The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Parachuting Cats, Butt-Breathing, Secret Uses for Viagra

Episode Date: June 9, 2021

The weirdest things we learned this week range from flying cats to breathing through your butt. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Sara Kiley Watson: www.twitter.com/SaraKileyWatson Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your 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 heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Perbita Saha. And I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. So on the weirdest thing I learned 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, et cetera. And then we decide which one we just absolutely have to hear about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? So I am here to talk today about the day that cats flew. Oh, exciting day for cats. I'm sure I would imagine. I don't know. Maybe I, actually maybe cats would hate flying.

Sad, dark day in cat history. Perbina, what's your tease? I will be talking about how Viagra boners could be the answer to easing our worst period cramps. Surely not the boners themselves, though. I hope. No, there is a degree of separation in between there. Good, just making sure. My tease is that I'm going to talk about how maybe in the future we could all breathe from our butts. I can't wait. Took us respiration. The future is now.

Let's see. Why don't we start with you, Pramita? Yeah, that sounds good. So I'm going to start with a little history on Viagra, but we want to start. be talking about penises the whole time. We would never. We just can't. We're not that kind of podcast. So to start, Sarah Kylie and Rachel, and even Jess, quick quiz.

Why do you think that Pfizer, who is behind Viagra, why do you think they originally came up with it? I have always heard it was like a blood pressure medication. Yeah, I was going to say like heart attacks or something, like something with heart and blood. Yeah, you two are smart popsite editors. It would be kind of... I am literally writing a book about the history of sex, so it would be really bad if I got that one wrong. I was prepared to get it wrong, but it would have been a bad sign at this point in time. Yeah, so you both basically got it.

Viagra has been a prescription drug. since the late 90s, I think like 98. And it's funny because I was reading about the marketing history. And like Bob Dole, the former presidential candidate, was like one of the celebrity marketers for it. And I kind of, I was like eight, I guess, when it came out. And I weirdly remember that. I weirdly remember him in Viagra commercials.

So good for Bob Dole. But yeah, so it's been out since the late 90s, which is. was surprising to me because I feel like it has such a big footprint in the U.S. and feels much more historical. But I think part of that is just because so many people use it, you know, tens of millions of prescriptions are given out each year. And it's like constantly referenced in pop culture and conversations and unfortunately not in the best light sometimes. And, you know, it's a really big cash cow for pharmaceuticals. There's some wilds. stat about how it made a billion bucks just in the first year that it came out.

Wow. But as both of you noted, Viagra wasn't when it was being developed and clinically tested. It wasn't for erectile dysfunction. Very simply, what the pill does is it relaxes muscles and causes the blood vessels to dilate, which are luckily the two main steps to getting a boner. Of course, there's a nervous system component, too, where the chemicals work as inhibitors and basically replicate a process where the brain instructs the organs to react when it feels some kind of horny. So with all that the drug does, it was originally seen as a way of treating angina and cardiac arrest in high-risk individuals. So it was tested in people alike regardless of sex.

But what these clinical trials showed was that it had a very serious, or I shouldn't say serious, but intense side effect in men specifically. A notable side effect. Very notable. And I actually, I listened to a bit of a podcast where one of the nurses who was in on this clinical travel, with Pfizer, she primly recalled how when she went to check on participants in the study, the men would be lying face down on their beds because they didn't know what was going on. But anyway, through all this, connections were made and it was soon realized that, yes, this did have an effect for people dealing with heart disease.

it had more of an effect as an erectile dysfunction drug. So that's how it was released and marketed. But it is still used to treat some heart conditions, which I didn't know, and I don't think is very widely shared. But one other interesting thing that I think was seen in the original clinical trials and was tested way more recently, I think in a trial that ran from like 2005 to the early 2010, so only like in the past decade, was to see what the effect was on the female reproductive system. If this drug can help relax muscles, specifically like in the penile area, then why can't it do the same in the uterus as well? So I was reading recently, possibly because I was going through some horrible monthly cramps myself, wondering,

why is it there something that can just magically wipe this pain away? So I was reading about this trial experiment by Penn State University and the National Institute of Health from 2007 to 2011. It was really small, only 25 participants. And a few received. And a few received, Viagra while a few others received a placebo. The patients who all suffered from conditions that caused uterine pain experienced massive relief within just an hour or two of receiving 100 milligrams of the drug. I should note that they got the dose vaginally, not orally, which is how Viagra is usually taken. And that might have maximized the effectiveness and also deterred. deter other side effects since we know that the drug can affect muscles and blood vessels all across the

body. Where is my Viagra? Exactly. It's, I mean, and again, to think that this was observed in, like, the original tests of Viagra before it was even FDA-approved, but, like, never taken seriously. Yeah, like, talk about a cash cow. I mean, I understand. I understand that on-demand, erections, major cash cow, of course. But like, at least on par as a cash cow would be massive reduction in cramping, I would say. Yeah, it's like, again, this was a very small test of the drug in this space, but nobody else has picked this up. Right. Which is the really sad thing. I understand, and to make a clear to listeners, if they don't understand, like, we can't say for sure the drug is a miracle period cramp cure.

However, why has there been no follow-up? Exactly. Yeah, and I also read that it's used in the lead-up to in vitro fertilization, and that target audience is largely women. So it's not like drug makers have ignored that women can use Viagra, But if you think of in vitro fertilization, also like a million, possibly billion dollar industry, so that's where the money is to be made. Versus to put research into endometriosis or like the many, many uterine conditions that affect people on a monthly basis.

Like having a uterus, for example. Yeah, it's such a widely available drug. It would be so easy to get a prescription. And it also, I know you all have talked about birth control. So many people use birth control, at least here in the U.S., but there's so little follow-up to how it affects different bodies, either hormonally or, you know, on the physical end. And it just, it's, you know, another thread in that

in the huge, like, mysteries and gaps of medical research when it comes to common reproductive annoyances? I don't know. I think that's understating it. Nusances. Nusances. Skinnundrums. I actually, I've never done this before,

but I'm going to grab my phone to play a voice message that we got recently because it is topically relevant. One second. Yes, please. That would be good. This, like, all reminds me of that sex in the city episode where Samantha takes Viagra. Like, maybe we need to get Kim Cottrell on the phone and see what she has.

What happens to her? Does she take it for cramps? She doesn't, oh, Samantha did not take it for cramps. I'll leave it at that. If anyone wants to log in and watch, that's all up to you. But I would say it's probably not medically accurate what was going on in sex in the city ever, especially in that episode. I mean, I think there have also been studies to see if it can, like, increase libido and sexual stimulation in women. as well. I didn't really follow up to read about that because I was more interested in the cramps, but maybe there's a scientific nugget in that sex and the city episode.

So, Jess, you remember on our last voice message episode, I talked about how marsupials have two uteruses, two uteri, and how humans, this can happen in humans too, and it's not as uncommon as you would think. And I asked if anyone with two uteri was listening, and I had to be have this voice message to share. Hi there. I'm Nazia. I am a uni student and science lover from Canada. And I'm so excited to be sending you a message because I am one of those humans with more than one uterus. And I actually, I was so shocked when I was listening to the latest episode that just dropped yesterday because I had no idea that marsupials had two uteri. And I now feel a deeper connection, I was born with uterastidylophis by colis, which was caused by another birth defect

called renal agnesis, and I've never met anyone else like me. So now I just feel like this deep connection to marsupials, which I was so grateful for. One weird thing that I feel like is interesting is that uteruses and uteri are both like potential plurals, which kind of bothers me. I feel like everyone should pick one. I personally advocate for uteri. I think it's better. Nassia, thank you so much for calling in. I'm so glad we could inform you about this connection to the marsupial world that you didn't even know you had. And also I agree that uteri is a cool word. Yeah, she should be able to choose anyway. Yeah, exactly. All right, I think we're going to take a quick break, but then we'll be back

with more facts. All right, we're back. And just so we don't go right from boners to butts, Sarah Kylie, why don't you talk to us about some cats instead? Yay! Okay. Well, I am really excited to be here to talk about public health, unintentional consequences, and most importantly, flying cats. So, welcome to Operation Cat Drop. Oh, yeah.

Love it. And so Operation Cat Drop, shockingly, there's not a lot of people that have done deep dives in this, so I just want to give an early shout out to University. of iOS Patrick O'Shaughnessy, who has done like this insane amount of work on this and all of this awesome stuff. If you hop in the wayback machine to like catdrop.com, you can learn even more about this. It is incredible. Wow, I'm really upset that catdrop.com doesn't exist anymore. Yeah, what? Is it a 404? Maybe I've just been living on the wayback machine from 2009 just to be safe. So maybe it is there, but y'all can find out. Things are probably much safer on the way back

usually in 2009, just like in general. I can trust it. Nice place to go back to. Yeah. So our story starts in 1950s Borneo, which is the third largest island in the world. Only Greenland and New Guinea outrank it, and it's the largest one in Asia. So Borneo is right along the equator and it's largely mountainous and forested. It's really hard to get around and to get to some corners of the island because, you know,

there's a lot of warm, wet rainforest that doesn't make for exactly easy. travel and a lot of the rivers don't navigate past like a hundred miles. So it's kind of like if you're trying to get somewhere trying to deliver something, it's super duper tricky. And like a lot of hot, wet places in the world, mosquitoes are a problem. And with mosquitoes brought malaria, which was killing thousands of people back in the 1950s, according to the American Society for Microbiology, that number worldwide could have been as high as 1.3 million annual deaths. But 20 years before in the 30s, those deaths were at 3.5 million. So obviously there'd been some serious work. Don did you drop that number down. And so a big part of that was diacathane or DDT. So back in the day, DDT was one of the ways that the World Health Organization recommended that people handle malaria. So it's developed back in the 40s to control icky pests found on crops, livestock, etc., as well as fighting off bug-based illnesses like malaria and typhus in military and civilian populations. populations. In fact, a 1952 New York Times article attributed the fall and overall worldwide death

rate to the quote, spread of the use of DDT. So how this went about in the Sarawak region of Borneo was that both DDT and benzene hexacloride were sprayed inside dwellings in the early 50s in this little part of the island. And so these dwellings were called longhouses, which were these gigantic thatched roofed buildings that housed dozens of families in the village. And the DDT solution would sprayed on the walls of these big buildings and they leave this white residue in hopes of killing mosquitoes before they could give malaria to the folks inside. And it worked really well, actually. So between 1953 and 1955, the percentage of malaria carrying mosquitoes in the area dropped

from 35% down to less than 2%. So nowadays, we know there's a lot of questionable stuff with DDT, namely its negative impacts on wildlife and ability to accumulate over time in the fatty tissues of animals. Figuring a lot of this out was thanks to radio. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which came out in the 60s after environmental issues with stuff like DDT spring up kind of all over the place. Which brings us back to Borneo and their malaria drama, which actually didn't get much press back in the day. So it's lent itself to a little bit of an urban legend over the years. The story more or less starts with caterpillars and then we'll dive into even more fun stuff.

But one of the first negative impacts of DDT spring sessions was that moth larvae were munching at thatch roofs, literally over the heads of the people that the World Health Organization were trying to protect. A World Health Organization team discovered that these little caterpillars were able to distinguish which bits of thatch were sprayed with DDT and therefore avoided eating the toxic stuff. So we have some smart little larvas, but their predators, which in this case were small wasps, still fell victim to DDT's toxins. So a study on the region of Saba, which is also in northern Borneo, found that DDT spring led to a 50% increase in caterpillars per roof area, much to the demise of the roofs in the area. So we've got a lot of dying bugs to begin with.

But another piece of the DDT-related stuff was with the cats in the area. The spring of DDT was in some way, shape, or form, killing off the cats in the region. And while that's devastating to think about for people who love cats in general, the even bigger piece of the puzzle is that without cats to manage population of rats that kind of run amok. And one 1959 annual report

on Saba said, quote, field rats were a greater menace than usual, partly as a result of antimilarial spring which accidentally killed many cats. So rats, we all know, carry disease. And famously, the sylvatic plague, which then turns into the bubonic plague in humans. And like we saw in the Middle Ages,

when cats die off or are killed like the medieval folks did in their plague-riddled fear, for one reason or another, the risk of sick rats getting people seriously sick is just something you don't want to mess with. So here's where the story gets exciting. How do we get cats back into Borneo so we don't have a resurgence of the plague? We already know how tricky it is to get into Borneo at all, let alone with live meowing kitty cats. But one way supplies could get to remote locations quickly that they were using a lot

during this time is to literally fly over the area in question and plop supplies down with parachutes. Sure, yeah. So why not do that with cats? Oh, no. So this is where the cats get to flying. So the earliest reference to... Oh, yeah, I do not think this was a good day for cats.

I'm going to... I feel like it was a mixed bag. There's a lot going on with the cats here. But the earliest reference to the cat drop was in 1965 by British or anthologists, anthropologist and curator of the... Sarawak Museum, Tom Harrison, who claimed to be a part of the effort, saying that in 1959, cats were collected in coastal, more reasonable towns by the World Health Organization, placed in, quote, parachute-borne containers bulging with cats of every degree of age and rage,

and drop- And-Rage! Age and rage! And dropped in the interior uplands with help of the Royal Air Force, which is flying out of Kuching. But considering his biography is titled The Most Offending Soul Alive. Maybe we need to take what he says. with a grain of salt. Luckily, there is another record of the cat drops from the operations record

book kept by the Royal Air Force from 1960, detailing a plane that flew of Shangy, Singapore. In March of 1960, with a, quote, unique drop to Barrio and the Kellebit Highlands and Sarawak. The unique drop in question consisted of 7,000 pounds of stores, and, quote, over

20 cats to wage war on the rats, which were threatening crops. So we got age, rage, and wage, all happening here. And apparently the cats made it their unsafe. They made it all their safe, all, you know, 20 of them. As someone replied to the Air Force thanking them for the cat donors and cat basket makers, and all of the cats are safe and much appreciated.

So, of course, with crazy stories come some differences in the way that they are told, and over time, you know, can get a little bit fun, especially when they involve flying cats. So some of them are really extreme, like the idea that 14,000 cats were parachuted down. There's so many cats. That's not what happened. I don't even know how we'd find 14,000 cats. And another one was that the plague had already broken out on the island, which there's not really any proof of that either.

But the biggest differentiation is how cats got sick. So this is where we can pull in some public health info. In some versions of the story, especially earlier ones, the cats became ill from eating up bugs and geckos, like those bugs dying from getting the DDT that we talked about with the thatch roof guys. So basically eating all those guys up with a classic case of biomagnification. And so biomagnification is the process in which a compound increases its concentration in the tissues of an organism as we crawl up the food chain. Think about it like this.

If a pond is a little bit polluted, then the phytoplankton that uses that water to grow becomes polluted as well. Zoo plankton swimming around in that pond, eating up that phytoplankton are going to become polluted as well, thanks to their meals being contaminated. And the fish that eat a whole bunch of plankton are going to be. to take on that pollution as well and keep on climbing up that chain and the big fish eating those contaminated little fish and the birds of prey that then munch on those big fish are going to be dealing with quite a hefty dose of pollutants. And this is the story that Tom Harrison ran with when he finally got around to talking about the cat drop five years after the event. So I was O'Shaughnessy, who's this awesome guy who put all of this together, points out that

the cat drop story came out as this huge tale, this huge fable almost. of mammalian deaths from biomagnification of DDT only after Silent Spring came out a couple years before, which could be, you know, cause for a little bit of embellishment to, you know, make it all roll with the times, you know, we're all talking about it. Make it topical, make it timely. Yeah, exactly. So after digging through all of the accounts of the cat drop and related DDT induced cat deaths, the culprit is more likely than not that the cats fell sick from licking the DDT off of their fur instead. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. So that is a little bit of an easier one. Like, you're sprayed with poison and you also clean yourself by licking

yourself like you were going to definitely ingest some poison. So around the same time in Mexico, malaria exterminators were called Los Matagatos, the cat killers, because the cats lick the DDT off their paws and then died of a nervous system disease. And so that was, yeah, so that was described in time in 1977, so a couple of years later. And Bolivian cats also experienced some weird DDT side effects. And a dead Bolivian cat analyzed by a CDC toxicology. And a found that DDT concentrations that a cat could lick off their fur were, in fact, high enough to be deadly. In 1963, so about a little bit of time after the cat drop happened, World Health Organization employee Michael Colburn said that the malaria eradication efforts did, in fact, lead to the

deaths of some domestic animals, but those deaths could be reduced or wholly prevented by quote-unquote adequate precautions. And then years later, another World Health Organization employee Anthony Brown stated that there were, in fact, undocumented cases of cats dying from contact with DDT in Sabah because, quote, of their habit of continually cleaning themselves by licking, which is like, why are we blaming the cats for this one? But so while the story has a lot of, like, fun things that we can learn about unintended consequences that come from public health measures, it probably isn't the biomagnification story that people once thought it was. But it still made appearances in the summary of a U.S. Senate hearing on DDT in the 70s, and that Senate hearing eventually got DDT banned in the States.

But the World Health Organization is still debating DDT's usefulness on malaria. They support it as of 2006. And the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollution still allows DDT for malaria control. So there's still parts of the world that are getting the cat kill and spray to protect them from scary mosquitoes. whether or not cats will ever fly in to save the day from the bobonic plague making a horrifying reappearance again, that's up in the air. Nice. So they saw the local cats dying from DDT, but they thought it would be different if they

brought in new cats. I think it helped, though. I guess like... With the rodents, yeah. I think, like, probably what happened is, like, if you're a cat just hanging out in the DDT man comes and you get sprayed, then you're out of luck. Yeah. But like if you're a new cat, one of these two cats to, or 20 cats to wage war on the rats,

like you're not like there necessarily when everyone's getting spritzed by DDT. So you might be better off. But yeah, I would assume that that still was a problem. But I think this is the only time that cats have ever been parachuted onto an island. But nevertheless. One would hope. Once you, once you mentioned that an ornithologist helped orchestras. this plan, I was like, ah, that makes sense, because there is some friction between ornithologists

and feral cats slash wild cats. So yes. Yeah, this guy on Tom Harrison was like a little bit of everything, I think. We was doing a lot of the sciences back in the 50s. Sorry, go ahead. No, you go. Oh, mine is really stupid. Just that when I first learned about bioaccumulation as an undergrad doing environmental science. My professor, Don Roter, he was like, never eat a duck in the Hussatonic. And I was like, okay, Don. And he was like, yeah, because, you know, fatty tissue, high enough up the food chain, PCBs, never eat a duck from the Hussatonic. And you know what? I have not, to my knowledge, ever consumed a duck from the who's a tonic. So thank you, Dawn. It has served me well. I guess ducks have those fatty

livers. Yeah, I would really like to know when parachuting animals became the thing to do to reintroduce a population somewhere. I mean, I read Ben Goldfarb wrote, who is an environmental writer, he wrote a book about beavers a few years ago. And there's a great chapter. And there's a great chapter about how beavers were parachuted and parts of the American West to, you know, help reinstate the hydrology of the land. And again, it's like, why parachuting? I guess you can cover more of an area that way, but... Just drop them as you go, cover the whole whole island. I like get it with the island because it's like, who wants to take 20 cats on a river in the rainforest?

But like, the American West, I'm like, pop them on a train, get them out there. Oh, so cute. Train fevers. Wow. I love it. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back.

And yeah, I'm going to talk about how one day we might be able to breathe with our butts. So to start, I just want to say that on one of the very first episodes of Weirdest Thing, I did this whole exhaustive history of something called a smoke in a month. you will have to go back and listen to it if you want all of the gory details. But the gist is that throughout history and until the early 1800s, people sometimes try to resuscitate, revive, or otherwise treat ailing humans by blowing smoke up their anuses. And this is real. Like I said, you can go back and listen to the whole episode. It's very good.

Very OG early times. Different time, different place. Okay. Now, I'm not quite like retracting my fantastic smoke enema expose from season one. Most of what I said still stands. But I did come down pretty hard on what a ridiculous notion it was. And it was pretty silly. The mechanisms that people had in mine at that time were totally made up.

But I am here to say today that while I wish it weren't so, there may have been more to the idea than I thought back then. This is huge. This is, I don't know, you've really grown, Rachel. Wow. All of these years, smoke animals are back to haunt me. So back to the news of the day. In May, researchers released a study that showed that at least in some mammals, mice and pigs,

to be specific in this instance, can be saved from suffocation with that. help of an oxygen-rich enema. I have to pause here, both to let people absorb this knowledge, but also to acknowledge that my dear husband Oliver sent this article to me, as to the Facebook group member named Dan, but I also want to make it very clear that, like, everyone sent me this article, and I also saw out of my own volition before any of those people actually sent it to me, because mammals breathing liquid oxygen through their inesis is, like, obviously the kind of news I longed to hear every day of the week. So, you know, hat tip to those who shared, especially

the one that I'm married to, but also unnecessary. Thank you. So the lead researcher of this new study, Takanori Takepe, of the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, was actually motivated by his own father's struggles with lung disease. He wants to explore alternatives to the kind of ventilation systems we have in hospitals right now. especially given how strained our access to those machines has been throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. And yeah, so he was inspired in this particular instance by the non-mammalian animals that we already know can absorb oxygen through their intestines. So there are a few examples of this. I'll just name a couple.

Sea cucumbers, for example, suck water through these branching tubes just inside their anuses. And they expel the liquid and absorb the oxygen. so that's fun for them. There are also these fish called loaches that, in addition to breathing through gills, like most fish do, can also pop their heads out of the water to get gulps of air through their mouths.

And they don't have lungs, so when they get air through their mouths, they're absorbing that oxygen through their intestines, which is wild. And of course, we mustn't forget turtles because as our favorite listener Liam once told us via voice message, they can absorb oxygen through blood vessels inside their cloacas,

a.kia a multi-purpose butthole, while they're slumbering underwater through winter. So the idea was like, well, there are animals that can kind of use their intestines and like blood vessels around their GI systems to absorb oxygen in a pinch. So like, what if mammals could do that too? And so yeah, it wasn't a totally far-fetched idea to think mammals might be able to get oxygen from their rear ends. But we obviously don't just breathe through our butts every time we go swimming, which I don't know, for some reason once I thought of that, that just like killed me. Don't try it. You will drown.

But Take and his colleagues were like, you know, working the problem. And they started by trying to simply pump pure oxygen into the rectums of several hypoxswain. toxic mice. So deprive the mice of atmospheric oxygen that they could breathe and just up the butt. There was some benefit. I'm sorry, I'm giggling so much. This is very serious science, but mostly I'm giggling at in my notes. I just like included so many alternatives to the word butt. And I am laughing at my past self for trying so hard to avoid word repetition. You didn't say bum bum yet. Yeah, okay, I'll get one in, I promise. So there was some benefit. Without bum bum oxygen, mice died in 11 minutes. They couldn't breathe, so that's fair. Pumping oxygen through their rear ends extended that survival to 18 minutes. So that's close to double. That's pretty impressive. But, you know, they still died. In a third group where the researchers, basically, they like scraped the entire. wall down to make it as thin as possible to like aid in the oxygen transfer. But doing this also

increases the blood flow. So that would also, in theory, aid the amount of oxygen that could come in through there. So when they did that, the rectal oxygen kept 75% of the mice alive for the whole hour-long experiment without the ability to breathe through their cute little faces. So that's pretty impressive, but scrubbing your intestines down to almost nothing isn't exactly more convenient or less invasive than a standard ventilator. So that's not very helpful for humans. So they went back to the drawing board and decided to replace the pure gas with perflora decalin, which is a perflora chemical. If you guys aren't familiar in their liquid forms, you can basically cram this stuff chock full of oxygen. There's actually some hope that

people could breathe this stuff while diving, for example, to avoid issues with deep sea pressure on their lungs and, et cetera, or that you could breathe it in on space missions so that you could just, like, float and bob around in liquid as a protector against, like, G-forces and other stuff. So you've probably seen some sci-fi movie or anime or other that has used a kind of, like, submerging people in liquid that they breathe in. And that's what this stuff is. They actually use it in the movie The Abyss. And while breathing in it is still something that hasn't been tested in humans, to my knowledge, and certainly isn't common practice.

The crew really did submerge rats in it to film a demonstration of the technology that, like, happens in the film. And the rodents survived. Like, animals have been, can breathe in this stuff. Though, as the owner of the rat says during the scene, she's doing it, but she does. don't dig it, so it does not look pleasant. I don't think it's ever going to be something we like do for fun, but exciting future stuff, just a side note. And it's also been tested as like a blood substitute because it's so good at carrying oxygen. Very fascinating chemical, maybe some really cool future applications, including perhaps going up buttholes. So I really need to stop

laughing every time I said blood. I'm, like, recording this very, like, hot cupboard, which just makes me very, I think I'm a little hypoxic, is what I'm getting at. But I have no bum oxygen on hand. Anyway, they took three hypoxic mice and seven hypoxic pigs. Mice and pigs, of course, some of our favorite model animals to use in studies where we might want to apply something to humans one day. Pigs especially very similar organ systems to humans. And they pumped this oxygen-rich goo up their bums while flushing the intestines of seven control animals who were also in oxygen deprivation. And the mice with the rectal goo soon had oxygen saturation at normal levels, while the pigs gained enough oxygen saturation to at least keep them from showing signs of epoxy.

So, like, their skin tone came back and they warmed back up. Very exciting stuff. Oh, cool. I would also like to shout out Caleb Kelly, a gastroenterology fellow at Yale, for writing a commentary on the study called enteral ventilation via anus. You can hold your breath. Like the opposite of don't hold your breath. Oh, man. Academics, they get me. So he and other outside experts basically seem to think that, like, this is a wild and fascinating and potentially useful finding. saw a lot of like positive responses to the study. But more work is needed to prove that there are no sneaky harmful effects. For example, they did test to make sure that using this liquid didn't

flush out important bacteria in the intestines, but it's not clear whether using it for a longer period of time might do that or that might be the case in humans. And they also just have to demonstrate like what circumstances this would be better in than traditional ventilation, if any, which is a big open question. But it is just fascinating basic science research that like, look, we knew there were some animals that could absorb oxygen with their anuses, their rectums, if you will. And now we know that in a pinched mammals can do it too. And if pigs can do it, like, pretty high likelihood we can do it. Generally, we're like shockingly and disturbingly similar to swine. So. So would you rather be able to do both or switch on and off, switch between?

Oh, that's a great question. And I did, like, in reading some of the, like, takeaways from other experts, like, no one came right out and said this. So it's possible. This is just speculation on my part. If so, I apologize. But I did get the sense that people were saying, like, this might be a good supplementary thing for people who had, like, really low oxygen saturation. you know, maybe they would have a ventilator or an oxygen mask and also have some kind of oxygen enema in place.

So I certainly like, I would love to have more availability to oxygen in many situations as a person with allergy and exercise-induced asthma. So like, I don't know. Maybe maybe the secret to overcoming my terrible lungs is butt goo. Who knows? The future... There's no knowing what the future holds for us on our butts. We will have to troubleshoot running leggings going forward. Oh, my gosh. Indeed, indeed.

All right, so what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? A great showing this week, I have to say. Really wonderful stories from all three hosts. I'm going to go with the flying cats because it... the ending was unexpected. I agree. A great story from start to finish with the flying cats. So Sarah Kylie, I think you have it today. Oh, thanks. I mean, I'm still processing the butt goo. So it's going to be, I appreciate that.

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