The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Ketchup Consistency Standards, Implanting Memories, People Inside of Sperm

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the standards and grading of ketchup to the idea that people were fully-formed inside of sperm before being born. 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 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/CorinneIOZO Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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

Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove's seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. 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. Popular science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other 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 Fulman. I'm Sarah Trowdash. And I'm Corinna I Osio.

So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we each give a little teaser for a fact or Wikipedia spiral or Twitter thread that we can. came across over the course of reporting and otherwise living our best dang lives over the last week or so. And we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about right away. Once we've all had a turn to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and vote on what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. And as always, if you have strong opinions about which story was the best, we would love to hear about it on Twitter at Weirdest underscore thing. Grin, since it's your first time on the show, why don't you give us your teaser first? So this is something I've been holding on to for a while, but it's a turn of the 20th century condiment war.

A war. Intriguing. It's tasty. It's tasty. Or is it? Maybe that's the war. You need to find out. Oh, God.

She's so good at teasers, we shouldn't have invited her on. So Sarah, what's yours? My fact is that 73% of Americans say that they are a remember. Remember watching the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center live on 9-11, even though that footage did not actually air until later the next day? Interesting. It's a little sad. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like it's not as happy as condiments, but it is interesting. All right. My teaser is that there was a time when scientists thought that living things existed, curled up, fully formed and teeny tiny, inside sperm. Little homunculi. Just little men inside the sperm. Little dudes.

Or eggs. There was a big debate. This one is a war too. Oh, oh, God. It's a battle battle. Oh, God. I think I want to hear about condiments first. Yeah, same.

Okay. Like I said, this is a fact that I've been holding on to for a while. I play in a regular trivia game on Wednesdays. About a year ago, one of the hosts posed a question to us that was a discontembourg description from a USDA white paper, and we had to tell him what the clue was describing. And it turned out that he had pulled a piece of information from a very extensive set of documents that lay out the methods and mechanisms by which you distinguish grade A catchup, the artist formerly known as fancy ketchup, grade B ketchup, grade C ketchup, and substandard ketchup.

Oh, God. Wow. Substandard ketchup. Such an indictment. It really is. So I started going down the rabbit hole of what exactly goes into making these determinations about different kinds of ketchup. Everything gets assessed out of 100 points, and the scores are broken down evenly between

color, consistency, absence of defects, and flavor. So grade A ketchup has a minimum score of 85 points out of 100 based on those four factors, but also has a minimum of 1 3rd or 33% total solids in the mixture. I just have to point out that I am tickled about their assessment of flavor because flavor obviously is an extremely subjective thing and they get a little bit philosophical in their guidance to people about how they assess the flavor of ketchup. Quote, first impressions are often the best impressions. Repeated taste testing for flavor may not be as reliable as initial impression. Wow. So taste your ketchup once.

Never again. it will be wow. So grade A catch up has a very clean flavor. They say it has a nice smooth finish, which is that it doesn't have any kind of metallic aftertastes and things like that. Bad flavor tastes scorch or bitter or overly astringent. And I should say that if you get a low score in flavor, you get downgraded immediately.

If you get low scores in flavor, low scores in consistency, you get downgraded immediately. You cannot possibly be the grade A fancy ketchup. They will not allow it. It's like flunking the parallel parking on your driver's test. Like, sorry, it's not going to work out for you. What tickles me the most about all of this are the measurements of consistency, which they use a tool called a Bostwick consistometer.

Whoa. And you can really just addometer to any word, huh? You sure can. what a Bostwick consistometer is is a tiny little ramp with centimeter marks on it. And what you do, oh my God, sorry, I won't interrupt. I'm sorry. I'm so excited. So you take your ketchup sample or whatever thing that you're trying to establish the consistency of, and you put a little bit of it in a trapped well at the top. And then you lift a little door and you start a stopwatch for 30 seconds and you see how far,

The ketchup moves down this ramp. This is incredible. In 30 seconds. This is incredible. And I'm pretty sure that they also used to do this in laboratory tests for phlegm taken from patient's lungs, which I know because my grandfather was like a, he did research on phleg. And my father was an intern in that lab. And he watched phlegm roll down tiny little ramps to see how viscous it was. Yep.

Wow. Yeah. A little ketchup door. Like watching the phlegm roll down. So is there a proper viscosity? There is a proper viscosity. Grade A and B. We'll move between three and seven centimeters in 30 seconds.

So that's fancy ketchup and U.S. standard ketchup. Hold on. Because they got rid of the actual nomenclature. So it's fancy, extra standard, standard, and substandard. Extra standard. That just sounds like that's nonsense. That's like extra average. Well, so these are from the 1953

documentation in the 1991-92 documentation, which is what we're current ketchup standards are. We don't have these words. It's just A, B, C, and fail. Yeah, because they were stupid. There's no more fancy ketchup. Well, there is fancy ketchup, but you just can only call it that in your heart.

And I do. Grade C ketchup will slide further. It'll go up to 10 centimeters, but also if it goes less than 2 centimeters, that is also bad. that is too firm of a ketchup. So this isn't even where I went down the rabbit hole. I went down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out who the heck actually established

what the proper consistency of ketchup should be. Like, could this be based on anything? And that is how I came upon the Great Condiment War. Something called the Pure Food Act was passed in 1906. And the big push behind this was a guy named Harvey Wiley, who was the commissioner of the FDA and would later go on to work at places like the Good Housekeeping Institute. And his beef was about a preservative that was in ketchup, but a bunch of other stuff, but mainly ketchup because we're Americans and we eat a lot of ketchup. So he had a problem with a preservative called sodium benzodia-benzoate, which is still in food now. but he did his own independent studies

where he had 10 people and over the course of a month gave them increasingly higher and higher levels of sodium benz-o-ate and a lot of these people got really intestinally violently ill. However, the amount that he was giving them, I couldn't quite figure out the math

but it seemed like gallons of ketchup a day. Yum. So, and at the time, it was sort of just jockeying back and forth of should we have this, shouldn't we have this? There was the ketchup people on one side saying we need it for shelf stability and we're never going to be able to move anything. And then the regulatory bodies saying, but it's bad for you and these are chemicals and this is terrible and all of our food should be pure. This all sounds extremely familiar to modern life.

Wiley got a ketchup manufacturer on his side, a guy named Charles Loudon. And Charles Loudon started working with chemists at the FDA to do a study of all different kinds of. of ketchup to figure out if the sodium benzoyate was safe and if it was possible to create preservative free ketchup despite what big ketchup was telling everyone. And all the while this is happening, there's a couple named Averill and Catherine Bidding, and they are doing this exhaustive study to try to figure out what the best way to preserve ketchup is. They tested in their home and their laboratory 1,600 different bottles of ketchup.

Oh my God. Yes. How were there even that many? Ketchup was, there were hundreds of independent companies producing ketchup around the turn of the 20th century. Ketchup was big, big business before, you know, ketchup consolidation or whatever evil term you would want to use. Big ketchup. Big ketchup. Yes.

What they found was uping the vinegar content and the sugar content slightly was just as, if not more effective than the chemical preservative. Heinz bought into this. They adjusted their recipe. A bunch of other people eventually started to do the same. And the other thing that they discovered was that the consistency of the ketchup was also somehow related to its shelf life. But the consistency that they found was somewhere in the neighborhood of what we have now. And this started to inform a lot of the recipes or solidify the recipes, the preservative free recipes that people were already using. So the Heinz ketchup recipe, that's on shelves now has no preservatives in it. It just has a slightly higher proportion of vinegar and sugar. That's smart. I mean, it makes sense. I mean, we would pickle things so that you can,

so that they are preserved. Hmm. Wow. But anyway, there's, yeah, and there's still sodium benzodia in things. It's one-tenth of one percent by volume is what's allowed. It's in soft drinks and juices. And again, you would have to consume a tremendous amount of any of it for it to be a worry. But we have, we have to, ketchup. Thank God. Thank everything that is holy. I love ketchup. Did you know that ketchup is a non-Newtonian fluid and that that is why it is so difficult to get like when you have one of those glass jars of ketchup and you bang on the bottom and then all of a sudden it all comes out.

It's because it's a non-Newtonian fluid. Wow. I love food definitions. It's really incredible because we will quantify anything. I found a definition for, to say that one thing. To say that one thing condiment in my favorite paper the psychology of condiments. Do you want to hear what it is? I've never heard of this paper. I really do. I know. It's totally new information.

Shout out to Teresa, though, who I saw on Twitter, went and actually looked up the psychology of condiments after I mentioned it the first time. I'm just so happy to spread the gospel of the psychology of condiments. God, thank you, Teresa. Love you. Okay. I'm curious what you guys think of this condiment definition. It says, as its etymology suggests, a condiment must have a shodemes.

shelf life, which until recently means it was vinegar, salt, or sugar-based. Also, it must be at least slightly more complicated and moisture than a seasoning. So you cannot sprinkle a condiment, but you can sprinkle a seasoning. Right. So does that mean sprinkles are a seasoning? I would argue that sprinkles are not a seasoning because they do not add flavor. They add texture. I think seasoning has to have flavor. I just love that it has to be more complicated and And moisture. And I think that makes sense. I agree with his definition of condiment. We could get into something pretty hairy doing like a Venn diagram of condiments and sauces. Like relish is a condiment but not a sauce.

Oh, there is relish guidance in the pickle documentation. It's amazing. Wow. Do you have anything for us about pickles? Oh, do I ever have something? Are there fancy pickles? So there are midget pickles, which I did not know. It is. Do they still call it that? They do. Wow. This is the current. Pickle grades and standards guidance. Wow. Three quarters of an inch or smaller.

Smaller than a baby gherkin. Smaller than a baby gherkin. I'm not sure why that's such a funny sentence. Faster than a speeding bullets. Smaller than a baby gherkins. Oh my God. Within there, right? So there's all kinds of things naturally, similarly to ketchup.

There are things that can get you immediately downgraded in terms of pickles. And one of them is too much bend in a pickle. and I submit to the group this picture of a bendy pickle, hit the angle from... Listeners, it is a very bendy pickle. The angle from the closest right angle is 60 degrees or more, which is a no-no. It has to be under 60.

That pickles got some bent. You can see these sad bendy pickles for yourself on popsye.com. They're adorable. That top one looks a little bit like a pepper. Hmm. A pickled pepper? Oh, God. I think we have exhausted all of the condominable.

knowledge that we can. So far from that, but we're just... We have to limit. Sarah and Corinne literally reading both of their favorite condiment papers word for word. I'm going to go look up the white papers. I'm so excited.

So we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with more weird facts. Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers.

We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. Okay, you guys should definitely join the Facebook group because I have to say the weird facts in there are weird. It is as advertised. We are loving it. Please join and be weirdos with us. It is so good. It has brightened my whole Facebook news feed, which is just mostly garbage.

and then I scroll past and I'm like, wow, that's interesting and it's always from that group. Amazing. Please join us. It will brighten your news feed too. Speaking of brightening our days, I think Sarah has a fact that has to do with repressed memory in 9-11. I promise this is going to get happier and more interesting.

So my fact is that 73% of Americans have like a very distinct memory of watching the footage of the first plane hit live. like I was standing in my kitchen, I was standing at work, and I remember seeing the first plane hit. But that footage did not air on the first day because the only footage of it is, I think, maybe only from one guy who happened to have a video camera handy. And there was footage of the second plane, obviously. Exactly.

And that's when everybody was going to the TV. Yeah. So the second plane is actually what everyone is remembering, but there's this really widespread fake memory that everyone just shares. Using national tragedies is unfortunately a way that these researchers often get to do studies because you have a large number of people who are all exposed to the same event at the same time, and then you can go and follow up. So there were actually a few researchers at NYU who decided I felt like, you know,

New York was just such a tragic place to be after 9-11. and the university was mostly shut down, but they were trying to sort of find a way to feel like they were contributing to something. And so since they were memory researchers, they started studying people's memories of 9-11, so they interviewed people just a week after the attacks had happened, and then they followed up a year after that,

and then three years after the event to see how much people could remember. So they found that, like, the facts of actually what happened that day, mostly people get pretty much right. But people forget their individual, circumstances to like where you were in particular when you saw it or who you were with. And especially what you felt like, like people were only 40% accurate or remembering their own feelings in the moment, which I think is wild.

So this is like in line with a lot of studies on implanting memories. Like there's very famous ones about showing people video footage of like a fake accident where a car runs, like you see like a red car and it comes up and it knocks down a pedestrian who's in the crosswalk and there's a stop sign. And then they stopped the video and the scientist asked you like, was there another car passing the red car while it was stopped at the yield sign? And it wasn't a yield sign. But if you say the yield sign, people revise their memory and say that it, in fact,

it was a yield sign, not a stop sign. But they revised the memory because every time you recall a memory, you can edit it a little bit. So the misremembering of 9-11 is probably a result of people talking about where they were. Like it's so common to compare where you were and what you were feeling. And every time you talk about it, you edit it a little bit. And so it's very easy to start misremembering. And if someone else who you're with says,

oh, I remember watching the first plane hit live, maybe you didn't remember that. Maybe you even actively thought, I don't think that's right. But you edit a little bit. And the next time you recall it just becomes part of the memory. So instead of a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's a self-fulfilling legacy? Yes. Well done. And Corinne looks so proud of herself.

I'm very proud of myself. But yeah, I mean, there's like a whole bunch of other studies like this. There's one where people were given four written accounts, three of which were actual memories that they had, like, submitted. And one of which was a false memory about how they got lost in a mall as a kid. and like a third of subjects immediately afterwards said, oh yeah, they remembered getting lost at them all, even though that was a completely fake thing that they just read about themselves

and then totally revised their own memory to say, yes, I was lost at a mall when I was a child. This is why eyewitness testimony is not admissible in a lot of courts anymore. Right. Like 73% of the convictions that I got overturned by the Innocence Project had been based on eyewitness accounts, but it's totally unreliable. And I mean, quite famously, therapists have accidentally given their patients' memories of, like, really traumatic abuse in some cases.

Are we going to talk about the satanic ritual abuse, moral panic? I think you're going to tell us more, Rachel. Why do I know that? But satanic ritual abuse is considered a moral panic, like, on the order of, like, the Salem witch trials. and what happened is that in 1980, there was this book called Michelle Remembers. I think it was by Michelle Smith and her husband, who was a psychiatrist of some kind, or a psychoanalyst. His name was Lawrence Pazder, and it was a huge hit, and it was supposed to be an autobiography about her coming to remember all of these repressed, traumatic situations she'd been in as a child, and not just that she had been abused, but that it had been part of, like, a satanic ritual and that actually there was this huge conspiracy of satanic child abuse going on

all around the country. So this book was really popular. It was also kind of like a period in psychotherapy when using hypnosis to treat trauma and to treat just like stuff in general. I remember hearing once about this. There was a famous case of like a nurse sometime in the 1980s or 90s who went to see a therapist and they ended up doing hypnosis therapy and convincing her that she had been part of this like satanic ritual abuse. And when you look at the timeline of stuff that she says happen, it does not line up. Like she basically conflated the death of a sibling, a house fire, and some other traumatic event as having happened as part of this like cult her parents were in. But all of those things happened before.

she was born. Like there was a house fire before she was born that she'd heard about later. She'd had a sibling who died before she was born and heard about it later. So it was just verifiably false, but it completely derailed her life and she like became estranged from her family and her story was very sad. And but the thing is that it wasn't just a few cases in the 80s and 90s, largely because of this book, Michelle remembers, there was this wave of people becoming convinced that this stuff was happening everywhere. So it was a combination of mass hysteria and a psychiatrist using hypnosis. And given how fragile memory is, as you were saying, Sarah,

like it stands to reason. It is really easy to manipulate when someone is in a suggestible state. And now, you know, we don't use resurfaced memories in court because there were all of these cases, including, like, there was a really famous one, the McMartin preschool trial, where two people from a preschool were, it was like one of the most expensive trials in history, and it was this completely fabricated hysteria about them performing satanic ritual abuse on the children. And like 100 preschools around the country ended up having similar cases because people were seeing this stuff

on the news and wiggin out. And of course, child abuse is real and serious and happens in a lot of places, but it was this weird moment where because people were becoming more aware of it and because there were these horrifying stories in the news and because a bunch of psychiatric professionals were really into hypnotizing, traumatized people, suddenly it just became this like horrible meme and it didn't die down until the 90s really. And now it's, you know, there have been like a lot of very critical looks at the cases. and books that were written at the time, and it was all, like, totally made up,

which really freaks me out. Yeah, the fragility of memory is really alarming, and I think about it a lot in the context of technology, particularly virtual reality, because once you're in this immersive place, like you feel like you are present someplace other than where your body physically is, you researchers have started to find that you,

will become apt to remember things that happen in the virtual environment as if they happened in real life. And early on, they were discovering that this happened with children, but there's some evidence that it's beginning to really happen with adults. There was a study that I read by this one researcher a few years ago where in a virtual environment, he had people walk into the redwood forest and then use a haptic controller and saw down a redwood tree.

And that experience imprinted on them in such a way that when they, were then, like, browsing the paper products aisle at the supermarket, were more apt to make more ecologically, resourcefully conservative decisions because he had imprinted on them feeling terrible about destroying a tree. Whoa. Yeah. That's both terrifying and incredibly helpful. It's very powerful, but, you know, evil hands.

Yeah. That's wild. On a happier note, there's a huge. group of people who remember a character on the 90s cartoon Street Sharks that never existed. Yes. I love this story. This is such a story. Hat tip to Jason, our producer, who sent me this article because it's a friend of yours, right? Went to college with it. This is on geek.com, right? On geek.com, Jordan Minor wrote just an incredible story about how there used to be like a wiki sort of site called TV Tome, and there

was a section of it devoted to Street Sharks, which is a 90s cartoon that you almost certainly do not remember because apparently it was terrible. But Jordan just started editing the wiki and adding in just little plot lines featuring a female shark named Roxy and like entire episodes and whole like long plot lines. And then when TV to him got merged into TV.com in 2005, then it just all that information migrated over and now it was in two locations on the internet. So it has to be true. and then when he revealed like

this is wrong I made all of this up people were like no this is real I remember Roxy I remember these shows you cannot tell me this is a lie it's like okay but it is verifiably a lie so there's this thing on the internet where most people remember

the children's book being spelled barrenstein bears because that's how it was spelled except apparently now someone's tried to retcon it and it's barren stain bears and the joke is that some of us are from a parallel universe where it was Steen. I bet things are going really well back there where I come from. Yeah.

I want to go back to that world. I bet it's the better place. I remember so much about keeping my room clean, listening to my parents. Those Baranstein bears, not the Stain-S-Stine. I don't know. I can't even say it. I can't even conceive of how you're supposed to say it. It's S-T-A-I-N instead of E-I-N.

Berenstain. So basically, Can we believe anything we remember? No. It's all wrong. Your memory is garbage. There's nothing you can even do about it. That's the worst part.

There's like no, especially if it's just like your personal memory, you have no way to verify whether it's true or not. Everything you know is a lie. Well, this is sunny. Thanks, Sarah. That's great. I'm going to think about that. Next time it'll be happier.

All right. We'll take another quick break to think about how much of a bummer that story was, Sarah. Thank you. And then we'll be right back. You're so welcome. It's Pride Month. celebrate with our limited edition Science Pride T-shirts

featuring a rainbow popular science logo. All profits go to Out in STEM, an organization that empowers the LGBTQ community in science, tech, engineering, and math. Get yours now at popsy.com and share on social media with hashtag sci-pride. That's S-C-I-Pride. Wearing this CyPride shirt again

because it is Pride Month and I am proud. As you should be. Yay. All right. Speaking of pride and hubris, I was a presenter at this event that was a funeral for defunct scientific theories at caveat, this really cool space in NYC that does science-themed and comedic events. And I gave a eulogy for pre-formationism, which is the idea that every living thing just exists all teeny tiny inside sperm or eggs.

It sounds pretty wild to think that there's little men inside sperms. But the way I put it at caveat was that it's like your uncle who sits at the table at Thanksgiving and you're like, all your opinions are bad. It's really embarrassing. But then someone's like, but for the time he's from, he actually is being very progressive. Give your uncle some credit. That's how I feel about pre-formationism. This was in the 1660s and 70s.

And around that time, people were still talking about spontaneous generation. Like literally people thought that if you put a pile of dirty rags in a corner, a mouse would be born of the rags. These are like the meats make maggots people. Yeah, exactly. And like rotting meats literally created maggots. That was spontaneous generation. And they had gotten away from thinking everything was spontaneously generated. I mean, they were like, clearly humans, you know, must come from something better.

But simple organisms like maggots, they were still talking about spontaneous generation. And even humans, people are talking about epigenesis, which sounds a lot like epigenetics, which is obviously a real modern thing. But the idea then was that male and female sexual fluids had to combine to make a person, which, not wrong. But they thought they just kind of congealed. Like old blue. Like epoxy style, like came together.

Like the Terminator. Right. Like the Terminator. They were so ahead of their time. The reason that idea was kind of going out of vogue in the 17th century is that people worried that it required the intervention of a higher power. Like something had to, because they am the sex goop into human flesh. Oh my God, there's such a wonderful like Batman graphic in my head right now.

Oh, my God. And people were rational in that time. And they were like, we don't need no stinking higher power to turn our sexual fluids into humans. They can gel on their own. Right. So preformationism was based on some like very logical observations of metamorphosing insects and growing chicken eggs. So basically they were looking at eggs and being like, okay, so there are fully formed living things in here. You can look and see a chick with all of the organs that we'll have as an adult, just small and not fully grown.

So why not humans? Also, you know, maybe there are eggs inside us. Again, they were not wrong. So close. They were very close there. And so the idea was that when life was created by whatever, that was also up for debate, future generations were all tucked inside each ovum, like Russian nesting doll style. What?

So you had your like proto-human and inside her ovaries were the eggs of all her future offspring and inside their hostings. Wait, wait, wait. So we have always existed as individual things. We saw the dawn of time from the gonads of our ancestors. Oh my God. The Big Bang was weird. So again, in many ways like crazy.

In other ways, not as wild as. other thoughts of the day. And preformationism, in many ways, kind of seems a little progressive because it's got like that pro-oven bent. It's like all those eggs beget life. But unfortunately, that was only because they had literally seen eggs,

like observable eggs out in the world that you didn't need microscopes to look at. At that time, semen was thought to kind of trigger some kind of growth. Like fertilizer. Right. Any sperm that had been observed using magnification that was available was thought to be some kind of parasitic worm.

Oh. Also not wrong. I mean, yeah, a little bit. If all you can see when you look at this bodily fluid is some vague wriggling, like that seems pretty fair. But then Anton Lovindhook, who was one of the great fathers of early microscopy, he saw some microbes wriggling around and some human sperm wriggling around. And he was like, yo, these animal cules, which is what he called anything he looked at on... Animalcules. Anything that moved under his microscope.

He's like, these could totally be the delivery system for these preformed humans we've been talking about for the past few decades. Somebody at caveat came up and was like, sorry, where did he get the semen? And I said, oh, it was almost certainly his own. I tried to track down the answer to this. And unclear, because there were a couple different things going on. there was this research assistant named Johann Haum, who announced when he arrived at the lab that he had observed tiny living creatures animated due to their tales

in a small quantity of semen from a man suffering from gonorrhea. Now, naturally, I think the thought was that they were causing the gonorrhea because there was stuff wriggling in the semen. And Levin Hook wanted to see for himself. Conveniently, the young man had brought the remainder of the semen in a flask, so they were able to observe. But a lot of reports will say that actually the first time Lou and Hook looked at semen,

it was his own taken from his wife after they had sex, which seems like you could have skipped a step there. Yeah. And less scientific than just, you know. Right. But what could possibly be inside a vagina that would... Right, of course. There's nothing in there.

They're just pristine. We're just awaiting. Yeah. that we are. I mean, really the whole concept of spermism as it pertained to preformationism as opposed to ovism was like, where does life come from? Oh, maybe men just literally shoot it straight out their d-de- that was the theory. Just men gun in for the uterus, tiny men. And so I think that both of these things are true.

I think that what happened is that Levin Hook looked at Homs gonorrhea semen and was fascinated. And then when he started writing this up and sending it to various journals and being like, if you are, he literally said like, if you are too disgusted by this, you need not print it. And they were all like, no, this is the most important work we've ever seen. But people wanted to know what healthy semen look like. And I think then that's when he went and had sex with his wife. Imagine being his wife. She was just helping the science get done. I know that you want to lie here in bed, but I just need to scrape a little sample.

Yeah. Can you just move a little to the left? Scoot down. So, yeah. So preformationalism in my eyes really goes downhill after our buddy Anton discovers sperm. and at that point it's decided that they are clearly the perfect delivery

product. They were like, oh, you know what? The one hole in preformationism was thinking that the ladies had to do it. One more thing about preformationism before we talk about its demise. Some spermists were like, okay, so if every sperm

has a little man in it, what happens to all the little men? Oh no. They must die. But panspurism was the idea that maybe sperm from air and ejaculations simply scattered onto the wind. What? Where did they go? To seek its fortune and take hold to make life wherever it found a suitable host.

So what? They thought sperm were flying around in the air. It's like when you go off a dandelion. Oh, my God. What did they think was happening when the sperm were. scattering in the wind that there was like spontaneous conception? Did they think that the sperm or did they have other natural things in them and that's how we have

trees and rocks and dogs and stuff? See I think that would be so interesting if just the tiny men became like a tree like an oak tree in the park. Yeah I think there was a little bit of that and also I think it was just kind of a like they get a fair shake. Okay. They got their chance. They can go off and seek seek better pastures, so you didn't have to worry too much. How did pre-formationism end? Microscopes got better, and cell theory happened. We were able to see cells.

The cell theory, we were like, oh, things just, that is how the sex goop congeals to make human flesh. Because there are cells in there. So it all comes back around RIP pre-formationism. Wow. Wow. This was an incredible trip. Yeah.

I'm really flashing back. I took it a whole developmental biology class in college, and there are so, so many drawings of just like little homunculi hanging out inside the sperm. Love the little homunculi. Yeah, they're just like all curled up in there. Cozy. It's adorable. For tens of thousands of years.

Yeah, before they spread on the wind. I never learned that part. They should teach that in developmental biology. It's also like in the 21st century, it's like hard to know how. how much people, like how much stock people put in the particular interpretations of preformationism. Like, preformationism was definitely widely accepted as fact. But how many people really believed that your, the results of your ejaculate were carried off on the wind and became trees? All we know is that someone wrote it down, damn it.

And it's in the record. I hope a lot of people believed it. Because that's just so funny. I think a lot of people probably did believe it. I think men were quite floored by the discovery of their sex cells. The tiny men inside them. I think they felt real psyched about it. The tiny men inside them.

All right. Well, I think it's about time for us to decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week is. I am going to go with Corinz because that is the thing I knew. least about when we started. And now I know a lot about condiment grading. Yeah, I agree. The condiment knowledge was definitely the most interesting. And things I will be able to bring up at dinner parties in the future.

And every time you have French fries. I'm sorry, are you not going to bring up semen at your next dinner party? The people I hang out with have already heard about the tiny men inside the sperm. Come on. No, I mean, I was clearly tickled by the condiment thing. But just the image is conjured by the tiny Russian dolls of existence is what's holding a special place in my heart. right now. It's all beautiful. I appreciate your votes, but I give mine to Rachel. Oh, thank you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like the show, please tell your friends, and please rate and review us on iTunes. You can buy our merch, including limited edition, Cy pride t-shirts and the weirdest thing I learned this week, totebags at popside.threadlist.com. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden. Our editor is Jason Letterman. 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. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omni-Shade technology. is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin.

The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.