The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Mary Roach talks Moose Crash Test Dummies, Famous Ferrets, and Deadly Planets

Episode Date: November 24, 2021

Mary Roach—author of incredible books like Gulp, Bonk, Spook, and most recently, Fuzz—joins the show 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 follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci. --- 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

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And 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. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill for 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 Home Depot.com slash price match for details.

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 Feltman. I'm Sarah Chodosh. And I'm Mary Roach.

Mary, welcome to the show. Thanks. Listeners, of course, most of you already know that Mary Roach is the author of numerous books that we talk about frequently on Weirdest Thing, including gulp, bong, spook, which was featured recently in our ectoplasm fact. And most recently, Fuzz. Mary, before we get into the show, do you want to talk a little bit about your latest? Oh, about the book, not my fact.

Yeah, we'll get to the facts. Sure, yeah, yeah. Fuzz is a book about animals breaking human laws and what to do about that. Obviously, animals can't really break the law because they're written for humans, but nonetheless, they commit manslaughter and breaking and entering and jaywalking and vandalism and trespassing. They do all that, and it bugs us. And so it's a book about essentially it's human wildlife conflict and better ways to deal with it. And that's pretty much what the book is about. Awesome. We will link to that in the show

notes and on popsye.com slash weird. So of course, as always, we recommend that our listeners check it out. But for now, let's get into the show. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah, why don't you start with your tease? I'm going to be talking about the cause of death in the 17th century known as planet. Wonderful. I can't wait to hear more. Planet. Yeah, I hope. Death by planet. Oh, my God,

he died of planet. So rare. Not really. Yeah, I mean, don't we all die of planet, really, in one way or another? I think planet is dying of us. That's fair. It is true, yeah. So my tease is that I want to talk about the most important ferret in the history of particle physics and several other weasels relevant. I thought you were just going to stop at the most important ferret. I mean, arguably, the most important ferret in the world of particle physics is the most important.

and ferret. Fair enough. Existentially. I will let you have that. Mary, what's your tease? My tease is that this Swedish National Transportation Research Institute funded the design of a moose crash test dummy. Oh, that's a big crash test dummy.

It is. It's got a lot of legs. A lot of moving parts. It's very large. So what should we start with? I mean, maybe death by planet. That's a pretty... Sure. I'm very curious. We can talk about planetary death of one kind or another. So, all right, so I feel like I don't usually talk about like how I found my fact, but I feel it's necessary to the story here, which is essentially that I was browsing Reddit and found a list, an amazing list, which is the diseases and causalities this year being 16,000. i.e. a record of the causes of death in London in 1632. And it is pretty wild. Like modern

tables of death records are not especially funny. But this one is pretty wild. So we've got one death from affrighted. We have 10 from cancer and wolf together. That's one line item. Right. Of course. We have killed by several accidents. Also, King's Evil, Rising. of the lights, teeth, and, of course, planet. There were a lot more. Obviously, you have your measles and so on, but those are the funniest ones. There are also some that didn't even really sound like words, such as jawfawn, J-A-W-F-A-L-N, Tisic, Quincy, Impostume. So I went looking for some explanations because these seemed absolutely wild. I was expecting it to be like infectious diseases I had heard of and, you know, are no longer causes of death. But in looking for explanations, I found this

entire paper about the births and deaths in St. Giles' Cripplegate Parish, which was one of the largest parishes in London. And it goes over all of the death records from 1654 to 1693, and then also 1729 to 1743. There was actually an act of parliament that required all parishes to keep records of births and deaths starting in 1653. So this one is more official than the earlier one, although no less full of hilarious words.

And this paper like goes through and explains all of them, such as the fact that cancer and wolf is because wolf was like, a term for cancers. I'm not quite sure why there were two words. But Wolf does seem kind of appropriate as a cancer metaphor. So some of these are like pretty standard, like a lot of deaths from fever, which kind of could have been anything that causes a fever. You've got your measles, worms, rickets, plague, also just aged, a lot of wounds, a lot of broken limbs, obviously, because there were no antibiotics and it was pretty easy to die from those kinds of things. There was one just called distracted.

There was also, yeah, there was also this amazing detail, which is really not disease-related, but it did note that there was one grocer who was, quote, blown up with gunpowder in his dwelling house by accident. And I don't know why a grocer would have had a lot of gunpowder in the home. Well, someone has to sell the gunpowder. Sarah, come on. I suppose that's true. It's not what I would have thought of as something you'd get from a grocer. I don't know if gunpowder is really a grocery item, is it? It's not and it's, it is his dwelling house. So, you know, maybe, maybe he sold some of bad fruit and someone had a vendetta. Or he's on a butcher. Or he's a hunter grocer. Right, right. The buy accident seems

presumptuous. Like, he tripped on a bag of gunpowder. It's spontaneous. Neasely ignited. Yeah. Anyway, so rather than me, like, going through and listing these, I thought I might make this a little bit of interactive. Would you two like to guess what the leading cause of death was? I love to make the game. I do feel like I don't, like, there's no two writers in the world who I feel are, like, more qualified to guess. Yeah.

The leading cause of death. Of all the ones that you mentioned? No, total. And this is 16. So it's 17th and 18th century. London. I'm going to go with childhood disease of some kind. They're always, the kids are always dropping dead back then.

The kids are always dropping dead. That's so true. The kids are not all right. I want to say syphilis, even though it's not true. You just want to say it. I just want to say it. It probably was true. I just don't think they knew that.

Okay, Mary is kind of close, but if you're going by like individual causes, it was tuberculosis consumption. If you added them all up, though, it is childhood disease and we're going to get to that later, but I thought I might start on like a slightly lighter note rather than all the children dropping dead, but we'll get to it. Leave it to me to bring the guy to children right front and center. Don't you worry. I wrote the end of this and was like, is this too dark? I thought, no. Mary Roaches on the show today, so it's not.

So yeah, so consumption, which is the old-fashioned term for tuberculosis, since you lose a wild amount of weight, is number one. And then actually there are two other names in the list, Tissic, which is like a bastardization of Tissus, P-H-T-H-I-S, obviously, which is like a more formal. name for tuberculosis. And also, so that's like, Tysic is, is essentially just also TB. And also King's Evil, which is now called Scrofula or Scrofula, which I don't think is a better word, to be honest, but is a kind of tuberculosis that spreads to your lymph nodes. So tuberculosis overall, I think it was called King's Evil because supposedly the King's Touch could heal it. And I can't tell if that means like the king was evil if he let you die of consumption or if it was like they thought maybe if the king hated you you got it it's unclear to me wow so scrofula

is actually tuberculosis it is a type of it's it's tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis to be specific i almost thought it was a scrotum thing you would think wouldn't you be yeah some gross crusty Scrotum thing. Scrofila. Or you know that are Dracula's. Yeah, it's like Count Scrofula. Count Scrofula.

Oh boy. So, okay, so we're going to have a little quiz here, if you guys will allow me. Absolutely, yeah. I'm just going to go through some of these and ask you what you think they are. Just shout them out. Okay. We're going to start with wind. A fart.

Flatchel. I mean, some kind of GI issue. Basically, yeah. Also, relatedly, there was a griping of the gut, flux, scouring, which I think was a word for like diarrhea. Yeah, if I had to guess. Yeah, it feels scouring. It's kind of apt. Also, my favorite, timpony, which is like, if your stomach is distended, right, you tap on it. And I just, I think that's the most beautiful term for like gas in your abdomen that I've ever heard. And also, Gout in the stomach, which you can't really get, but gout does cause stomach problems. It's a joy thing. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I'm going to be honest, there was a lot of medical confusion on this list in general. Did Dropsy make the list?

That was always my favorite. Dropsy. Dropsy was on the list, yes. I almost included this here, and now I'm glad I didn't include it because I wouldn't have stumped you. Okay. Dammit. Mortification. I know.

All right. Mortification. death by death? Just, you just died. Or like, just, yeah.

It seems like it'd be death by fright, but. Yeah. Right. Right. Psychological. Fear.

Being just someone who was really universally disliked who then died and they were like, it was probably because they sucked so much. It's gangrene. Oh.

From the. original term, like if you mortify originally meant, like, something dying. Oh, okay. Interesting. Yeah. So it actually kind of makes a lot of sense. And actually, if you look at, like, the Google Ngrams thing, mortify is a really popular word in the 1800s because I guess a lot of people died of gangrene.

So that's a fun fact. Yeah. Okay. It makes the modern use of the word feel very melodramatic. I know it does. I'm kind of now curious to look up the etymology about how that shifted as a meaning. Okay. Rising of the lights.

Honega. Rising of the lights. On death by Hanukkah. Rising of the light. I don't think there were any Jews in this census reading. Was that a like something based on the humors? Like your lighthearted humors are out of balance or something? Or like a.

Like some of the balance. An imbalance of some kind. Rising of the lights. Oh, hit by, hit by a car. Oh, they didn't have cars. Yeah, in the 17th century. Yeah, hit by, well, a horse and buggy. Or like a, like a stroke, something.

These are a good guesses and none of them are correct. Yeah. It has to do, the lights was a term for lungs. So basically, like, if you had some kind of, like, lung issue, rising of the lights referred to like a rising feeling in your chest, like a tightness. So it was like probably anything that would. was vaguely related to breathing. Also, rising of the mother, the mother being your uterus.

Oh, yeah, I was going to say, the mother was the uterus. And I have a whole, in my upcoming book, there's a whole bunch about, you know, the uterus on the move. Yeah. I knew going in that they thought that the uterus was on the move, but there was just a lot more throughout medical history of people blaming things on uteruses being on the move. and like literally being like rodents inside of you. Uh-huh. Like snuffling around. I remember that.

So that's horrifying. Okay. We're going to do one more and then I'll explain. Then I'll have you guess plan it. But first, purples. Purples. It sounds pretty cute. Was it like bubonic plague or something else?

Some kind of disgusting skin bulbous thing. You're pretty close. Not bulbous, but purpera. Like perpour. being the symptom, but like I think any bleeding disorder where you've got like little purple blotches under your skin, so it kind of would have covered a lot of things. I think it's generally associated with typhus or also meningococcus. I don't know how common that was, but typhus was definitely popular. Well, popular is maybe not the right way to put it, but common. I love typhus. Okay, and then planet.

Or planet struck, if that helps you. Planet struck. Planet struck. Planet struck. Is that just like falling? The planet does kill you if you hit the ground if you think about it. That's true. That's the only guess I have. That normal force coming back up at you. Or like a weather natural disaster.

Was it just like getting like killed in a storm? I don't know. Oh, good one. Yeah. Like natural disasters. Yeah. That also would make a lot of sense. This doesn't make too much sense for the 1600.

This is logical. COVID. It's less logical. Was it COVID? Yeah. It's come back. It basically meant that you just died suddenly, as in like the planets aligned, like fate had it in for you and you just died and there wasn't an explanation.

Also, frighted or affrighted was the same thing. Like it didn't mean you were frightened. It just it meant like, you died. We don't know. Sometimes it was just suddenly, which is a much more concise way to put it. It's funny because I knew there were, there was a lot of confusion about like, like how many different diseases there are, which is fair because they're like, you know, germ theory wasn't a thing. So it was like based on symptoms. And that meant sometimes two different

diseases could be confused for the same thing or one disease could be confused for like 10 different things. But it's funny to me that they had multiple names for more philosophical ways of dying. Like it feels like they should have just settled on one word for they just died. Yeah, it seemed like even within the same table or within the same parish, it was like not consistent. And the paper does point out that a lot of times that people determining the cause of death was like not any kind of medical professional. It was just like whatever schmuck got sent to like pick up your body and bring it to the church was like asked your family like what happened. And they were like, I don't know. And they were like, I don't know.

And they were like, all right, just plan it. Yeah. So yeah. And coroners were appointed. I mean, they're not medical. even today, they're like elected or appointed. They are not the people to do the exam. They're the people who announce it.

It's the weirdest. It used to be like the king's, you know, Corona comes from Corona, Crown, and it was just kind of like some dude who got a cushy post. It's like, what did he die? Oh, hang on, let me ask. Planet. I didn't know the origin of that, but every time I voted for coroner, it just felt fundamentally wrong.

Yeah. Like what do I, I don't know what makes a good foreigner. Exactly. Why am I voting for this? Well, when you think about it, like, it's less silly today, but we do still run into trouble. I mean, Sarah, you've done a lot of, like,

data reporting on, like, mortality trends and had to deal with the fact that often the reported cause of death is, like, not really useful or consistent. You know, it might, like, deaths might all be lumped together as accidents, depending on what state they're in and you have to, you don't have any way of like breaking those apart into like overdoses, et cetera. And then obviously with the pandemic,

there was a lot of, there were a lot of issues around like arguments over what the cause of death should be, whether it was like the ultimate organ failure or COVID. So I guess what I'm saying is, as is so often the case on the podcast, I think if we are lucky enough to have humans thinking about us, 400 years from now, they will probably think we're really goofy. It's true, yeah.

It's difficult to track deaths well, even with a very, very standardized system. So, you know, hard to blame them. I have a few more that I'll run through that I won't make you guess. For instance, impostrum was some kind of abscess. Meagram could have been either a migraine or depression. I guess those went hand in hand. Quincy is actually a term that is still used today, which is a complication of tonsillitis,

where the infection spreads to the rest of your throat, and today is super treatable, and back then, your throat could swell up to the point that you just couldn't breathe anymore. So that's a horrifying way to go. Someone really didn't like Quincy, whoever he was. I know, yeah. I think it's spelled with an S, right, Quincy?

Yeah, that makes sense. I know, but you know what I, that leads to me, what I was going to say is I really love the names of disease, you know, some of these horrifying diseases, they just had such quaint names compared to now where it's like strepto-numocococococry syphilitic cuhuh. Yeah. Now it's like, it used to be Quincy, dropsy, you know, these very. They were much more charming ways to die for sure.

Yeah, they were very charming. And so were the treatments, some of them. Like I have the 1890 Merck Manual, which the Merck Manual people put out. as an anniversary thing in 1999 or whatever it was. Yeah, 1999. They put out the, it's a slim volume and it had things like one of the treatments, I forget what it was treating was removal inland. Removal inland, which I think meant a change of climate.

Yeah. Like to a drier place maybe, a removal inland. So just put them on a train, give them a nice vacation. He'll be better in a week. I saw a tweet or TikTok recently that was like, we need to bring back being sent to the seaside for your health. Like, I would definitely benefit from someone being like you have a weak constitution. You're not fit for labor. You need to go take in the seaside air.

I would love to be told that. That would be great. I totally agree. I'm also going to totally ruin the mood by getting around to the end, which is about the children dying. Oh, of course. Of course you are. Sorry about that. Okay, so to circle back. So, like, Mary is correct that definitely the leading cause of death was being a child, essentially. In this paper in particular, more than 17% of all deaths occurred in early childhood, and that was not counting, like, plague, fevers, consumption, which almost certainly killed lots more children.

So like probably at least one in five deaths were children, which is fairly horrifying. And upsettingly, as I went through this and I was like laughing my way through the list, like I was expecting to see a lot of child deaths. So you have a lot of like stillborn and abortive, like not meaning an abortion back then, but just like some kind of miscarriage probably. But I mean, there's literally a line that just says infant, which is very sad because that's just like, that's not even a cause of death. That's just like, this was a baby.

Yes, this was a baby and babies die. Yeah. But even some of the ones I thought were going to be funny, we're sad. Like teeth is way up there. It is the fourth most common cause of death. And that was a term for babies that died when they were teething. Like, that was such a common occurrence that I think there was a belief that like teeth coming in could be dangerous. Because so many babies died when they were teething, which is horrifying.

A chrysom, or I'm. sure I'm not saying that right, was a baby who had been baptized but was still less than a month old, the chrysom or chrism being like the white cloth that you lay over a child during baptismal service. It was just like, it was horrifying. And most horrifyingly, Mary, you go. Wait, wait, wait. Let's stretch that out. Let's build some drama and anticipation. The christening cloth killed them? What they're. They've smothered? No, no. Sorry. It was as in that they had a specific term for babies that had already been baptized, but died before they were a month old. I see. And that was just the term.

They named it after the cloth. I see. I see. Okay. That would be an extremely dangerous service if they died of the cloth. Yeah. Okay. All right. Now to the dark part. Yeah. Darker. So the second most common cause of death, like item by item, was, convulsions, which I thought was really weird because to us today, convulsions is a very specific medical term. And why would that many people be dying of convulsions, like more than fevers or plague or anything like that? But back then, it was probably a cover-up for infanticide because that was a crime, obviously, and still is. And it was really common back then. But that was not. That was not something that anybody wanted to fess up to. There was also one called overlaid, which meant

like a person rolled over on their baby accidentally and smothered it. And that was also a really common thing to put if you had killed your child or someone thought you had and didn't want to blame you. I think, I feel like those were the worst ones because that's not like, like disease we expect kind of to have like taken a lot of lives. But we kind of forget that like in an era with like no birth control and no real medical care, let's be honest. It was like, it was a liability to have a child, especially if you were a woman who had a baby out of wedlock and you were going to, like, have your life completely ruined by the fact that you just gave birth to a child. Right, or you couldn't afford number four. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, just an incredibly

depressing note to end on, but I do feel like we should appreciate more the fact that in the 21st century, it's just assumed you'll make it to adulthood. Like, that's fine. And we kind of forget that it was not that long ago that it was pretty common that, like, a substantial fraction of your children would die before they were 10. And, like, for reference, so the U.S. child mortality rate today, like, I mean, 2019 is the most recent data, is about 0.65 percent. And the highest in the world is Nigeria, which is about 12 percent. And that's down by, like, a third sense. 1960. Worldwide, it's like generally closer to something like 0.5 to like 6% in many parts of Africa. It's more like 6 to 10%. And that's obviously still a lot of children. It is millions and millions

of kids who die every year and many of them do not have to. Like many of those are completely preventable deaths. But it is still a really wild amount of progress. Like in this paper, the number they cite is like roughly 20% of all deaths were children, which is not how we define child mortality today. But I did find another paper that said in the 17th century, the mortality rate would have been like one in three children died before they were 15, which is just a crazy number. Yeah. Wow. That's awful. Sarah, sorry. Why are you always going to come to my house and bump me out? But yeah, it is true that the world has come a long way in that regard. I mean, of course, antibiotics have helped.

Access to clean water and food has helped. But, yeah, also a great reminder that the access to those really basic life-saving things is still not equitable. So really, really easy fixes. Happy, happy holidays. Donate holiday. Donate your money to someone who could use it. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then be back with Hope. Hopefully a more uplifting fact.

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And 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 grains 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 terpen profiles designed for specific moods. So you can choose your cannabis gummy gummy, edible. flower 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 discrete 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 9 THC buttercream carmels, because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can have dairy rights. now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me out and sends into 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. Okay, we're back. And for perhaps a lighter note, I hope,

lighter than infanticide. It would be hard to be darker. Mary would you tell us about some mooses, some moose. Okay, well, so this has to do with the question of when an ungulate of some variety steps into the road when you're driving, is it safer, smarter to swerve or to just hit it? And the answer is a little bit complicated. according to the CDC, 10,000 people a year are injured when they take evasive action. In other words, they swore because an animal stepped into the road and then they go off the road,

they roll over, they hit a tree, whatever. And that is only 2,000 fewer than are injured when they actually hit the animal. But interestingly, 77% of these were deer, the ones where people tended to be, killed were elk and moose, and in one case, a horse. And so clearly hitting bigger and taller is more dangerous. And this has been investigated by Swedish bioengineers and the Swedish transportation research industry. They funded a study where, and this study was hard for me to understand. They filmed it at high speed.

It was a car hitting an actual moose. such that they could play it back in slow motion and see exactly what is happening when a car traveling 50 miles per hour, a Volvo, in fact, of course. It hits a moose. But they mentioned that this was an ill and weak moose and that it was put to death shortly afterward, which doesn't make sense to me because if you're going to hit it, you don't need to put it to anyway, it was a confusing. They were, they took pains to make clear there was an ill and weak moose that they were using

to hit. But there was something sort of odd in how they were saying that we didn't really kill it. It had already died. I mean, there was only so much, there's only so much you can do to say politely, we killed a moose to this experiment. Exactly. Exactly. I think it was like they killed it.

And then in the interim, like they wanted to say it's already dead when we hit it. but that would mean in the time it takes for a moose to be shot and crumpled to the pavement, you smashed into it. So it's a lot of very complicated timing. Well, they're bioengineers, Mary. I'm sure they can handle it. I love that this experiment was on Volvo's because as soon as you started your fact, I was thinking about, I grew up in like rural South Jersey where spotting a deer on the side

of the road is like the first part of your driving lesson, the most crucial part. and my dad having a long commute hit several deer in my childhood, sadly, all with his Volvo, which managed to survive every time. So clearly they did something right. Well, yeah, the Volvos, partly as a result of this research, but I think it probably had been done beforehand, Volvos and Sobs as well, your northern country cars have reinforced, you know, the struts that hold up the roof. Those are reinforced. And it is particularly important with the moose. Now the moose, when you hit a moose, what happens, which we learned from the study that I just mentioned, what happens is you are striking the legs. So you're knocking the legs out

from under and then the whole body, the torso and the head and the antlers ends up cartwheeling over onto the car. And if it's a tall animal crashing through the windshield and or the the roof. So you end up with a lot of broken necks and a lot of people trying to duck and going sideways. So their head is broken one way or another. And this is also an issue with camels. The Swedish Transportation Board was after the study came out, they got a request from somebody in Saudi Arabia to create a camel crash test dummy. Because camels, there's a great study. I had the statistics here somewhere for the number of people.

Oh, it was, okay, 16 in 16 camel strikes, nine of the drivers ended up with quadriplegia. So it's a, because it says you have a, you know, a camel coming through landing on your head. Very top-heavy animal. Yeah. And the other thing that happens in Saudi Arabia, according to the, study by neuroscientists that the Riyadh Armed Forces Hospital is that camel owners, if you hit a camel and kill it, you then have to pay the owner. You have to compensate the owner for the camel. So camel owners would kind of lurk in the dark and like encourage, yes, it's in the paper

by the Riyadh Armed Forces Hospital dudes. They would kind of encourage the camel onto the road in order to get the payout, like this would be their older. They're ill and weak. This would be your ill and weak, camels. In order to get the compensation. And so this is a serious issue with camel strikes in Saudi Arabia. What a scheme. What a scheme. Yep. So the other thing that goes on, and this was, I liked this quote also, in terms of how what happens. I, I, I, I like the wording of this guy, the guy who was the designer of the moose crash test dummy, whose name was Manus Gens or Gens. This is how he phrased it.

Crumpled steel interferes with the head's path. That's, yeah. Instead of like your head smashes into the roof of the car as it collapses onto you, crumpled steel. I think actually he wrote crumbled was the way it was translated. I don't think he meant crumbled. you make crumpled because you can't really crumble. You can't crumble steel.

Crumpled steel interferes with the head's path as though the head has its own kind of, kind of like the uterus. The head goes where it will, you know, when the steel gets in the way. That's right. Yeah. So lots of broken necks and severed spinal cords. Also a lot of, they mentioned a lot of lacerations, facial lacerations, and then pointed out that these are infected by, quote, entrails, hair and feces.

There's just a lot going on in those. Plus, if you survive, you have, you know, a moose or a camel in your lap, probably dead, but maybe not. Yeah, that seems potentially chaotic. It's potentially chaotic. So the answer to what you should do is it's safer to swerve or to hit. For your smaller animals, obviously, it's much smarter to hit them, although, you know, we are emotional. and people who are emotional and we follow our instincts, you do tend to swerve anyway, but it is a lot safer. It's safer to swerve with a smaller animal. It's a larger animal.

It's safer. A larger animal you want to just, you do want to swerve because if it's tall, it's going to come and hit you and possibly break your neck. So in that case, you do a swerve, particularly if you're on a desert highway with camels around, you would want to go off into the sand. there's no trees to hit. Swerving is much safer with a camel than a moose. This was my equivalent when I learned to drive because I grew up outside of Philly also with lots of deer, but we go to New Hampshire every year where there are moose. And so this was the number one driving lesson I was given by my father, was if it's a deer,

you're better off hitting it. And if it's a moose, you are definitely better off swerving it. Yeah, well, he must have read this paper by Magnus Jennings and the Swedish transportation. He's a doctor who worries a lot, so I suspect he did some research. Well, he totally got that right. He totally got it right. When I worked on this, though, because I started thinking about self-driving cars, I thought, okay, they're really rational. So what they're, I guess, and Volvo and Saab have a large animal detection system, which looks for the profile of a moose or an elk or presumably a camel, and proceeds accordingly. It tries to keep you from hitting it. But I wondered, like, if it's a dog,

if it's a bobcat? Like, what does the self-driving car do? Does it swerve or does it not swerve? So I tried to call Google. Google Waymo, who have a self-driving branch or segment of their massive corporation. And I said I really wanted to come down and interview someone about that. And the media relations woman did not want to have relations with me. Absolutely.

She said, let's get you down here to drive in the self-driving car. And I'm like, I don't want to drive in the car. I just want to talk to someone about what do you do if it's a beagle or a bobcat? Like how does the, you know, it's a dog or it's a, like, how does the car make that decision? And if it slams on the brakes, does it check to see if somebody is behind because that could be bad? And, you know, if you slam on the brakes and the rear end of the car goes up and now the other person goes under. Does it look to see if there's trees near you? So if you swerve, are you going to hit a tree?

I mean, that's a lot for a car to figure out. I mean, it's a lot for a human to figure out. And I had a lot of things I wanted to ask, but she just absolutely stopped. I sent about six emails, and I finally started going like, I think her name was, her last name was Barrier, which was kind of appropriate. I said, is beautiful. Are you okay? I'm kind of worried about you.

And then it was right around that time that one of those Uber cars, hit that pedestrian in Arizona, just like it was a squirrel and killed. It was a woman, I guess. Anyway, so obviously the self-driving cars haven't figured out what's safest to do in any cases. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's that whole, the whole like trolley problem situation with cars. The trolley problem. Yes. I think they do not like to talk about how to deal with that because there's no answer people will like, you know? There's really no good answer. my college boyfriend, Sher Deal once stood me up because he was driving home in a snowstorm and hit a cow. And that was a really funny series of text to get.

He was okay. But he was like, I can't drive you to this very important appointment today because I hit a cow. And I was like, excuse me? Wow. Well, see, now, cow is very heavy, but it's got pretty short legs. Right. Apparently he was fine and the cow wandered away. So it seems like it was a pretty ideal scenario for both parties.

Cow strikes go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's kind of it for your moose crash test, dummy. You should call like one of the smaller self-driving car outlets or like a researcher and see if they'll talk to you about the moose thing. I'm so curious now. I never thought about like detecting what kind of animal it might be. Yeah. But that's so important.

Like so many people will come across those issues. Yeah. And everyone's so focused on the people. What about the moose? Yeah. I guess it's, you know, with the, you know, the reason, they have the large animal detection system. So, you know, because that's a straightforward answer.

But the other one is not. It's not straightforward. And it, and a beagle is about the size of a raccoon. And I mean, it's, it's, you know, obviously people have more emotional reactions to pets and they're probably more likely to swerve. And it's a con it's, I think it, they maybe just think if, if we humans don't know what to do, we can't tell the cars what to do. But it is, yeah, well, the book's already out.

So I'm not, I'm not, I'm no longer motivated to do anything else on the topic. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost.

Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton 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 talk about a ferret named Felicia. I didn't share that it was named Felicia before, but that's wonderful. Her contributions to science. So first, I am going to talk about particle accelerators, and I'm not interested in explaining really what they are or how they work.

So friend of the podcast, Ryan Mandelbaum, texted me from a birdwalk to provide their explanation. They wrote, anyway, particle accelerators. are big round magnetic tubes that put energy into particles to make them go fast. You can do a lot of stuff with those fast particles, but most famously, you smash them together. Basically, by smashing them together, the energy from the speed turns into mass, producing new particles from the energy and helping physicists discover new things about the universe. Then they said, you can add, it's basically E equals MC squared. So that is all I will say about the function of particle accelerators

for the rest of this fact, because this is about ferrets. So, some listeners may recall that in 2016, the large Hadron Collider, which is a big old particle glider in Switzerland, shut down because of a weasel. There was a massive power outage that turned out to be the result of a small mammal, now thought to be a Martan weasel. It chewed through some power lines and sadly died, but not before taking the LHC with it, albeit temporarily. And animals are not in frequent sources of trouble in.

those facilities. In 2009, a soggy baguette caused an electrical short at the LHC, and the prevailing theory was that a passing bird dropped it down into the electrical equipment. And in 2006, a Fermilab newsletter even recounted an only somewhat facetious report of a coordinated attack on the facility, which is a particle accelerator in Illinois, by a family of raccoons. It seemed like the raccoons just wanted to live there, but they couldn't because it was a particle accelerator. They didn't have a secret plot to take it down? I don't think so, but that is how the, it was one of the more delightful newsletter blurbs I've read from a scientific institution. So I'll link to it on popsai.com slash weird in the article for this episode.

But speaking of Fermilab, and back to ferrets and weasels, I want to talk about a more positive animal interaction at a particle collider. So in the early 1970s, back when Fermilab was still called the National Accelerator Laboratory, it had been completed on schedule, which was good because the director had told the U.S. Department of Energy, it would be online within five years, and they were already at the four-year mark. But when they tried to actually use it, they couldn't get the particles up to the necessary speed without the magnets inside shorting out. Eventually, they figured out that basically a bunch of tiny metal shavings had been left behind by the construction and that they were interfering because magnets. But the question was, how do you clean out a ring-shaped tube that stretches for something like four miles? luckily back in the late 60s, the Fermilab crew had brought on this guy named Bob Sheldon from England.

I wasn't able to find anything about Bob's training, but the way his colleagues talk about him in historical write-ups, he's presented as kind of like a folk hero in contrast to their academic engineering physicist backgrounds. He was some kind of manager at a lab in the UK. And at Fermilab, his job was literally to think of ways to finish projects faster and cheaper. So whenever anyone was like ordering materials or having trouble executing something, he would like, you know, come over and take a look and be like, no, do it this way. One of the former research heads, Frank Beck, wrote that he was an affable North Countryman with an expansive personality. So I just get this picture of him being this very like salt of the earth. very like street smart guy compared to all of these particle physicists, which I just love. And I would

read a lot more about him if I could find it. So I will try to track that down at some point. But anyway, Bob looked at the tube cleaning problem and he thought of ferrets because he said that hunters in Yorkshire, where he was from, had historically used ferrets to flush rabbits out of Warrens to hunt them. Wait, can I ask a question? Yes, please. An uneducated question. How big is the tube?

Like in proportion to the ferret specifically? That's a great question. I mean, the tube is bigger than the average ferret, but not much bigger. I think it's like this. I know it's because I dated a particle physicist once and he took me down into the tube that's down at the Slack, the Stanford linear accelerator. Yeah. So we walked around with near.

or the two, and I remember it being, you know, yeah, it's like a foot. Okay. Yeah. Maybe less, but not like way less than that foot in day or everything. Okay. Okay. All right. So that was smaller than I was, than I was.

Yeah, it's pretty small tube. Definitely not like person sized. You can't like climb around in there. Okay. All right. All right. You would not have a good time. I don't think.

Um, so yeah, basically a ferret could be reasonably counted on to go into a tiny tube willingly. and like keep going until they found their way out the other side. So because they, everybody trusted Bob's opinion, they purchased Felicia, the smallest available ferret from a fur farm in Minnesota for $35. And I think she was about,

I read the like 15 inches long, but she was like the narrowest ferret because larger ferrets would push the limits of what they were comfortable putting into the tube. So Felicia actually never scurried around that four mile long main ring because she looked at it and was like, nope, no thank you. It was probably a little bit too long and dark for her, just like a good instinct. Like the four miles is a long way for a ferret to run through a dark tube. I learned about that ferrets and stoats in reporting for Fuzz, one of the things, there's a kind of, I just interrupted you.

No, no, please. Otherwise I'll forget. there's this kind of trap that is more humane requires that the animal stick its head up this tube and be very specifically placed and then this bar comes out and it's like an instantaneous death. But what they didn't realize is that ferrets don't like and stoats and wiesels, which are all in my head, the same animal, don't like to stick their heads in things. That was the quote. They don't like to stick their heads in things.

So this was something your guy perhaps didn't realize. Yeah, yeah. No, they do need to be coaxed in. There needs to be some payoff. And they did, you know, feed her hamburger meat after her expeditions. But like four miles was just too dubious for her, which again, I think is like smart on her part. But they did have her clean some shorter segments in a testing lab. They got her up to being comfortable with a few hundred feet at a time.

She did wear a diaper because there was some concern that she might put. and introduce further contaminants. Yeah. And then she did prove to be like an invaluable proof of concept for an automated system that they would later design to clean the main loop. But, you know, how did she clean it? It's a great question. And I have to say that when I first heard about Felicia, I really wanted to believe that she was just like a living pipe cleaner, like that her furry little body was the literal cleaning implement. That's what I thought.

Alas, that is not the case. I think that would... She'd need to be bigger. Right. And I don't think they wanted her, like, leaving fur behind in the tube. So she was more of like a pipe cleaner delivery device. She would go in with a string tied around her. And someone would hold on to the other end of it.

So that once she got through, there was a length of string throughout the whole length up the tube. Then they would take... Yeah. Then they took like a fuzzy... She was a needle. Uh-huh. They took a fuzzy cleaning thing, coated in some kind of like particle accelerator friendly cleaning solution.

And they tied that to the end of the string. And then they just pulled it through, like cleaning like a wind instrument. Or at least that's how I used to clean my flute, not with a ferret, but kind of the same principle. And yeah, they basically ended up inventing a magnetic object that was kind of jerry-rigged to rock it around the tube and pull a string along to do the same job that, Felicia did. And that worked well enough to get the facility online by 1972. So between her unwillingness to go into the main tube and their invention of a device that wasn't furry and hungry that could do the same job, she only actually worked at the lab for like a few months. And by 1972, she was functionally retired, was more of a pet and mascot. There was a great 2019 Atlas Obscura

article by Jen Pinkowski about this, which pulled together a lot of historical sources. And according to that article, Felicia spent most of her time as a border at a local mink farm, but sometimes would spend the night with Fermilab staffers. And in 1972, unfortunately, while at the home of a staffer, she took ill and they brought her to a vet and she rallied a little bit, but then she passed away. there were plans to taxidermy Felicia and keep her on site, according to the very loving little obituary that ran for her in the Fermilab newsletter. But if that happened, no one knows where her remains were. So there may be a very historically significant stuffed ferret somewhere in Fermilab or in somebody's like house in Illinois.

but that remains to be seen. Also, I should say Fermilab also has bison. I've met the Fermilab bison. They're very cute. It's a great place. So now my memory from having wandered around the Slack linear accelerator that time is that there was a certain amount of radiation. Like we weren't, we didn't stay down there very long because it was so I'm more concerned about Felicia's exposure to radiation. That is a great point. Everything was powered down when she was present. Very good. Yeah, and just one more quick thing is that in researching Felicia's story, I found that she was actually following in the footsteps of another pipe scurrying ferret named Freddie. According to a 1948 article in Time magazine, some electricians in New Zealand decided to use Freddie the ferret.

to thread wiring through protective piping. Similar to Felicia, he like scurried through it with a string attached to him, and then his co-workers would drag the electrical wires through the length of the pipe using that string. Apparently, they would hold a dead rabbit at the other end and use an air compressor to like waft the scent in, which is maybe something that they should have thought of at formalab if they wanted Felicia to scurry for four miles. according to Time Magazine, the work Freddie did would have cost something like $300 in human wages every month, which according to the first inflation calculator I could find is something like $3,400 today. So no small feat.

And that made him very unpopular with the New Zealand Electrical Workers Union, who filed several complaints against Freddie's company, including that they were employing a non-union worker and employing someone under the age of 15. What? Yeah, but not in ferret years. Yes, exactly. According to time, his colleagues responded that the ferret was, in fact, already a grandfather. So they felt he was mature enough to hold down a job.

And they filled out a union card for him. which was accepted. So then it was all on the up and up for however long Freddie kept working. That's the most New Zealand resolution to that story. Like they just applied for a union card and they were like, well, that seems in order. That's all I have to say about ferrets in the workforce for now. For now. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week?

A lot of weird stuff. Yeah, it's hard. man planet. I know somehow. Yeah. Planet. Planet. Yeah.

Death by planet. Pretty good. Learned a lot there. All right, Sarah. You've got the one this week. I'm so glad that my wildly depressing fact. Yeah. I'm choosing to forget like the last 10 minutes of your fact.

Yeah, that's fine. That's absolutely fine. Mary, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It was great having you here. Oh, I loved it. Thanks for having me on. And listeners, don't forget to check out Fuzz to learn more about crashing into moose, avoiding moose, and many other legal predicaments between humans and animals. 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 read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show.

For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popsai.com slash weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsye. com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Jess Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes so you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way, with Rob. Ralph's delivery and pickup.

And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.