The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Labor-Inducing Salad, White Hair Overnight, Coyotes Vs. Cats

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a salad that makes pregnant people have their babies to hair going white overnight. 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!  Click here to buy tickets for Weirdest Thing Live on June 14th!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy --- 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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Hey, weirdos. Before we get to the show, I just wanted to remind you that we have a live show this Friday, June 14th, at caveat in New York City. Tickets are on sale, obviously, because it's this Friday. And we would really love it if you were there. In case you're not familiar with our live shows, it's just like the podcast, except you get two episodes at one. and we're there in person being weird with you. We also try to have some fun with trivia and drinking games, and there are prizes, and it's just great. There are also visual aids, which is one thing that you will never actually get on the podcast, so worth 12 bucks in my opinion.

And caveat has delicious drinks of all sorts, so it's a great place to spend a weird and nerdy Friday night in the city. As I've probably mentioned a few times before, our last two shows totally sold out. They were standing room only, packed house, line out the door. So you want to get your tickets ASAP. Make sure to check the show description or popsai.com slash weird or Google Popsi, weirdest thing, caveat. You can find it. You're very smart. Okay.

So please get your tickets. It would be super weird to do the show without you. But I also want to mention one other thing. I want to thank our very first weirdest thing supporter. So we didn't actually know that you could do this. But apparently on the anchor app, you can go into the weirdest thing. page and pledged to support our show with a monthly donation. And Karen Patty found this feature before we did.

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I love that restaurant. I heard Madonna went into labor there. And like, was it about the salad restaurant? Wow, we have to get to the bottom of that. 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 Eleanor Cummins. I'm Jake Biddle. So first off, Jake, welcome to the show. Jake, whose new to weirdest thing is not new to us. He's one of Popsize's favorite fact checkers, which makes him a perfect guest for this show. You deal in facts, sir.

Yes, I do. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of story or fact that we learned in the course. of reading, writing, reporting, and then 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. Eleanor, why don't you start with your tease? I would like to talk about hair turning white overnight and whether it's possible. Doesn't that happen in the book we're reading for book club? Oh, yes, it does, indeed. It's a very common literary trope, but

it seems like it may be medically possible. Wow. Okay. My tease is that urban coyotes eat more cats than you might expect. Uh-oh. Jake, what's your tease? My tease is that the same guy who invented barbecue chicken pizza also invented a salad that was reported to induce labor and overdue pregnant women. Oh.

Wow. Cool. Wow. Eleanor, why don't you start with white hair? Sure. A shocking story. Ooh, a shock of white hair. Yes. So I have a newsletter that I do on the side about death and design called the Pine Overcoat, and I was working on a story about my trip to India, specifically about visiting the Taj Mahal.

And the Taj Mahal has a great story. It's not what I want to talk about per se, but I'll give you a quick overview. In 1631, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's wife, Mumtaz Mahal, dies in childbirth. And grieving, he decides to build her the greatest tomb the world has ever ever. known, and that's the Taj Mahal. But the weirdest thing about the story is that, according to legend, Shah Jahan, who was only 39 or 40 at the time that Mumtaz died, had his hair turned white from grief basically overnight. And so by the time he emerges back into court life full two years later, that whole time he's just been away, being sad and processing the loss, he's gone prematurely

gray. And I wanted to know if that was possible. So synergistically, my mom, Mom actually sent me a link to a great article in the Atlantic from 2016 about the phenomenon of what's called Kennedy's Sabita or overnight hair whitening. And so the author, Ann Jolis, is in Dagestan at the time. And she's like writing this story about how a bunch of gunfire goes off and she instinctively hides under her bed because she thinks she's going to die. And everything's fine. It seems like it was maybe like a wedding. Like it was celebratory gunfire. I had something really similar happen with impromptu fireworks in my neighborhood last night.

So I understand. Sure. It's a completely a normal response to a very loud noise. And so she's like hiding under her bed and then she emerges. And the next day she's looking at herself in the mirror and she's like, my mustache hairs have gone totally white. How is this possible? And so she's, you know, she's describing them. They're like pure, pure white down to the root. And they're still that way three years later as she's actually writing this story. Wow. And so what happened to her is never really resolved. Candidie Sabita is a very contested phenomenon. So the doctors she talked to are like trying to suggest all of the of these other things that it could be. One of them is like insistent that her hair must have just fallen out because that is this autoimmune response to stress called alopecia Ariata, which is totally possible. Like you're, you just get rid of your hair in a time of stress. But she's like, my dude, I can see the hairs there's still there and they are white. And so this whole experience like sets her on an odyssey of the historical accounts of overnight whitening and they are truly wild. Two of the ones that stand out to me from the story are

Marie Antoinette, who actually this syndrome is colloquially named after her. It's called like Marie Antoinette syndrome, as well as Mary Queen of Scots. So apparently before both of their beheadings, their hair turned white prematurely from stress, despite the fact that they were both pretty young when they died. Marie Antoinette was 37 when she died and admittedly always a very, very light blonde, as we know from the Sophia Coppola film. Mary, meanwhile, was 44 and a redhead, and both of them, like, basically revealed that their hair had gone totally white from the pressures of waiting to have their heads cut off, which seems reasonable to me. But a more recent case that really blew my mind was in 1902, the British Medical Journal published

a case study on a 22-year-old woman who witnessed someone being murdered and then experienced a menorrhea, which rate where you stopped menstruating. And wait for it, half of her pubic hairs turned white, while the other half remained black, like straight down the middle, Cruella DeVille-style pubes. Whoa. This was in the British Medical Journal in 1902. I'm surprised they could even discuss it. It was so bold of them. It was undeniable. So you have to read this Atlantic

story, basically. But I was going back through some of the other history around this, and it seems like this phenomenon goes really far back in sort of recorded history. Kennedy's Sabita appears in the Talmud, which was written in 83 AD, and then, you know, just all of these accounts throughout history. But at the same

time that people love to talk about it, people also love to say it's not possible. There's something like really fantastical and surreal about the whole thing. It sounds like a literary embellishment, like a way to turn mundane grief into something on the order of legend. Or in the book, Gingerbread, mundane celiac disease. Yes, absolutely. It's so funny that you thought of that immediately because my first thought when I was thinking about people with gray hair with Stacey Clinton from what not to wear and how she has that one stripe. She does have that fantastic gray stripe.

Iconic. This is like a tangent, but there literally is an article in the in JAMA Dermatology. That's called streaks of white hair in popular culture. And it argues that an acquired white streak usually signifies something momentous in the character's history, exposure to magic, a turn to evil or goodness, or most often physical or psychological trauma. Wow. So, Daisy Clinton, I hope you're okay. But as I was saying, you know, it's really highly contested because it's so cinematic. And so there's the story of Henry III of Navarre, which is a part of Spain. He later becomes a king of France, whatever. And reportedly, his hair suddenly turned white on the eve of the St. Bar Talamu's massacre in 1572. And there's an entire research paper in the International Journal of

Trichology that's just set on disputing this. They're like, this isn't possible. And basically what it comes down to is that same question, Angola's face, which is like, what is the mechanism that you could possibly ascribe, like, overnight whitening to? And so the researchers in this, Henry, the third of Navarre paper, were saying that they think that Kennedy's Sabita is a phenomenon of diffuse alopecia ariata, which is something that Angelus was also told, which is basically the idea here is that when you have salt and pepper hair already, like all of the pepper falls out. So like all of like your dark hair disappears. And so then you have the impression that you've had overnight whitening.

The thing about that, though, is that, you know, if you didn't have salt and pepper hair, then you would just be bald. And so they were saying that Henry III, who was 19 years old on the eve of this massacre, probably didn't have any gray hair at that point in his life. So he would have just been bald if this had really had. happened to him and like that's their definitive proof. That seems kind of backwards to be like this is the best mechanism we can come up with and since it wouldn't explain this guy, it means it didn't happen.

Thank you. I agree. I'm very disappointed in this Journal of Trichology article. So obviously I kept going down this rabbit hole because they could not stop me. And the reason that people try to argue that Candidia Sibita is actually just diffuse alopecia Ariata is because there's this fundamental problem. there are no living cells in human hair. It is dead stuff on your body.

And so... It's lovely. I'm just, you know, here to bring great morbid facts. Yeah, so your hair's dead. And that means that it can't really be affected by any sort of internal mechanisms, right, at that point. Like, you can basically, like, sloth it off, or you can dye it, you can braid it. But you can't change its color from the inside. Yeah, I'm just coming up with...

Red dyed braided hair. You know, just make it up with you. You can balliage it as our producer, Jess Bodie has. Lots of options. But you can't probably just, like, force it to change color with will. And so the idea then is that for your hair to turn white, you have to have something that affects the melanocytes in the follicle itself and basically just causes them to stop producing pigment. And that is something that we have had a lot of trouble validating, like that that can happen

quickly or randomly or, you know, because of stress. Even patients on this drug called Pasopanab, one of the side effects is premature graying. And even for them, it takes a really long time of being on the drug for their hair to actually start changing color. Like, it just, it doesn't seem to happen quickly. And so, you know, I am no follicle expert. I have hair, but that's all I know about it. But it seems to me like there are kind of a few things going on here.

One being that it probably is possible, though extremely rare, for a lot of your hair to turn white really quickly. And we just don't have a great explanation for how it's happening. And then similarly, that, you know, probably a lot of people really do go prematurely gray from, like, stress. Like, I think we all know someone who has experienced something like that. And so, yeah, it just seems like then people, you know, embellish it and say that it's happening overnight, when really it is just maybe like a sort of compressed experience. Right. Maybe it becomes noticeable to you. Right. Overnight as so many things do. So many things do. do, which brings me back to the Taj Mahal. So Shahjahan almost definitely didn't go gray overnight

after his wife died, as we've learned. And it's not 100% reliable that he even went gray over his two years of morning. But the structure he built, the Taj Mahal definitely has some color constancy issues. It's made of white marble, but because of air pollution, it's always turning gray. And so workers have to periodically scrub the whole thing down so that it can still look good in photos. So there's at least one overnight graying mechanism we understand. Oh, wow. Thank you. That was deep, Eleanor. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more facts.

Okay, we're back. And I'm going to jump in with My Fact, which comes from a new study by the National Park Service, which was looking at urban coyotes and their diets by looking through their scat. And they found that a lot of coyotes are eating house cats. guess how much of an urban coyote's diet is cat? 30%. Wow, 20%. Oh, I was going to say 5%. Well, I'm shocked.

That would be so many cats, Jake. It's already so many cats. Well, 20 is not that far from 30. So they dissected 30. I'm not supposed to think like that as a bunch of it. I was going to say, that is not what you wrote the last time I got a percentage from. All numbers are the same. So, yeah, they dissected more than 30.

thousand specimens of SCAT from a couple different sites. So this isn't a totally generalizable study, but another study that looked at different areas and used DNA analysis actually claims to confirm this. Their results aren't out, but the researcher behind it was like, yeah, we got like 20% or more cat in there. Fun fact, they also found like work gloves, condoms, a piece of a computer keyboard. So coyotes are just hungry, boys and girls. Miverous. Eating whatever they can find. animal vegetable or mineral. And a quarter of their poop actually also included fruit from ornamental plants.

And so the researchers were like the big takeaway is that they're being attracted to your yards by your like fruit trees and your shrubs that make, you know, things that look yummy. And then once they're there, they're going to stop and eat your cat. Not always, but sometimes. I don't begrudge them. And so how big of a problem is this? I didn't really know much about coyotes. Negative interactions with coyotes are on the rise in California, but elsewhere are pretty uncommon still. And so I wasn't really sure where all one has to be worried about coyotes eating your pets.

My hometown. Yes. I don't know anyone who ever actually lost their cat to a coyote. But it was like a topic of discussion. Oh, yeah. And also just my dad constantly being like, don't like be careful if you go outside. Sounds like your dad. That's, you know him.

And so... He will not be pleased. So one survey of 105 urban areas found that coyotes lived in 96 of them. And all of the large cities had coyotes. It was in the medium and small cities that sometimes didn't. And three quarters of those 96 cities had recorded cases of, quote, coyote human conflict, not necessarily attacks, which again. are very rare, but any time you're like outwalking your dog and a coyote yips at you, growls, that's conflict.

So very similar to the workplace. Yes, exactly. Attacks uncommon. Conflict. Constant. Off the charts. And so conflicts are less common in the Northeast. It's not really clear why.

But a lot of people think it's because they're relative newcomers. So they only started going into those areas in the 1950s. and they've been in the West much longer. And so they're comfy. So as urban sprawl continues apace, there's just more and more territory that coyotes would like to live in that people are also in. And also, they're just generationally becoming less afraid of humans, more bold, learning where to find food and learning that that is probably your backyard.

Right. So what I found really interesting here is that we kind of, over here on the East Coast, have an opportunity to, like, keep this problem from developing. So traditionally rural people would be unfriendly to coyotes and make sure that they were not leaving out food that they could eat. And generally just being like, please don't eat my sheep. So I will kill you if you come close, et cetera. And urban coyotes don't have that level of conflict with humans.

We might send out animal control to tranquilize them. But generally speaking, they're going to. to have free reign of wherever they want around here. In December, apparently, a coyote was prowling around Harlem, and I missed it, which is rude. I know you would have loved that. Yeah, because I would have loved to come across a coyote outside my apartment building. I definitely would not have freaked out like the time I saw a raccoon the size of a toddler. But, yeah, it got to Chelsea Pierce and animal control tranquilized it and brought it to an appropriate habitat.

But there are coyotes all around New York City. There's a breeding population in the Bronx. In fact, Long Island is considered the last large landmass in the U.S. without a breeding population of coyotes. Wow. So they're going to be making their way there because it's a great place for them. Lots of coyote-friendly area on Long Island. All it takes is one walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Well, that's the thing, is that as they are moving from the Bronx to Long Island, some of them are perhaps getting wheylade. Oh. And in 2015, there were like a bunch of incidents of people seeing coyotes like all around Manhattan and Brooklyn. Researchers think that they were just making a natural progression from the wooded areas of the Bronx to the wooded areas of Long Island, but cities were getting in the way. And those coyotes are really like not going to be a threat. I mean, you shouldn't go near them if you see them. But a coyote that wanders into New York City has no idea what's going on and is not going to like it. and is going to just be really freaked out. I understand that experience. Yeah.

Yeah. They just don't know what's what. And so we have this opportunity to keep that relationship with coyotes, you know, where if they stumble into really urban areas, we don't allow them to make themselves at home, which Californians have inadvertently done with their fruit trees and cats. So what do you do if you see a coyote? You don't feed them. You remove attractants like garbage in open containers.

That's one thing we do have an abundance. It's true. We have a lot of garbage, which I'm sure... Just on the street. I'm sure the coyote coming from Harlem to Chelsea Piers ate garbage that me and my neighbors had created. But, you know, we already know we shouldn't leave trash lying around. You should supervise pets, which, again, you should do in New York City. If you have a dog running off leash, you're a monster.

unless it is in a designated dog run. And you want to keep coyotes wary. This comes from animal control. That is their wording. If you are approached, act big and make loud noises. So again, we're not giving them the impression that they should want to keep tooling around Manhattan. We're encouraging them to keep going, find some nice woodland elsewhere. And appreciate coyotes, but from a distance, stay at least 150 feet.

away. So I just thought it was fascinating to think about how coyotes settle in to urban areas and why there's such a problem in California specifically. You know, L.A. is this like sprawling urban area with tons of really yummy plants and tons of people with lots of pets and really delicious garbage. And the coyotes have been there for a long time and they've been coexisting with the people for a long time. So they are just getting more and more comfy with the idea of hanging out in celebrity backyards, I guess. So as they're going back to cats to wrap this up, you may be wondering, how do I keep a coyote from eating my cat? And the answer is that you should keep your cat inside, but you should already have been keeping your cat inside because

cats are way more of a threat to the ecosystem than coyotes are. I'm going to Americans own about 86 million cats, which is about one for every three households. And that's not even counting strays. And a quarter to a third of those pet cats are outdoor cats, otherwise known as ruthless killers. Yes. I love cats. And people get really sensitive about this. But I'm just going to go for it.

And you can hate me if you want to. Okay. The numbers are easy to quibble over. But facts are facts. Outdoor and stray cats kill loads of birds. And in some parts of the world, they've actually driven them to endangerment or even extinction. There's actually one cat named Tibbles credited with driving a bird to extinction on a small island in New Zealand. That's devastating.

Yes. What a cute name for a kid. A murderer. Exactly. The only real argument is just how many birds they killed. There was a study that came out that gave a range of like $1 billion to $4 billion. Oh, my God. And there was this huge pro-cat outcry.

No. There was like the uncertainty here is much too good. Great. And like, yeah, but the lower end is still a lot of birds. It doesn't really matter if you don't believe that the number is on the high end. Birds are wonderful. Well, they deserve to exist as much as Tibbles. Yeah. Well, and in New Zealand, as we talked about on a previous episode, there were no native land mammals and there were lots of birds. And in New Zealand and Australia, cats have been a real problem. Australia actually aims to euthanize 2 million cats by 2020. And that's just like scraping the surface of their cat problem. But again, people get really upset about this. The researcher that did this study on how many birds, outdoor cats kill,

has gotten like threats. Wow. They've been personally attacked. How ironic. People are so quick to oppose a new skyscraper when it seems like it's going to kill migratory birds. And as soon as it's their cat, that's the problem. Yeah, exactly. No one is saying you can't have a cat, but you should keep them inside.

And if you don't care about birds, then care about the coyotes that are going to eat your cats because you left them outside like an idiot. So that's my take. Tell your cat to act big. They can be an outdoor cat as long as they know how to keep coyotes wary. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. All right, we're back. And Jake, why don't you tell us your fact? Okay, so my fact is, as I said before, that the same guy who invented barbecue chicken pizza also invented a salad that was supposed to induce labor and pregnant women who...

Wait, so that was the point of the salad? No. So it's actually kind of a long story. And the reason why I discovered this was because I went to a pizza place and I got a slice of barbecue chicken pizza. And I had read before that the story of the way that ham and pineapple or Hawaiian pizza was invented, which is like a nice pizza. story about like a guy who came to the United States and like found some stuff and made the pizza. But I was wondering if there was a similar story for barbecue chicken. And so I looked it up and it turns out that it's actually a really interesting story about gourmet food versus like

cheap food. And I associate barbecue chicken pizza and buffalo chicken pizza with kind of like sort of places that you would just, you know, storefront pizza restaurants. They're just kind of like vulgar variations on, you know, historically legitimate pizza. And it's actually not the It's actually not the case. It's actually not the case at all. Right. And California Pizza Kitchen is involved in this story. So basically, there was a guy who's born in Washington State.

His name is Ed Lidoux. He dropped out of high school to become a pizza chef in California. He's born in Washington State and moved to L.A. And he was cooking pizzas at a restaurant called Prego. And a couple came in and he had done a sort of inventive ricotta pizza that was considered a little bit out of the ordinary. And a couple came in and they loved the pizza. and the guy in the couple was Wolfgang Puck, and Wolfgang Puck...

It always is. He poached Ed Ladoo to his restaurant that he was opening called Spago in L.A. So this was like in the 1980s. This was like at the peak of the L.A. restaurant scene. And so just to give you an idea, when they opened this restaurant, Spago, it was like a huge thing. Hundreds of celebrities came to the opening night. And they had done the bathrooms in this really fancy European tile. and within a week, so many people had used the tile to cut cocaine that the tiles were completely shattered.

And this was the only expense that they had really gone full in on for the decoration. It was like completely done. So this is like the most L.A. restaurant was extremely expensive. And he was there and Wolfgang Puck just basically gave him free reign to create whatever kind of pizzas he wanted. So he created a bunch of different ricotta pizzas. There was like a smoked salmon pizza. There was like a linguinean clam pizza. He had a Peking duck pizza.

There was tons. I mean, he was just going all in. And this was a sensation in L.A. You know, the waiting list to get into the restaurant was, you know, months long. And that is where he sort of cut his teeth on inventive pizza. And so Wolfgang Puck later got a lot of credit for this. You know, he was basically, you know, in all the reviews, it was, you know, Wolfgang has revolutionized pizza. And Ed Lidu was a little bit pissed about this because Wolfgang Puck, the reason he hired Ed Lidu,

was because he didn't really know how to make pizza. He actually had no idea what good pizza was, according to Ed. So Ed, a little bit disgruntled, goes on to found a restaurant, which is actually coincidentally called Coyote. But it's C-A-I-O-T-I. It's an Italian last name that's spelled Coyote. The synergy here is overwhelming. I know, it's crazy. So he then found his own pizza.

restaurant and he would later go on to just to sort of finish the pizza thread after coyote he founded california pizza kitchen and so california pizza kitchen then became the sort of staple of mall food and through you know entering just about every mall in america spread some of the pizzas that he created including barbecue chicken which was one of his most notable creations and so that is how barbecue chicken pizza it's kind of a class story weirdly because it's about how gourmet food entered this sort of like really diffuse American mainstream food and is now considered by a lot of people to be ridiculous. Like I think if you asked most New Yorkers, they would say barbecue chicken pizza is,

you know, it's disgusting. We don't eat that. It's not real pizza. Actually, it's created by the guy who arguably invented modern pizza. I mean, pizza's not that old, right? It's only about 120, 150, 130 years old. And it's been in America for less than 75 years. And so we really do know who.

invented barbecue chicken pizza is this guy, but now it's everywhere. And so, so I think the one point you should take from this is that you shouldn't feel ashamed to eat barbecue. Like I eat that stuff, like ham and pineapple, buffalo chicken. You should, you know, you're eating perhaps fine cuisine. It could be argued when you're eating that kind of pizza. But when he started Coyote, he also created a salad, just kind of like a salad that you would have with a pizza. And it had, I think, watercress, Gorgonzola, and a balsamic

vinaigret dressing. And this salad apparently would cause overdue pregnant women to go into labor around 24 hours after eating this.

So I'm not sure how this first, like who the first patient zero of this sort of phenomenon was, but within a few months of this salad being introduced, women were coming

by the hundreds every day to this before the dinner hour to this restaurant and just eating the salad, two or three salads at a time, to induce labor. And later, Ed Lidu claimed that he had never said that it induced labor, just that it might help. But in fact, he did claim that it induced labor. What he did was he actually bottled the dressing and sold it to thousands of people across the country as the dressing that pregnant women prefer. Wow. He, I mean, you know, legally speaking, it's actually not a claim that it induces labor,

but he certainly, like any good entrepreneur, leaned in to the reason that people were coming to eat distressing. And so this restaurant is actually still open, and they still sell this dressing pretty frequently. And the legend has continued. And most recently, I think, or most notably, Hillary Duff ate at this restaurant in 2018. Of course. And put it on her Instagram story and said, this dressing is supposed to. induced labor, hope it works or something like that. The science behind this is... Wait, did it work? Well, I think she's had the child since then. But that's the thing.

I mean, that's the thing is that this is... She wasn't gestating an elephant, so... That's the thing is that this is from a fact-checking perspective or from the perspective of any kind of scientific rigor, it's impossible to prove. I mean, there is a control group, but it's not, it's incredibly large and not subject to being observed. And typically speaking, all women who are pregnant when they eat the salad do have their children after they eat the salad and if they're already overdue

then it could be a matter of you know days or weeks so there's no way to really know but I mean it seems like most people who eat who do this aren't actually they don't feel like it has to work they just are trying something because they want to have their children

so there are a whole bunch of foods that are rumored to induce labor there are some fruits papaya pineapples dates are supposed to induce labor spicy food in general is probably the most common recommendation because it's supposed to act as an irritant to the stomach. And there's a restaurant in Georgia that claims that it's eggplant parmesan induces labor reliably. And then also in 2017, there was a phenomenon of women going to Taco Bell and claiming that it induced labor.

Taco Bell induces a lot of things. Certainly. So the science behind the salad at Coyote was that it has a lot of alkaloids, like balsamic vinegarate, has a lot of alkaloids and so does Watercress, I think. And so that causes uterine contractions, supposedly. But there's, you know, legitimately no scientific evidence that this has ever happened. Like, it's impossible to establish a real causative relationship. But, you know, they did a survey at a hospital in 2011, and about half of all women had done some kind of non-prescribed method of inducing labor. 10% had ingests spicy food.

Probably the next most common method after walking is just, sexual intercourse. And in a systematic review of methods of induction of labor conducted also in 2011, eating any kind of food was ranked as very low reliability, somewhere around the same amount of reliability as castor oil and hypnosis. So there's really no backing for this, but I think it's interesting that the rumor has persisted so much. I mean, it's probably just because, I mean, there's really very little knowledge about what causes labor to begin when it does in general, ways to induce it are really hard to track. But the salad does sound really good. And you can sort of, I think it's interesting to... It's worth a shot. Right. And that they, the salad and this sort of

other really entrenched American invention, barbecue chicken pizza, both came out of the mind of the same guy. Definitely. Do you have to name your child Wolfgang if you're, if you induce labor with the watercress salad? No, I think there was some bad blood between Ed and Wolfgang. But Wolfgang is potentially the reason why we have barbecue pizza and the reason why, who knows, how many women successfully had their children. Wow. Well, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I'm going to go with salad. Yeah, definitely. I learned the origin of honestly one of my favorite pizzas. Barbecue chicken is one of your favorite pizzas? Yeah, well, specifically the barbecue chicken pizza at Babelieuie's in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Shout out Babelieu, please give me free pizza.

Did you guys ever eat at California Pizza Kitchen? Oh, yeah. I loved that place. I never heard of it until I moved to New York. Wait, really? Yeah. Wow. But you're from, and you're from Washington, the same place that Ed Lidd?

Wow, I'm sure he'd be turning his great. He never made it into the Washington market. Yeah, I had no idea. I thought the place was amazing. And the novelty pizzas are so, they were so entertaining to me, like, growing up. I think the white hair is the most interesting to me, but I also feel like I'm not allowed to vote for my own. But I don't even want to. You can sit there silently and smile.

And we'll just give you the old. Thank you so much. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including weirdest thing, t-shirts, totebags, and mugs at popside.

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