The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Lubed Up Chocolate, Ovaries Before Brovaries, Birds on the Moon

Episode Date: March 15, 2023

The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek -- Thanks to our sponsors!  Check out https://HelloFresh.com/weirdest60 and use code weirdest60 for 60% off plus free shipping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor. job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text 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 Feltman. I'm Chelsea B. Coombs. I'm Rachel E. Gross. Rachel, welcome to the show. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad to finally be here with you. I think this is the first time we've had a second Rachel on the show, actually. I don't recall another instance. And I intend to be the last. There can usually only be one, but listeners, Rachel Gross is so fantastic that occasionally I say, let there be two. Rachel, why do you tell our listeners,

a little bit about the awesome work you do? Yeah, sure. So I write mostly about gender and bias in science, and that often means following around scientists who are kind of new voices in their field, so like women of color, LGBTQ scientists, sometimes just the first woman scientists in their field, and the new ideas and questions that they are bringing

and how they're helping us still in all these knowledge gaps. So my biggest project so far was I recently wrote a book called Vagina Obscura, an anatomical voyage. And it's so good. Stop. That means a lot away from you. And it's like a journey to the center of the, quote, female body that kind of goes organ by organ and traces the, the scientists who are rethinking how these organs work and their importance to your health.

Amazing. Yeah, we will definitely be linking to that in the show notes. And highly recommend that our listeners check it out. And, uh, Chelsea, it's been a while since you've been on the show. Welcome back. Thank you. I'm so happy to be back. Amazing. All right. Let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learn this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fashion. we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. And then decide which one we 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.

Chelsea, what's your tease? My tease is that lubrication is why chocolate feels so good on your tongue. Yes, I did make that really sexual. Yeah. You're welcome. I'm intrigued. I'm intrigued. A little turned on.

Yeah. Sorry, I went there. Sorry. I'm here for it. Rachel, what's your tease? My tease is that contrary to what you may have heard in sex ed or biology class, actually human ovaries can probably make new eggs. And the reason why it has to do with chickens. Amazing.

thing. We love a chicken fact on weirdest thing. Even better when it involves sexual health and debunking nasty old science. I know we're big fans of this. Okay, my teeth, not sexy. I mean, you know, no judgment if it is. My teeth is said, I want to talk about why there is a German word for a bird with an arrow stuck through its name. I'm here for it. Hey and the bird theme on point. Yeah. Yeah. Sex and Birds. That's what this episode should be called. That's all we ever do on here. Subscribe. Let's see. Where shall we begin? I'm so drawn in mystified intrigues by the chocolate lubrication connection that I would love to begin with that, Chelsea, if you don't mind.

Amazing, amazing. Because this study just came out like literally yesterday. I was just like looking around for some food science kind of stuff. I don't know. It was kind of interesting. But so when we eat chocolate, most of us aren't really thinking about like physics or materials science. You know, we're kind of just eating chocolate. Right. But there's actually a reason why chocolates melt in your mouth sensation feels so. good and it's all about lubrication, which I know. I literally wrote a whole book about sex. And I just like lubrication is just a bridge too far for me as a word. Yeah. No, I wanted to say lub a few times when I was like, I don't think that's like super profess. So, you know, I don't think that the engineers. I mean, you know what you're talking to here.

That's true. That's true, right? Like, I guess I should. I know my audience, right? But I can see it on candy wrappers now. just louves your tongue right up. Yep. Yeah.

I do wonder why lube feels less profanished. It's like clit and clitoris. Like, same word is easier to say. Yeah. You know, I don't know. They didn't use the word lube in the paper, which is surprising because there should have. We're going to make lube happen. So this paper was, like I said, it was published yesterday.

So we're recording this in January 2020. It was published in ACS applied materials and interfaces, which clearly is just, you know, poly-read journal here. Yeah, I love it. So researchers from the University of Leeds, they created a 3D artificial tongue surface, and they used techniques from a field of engineering called Tribology to better understand the reason for chocolate's specific mouthfield. which mouthfeel is the worst word ever. So I'm so sorry.

It is. Lub and mouth feel. We're going forward today. Yeah. So tribology is basically the study of how surfaces interact with each other while they're in motion and how friction and lubrication affect them. Oh, that is kind of sexy. Right? Right.

This is a sexy meal. Tribology, you know, let's talk about tribology, baby. So when you put. Chocolate on your tongue, which I'm sure the people listening probably have, it starts out as a solid, but then it transforms into a liquid as it kind of like melts and, you know, melds around with, you know, your spit and everything. And the researchers actually broke it down even further into three stages of mouth chocolate interactions. The licking stage, when the solid chocolate first hits the tongue, the molten chocolate slash initial mastication, phase when the chocolate melts from solid to liquid, but there's not much spit mixed in yet. To finally, the bolus before swallowing stage, when the chocolate is mixed with spit and swallowed.

And bolus, by the way, this is the vocabulary episode, apparently, but a bolus is a small, rounded mass of a substance, especially of chewed food at the moment of swallowing. So, you know, we're all learning so many new words today. So getting back to kind of like the actual experiment, to find out how chocolate interacts with your tongue. They use dark chocolate, which good choice just to begin with, as well as a human-like spit recipe made from pig spit. And they created both a singular artificial papillae, which is the little, you know, rough spots on your tongue or if you have a cat, you know, the cats roughs knot on their tongue, as well as an artificial human tongue that they could monitor with a microscope. And I love how they actually described this artificial tongue saying

that it emulates the topography, deformability, and wetability of a real human tongue service. Everything you need. Yeah. Wettability. I've never heard that word, but I'm using it now. Absolutely. So what they found is that, chocolate actually releases a fatty film, which is the lubrication, that mixes with your spit to coat your tongue and your mouth. But the really interesting thing is that it's the fat layer on the outside layer of the chocolate that contributes to chocolate's mouth feel and not the fat that's on the inside of the bar. So you might be like, who cares? Like, I'm just hungry. I just want to eat some chocolate. But this is great news for all of us because the researchers are hoping that

this science could help food scientists develop multi-layered chocolate that's better for you by reducing the fat on the inside of the chocolate, but keeping it in the outside. So when it actually comes in contact with your tongue, it still feels like chocolate. So yeah, Lou, chocolate, what ability, bowless It should have been a snacks episode I feel like we all needed to bring a chocolate

bar so we could experience this in real time even yeah I will say I as I was like researching this I had like a lint truffle

so you know because I just really wanted to make sure that that I was experiencing trust it's an important part of research thank you exactly so yeah

let's hope that this lubey chocolate ends up on shelf soon Amazing. I edited a profile for an issue of Popsie that I'll make sure we link to on Popsie.com slash weird. That was talking to a candy scientist. And it was so cool. Her job is so cool. And so much of what she does. She specifically, she does a lot. But one of her specialties is working on like weird flavor combos for her. Hershey products like Kit Kat, et cetera. And so much of it is like it's easy to come up with an interesting new flavor combo, especially when new just means like it's not sold in mainstream

candy bars in the U.S., right? There are many flavors out there in the world that you could put in a candy bar. But so much of the issue is like, how does this interact with the fats, with like the cookie inside? You need to make sure that all of the ingredients that go into creating the flavor experience, like, don't mess with the very quintessential important mouth feel. Sorry. These, like, quintessential Hershey's products and that then they won't, like, degrade on the shelf the way that messes with that, too. So it's like, so much of it is about, like, moisture movement and fat movement.

It's so complicated. And, like, thank God for scientists who's their lives figuring that out. I'm just feeling very grateful right now. I think we all should. I mean, like, what a cool field, like food science just generally and like being able to figure out how to make something actually work in manufacture it too. Like that's a whole other side of the story, right? So cool to me. Yeah.

Well, I'm definitely going to need some chocolate later today. Luckily, I definitely have some. So it's all good. Crisis of Virtue. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more.

And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland, and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit, and, you know, I definitely miss it a little bit. But maybe you can have a weed gummy, and you can get one at mood.com. So the reason that different cannabis drains can make you feel different ways isn't just about the THC. It seems like it's also based on other components called terpenes. Turpines influence how a product tastes and smells, and it seems like they can also impact the way you feel. Mood partnered with dozens of small American farms to custom cultivate flour with specific

terpine profiles designed for specific moods. So you can choose your cannabis gummy, edible, flour, or pre-roll based on how you want to feel. Just go to mood.com and click shop by mood. And yes, it is now 100% federally legal to have really great bud shipped right to your door. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by mood's 100-day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code weirdest. I'm eyeing mood.com's delta night. THC buttercream caramels because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also mellows me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice.

And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has delta 9 THC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront 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. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to go into my fact, which is about why there is a German word for a bird with an arrow stuck through its neck. I love science. So in 1822, this white stork flew by a northern German estate, and it had a rather shocking passenger in tow. It had a two and a half foot spear sticking through its neck.

And actually, I'm going to pause and drop a link to a picture for my co-host because I feel. feel like it's very silly for me to keep talking about this without you seeing this amazing bird. So I must see this. I guess spear also. It's like very evocative this image right now. Quite mythical. That's how I want to go out. Yeah.

I want to go out like with a spear through my neck. Instead of just hunch over my computer passed out from like internet exposure. I have to say I'm not sure that how. I want to go, but I do really respect these birds. Okay, here's Oh my God. It's dramatic. You know, I hope that spear was lubed.

Sorry. Well, Langlon pops out of Comflesh weird. But yeah, these, um, it was really just through its neck. The wound didn't seem to have bothered it much, though, because it had carried the weapon all the way from Africa, which is,

We care. The bird, which after all that, by the way, we shot out of the sky and stuff, which seems extremely unfair. Yeah. It's been for so much. It's a survivor. It's a hero. Yeah. The bird was dubbed a fiestark.

An aerostork. Literally means an arrow stork. And once they examined the weapon that had impaled it, they saw that it was made of, quote, Central African Wood. and similar in design to weapons used in Central Africa. I know that that is a ridiculously large generalization to make, but this was 1822 in Germany, and that is the generalization they made. This wasn't just shocking because it met the bird had flown thousands of miles with an arrow through its neck.

But in fact, the very idea that a stork might spend time on another continent was pretty big news, or at least the confirmation of it was pretty big news, because at this time, at least among Europeans, the fact that birds disappeared for part of the year was considered a pretty big mystery. They didn't know that the birds were migrating, generally speaking. I'll get into some more detail in a minute. But basically, they didn't know the birds were migrating.

So an appearance of a local bird that carried proof of having recently been on a different continent, also provided the best evidence to date that birds migrated. And side note here, just to emphasize that while European science, such as it was, from the beginning of recorded history to the 1800s, couldn't seem to really wrap their heads around migration, there were definitely people and cultures that totally knew how migration worked, at least, to some extent. There are indigenous folk tales that involve references to migrating geese flying off in the winter. There are some Polynesian myths involving birds traveling long distances as well, which makes a lot of sense because so many Polynesian explorers were island hopping themselves thousands of years ago.

So they would have had a much better chance of like spotting a bird mid-migration than like Aristotle would have. Aristotle, for what it's worth, described some short-range migrations around the Mediterranean like as he and people he knew observed them. But he hypothesized that some birds might go to the edges of the earth to do an annual battle with the humans who lived there for some reason. Oh, yeah. Most badass birds ever. Some Lord of the Rings shit. Yeah. It bites the spear.

Yeah. But he also thought that some birds like swallows hibernated in muddy lake beds. This was like a pretty common concept that they like clumped together. and like curled themselves up in little balls and just like drop to the bottom of a lake bed and would like wriggle back up. That would be awesome. Like turtle style really.

Others, he thought, turned into entirely different kinds of birds like caterpillars turning into butterflies, which it's easy to make fun of now, but also like, listen, if a caterpillar can turn into a butterfly and you like don't have like microscopes, or like cell theory. Like it's not that wild to be like this flying thing disappears and then these other flying

things show up. So this must just be the next part of its life cycle. And yeah, that's what he thought. Honestly deducted reasoning. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just like imagining like all these Europeans being like, where did the bun go? I can't find them.

Like it's just, you know, like it's like a reverse Alfred Hitchcock situation. Oh my God. Absolutely. I think that's pretty accurate. And those beliefs were still circulating in the

like the turn of the 17th into the 18th century which is when a scholar named Charles Morton wrote a pamphlet arguing that storks disappeared because they flew to the moon. Now again, very easy to laugh at this next.

But keep in mind that at the time, no one knew that like the Earth had an atmosphere and the moon lacked one. So it was just kind of commonly assumed that stuff probably lived up there and on other celestial bodies that people were able to see. And birds could fly. So maybe they lived there too. He proposed that it took them a month to fly to the moon. And they're generous. Yeah. And what's interesting about Morton is that his logic was actually really sound,

same for his choice of destination, because he was pointing out that like birds left when there wasn't food for them during winter. So he was like, they have these fat reserves. They probably just like coast to the moon for a month. And they like eat some moon food and then they come back home. The moon is well known for being made of cheese. So I'm sure they were able to plump up, come back. And I know there was a period of time where we thought there were moon men and moon monkeys.

Oh, totally. There was that famous hoax where there were headlines and it was actually like a sci-fi article. Yeah. Well, we've talked about on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing how Popsie in its early days had articles about how the moon was probably home to a bunch of crab-like organisms and how Mars was probably full of beavers. So it was just very normal for people to be like, who knows what lives up there. And honestly, given the available information, it wasn't actually absurd for them to do that. Yeah. That being said, like Occam's razor, like simplest answer is usually the correct one.

And I don't know why he picked the moon and not just like somewhere else on our planet. But yeah, I don't know. I applaud the creativity. Points for that. You know, so close. Wow. I want whatever drugs they were on, you know, thinking about this kind of stuff, right? Like, how do you come up with this?

A lot of black people have parties, you know. So by the late 1700s, reports of flocks of birds being seen flying to different areas by sea captains made people be like, oh, maybe they just fly somewhere else for a while. That could possibly be it. But it was still just like, who can say? According to Don James Audubon, who by the way, made a lot of stuff up, I have learned from my friends who are really into birding. In 1802, he said he tied silver string to the legs of some nestlings and was unable to recognize them when they came back from the moon or wherever they had gone. But apparently, according to recent research, he was actually in France at the time when those birds would have been returning to North America from Point South. So that probably didn't happen.

But anyway, it was considered like basically impossible to prove when or how migration was happening if that was a thing. And around the same time that Audubon supposedly did this tagging research, just to like make it clear sort of. how basic these inquiries were, scientific inquiries around the question of migration, around the same time that Audubon supposedly did his tacking experiments. Other researchers were literally just trying to prove that if you kept a swallow from leaving England and kept it warm and well fed, it wouldn't like go to sleep all winter or disappear or die or turn into another bird. They were literally just like, keep eyes on the swallow.

Let's see what happened. And I love that. It's good science. It's good science. It's good science. And sure enough, they were like, yeah, the swallows stayed swallow. So probably. Well, a watch pot never boils.

Yeah. Well, that's true. They're like, it's like gremlins, you know. Now, one especially fun thing about the phyluses. Stalk in particular, is that folks say some 25 of them have been recorded, like 25 storks with arrows migrating from the place where they got shot with the arrow to a very different place. I will say that I tried to trace that number back to its source and I got to a 2003 newsletter in German from the University of Rostock, which is the institution that studied and taxidermied

the infamous bird in 1822. And they basically said, you know, a professor told us this has happened with 25 birds. You know, I don't know if maybe he was playing a little fast and loose. I did then find an English language review of a German book published in 2005 called Das book von der Stauch or the book of the aristarch, which apparently, according to the review, recounts and summarizes 24 known instances from the last few hundred years. I have not gotten a copy of the book, but I am literally starting my German lessons this week and I am committed to learning German so that I can read this book and confirm. So more on that at a future episode.

That's definitely why I signed up for German lessons and not because I'm married to a German and go to Germany a lot. No, I prefer this quest. one. Yeah. The professor who wrote this book is in his 80s and now retired. But Dr. Kinselbach, if you're listening, you know, moin, vegetzinen, let's talk. Or not. But like, big fan of your work. Looking forward to reading it.

You just have to DM him on Twitter. I know he's very active there. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's going to be so flattered that you're literally learning a whole language. to read the aero stork. Absolutely. We do know that the aerostork phenomenon has happened more than once,

or at least I can say personally, I'm sure it's happened more than once, because at least two have been reported at different times in recent history in Israel, and those were birds that had been speared in Africa. There's also an old taxidermid specimen that is not the OG, arrow stork, though I couldn't find details on like where and when it showed up. I just know it's been stuffed and it is a second different stork with the arrow in a different spot. I also found a 2022 news story about a stork spotted with an arrow through it in Istanbul. But Twist, an expert said that that arrow looked like the type of recreational hunter would use.

and he also said that it looked like the trajectory of that arrow would have interfered with the bird's air sacks. So it probably wouldn't have put it in mortal danger, but it would have made it way harder for it to fly long distances. So that made him think it was an incident that had occurred in Turkey. So more an instance of domestic animal cruelty than true fight astroch. And of course, the possibility of that scenario kind of raises the close. question of how many supposed instances of this bird might not have actually been ones that made the journey from a far off place after getting speared with an arrow. Considering there has not been, to my knowledge, like a rigorous review of reported cases,

but I'm going to hit up to Dr. Kinslovak and that I will let you know what I find. I still give those birds props, even if they didn't fly long distances. It's still wild. I spent a lot of time looking for like how, how. And it's, it seems like, you know, as can be the case for any animal, including humans, it is totally possible to get like fully impaled with something and have it just miss everything important. That doesn't mean it's comfortable or fun, but like it happens. And sort of the best answers I was able to find was like,

like so many birds migrate and have done for as long as humans have existed and been shooting arrows and spears at things. So just like statistically, there are going to be a certain number of birds who are injured but able to continue on to their destination, which like that does make sense. So there's no like amazing reason that birds are able to do this. They're probably many who in fact are not. See, I'm thinking this is all just like a plot by Party City to sell more of those like Arrow through the head things. You know, they, somebody at Party City. Well, they're sponsoring this fact. Yeah, somebody at Party City. They have a time machine. You know, they're really committed to the bit. Well, at least Rachel could be the Arrow Stork

for Halloween using one of those props. That's true. I absolutely could be. That's actually possible. That is a really great thought. Thank you for that. Glad for this brainstorm. So we now know, just to wrap this up, that the Stork's 4,000 mile or so round-trip migration is actually pretty chill as far as bird migrations go. The Arctic turn has the longest yearly migration because it literally flies from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle. So you can't go any farther. Unless it goes to the moon. That's true.

Stretch goal. Yeah, so CLEX there and back every year, which is nearly 19,000 miles as a round trip. Absolutely wild. Good for that. In 2022, research has reported what could be the longest nonstop journey for a migratory bird, which was a five-month-old bar-tailed godwit. It made it all the way from Alaska to Tasmania, which is about 8,500 miles in just 11 days. And according to the little solar-powered GPS, it was carried.

It did not stop such a long way for a little guy. But that brings me just to say that we now have actual ways of tracking where birds go, you know, scientists tag them either with, you know, inert little tags that they just record. Like, oh, we saw this tag again X months later X miles away. But we also have little tiny GPS trackers now so they can literally follow a bird's path. And that's really good because bird migrations remain fairly mysterious in that like it's still an open question how birds know where to migrate, you know, why they go exactly where they go. And there are some birds where their migrations themselves are still kind of mysterious.

So we've come a long way since maybe they're all at the bottom of the lake. but there's still a lot we have yet to learn and I love this intrepid creature from the 1800s for really really changing the game really changing the conversation and getting us on the right track truly like should we all get tattoos I honestly I think it would be a really good tattoo and I have thought about it. So maybe. Arrow Stork, the band. Oh.

There you go. That's fantastic. I love it. And, you know, I'm sure. I learned. T-I-L. Yeah. This podcast lived up to its name.

Excellent. I love to hear it. And, you know, I will say that as many times as I asked Oliver to slowly pronounce the word for me. You know, don't, don't come for me. He's already going to give me a hard time. And like I said, I literally start German classes in a few days. So the next time I talk about this dang bird, I'm going to be, it's just going to

roll off the tuck. Yeah. Putting on that, like all German notoriously does, rolls right off the tongue. Yeah, just like chocolate. Wow. Amazing. It's a luby language, I would say. No.

All right. We're going to take a quick. break and then be back with one more fact. 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 seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499.

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 homedepot.com slash price match for details. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month.

Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees, Google Fiore Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice.

He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets.

Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back. And Rachel Gross, please tell us about eggs. Eggs, the kind that we make, not the kind that you eat, although you could. So, okay, this was like the wildest thing I learned in a whole book about vaginas, which is saying a lot. Yeah. So I don't know about you guys, but I don't know about you guys. I remember learning in sex ed and biology class this single fact over and over again.

And it was that if you're a person with female anatomy, you are born with all the eggs you'll ever have. Right. And they just sit in there getting older and dusty. Right. That was the subtext of that. Yep. Eggs. Yep.

Until you get menopause and that's all over, you're no longer considered a person or a woman. And it's, that's the end. That's the subtext. But I guess more specifically, they being science had found that when you're a fetus in the uterus and you're about five months, you actually have your peak number of eggs, 7 million eggs. And they degenerate very quickly. So when you're born, you only have 2 million. And then every year you're just losing eggs. They're basically programmed to die and to not ovulate except for the lucky one every month.

for most of us. So it was crazy for me to find out that this kind of fact that everyone knows, actually no one knew until 1950. And it was this Oxford anatomist named Sir Sally Zuckerberg who was like, all right, there's a huge debate in the field over whether women make eggs throughout their lifetime or whether they're born with all the eggs that we'll have, et cetera, et cetera. I'm going to figure it out. and he did a huge lit review.

He also did some really gruesome experiments where he put ovarian tissue into the eyes of monkeys so that he could see, yeah, because he could like look into the eye sockets and see if the ovaries were doing their function and taking root without their nerve supply. And they did. So there was a growing like field of realizing that gonads and glands, the kind of organs that make hormones that support many other organs. can be put anywhere in the body. So they were also experienced with roosters where they would remove attesties and they would see its, quote,

like masculine traits, like kind of disappear and then they would add it back and they would see it grow its waddle and start strutting again and like going for the females. And that proved that you could just kind of remove this male essence or put it back in anywhere in the body to them.

So basically... Which then led to a bunch of dues trying to shove like monkey and like goat testicles into into ball sacks just to be like it'll just give you some extra vim and vigor i mean why not like could only help right yeah uh yeah i mean i honestly think that that the the gonad huckster phase is kind of interrelated with uh the ovary stuff I'm going to talk about, so I'm glad you brought that up. So right, so in 1951, this British scientist speaks before the academy and he says, like, listen, guys, I read every single study out there, and I can tell you definitively that all the eggs are created before birth, you can never have any

more eggs, that's it. And nobody has questioned it in the past, like, 70 years. Wow. And so that's how we got that number. And could use a little reconsidering. This man did a literature review and was like, well, I figured it out. And he put some ovaries into eye sockets as well. Yeah, what is that? He was very influential. And like, I mean, I have my own kind of thoughts on this. I think that there seems to be this longstanding divide between how we treat like male and female organs.

And I think scientists never question the fact that men, people, with male anatomy make 1,500 new sperm every time they breathe. And those are very similar germ cells to egg cells in some ways, like that they can be regenerated all the time. And that's just like a natural ability of the male body. But when it comes to the female body, like Rachel was saying, there's this idea that things degenerate over time and that things are kind of passively. As you go from maiden to mother to crone.

The arc we almost children. Right. There's like an unwomaning that happens. That was like the terms in this time to describe menopause. Yeah, very, very offensive. Yeah. So that's how this idea came about. It was challenged in the past 20 years or so. And the way I'd like to take you through that is through chickens because this was the most unexpected part of the journey for me. I did not know chickens were so fascinating. Maybe you two did. But chickens have one ovary. They are bored with two, but the right one stays undeveloped. And the left one grows to enormous proportions.

It basically is like the size of the palm of your hand. And it's kind of like a stalk of cherry tomatoes. So it has all the eggs in it. And you can see each one growing in a different stage. So scientists will label them like F1, F2, F3. And it's an incredibly important, like, reproductive science model because it's like the clearest example of ovulation. You can see the eggs at all different stages of growing and dying.

But a crazy thing that chicken scientists know that no one else really does is that if you remove a chicken ovary, so remember there are all those experiments removing and replacing gonads in chickens and roosters, it will actually grow back entirely. eggs and all. Sometimes it will even grow back into it testes, which is wild, and will produce male-like characteristics, even though usually it can't father children. But so chicken scientists know that these gonads are super regenerative and like dynamic, but it's never applied to humans because chicken scientists and human scientists don't really talk much. However, a real shame. Clearly, we're missing a lot. So there are two

ovary scientists who start in in chickens who ended up being the ones to question Sir Salli's pronouncement. And one of them was his name is John Tilly. He's an ovarian scientist. He's working at Mass General Hospital in like the 2000s. And he's studying what happens when when people with cancer get chemo

that is known to kill germ cells. So they're basically they're basically spraying ovaries with chemo drugs in the lab. And they found something weird, which is that the ovaries did lose a lot of eggs. The eggs died off. But then they started to climb back up, which they didn't think should be possible. And so the numbers were off. It was as if, like, less eggs were dying than they knew were dying.

So they could have said, like, the math must be off. there must be another explanation. But because they had this sense that there was potential regeneration that no one else in the field believed was possible, they actually kept questioning it, kept looking at the numbers, and finally concluded that what the rest of the field thought was impossible must be true, that these eggs, that these ovaries must be making new eggs that were making up for the lost ones. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

And this was probably the most controversial paper in the entire field of ovarian biology, if you can believe it. It was both the fact, like both the substance and the form of the message, the substance was like, hey, this foundational fact, literally the first line of every study for the past, like, 50 years is wrong. And therefore, like, many people's careers are based on this false foundation. And then there was the message itself. So this scientist, John Tilley, he's very charismatic.

He's kind of not your typical scientist. He has, like, used car salesman vibes. Oh. He literally uses the word, like, unequivocally, this is the discovery of the century. Okay. Yeah. I can see that chafing. Yeah.

I mean, literally other scientists tell me now, like, it wasn't even the science that people were skeptical of, it was the voice that was delivering it and the kind of confidence that this would have crazy consequences for women, that it could allow women to have babies much, much later, that it could stave off menopause, that it could be used to create like new forms of IBF. And yeah, so, as you know, like most scientists are super circumspect. When they talk to reporters, they never make big claims, they're always like cabbiati everything. And John was just like, yep, this is going to revolutionize birth. And like, we used to think that women were old when their ovaries stopped working, but it turns out that their ovaries are not the limiting factor.

We can change that. And so we can extend your healthy lifespan. So there were like 10 years in there where this was just like an untouchable nuclear topic until more and more papers started piling up. showing, yeah, this is the case in mice and zebrafish and giraffes. And some of those early critics of Tilly in his lab, including Dory Woods, who came from the same chicken lab and ended up being kind of the key to this lab. Some of the critics ended up coming to the lab, seeing these new aches being made and seeing evidence of it, and changing their mind and becoming collaborators, which is also pretty crazy. I love it.

It's like this beautiful science, like success story, even though John Tilly kind of sounds like a lot. He's a lot. Sometimes it takes a really out-in-the-box scientist to do this stuff. Yeah. And, I mean, you know, science is self-correcting and self-criticking. And I think it's kind of, it's kind of, of like when you have eczema or immune disorder and your immune system is really trying to do the

right thing to protect you but goes a little overboard. It seems like that's what the field did to him. Like there were good reasons to be skeptical and critical, but because they were so against this possibility, it took like at least 10 years and it's just now being added to reproductive textbooks that basically say like we are pretty sure there are stem cells in human ovaries. We think it's possible they're making new eggs. No one knows for sure. And that is kind of how science progresses, as slowly and cautiously step by step.

But to me, this is, it's more than the tech that it could spawn in the future, which I think we're so really far away from. And there's a lot of controversies involved. The idea of trying to stave off or push back menopause, for one, is like really gets a lot of feminist tackles up because of this idea that menopause shouldn't be a disease, it's a natural phase of life, all those things are true. But to me, it just makes me, like, imagine my body differently because I think we have been

taught about the degenerating concept and that it's just like a countdown until menopause and, like, that you run out of eggs and your ovaries wither away. And that's like, this is like the worst language possible, but I think that was my subtext in my head. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And now I'm like, no, these aren't like shriveling. raisins, they are rechargeable batteries. And most likely they are, like, however slowly, however much

they are regenerating, like something is happening in there. And there are like processes that we haven't explored yet. And I think that's really cool. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. Like that's the fascinating part of molecular biology. Like, you might think like, oh, wow, we've gotten, you know, so much information. We've, like, barely touched the surface of, like, what's actually going on. at like a cellular level or like at a tissue level or anything like that. Like there's all these new discoveries all the time. So I don't know. I like that, you know, someone decided to kind of challenge the heterodoxy of like all this.

That is actually exactly how he frames it. Oh, wow. Maybe we would be friends. I don't know. It's very friendly. I mean, to your point about the discoveries we made all the time, the other crazy thing to me is that like an ovary, like you think. think of it as a basket of eggs. It's kind of what the term comes from. But it's got all this tissue

in it. Like I always think of it as like chewed up bubble gum for some reason. It's very pink in my head. So all this like connective tissue that the eggs and the follicles are embedded in and we don't know what all those cells are and what they're doing. They're probably like communicating. They're probably really important. But we have no idea because we really lashed onto the eggs because that's what we cared about. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and also just like, you know, organs that are involved in reproduction more broadly, like the focus has been so squarely on their role in making babies. And first of all, a lot of the science on their role making babies has been shoddy historically. But then it's just also like, you know, I bet that these organs that are in someone's body for their whole light probably have larger impacts on their bodily function than just.

sometimes you get pregnant. Right. A baby happens. Could not have said that better myself. Like, I mean, even I like forget that the ovaries don't just have eggs. They're producing estrogen that literally supports like your brain and your bones and your blood and like give them more credit. They're not just reproductive organs.

Yeah. Well, and you know what else I was thinking of as you were starting the fact was that like it's so recent. that it like happened during my career as a science journalist really that people started talking about the very concept that maybe sperm got less good when you get old too right oh my god that's such a good point it made people so mad right how dare you everyone knows that men of any age can father a child and it's like yes yes yes that's true but also when you're doing are all falling apart and your hair is falling out. Your sperm are perfect.

Like, why do you think that your sperm would be like really good at the thing that they do? Yeah. It's like there's a force field to logic when you have these like really deeply embedded like gender constructs come in. And there's like resistance to poking holes in the paradigm. It's crazy. No. And the fact that like it was, there was so much uproar. I remember because I covered it and wrote about it and people sent me really angry emails.

And there was so much like, that is so offensive to say given that so many older men are fathers and like, what are you implying about their children? And I'm like, women who are 35 literally are called geriatric pregnancy. Right. Yeah. And you're worried about me offending a 70 year old who just had a kid. I'm sorry. Who's probably doing great. Yeah.

And his kid is probably. probably fine. We're just talking about spur quality. Yeah, just the biology. Yeah. And the other thing that people get offended about are resistant to you is making these really obvious connections to other animals. So like the first study on this was in mice, which is naturally how it goes. And like, yeah, you absolutely have to confirm and do more studies. But they were like, humans are not mice, except at Disneyland. Like that was a literal quote from a researcher. And it's like, well, Well, if you're seeing that more and more other animals have this happening, you could at least consider that maybe it's happening in humans. Like, we're not like just this special, unique exception from all other animals.

Yeah. That's such a good point because I think, you know, there are so many over-the-top headlines around research that's in rodents. And, like, so it's become a real trope to be like, you know, parentheses in mice. like don't take that headline seriously. Right. It's just a rodent study, which is definitely true. But then also, I think you make a great point that it can easily become like a strawman argument to be like, don't listen to anything this person is saying it's absurd to think that this thing that happens in mice would happen in humans. It's like, no, that is it's the very obvious first step.

Right. Right. Right. The issue is that everything is so black and white, right? Like whether it is like, oh yeah, the ovaries, they're. have to be withering away. Or, oh, the mice studies are total BS, you know, like, we take like a new piece of information and then we take it to its, like, very end conclusion.

Yeah, evens are really bad at nuanced. Or we just try to slot it into our existing paradigm. And if it's, like, making the whole, like, Jenga game fall apart, then we're just like, no. Right, right. And people being like, people, like the idea that, like, the takeaway from ovary's probably keep making eggs is like, so you can maybe not get old by not going through menopods. It's like, I don't know if that's... I'm really glad you mentioned that because that's why putting the goat testicles into your

own testicles is relevant. Like there's always going to be with some new information. There's always going to be the strain of like the Huckster coming out of the woodwork. Keep you virile. Right. Maybe this is the elixir of life. Well, maybe this one is it. So definitely be skeptical of that. Yeah, I don't know. Periods are horrible. I think I give me the menopause. I know it's horrible.

Give me the menopause. But you know what I mean? I don't know. I don't know if I want more eggs. Yeah. That's fair. Maybe more eggs not for everyone. Yeah.

And we should just be able to choose and decide that for ourselves. Exactly. You can choose an IUD that gets rid of your period for some people. It would simply be great to know. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I just want to know the basics of my body.

Just like the very basic operating manual. That's all I'm asking here. Yeah. When I was writing my book and I, well, it was before I wrote my book, but not long before. When I really sat down and like read the step-by-step mechanics of how eggs are released. And I was like, what the fuck? Yeah. Nobody told me this.

Yep. No. No. And he was. Busting through this. like the Kool-Aid man and that's fine but like that was an incredible life why didn't I know that right it's incredibly like violent and competitive and the eggs like fight to the death and I'm like so why is the female bodycast? The egg like goes out there it like exit and then the little

the little fingers of the floppy tube are like come back come back yes it's incredibly oh my god like an astronaut that's like untethered from the spaceship and then like Rope back. In the movie Gravity. Exactly. Every time we ovulate. Why is this not the amazing drama that we want to learn? Yeah.

There's a little Sandra Bullock inside everyone. Once a month, she comes out. And you're buying. And always make more. And that's beautiful. Amazing. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I, what a group of winners, I have to say.

I would say we flew to the moon and back today. Yeah, yeah. I love that they all kind of like tied back together. Like, that's a real synergy. I really, I can't pick between the two of you. They were both really good. We could call it a tie this week. It's one in a while else since we had a tie.

We just all brought our A game. We really did. I was like, dang. I'm just glad. if I held up with you too. I'm still thinking about the fact that like birds just disappeared for half the year and everyone was just like

birds. That just makes me so because they weren't scrolling Instagram so maybe like all winter they're just thinking about the birds and like dreaming about them. What if okay one more side before we before we close out is that one thing

from the the historical like belief that swallows hibernated under like ponds, there would be all of these references to like, you know, men who are are trawling for fish if they don't know any better can sometimes try to catch the hibernating birds, but the birds will die once you interrupt their hibernation and make really bad meat. And I'm like, those birds were bad meat because you found a rotting bird crest at the bottom of the place. Or some other rotting animal who knows what. I love history. I really do.

That's the type of creative thinking I want more of. Really, they make things so much more complicated that they have to be. Exactly. What, what, though, today are we learning in science that people are going to be like, I can't believe that they thought of this, you know, it's on the same level as the moonbirds. I can't, I, you know, I can't wait, knowing that I will never know. Yep. I still can't wait.

I feel like I've been seeing a lot because of the circles that Rachel and I are in. a lot of headlines, you're like, actually, snakes have seen the dolphin clitoris? And like, have you seen the dolphin clitoris? So it is my sincere hope that 50 years from now, people would be like, wow, they just thought snakes just didn't have a clitoris, that they just won around not enjoying themselves or other whole life? That's sad. Like, I didn't know one asked this question. Amazing. Listeners, definitely check out Vigna Obscira everywhere you get your books.

pairs incredibly with been there done that like a fine wine just saying true two great taste that taste agree together and are looming as hell yeah you can you can read my bad tweets if you want I will I will continue to do so thank you the weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts including me Rachel Fultman along with Jess Bodie who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore

thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. 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. Did you know if your windows are bare, indoor temperatures? can go up 20 degrees. Get ahead of summer with custom window treatments like solar roller shades from blinds.com and save up to 45% during the Memorial Day Early Access sale. Whether you want to

DIY it or have a pro handle everything, we've got you. Free samples, real design experts, and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 45% off site wide right now during the early access Memorial Day sale at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply.