calls it like a planet

the apes. There's a lot going on in this fellow's life. But ultimately he doesn't, he hasn't answered the question either. Like at the end of it it's like you haven't actually answered the question when is brain death real? Like when are you dead? And he never really

gets there. He gets close to a different sort of question I think which is where are we in this composite brain body like where are you? Where's the essence of that monkey, where's the essence of a person. But he doesn't perform the experiment on people until the 90s. And then, but then, well, he almost does in the 90s.

But yeah. Right, it was on hard copy. I talked to Craig Vitovitz, who was a gentleman who was a quadriplegic. He was willing, he actually contacted Dr. White and was willing to be the first one because his organs were failing. And to him, he was like, you don't understand. To me, this is a chance at life. It's not, you know, things are bad for me anyway.

But no, it did not go through. I mean, it's not because it was illegal, interestingly enough. It turns out it's not illegal necessarily to take a person's head off. Because experimental surgeries do happen a lot. And that's not actually regulated by a government body so much as individual hospitals, which is a little creepy when I'm. I found that. Government body.

Yeah. Where's the government braid? Cool. What a question. It doesn't happen because no hospital wanted to like take that on and be like, yes, please go ahead and take somebody's head off. But yeah. So that happened.

And in the end, after all of that, we still can't answer the question of when exactly are you dead? Yeah. Wow. wild. Much to think about here. Yeah, yeah. Well, we do know what some, I take it back.

We know when you're dead. It's that moment, right, in between. That's what's tricky, that very murky little. When you're nearly dead. Nearly dead. When you're mostly dead. That's when it's a problem. Yeah.

I will say that it did lead to actually better treatment of animals, though, because once all this stuff got published, like several journalists took him to task, and as a result, a lot of a lot more. scrutiny was like placed on what you could and couldn't do with primates in particular. And hopefully dogs. I'm still thinking about the two-headed dog. Yeah, yeah. They also put a brain of one dog in another dog's neck to see what that would do. Yeah, you know, it's real, Cold War science is something else.

So if it was a bad place to be a dog. It was, except that happened in the U.S. Yeah, no, that, yeah. There's a bad place to be a dog anywhere. Yeah, yeah. There was so much stuff that happened during the Cold War that I was like, no-uh. But progress. Great.

Well, you know, a cheery note. To end on, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? What does everybody think? Monkey heads has me. Yeah, I, you know, I don't want to be thinking about the monkeyness, but I am going to be thinking about it for a long time. do you think that you did this one. I'm sorry.

But you have to, I mean, and you guys, I did not want to write the book. I didn't, but part of me was like, but what if no one ever does? I need to find out. I'm glad you did. Yeah. Well, I didn't want to give, it's not exactly, it is a biography of Dr. White in some ways, but it's not exactly super celebratory. It's called Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher, which were his two nicknames.

So, yeah. He gave himself the nickname. Mr. Humble. Okay. That's always a good sign. Makes sense. Pita gave him the name Dr. Butcher. Unsurprising.

Yeah. Unsurprising. Well, thanks for coming on. And listeners. I feel like I need to tell you something fun now. I feel bad. Listen. Listen.

There's lots of fun stuff to be heard at peculiar book club, which listeners should check out. Much less. likely to hear about ugly monkey stories. Here, I'll end on a funny aside from my fact, which is that yes, there are smart toilet algorithms being designed to detect your unique anus print.

No. The question is, what about koala anus prints? Oh, no. Great question! Wait, for another day. They're not the ones who do the square poop, though, right? That's wallabies. No, that's wombat. wombatts.

Yeah. No. So I don't know what a koalap at all this like. And I'm probably not going to try to find out. But, you know, that is something that smart toilet manufacturers may need to keep in mind. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now.

And if you like what you hear, please read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show. For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsye. threadless.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Just Bode. 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. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion.

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