The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Our Swolest Ancestor, Climate Fungi-pocalypse, Terrifying Bananas

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Guest host Kasha Patel talks how wildfires could play a part in spreading Last of Us-like fungi, Rachel spins a yarn about how bananas can induce crippling fear, and Sara Kiley describes our buffest, beefiest ancestor ever. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  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 Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  Here's a special, (limited time) deal for our listeners to get you started RIGHT NOW, Get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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. 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 popular science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. I'm Kasha Patel. Kasha, welcome to the show.

It's so great to have you. It's been a while, but I believe we did a panel together ones about science and comedy. So I'm very excited to have you bring some science comedy to the show. But why don't you tell listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do? Okay. Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, don't have your expectations too high listeners about a funny science joke. We'll see how quippy I can be on the fly. Rachel's very quippy as is Sarah, so hopefully I can keep up to them. What was I supposed to do? Say what about me? Yeah, who you are, what you do. Oh, right. I know that answer. Okay. Yeah, I'm Kash Patel. I am a science writer and comedian with the specialization in science jokes, which is not really a thing. So I believe it should be. I also believe it should be, which is why I decided to make it a thing. There are a few of us that do it around the world.

I've probably been doing it for about, oh, geez, I made my first science comedy show like 10 years ago, maybe by now eight to 10 years ago. And yeah, it's cool. I joke about life as a scientist. I joke about certain scientific studies and just like interesting science facts. A couple of the facts on your show I've tried writing jokes about or like have wrote related jokes about when I was listening to the episode. So I feel like we're going to vibe pretty well. Awesome. So on the weirdest thing I win this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, writing jokes, etc. 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, except not in like a ranked competitive way anymore because I have officially decided that that is too hard and annoying and everybody wins on this show. And I have not rewritten the intro yet. And maybe I never will. Does this bother you? Let me know in the comments. There are no comment. Unless you're listening on YouTube, in which case, do let me know in the comments. Anyway, Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? Okay.

So my tease is that one of our oldest human relatives could not only walk upright, but they were also super duper buff. I love that for them. Yeah. I can neither walk up right nor am I super duper buff, but I'm working on both every day. I was going to say, good for them. I'm glad you guys have to have goals. That's fine. Kasha, what's your teeth?

My tease is that we could be breathing in fungi that could harm us in wildfire smoke. That sounded really depressing. That's such a depressing tease. Well, I love a fungal fact. You too. Wildfire, a little bit of a bummer. You know, we're recording this in June. It's going to air later in the summer when I assume the air will be even worse.

But yeah, after like last week's horrible air quality in the New York area, today it's like moderate. It's like what I would consider a bad air quality day before what happened last week. So I'm like the air's kind of spicy. I don't like that. But I'm, listen, I was already like, we were already a three air purifier household. So I'm equipped. My fact, very, very different. I want to talk about why male mice are terrified of bananas and how scientists accidentally found out.

Ah, I feel it. I tried writing a joke about this one. I even have like my document and I can pull it up. And I never, yeah, my joke, I never got a good punchline. So maybe you will help me create a punchline for it. Oh my gosh. I was super happy to help you workshop this. Well, I can get started with with scaredy cat male mice.

Please do it. Yeah, okay. So a while back, researchers at McGill University were studying pain sensitivity in mice, and they noticed something weird, which is that when pregnant female mice, which were being used for a totally different experiment, were kept close by, the male subjects started acting strangely. A grad student apparently picked up on the fact that they were, like, aggressive. and seemed, you know, sort of anecdot, it seems like their pain thresholds were higher when the pregnant females were in the area.

And of course, not only is this like a weird quirk, you know, would love to know more, but it was also potentially messing up the study's results because, again, they were studying pain thresholds, pain sensitivity in mice. So this notion that this grad student got that female pregnant mice were making them, um, less susceptible to pain, they were like, what if that's skewing all of our data? And further, you know, what if other previously published studies were inadvertently skewed because people just didn't realize that keeping pregnant mice around did something. So they decided to start a new experiment to investigate further. And I love that because it's just such a like, it's both curiosity driven and like a weird kind of accidental curiosity journey, but also just like this very concrete, like how science works and like what's often wrong about how we do science. So I find

that very satisfying even as just like a lead in. So then they tried like the usual number of variations of like trying to figure out exactly what it is about female mice plus young male mouse plus pregnancy. trauma. So they were like, what's going on? So they'd like introduce the male mice to a mouse who had just had pups but didn't have them with her, like a mouse really early in gestation, a mouse who was delactating, a guy mouse, etc. And ultimately they zeroed in on the fact that soiled bedding from a pregnant female was enough to give males the superhuman or super mouse, if you will, pain tolerance and a look at their hormonal levels also show that they were experiencing a spike

in stress hormones. So that meant it was time to investigate some urine because that's what was soiling the bedding. They eventually isolated the chemical n-pental acetate as the signal that the males were reacting to. And totally coincidentally, n-pental acetate is what gives bananas their signature odor. And so the researchers were like, great, we have a way to see whether this chemical, you know, in isolation of other mousy things has this effect. So they went to the like local supermarket and picked up some banana oil and like doused cotton balls in it to see if their presence would have some similar effect. And sure enough, the banana funk raised stressed hormones and lowered pain sensitivity in these young mill. mice. And in both cases, both urine and banana, the effect kicked in within five minutes

and lasted about an hour. The researchers think that this hormonal spike directly relates to like a fighter flight response, basically. You know, the same way that like when we're exposed to something scary or surprising, you know, our cortisol levels go up. We have adrenaline. And it's like whatever you end up doing with that, whether it makes you aggressive or just like panicky, your body is like activated for something, you know. And it's stressful. And so you might be wondering, why would pregnant mice and as a result also bananas have such an effect on young, healthy, virile males, you know? And the answer is that it's because pregnant mice, generally speaking, can and will kick the absolute shit out of a young male mouse. Like, they will just

absolutely f*** them up. I mean, you've got to do what she got to do to survive in this world. Exactly. Sarah Kylie, you are right on the money. They are just doing what they have to do to survive, good for her, et cetera. So yeah, male mice, especially virgins, which, you know, this is not unique to this study, but researchers will refer to virgin animals as being sexually naive, which I always love because it kind of sounds like a diss, have a tendency to try to kill babies. Rodents in general are like more open to infanticide than we would like. Anyone who had a friend with like a traumatic guinea pig litter experience knows this. Females of many species will like chow down on their children if something makes them smell

unfamiliar. So again, if you have pet rodents, like don't handle the newborns. Like just let her do her thing. You don't want to mess with that. You might make her think that that's food. And then everybody's going to have a really bad day. Or even if they just have too many babies at once. Because resource management is important.

It's an important part of running a family, you know. Meanwhile, males of many ridden species will go after pups that aren't theirs because basically it's a free snack and the behavior stays in the gene pool because like the snackers are more likely to like have successful offspring out in the world than guys who mind their own business. And there have been some studies that suggest that introducing the smell of an unfamiliar meal is enough to make certain rodent mamas like stop tearing for their pups. And the idea that researchers get at with this, I'm not sure how much of this is like projection, but the idea is that like they assume some dude is going to come eat them so

they don't want to waste the energy in the meantime. That being said, not all rodents or even like every member of a species that sometimes does this is this way. There's research on the Chilean Daegu, which is this adorable rodent that nests in like big social groups. They're just all friends. And they do not put babies on the menu. The research on them suggests that there are genes that like make a species more or less likely to go the infanticide route. Some researchers have suggested that communal nesting may have actually evolved as like an alternative to meeting with multiple mates. Because meeting with multiple mates has its own evolutionary costs, you know, males harass females. They might transmit disease, et cetera.

But meeting with multiple meets is a great strategy for avoiding this male aggression because you create paternity confusion. which is a great name, I think, for like a band. So paternity confusion, great evolutionary tactic, and communal nesting may have evolved as one way to make that happen. Basically, everybody sleeps in a big old cuddle pile. And so whose babies are whose doesn't matter. They're all just the babies. I love it.

Which actually reminds me of something that I wrote about in my book, been there, done that, a rousing history of sex. that I have not talked about on weirdest thing before, but was one of my favorite things to research for the book, which is the idea of partable paternity, which is a belief that persists in some groups today that multiple males are required to meet a child. The details vary slightly between different groups. Sometimes it's like there's a belief that like, literally you need sperm from more than one guide to make a good baby. And sometimes it's more like there's just sort of like some ineffable genesis like qua that happens with during sex that is like

important and that like it's important for a baby to have some like secondary fathers. But in those groups, it is like very clearly this awesome human evolutionary strategy where just instead of doing that sort of meet an offspring competition, you just decide we're not going to do that. That like everyone is operating under the assumption that like these kids might be part theirs. And so like resources are shared. And you know, it would be great if we could all share resources without having to have an evolutionary reason for it. But I've always thought it's just such a cool example of like the way things can can go

differently, you know, culturally and illusionarily. And there are species where like the whole species has gone that way where it's just like, listen, who knows? Yeah. And therefore, let's not eat babies. It's a great takeaway. And by the way, actually, young females without pups, speaking of mice specifically again, are also known to sometimes go bananas on another mouse as babies. But they stop this behavior once they have kids of their own. Like generally, a mouse mom will not just randomly attack another mouse mom's pups.

And researchers have found that there's like a whole region of the brain that quiets down after a mouse gives birth. And that chemically blocking that region can quiet a young lady's bloodlust. While stipulating it can send any mouse on a baby eating rampage. So brains are wild. And geez, I like, I think the part about the communal paternity is quite heartwarming, right? Because especially when you compare it to humans, like, you have things like Mari where it's literally just trying to figure out who the father is like child. Like, I don't know. I think it'd be very interesting to just live.

I mean, I guess they have communities like that where like, you know, everyone is just like for everybody, right? where it's just like you go in there. Mama Mia. Yeah, that's true. Basically, if you don't understand the concept of part of what paternity, Mama Mia is a great example. I would rather have one third of a daughter. Yeah, it's sweet.

Everybody's happy. Yeah. And yeah, so with mice specifically, studies have shown that there's this gene called TRPC2, very catchy. And it's a big factor in determining whether mouse is like a parent of the year or just like a decent babysitter or an infanticidal mania. The three choices. Yeah, yeah. So when you turn off the TRPC2 gene in a female, they will start to act like males.

I didn't find a reference to them eating babies. I don't know if that's something they studied. This was like they put them in with other adults, but they ran around trying to mount all the other mice. So definitely some specific behaviors were happening. And then when scientists engineered a male mouse with an activated TRPC2 gene, he reacted to the introduction of strange pubs not by attacking them, but by building a nest and gently placing the foundlings inside. He went, he went Mandalorian. And again, that is. it's just like there's a protein that this gene encodes for and it seems to be crucial in allowing

animals to sense pheromones which of course are chemical signals that enact some kind of response in the the animal that senses them but still it's so wild to me that like one one protein can just like radically alter behavior that way um this brings us back around finally into the banana business. Basically, the researchers concluded that what was happening is that nursing mothers in their pee were giving off this chemical signal that was like, don't mess with my pups or I will fuck you up. And that males have evolved to actually listen to that or at least get ready for the fight of their lives. Like, either way, they have this surge of stress hormones. They suddenly become less susceptible to pain, they're ready for a mama to come absolutely whale on them.

So obviously this finding is like kind of weird and funny, but it's also important, just like the researchers in this study initially, many scientists studying animal behavior in the lab may be inadvertently introducing variables that mess up their data. And the researchers actually pointed out something specific about this that, again, gets into like some deeper issues in science, which is that female pheromones in particular have been like very poorly studied. There's been a lot more research on the chemical signals that male animals produce, basically across species, because there is this known bias in lab animals to study males. For a long time, this had to do with like, oh, the hormonal cycles of female animals, including humans,

in drug trials, it's too big of a variable. So like why introduce it? But like it's, it's all back to this like real, strange misapprehension of the male body being the default, that being normal and then, you know, anything else being a complication. So they're basically like, listen, like people have not really studied the chemical signals that female mice or most other female animals give off. And we're really missing stuff because of that. And also, who knows, like, maybe a grad student's unfortunate choice of snack could, like, skew an experimental result. If you're looking at mice and you bring a banana into the room, all bets are off. So I really love this. That's all I have to say about it. But what a delight, that's my take. I think we've talked about bananas hilarious in quite a bit.

Claire once talked about the first, the introduction of the banana to like U.S. audiences at the World Fair, where it was sold for quite a lot of money. I think it was the equivalent of like $20. Oh my gosh. And came wrapped in a foil packet, which is so funny because bananas literally have their own package. But they unwrapped it, wrapped it in foil, and then gave people fork it a knife. Oh, interesting. Was it all brown, though? Like, because you're not supposed to wrap bananas.

is. Yeah, that's a great question. I guess they like peeled them right on site and then we're like, here it is. I've wrapped it for you like a hot dog because that's the only food that there can't know how to consume at the world's fair. But eat it with the fork and knife, please. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? 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.

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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. Okay, we're back. And Sarah Kylie, now. that we've talked about mouse infanticide, please tell me about our buff ancient ancestors. We love some ancient ancestors. Well, yeah, so this is a study.

So fun fact, I'm being Laura this week, which means I've written about a lot of really fun things. Our science writer is on vacation. So this is one I actually had to dig in and write myself for the website this week. So hopefully I know what I'm talking about. But basically, there's like a couple of things that we think about as like making humans human. And one of those is walking upright. So beyond just walking bipedally like with our feet, there's like something about like actually like standing up and I'll get into it.

But I wanted to start by talking a little bit about, you know, just a couple million years of evolution of human evolution. So I'm going to run through real quick, bear with me. And then I will tell you a little bit more about our buff ancestors. and why we're even talking about them at all. But yeah, so humans and our lineage split from chimpanzees, which are, yeah, are closest living relative today about seven millions ago. But like primates were evolving for 55 million years before that. So there's a lot more that I'm not covering in today's class.

We don't really know what the split between chimps and humans like exactly look like. But around 6 million years ago, there was a bit of evidence that one of the earliest human knowns, which is called the size. Helenthropus was walking around on two feet, which is a big deal bipedally. So fast forward a few million years, we're starting to see the Australopithecus. Australopithecus. Australopithecus.

And I looked this one up earlier because I always mess up saying things. So that genus started showing up. And that evidence was pointing to, again, the ability standing on two feet. And the species was starting to look more like a human than like an ape. So they're kind of like human slash ape versus like the earlier ones were like, okay, this is quite ape looking. And then fast forward again, two or three million years and we've got tools being made. And this is like also around the middle of when Australopithecus, Afrikanus's reign was like going on. So they had a bigger brain than their predecessor.

So we're starting to see brains get big. We love that. By around 1.89 million years ago, the Homo erectus was walking around and was considered as the Smithsonian says to possess. quote unquote modern human-like body proportions with long legs and short arms compared to the size of torso as well as an expanded brain case which is a big deal because I mean if you have short arms and long legs

it really just doesn't make sense to do anything except walk around bipedally I mean I haven't walked around on all fours in a while but they just not comfortable Yeah we're not all sitting to it It just doesn't feel quite right But yep so those guys lived on earth about nine times as long as homo sapiens have,

which I think is very cool. Wow. Humbling. Humbling. Yeah, this is a whole, this is a homo sapien humbling piece today. And about 800,000 years ago, things start to speed up during, again, the Homo erectus's reign. These cousins of ours were like figuring out

how to use like fire. And then a little bit later, brain sizes like exploded and you get a bunch more Homo Dienis cousins, Neanderthals, Homo, Homo, Aleti, yada, yada, yada. Homo sapiens, aka us, didn't even come on the scene until 300,000 years ago. And we figured out farming 12,000-ish years ago. And here we are now talking on a podcast. So that's it. That's all that happened. I love it. Complete history. So that's it. That's human history. And all that being said,

we've got this long, complicated evolutionary history behind us. It's kind of confusing to think about like what it means to be human, like how different are we from these other like humans that were wandering around like a couple hundred thousand years ago or even like millions of years ago and you know what what really is different um so now i'm going to dive into the newer part of the factoid which actually starts still in the past so um i don't i'm sure we've talked about lucy on here before lucy is uh the OG one of the OG like original old humans that was found um in november of of 1974. So there were a couple of paleontologists like scooting around and looking at things in Ethiopia. They'd seen a land rover according to Arizona State University and they were like going to

map out somewhere and after a long hot morning of mapping and surveying for fossils, they headed back to the vehicle and one of them was like, let's go do a little something different, go through a different galley and within seconds or moments he had spotted like a forearm bone and was like, oh shoot, this is a hominid and so he saw the skull bone a femur some ribs pelvis lower jaw two weeks later after many hours of excavation screening and sorting

several hundred fragments of bonehead recovered representing 40% of a single hominid skeleton Lucy who is um an australopithecus a farinesis because it's about a place in Ethiopia very exciting um

and so yep we've got this like awesome skeleton Basically, a skeleton is 40% of a single hominid, which is still a pretty big deal considering it's 1970s. We're not really sure what was going on. But we have been able to figure out a ton with less than half of a skeleton. For example, her discovery further proved the rise of bipedality, which even as far back as like three millions ago when Lucy's species was running around. And that was officially established in mid-70s as well. So we're basically with this discovery, we were like, okay, so people were walking around on two feet three million years ago.

And at the time, she was the oldest hominin species known, but yeah, we found some other things in the past 40 years. But back to this week's discovery. So we know that for a really long time, human ancestors have been walking around on two feet. But the difference between just walking around on two feet and walking upright is kind of where we have drawn the line of like humanness. because I mean, ostriches and kangaroos and certain rodents and all sorts of things. Birds, tons of dinosaurs, tons of things walk around on two feet, but they're not all human. So what is like the difference between like bipedalism and like in walking up, right? And when did that distinction get made?

So nobody really knows when this happened. And when like human bipedalism versus like a primate. version of bipedalism happened. And there's been a lot of debate in the past, you know, for 40 years that we've had, Lucy. And some experts think she probably waddled around more like a chimpanzee, whereas others think she walked upright like modern humans. And so one of the ways that we find out how animals that are new longer with us on this planet were moving around in their days by recreating soft tissues and muscles, since they don't really make it in terms of like the fossil record. Obviously, hard stuff makes it way longer than the

soft stuff. And that comes in pretty much every single case that you can think of. Like even, yeah, like, obviously we have had some lucky chances of getting a couple pieces of soft tissue muscle, but it is rare, especially when it's from three million years ago. But yeah, so there is a way that scientists have found a way to like 3D model muscles. And we've done this before. The like one noted example of this is how we learned that T-Rexes couldn't run very. very fast. So basically, like, I mean, you think about T-Rexes and you're just terrified and you're like, oh my gosh, you can see a skeleton. You're like, oh, goodness. Like, that thing would definitely eat me up. But I think, goodness indeed. But by recreating muscles, we can actually see like how that skeleton actually moved it throughout space. Like, and so, yeah, T-Rexes don't run very fast, which is, you know, I don't know if that's been on weird thing before, but whoever's supposed to think. That's your next one if you want them. They're trash. No. Every time I hear T-Rex, I always think of that cartoon movie scene where the T-Rex was like,

I have a big hedge but small arms. I don't think we thought this out all the way. We love evolution. Why is she so weird? Why does she do this over and over again? I don't know. But yeah, we haven't done the T-Rex method on a hominid. So a bunch of Cambridge researchers led by Ashley Wiseman

They were like, okay, let's put some muscles on Miss Lucy. Let's see what's going on. And so they recreated 36 of Lucy's muscles, specifically in her legs. And basically, by doing this, they were able to recreate her movements. And so what Wiseman said was Lucy's ability to walk upright can only be known by reconstructing the path and space that a muscle occupies within the body. we are now the only animal that can stand upright with straight knees. Lucy's muscles suggest that she was as proficient at bipedalism as we are,

while possibly being at home in the trees. Lucy likely walked and moved in a way that we do not see in any living species today. Wow, Lucy, look at you go. I know, Lucy girl, she's three feet tall, she's got tiny brains, she weighs 60 pounds, and she also could swing through the trees, and she could also walk around Savannah like a modern human. So this is a big deal because we are. And so sure, like, where bipedalism came along in, like, terms of, like, brain size,

in terms of, like, species in terms of genus, you know, this is before homo was happening. So it's a pretty big deal. And the other fun part is that Lucy was super duper muscular. And her calves and thighs were over twice the size of those in modern humans. So she's little, but she is, she is strong. She is tough. Jealous. I know.

Like, she definitely win, like, whatever Iron Man, not what's it called? Not Iron Man. The one where you like bench press a bunch of stuff. I don't know. I don't know sports. Oh, like strong man competition. Yeah. Also like American Ninja Warrior.

Oh, yeah. I want to see her go for the gold. I feel like I've mentioned this on weirdest thing before. But like one of the, there are two times in my life I can remember researchers like being so mad at each other professionally that they like almost basically called me stupid on the phone for like. Like, what? Taking their, their nemesis' work into account. And one of them was somebody talking about a Lucy study. Oh, my gosh.

She climbed trees a lot. It was something, it was, it was like very, and they were like, you can't tell that from Bode. And they were like, you can't not tell that from Bode. And it was just, I was like, you guys need to hug it out. Like, you literally, you study. You study the same old broad. Like you used to be friends.

We're all obsessed with Lucy here. It's okay. Like we can all share her. Oh my gosh. Well, yeah. So apparently she was walking as well as swam. So that's great. And oh, a fun fact,

muscles made up 74% of the total mass in Lucy's thighs versus like 50% of muscle and humans. So it's like she was going crazy. That's what my legs were like when I was still doing roller derby. Everything you're saying is just making me picture. My friends who still play roller derby. That's what they're built like. They're built different.

Everything you're saying is making me realize how much I'm not like Lucy, especially compared to the average person. Like I think my muscles in my legs are like probably 15% of my leg. I'm not muscular at all. Like I aspire to be like Lucy. I'm going to go climb a tree after this. Like this is very motivating. Yeah.

Exactly. But yeah. I mean, I think this one's fun just because, I mean, Homo sapiens really do consider ourselves to be so special and different, but some of our most, like, human-link qualities or whatever aren't really exclusively attributed to us. Obviously, Lucy came, like, a long time before Neanderthals, but a couple of things that we've written about just the past couple of months. Like, Neanderthals, they cooked crabs, they had family bonds. A whole different species of Homo was recently credited with bearing their own dead, like 100,000 years before Homo sapiens even began to do that, even though. though their brains were considered tiny. So yeah, go Lucy, go other ancient humans, show us that

we're just not that special and that it's a little bit more complicated than that, even though we're the last one standing. I'd argue our brains got too big. And there was a time when we had funerals and clam bakes and mind our own business and didn't have existential nausea. I imagine. True. No, I stumbled upon like one story where basically a couple of scientists like attributed the dominance of homo sapiens to the being the only species to quote unquote have colonized the entire globe in all of its environments so we're just like good at taking stuff over that's it apparently according to the scientist yeah i'm just i'm just going to aspire to be like thick thighs just vibes yeah like i like that thick thighs just vibes that could be the name of your album i like it

Your next book. Thick thighs, chest- Oh my gosh. Yeah, absolutely. By parental confusion or whatever it was. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back and tell us some fungi facts. Yeah. Well, I'm very lucky because I didn't realize that you are somewhat of a fungi expert as well because you said you studied it in college. Isn't that right? I did. I did some mycology in undergrad and I really loved it. I'm very like out of, out of the loop on like super recent mycology research. But I always say if I had gotten a PhD in something, it would have been that. So I always, I love talking about the mushrooms. Mushrooms. The way that I feel about it, when you were learning these fungi facts, were you just like freaking out at everything you learned? Because that's what I feel like

My life has been for the past few months. Every time I learned a new fungi fact, I'm like, how did I not know this? It definitely is. Like, I took my ecology just as like to, I went to a very small liberal arts school and I was doing environmental science. So it's like there were only so many sort of like 200 level science courses without a prerequisite. And I took my ecology. And then like every day it blew my dang mind. Yeah.

Yeah, they're wild. And it's like, why don't we, why don't people talk about this more? They're like way more interesting than most things I learned about in like high school bio. Yes, I would agree with that. Sarah, do you know how, what's your fungi knowledge like? Limited, I would say. But I mean, I definitely have found some fungi in my shower before.

But that's about some home experiments. Unfortunately, that's probably it. Perfect. Yeah, so basically I came across this because we've been having some pretty, I mean, there are record wildfires up in Canada. And you guys might remember that the smoke has come over to the East Coast. It's like created record air pollution days. It's some of the worst, you know, for some cities on record or in decades. And I was tasked to write a story saying what exactly is in our wildfire spoke. And I think we all kind of know the most harmful component for humans is particulate matter, specifically something called PM2.5, 2.5 talks about how small it is, 2.5 microns. It's smaller than like the strand of the thickness of a strand of hair. So basically it just means you can go inside your body and go inside your lungs and it caused a lot of respiratory issues. And, you know, that can actually send people to the hospital and cause death.

there are other things that are involved in that though they're like there are things called haps hazardous air pollutants which is pretty obvious i don't know why you had to make an acronym for that but those are things like formaldehyde and benzene these kind of other things that happened because maybe the tree that you're burning or whatever material burning didn't fully combusts so if it fully combusts that means you're you're going to get kind of like a clean product, which is like carbon dioxide and water vapor. Here, if it doesn't fully combust, you're going to get all these other toxic things. So those are interesting because those are actually being created from the process of burning.

I also learned a researcher told me that sometimes wildfire smoke can also spread stuff in the soil like bacteria, fungi. And he even mentioned arsenic, which I was like, wait a second. What? And it's been in recent years. It's been something that has been appearing more with hospitalizations and there's been more research into it. And now I'm not trying to fearmonger, say, like, you know, when you see wildfire smoke, like you might catch like a fungus infection because, you know, there's so many other things in there that are more worrying. And we also don't necessarily know how far it can spread. But this little nugget, just kind of piled on to all the crazy things that I've been learning about fungi and the past few months, all thanks to HBO's The Last of Us.

Have you guys, did you guys watch that show? Oh, yeah. I did. And in that, in that, like, opening scene where they're, like, talking to academics and he's like, the next outbreak is going to be fungal. And I'm like, this is a real conversation people have. So many people are going to Google this now. and learn so much about fungus but also be so scary. Yeah.

And you're describing me. And that is 100% correct. So, yeah, everyone was talking about like, oh, could this actually happen? And I had to write an article about how likely is a fungus pandemic like you'd see in Last of Us. And in that search, I found a lot of very interesting things. Like, for one thing, in that opening scene, they talk about the climate adaptability for fungus. And they're like, well, you know, for the most part, fungus can only affect people who are already like immunocompromised or sick or the probability that they'll infect a perfectly healthy individual is very difficult for two main reasons. One, the person's immune system will be able to fight it off.

And two, they can't withstand really high temperatures like it would be in our body. And I talked to one researcher that I thought this was interesting. He actually has this theory that maybe one of the reasons that dinosaurs met their fate was because of a fungus pandemic or epidemic there locally. And he's saying that the cool conditions that happened allowed the proliferation of all this fungus and then it could actually infect the cold-blooded reptiles and that's what killed them right um so you know it's a theory we have a lot of theories about how the dinosaurs died um but basically it's actually not that far-fetched to think that this fungus can adapt to higher

temperature so we actually have cases like that now there's a particular fungus called candida aris which is creating a lot, it's creating a lot of issues in hospitals now. During pandemic, it also caused a lot of issues with people who were hospitalized with COVID because they had compromised immune systems. But there's actually, so Candida Aris, the researcher told me and they have published studies on this, that it kind of came out of, not only say nowhere, but for the sake of this conversation, nowhere. It just like simultaneously emerged on. different continents all at once. And they found that it actually was, it had a higher heat

tolerance than other fungus. And there's been other studies that have come out during the show. And since I wrote that my last article, showing lab experiments that fungus can adapt over generations to higher fungus. And as they said in the show, you know, you can't really, you can't really treat it that well. Some of them are resistant to antibiotics, and some of them are really difficult to even come up with a good treatment for it because, and this is a fact I did not know. Apparently, the DNA compatibility between fungus and humans are very closely tied.

Like fungi or more closely linked to humans than they are to place. plants. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. And they're, um, they produce cayenne like beetles. Like they're very, um, it's, they're very much like, uh, you know, we lump them in with plants because they like grow and we can eat some of them. But they are very much not. They are a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. So basically the reason that it's difficult to create a treatment for them is because if you create a medicine that can attack a fungal infection in humans, it might also attack the human. So it can be toxic to them as well.

So it's just kind of like the medicine can't differentiate between this came from a fungus. This is like innate to the human. So it just kind of kills everything like, you know, like radiation and cancer would. So that's been a big issue. And like Rachel said before, like a lot of researchers have known this is a problem, but there's just not enough resources or funding to look into this. So that's kind of like the scary part of fungus that I was not aware of. And the other part is particularly in, let's say, wildfire smoke.

Now, when you think about like, okay, how on earth would wildfire smoke move like mushrooms? Obviously, it's not moving like mushrooms. But there are certain fungi that are found in the soil. And one of those is Valley Fever, which I think has been coming increasingly popular in the news. It's on the West Coast, like Arizona, parts of California. And this is actually found in soils. So it's not surprising that wildfire smoke can kind of kick up the soil. But it's what's in that soil.

And Valley Fever has been spread within dust storms. Like in Arizona, people kind of know that, oh, there's a dust storm if I'm down wind. they will feel the effects of valley fever. And what that does, it just creates a lot of, like, respiratory issues, coughing. I mean, it can be treated, I think. You should fact-check that. But it just causes a lot of, like, coughing and respiratory issues. But now with wildfire smoke and what lab studies have shown is that it's actually

Valley fever is the one that can actually spread, get kicked up by the smoke. and spread. Now, people don't actually know how far something like this could go, but, like, you know, wildfire smoke, as we already evidenced, recently, it goes from Canada to the East Coast. I mean, it can go very, very... It was in North Carolina when I was home. North Carolina, I'm not a fan.

I mean, like, during wildfire season, wildfires from Russia can, like, come over to, across the Atlantic and come to the, So, I mean, it can go really far, but now under what concentrations that is is going to be, you know, variable. But in terms of exactly how that can be packaged, you know, researchers say they're not, they're, they don't actually quite know, but one idea is that they know there's certain evidence that shows that this fungi and some of the bacteria can withstand the high heat in certain aspects. But even if they, in some cases, they might not even need to. It could actually be protected in small clusters of particular matter.

So it might not even be exposed to the fire. So it just might not be a point for them. The studies that I have seen, like I said, there's a couple of studies. One in Lancet that was actually published of March this year, they actually looked at this valley fever and they found that months after there was wildfire smoke, they saw hospital admissions for this increase. Like, increased by about 20% in hospitals in the month following any smoke exposure, which to me is pretty crazy because it's just so long lasting. Yeah. The other thing about Valley Fever, you know, even without wildfire smoke transporting at places, it's kind of a

tricky, it's kind of a tricky one because there are other studies that show like climate models that with climate change, its coverage, which is primarily kind of like Arizona, California, like the western area, could double. I think it's by the end of the century. Yeah, I remember my my mycology professor, one of the things he really emphasized to us was like, if you, like, doctors would call him asking about fungal infections. Like, I'm sure this has improved somewhat in the last decade and change, but like it was just not common for medical schools to talk about fungal infection. beyond like yeast infections thrush and yeah so he was like listen if if you based on the knowledge you learn in this class suspect that what's going on with you is fungal like bring some research with you to the hospital because they will not know what to do oh that's so frightening I mean we saw

that in the last of us they didn't go to a doctor to ask what was going on they went to a researcher And also we can see how rare diagnosis of a fungus is because I've been watching a lot of house recently over a pandemic. And they always talk about it. Even scrubs. I was watching, I guess, a lot of fictional medical shows. But even scrubs, I remember like the crazy thing that ended up being it was like a fungus. And yeah, it's just, I guess I should say that. You know, not all fungus is bad. We have so much fungus living in us and on us that do a lot of really good things for us. And to end on a positive note, if you are wondering if a fungal pandemic like The Last of Us is probable.

The answer is not in that same rendition. Yeah, no, you'll get fungal pneumonia. Don't worry. It will be way less weird. You will not have a fungus overtaking your body and trying to control your movements. Even though some can do that at ants, researchers told me that that fungus is not adapted or has not evolved in the human body to do that. So, you know, just be safe and just, you know, avoid all wildfire smoke, I think, whether there's fungus in it or not. Yeah, that's a good takeaway in general.

And there are a lot of people out there like raw dog in the air in New York. And I just put a mask on. I could not believe that because you can see it so visibly. Like the cloud, like there was a darkness in the sky at noon. Horrific. People are like, we can't let the wildfire smoke win. Yeah, we can. For one day, we can.

We can stay inside. Yeah, I've been seeing a lot of our. articles that were like, the East Coast just had its climate moment. And I was like, we'll see if it sticks. You are not, you are underestimating the willpower of humans to ignore things, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I loved all of the weird things we learned this week. Like I said, I no longer pick a winner. I don't believe in winners and lose anymore. You're like the communal paternity. It's true. It's true. I just want everybody to have a good 10. I just want a third of a win. That's it. True. It's more of a win than I ever thought I'd have.

Kasha, thanks so much for coming on. Reminder listeners, where they can find you for science comedy and science not comedy. Yeah, thank you for having me. This was fun. You can find my science comedy. I mean, I'm basically. based in Washington, D.C., but I'll be doing tours along the East Coast and West Coast this fall. So you can find that out on my Instagram, Cascha Blanca, or my website, Kasha Patel. And then for my science writings, which, you know, I think I will be doing a more in-depth article about wildfire smoke and fungi. I write a column for the Washington Post called Hidden Planet. So, yeah, you can check me out on any of the things, and you can Google me. I'm pretty Googleable.

Awesome. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing.

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