The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Immortal Jellyfish, Cocaine Hippos, Potato Chip Controversy

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

This episode celebrates our latest print issue hitting newsstands! The weirdest things we learned this week range from a jellyfish that can live forever to invasive cocaine hippos. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/CorinneIOZO Sara Kiley Watson: www.twitter.com/SaraKileyWatson Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 sure 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 Corinne. Iosio. Sarah Kylie and Corinne, it has been a while since we had either of you on Weirdest Thing.

So welcome back. It's actually my first time. Oh, my gosh. It's your first time? Oh, my gosh. This is my first time, guys. For some reason, I thought you had been on back when you were an intern. Well, Sarah Kylie is a beloved member of the Pop-Sye staff.

And congratulations, welcome on your first Weirdest Thing episode. Woo-hoo. Very excited. Rachel promises to be gentle. Oh, gosh. Okay. And Corinne, of course, is our illustrious editor-in-chief. Welcome back, Corinne.

Thank you. It's great to be back on. Corinne is here because today's episode is very, very special. And I'll explain why in a minute. But first, a little bit of housekeeping. Just so you all know, this is going to be our last episode for a little while. We are just taking one of our mid-season hi-aids. is to give us a little bit of extra time to lovingly craft wonderful Weirdest Thing episodes for you

all while also creating all of the other great content that we make at Popular Science. We'll be back sometime in the spring, exact date, TBA, and we'll definitely be back with some announcements and you know, maybe we'll do some special episodes. Make sure to follow us on Twitter at Weirdest underscore Thing or join our Facebook group, which you can find by searching Weirdest. thing on Facebook. And let us know what kind of things you'd like to see during the break or during the rest of season four. But speaking of the other wonderful content we make at Popular Science, this episode is all about the concept of transforming and thriving in the face of adversity. And Corin, would you like to explain why? Absolutely. So yesterday, our last issue of,

of 2020 hit news stands. If you look for it, it's got a big, beautiful monarch butterfly on it, and the main line on the cover says, we can transform. And this was not the issue that we planned to make this year. We had something super fun and cheeky plan to round out the year and launch us into 2021, but then 2020 turned out to be... Not the year we'd planned it to be. No, no, it turned out to be exactly what 2020 has been, a nonstop roller coaster of what on earth is happening. And so we took a step back and we decided to reboot and think about how does Popsie deal with this? How do we make a magazine that channels the optimism that we all have and our wide-eyed wonder about the world when the world is so the way the world is right now? And we landed on this concept

where we realized that some really, truly awesome things come out of really terrible circumstances. Because what terrible circumstances do is they show us the things that need to be fixed. So this issue of popular science and therefore this very special weirdest thing is all about great things that come out of seemingly terrible situations. And it's not all exactly what you would think it would be, you know, vaccines, which are great and we love and we need and we're fast-tracking towards development. But it's also just fun stuff that makes life better. And that's where we really love to find these tales.

Absolutely. So definitely check out our latest issue on whatever newsstands you can safely access. I don't want any of you in airports, please. But while you're doing your essential grocery shopping, you may come across an issue of popular science. And I would highly recommend you buy it. And if you can't find it, there's a great website called mag, like magazine, M-A-G-Finder.com. You just type in the magazine you're looking for in your zip code and it tells you where to go. It's super handy.

Amazing. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera. in this case, in the course of creating a whole dang magazine out of paper. Wow. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, let's start with your teas. Okay, so I am here to talk about an animal that can theoretically live forever.

Like never die. Hmm, must be nice. Or terrible. I can't decide. It's true. I read Tuck Everlasting in middle school. I know it's a complicated question. I know, but I also saw Benjamin Button, which I know isn't living forever, but it's in the same universe. Corinne, how about your tease? I want to talk about something that actually wasn't in the Thrive issue, but is very close to my heart, which is the time that the U.S. government almost killed the potato chip.

How dare they? I know it's super rude. I'm already mad. Okay. My tease is that I'd like to talk about Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos. Love them. Yeah, I know. Sarah Kylie, you know, we often are sharing facts that the rest of the team aren't aware of.

But obviously, this episode is a little different since a lot of these things are from an issue of a magazine that we all helped make. But also, Sarah Kylie, I think you wrote an article about these hippos, specifically. Yes. I am a big fan of all things weird and animal. Just what's happening in my brain right now is, you know how there's like a butter sculpture culture in like Midwest and a big state fairs? For some reason when Rachel said Pablo Escobar's cocaine hippos, pictured hippopotamuses made out of cocaine. Oh, wow. That's really, I mean, honestly, if anyone had hippo sculptures made of cocaine. Who else? No one could have done it except for Pablo.

Escobar. So, um, I don't know if that's wilder than like the reality or if it's just about as wild as like the reality of the cocaine hippos. Well, I guess since we're, since we're already spiraling on cocaine hippos, I guess maybe I should, uh, I should just get this fact out of the way. I was going to say, I think this means you go first, Rachel. All right. So Paulo Escobar is a complex historical figure, to be sure, from the 70s until his death, until 1993, he did unspeakable things, let's just be clear, really unspeakable things, to gain control of the U.S. cocaine trade, and he amassed a net worth of tens of billions of dollars, very rich, suffice to say. And we won't get into all of the gnarly details,

but there's a reason Colombia was considered the murder capital of the world when Escobar's cartel was in power. He was absolutely not a good dude in the traditional sense, but tens of thousands of people showed up to his funeral because his tendency to inject wealth back into impoverished neighborhoods gave him a sort of Robin Hood-like reputation. Anyway, we're not here to debate how Escobar's acts of local charity stack up against his acts of local and international murder and general terror. But I do want to talk about one particularly surprising aspect of his complicated legacy, his pet hippos.

So in the 1890s, Escobar built himself a 7,000-acre estate that included, among other things, a zoo. And that zoo included, among other things, for hippos. There were three females and one male bought from a zoo in California. That estate is actually now a theme park, but it sat idle and abandoned for something like a decade after Escobar was shot dead by Colombian police in 1993. authorities shipped most of the zoo's occupants off to wildlife preserves or public zoos, but they decided that the hippos were just like too big to deal with, which, you know, I would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation. I guess they just thought they would like stay put.

But spoiler alert, the hippos did not stay put. And they had a lot of babies. At one point when it first became apparent that these animals were like lumbering around outside of this. 7,000 acre property and like going into towns and like making their way into local rivers. Officials actually floated the idea of culling them, you know, just finding all of them and killing them because they were worried they would disrupt the local ecosystem or hurt local people. Hippos are large animals and they're not very nice.

I know they look pretty doofy, but they will mess you up. But apparently the local pro-hippo public outcry was so intense that they just dropped that idea. And this is based on reporting by the New Yorker from a few years ago. But I think like a lot of locals, first of all, again, complicated legacy of Pablo Escobar. There were a lot of locals who were big fans of his. And also the hippos were like a novelty and people didn't want the government to kill them. So that brings us to today. Many years after the government of Columbia decided to just leave the hippos be, there are now an estimated 80 hippopotamai, which is by far the largest wild population of the animals outside of their native habitats in Africa. So in case it wasn't yet clear to you, hippopotamai not native to the Americas, definitely had never been wild in Colombia.

before Pablo Escobar's pets were let loose. Now, these hippos definitely fit our usual definition of an invasive species. You know, we talk about invasive species all the time at Popsai and other science publications. These are animals that enter an ecosystem that they don't really belong in. And often because they have no natural predators in this new ecosystem, they go totally out of control. and they like eat things. They're not supposed to eat. You know, we have like goats messing up the Galapagos Island for the tortoises is a classic example.

But we have all sorts of bad invasive species in the U.S. and all over the world. It's a big problem. And, you know, these are literally animals that did not evolve there being shipped in to suit the whims of a drug lord and then left to run amok. So generally, traditionally, traditionally. scientists would say, yeah, that's an invasive species. It's bad. But like I said, these cocaine hippos are complicated, and they're complicated in a way that reveals how much we still have to learn about conservation. So back in March, this study came out in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and it posited that these animals might actually, in some ways, be helping their new

ecosystem. And it pinpointed a really fascinating explanation as to why. So, first, how the hippos might help. And a lot of this is kind of either based on very little data or based on observations of the ways hippos help their own ecosystem back on the continent of Africa. So keep that in mind, grain of salt. But for one thing, their massive bodies can create these little stream-like waterways in the mud. And smaller animals like fish or frogs or whatever, can hide from predators in those little streams. And that could help support more biodiversity for the area. They also trudge around and make these deep pools within the rivers that they hang out in.

And during dry spells, those deep pools create little reservoirs where fish can survive. Another thing they do is that they help stir up sediment, which might help distribute nutrients closer to the surface of the river. Also, they poop a lot. like a lot, and things eat that poop, namely microorganisms that fish can then eat. So they just like inject all of these nutrients into the waterway. And so this study back in March lays out a really cool argument. South America was once home to many large herbivores, including a semi-aquatic rhino-esque creature and a giant llama, which the

llama did a lot of the same kind of grazing and nutrient recycling that hippos do in Africa. Also, I'm going to post a link to a drawing of the giant llama because when I first opened it, it's a picture of a giant llama and then a bunch of little shadow figures off to the side. And I thought that the giant llama was to scale and it would basically be like, the size of a skyscraper or at least a large dinosaur next to the human. But I misunderstood. It is a set of figures for scale, including the giant llama, which was larger than a camel, but not that much larger.

And then a very large illustration to show us what the llama might have looked like. To be clear, it took me a minute to figure that out too. I opened it and I was like, dear God. This thing is the size of a brachiosaur. What is happening? But no, they were just slightly bigger than camels are today. Still, you know, big for a llama. I would have loved to beat one.

They probably were very bitey and spitty, actually, so maybe not. So the idea of this study is based on the fact that around 100,000 years ago during the late Pleistocene, a bunch of extinctions occurred. and a lot of them hit large mammals. There were horses in Eurasia and giant sloths in the Americas. And part of this, you know, was the hit on these rhino-like and giant llama species in what is now Columbia. And so the idea here is that even though hippos aren't native to the area, they're filling ecological niches that have been left empty. for tens of thousands of years, and that in that way, they can actually contribute to the health of the

ecosystem because there's a place for them. And of course, there are things that these hippos do that fit more neatly into our usual idea of what invasive species are like. For example, the same trudging around they do that creates those really helpful little streams and pools could also just as easily trample important plants or habitats of animals that live in the same river as they do. And that poop that creates such a bountiful nutrition for microorganisms can also lead to algae blooms, which is, you know, when algae grows out of control and it can actually kill off lots of animals in the water by expending too much oxygen. So not all good. But the big takeaway of this study and of others like it is that we really don't know what

a natural habitat is. Sometimes the things we're fighting to protect are actually animals or plants that humans introduced a few hundreds or thousands of years ago. And sometimes the species we see as invaders are actually filling a long-lost ecological niche. So the takeaway is that the earth is a really complex place and we've done a lot of lot of damage to it. And if we want to help it heal, we have to be a little more humble about our understanding of what belongs where. The investigation into these cocaine hippos is far from complete.

We don't know for sure whether they are helping more than hurting, and they are expected to really have a population boom in the next few decades. So that's something we should probably figure out sooner rather than later. But the larger takeaway here is just something I love so much. much because it's a great example of how sometimes a tricky situation can help reveal the cracks in the way we've been doing things, the way we've been thinking about things, and give us an opportunity to, you know, rebuild them in a way that's better. Yeah, I like to think of the hippos as these giant smelly clues about what the way that we need to think about what restoring habitats means.

Because it sort of forces us to really examine or try to examine what happened before even there's a record of what the environment was like and how do we do that. And it's a really, really tricky problem. But the hippos are showing us the way. Indeed. Yeah. And so listeners, you can learn more about Escobar's hippos in the, latest issue of popular science. And we also actually have a feature that's more broadly about

our efforts to kind of like undo human damage to the earth and how important it is that we like consider the earth's needs when we do so. So lots of cool conservation and environmental stuff to find on newsstands right now. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is in part inspired by a very real phenomenon. The year is 1961. In Santa Cruz, California, thousands of Souty-Shearwater birds are losing their minds, dive-bombing into buildings, regurgitating fish guts, and biting people.

For 50 years, no one knew why. In episode two of Popular Sciences video series Wild Lives, we uncovered the true story of Hitchcock's attacking birds, a mystery solved by scientists half a century later. click on the link in the description box to watch and subscribe to popular science on YouTube for more. All right, we're back. And Corinne, why don't you go next so that we can sandwich these animal stories around some nice potato chips. Give it a good crunch.

Yes, absolutely. Yes. So I'm going to start by basically saying I discovered this potato chip fact because I was thinking a lot about food rationing around the the Second World War specifically, and I started to wonder, like, what kind of innovation and ingenuity comes along in times like this. So there's some research that I've been reading about, specifically companies that were founded in the economic downturn of the 80s that are now largely Fortune 500 companies, some of the most successful and profitable businesses that we know of. And, but again, bringing it back to snack food because this is a pandemic year and we know that

we're all snacking. So I wanted to figure out if there were any snacks that we could credit the Second World War with specifically. And I happened upon the story about potato chips, but it actually starts way before that in the mid-1800s. Because often potato chips are credited with being an American invention. And while the popularization of a potato chip is probably an American thing, obviously, as we know about so many historical assertions, that's not necessarily true. So the first modern mention that we have of something like a potato chip was in a cookbook from England around 1822, written by a doctor named William Kitchener. And in the preface to his cookbook, Dr. Kitchener basically said that he had noticed

anecdotally that his patients were paying more attention to the food and the nutrition of their livestock than they were their own food and nutrition. So in his book, he presented them with ways to prepare their vegetables and among them were fried potato shavings or crisps, as they would say, in the UK. So that's the first modern mention. But the great American story of the potato chip comes around 1853. And it's a chef named George Crum who was working at a restaurant in Saratoga, Springs, and he was getting very, very frustrated because there was a customer who kept sending his French fried potatoes back to the kitchen, complaining that they weren't crispy enough. So after however many orders of these fried potatoes came back, Mr. Crum got a little bit hot,

and he sliced some potatoes as thin as he possibly could, and he fried the living hell out of them, and he sent them out. And this customer loved them because it's a potato chip. It's delicious. It's delicious. You know, fry potato oil, salt, done, great. So it was born the legend of the American invention of the potato chip, which is kind of true, but not exactly true. A couple things going on here.

First, this particularly demanding customer is often cited as being Cornelius Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt's. But historical records show that at this particular time, This particular Vanderbilt was in Europe, so probably not true. The restaurant that George Crum was supposedly cooking at wasn't founded until a couple years after the story supposedly happened. But we do know that George Crum existed, and we do know that he made really good potato chips. First at this restaurant and eventually at his own place in Saratoga Springs called the Crum House. The Crum House. The Crum House.

Yes. Oh, and I should say Crum with no B. George Crum, C-R-U-M. That's less cute. I don't know if I like the word crumb. I feel like he's like a reticter character or something. Like, I'm really into it. So this began the American infatuation with the potato chip.

And they just took off restaurants around the country, started putting them on tables. There was a lot of innovation around figuring out how to mass produce these slicing machines and all kinds of different ways to package and transport them. Because early on, potato chips weren't. You couldn't go to the store. and buy a bag of potato chips or buy a tub of potato chips or whatever container. You would go to like the mom and pop shop and there would be these giant barrels or glass canisters and they would scoop your potato chips out and you would eat them in whatever, you know, paper vessel

or whatnot that they gave you and that was it. But like I said, big potato chip innovation boom because potato chips. Probably my favorite is a woman in California named Lauren Cruttard, who is the first person to develop a potato chip bag, wax line bags for packaging and transport, game changer. And all up through the rest of the 19th century, through the beginning of the 20th century, Americans are just eating more and more potato chips. We start to see the rise of like the great potato chip families. The lays potato chips and Mr. Wise enters the scene. But there's one fellow in particular, who's going to be really key to this story. And his name is Harvey F. Noss.

Mr. Noss had run a pretzel company before he got into the potato chip biz. He is one of the founders or founding members of the Ohio Chip Association. And then eventually the National Potato Chip Institute, which in modern times is called the Snack Food Association. The people who bring us an annual festival of snacks called Snackspo. What? Oh, yes. Corinne, why have I never been said to cover Snackspo? Me first.

That's all I have to say about Snackspo. I am waiting for my official invitation. So we're getting our potato chip on. We're eating a lot of them, more and more. And then World War II happens. And the country and the government have to start making some really tough decisions about how we use our resources, what should be diverted to the war effort and what was essential for everyday folk to have. One thing that the war production board started looking very closely at

were shortening's and oils because the military not only needed them for food stuffs, but also for production of war materials, ammunition, explosives, and things like that. And all of this led potato chips to be labeled by the war production board as a non-essential food. How dare. That's rude. Honestly, I'm up. upset. I, it was really, it's like, it's hurting me in my heart a little bit. But don't worry, because we have Harvey Noss. And Harvey Noss on the heels of great protests from his industry, but also, but though I've found no actual evidence of, but I have seen written about public protests about people being robbed of their potato chips. So Mr. Noss gets to work, and he

pulls a bunch of, bunch of research, and he writes a memo. He writes a memo. He writes a memo called 32 reasons why potato chips are an essential food and he takes it to Washington, D.C. Wow. A hero. Truly. Now, I looked for this document and I looked for it and I looked for it and I couldn't find it and is like one of the great failings of my journalistic life. But I did find a couple takeaways, things that he managed to argue and convince the

the War Production Board with. First of all, he argued that potatoes are a high energy food. food, which, okay, fair, very dense, very, very dense in calories, complex carbohydrates. This is energy food. Okay, cool. I can't really argue with that. It's basically a power bar when you eat a handful of potato dips, really. He also argued to them that they were the only ready to eat an easily transportable

vegetable that could be made available. Okay. Which, like, okay, maybe not wrong, but it kind of tickled. is that part of my brain that remembers when it was argued that French fries could be counted as vegetables in high school cafeterias. Right. And then pizza could be a vegetable because it had tomato on it. Oh, and ketchup is a fruit.

Right. Mm-hmm. So after all of this, he manages to convince them. Potato chips are declared an essential food. And they, if our potato chip consumption was a lot before this, this is when it skyrocketed. because the War Production Board had also put rations on things like sugar and chocolate. So if you had a sweet tooth, you were kind of out of luck. And so people just really went hard into the potato chips.

And I got some numbers. I'll tell you, like, where we've gotten with potato chips after things like the crinkle cut machine and people innovating ways to flavor them, which like, okay, fine, totally cool. actually, there's some data that I found like Lays potato chips are on the rise during the COVID pandemic, because obviously people are snacking a lot. But as of the most recent numbers that I could find, the United States consumes 1.8 billion pounds of potato chips a year. That's around six pounds per person or 16 bags of potato chips.

I got to say, as much as I love potato chips, I do not think I am pulling my weight nationally. It's okay, you got your back. Like, what size are the bags? Are we talking, like, party bags? Like, I feel like... Oh, that's a good question. That is, you know, I don't know. I guess it depends on, because, like, you know, I'm not going to lie.

Like, if there's an open bag of potato chips, it doesn't matter if it's the fun size that you get free with a deli sandwich or the family size, that bag is empty. Right. If it's six pounds a year, it must be the big bags because they don't weigh, like, anything. Yeah. So, yes. So World War II didn't bring us the potato chip, but it's... gave us the potato chip that we have today. And, you know, it just got me thinking about,

it got me thinking about all the other food innovations that we owe to wartime. Like, did you know that Nutella is also from World War II? Not a lot of chocolate in Italy, but a lot, a lot of hazelnut paste. Oh. I love that. So, and when the, a guy named Michelle Ferraro, who was the first, who changed the family product name. Oh, Ferrar-R-Mash.

Yep. When he changed the product name to Nutella from the longer, harder to pronounce Italian phrasing, he, when he died, was the richest man in Italy. Yeah, that's fair to tell us freaking delicious. So he deserves it. It's fine. We have, like, difficulty of getting fruit to thank for there being cream inside our Twinkies instead of bananas.

Oh. Yep. Mr. Mars of Eminem's fame initially only sold his candies to the military because he couldn't sell them to regular consumers. even the dehydrated salty cheese dust that goes on Cheetos was originally a wartime innovation, that they would spray on pasta and potatoes. Okay, well, I don't want Cheeto pasta, but I would eat a Cheeto potato. I think so.

And Pringles, actually, the research that led to Pringles was funded by the quartermaster core through the USDA to make a pulverized potato product that now we know is pressed back into chip-like form. So anyway, like I said, it's not, these aren't snacks that are going to change the world. They might actually have set us back in a lot of ways, I will freely admit. But they're delicious. And they bring joy. And there's so much value in that. And they wouldn't have happened or we wouldn't have had them the way that we know them if we hadn't had to stare down some really scary, difficult to deal with stuff.

Well, there you go. Now I want some chips. Me too. But if we were all together, we would all be eating chips right now. I can guarantee that. Well, we're going to take a quick break, possibly to find some potato chips. And then we'll be right back with one more fact. Okay, we're back.

And Sarah Kylie, tell us about these immortal creatures. Yes. Okay. So this is very cool. But there's this tiny, tiny, tiny jellyfish that's from the Mediterranean. Of course, I feel like something that could live forever and be young forever would come from Italy. All that olive oil. Yeah, exactly.

So it's a tiny jellyfish about the size of your pinky nail when it's full grown. It's called a Tor Dops of Storni. And it was discovered about back in the 1880s, but we didn't know how cool it was until the 1980s. So before I get into all of that detail, I think I should let you know a little bit about the jellyfish life cycle. So it's pretty straightforward. Basically, you have the fertilized egg that turns into a planular, it's a larval. and it kind of sinks to the bottom of the sea or the ocean or whatever, and then it kind of turns into this polyp, which I think honestly looks like a little tree trunk, and it kind of spurts

out these little, almost like leaf things that turn into Medusa, which are those big bell-shaped jellyfish that we come to know and love with the lots of little tentacles, and those just float around and live their life. And one day, they release sperm and eggs, and those fertilize, and it starts all over again and mama or daddy jellyfish dies and goes to jellyfish heaven. But in 1980, a bunch of researchers that was actually grad students in Italy were looking at what they thought was just a normal jellyfish. So they picked up a couple of these tiny turdopsis dorn eyes and brought them back to the lab and kind of just were like, okay, we'll see what happens here. And so what happened was actually kind of weird. So what they expected was for

nothing really to happen because these were young jellyfish they weren't exactly ready to reproduce or anything like that but when they came back there were polyps so it's kind of like wait what how did this happen and so what we ended up finding out was that when a turidopsis dorni is an immature medusa or it's it's just getting into that bell stage it's got its tentacles etc and whatever happens and it's injured or sick or dying or a bunch of grad students grab it take it out of the So we're talking about, like, peak 2020, Turdops is Doranai stressed. They will basically invert into a little dumpling. Some people call it a meatball.

Sometimes it's a dumpling, but it's just this ball of tissue of, like, goodness knows what, drops to the bottom of the sea again, and then just starts over. So what we're having here is not necessarily that the Medusa stays in Medusa phase forever, but those cells stay alive. Like, it's not like there's death. and then those cells, you know, disappear. What's happening is basically, instead of, you know, dying, these cells are repurposed into a new identical set of actually multiple cloned jellyfish.

So basically, and this can happen over and over again, there's a researcher that had this happen over the course of two years with a single one. They did this 10 times. So theoretically, if, you know, a hungry sea slug doesn't munch one of these up or it doesn't get stuck outside of water, these little jellies can stay alive forever. And so what we're trying to figure out now is what's going on inside the meatball. So what we do know is what is going on in there.

It's a spicy meatball indeed. Yeah, because it's just like, hmm, how did these cells, you know, stay young or become young again? And they go through this process called transdifferentiation, which actually a bunch of cells do that. But if you take, if you look, for example, I think that chicken's eyeballs do this. Like, basically what happens is a cell that was doing one job gets a new job. So it's like, and sometimes they pass through the stem cell stage, which I feel like it's kind of like the LinkedIn stage, like looking for a new job stage of cell. Thinking about retraining. Maybe my skills can translate.

Open to new opportunities. Open to new opportunities. So basically some cells can do that. They say, okay, I'm doing this one thing. I'm going to go back to the LinkedIn. themselves stage and do something else. And that happens in lots of things. Like I think that happens in our pancreas sometimes. But the thing about the jellyfish is their whole entire body does it. So it'd be like if a chicken turned into an egg again. So that's kind of what we're looking at here.

So yeah. And so something that we're curious about and I think like some applications hopefully that we're looking at here is how to, you know, make ourselves do this, how to press the reset button. like if you've got, you know, like a cancerous skin cell or something, how do you say, okay, wait a minute, let's backtrack and research you again. Let's go back to LinkedIn, get you a new job instead of being a cancer cell. Let's make you a healthy cell. So there's lots going on with that. And actually, one of my favorite things about this is there's a couple of very interesting

people that have kind of focused their lives around the jellyfish. And you kind of have to. So there's this one man named Shin Kubota. And his life basically is dedicated. to feeding the jellyfish, then poking them with a stick and making them rejuvenate. And the best part about him, I think, is that on the side, he is Japan's Bill Nye, and he sings songs about the jellyfish in Japanese. Oh, my God.

He is a karaoke wizard, and he has, like, I think, let me see, I think there's six, at least six albums of songs about the immortal jellyfish and their other sea creature friends. Oh, wow. Not only, I feel like we haven't lived in a lot of ways, like in the ways of these jellyfish, but also in the way where we haven't heard this music. Yeah, we will definitely be embedding some examples on popsight.com slash weird, so. Right. So, like, that's just like the side fun fact that if you're not inspired enough by the jellyfish that can live forever, that you can also get inspired by the man singing about them because it truly is one of the most wonderful things ever. Wow.

I love that. It's how inspiring that this animal is just vibing and thriving forever. What I picture in my head is kind of like the vampires from Twilight where if you leave them alone, they'll live forever, but like if you you know, leave them or something.

You can still like stabby stab them or Yeah, because it's like, well, even if you stabby stab them, it's just like, if you get them to the brink of death, then they'll do this. They'll be like, okay, bye, I'm becoming a baby again. So if you ever. find yourself, you know, locked in a life or death battle with one of these jellyfish, like, finish the job, man. I also, since the beginning of this, when you said they're the size of a pinky

nail, I have just been staring at my pinky nail going, oh, my gosh, they are super cute. And they have like, they're called the Scarlet Medusa sometimes. They have this little red spot inside. Like, they're itty-bitty tiny, tiny, so you can barely see them. But they're like little glowy red rubies of everlasting life. And then they turn into little meatballs. And then they turn into a meatball. Little meatballs of everlasting life. And then there's hundreds of them.

And so these guys are kind of an invasive species, not unlike the hippo, but much smaller. Much smaller. Because they literally live, they can live forever. And each one of them can reproduce into hundreds of clones of itself. And it's so tiny that it ends up in ship ballast. water. So now they're like all over the place. Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's just everlasting life all around us. Just so inspirational, truly. All right. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Oh, man. It's hard. Yeah. A lot of good stuff this week,

for sure. Even more great stuff in the latest issue of popular science on newsstands right now. Find yours. Magfinder.com. I'm going to say the hippos. Yeah, I'm partial to the hippos, I must say. Who, hippos. Okay, great. I'll take it. Cocaine hippos for the win. And now I will never stop picturing them as being sculpted out of actual cocaine.

You're welcome. You forgot to say thank you. Weirdos, thank you so much for listening to the first half of season four of the weirdest thing I learned this week. Reminder that we are taking a few months off just so that we have plenty of time to craft a wonderful second half of season four for you. We will be in touch with any updates or special bonus content we're able to share. In the meantime, follow us at Weirdest underscore Thing on Twitter and join our super secret awesome Facebook group, which is not very secret. Actually, you just have to search Weirdest Thing on Facebook to find it. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you soon.

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