The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Medical Butt Chugging, Ancient Ice Cream Pyramids, "The Thing" but Midwestern

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Mary Roach RETURNS to Weirdest Thing to share her new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy! From this phenomenal new read, she discusses a section on breathing through your butt, a thing not only turtles can do, but also apparently humans. Plus, Rachel talks about the ancient (and DEADLY) origins of ice cream, and Lauren explains a strange, dark goop found on a research boat propeller in one of the great lakes. (Yes, we know it sounds like the premise of a new John Carpenter flick.) 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! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Go check out Mary Roach's new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy! https://maryroach.net/replaceable.html Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Link to Jess' Twitch: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ -- 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 Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty-five -day returns. Buy or sell your next car today with Car Gurus at https://cargurus.com 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. 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. Lost supplies last. Price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details.

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. 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. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 Popper. science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Lauren Leffert. I'm Mary Roach. Mary, welcome back to the show. It's so great to have you. I'm so excited to be back. Thank you. Would you tell us a little bit about your latest book? Sure. It's called Replacable You. It looks like that. Oh, you can't see it. You guys saw it and no one else will. It's a lovely cover. I could describe it, but I won't. The subtitle is Adventures in Human. anatomy, which is admittedly kind of vague, but it's all about replacing the challenges and successes and failures and weirdness of trying to replace bits and pieces of the human body. So everything

from hair to feet. Everything in between. And like, I can't wait to read it. Like those ears that they grow on the backs of mice, are those in there? Yeah, no, they're not that that actually, people think it grew an ear. It was actually just sort of a, they sort of stuck an ear form under the skin and the skin grew in. It didn't actually grow, sadly, because that would have been very, yeah, I know, yeah. And everybody thought that was the case. And at the time, it was like, whoa, they're growing ears on mice. They're not. That's actually way more gruesome than I thought, though. They just stuck a, I know. Yeah, to grow an ear would be sort of a gentle, oh, you know, the rat would get used to it. Oh, well, is this little thing and now, you know, day by day,

you'd be like, this is me now. Well, I can't wait to read it. But for now, we've got some weird facts to share. So we'll get right into the show. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we've learned in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera. Decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first.

Then once we've all had time to spin our, our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Except we don't have winners anymore. We just kept having three-way ties, and you just can only do that so many times. Lauren, what's your tease? Okay, so my teaser this week is a busted ship propeller led to the discovery of entirely new life forms. I love that. I love a new life form.

Mary, what's your tease? Mine is that it is possible to breathe through your ass. Amazing. We love a butt breathing story here on weirdest thing. I can't wait to hear more. My fact is that I'm going to talk about the surprisingly dark history of ice cream. It feels seasonally appropriate. I've had questions about that for a lot.

long time. I went through like a Wikipedia deep dive on like pyramids that maybe could freeze ice in ancient times. Anyway, excited. Yeah, we're going to talk about those. They were real. Nice. Yeah. Well, I can I can go first. I can jump right in. So I learned a few interesting things about ice cream this week. And I decided what a great time to talk about ice cream because it's a billion degrees here in New York today. So I'll start with the early history of ice cream, because once I found these couple of weird facts about ice cream, I was like, from once did ice cream really come? I really take it for granted. And the early history of ice cream is kind of murky. It's one of those things where you'll see a lot of supposed facts thrown around, and then

you trace those facts back to like a book from the nine. 90s called like a history of sweet treats and nobody knows where that book came up with it. So yeah, the scholarship on ice cream history honestly leaves something to be desired. I think it's a niche that some people should really dive into. But, you know, when you think about the history of frozen desserts, when you think about them emerging. You need access to ice, which of course some people have had since almost the dawn of humanity, you know, the first time humans lived in cold places. But you also need warm weather during which it's appealing to eat that ice if you... I disagree with that. I think you can,

I want to eat the ice all the time, especially if it's cold sweet. That makes sense now when your likelihood of dying of hypothermia on just like a random day is significantly lower than like proto-human in Siberia, you know, so I feel that probably it is unlikely that people at that time would have been like, hmm, a delicious cold treat. But hey, there's always someone who wants something. So maybe. If your inside temperature matches the outside temperature, nothing can hurt you. Yeah, okay. Yeah, fair. So yeah, you need ice, you need warm weather. And then you you need both the means and the, you know, foresight to keep ice from the cold time until it's warm. So that is kind of complicated.

So it's not surprising that for kind of most of human history, it seems frozen desserts were not really a thing. Like I said, there's a lot of, like poorly cited facts about the origin of ice cream that get thrown around. but ancient Persia comes up a lot, and that does make a lot of sense, because we do know that Persian engineers were building Yacls, which are these domed structures with subterranean storage space beneath them that kept ice frozen as far back as 400 BC, which is wild to me, good-going Persians. and they also would make ice because I was like, where did it come from? Where were they schlepping this ice from? They didn't schlep at all. They would channel water into these shallow pools near their little ice domes. And then because it was so arid, it would get cold at night.

It would get cold enough, theoretically, for water to freeze sometimes. And also there was very little wind. So the conditions were right that if you made a shallow enough pool, it would freeze at night. And then they would be like, okay, we scrape up that ice. We put it in our really well-engineered ice hut. And they were able to create and store ice in the desert, which is pretty wild. And so I didn't see anyone, you know, talking directly about evidence that they were eating frozen desserts at that time.

But they definitely talked about making beverages cold, which was pretty innovative. So I feel like once you're putting ice into beverages, the idea of a cold sweet treat isn't far behind. But we do know that by the year 1002, the frozen dessert cagyori showed up in a book written by a Japanese court lady. And that was that really delicious, like, hand-shaved ice that gets flavored with like these days often condensed milk and syrup. At the time, I think it was just like botanical syrups. So we know that by the 11th century, someone, people in Japan, were eating frozen dessert, which of course is the precursor to ice cream. That was really just for the elite into the late 1800s. There was not a lot of ice around.

In the late 1800s, merchants started bringing ice from Hokkaido, and it became much more accessible. Apparently the first kind of like pedestrian shop for frozen desserts in Japan opened around that time. Meanwhile, frozen dessert as a general concept didn't make it to Europe until the 17th century. This is something I didn't do a deep dive on, but I saw a couple allusions to the idea that in a lot of Europe, the idea of kind of freezing things or keeping things cold was just not really a thing. Like they salted stuff, they fermented stuff. They sometimes put stuff in cold bogs. But there were other preservation methods. And so if there wasn't ice at hand, it seems like maybe in a lot of Europe, they weren't really concerned about getting or making ice, which, you know, it's fair enough.

It means that there were probably a lot of lukewarm beverages throughout a lot of European history. But by the 17th century, they were turned on to the idea of frozen dessert. and ice cream and, you know, ices became really popular in Europe and America by the 1800s, which brings us to the dark stuff. Because basically in the Victorian era, in both England and in the U.S., people kept getting poisoned by ice cream. This was happening frequently enough that people would refer to like mass ice cream poisonings. This one historian, Edward Geist, has written about this. He said, you know, there were semi-regular reports of whole groups of picnickers or people going to fares becoming terribly sick with gastrointestinal illness.

Sometimes people died, especially young children. There was an incident in 1854 where people at a festival in Massachusetts got sick after eating pineapple-flavored ice cream, which brings us to one of the common explanations at the time for what. what was going on, which was flavorings and other additives. Because in this case, it contained butyric ether flavorings, which are made using rancid butter. Basically the precursor to this compound is a short-chain fatty acid that's naturally present in butter. And when butter goes bad, it releases this apparently kind of fruity tasting compound through

hydrolysis. So they were like, yeah, it's definitely that rancid butter juice that you put in the ice cream. Was there any actual pineapple in the ice cream or was the flavoring entirely rancid butter? You know, I haven't seen explicitly whether there was any pineapple, but it does seem like this flavoring was meant to be the fruity flavoring. And I don't think they had the pineapple. I don't think they had a lot of pineapple at that time in Massachusetts. Not for a casual fair goer. So, yeah, first of all, did the ice cream taste like pineapple, doubtful? Second of all, it made a lot of people really sick.

But yeah, in general, a lot of times people would bring up dyes, which were frequently contaminated with arsenic. And, of course, we've talked about the Victorian era dyes that were so popular that often had really nasty, dangerous stuff in them. And people were just like, wow, I've never seen a green this green. I wonder why also I'm so sick. And so, yeah, additives and dyes and flavorings were often considered the culprit. But even when additives kind of fell out of favor, the ice cream poisonings kept happening.

Is this why vanilla ice cream is like so popular though in the U.S.? Perhaps, yeah. Because it was just like as close to plain as possible. They were like, we got to get these additives out. the ice cream is unflavored, undied. Though there were some scientists who blamed and doctors who blamed artificial vanilla flavor, though it was like, why aren't other people, why aren't people who use artificial vanilla for other things getting sick?

And they were like, hmm. But yeah, really, people were just like really throwing out ideas, not really landing on anything. And one thing that came up, which I find really interesting, is, the idea that toomains, it's with a silent pee at the beginning, but I'm pretty sure it's pronounced tomains, were the problem. And these were compounds that they thought were created by bacteria during decomposition of tissue.

So it was too wild to be like bacteria might be making people sick. They had to come up with a secondary thing created by the bacteria to explain any illness. This was not a thing. But it did sort of lead to some thoughts about hygiene that were accidentally correct. And it's true that probably, you know, lack of pasteurization and, you know, sort of lack of regulation around food safety in general was probably a huge part of this. Meanwhile, often people just blamed overeating. They were like, people are so into this ice cream stuff. It's no wonder that they're all getting messed up. They're eating too much ice cream so they died. Yeah, exactly. It's like a Monty Python sketch. You know, just a case of the old

ice cream death. And meanwhile in England during the same period, they were also having issues with ice cream death, though the culprit is a little more obvious. So in England, you know, once ice and sugar became available enough that this wasn't just like something for really rich people. The way that ice cream sort of percolated down to the masses was this thing called the Pennylick, which was basically a proto ice cream cone, except they were sold in these glass containers. and I saw one source referring to them as a deceptive glass container and I looked it up and it's even more deceptive than I was assuming. So it sort of looks like it looks like it's a small cup with a handle.

But just the very, very top of the cup has a divot in it. It's not a hollow cup. It is just a slightly concave surface on top. of like an inverted pyramid. And so you are getting literally a lick of ice cream with your penny lick. It is like one tongue motion and the ice cream's gone. This is a sneer of ice cream.

And I guess the glass vessel is really just there as a farce. But you obviously didn't keep the glass vessel. you gave them back immediately. So like you waited in line, you bought your penny lick, you licked it, and you handed it back. Wait, wait, wait, why didn't they just use a little spoon? That would be so smart. Or like the little wooden thing, yeah.

The wooden thing, yeah. Exactly. What they really needed were those little wooden spoons. Yeah. But no, they did it in these very, very deceptive glass cups. even though like no one could have been fooled because you would see the person in front of you like take half a second to eat their ice cream

and be done but you would hand it back and then yeah I guess so yeah it was all part of it it was part of the theater ice cream the inverted pyramid was just so you could hold it easily or it was yeah

and I guess that was you know the cones were sort of echoing that that's interesting yeah And so you would hand it back and depending on your, your Pennylick vendor, it might not be washed at all, or it might just be kind of dunked in a bucket of water that maybe came from the Thames. Like, it was not good. So it was actually so clear that this was leading to outbreaks of all sorts, that the sale of Pennylicks was banned in London around 1890.

So good for them. They came to a conclusion much faster than the people in America trying to figure out why the ice cream was killing people. But apparently some vendors continued to use the dishes until more widespread bands went into effect in the 1920s and 30s because people love the penny lick. And then around that time, I think the reason those bands were able to stick is because the concept of like an edible ice cream cup and then the cone that is now so iconic were

coming about so the people were ready to ready to have more ice cream you're saying that just like thin tasty waffles saved like the entire population of grape and from ice cream death yeah probably and also what this reminded me of is that um something absolutely wild to me that I feel like more people should know about is how the Soviet Union had these soda vending machines

where everyone used one cup it was a it was sort of like a Coca-Cola freestyle machine like it would dispense soda and syrup but it was you know you would put your money in to get it it was basically an uncrewed soda fountain

which was very exciting but instead of it coming out in a bottle, you know, it got dispensed into a cup that would be like, you know, maybe attached with a wire. And so you would like wait in line. You would put in your money. You would get your soda. And then you would just drink it in front of everyone and then put the cup back. And there was like one of those little things like an old soda fountain store would have where you like press the cup down. Or like they have it bars and like the water sprays up into it to clean it. But, you know, you'd have to rely on people having done that and like what's the water.

you know, there's no soap. And so it was just sort of whenever somebody came around to service the machines, they would actually clean the cups. And I was reading this one article about it where it was like, you know, no disease outbreaks have ever been tied to the vending machine. But then again, the Soviet Union didn't have a great track record for admitting that something that they had everyone do might have caused disease. So it seems pretty likely that probably a lot of people shared a lot of communicable diseases at the communal soda fountain cup.

And yeah, I'm really fascinated by all the points in history when capitalism has innovated enough to bring this product to the masses, but not enough to like serve it to people in a it in a clean vessel, you know. And so just to clarify, the ice cream deaths in across the pond in the U.S., were they, they were just like a raw milk issue? Like, oh. So, yeah, we still don't have a definitive answer. It was probably a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I mean, the people were not wrong that a lot of these additives were really dangerous, but like I said, the deaths kind of continued once those fell out of favor. But yeah, to me, my assumption is that lack of pasteurization and, you know, lack of food safety prep courses and certifications were probably a big issue. It was probably a lot of, you know, bacterial growth happening.

But yeah, truly, who knows? So I have a question. Yeah. So there's a sense that if you freeze something, you kill a lot of the, you kill the, you kill the bacteria. You don't kill all types of bacteria. So it's possible that if it were contaminated, if the milk were contaminated, it would still continue to grow. I'll buy it slowly in the ice cream. Is that right? Because people think, ah, it's frozen. You don't have to worry. Yeah, yeah. I think that's exactly right, where it's like some bacteria, probably even a lot of

bacteria will not, you know, survival in a frozen thing. But like I know there have been Listeria outbreaks tied to ice creams. And then also, like, bearing in mind how new refrigeration was, like, how cold was the ice cream? How frozen was the ice cream? Very much up in the air. Yeah. And how often did it thaw and then get to frozen?

Yeah. I mean, at the time, did people know that these outbreaks were happening and everyone still got in line at the ice cream shop? They were like, it might kill me, but I just. have to try it. It's worth it. Apparently so. And I mean, you know, I think, you know, to be fair, probably the percentage of people who got sick versus the many people eating ice cream was probably relatively low.

But yeah, you know, also though, like anything could kill you. It was a wild time. Many things you ate could kill you and many things you put on your face could kill you. and I guess, you know, they were there for a good time, not a long time. Might as well lick the scoop. Yeah. And this is all pre-FDA and pre-it's just, it's a free-for-all in terms of food safety. Absolutely.

But yeah, those are my big ice cream facts. I learned a few more things about ice cream that maybe I'll save for another day. But I'm glad that we've gotten a lot. a little bit better about food safety. You know, things are, things are feeling a little dicey right now, but on the whole, we're in better shape than Pennylicks. So that's something. Yeah.

Yeah. I remember reading a book by Deb Bloom about the early days of food safety. And before there was any regular, before these kind of heroes came in and like, we will be testing and we will be exposing the people who are like putting lead and sawdust and the bread. and the bread and it was horrifying how people were adulterating and just stretching the supplies with just random shit around the garage basically. Yeah. Well, and milk itself was often adulterated, which is another potential avenue for some of these

ice cream related illnesses is like people would put like, I forget exactly what it was, but I want to say like chalk. People would put like random white stuff. in diluted milk to make it look more robust. So, you know, if you take that and you make ice cream, that's not so good. Yeah. I actually, I interviewed Debra Bloom about the origins of the FDA a few months ago and wrote about it in an AUA for Popsie.

So you should read it there. But yeah, it was like often, often like drywall dust and borax was like a really common adulterant also because they thought it had antibacterial properties and it like tasted kind of sweet. Yeah, coffee was like 90% brick dust and like cadmium or whatever. Just unreal. Just unreal. I mean, we think it's going in a bad direction now, but it was really bad. We could make it worse. The percentage of non-food allowed is still low, much lower. Yeah. Okay, 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

T-HC 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 dreams 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 turpine 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 9 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 into Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, Mood.com has Delta 9th-C 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. 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. 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 Google Fi Wireless plans today.

Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Okay, we're back. And Lauren, what's, What's going on with the ships, the propellers? Yeah, I sure do have a science yarn to spin. Yeah, so enter the story zone. Buckle up. Last year, at the end of August, something was amiss aboard the RV blue heron. The ship was making some strange sounds, think like a loud, low grinding noise or a deep hum.

during its journey around the Great Lakes. And specifically, the noises were emanating from the propeller and propeller shaft and things weren't working exactly the way that they should. And it was all towards the end of the Blue Heron's planned route anyway. So instead of heading back to its usual dock in Duluth, Minnesota, the crew diverted to a shipyard in Cleveland. Once the vessel was dry docked there, they started disassembling the propeller and they, they fixed the problem almost immediately.

It was really anticlimactic. They figured out what was wrong. It was easy to address. It was a real red heron. Red heron, red herring. It's the blue heron, but it was a red herring. But then there was something else. So during this maintenance process and all of the repairs, the ship's captain, Ruali,

he noticed something he'd like never seen before in all of his years as a ship captain. You know, all of his time on the high seas. And by high seas, I mean the Great Lakes because they're on the Great Lakes. There was this mysterious black goo oozing out not from the propeller shaft, but from the rudder shaft. And this is where the horror turn would be if this was a John Carpenter movie. Sure, yeah. You know, it's like giving the thing. It's giving the cursed cylinder of like Antichrist, Antimatter in the Prince of Darkness.

She doesn't give up her dead until now. Yeah. Undead goo. Yeah. So the synth soundtrack gets all dissonant. you like have a slow zoom on this like weird black gunk. And it is weird enough to the captain that he opts to disassemble the rudder, which is a pretty labor intensive process.

It's not a small boat. It's a big ship. So they have the whole maintenance crew take out this post and disassemble the shaft. And it's something that had never been done in the entire 28 years that the Blue Heron had been owned by the University of Minnesota. When the maintenance crew did that, they found that the rudder post was completely, covered in this gunk that had been oozing out, like tip to tail, the whole length of it was just like thick with goo. And importantly, the rudder is not a ship part that gets greased.

It's supposed to be lubricated just by the routine intrusion of fresh lake water into the shaft. So there's no oil added. But this like gloop or glop or slop, whatever you want to call it, it looked like the wrong end of a petroleum refinery, not that I like 100% know what the right end is. It was a completely strange substance in a place where there was supposed to be no substance at all. At first, the captain was like, well, this must be some sort of oil or grease because that's what it looks like. This seems reasonable, yeah. Yeah. Like what else is like a thick black gunk supposed to be?

So he took it upon himself to do like all of these initial tests to verify his hunch. And I guess like for either of you, what might you do to test if something was made of petroleum product. What a good question. Maybe like, I don't know, see if it floats. Try it as a lube? Try it set it on fire. Honestly, you're like absolutely correct.

Except for Mary, the lube suggestion, not there. But he did, the captain, he like took some of it. He dropped it in a container of water to see if it was less dense, to see if it floated, to see if it made like a sheen on the surface. it like didn't really there's no dice no sheen then he he took a blow torch to it to see if it would catch fire I know that he was he was experimenting with it but it also does seem like kind of a reasonable thing to do once you realize it's not an oil-based product you're like kill it yeah got to kill it with fire there's um there's citizen science where you count birds and then

there's ship is in science where you kill it with fire but uh the the goo, it did not ignite. And then, you know, he sniffed it. It didn't smell like oil or chemically. It smelled like almost a little bit metallic, but it really didn't smell like much. And despite the metal smell, the like metal rudder shaft didn't have any apparent damage. It wasn't visibly eroding away. It wasn't resting.

And so all of this was kind of bizarre and unsettling enough that Lee called his boss. He got the Marine superintendent Doug Ricketts involved. He got Ricketts over to the shipyard. He showed it to him. He walked him through all of the little tests that he'd done. And Ricketts also really wanted to know what the goop was. And they were kind of out of easy ideas they could do on their own at the shipyard in way of experiments. So Ricketts thought, why not just ask some experts?

Like I mentioned earlier, the RV Blue Heron, it's owned by the University of Minnesota. And one of the beautiful ironies of this story is that the RV, in RV Blue Heron, stands for research vessel. It's a ship dedicated to intentional and purposeful discovery. Scientists and the crew use the ship to monitor algal blooms,

collect sediment, water samples, deploy meteorological buoys and devices, all sorts of things like that. And then there's this completely unplanned accidental finding that was not a scientist's idea, but was just like the ship captain noticing something weird. So the point of that is that the crew and Ricketts, They're all part of this Great Lakes Research Institute.

They interface with scientists all the time, and they have the connections to really try to solve the mystery of the goo. So Ricketts, the superintendent, he decides to just bring it to the next lab meeting that's on the schedule and see if anyone wants to deal with it to see if anyone can tell him what's up with the gunk. And at this juncture, I just want to say that every day I'm frustrated I can't beam pictures into people's heads over the internet because I really want you to be able to say. see how the goo was brought to the lab meeting. They have, they have a cup. And the cup is like objectively funny. I mean, it's, it's like the most underwhelming of objects. It's like pure Americana office culture. It's like a beat up paper cup from a desk job coffee machine. It's bent at the rim. There's like some smudges on the outside. Someone clearly meant to throw it in the trash, but they just like missed the bin. And on the outside of the cup is a piece of yellow tape.

that just says ship goo in questionably legible Sharpie. If you're looking at it from the side, you can just see into the inner room that there's like these cartoonish dribs of something black. It looks like if Nickelonian slime was not green, but instead like the color of the night. It's, if you look inside, it's about a quarterful of like more of this completely nasty looking substance. It's really, really dark.

it's kind of like unnaturally flat and gray. It's like if you mixed charcoal and chalk dust into molasses, maybe like something that might have been served at like ye oldy ice cream shop. And because it's in a cup, my brain like immediately imagines drinking it. And so every time I look at this picture of the cup that one of the scientists at me, I kind of involuntarily gag a little bit. So anyway, this is like where the majesty of discovery begins is with this like completely gross, innocuous-looking coffee.

And so the superintendent, Ricketts, he busts into the lab meeting. He's got this cup. He just like, is like, can anybody tell me what this is? And incredibly kind of confronted with this yucky cup of goo. One scientist is like, yeah, sure, I'll analyze it. And so enter our next character, Cody Sheek, who is a microbial. ecologist. He takes the cup back to his lab and he immediately just passes it off to a grad student because he is so unconvinced that there's anything worth finding in there that it's like not

worth his time initially. He just tells the student to chuck it in with their next batch of routine DNA screening that they do on all of their samples, soil samples, sediment samples, everything that comes to the lab. So the first step in that routine screening is to try to, to extract genetic material so they can compare it to things and figure out what it might be. Again, Sheik really didn't think that that would be possible, but lo and behold, the grad student came back with lots of DNA successfully isolated from the sample. So then, Sheik, our scientist, he thought, well, probably whatever DNA they found, it was probably just routine sample contamination.

the kind of stuff that's unavoidable when working in the lab. You might, you know, maybe it's on the Petri dish. Maybe it's on like the DNA extractor machine, which I completely know the name of and I'm forgetting. But they had this DNA. And so the lab took the next step and sent it off for preliminary sequencing. They just looked at this one gene to get a sense of what type of organism it might be. And if all the DNA were just from routine contamination, they'd be able to see pretty quickly that it matched the usual profile and then they could move on with their lives and forget all about ship goo.

But surprise, surprise. The gene sequences were like not at all what would be expected from standard sample contamination. And in fact, many of them didn't readily match anything at all in like the massive comparison databases of microbial genetic data that the lab uses to identify samples. So it wasn't just that they weren't contamination, but they like weren't even. documented or recorded in like the entire compendium of human microbial knowledge. A lot of the sequences just look totally new. So this, this prompted Sheik to like finally like sit up and be like, grad student, we have to look at this more closely.

Not to portray him in a, he was perfectly nice when I talked to him. Go Cody Sheik. But, you know, it prompted him in his lab to send the Shipku off for another round of sampling where they assessed the whole genomes, not just a single gene, of some of these mystery microbes, and they confirmed that several of the organisms inside the goo were previously undiscovered. And they weren't just like new species, which are pretty common in microbial research because, you know, microbial life are really poorly surveyed. They're tiny. They're everywhere, but we don't pay much attention to them.

But these were new categories of microbes all together. So there's at least one new order of archaea, which is a type of single-celled prokaryotic life that's distinguished from bacteria because of the makeup of the cell membrane. Archaia are often associated with extreme environments like undersea geothermal vents and super-polluted places. So they've confirmed this whole new order of archaea, which is a family and genus away from just a species. And anyone want to guess what they named the new microbe that they found, representative of a whole new order? Larry. Yeah, Larry would have been great. Goup, I do think they would have gotten into a copyright battle with Gwyneth Paltrow about that one.

But they went with Shipgou One, which I think is a beautiful name for a microbe. I agree. Yeah. And then aside from Shipgou 1, there's potentially even a new bacterial phylum, so even higher up in the kingdom domain, la da-da-da-da-da-da, then order. And if confirmed, sheik says that they would officially call that new bacterial order Shipguu 2. And then several other microbes in the sample might also represent previously undiscovered genera or families. there's just like so much that they could not identify in the sample, and there's still a lot of work needed to pin down everything living inside the gunk.

But there are a couple of things that we do know or that were able to be revealed through sampling. Some of the early comparisons and findings they have, they indicate that the closest known organisms to the things living inside the gunk are associated with tar pits and oil wells. Many have international origins from places like Germany, which is again really odd because like why are the relatives of those microbes inside an ungreased rudder system in the Midwest. Unfortunately, I am sorry to say there's a lot of question marks that are still unresolved here. For one, where did the goo come from? They still don't know.

The best prevailing guess is that the ship's previous owner more than 28 years ago did at one point. point maybe grease the rudder shaft introducing some sort of petroleum substance, but then what have those oil-associated microbes been living on for decades? Like 30-year-old DNA from long-dead microbes in an open environment, constantly exposed to lake water, it's not going to stick around and be like readily isolated in quantities big enough to sample and analyze. So these organisms, if they were introduced on grease, they somehow found a way to subsist off of something else for almost 30 years. And not just to subsist, but they, like, survived and reproduced and proliferated.

And so then the question is, like, well, what are they eating? What are they living off of? Is it the metal? Is it some sort of organic material from the lake water, the algae, some sort of dead muck? And then what are the microbes floating around in? Like, what is the goo itself? because it's not 100% living microbes. And that's still also a big unknown.

They just don't know what like the matrix containing the microbes is. Sheik is hoping to do some chemical isotope analysis to find out. But currently he describes himself as quote, kind of clueless here. He said it's like trying to assemble a thousand piece puzzle without any picture of what the final product is supposed to be. And unfortunately, or I guess like fortunately, fortunately, if you believe the gunk might be some sort of like vengeful harbinger of madness and destruction. Watch a John Carpenter movie. It's fun. There are a couple big challenges standing in the way of solving the puzzle. So first off, they cleaned the rudder. They scrubbed it down and the only

do they saved was that little sample in the cruddy coffee cup. And the rest is like a memory on the asphalt at a shipyard in Cleveland. And so Sheik and Ricketts, they're both pretty sure that this rudder post can't be that unique, that maybe somewhere else out there, other ships are also carrying this whole community of never-before-seen life. You know, microbes are everywhere after all. But if that's the case, each ship might have its own microbiome. And the specific weird organisms on the Blue Heron might be like functionally exist.

it functionally extinct in the wild. And then there's this other actually terrifying challenge, which is that Sheik's lab and many other labs at the University of Minnesota and beyond that rely on federal funding, they're really struggling just to stay afloat. And, you know, the work that they do, it helps us understand the fundamentals of aquatic ecosystems.

It reveals and resolves the causes of toxic algae blooms. And they might not be able to keep going amid all the federal funding cuts. Shipgoo sounds really silly, and it was just kind of a fun, opportunistic side project. But microbial discoveries akin to Shipgo, they've led to things like life-saving drug development. They've helped us better manage waste and conduct pollution remediation. We really, really need primary curiosity-driven research in order to keep innovating. And right now, we're at risk of losing a ton of it. So that's the end. I'm cutting off the Shipgu's saga, I please care about science funding.

Here, here. Excellent. Well, we're going to take one more quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. 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 to 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, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365, copilot.com slash work. 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-sponsored 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. Okay, we're back. And Mary, tell us about some butt breathing. What's new in the world of breathing butt? I guess I was just going to say, the shipgoo, you know that's going to find its way to the Ben and Jerry's warehouse and we're going to have another mass death by ice cream one of these days.

Yeah. Shipgoo. Yeah. Okay. So the technical term for breathing through your ass is enteral ventilation via anus, which is pretty much what it sounds like. You are breathing, just sort of using the rectum as a third lung. And this is, I mean, I came across, the rectum is a, you know, it's a pretty, the gut in general, pretty versatile. organ. You know, it's possible. I don't even remember which book. It probably gulp. There was the story of one of the presidents who was shot, was an assassination attempt, and now I'm forgetting his name. But anyway, he developed a blockage and he was kept alive by rectal alimentation. In other words, eating through his butt, eating through his rectum. And there was even a, there was even a a cookbook that there was a number of recipes that his physician put together you know they tended to be

you know kind of like beef extract a little whiskey thrown in I'm not sure what the whiskey was for other than just to cheer him up and make life a little less horrible while he was while he was dying basically so yeah you can absorb yeah go ahead oh I just I mean like the whiskey that's like um that's like some frat house butt chugging stuff to like just be putting the alcohol reverse. Yeah, yeah, you can, you can absorb a lot of, a lot of things through the butt. The, uh, I think it's about 20% of what you could, uh, absorb compared with breathing. I mean, the lungs are better. The lungs are like, we got this. This is what we do. We do this. You, but you're not very good at it. It's not the butt's primary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's great that

You tried. No. Yeah. So anyway, I was spending some time at the University of Michigan Extracorporeal Life Support Laboratory, which is run by the director of it. He's retired now, but he still comes in just about every day. Bob Bartlett, he's in his 80s. He's a lovely man.

And we got to talking about ways that you can, you know, know, breathe outside the body. We were, you know, he's the father of ECMO, which is essentially a machine that oxygenates blood outside the body. It's used mainly in operating rooms, but you can now sort of bring it into the home sometimes and use it also as an emergency, you know, ECPR. In other words, you could, if you have a truck, an ECMobile, you can kind of bring in, you can, you can do that and keep someone alive more effectively than with regular CPR. Anyway, on the topic of machines doing breathing for you, I mentioned breathing through the rectum. And he said, well, you know, we tried that actually just blowing oxygen through the digestive system,

like through from the stomach all the way through. And he said that way you can, you're just blowing the oxygen through. And that removes the carbon dioxide. And he said it doesn't work very well. And I'm like, wait a minute. So that's essentially air constantly. coming out the butt. It's like one long continuous fart. And I finally got him to smile and he said, yes, doesn't sound very attractive. Anyway, so, but it works better with a liquid, something called perfluorocarbon,

which holds, can hold a lot of soluble oxygen, a lot of oxygen. So you can, it's essentially called a perfluorocarbon enema. So that can, you know, and that works better. And that's something that's been known since 1966. There was a paper in science in which rodents, I don't remember if it was rats or mice, were able to

breathe underwater. They were able to breathe this substance. They were able to survive that way for about four hours. And there was some initial excitement. And this is taking it in through the lungs. There was some excitement that this might be a way to facilitate escape from a submarine.

But as it turned out, there was damage to the lungs. There were all these sort of white polka dots. That was actually a technical term that they used poca dots. It didn't work. Anyway. But perfluorocarbone, you know, you hear a lot about that in terms of blood substitutes. But it is, and it's kind of amazing that you know, it's effective enough that it could be used in neonatal ICU's.

Because if you got, you know, the baby's born too early and the lungs haven't completely developed. And to use a ventilator would damage the lungs, that's a big problem with keeping premature neonates alive. The lungs aren't working yet. But the pressure, you know, it's a very delicate tissue, the lining of the lungs. So you blast air in through the, using a positive pressure ventilator is, is damaging. typically so this to use perfluor carbon and use the rectal enema way of breathing would would be great also could be kind of a combat medics or emergency medics could use that as kind of a supplement to if there if you don't have a

ventilator for an adult I'm talking about you just you know stick that perfluric carbon enema up there and have the person breathe through their butt. Could it be like an alternate scuba diving method or something? Or like could it help someone like Summit Everest? Yeah. I think there are a lot of options here, a lot of possible applications that haven't really. Yeah, the researchers is great.

Takebe is his name. He's at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, I think it is. I'm forgetting one word of that title. But anyway, he was very enthusiastic about it, and they've been doing a bunch of work over the past couple of years on rectal breathing. What happens if you just drink it? Does it have to go in the rectal end, or could you just drink it to get it into your chest subtract? Interesting. I don't know if you could drink perfluorocarbon.

Good question. Yeah. I mean, you could just, you know, hook up the IV, do it that way. Could you drink it? Don't know. Only one way to find out. Only one way to find out. Probably somebody has tried it.

That's kind of wild, though. I wonder if you still feel like the impulse to breathe if you're getting your oxygen needs met through your rectal end or if you just like happy you don't. Yeah, you know, just with. ECMO. There's, there's, um, Dr. Bartlett was talking about how he called it sport ECMO. Like you could hook up somebody in their home and have the blood, um, oxygenated outside their body. So they don't need to be breathing. So they could literally like watch Netflix with their head underwater. You know, I mean, it was like, it's like, what a weird. Yeah, it must be psychologically be strange to

just stop breathing. to not need to breathe. But yeah, I don't know the answer to that, whether that's just a freaky thing that they have to get used to or if it's just very relaxing. Yeah. You could probably play some fun pranks with that on your friends and family. Wow. Well, that's incredible. Makes me even more excited to read the new book. Would you remind our listeners what it's called so they can go find it. Sure, it's called Replacable You. Adventures in Human Anatomy is the subtitle. Amazing. Well, thanks again for coming on. It's always a pleasure to have you. And Lauren, thank you for another amazing weird fact, as always. Happy to be here as always. And Mary Roach, it's so

exciting to meet you. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bode, 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.