The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Historical Sex Toys, Killer Trains, Charles Fricken Dickens

Episode Date: May 10, 2019

This week, we've got the first-ever voice messages episode of Weirdest Thing! We listen and react to extra weird, listener-provided facts that range from a dildo machine for nuns to a chicken named Mike who lived for 18 months without a head. It's always great to hear from you all—to submit your own fact, download the Anchor podcast app on Apple or Google Play, and look up our show, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. Click the voice message button, introduce yourself, maybe tell us where you're from, and record up to 60 seconds of gab about your favorite weird fact. Don't worry, we'll make sure it's accurate before posting it anywhere. Thanks for calling, weirdos! The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share more of 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!  Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on June 14th!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden --- 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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Hi, this is Jason and of a weird fact. Hey, weirdos. Rachel and Jess here. We are really excited to share our first ever voice messages episode. In case you missed the little ad about it in our feed, Anchor's podcasting app allows you to send us voice messages whenever you want. It doesn't have to be for a special episode. You can just say hi.

I mean, don't be weird in a bad way about it. But like, seriously, you can talk to us whenever you want. But for the purposes of this episode, we asked weirdos from all over to share their favorite weird science, health, tech, engineering, what have you, facts. And we have a few of those to share with y'all today. Jess, are you ready? I have never been more ready in my life. Okay. So I have listened to these already because, as promised, I did fact check them.

I didn't want any of our weirdos to get embarrassed. Did they check out? Yes, though there's one that I have a caveat for, but it's also one of my favorites. So I certainly wasn't going to leave it out, but I am in need of more primary literature. So, okay, let's start with the very first one we got. Great. Hi, my name is Susie Stewart. I wanted to share a cool, weird fact with you that I teach every day at work as a neonatal

intensive care, NICU, nurse. The cool fact that I would like to share is that breastfeeding is a positive feedback loop system. Yes. So when the baby is breastfeeding, the baby's saliva can travel through the nipple opening and the ariola openings, and these are now signals that travel to the mother and can tell the mother's body that the baby is sick or needs more fat, etc. The mother's body then responds and creates the milk medicine that the baby needs with those antibodies in it. Also, if the mother is sick or nursing a cold, the mother's body creates antibodies for whatever she has and passes those along in the milk so that the baby won't get sick with whatever she has or has been exposed to. There is, of course, a whole lot more information

I would love to share about this fact, but time limits are a thing. I love your show. Bye guys. Love you. Susie. Wow. We love you too, Susie. Susie, thank you. That's so timely with, you know, the royal baby being born as well. It's true. As our editor-in-chief Joe Brown's baby.

Yes. That's fascinating. Yeah, I love that one so much. Okay, so this next one is the one that there's a caveat for. Okay. Which is that I was able to confirm that the device described exists in the location. that our weirdo says it does. However, I was not able to find anything confirming the purpose that she ascribed to it.

So anyone hears this fact and recognizes it and has some more info to send me? Please do. Okay, here we go. Hi, my name is Kathleen from San Jose, California. My weird fact is that in the late 1400s during the Spanish Inquisition, some convents in Spain used a device to encourage nuns to work faster. It was a combination spinning wheel and dildo machine. The faster the nuns spun the spinning wheel, the faster the dildo worked.

You can see this device in person in the Museo Lada in Rondo in Spain. I have always thought that this device was the inspiration between that infamous scene in the Cohen Brothers movie, Burn, After. after reading. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. I have a lot of questions, like, how, would that make you more productive or I don't, I don't know. We did have a great episode about Hildegarde von Bingen that involved nuns and orgasms.

So I do feel that this is very on theme for us. Like I said, I was able to find a picture of the device, which is clearly a dildo machine. There's no, there's no other. There's nothing else that could be. else it could be. I'm flabbergasted right now. Yeah, but I couldn't find any, at least anything in English. And I don't, you know, it's been a while since I took Spanish, but like I'm pretty sure none of this stuff I was reading in Spanish was telling me about nuns using the Dolom machine. And then also, it's that same museum has a lot of stuff from the Inquisition era. This machine is

allegedly something that the Spanish Inquisition, like, targeted as a machine of the devil, but there are also machines there that were used for torture. Oh. Involving like similar apparatae. That's dark. So, yeah, that, the, the gritty, the blurriness there made me want to find some more verifiable sources. Yeah, it reminds me of the episode where Claire talked about the treadmill, because the

treadmill was originally invented as a torture device. Yeah, I want to know that people had fun with. this particular Dildo machine. That's what I want. Thank you so much for that fascinating fact, one that I am desperate to know more about. Okay, now we have another weird fact. Hi, fellow weirdos. I'm Shunee, a student from Philadelphia. And the weirdest thing I recently learned is that CAPTCHA, aka the completely automated public touring test to tell computers and humans apart. Basically, the thing that you need to identify and type in stuff so that the computer can recognize that you are a human and not a robot is actually really helpful for Google. So the old

version had users type in some blurry looking text. That was actually used to digitize all of what is now Google Books. And the current version has you identify signposts and storefronts, and crosswalks, and you're actually helping train artificial intelligence and possibly self-driving cars. So next time you're mad at the website for tripping you up, just remember that you're helping train our future overlords. Interesting. Yeah. And I know that training self-driving cars to interpret visual cues like that is going to be really difficult. They're not good at reading signs.

Right. So it's good to know we're training our future robot overlords. Yeah. Thanks for that fact. Also, go Philly. Yay. Yeah. I love Gritty.

We stand, Giddy. Okay, now we have a weird fish fact. Hey, weirdest thing podcast people. My name is Lacey Connors, and here is my fact for you. What does a handle of fireball whiskey and a fish from Antarctica have in common? They both actually have a type of anti-freeze in them. So, as one could imagine, it gets a little. pretty cold in the southern ocean, usually below freezing. So that's pretty bad news

bears for anything that wants to live in the water without their blood freezing. So there's this type of fish called a notothenioid and they're pretty dominant in Antarctica. And they have this special type of protein that actually binds to ice crystals and prevents the ice crystals from growing. So these fish can actually live in these sub-freezing temperatures and be relatively unaffected. So, yeah, they're pretty cool fish and definitely better than your average goldfish. Very cool. That is cool.

I love the anti-freeze fish. Yeah. What I want to know is if I drink enough fireball, will I be able to swim in the southern ocean? I mean, you might, like, not care about how cold you are. Yeah, don't drink too much fireball, please, listeners. Yeah. It's never good. In moderation.

Yeah. All things. Yeah. Okay. The title of this one is, he died dot, dot, dot, 18 months after losing his head. What?

So here we go. Hi, all. This is Katie from Michigan, and this is my very first favorite weird fact. It's the story of Mike the headless chicken. Picture it, Colorado, 1945, and Farmer Lloyd Olson goes out to get a chicken for dinner. He picks one, he cuts his head off,

and he waits for it to die. but it doesn't die. It continues moving around and moving its neck as if it has a head, but he does not have a head. Cut to, they spend the next 18 months touring sideshows, and he charges people to see Mike the headless chicken. It turns out he had caught off his head,

but he left just enough of the brainstem control kind of reflex actions, such as breathing, and there was a blood cut that kept Mike from bleeding out. They fed him using an eyedropper, and sometimes he would start choking on his own spit, and they would have to clear it using the eyedropper. But one night they heard the choking noises start and realized they'd left the eyedropper somewhere else,

and Mike ended up dying 18 months after he lost his head. Thanks. Love the show. Oh, it's such a wonderfully dramatic reading. I really felt like I was right there in Colorado with that farmer and his chicken. Wait, did they say the chicken's name was Mike? I think so. That's, you know, I love when like pets have generic human names, So I love that the headless chicken is like.

I also like that the chicken only became a pet once it was headless. Right. Before that, it was going to be dinner. But. Tragic. Yeah, I was recently reading totally unrelated to this, an article about the investigations behind all those myths about people who were executed by beheading, you know, having their heads, like, continue to do stuff. Right. So maybe I'll do that on an upcoming episode because there are some freaky brain activity that happens.

The other question I have about the headless chicken is like we know so little about how chickens experience the world. We do know that they are, you know, not the most intelligent animals. I think they get a bad rap. I think they're more intelligent than most people assume and they deserve our respect and dignified life and death. But I do wonder how much cognitive difference there is between a chicken with just a brainstem and a chicken with its tiny little brain also. Like, did his life pretty much continue the way it had always been, except without a face? Wow, I have so many questions.

Somebody should definitely do this. Okay, well, let's move on to our next fact. Hi, this is Julia Collin from San Francisco. My favorite fact is that hummingbirds eat about the equivalent of about 200,000 calories. Like, if a human would eat it, it would be 200,000 calories a day. in their amount and that they can't do it throughout the entire day because they would be weighed way, way too down to, like, do all the little flying things they do. So they have to essentially eat all those calories in 20 minutes, like while dusk is happening right at the end of the day until they go to bed. So yeah, that's my favorite fun fact.

I really wish I could be a hummingbird. Thanks. the different rates of metabolism that different animals can have. And I like to imagine a world where I, too, got to eat literally all day, except that is what I do. Yeah. Same. Constantly bulking.

Yeah. Yep. Always a bulk. All right. Let's go on to our next one. Hey, guys. This is Cade from Phoenix. And I'd like to share my fact.

sometimes when the sun sets the atmosphere reflects the light refracts the light and makes it shine green for like a split second yeah and that's it great gaspy is my immediate thought yeah the green flash is a phenomenon that like a lot of people try to take pictures of from what i understand it's like it technically always happens but it's hardly ever visible and then you have to be looking at exactly the right time. Interesting. I'm not quite sure what the exact conditions are that mean you get to catch it, but I know that people are always very excited when they do. Isn't it also a thing in Pirates of the Caribbean?

Oh yeah. Classic film. This next one sounds a little bit familiar, but I'm going to play it anyway. Hi, I'm Chris Brasher in Manitoba, Canada. The weirdest thing I learned this week is the for a hundred people. hundreds of years European nobles, priests and scientists incorporated human remains, including stolen Egyptian mummies and grave-robbed Irish burial remains into medicine to treat many different ailments. A Smithsonian magazine article by Maria Dolan references recent books,

medicinal cannibalism in early modern English literature and culture by Louise Noble and mummies, cannibals and vampires by Richard Sugg. William Shakespeare even referred to the practice in Othello. Keep up the great work, weirdos. So we actually already have an episode on medical cannibalism. It's one of my favorite episodes. It's a good one. Yeah. So I definitely recommend going back to season one if any of you haven't listened yet. There are some real gems in there. And you can hear Eleanor tell you all about when people ate people for their health. Delicious. All right. Now we're going to get to one called Charles Freakend. Dickens. Hi, other weirdos. My name is Chris York. I am in Raleigh, North Carolina. I am fanboying

pretty hard right now because this podcast is amazing. I thought it would be cool if you ladies could do a deeper dive into Charles Dickens. I did a report on him when I was in fourth grade, I believe, and we actually had to dress up like the characters that we were reporting on. So there's a picture of me somewhere dressed up like Charles Dickens that I don't know where to find. I'll have to inquire with my mother. But he definitely had some quirky things going on. I remember them talking about how he always tried to sleep facing the north because it helped him to write more efficiently. And then he also gave his children. I think he had a bunch, too, some really weird nicknames. But it would be really, really cool if you guys could do that. If not, I love your show

anyways. You all are amazing. Keep doing it. Thank you. Well, thank you, Chris. It is always great to hear from a fellow weirdo and fan. First things first, we will need to see that photo. So please do inquire with your mother. Yes. Secondly, I would love to look into Charles Dickens in a future episode because weird sleep habits of historical figures is a great topic for discussion. I just suddenly thought of the episode where I talked about how Ben Franklin liked to hang out in the nude.

I was just thinking about that too. I don't know why. I guess because it was part of his post-sleep ritual. Right, right. He was like, I wake up, I take an air bath, otherwise known as me sitting around naked. Cool. Okay, we have one more, and I have to show the title because it is, sorry for cutting myself off at the end, but this was the least worst take. So. So endearing.

With that in mind. Hello, weirdest thing. My name is Joe, and I'm from London, and I want to tell you a bit about the Shienin Zeppelin, or the rail zeppelin. Now, this was a train that was designed and developed by Franz Krukenberg in 1929. And what makes it weird is that there was a massive propeller on the back of the train, and that was what powered it. So the fact that it had a 600 brake horsepower, engine and that it was made of like really light aluminium meant that it was super fast.

It still holds the record for the fastest petrol driven rail vehicle and it got up to speeds of 143 miles an hour. However, having a giant open propeller near passengers on a platform was very dangerous. Also, the fact that they couldn't pull additional carriages, again due to the giant propeller on the back, and the fact that it was just very difficult to reverse. And also the fact that the 100-year-old tracks weren't really ready for a high-speed train meant that this never went into production and actually there was never more than one built, which I think was a real shame.

It was dismantled in 1939 for the war effort. And that was the last we ever saw of it. But I think this is a really cool, an interesting thing. I assume you were going to say worth an episode because I agree. Anyway, I love this fact, even though it was cut off just as so many limbs would have been cut off had this motive. of transportation gone into fashion. Mm-hmm. I just love the absurdity of a giant metal propeller next to a train platform.

Yeah. It's a bad idea. I don't know about that. Wow. Humans. We have some bad ideas. Mm-hmm. And we love to go fast.

All right. Those are all of our weirdest things for today. I hope you guys like that as much as we did. I hope you loved calling in. I hope if you didn't, you feel like you really missed out and you should Colin next time. Like I said, feel free to drop us weird facts anytime you want by voice message. We can definitely look into them for you and we'll totally give you a shout out on the show if we use them. And who knows, maybe we'll do another episode like this sometime. Let us know if you liked it,

maybe by voice message. Maybe by leaving us a positive review on Apple. A couple more things to note. Don't forget to buy tickets to our live show at Caviot in New York City on June 14th because we would love it if you were there. Everyone, including and especially the people who sent in voice messages today, though I realize there may be geographic constraints. That's it for now, but we will be back on May 29th with a very special guest host. So trust me, you're going to want to tune in. Keep an eye on your feeds. We love you so much. See you soon. 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.

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