The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Human Refrigerators, Poop Knives, Whacky Tongues

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. 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.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. 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 Lauren Young. Lauren, welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be making my very first appearance. Listeners, Lauren is making her weirdest thing debut. She is our newest associate editor at Popular Science. And you're going to be hearing her voice not just on weirdest thing, but also on our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything. And that's coming back pretty soon. So if you are not subscribed yet, search for Ask Us Anything and add it to your feed and definitely catch up on seasons one and two because they were awesome and feature lots of friendly, familiar

voices from Weirdest Thing. 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 we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, 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 bit. little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, why don't we start with your tease? Okay.

Well, today I am going to talk about the legend and the science of the frozen poop knife. The man, the myth, the legend, the frozen poop knife. I mean, you know, I have quite a reputation well earned for being a poop science journalist. list. And I have to say, I don't know what this poop knife is. I have a lot of questions. There's layers. There's a lot going on with the poop knife. Just wait. Okay. Okay. All right, Lauren, what's your tease? Yeah. So I'm going to talk about woodpeckers, but not how they peck wood. I'm talking about how they have really long tongues. So we're ready for that. Why does that creep me out a little? We'll find out more, I guess, in a bit.

We'll unpack that later. Okay, so my fact is about how the first international vaccine campaign in history used orphans as human refrigerators. That sounds sad. Yeah, you know, this is a complicated one. There were several points in the course of reporting the story where I thought I had zeroed in on how it was going to me feel. And then it would take another turn. It's not the happiest thing I learned this week.

That's for sure. But it is one of the most ethically complicated. Should we start with that? I feel like it has the potential to be the biggest bummer. So how do we get it out of the way? Let's do it. Excellent. So I should start by saying that this fact

comes from the running email thread of weird facts that my husband Oliver sends to me for consideration for the show. I believe the subject line is just a weird stuff. So you can all thank Oliver for ruining your day. So there are stories that you expect to be uncontroversially positive and stories that you expect to be irredeemably negative.

The Balmiss Expedition really defies that kind of black and white categorization. On the one hand, it's the tale of the full. first international effort to get vaccines into arms all over the world. It's an instance of a monarch choosing to put resources toward improving public health and eradicating a horrific disease. On the other hand, it involves young orphans, toddlers in some cases, being crowded onto ships and sent around the world to serve as human incubators. So my research for this, I started out with a couple of articles that were like very top level and kind of glossed. over the very obvious in retrospect human rights travesties that occurred, which is something

you get very used to when you research the history of medicine. I just wrote a book about the history of sex and, oh boy, where there are a lot of secondary sources from appallingly not that long ago that just breezed right over human rights exploitation. And I thought this was one of the same. things were like, the deeper I dug, the more obviously evil the people in power were going to be. And I am not going to say that the people who chose how to conduct this expedition made good choices or were entirely altruistic. They definitely didn't and they definitely were not. But the villains weren't quite who I expected.

And it's a very, it's a complicated story. I'm not going to tell you how to feel about it. But I think it's such an important story in the history of public health and medicine that so few people know about and many people who do, like really do not know the more gnarly upsetting details. And I would like more people to know about them. I'm really selling this. It's going to be super fun. I'm so sorry. I'm just here to report the facts, ma'am. To understand the story, we need to talk.

little bit about smallpox. Historians have found evidence of smallpox outbreaks going back as far as 1500 BC in India, and it's not that Egyptian traders brought it there sometime before. But it's difficult to be certain whether reports from that far back were actually referring to smallpox or some other disease. Just to plug my book again, it's called Been There Done That, A Rousing History of Sex. It comes out in May, and you can pre-order it now. One of the things that I grappled with in my chapter about sexually transmitted infections is that there was this whole period of history where, you know, you couldn't really tell if the oozing somebody was talking about was gonorrhea or syphilis or both or something else. You know, symptoms evolve over time the way people write about

symptoms evolves over time. So a little tricky. But we do know that after popping up several times in Asia and Europe, the disease spread rampantly during the medieval crusades. And then smallpox spread throughout most of the world due to colonization. Again, colonization, bad for many reasons, including infectious disease transmission. So by the 1700s, smallpox was a horrific fact of life. I read one estimate that it killed more than one in 10 Swedish infants around that time, and an estimated 400,000 people throughout Europe each year. But things were even worse in the Americas, which had only been exposed to smallpox by Spanish invaders starting in the 1500s. The lack of immunity there is thought to have contributed to the downfall of the Incas and the Aztecs,

as the diseases were almost always fatal to indigenous people in the Americas. So jumping back to the late 1700s, enter King Charles IV of Spain. He's someone who's lost several family members to smallpox and seen several of the survivors scarred significantly by virulation. I talked about virulation on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, and I talked about If you're a fan of the definitely not historically accurate but very fun show The Great on Hulu, you are also familiar with it from there. It's the practice of purposefully infecting people with smallpox using scabs or pus from

someone who's had it that have been treated in some way to make them less potent. Sometimes they would be like steamed or they would just be kind of like old and dried out. The idea was that if you were exposed to smallpox by way of these like gnarly old scabs or pus, it would most likely be a weaker form of the illness than if you got the viral load of being exposed by someone in your household during an outbreak. And that was true. Like it did save a lot of lives, but it was at the end of the day deliberately infecting people with smallpox. So you could get a deadly case of smallpox from virulation if you were unlucky. and even if you survived, you would often have enough of the kind of characteristic puschules

that you would be left with some pretty intense scarring. That changed in the 1790s when Edward Jenner tested pus from cowpox blisters as a less dangerous form of inoculation. Like it sounds, cowpox is related to smallpox, but it affects primarily cows. He had noticed that dairy maids would get blisters on their hands from milking cows with cowpox and then they wouldn't seem to get smallpox. I say he had noticed actually, like, several people were talking about this at the same time, and he was the one who was kind of first out the gate with harnessing that knowledge,

but several people were typing, shall we say. He figured out that you could use material from cowpox blisters as a less dangerous form of inoculation, thereby inventing vaccines as we now know them. He tested it in 1796 on his gardener's son, which is a little bit of, little bit of foreshadowing for how the rest of this story is going to go. God, I think the milkmaids. Yeah, exactly. I don't think we talk enough about the milk maids.

Thank God for them. Also, most words don't gross me out, but pus just is a gnarly word. Yes, it is a gnarly word. I agree. So that was 1796. And then in 1803, King Charles announces his intention to provide free vaccination to the masses in the Spanish colonies and to leave each region with the resources and knowledge necessary to continue their own vaccination programs in the future. Of course, altruism aside,

it's important to note that he was standing to lose a lot of money. Not only were the indigenous populations in the Americas are really susceptible to smallpox, but now you're starting to have these generations of Spanish colonial residents. who have never lived in Spain don't grow up surrounded by Spanish germs. And they are also really susceptible to smallpox. So between those two groups, a huge portion of the colonies, both enslaved and paid and indentured, etc., workforces are imperiled. But even with all those caveats, this is considered like a huge humanitarian undertaking.

people are like, my goodness, the cost, the expense. And royal physician Francisco Javier de Balmess, who had spent some time in Mexico researching botany folk medicine, was chosen to lead the charge. It was possibly even his idea in the first place, but this story has been really, you know, elevated as part of this king's legacy. So that possibility has been quite swept under the rug. But there was a hitch. The pus or fluids that were necessary for the inoculations, it could stay viable on a piece of cloth or press between glass and sealed with wax for a journey of a few days.

But they had to get across the whole freaking Atlantic Ocean. So there was the question of how they were going to be able to arrive in the Americas with. a viable cowpox. That sounds so bad. That seems like a problem waiting to happen. So there was actually a suggestion at some point about like just bringing a bunch of cows on board and like slowly giving them cowpox one by one in the hopes that there would just be like a viable cow left at the end with smallpox. Oh my God. Yes, there were there were several problems with that.

You know, the weight, the poop, the potentially angry. cattle. So they tabled that idea. And then they landed on a little twist on that same concept, which was to use humans to store the cowpox in transit. The idea was that you would infect someone with cowpox and then wait until like the very last second while they still had like a raised pustule, but like just before it healed to maximize their their use as a human refrigerator. And then you would use that pestrel to infect another person. And you would keep that chain going to keep the cowpox alive so that you still had a reliable source by the time you arrived in the new world. And you could start using it to inoculate people.

But for a few reasons, I think mainly because smallpox was so rampant that it was pretty hard to actually find a living adult who hadn't had it at some point or been through your relationship. which would have kept them from catching cowpox in most cases, I think. They decided they would bring 22 orphans, like quite small children, which also makes me suspect that maybe they also just wanted people who would take up less space. I don't know. But that's what they decided. They went with 22 Spanish orphans, boys between the age of three and nine, and their caretaker, Isabel Zendaya I Gomez.

So, yeah, the way this worked was that they would inoculate two boys. They would give them cowpox and they would wait until that very last second and then use them to infect another two boys. You needed an air and a spare. And it turned out to be very good that they did it that way because apparently by the time they arrived, there was just one single postule left and it was like about to heal. I don't know what happened to the other kid in that pair. Maybe it healed too quickly.

I know that nobody died on the trip, so don't worry about that. And because this voyage, this initial voyage was successful, by the time the expedition finished, some 300,000 people in the Canaries, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines, and China had received the vaccine for free. And vaccination centers had been established all over where this expedition had been as well. So people continued to get vaccinated as the years went on. Obviously, this is amazing, great, and also horrifying. And so of course, the horrifying bit is the part that I'm going to dig more into. So there's been some great historical research done on this really recently. And in recent years, historians have pulled up the letters and the chip notes

and really figured out for us what was going on with these boys, what the adults involved had to say about it. And it does seem like Balmiss and Isabel had very good intentions for what it's worth. There were all of these promises made about how the boys were going to be treated in Mexico City. The idea was that they were going to have a much better life there than they had any odds of having as orphans in Spain. they were going to be like in the personal care of like the governor. I may be picking the wrong government official. But the idea I think was that they were going to be, they were going to arrive as heroes.

They were probably going to be like adopted by prestigious families. They were going to be educated. And that was not in the cards for them in Spain. And that seems to have been a very important part of Isabel's decision to, you know, have these boys become part of the expedition. and for her to go with them. Of course, it should be said that these boys were as young as three. So as good as the promises were, it is clear that not all of them made a decision to go. And I know this is going to shock you, but those promises were not kept.

It seems like in Mexico City, they were treated pretty much the same as all orphans in Mexico City, which is to say not good. It seems like some of them ended up being boarded in workhouses. And Balmiss does seem to have been really upset. about this. Like, this was not his intention. However, as far as I can tell, he didn't really do anything more than like send some strongly worded letters on the subject. Also, a lot is written about Isabel, like praising how virtuous she was for like traveling with these orphans and looking after them and going on this great vaccination journey. But I do think it's important to note that

she chose to leave them in Mexico City and continue on with the expedition. because here's the thing, is that they kept needing fresh children. So remember, the way this like chain of keeping the cowpox inoculation alive worked is that they arrived with like one remaining pestle. And they had to be like, quick, get us your children so we can inoculate them. And so they could keep the chain going. In theory, their plan had been to like get another batch of orphans in Mexico. But that didn't work out probably because the people who were like,

analogous to Isabel in Mexico City. We're like, we see you ditching these orphans here and just like leaving and like not making sure that they're taking care of. So like, no, we're not going to give you 22 of our children, our charges. Just fair enough. So instead they ended up kind of renting children. Basically, they would pay parents a fee and the kids would go with the expedition for as long as they were like a useful part of the cowpox.

chain and then they would come home. Now, as far as I can tell from historical documentation, like the children were returned. So that's good as a bare minimum. But it does kind of seem like their parents were probably promised more than they ultimately got. Like, yes, they were paid the, like, rental fee. But it seems like Balmiss probably made some promises and it probably did have good intentions about like how these children would be treated like heroes and like the Spanish government

would help educate them or like help them get military service, whatever. And it seems like that didn't usually pan out. And just in case, I haven't made it clear that like Balmus for all of his good intentions fundamentally believed it was okay to use humans as medical tools. So there were a few times where they would arrive at a village and find out it had already been vaccinated, which was, I have to imagine it was kind of awkward because they would arrive like, we're here to save you. And they were like, we're fine. Thanks. And but that also posed a problem because it meant that they couldn't like snatch up a clean body to continue on the cowpox chain. And when this happened, sometimes he would order members of the military to join their crew briefly. But there

were also at least a couple of instances where he just purchased slaves and, and use them. And, you know, there was a lot of like romantic stuff written about like the grand purpose and adventure that these boys went on on their smallpox inoculation crews. But when you dig into it, like, that was all very fake. And it was really just a man using other people as refrigerators. So we do know the names of these orphans and the boys who were borrowed. And we know what happened to some of them. It seems like some of them, you know, grew up to be pretty ticked off.

There are some letters that were written. to the government or people involved with the expedition being like, you know, I was promised a better life as preface in education. Where did all that go? And this is treated as, you know, the first great humanitarian vaccination effort. And it's so much more complicated than that. And even when you just look at how like the boys and Isabel, how so much writing in even pretty recent history about them has the tone of it has been like, they were going on this

great adventure to help save the world. And I think about like literal three year old boys, just babies, like too young to even be genuinely proud of what they were doing. I mean, sure, you could get me behind the idea that like an 11 year old might think it was a swashbuckling adventure, even if I think that you're a very bad adult for trying to rope them in that way. But a three year old, I'm like, they, they just want to take a nap, need some cookies. on the other hand, this did save hundreds of thousands of lives and smallpox doesn't exist anymore. We eradicated it. That was not due entirely to this particular expedition at all.

But like it was an important step in the idea that like it is worthwhile to vaccinate the world against an infectious disease and make sure everyone is vaccinated because that is the only way to protect all of us. So yeah, this is a complicated story. And I think we've only really done the barest, bearous minimum of unpacking the less rosy side of it. I mean, I saw so many fairly recently written stories about this point in history that didn't treat it as like a horribly dark, conflicted thing. I think there was kind of an instinct that people had to be like, well, it sounds bad that they infected these orphans. but you have to understand that like cowpox was really safe. And I'm like, that's not the only thing that was bad about it. Yeah, I know I said at the beginning that this was like kind of a complicated story.

It's not that complicated, like bad things were done. With the best of intentions, I think genuinely. And, you know, isn't that just why the history of medicine is so hard to talk about calmly and coherently? But all the good intentions in the world don't really matter when you're shoving a bunch of babies on a boat and giving them an infectious disease and sending them to go live in a foreign country and then abandoning them to the fates. That's just my take. I'm still confused about how the kids all made it. Like, did they all make it to the Americas or do we have any, you know, fallen orphans? So they did all survive based on the records we have.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like any of them were lost in transit. I think, you know, it does seem like Isabel took her care of the orphans very seriously until she didn't. She saw them as like precious vessels of cowpox for whatever that was worth. Everything I saw, it did seem like they were treated well on the boat because, again, Balmiss did intend for them to be treated well. And Isabel did intend for them to be treated well. And that chain of responsibility was just broken in Mexico and moving forward from that. But yeah, you can read the names of all the boys who were part of the expedition on popside.com slash weird. I wish we knew more about them.

I hope that historians continue to dig into this. I would love to know more about how they grew up, how they felt about their role in this period of history and, you know, how they they fared from what I feel like must have been a pretty traumatic journey. And for now, we really don't know much about that. We know that a couple of them wrote angry letters saying, you know, give me a military appointment. I was a cowpox baby. But for now that's it. And now I'm going to stop talking about this story because it does really bum me out. But yeah, it's just something that I wish I had known more about before now. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be right back with more facts.

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There's a lot of levels, so you'll have to stick with me. But, um, so this weirdest thing story starts like many others with a legend. This time is about the Inuit tribe, the Arctic indigenous population of people that have lived in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland for, you know, a long, long time. For centuries, they survived in the super-duper-cold Arctic North. But like many other indigenous groups across the world, they were negatively impacted by colonialism. Like Native Americans in the now U.S., they were forced into permanent. communities forced to adapt to a quote unquote Western lifestyle and had traditional ways of life taken from them.

In the past couple of decades, they've been able to get a little bit more recognition from the Canadian government and Inuit claims to land have been officially recognized for what's now called the Inuit Nunahat or Inuit homeland. Colonialism's impacts can obviously be felt far and wide and the Inuit have also had a front seat view of the horrors of climate change, which affects pretty much every aspect of their culture. And so there's lots of people that have been trying to get attention drawn to this, and one of those people is Wade Davis. A Canadian anthropologist sometimes called the Real Life Indiana Jones.

So he's really passionate about telling stories about the Inuit people and the relationship with their icy homeland. But one of his stories is especially iconic. So he wrote the story of a mysterious Inuit tale in one of his books called Shadows in the Sun back in New York. 1998. The tale of survival goes as such, and I quote, There is a well-known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So, in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of the igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he then sharpened with a spray of saliva.

With the knife, he killed a dog, using its rib cage as a sled, and it tied to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness. That is the beginning of our story. Oh, my gosh. It's not what I expected the poop knife to be. I don't know. I guess what I had in my head was like, somebody was, like, somebody was, like, using the knife to, like, wipe poop. So there are a lot of those on the internet. I found those.

like there's a lot of things. So if you're like for a different kind of pooped our internet. I don't know for like hiking. I think there are some kinds of like scraping tools. I've never used what. Oh my God. No. But yeah,

that's not always like getting this is way better. Listeners do not put a knife near your butthole. Okay. This is your producer speaking. Thank you, Jess. Great point. A different kind of poop knife altogether. this is the, you know, original, I guess.

But also such a vivid scene that was like just so like visceral. Also it's like it's like a spite poop knife too. Yeah. A spite spit poop knife. And then he murdered a dog. Like it wasn't with its bones. There's a lot going on. And this is a paragraph long story.

So yeah, this kind of story, obviously. becomes notorious and has been retold by Davis and other folks that are interested in this kind of stuff over and over. And after his book was published, Davis finally came out with who the original storyteller was, an Inuit man named Oliuk Narquidavik. Allegedly, this poop knife wielding ice warrior was Narquitivik's grandpa in the 1950s. But even Davis has admitted that he thought the story felt more fictitious than real, even saying he thought the storyteller was, quote, pulling his leg. But strangely enough, this isn't the only story of frozen poop tools around this time.

So Arctic explorer and anthropologist Peter Freundsen told a different tale but from the first person of a very similar poop experiment. Freudchen was sleeping in a pit when he awoke covered in snow. Trying to escape was mostly hopeless until we found a chunk of frozen dog poop and he was truly inspired. So he pooped in his. hand, formed a chisel of said poop, and then waited until it was frozen. Voila, a perfect escape tool.

And he escaped to tell the tale and write about it in his 1953 autobiography. I don't look, not to cast any dispersions on autobiographies written by men in the 1950s. I would never. But I have several doubts. Yeah, there's a lot of questions. And we're not the only ones. And so, but, you know, like, poop has been used as, as, Rachel, I'm sure you know, has been used in many. Full stop.

Has been used probably, you know, an interesting way. So we still, you know, kind of use it as a tool for, like, fertilizer and stuff, not necessarily for blades. You know, poop is a powerful tool. But, of course, frozen poop weapons are a lot different than theoretical tools. tools. And as far as Forrechin's story, there's not a lot of evidence that it actually happened. So we kind of just have to believe him. So, you know. Or not. I mean, take that. Do we have to believe him? Take it with a grain of salt. We can enjoy that he wanted us to believe that story. Like, honestly, visualizing any version of it happening is deeply entertaining for me. Just the entire

concept of it and whatever was he was inspired by. Yeah. I mean, like the idea of him like pooping in and like I'm waiting for it to freeze. Also, like, imagine you're in this horrible situation that you reach down and you touch something and it's frozen dog poop. Like, I would, I'd be like, I think I'd be like, the ice monster can take me now. Like, I've been through enough. Yeah, adding insult to injury. Like, uh-uh.

But, so, and also there's like some differences between even the two, two poop, uh-weapon stories. So, because a frozen poop chisel to pound out an escape hole in ice, you know, that's, that's a little bit different than sharpening a slice of poop up to slaughter skin and debone an entire animal than, you know, right off into the darkness on its remains. So, yeah, a bunch of anthropologists had questions about this. So there's a handful of Kent State folks that said, hmm, let's actually test this whole poop knife thing. And so they did in 2019. They really, really committed to the poop knife and they said, we're going to do it. We're going to figure out if this is even feasible. So the first step of the research is to make the poop that's similar to our Inuit mystery man's.

Because he got to have accurate materials. You can't just have any old poop. You've got to have, you know, ice warrior poop. So one of the scientists, his name is Meton-Aaron, switched to a Arctic diet for eight days, which meant eight days of high protein and fatty acids. like beef, turkey, salmon, perch, meatballs, sausage, salami, eggs, and then only in three instances in the eight days that he was eating this. Did he get any kind of fruit, veggie, or carbohydrate?

I really thought you were going to say, did you poop? And I feel like you're either going to spend all of your time on the toilet or none of your time on the toilet, if that is not the diet you are accustomed to. But that's his business, I guess. literally his business. So we do know when the poo started to be collected for toolmaking, and that was on day four. I don't know if that's the first instance of pooing, but that's when it started becoming like, this is toolworthy. And so they collected it on day four and for the next five days. And then so they then they were like, okay, we've got the poo, we're going to form it into knives in two

different ways. So one with a knife mold, so they've had like a knife mold. Great. And then one with just their hands, and they stored it at negative 20 degrees Celsius. until experimentation. And Aaron, the scientist who was really super committed, described it to Ars Technica as, it's funny because we've got this amazing lab. I'm not in the lab. I'm in my house, pooping in a bag,

making knives out of my own feces. It was sort of depressing, which makes sense. Yes. And so instead of a dog, thank goodness, the researchers procured a pig hide, some muscles and tendons, and put them at the same icy cold,

temperatures, you know, for future experimentation. Okay. And so two days before the big poop knife reveal, the pig hides were moved to a four degrees Celsius temperature, and the poop knives only were removed like minutes before the experiment. So there's another way that, you know, the lab poop knives and the legendary poop knives, they differentiate a little bit because the scientists actually used a metal file to sharpen the poop knife versus a spray of saliva.

So a little bit different there. The sharpened poops were then refrozen with dry ice, and the test began of like, okay, so can we actually cut some hide with the poop knife? By now, the poop was pretty darn solid, and the researchers actually thought that it could possibly work. They're like, this is a really tough piece of poop. But as it turns out, the poop knife both hand in mold made, couldn't even cut the pig hide. It just melted and left skid marks. They did a round two with, quote, unquote,

normal Western diet poop. Still only skid marks. They eventually tried to cut the subcutaneous fat on the underside of the hide, which ended up making, quote, with some difficulty, only the shallowest of slices. I just feel really bad for the grad students who are just hacking away at that. But, end quote, the knife edge still quickly melted.

and deteriorated. So I, yeah, I'm sure you can imagine what that would have been like. So the authors also noted that the poop knives were more or less given a prime opportunity to work. So it wasn't like they were, it was like just random poop knives. Right, not real world conditions. Not real world conditions. And they wrote this like very amazing paragraph about it in their findings that said,

our results should be considered in light of use of our negative 50 degrees Celsius temperatures, a metal file to sharpen the blades, and a cold hairless hide rather than a warm hair-covered hide, the latter representative of a fresh kill. In other words, we gave our knives the best possible chance to succeed, and they still could not function. So Wade Davis, the originator of this story, so he had something to say about this, though. Of course he did. So Indiana Jones-esque originator of the tale, he said a bunch of different things. So I'm just going to do a little roundup. He told Discover in an article that came out in April of 2020.

I think it's just funny and wonderful. It just adds to the mix of the humor story, the fact that a team of scientists set out to prove whether this could be true or not. But he hasn't always been jolly about it. In October 2019, he wrote in an op-ed for Nautilis, I met no disrespect. But at a time when the entire world of the Inuit is literally melting around them, I found it hard to accept that any serious scholar, even the most reductionist, would exhaust time and money in such a pursuit.

And also, he noted that they should have used a dog skin instead of the pig skin, and then maybe we would have had different results. But nonetheless, Davis says he'll keep telling the story because it helps audience grasp and understand the extent to which the Inuit are truly a people of the ice. But meanwhile, the main author of the study, the Kent State, his name's Metaneran, he told Arts Technica, the problem with that, which is the idea of just continuing to tell the story as if it's, you know, the cold hard truth. But the problem with that is that... It's the cold hard poop. Ah! Sorry. The problem with that is once you start using untested or unsupported stories to support a situation.

stance, it becomes a slippery slope, because then you can use another unsupported story without any data. Once you don't have data anymore, you can use unsupported stories to support stances that are harmful to society like racial prejudice. Science is a vital check on these source of urban legends. In this age of alternative facts and fake news, data-driven evidence-based science is needed more than ever. So there you have it.

The legend, the science, and the anthropological disagreements surrounding. the poop knife. But yeah, don't freeze your poop. Don't try this at home. Don't try anything with poop or knife. Please. I also just really take issue with the implication that the only way people would respect the Inuit people as if they believed they made knives out of shit.

They are human people with a rich culture who have done many interesting things throughout history. And either way. do not deserve to have their home melt, least of all because they have not made a poop knife. Right. Like, the poop knife should not be the determinant of anyone's humanity at the end of the day. Also, just, like, I'm sure there are a million stories you could tell about the Inuit people, even about, like, that one guy, that, like, particular angry guy that don't involve fake poop knives that they never made. But I mean, it is a good story.

I understand why he doesn't want to like that. It would be hard. It would be hard. If you've been telling that story for like 20 years. It's true. Oh, my God. If I was the guy who had started telling that story, it would be my entire personality. I would tell it every time I walked into a room.

So I sympathize. I really do. Wow. That was fantastic, Sarah Kylie. Really wonderful stuff. I'm courteeing while at my desk. All right. We're going to take a quick break.

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And Lauren, tell us about woodpecker tongues. I'm a little scared. Really? To be honest. I don't really know why. You don't have any reason to be scared. I'm actually here to convince you that I think that they're really cool and actually potentially beautiful.

I don't know. I think they're kind of the coolest feature now of a bird. Here we go. Hot take. But yes, I'm super excited to tell you about wild, wild world of bird tongues. So you might be more mesmerized by perhaps like birds' bright plumage or there are songs, all justifiable reasons to love our avian friends. But yes, I'm here to convince you that their tongues are very weird, but also very fascinating.

So there's a whole diversity of bird tongues I've come to realize, which I want to get into. But one surprised me the most, which is the woodpecker's tongue, which is very dramatically long and kind of rope-like. sort of almost too sort of like wormy a little bit I find ironic but so some woodpecker species have tongues that are a third a length of its body

it could extend out from its bill like five inches past its bill which I think it's just bonkers it blows my mind so I had a lot of questions after I found this out but before I get into like how how this tongue is like tucked into a relatively small

head I need to explain some basic bird tongue anatomy. So our tongues and bird tongues are supported by the hyoid bone, which is a horseshoe U-shaped structure. And in humans, we have a singular hyoid bone that sits kind of above our voice box. So if you like gently touch your neck, you right below your jawline, you can, where your trache is, you can feel like the bones sort of floating there. But in birds, it's an apparatus or a series of bones and cartilage. So some of the muscles and the tongue, use the hyoid bone as a sort of like an anchor point, particularly the muscles that allow us to swallow or stick out our tongues. So some birds have an extremely long hyoid and beak, which allows them to poke out their tongues like super far.

I found this out by a story that Kate Bagley did for us in December about an ancient bird fossil that also revealed it had a very long hyoid bone. Also saying hyoid bone is very hard. But so this is giving paleontologist clues about how the hyoid apparatus has evolved in birds and adds more evidence that birds back in the Cretaceous dinosaur period time might have been able to stick out their tongues like modern hummingbirds or woodpeckers, which is what I'm going to get into. Okay, so sorry I had to like explain some of that stuff, but it'll help contextualize everything else. So woodpeckers are a bit of the extreme. They have this, like I mentioned, the dramatically long tongue. And their body to tongue size ratio, like, doesn't make sense when you, like, see it. So you're probably wondering, like, where does all the tongue fit?

At least that's what I was trying to figure out when I saw this. Like, where does the tongue go? So the tongue actually wraps around the top of their skull and enters through one of their nostrils, like it, like, around the back of the head. What? Yeah. It's like, yeah. It's very like snake-like, I guess, in that way.

Thinking about it. I don't want to be thinking about it. Try to wrap my head around it. Oh, no. Oh, no. So the northern flicker woodpecker, so that one is one of a particular species that has a pretty long tongue. It could go two inches past the tip of its beak.

And it's up there in terms of like long as woodpecker tongues. But, okay, so why, the other question I had is like, why the heck do they have such long tongues? Like, what is, you think it might be like more cumbersome to have like a long thing flopping around and it's big. I don't know. Sure. In your skull. Like, yeah. Right.

So, so actually it helps them when they're pecking, which I, okay, so this is, like really, I thought was really fascinating. So what peckers, they use their long tongues to, one, stick into the holes they chisel. and they grab, you know, like hard-to-reach insects and other little food morsels. But some woodpeckers, so the northern flicker woodpecker also has like a sticky mucus coating the tongue. So they kind of like dip it down ant hills and like collect all the ants. It reminded me a lot like an ant eater. I have no idea if it's like the same function, but it's like it looks like it.

And you might think it's like really snappy like a frog, but it's not like that. it's like if you watch videos it kind of like juts it out and it like flops around a little bit i don't know i find it really cute um but the surprise function is that the tongue it acts actually as a cushion on the back of the brain as it drills into trees so i found this out from a really great write-up actually a lot of the facts i found was from this really great article by rebecca heisman on the american bird conservancy website and it was an article there and so the woodpecker it kind of tenses its muscles around the apparatus. So it's like holding its skull and spine in place as it pecks. And so the the tongue like acts like a cushion while it's like doing that. Oh my gosh. I mean I had heard that they like have

something to cushion them. Like I've heard the analogy that it's like they have like a football helmet inside there. But no one had ever thought to mention that it's their tongue to the cushioning, which is a crucial piece of information. Like can they taste their brains? Like I've got questions for the woodpeckers. I did not think of that. I know. I have questions too now, too, about taste. But yeah, the other analogy I've read that Rebecca writes is that it's like a seatbelt, too. Like it like holds everything in place. So like helps these like ultimate head banging experience. I'm sorry. I'll see myself out. Okay. So what a wacky animal. Yeah, I thought so too. Okay. So I know I want to give a few more.

other tongue facts if I have time about bird tongue facts, I promise. So, okay, so bird tongues really come actually in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Some are short and thicker. Some are frayed and barbed or have like a pronged tip. And if birders can see them, they actually can help with distinguishing between different species, if you're lucky enough to catch a bird with its tongue hanging out. Hummingbirds, for instance, are another bird that has a pretty long tongue. And for long time people thought they used their tongues like a straw to suck up nectar, but researchers actually recorded a bunch of hummingbirds back in 2015 in slow motion and saw that they actually use the tongues like little pumps. They inferl like the flat little tips of their tongues and lap up the nectar

in slow motion. To me, it reminded me kind of like how my dog drinks water, but I'm actually not quite sure if it's like exactly the same. But that's what it looks like when you're watching the video. And then a couple other birds with fun adaptations. Parrots and lorries have tongues with a bushy tip, and the bushy tips have like little papillae that are good for collecting pollen and nectar from flowers. Birds like penguins have like spines on their tongues that act like fish hooks to help like basically, you know, hold on to those fishy things. And then geese, which are also like hilarious birds to be,

they have really wild tongues. They have these kind of like teeth looking serrated things. They're spiny papillae, but they're on the sides of the tongue. If you like look up a picture, it's just they, it looks really rad. But they use them to like peel apart seeds and cut vegetables and things like that, or plants rather. Yeah. But yeah, and so other things about other random facts I'll leave you with with about part tongues. I went too into this.

but they also have taste receptors, not as much as we do. And actually for a really long time, scientists thought that they couldn't taste, really, but they actually do have, how many, how many they have, they have taste buds, and they could generally taste sweet, salty, briny, and bitter things. And then the last thing that I also really wanted to figure out is if these tongues, because they're all bizarre shapes, are involved with their songs. and so for the most part it looks like they're not really super involved. The bird songs are actually mainly controlled by the syrinx, which is a sound producing organ,

which is different from the vocal cords that we have and other mammals. But it's generally thought that the tongues don't play a super big role. But there was a cool piece that I found on parrots, because obviously they are very good at mimicking and are very nimble with like speech and all that. Because they have, they actually have, of birds, one of the strongest muscular tongues. So they found out that they can actually, like, the position of the tongue helps with, like,

changing vocalizations and pitch and stuff. So anyways, that's the, all the facts that I have on birds. I find it personally pretty cute. I hope I convinced you that bird tongues are great, maybe arguably cooler than the feathers and all the other things. But, I mean, all things about birds are awesome. But anyways, those are my birdbacks. I'm still thinking about, like, what bird brain brine tastes like.

I'm not going to be able to stop thinking about it. Okay, so I think the weirdest thing I'm in this week was how all up in their brains would pecker tongues are. because again, I knew that they had some kind of little cushion to protect their low brains while they were pecking the wood. And nobody ever thought to tell me that it was because their tongue goes like up through their nose. Yeah, it truly makes our tongues. I mean, all of this made my tongue feel very insecure for how little it does for me and how unprotected my brain is. Yeah, my tongue doesn't do anything to protect my brain at all. Like there's no spines. There's no twisties. I'm honestly devastated. So, yeah, agreed.

Well, congrats on your first appearance and your first win, Lauren. I'm so, so honored to have won this prize. 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 Apple. podcast. 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 popsay.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have

questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried.

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