The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Hockey English, Lasagna Power, How to Find the Light

Episode Date: February 12, 2025

Paleontologist and writer Riley Black joins the show to talk about a plant mystery. Plus, Amanda talks about turning your leftover lasagna into a power source, and Rachel discusses Letterkenny and "hockey English." 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  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by 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 Thanks to our Sponsors! Get started today at https://chime.com/WEIRDEST Chime. Feels like Progress. Get an additional 20% OFF the @honeylove Holiday sale by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

That's code weirdest for 20% off. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this shelf will get a $75 sponsor. job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. At first, I didn't think it was real.

I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free. The truth is our scene. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 N. The X-Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. At popular science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 editor. of popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Amanda Reed. And I'm Riley. Riley, welcome to the show. So great to have you on. Yes, finally on. So glad to be here. Yes, I have been trying to snag you for agents. So I'm glad that the stars aligned. For listeners who aren't familiar with your work, would you tell them a

little bit about the awesome stuff you make? Sure. I'm the author of The Last Days of the Dinosaurs and when the Earth was green in addition to about a dozen other paleobos. I regularly write for Smithsonian National Geographic Slate and other science publications like that. You've probably heard me on Science Friday or seeing me on Nova. I mostly run around chasing and talking about dinosaurs for most of my career. Amazing. And you have a new book coming out, right? That's right. Yes.

When the Earth was Green is a book all about the interrelationship of fossil plants and animals. And that comes out on February 25th. And I'm really proud of this one. Amazing. Well, and this is the first time I've been. been able to get you on the show, but long-time listeners might remember, I just realized I did a fact a few years ago pulled from your book all about bones talking about the bone market on Instagram. So folks, if you have not read Riley's work yet, definitely need to check it out.

You had me at Bone Market. I mean, thankfully not as much of a thing as it used to be, but it used to be so bizarre that it's like, scrolling to do. And they're like, oh, this is someone selling somebody else's skull. I do not know where it came from, how it got it, where it's going. This doesn't seem to do. There's definitely no ethic, nothing ethically wrong going on here. Nothing to worry about. Well, excited to talk about some weird stuff with y'all today.

So let's get right into it. On the weirdest thing I'm in this week, we start by offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, shopping for bones, et cetera. 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 in a chill, non-competitive fashion where all the girlies always win, which is how the world should be. Amanda, what's your tease? My tease is, oops, accidental battery. Cool. If I had a nickel.

My tease is, do hockey players sound more Canadian? than other Canadian people? Maybe. Incredible. Riley, what's your tease? I'm just going to keep it simple. Go towards the light. I'm going to keep it a little bit cryptic. Yeah.

Oh, that is great. I hate when guests have really good teases because I never make guests go first. But Amanda, you also had a somewhat cryptic tease. So take us away. Okay. So have you ever stored leftovers in like a steel pan with aluminum foil on top? And then you unsheath the foil and you're like, what is this weird black stuff on top of my leftovers? Congratulations.

You've made a lasagna cell. And it's called a lasagna cell because typically it happens with lasagna. So it like really is. Like, that's great. I've heard the term lasagna, Sal. I couldn't tell, you know, gun to my head. I couldn't tell you exactly what it is you're about to tell us about. But I've heard it and definitely had no idea it was named in reference to actual lasagna.

I was ready to the Garfield joke. Exactly. And he is my favorite cat of, cat of your, cat of all history, other than my own cat junk junk. So it happens when lasagna or any other sort of like salty, moist food is stored in a steel. baking pan that's covered in aluminum foil. And afterwards, like after a few hours, the foil develops small holes where it touches the lasagna or the food surface. And usually it's the melted cheese on top. It becomes covered in small spots of corroded aluminum. Mmm, delicious. So I've seen it in my research on this for today.

Someone said it happened to their enchiladas. It happened to my pork and sauerkraut, but only because I think the vinegar in the sauerkraut just like kind of chomped through the aluminum. I don't think actual any battery nonsense was happening, but just still very interesting. So among other things, battery cells contain a cathode and anode and an electrolyte. So in this case, the salty food, aka the lasagna,

is the electrolyte, the aluminum foil is the anode, and the steel pan is the cathode. If the aluminum foil touches the lasagna in small areas, it's the, so this is an example of galvanic corrosion. So the galvanic corrosion can happen really, really fast if only like a small part of the foil is touching the aluminum. And it's possible for, as a mentioned before, if you're like, hmm, is this actual lasagna cell activity or did I just store a very acidic thing? In steel, salt, vinegar, and other acidic compounds can cause the foil to disintegrate. So it's a little fun game, regardless, the product of either of these reactions. So whether it's something acidic eating the foil or the lasagna cell itself is aluminum salt.

It doesn't harm the food, but you might not like the flavor or color that, you know, the affected area treated with the aluminum salt may produce. You know, not everyone is like, hmm, yes, I love black spots on my food. It's my favorite part of food. How much can I power with my lasagna battery? Probably not that much. But like, listen, if you get enough lasagna, like mathematically, technically you could. It's like all those cartoons of the kid was like,

we'll make a potato battery and then they make like a million of them to power like the DeLorean or whatever. Exactly. Exactly. But this time it's Garfield approved. I like it. I mean, it feels like a good setup for like your brain cheese. It's like, what do vinegar and cheese have in common?

What are you talking about? Calvana crogent. And a lasagna cell, speaking, of it's not even the most famous examples of galvanic corrosion, which for those at home who are like, I don't feel like Googling that phrase. Galvanic corrosion happens when metals corrode in the presence of an electrolyte. The other example is the Statue of Liberty. I was going to say, I know that girl has been through some galvanic corrosion.

I know. That gorgeous patina. Sounds like what happens to a cyber truck when you drive it off the lot. It's like, oh, yeah, I'll go vanically corroborate. Yeah, exactly. I'm actually, well, by the time this airs, it will already have happened. But I'm going to dress up as the Statue of Liberty for an event I'm going to. It makes a lot more sense than you might think.

It's for I'm going to the live show for Dimension 20. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I'm going. Oh, I think one of my friends is going to that show. Yeah, it's going to be so fun. I mean, they sold out Madison Square Garden for people to watch them play D&D, which is incredible. That's crazy. But it's their riffing off of the campaign they did that's based in like a magical version of New York City called the Unsleeping City.

And I realized I was like, I have a diaphidus green dress. I'm just going to like spray paint my hair and get a foam tiara. You have a talking point now. Someone says like, oh, I like your outfit. It's like, thank you. It's the galvanic corrosion. Yeah, exactly. Thank you.

It's science, baby. It's a lasagna cell. Yeah. I should just go as a lasagna cell. Exactly. New Halloween costume just dropped. I hate gay Halloween. What do you mean? You're a lasagna cell. You get to like sexy lasagna cell from spirit Halloween or something. Right. I love it. Amanda, another incredible factoid, as always. And another great food-related factoid. First ginger ale, now lasagna. Two things I love. All right, we're going to take a quick break and 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? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit, and, you know, I definitely miss it a little bit. But maybe you can have a weed gummy, and you can get one at mood.com. So the reason that different cannabis grains can make you feel different ways isn't just about the THC. It seems like it's also based on other components called terpenes.

Turpines influence how a product tastes and smells, and it seems like they can also impact the way you feel. Mood partnered with dozens of small American farms to custom cultivate flour with specific turpine profiles designed for specific moods. So you can choose your cannabis gummy, edible, flour, or pre-roll based on how you want to feel. Just go to mood.com and click Shop by Mood. And yes, it is now 100% federally legal to have really great bud shipped right to your door. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code weirdest.

I'm eyeing Mood.com's Delta 9-THC buttercream carmals because in addition to not, not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also mellows me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has delta 9 THC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goal. because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for citizens back. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host in style with the fridge serving craft ice, mini craft ice, cube ice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid.

14th through June 3rd, U.S. only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. The C store online for details. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to get into my fact, which, as I said, is all about hockey players and Canadianisms. I, do either of you, are other of you, hockey fans? A little bit. I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so we have the Pittsburgh Penguins, Stanley Cup Champions, 2017.

Yehah. So there is a big hockey culture in western Pennsylvania. So by proxy, I am just very familiar with hockey. My older sister's husband also works for a farm team for the capitals. So I'm like, actually, yes, I am way more involved in hockey than I thought. Yeah, absolutely. Unfortunately, I don't know all that much about it. I went to a couple Devils games as a kid.

And I remember friends having hockey NES games. But I mostly remember the point was to try and get the players to fight. I'm like on sub one-on-one levels for hockey, but I know what it is. Yeah, that's about my level of hockey. I did recently, I did recently like see it on at a bar and was like, ooh, I haven't tried watching ice hockey since I got into roller derby. And I feel like maybe I was like, those men can skate. Maybe I'm interested.

So we'll circle back in like a year. Maybe I'll be watching hockey by then. But yeah, I grew up in devil's territory, but people were much more interested in football so it didn't come up much and gritty didn't exist yet so it was not quite the national conversation that it is now though fun fact i did once do a martial arts demonstration on the ice at a boardwalk bullies game in atlantic city nice and similar to that scene in parks and rec they did not give us a full carpet walkway to the middle of the ice where they put carpet down we had to walk barefoot across the ice to the carpet to do our martial arts demonstration,

which was just a really formative experience for me. And then meanwhile, Wully the bully, the boardwalk bully's mascot, kept like goofing around with us. And I was like, I am barefoot and you are a man in a giant mascot head wearing blades on your feet. So actually, I don't actually stay away. But anyway, hockey. It exists. I also really like the show Letterkenny and the spin-off Shoresy.

So when I saw this study come out, that was the first thing I thought of. There's a lot of people talking in very exaggerated Canadian accents and playing a lot of hockey on those shows. And so, yeah, a few months ago, a University of Rochester linguist named Andrew Bray, I think this was at a professional meeting that he, like, presented this research. But basically, back when he was a master's student, he was interested in hockey. lingo. He had played some hockey, I think, as a college student and was interested and knew a lot of hockey players. And he was, you know, as a linguist, really interested in how their various lingo had developed things like calling a puck a biscuit. And it's, I would also, I mean,

I feel like it's probably pretty straightforward, but, you know, we don't know until we know. So he was interested in those questions. And apparently at some point, someone said to him, are you going to study why all the American hockey players sound like fake Canadians? And he was like, huh, maybe I am. Beautiful. And then it turns out he did. So his research is sort of addressing what it turns out, once he started thinking about it and talking about it with other people, is like kind of accepted as like a universal

truth that like American hockey players sound vaguely Canadian. First he had to figure out like, what do we mean when they say they found vaguely Canadian? what makes them sound Canadian? What makes it sound fake? You know, how much is this actually happening? And so he went out and actually did that. He interviewed a bunch of hockey players from a few different teams. He actually noted that the fact that he had a background in hockey was really beneficial because he was able to just sort of hit record and get these conversations going with them and get them to like talk about hockey as much as possible for 20 minutes without saying to them, I am studying how hockey changes the way you talk.

Because obviously if you ask someone that question, they might be thinking too much about how they talk and talk differently. Instead, he could be like, I'm a linguist doing this study. By the way, I used to play hockey. I see you're on this team. Tell me about that. So he got all these recordings to work through and started looking at, of course, how they said their vowels.

Because even if you don't really know anything about linguists, linguistics or Canadian English, you got to know that it's about the vowels. More like a boot the vowels. Yay. Yeah. I was trying to work out like what fakely Canadian is, right? Is that like someone talking about like all dressed chips? Like, and I like that we're focusing on vowels.

Speaking of Letter Kitty, there is a fantastic episode that is all about chip flavors. And it's basically a black box play of the town talking about chip flavors. It's some of the best television I've ever seen of my life. I highly recommend that being the first episode you watch and then being like, what are these people up to? What's their story? Then you can go back to the beginning. But the chip episode speaks for itself.

It stands on its own. So yeah, I'm not getting it into all the different ways that vowels are different in Canadian English, but he was looking at a few of them. And he thought maybe some of these American players might be using these vowel variations, but maybe like to different degrees because they hadn't actually grown up using them. And that might be why it sounded kind of off to people. And he did find some evidence that some U.S. hockey players were, in one case, he said they were using something called monophtongle pronunciation, minimal tongue movement, ironically.

As I would never try to say monophtongle with minimal tongue movement. And that is what you would expect in, you know, Midwestern English or Canadian English, not something you see in most of the rest of the U.S. And basically, U.S. hockey players were coming close, but not quite sort of hitting the benchmark. That would make you say like, this is Canadian English pronunciation. Same with like vowel sounds like boat. So their pronunciations were just like not quite right for other American English dialects, but also not quite Canadian, which answers the question of like, why do they sound like fake Canadians?

then there's like, why do they sound Canadian at all? Yeah. And the answer to that is probably pretty simple. I mean, I'm not going to say there's no way to test this, but he didn't test this. But his hypothesis is that what we're seeing is sort of like a linguistic persona, like people talking in a way that feels appropriate for like the social context and in group that they want to be in. Yeah. I was like mirroring in some way where like you're around folks who are. use certain expressions and you start to pick it up.

Like how many people start to never say y'all unless they're around someone who says y'all a lot. Exactly. Yeah. Well, and you know, hockey has such a Canadian identity. And even beyond that, like a very like northern U.S. state identity. So even though it has now become a certainly national and even international sport, there's still an association with those parts of the U.S. when we talk about hockey. and there's still, you know, to some extent, a majority of players coming from those parts of the U.S. and Canada,

if only because there's more infrastructure to get kids into hockey early. So, yeah, the idea is that, like, hockey slang terms might be sort of preferentially pronounced in sort of Canadian English, and that then just that sort of diffuses into other words that they're using. And again, just like when you're in this group that it has like a Canadian vibe and, you know, maybe the coaches are Canadian. It's just sort of like seeped into being part of the culture of the sport beyond being specific to Canada. But it turns out he is definitely not the only person studying this question. I found a few different research papers on it. What in particular I want to talk about because I thought it was really interesting by Judy Dalinges.

Sorry if that is not how you pronounce your name at Western University. It was this small survey of Ontarians pretty recently asking how Ontarians feel about the idea of hockey English as opposed to Canadian English. Interesting. Yeah. The author of this paper said that it's just kind of common knowledge that people will refer to hockey English as being this sort of dialect. And in her survey of Ontarians, it was a small study, just a few hundred people, but I think this is really interesting. So I wanted to talk about it anyway. 67% said that hockey English was a thing distinct from Canadian English.

Not that it's its own whole dialect, but being like, yeah, I know what hockey English is. I know what people are saying when they say something is in hockey English. Some said it was a more exaggerated, quote, more Canadian form of Canadian English. What's interesting is that when the survey asked what distinguished it from Canadian English, most people just listed hockey slang words and phrases. So the example she included were sauce that, tune him up, and Selly. I've heard Selly on Letter Kenny a lot. The other two can't say I have.

But again, I'm not very into hockey. Or they said they gave sort of like vibe-based responses where they were like, Canadian hockey is more rural, it's uneducated. Yeah, unfortunate, unfortunate, but apparently very strong stereotype. But when they were asked to guess whether a voice clip came from a hockey player or a non-hockey player, and then to explain why, that was when they started citing the actual pronunciation, and it was always about the vowels. And some respondents even said specifically that hockey English was not exclusive to hockey player.

that it was a thing that came up whenever people talked about hockey or even like a broader social phenomenon that they couldn't really pinpoint the boundaries of, but they knew it was different from standard Canadian English. One thing that was really interesting to me is that the speaker most frequently identified as a hockey player was a male speaker who was not, in fact, a hockey player. Almost 80% of people thought he was. And then the actual male hockey player only got clocked about a third of the time. And meanwhile, less than 10% of the respondents realized that the female hockey player was a hockey player, even though most people when asked said that women also were guilty of using hockey English.

But when the clip featured the female hockey player saying the word sports, about half of the people guessed correctly. So, it seems like a lot of this, even if it's not exclusive to hockey players talking about hockey, a lot of the actual cues people are looking for are probably those hockey. slang words. And then, yeah, it really did color how people received the speaker. Basically, when people thought they were listening to a hockey player, they were more likely to say that they didn't seem particularly well educated or even seemed undereducated. When they said someone wasn't a hockey player, they were more likely to say they were very educated. And sort of similarly, when they thought they were listening to a hockey player, they were more likely to say, yes, this person sounds very Canadian.

It's kind of amazing just how much this has to do with like context and perception, right? Like how someone should sound and in what context. And it makes me think of, this is kind of a tangent to what you were mentioning, but like how often our own voices change, probably contextually. And we don't even know. It's like, I just sound like what I sound like. It's like, no, if you were listening, you'd hear all the different tonalities. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, there's somebody from a place with a regional accent that definitely gets read as uneducated, rural, and weird. It pops up in weird places and most of the time it's not there at all. And then sometimes I'll be like recording voiceover and I'll be like, oh, no. I sound like I'm putting in an order at the wah-wah. I know. I feel like, especially here in Utah, so I grew up and spent, you know, 20. years in New Jersey. I didn't come out with like a strong New Jersey accent, but Utah drivers are the worst. And when they're driving badly, like the inner New Jersey comes out, not just like in tone,

but in like what I say, like I normally don't call people a fucking fuck like, you know, in my day to day, of course. But the driving around here will just like make that like Jersey Shore accent just like pop out. And it reinforces off because it works. It's like they're not ready for it. Yeah, nobody, nobody's ever ready for that accent. Not at all. It also reminds me of Madonna when everyone was like, why is Madonna suddenly having a British accent? And it's like, well,

I mean, she married, she married a Brit. And I think a lot of people, Diana Agrin of Glee of Glee fame also I think married to Brit and spend some time in London. And I guess she was recently interviewed for something and people were like, she's Madonnaing. And it's

like, surprise, when you spend enough time in a place with people of like a similar dialect, you sort of like start picking up on those cues and mimic it. Yeah, it's really interesting to me, like who gets mocked for doing that and what dialect they're switching to or from because I think it's so natural for people's speech to change a little bit depending on where they're living and who they're talking to all the time. But we really love making fun of American people who suddenly sound British. That's true. Getting back to the hockey thing, it's really interesting how so much of what the people in the survey are saying circles back to the idea that people who are talking about hockey, playing hockey are uneducated and rural.

Apparently there's research showing that even among hockey players, there's the pervasive stereotype that hockey players aren't intellectual. And I mean, it's fine if you don't want to be intellectual. But I bet there are many hockey players who are intellectual. And there's also a lot of media that conveys hockey as being like a small town thing, a rural thing. But that's like not really true anymore. There's been a lot of influx of players from urban centers. And of course, like hockey is a huge sport. But, you know, we still have these preconceptions about hockey players.

And it extends to how we think they talk, whether or not that is actually a thing that's specific to hockey players or just, sort of a vague sense of super-Canadianness that Ontarians can't put their finger on. It's almost like how close can you get to Canada or a Canadian before you start to like be associated with the attributes. Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, this is far from the only research on hockey English and how hockey players talk and how Canadian it is. I'm really looking forward to seeing more and also watching more Shorzie.

and thinking about that. I did also learn while putting this together that the origins of hockey are like controversial isn't the right word, but like very murky because there are so many stick-in-ball games played through history. Like basically, like so many disparate cultures and civilizations had stick-in-ball games, some of which maybe were sometimes played on ice. So we do know that indigenous people in Nova Scotia were playing a stick and ball game probably on ice as early as like the 1600s. There's a lot of controversy over whether that means that hockey, as we know it now, has its origins there because again, like also on the other side of the planet, people were knocking things around with sticks. But I guess that just means that like hockey is actually like a deeply universal sport.

Yeah, it's kind of like the origin of like dumplings, right? Like, okay, we got brogis over here in samoses and everything. Like, maybe we just really like wrapping proteins in doll. As we should. As we should. And yeah, it seems like humans are just, when there's nothing to do, humans are pro to picking up sticks and rocks and being like, what can we do here?

What can we do with this? And isn't that beautiful? We're going to take one more break and then be back with one more fact. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the 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. day. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play

with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. slash college PC. Okay, we're back. And Riley, you want us to go towards the light. I'm down,

but tell me more. Well, what I picked is something I had to actually go back and rewrite some of my book to include this. It was just like so cool. It's like under the wire. I have a couple of days left, but like this has to go in there because it's something that's so basic that I think we just assume scientists know, right? So I remember being preschool and, you know, you get your little seedling and a little thing of dirt, and you grow a seed, and you learn how to grow stuff. And there's always that point where it's like, well, plants are phototropic.

They've been towards the light. And that was like the first nerd word, I think I really got enthusiastic. Like phototropism, it's just, it's a satisfying one to say, I like it. It's like, that does something cool. What is it? But for, you know,

basically for as long as we've been studying plants, we don't really know why plants do that. We know that they do. We know that, you know, given that, plants require sunlight. They require, you know, generally require sunlight, require that energy to, you know, undergo photosynthesis, you know, the chloroplasts, you know, in their cells, become stimulated when they had sunlight. But never really seemed to explain why a living thing would bend towards sunlight. We didn't have the mechanism,

basically, in other words. And then 2023, you got a science paper that basically came out of an accident. And this is like one of my favorite kind of science stories where somebody said, Like, that's really weird. And then they follow it, right? So this particular lab was studying genetics in basically a brassica, like a kind of crest that's very commonly used. It's like, you know, that little roundworm is like that equivalent but for plants in these genetic studies. And the researchers realized that some of these plants had a mutation to this little like protein transporter thing, well, ABCG5. And the plants that had this particular mutation, they weren't.

following the sunlight as they were growing. Like as seedlings, like, they could not track where the light source was coming from, and they weren't photosynthesizing right. So they were just like, that's kind of weird. Like, why would this particular mutation for like a transport protein do this? And what they realized was that it was affecting air spaces within the plant. And basically the plant that did not have this mutation had air spaces as normal, was able to bend towards the light and said, huh, that's kind of weird.

And they realized that when, sunlight's hitting the plant. It's hanging the green part of the plant. It then goes through that outer part of the salt wall. And it hits this air pocket and it's scattered. The light refracts. And it creates basically a gradient. So the plants can tell where the light is stronger versus not. So if they don't have these air spaces, the light doesn't scatter. It doesn't create this gradient. And there's no way for them to detect it. So basically plants rely on, at least so far as the species goes, they still have plenty more work to do. But it's these air spaces that basically interact with the sunlight in such a way that they can tell where it's coming from.

And then everything starts to bend in that direction. So I wish we had more about how exactly like this whole like behavior basically happens. It's what my bane is a science journalist. So when we find out one thing that's really cool. And it's like, can you explain the whole thing? It's like, no, because we don't know yet. Yeah. But we at least know that these these air spaces are critical for this basic thing that plant.

do. And I just love that, like, everybody knows us. It's like this common bit of knowledge, but until 2023, we had no idea how they did it. Wow. That's really cool. And it's also something fun to see in practice. In my living room, we have a bunch of plants. And I forget what kind of plant it is. I apologize to the plant. People who are like, here is my. I thought you were just apologizing to the plant, full stop. No, but before this plant, it like wasn't right against a window and it was kind of like floppy, but now it's within two feet of a window. And all of its little leaves just like flop towards the windowsill.

And I'm like, I love this for you. You are just, you're just like, here is the light. Here is my happy place. Yeah. And they can be so sensitive to her, right? Just like a little bit too much or too little. The ones that get me are like, I love plants that break the rule, right? He's like, oh, plants photosynthesize.

Well, it turns out some don't. One of my favorite is a ghost pipe. So you can find it in eastern forests, and it's pale. It's basically this pale stock with a downward-pointing, like, bell-type flower on it. And it gets its food with basically a relationship with fungus that grows on tree roots. And it doesn't photosynthesize at all. Like, it doesn't even have the cells really to do it. It's found this extra step way of surviving.

And I wrote about that in when the Earth was green, partially because in the Ice Age chapter, it was a neat way to talk about glacial retreat and how ecosystems change. Because we talk about the Ice Age, just like everything's covered in ice, which wasn't, but like it's this monolith, right?

Just like the ice came in on a Tuesday and a million years later it was gone. But there are all these glacial advances in retreats. And you can follow basically the genetic legacy of these ghosts. pipe plants as they found these like southern refuges. Basically they like would just keep being pushed further

down by the ice sheets and when the ice sheets receded they came back up. So you can trace basically the waxing and waning of the glaciers. These genetics are these plants that don't photosynthesize. I love ghost pipes. So like little vampire plants. Yes. Yeah. Any like like epiphytes

in general like that grows on another plant and I just like how did you wind up doing this? There has to be some kind of backstory. You smart cookie You smart What is it? Resourceful little cookie Yeah

I mean your book is on such a fascinating topic What were some other like little tidbits that You can't get out of your head? Catnip one of them partially because my life is largely run By the cats that we have Schedule wise I can hear one of them Meowing outside the door As I speak

Do not like closed doors at all I did not know that But catnip is really quite ancient. It's, you know, at least 20 million years old as a plant. And that evolved basically its like active ability in terms of like, you know, the compounds within it that drive off mosquitoes and attract cats at least twice. Oh, wow. So so much stuff in evolution, like we usually say, okay, like if we look at a couple of different organisms and they all share the same trait in common, we usually assume that must have been present in the common ancestor. It's like the simplest explanation evolved long, long ago, and it was retained.

But there's also a phenomenon called homoplasy where you get basic convergence. You have organisms evolving the same thing over and over. And without like filling in that backstory, you would never find it. And this is definitely one of those cases. So I wrote a whole chapter basically around this, as plants do all kinds of interesting and fun things for brains and behaviors. As anybody in a marijuana legal state knows. And catnip felt like a great way to talk about because like if this is,

accurate. The compound within it, it interacts with a very, very ancient, if I'm remembering this correctly, a very, very ancient gene, you know, very, very concerned. So way back when like everything wasn't invertebrate, like long before bones, everything's still living in the ocean, there's this certain receptor involved to a certain genetic signal that basically says, like, this is a noxious thing, you should move away from it. It does very basic biological stuff. And the compound and catnip basically affects that for insects. It's really good, as a mosquito repellent, basically. But the same thing in cat brains, for whatever reason, you know, makes them turn to total goofballs and play and try and fight each other and everything

else. And so if catnip is, you know, 20 million years old or so, there were saber-toothed cats around them. This is around the same time that, you know, we're getting our true cats and dogs. And it was just too good to resist imagining saber cats, like rolling around in this stuff, whether it actually happened or not, I don't really know, but it was just like too good to leave out. Like this incredibly familiar thing has this ancient legacy that probably affected prehistoric critters. Wow. Cute.

I love imagining a big cat just roll in the nip. Another one of my favorites had to do with a fossil bat from New Zealand that's about 14 million years old or so. that's related to bats that still live there. New Zealand's kind of fun because since it's, you know, a couple of islands, you get evolutionary weirdness that you don't normally get elsewhere, right? So, look, there are bats there living today that mostly walk on the ground. And this fossil bat was related to one of these sorts, and they also pollinate. So to highlight pollination, I thought about, you know,

how this particular prehistoric bat would have pollinated this ancient flower. But we know that if a certain flower disappears, if it goes, distinct. You know, the relationship between pollinator and flour can be so close that they become anatomically extremely well adapted to each other, right? There's a, I forget the exact name, but that was the, one of the

famous things that we always like asked R went up about, even though he's been dead for so long. He guessed that there's going to be a moth that matched this flower. And it is a good example where it's like you have like a particular kind of sphinx moth as, you know, basically proboscis is so long to match a very specific kind

of flower. But the dark side to is you get basically so evolutionarily codependent for lack of a better term, that if one of them goes extinct, they're kind of left hanging and something else has to do it. And we see this on some of these places where you have this wonderful biodiversity. But if one species starts to disappear, in this case, some of the flowers, like the bats have to basically switch to something else or go extinct. So these beautiful examples of very precise adaptation, but there's always kind of a cost or a catch-tip. that. Yeah, totally. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Riley. This has been great. And Amanda, great as always to have you. Riley, would you remind our listeners what some of your books are called, where they can find you? Yes. So my most recent book that's already out is the last days of the

dinosaurs, and that's in physical e-book or audiobook. You can find that basically anywhere. You find books. And the new one, when the Earth was green, plants, animals, and evolution's greatest romance, That comes out in February 25th, and they'll also be in physical ebook and audio, basically everywhere. I'm Blue Sky. I'm resting dino face at bluesky.com. And that's where I post most of my stuff. Otherwise, I write articles all over the place. Smithsonian and National Geographic are some of my most regular clients. But generally, if you see a new thing about dinosaurs, like the byline's probably mine.

Nice. Well, thanks again for coming on. shared some weird facts with us. Oh, this is so much fun. Love talking about Canadian accents and weird plant stuff and lasagna cells. I will have to look out for them. We're going to, that's going to have to be like the next car innovation. It's just like a bunch of lasagna in the trunk with some wires hooked up to the engine.

Absolutely. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. There's a new way to sweet green. Meat, wraps, handheld, hearty, and made for life on the moon. With bold, chef-crafted flavors, fresh ingredients, and over 40 grams of protein, they're built to satisfy without slowing you down.

wraps today in the app or at order.sweetgreen.com, available at all participating locations. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop. So it's always easy to save big every day with savings and rewards. Ralph's, SoCal for over 150 years. Savings may vary by state. Fuel restrictions apply.

C-Sight for details.