The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Pointy-Headed Vikings, Apocalypse Popularity, Perfect Prism Poops

Episode Date: July 3, 2024

Dr. Jessica Ware from the American Museum of Natural History joins the show to talk about the most perfectly shaped poo. Plus, Laura talks about being popular in the apocalypse, and Rachel explains why some Vikings and other folks had especially pointy heads. 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  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 Thanks to our Sponsors! Right now, get 60% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton.

Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or their. 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 text stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured,

why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm really. Rachel Feltman. I'm Laura Bysis. I'm Jessica Ware. Thank you so much for joining us. We are so excited to have you. Jessica, would you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do? I'm so excited to have you on the show. Thanks for inviting me. My name is Dr. Jessica Ware, and I am a curator at the American Museum of Natural History. I'm also the division chair for invertebrate zoology. And what I do here is I-City insect evolution, and I mostly focus on dragonflies and damselflies, but I also work on termites and cockroaches and true bugs, and some of my grad students

work on ice crawlers and stoneflies and twisted wing parasites. There's a lot of insects here, and so we're trying to unravel their long history. Amazing. Well, I'm very excited to hear some weird insect facts from you today. So let's get into the show. 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 we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, except not really anymore. We just talk about how weird all of the things were

because I decided having a winner was arbitrary and hard and silly. Anyway, Laura, what's your tease? My tease is, it's better to be Apocalypse popular than high school popular. Wow. I think I may know whose research we are going to discuss. I'm very excited. Well, color me intrigued. my tease is that some Vikings had very pointy heads and I'm going to talk about why or maybe why not

why not have a have a pointy head depends on who you ask. Dr. Ware what is your tease for today? That is a good question. I guess my tease is that sometimes you can put a lot of water in your bum. That's a great tease. Fantastic work. Hydrated bum is a happy bum.

All right. Yeah. Lately our guests are really, you know, I never make guests go first. And lately, guests have really been being that very difficult for me by offering some really good teas. But I think I will kick us off for today. It's been a while since I made myself go first. So I'm going to talk about some new research out of Scandinavia.

I just got back from Northern Germany. You may remember from the Babel commercials I record for this podcast that my spouse was born up there. And not on this trip, but previously I went to a very awesome Viking museum they've got in that area. and coincidentally, some researchers from said Viking Museum just released some really cool new findings. So I figured I would talk about them today. So they were examining remains found on the Baltic Island of Gotland. It's now in Sweden, which was once home to many wealthy Viking settlements. It was a real, real hop in place for Vikings.

And they found an unusual instance of body modification from a thousand years ago. three women who had elongated cone-shaped skulls. But this find wasn't unusual for the reasons that some listeners might be thinking, because the practice of artificial cranial deformation has actually shown up loads of times throughout history in lots of different parts of the world and seems to very often have been part of mainstream practice, mainstream beauty ideals. and it's a really interesting sort of area of historical research. I've always been fascinated by it, and I learned a lot by sort of digging into this particular study.

So I'm just going to share a little bit about what I have found. So I should start by saying that there are groups that still practice cranial modification to varying extends today, including some that may surprise you. I will get back to that later. But cases of cranial modification have been found throughout history, actually on all continents except Australian Oceania. And this is taken from an article I was pulling from. And I should add, I don't think there's any evidence on Antarctica either, but I get what they

were going with when we left Antarctica out. But it was more common in some parts of the world than in others. in parts of Europe, it was quite the thing. On Gotland, it seems to have been a trend that stayed isolated to these three women and actually possibly just two of them, because when you dig into the paper, you see that they're like, one of these skulls could reasonably be considered just a lady with kind of a pointy head, which is fair. Human skulls.

Fair? Yep. Different shapes and sizes. And I did appreciate that they were like, we have to be real. Two of these skulls, we are very confident that someone did something to them to make them look like this. One, in the context of the other two, we think, but listen, could just be what her head looked like. So definitely these other two seem to have been alone in this practice on the island they lived on. And this is the first time that Vikings have been seen with purposefully elongated heads.

The closest folks who were like wildly doing this at the time were over by the Black Sea, which might be just kind of a hop-skipping-it-jump today, but was much too far for like a casual cultural crossover at the time. There are some graves from several hundred years earlier in Bavaria or southern Germany, where 13 women were found with varying degrees of elongation in their skulls. But the crucial difference is that, at least according to that research study, they were genetically distinct from the people that they lived near in Bavaria and in fact seemed to have come from somewhere near Romania where we know that this cranial manipulation was very common.

So that seemed like a more straightforward these women, were brought to this area, you know, for one reason or another, by some means or another, and this had been the practice where they were from. We know that the nomadic Huns, who invaded Europe from Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries, were very into this practice, and they spread to a lot of places. So did cranial manipulation. But over in these remains from the Baltic Sea, that little island in what's now Sweden, they had DNA that placed them as like members of this Viking community. They were locals and yet they were the only three people who had this very not local cultural practice. And I will get more into like what the

actual practices. I promise I'm not just going to ignore the fact that like you have to do something to make your head be a different shape. But, you know, just getting all the context in. So the biggest mystery isn't how these women ended up with differently shaped skulls. We can't know for sure, but there are, like, a lot of plausible reasons that a Viking girl might be born in or spend some formative years in another place. Vikings being Vikings and all that. you know, their families may have been trading in different parts of the world and then come back. Or it's also quite possible that while these women were genetically members of this group,

they had descended from a woman who was from somewhere else and had brought this practice with her. And then just for whatever reason, it didn't extend beyond these things. three women, you know, maybe one of them only had sons, maybe they got tired of being the only women on this small island that had heads that looked different from everybody else. It definitely one wonders how other people felt about their heads being elongated. But what's really intriguing is that it didn't spread. Because in a lot of instances, we see this becoming a really widespread cultural practice. There are probably like many things that we try to study in ancient history,

there wasn't just one reason for it happening. There certainly wasn't just one place where it started. And so, yeah, it would be a mistake to try to ascribe, like, one meaning to every instance of cranial manipulation we see in the fossil record. It's widely believed that it was commonly, a marker of being like in an elite group or like a noble group. But also a lot of this research on specifically skulls in different parts of Europe, researchers think that it may have been like specifically the sign of belonging to a distinct

cultural group, like maybe some kind of religious faction or some other sort of like cultural identity that might not necessarily be exclusively tied to a genetic lineage, where, you know, maybe if you became a member of a certain spiritual group or a certain even like merchant class or trading group, that maybe this would become something that you would do to distinguish yourself from other people. But again, there were probably many different reasons why this might happen. including accidentally, which I'll get into in a minute. But despite the fact that artificial cranial deformation can create pretty dramatic effects,

so dramatic that some Peruvian skulls have been frequently touted as proof that aliens visited the ancient Earth, which they are not. They are human skulls. We have ample, ample, ample evidence that they are human skulls. But despite that, it's pretty simple to elongate ahead method and desired outcomes vary a lot, as of course do the motivations. Including within cultures, the pre-colonial Maya had a range of different compression devices that they would use that could make heads wider, more narrow, slope in different directions. And actually in Mayan culture, there were two different broadly you could divide the cranial shapes into two different styles. And people in the general population would have head elongation, but their head would still be pretty rounded. and you had to be like elite to have what researchers now refer to as

referred to as oblique deformations, which means like an actual conical shape. So you were not, it was like, I don't know what happened if your mom went a little too hard on the poignness of your head and that was not socioeconomically appropriate for your family. But apparently there was that divide. generally speaking, though, when we're talking about these kinds of practices, we're talking about folks using cloths sometimes along with like a small board to wrap the heads of their infants. Baby skulls are very soft and flexible.

Spaces between the plates don't fuse together until around 18 months. And even the plates that are like touching from day one, they don't really fuse at their meeting points for at their meeting points for some time. And in fact, if you ever see somebody talking about one of the Peruvian skulls or another skull like this and being like, we know they're not human because the sutures aren't there. The sutures are the places where they meet and connect. And it actually varies a lot from person to person depending on how your skull develops, like when those sort of totally seal up. We're like if you can still see them. So actually, being, is it kind of like a skull fingerprint that way?

I get, you know, I don't think there's quite as much variation, but I think it's just that like there is a, there is a spectrum of what is like how a skull can seal itself up. So if someone's like, there's no suture here on the skull that means it's not human, that's made up, that's fake. That's red flag. It is still a human skull. Yeah. And this flexibility, very important for getting a baby out of birth canal. And as many people who have been around newborn babies can tell you, they often have very funky shaped heads for their first few days of life.

And everything turns out okay. But yeah, I will come more into that in a second. And binding a baby's head might sound drastic. And I certainly am not saying that this is something somebody should do for cosmetic reasons on their own with their baby, but when done carefully, it's not painful. It's probably not harmful. I will get more into that. That's kind of like an open question. Probably in some cases, it can be harmful. It's like anything else, man. You've got to be careful when you're wrapping a baby's head. But I think it's really interesting that like we see these like ancient

mysterious skulls. And this was actually going on in Europe until pretty really. recently in some pockets. And yes, it's still practiced in in some groups today. But to my knowledge, it's not practiced anymore, anywhere in Europe. And certainly in a lot of articles you see about it, it's kind of, it's very much othered. You know, I feel like the pictures are often like very, very, striking, very, look very different from, you know, how we would swallow a baby in the U.S. And in Europe, up until the 19th century, this was a very common practice in Toulouse, France, to the extent that this was actually referred to as the Toulouzian deformation, where there are actual studies that have photographs of people from the 19th and early 20th century with these

formations. And it's cool because that really allowed researchers to sort of look at how this changes the morphology of the face. And it's really interesting because some of these photos, yeah, some of them are quite like striking. Like if you saw this 19th century French guy on the street, you'd be like, oh, what happened to his? skull. And some of them are just like, yeah, that's kind of like an eggy-headed aristocrat man. Like, you know, that's just an old dude. And- Is that where that expression comes from? So you have to do that. Oh, me. I, that is such a great question. And I will be looking that up after this. Yes. And what's interesting about the Talusian deformations, again, getting back to

the importance of not trying to like generalize and ascribe like one more. motivation to all of the many, many people who have done this throughout history is that it's thought that at least among like 19th century French peasants, this was kind of accidental because they had a practice of very tightly swaddling a baby's head with padding after they were born because they were like, you don't want the baby to bump its head, which, you know, fair. but it seems that the skull deformations that often resulted were not a cosmetic effect that people were going after for their children. And in fact, if you were like poor and you had a particularly elongated head, you know, this started to be sort of like a sign of, you know, being very

provincial and the assumption was that you were lower in intelligence because you know, these like superstitious moms had had swaddled your head too tight. The actual research on whether this is harmful is like pretty inconclusive because it's hard to study, first of all, the ancient humans. we don't have soft tissue, we don't have, you know, their feedback on cognitive test questions. It does seem like that from like a neurological, like cranio-neurological perspective, it is totally plausible that this practice could be done safely and not affect the amount of space there is for the brain and therefore not impact function at all. It's also quite plausible that in some cases this could go really badly.

So it's sort of, again, it's kind of a mistake to be like, was this good, was this bad? So, yeah, the truth is we're still not entirely sure how this practice would have played out for most of the people that, you know, had this done to them. But there's a lot of modern work on the question of reshaping baby heads because we still do it. It's just that now we like them round. So platiocephaly is the official name or brachycephaly for flat head syndrome. Babies, again, their skulls very soft. And if they sleep a certain way or if they're positioned a certain way, even in utero, or again, like sort of birth trauma, they can have flat spots on their head. They can have heads that are very cony.

All this stuff happens. And generally, it's like it's going to sort itself out. Again, the skull is soft. Like, you don't worry about it. It's going to even back out. But intriguingly, now there is a rise of people who are like, my baby's head is too flat, do something about it. And that is probably because of the back-to-sleep campaign, which started in the early 90s and has probably saved lots of babies' lives recommending infant.

sleeping on their back on a firm mattress without, you know, pillows or stuffed animals in the crib, which is an important way to lower the risk of sudden infant death syndrome. But some studies have found that there has been a sixfold increase in the diagnosis of, quote, deformational head shapes. And that is probably because laying flat on a hard surface means your head will start to look a little flatter. Or if you like to turn your head in the night, maybe it's a little flatter on one side and the other. Here's the thing. This is usually totally fine and you don't need to worry about it. You can and should like mention to your pediatrician if you are concerned about the shape of your baby's head because there's a different condition, craniosynastosis, which is where the sutures,

as I have mentioned, that don't prove whether or not you're an alien, a fuse too early. So sometimes if the shape is off and the bones are fusing, then that can actually cause a problem because you need room for the brain to grow. In most cases, that is not what's happening. And the head will even out. That being said, many people get those adorable little helmets to put their babies in. And that is just literally it is doing the same thing I have talked about ancient people doing to shape a baby's head. It's just making it around. What I found really interesting was that the NHS in the UK

kind of talks about using those helmets in sort of a similar way to the way I talked about the research on ancient head wrapping. They're like, it's probably fine. Research suggests it's fine. But like, do you really, must you really squish baby's head? Maybe just wait. Maybe just be patient. So, you know, the more things change, the more things they, the more they say the same.

Again, this is no absolute no shame or shade to anyone whose baby has been or is in helmet. Doctors in the U.S., I think, kind of actively recommend them. It's just sort of a different, they have a different sensibility about it in the UK. But again, because it is so similar to the vibes around how researchers talk about, ancient cranial deformation. I thought it was worth bringing up. And yeah, I think, you know, it's so interesting. We talk about this on the show all the time, but it's really interesting, like, what strikes us as being like a really wild body modification and what is considered totally normal. Yeah. It made me think about the neck rings that are common in some African and Asian

cultures. I definitely was told about these as a child and people made up a lot of stuff. I really thought that like green ribbon style, if you took them off, your neck would break and it was like horrifying. No, in actuality, the neck elongation from neck rings is mostly an illusion caused by the weight of the rings. It pushes your collarbone and ribs into an unusual angle makes your neck look longer. I'm not saying it's comfortable or I would do it. I don't think either of those think they're true, but it's just like very different from the way it is often presented in U.S. context. And in fact, today, many young women who engage in this practice like take the rings off pretty often when they don't feel like having them on. and even footbinding, which in some cases was like truly as horrific as you can possibly imagine.

I like need to put my head between my knees when I think about it. In other related cultural groups was much more on the order of modern fashion trends, like maybe sort of wrapping fabric around your feet just on the day of so you could wear slightly smaller shoes or like walking with your toes curled in or wearing shoes that kind of made you like totter. There were just, there were a lot of variations beyond the like very brutal, debilitating breaking of feet. And I just think it's fascinating how like the stuff that gets shared is like the really extreme. Like no one can imagine doing that to their child. No one can imagine doing that to yourself. And when in fact like I don't know, we do we do a lot of stuff for for beauty norm today that I think is pretty pretty cuckoo bananas personally um and just

one last note on the Vikings speaking of body modification the same research uh they've been looking at marks on teeth because uh yeah there's been a lot of a lot of ancient people did various filing to their teeth. And I think when I hear filed teeth, I think like pointy teeth, these were like grooves that were like horizontal. And in fact, a lot of people have previously said maybe this was something that happened because they used tools all the times. Like maybe there was a leather working tool that like form these grooves. In this new study, they are saying, no, these are definitely like deliberate filings. We tested a bunch of ways teeth could have had these horizontal grooves and we are confident that they used an iron

file. Why? Who knows? But isn't that the case with every fashion trend? Kind of. Listen, I don't feel like I can judge Vikings who filed their teeth because I've done some silly stuff. It could be an attempt at filling a cavity in a way.

I mean, think about how much your teeth must have hurt. Oh, yeah. You know, think a cavity now, all the time, without like proper, that's whenever, I mean, again, I see these, like, Viking teeth stories constantly, or studies constantly, too. And that's always my first thought is, like, it hurts now when something is wrong with our teeth. That would have been your just everyday existence then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, maybe it would have been more likely to pull it.

Totally. I think we moved on to teeth a lot more like a treasure. Yeah. Right. Wow. Yeah, much to think about. But I, you know, I'm going to be thinking about these three ladies wondering how the other people on their small island in Sweden felt about their heads. I hope they looked in the mirror every day and said, you are so beautiful, girl. I love that no one else has a head like us. But, you know, maybe not. But that's what I hope it would like for them. I kind of love that it's a trio, too.

You know, because if you think about it in like literature and history, you know, you've got the three witches in Macbeth, the three witches in Hocus Pocus. It's kind of fun that there's a trio involved here. Just might too sense. My two cents. I like that it's a trio. Listen, I also, I like where your head is at. No pun intended.

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Okay, we're back. And Laura, let's talk about Apocalypse Friends. Her apocalypse popularity? Apocalypse popularity. Apocalypse Frenemies. Frenemes. Apocalypse popularity is not very easy to say I've learned today. It's my favorite song and Wicked.

I cannot wait for that movie. Anyway. So it's kind of obvious that the world feels a little bit scary right now. We're staring down the barrel of another. summer of potentially record-breaking heat in the northern hemisphere and stronger hurricanes. H5N1 flu is, you know, taking up a lot of real estate in my brain right now, now that it's in mammals. We've got wars raging in multiple countries and, you know, stateside, very serious election coming

up in November. Not sure if you've heard. So it's a lot. It kind of pretty much feels like we are living in the, you know, this is fine dog in the burning room meme every day. And that kind of, you know, it's almost becoming a cliche to reference that meme at this point, just because that's kind of our every day. It's not so novel anymore. So it's really easy to want to bury your head in the sand every day, self-sooth with, you know, some Netflix or just associating. But obviously we know that that's not really going to help in

the long run. It's kind of the, you know, equivalent of, you know, wanting to eat a pound of candy instead of, you know, a nutritious meal kind of thing. Not that there's anything wrong with eating a pound of candy. No, but you do know you will have a tummy ache later. You will have it, yes. Balance, balance, you know, again, you can have the candy, but you need some of the nutrition too. The fiber helps the candy.

The fiber helps the candy absorb. Anyway. Natural candy, it's good. Yeah, yeah. It's bliped with fruit. So one way to sort of, you know, deal with all of this insanity in the world right now is kind of shifting your mindset and thinking about how and thinking about how to face this rather than again burying our head in the sand does not

work but also running around screaming the sky is falling henny penny style doesn't really work at all i recently read a field guide to the apocalypse by athena actippus she is a cooperation theorist at Arizona State University and the co-director of the Human Generosity Project. She's a great podcaster, does a lot of really interesting work around game theory, zombies, and just kind of an all-around cool person. Rachel, I think you will agree. I blurbed the book. She blurbed the nameer.

The first, when I got the galley, I emailed Rachel kind of immediately. I was like, I know that name. So the book is billed as a mostly serious guide to surviving our wild times, which automatically could kind of, I think, peek at it. anybody's interest right now. It offers really practical advice on kind of how to just do that. And she and I spoke recently about why it's not all about that stereotypical image of the doomsday prepper. It isn't about tradeoffs and it's more just kind of about being ready for a worst case scenario from all different types of levels and ways that are approachable to you.

Like, for example, I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I can't. can the way that somebody living out somewhere with a lot more land can have supplies. You know, there are things, but there are some things with my space that I can do a little bit more. It doesn't mean I can't be prepared just because I live in a smaller environment. One of the first things that kind of jumped out was that the apocalypse approach in her perspective isn't so much, again, about that hoarding or stockpiling weapons mentality or, get even walking around with that sandwich board that says the end is nigh in Times Square. It's a little bit more about how to enrich your life on a day-to-day basis and make things better

in the world around you right now. Because again, nobody has a crystal ball. Nobody can tell what's exactly going to be happening. So by kind of living in the present and sort of having that present mindset as far as how to prepare for worst-case scenarios, it will help because you won't be constantly dwelling on a dismal future. Basically, taking care of those materials, necessities that you need to get through disasters, but not being rude about it or not being an ass about it. And that's the kind of thing that will make life better, not only in the face of a disaster, but also now. That sort of mentality is kind of where the whole high school popular versus apocalypse popular comes in to kind of like really get granular in defining the two.

You know, that version, there's still a version of high school popular as we're adults. It has to do mostly with high status and money. You use things to become more dominant and manipulative. You're striving for like that status and popularity. And according to the book, that can kind of get in the way of solving more complex problems. I mean, you can kind of watch this a little bit on Survivor. I think that that's kind of a good example in a reality TV sort of way of how that mindset can get in the way of solving problems. Apocalypse popular, on the other hand, is when you're better at helping manage leadership and tasks and distributing, understanding that, hey, I might be really, really good at getting water. Dr. Ware might be awesome at finding food, and Rachel might be,

like, the master shelter builder. Somebody who's more apocalypse popular could recognize that because they're not constantly thinking about how do I dominate this situation? How do I manage it and make sure that other people are playing to their strengths and we're not just focusing on their weaknesses? It helps a community manage a troubling situation and it kind of helps connect others in a network. Like at the beginning of every apocalypse movie, it's pretty much you're finding your people, you're finding your crew and the ones that, do well are the ones that kind of play to those notions of strength and, you know, skill levels. You know, in human societies, it's kind of playing to that idea of like there's the dominant

and there's the, you know, free, more free flowing of information. A dominant mindset is, you know, I'm stronger. I have more resources, you know, to heck with all the rest of you. Whereas that sharing mindset is something that you're going to need more of in an apocalypse. some of the best sci-fi movies kind of show that. And I think it's one thing that we saw a little bit in the early days of the pandemic. Like there was obviously a lot of fear that it was going to devolve into that more Mad Max style mayhem. And sure, it kind of felt like that. But there were so many more good examples of people actually cooperating.

You know, again, there was good and there was bad. But I think for me personally, that was something kind of surprising. I was really like pleasantly surprised at how much good I was seeing all around me than like the actual hoarding of things. So when she talks about, you know, kind of this idea of teamwork and working together, those are kind of all similar to popular. Those are some of those like buzzwords that you throw around, but you don't usually kind of like sit and actually think what does that actually mean on like a little bit more of a philosophical level. And she kind of talks about how unique, in order for that like strong. Apocalypse team mindset, you need creativity in problem solving, replanning in the face of chaos. Obviously, things are changing every single day.

You know, it's like, you know, wear masks, don't wear masks. It's transmit. The virus is spreading by touch. No, it's in the air. You know, you need to have a lot of that kind of mental flexibility to deal with new information. But on the same time, have some excitement with that. rather than thinking, ugh, I got to change my plan again. It's more, ooh, it's a game. I now just thinking of it as like, there's now a new obstacle in my way that I have to figure it out. That's kind of where the whole like game theory hacking side of it comes in. And it also kind of working as a team, it's one of the cool and unique things that makes us humans. I mean, other animals do cooperate, but we, you know, we're pretty good at it. So it's kind of something that you can celebrate and

feel really proud about as, you know, that, you know, hey, I'm a human. I have this ability to kind of do this. And it's also about using and creating tools collectively, that idea of, again, yes, get the, have the canned goods, have all of that, but being sure to share, you know, again, it sounds so basic and it sounds so trite, but like those lessons that we learned in preschool are going to come in very handy, you know, as the world, you know, as the world faces challenges. She also, smartly, this is something I find that like when I'm talking to friends about, you know, the craziness in the world, since I love history so much, is I'll bring up, we've always felt like the world is ending. Like feeling like the world is ending is about as human

as that collect, you know, as as working together. So we've been here before and our genes are definitely built for it. Like we are descended from people who have survived various little, various little and big events where it felt like the world was ending. And that was, I think, something that I found very comforting in the book is to kind of like say, my jeans got this. Yes, it's not great. I don't like all of this, but my jeans got it. Like my jeans got me here. I kind of recommend this book to anybody who's kind of like me where they replay these scenarios in their head all the time because it's just kind of a good way to start and turn those thoughts into actions and just kind of in a reassuring way.

And along with those more philosophical notions that we were talking about, you know, Apocalypse Popular versus High School Popular, there's also some of really good practical advice within there about like what you can have the types of scenarios we would be facing, which again, we all pretty much know by now. And, you know, what to put in your go bag or shelter in place kit. So I highly recommend checking this out, especially because for me, I think I think about this type of stuff more in the summer with, and I hate the hot weather. I'm really, really bad. Yeah, I'm really bad in heat. So, you know, that it's really easy this time of year to kind of go into that like climate change specifically doom spiral. So this kind of book, it's like, okay, yes, is it getting hotter? Yeah, is it going to? Here's how we're going to. Here's how we're going to tackle it. I do want to end on a fun question just because, you know, again, the apocalypse is a scary word.

We're going back to Survivor. I'm not a completely religious every season of Survivor watcher, but I have dabbled. And on the show, the castaways are always allowed to bring one luxury item within reason. Obviously, you know, you're not bringing a TV or a smartphone. own. What is some not so obvious item that you would want similar to that in your Apocalypse Survival Kit? An example, Athena always would want, she carries a ukulele because it's easy. You don't need electricity. You know, it's an easy kind of way to get entertainment. So what is a not so obvious item that you would want with you in an apocalypse survival kit?

I can go first. If, uh, yeah, please. It's a little bit obvious, but I was really trying to think about this the other day. I need to write things down. I need the action of writing. I love it. I'm surrounded my notebooks right now. I would need a notebook and multiple writing instruments because there's no way I could survive getting through an apocalypse without being able to document things. Yeah, that's a good answer and probably would be my answer too.

but the first thing I thought of was like parasol, sun protection. Oh, yeah. That's what's going to get me. I burn. I do not tan. So, yeah, I, you know, I just don't. I need shade. So I need one of those little pop-up beach shades or something.

I think that would go a long way toward keeping me alive and thriving. I love it. Not it. I would say an insect net for sure. You could use it for lots of different things. You could use it to like hunt food or whatever. But then you could also collect insects, which would be really fun. But you said to get through the apocalypse, but that's a question.

Does one get through an apocalypse? Right. Is it really an apocalypse? Is it really an apocalypse? If you get through it, you just kind of somehow make it through. Yeah. Like towards your ultimatum eyes, right? Right.

hoping that some new humans are born, right? Right. Because if I'm just in it just because knowing this is going to be my fate until the end, then I would definitely have it be an net. But if it's like an apocalypse that lasts like 10, 15 years and I know I can come out the other side, well, then I might choose something different. Right, right. Very good point.

That's what's so cool about the book is it does do like all of those little questions, like you read one thing and then it just kind of like splinters off into all of these others. Exactly like that. Like are we getting through this or is. at the end? Like, what's the, you know, because, you know, the possibilities with it are kind of endless. Yeah. One of the things I love about Athena's work is how much she comes back to the, not just the importance of cooperation, but kind of like the innateness of cooperation for humans that like we really, we really evolved to collaborate in groups.

that is our strength. And, you know, she's done a lot of research on communities that, like, still do more kind of formal cooperation and sharing of resources than, you know, we do, for example, in the U.S. And whenever I talk to her about it, I'm like, it's great advice that, like, a good way to, you know, to, survive hard times is to like have a community that's really like truly community minded. Yeah. But I'm also like if everybody did this, I don't think we'd enter an apocalyptic situation. It would just be so great. Right.

If the world could be more like this, I think we'd have far fewer problems. Go figure. But I really appreciate that, you know, researchers like Athena are being like, listen, if you don't want to cooperate for altruistic reasons, I will show you the math on how it makes me more likely to survive. Yes. So, yeah, very, very cool stuff. And it also reminds me of when we had Annalie Newitz on talking about lost cities and, you know, the. civilization that has seemed to like thrive during the Bronze era collapse and like

their secret they were a relatively small group of people who found a way to cooperatively live and if it's the same study I'm thinking of it was they invested in their infrastructure which is another key that we're not great at but right true here that's a whole other it is I think like you know thinking locally and really thinking about how how you can make your corner of the world more like that, you know, cooperative, really humanistic society that you would love to be in if things got bad. Why not may it happen now? I think about that a lot. Well, great. Hopefully,

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And apparently sometimes there could be a lot of water in the butt. Is that great? Okay. Tell me more. Well, actually, I mean, often when people think of insects, the thing that they're not really thinking about is their buns. But there's lots of different. types of rectal cavities in insects for sure. And depending on whether an insect lives in freshwater

or whether they live terrestrially, depending on their diet or just their evolutionary history, they can have lots of different ways to kind of excrete what they need to excrete. So in terms of water, I mean, one thing that's kind of cool is that dragonflies, which have their babies that develop in freshwater, they can actually kind of relax their bum and let water go into their bum and then they can shoot it out really fast and it's jet propulsion. They can use it to escape a predator or evade a predator. Whoa. It's very cool. They normally have water going in and out of their bum, but they can relax the kind of rectal gills that they have because they're breathing outbrances in their bum and they can just get a lot of water in there and then just kind of squirt it out

really, really fast, which is cool. And if you look at the, we call it frass, insect poo is called frass. If you look at dragonfly nymph frass, it just looks like. like a regular, if you were to picture what an insect poo might look like, it kind of looks like how that would look very tiny. Yeah. Yeah. You could picture it right now, I'm sure. But then there are these other insects like termites that actually have shapes and to their poo.

So termites are in the order Bladodia, which are the cockroaches. And termites are just social cockroaches. And there's, you know, thousands of species of termites. So I think it's close to 3,000 species. And what termites all have in common is that they have rectal pads that are hexagonal. So there's six sides to the exit through which their frat leaves their body. So they actually, as they are defecating, their frascots kind of molded into a hexagonal prism, like a hexagonal shape that comes out of their brim.

So you can look at frass on the ground, and sometimes you see that insect frass. And if it looks the way that you are kind of picturing what insect frass looks like, it's not a termite. If it looks like these perfect little meticulously made hexagonal poops, then it is a termite. And so what's really cool is that like termites have been around a long time, so hundreds of millions of years. And you can look in the fossil record. actually see things that look like their little hexagonal prisms, like little hexagonal shapes. And so some people have said, well, maybe this is actually evidence that termites were here. There's like a little bit of hot debate because, of course, there's other things that are six-sided

in nature. So it's kind of, sometimes it's hard to know if it actually is a termite group or not. But some people in the literature have definitely discussed this at length. And if you're ever out for like a hike in the woods. Often you'll see rotting wood. Termites don't just eat rotting wood. They consume a variety of things, including grasses and soils. But there's quite a few that consume wood. And so you'll see kind of like maybe a fallen log with a bunch of wood shavings and

kind of crumbly, sawdusty looking things. And if there's a bunch of mud with misshapen poop there, it's ants or something really basic. But if there's like tiny little hexagonal pellets, then you know that it's termites that was feeding on that wood, which is very cool. I'm picturing like that, you know, child's toy, like where you're putting in the different shapes and this, like, something like that just with, you know, insect press. Just brown.

Yeah, just brown. That's basically, yeah, that's basically what the termite poop looks like. And they're able to get like a lot out of their digestive system because they actually, they consumed cellulose, which is the most abundant macromoleal on land. But they can't digest it without the health. help of these endosimbayants in their hind gut. So they have protists and bacteria that do a lot of the digestion for them in their stomach. They're kind of like ruminants.

They're kind of like a cow where they have lots of different segments to their gut in their hindgut. But then the ultimate product is like this beautiful, I think, rather beautiful, you know, very dry. So they extract a lot of moisture out of this. Very beautiful, dry hexagonal prism that comes out. That's so cool. I do pottery and we have a giant clay extruder at the studio, which is basically just a grown-up version of like a Play-O, you know, the thing where you squish it and the Plato comes out. But they have all these different, like, dyes that you can put in to make the tube that comes out be a different shape.

And it's sort of like, for a lot of them, it's like, what is the use case of this? I don't know. I guess if you want to make a bunch of triangles that are the same size. But yeah, I guess what I'm saying is that I do, I have the technology at my disposal to make a long hexagonal poop out of clay. So now I think you should do it. Yeah. I think you should make an installation of like many, many orders of magnitude larger termite poop scene. Absolutely. And you could have these tiny little hexagonal prisms. I'm inspired.

And some cold termites there. New weirdest thing, merch. Yeah, right there, boom. Selling like hotcakes. Sometimes we, I mean, like we go like around the world to collect termites, and sometimes you're not sure what's in there. You can see kind of like their feeding galleries inside the wood that they're eating. And that can be a clue that there's termites there,

obviously if you have mounds that are made. Sometimes termites will actually make mounds with like saliva and mud and dirt. Then you know those termites there. So you find a piece of wood and you aren't quite sure looking for the termite vass is a really good clue. So we actually do look for this sometimes when we're in the field, which is wild. And it's just like one example of how like you kind of are

when you eat, right? Because if you're eating wood and it comes up pretty solid, you mash it up into a pulp, and then it kind of comes out, as you would expect compressed paper that kind of come out in the Plato-like device that you're describing. But then, I mean, there's other insects that don't eat solid food at all, right? there's things like the true bugs or hemiptera, and they're basically just drinking plant sap

all day. And so then their poop is completely liquid. And we call it honeydew. Oh, so love. Yeah, so. Honeydew or cicada rain. Yeah, we've, I've talked about, about honeydew on weirdest thing before, because there are some, some honey makers, probably in many,

places, but in Philadelphia, they're specifically ones who are like, our bees ate bug pee to make this honey. And I think they were specifically, oh my gosh. Oh, they specifically got, it was honeydew from spotted lanternflies that their bees were consuming as their sugar source to make honey. It seems like it would be low nutrition. Yeah. And yeah, listen, sugar is sugar.

Yeah, I mean, Spired Lantern Fly, I mean, you'd think it would be like low nutrition, right? Because at least like nectar has like a nice concoction that's involved over hundreds of millions of years. Inspired Landon Fly is like garbage and garbage out. They're just like, they have to drink a huge volume. Right, yeah. To get the nutrition that even they need. And so whatever little they're pooping out seems like it'll be very little, those people. more bees.

Hopefully the bees I think they had access to other other things as well. But yeah, if I'm remembering correctly, listeners, you can go back to listen

to the actual episode where I tell this in a lot more detail. But I think it was that they noticed there was a unique flavor going on in their honey.

And they were like, what have they gotten into? And the answer was spotted lantern fly poop. But, you know, then people bought it. because they were like, what a unique surprise. I've often wondered if you could use like termite hexagonal poop for things, right?

Like right now we don't use it for anything. But like it's actually like a perfect little, like little start, not saying you should eat this, but like little star shaped pasta. You know what I mean? Like so unique, so beautiful. You could use it like as beads like on a necklace or as packing in a, if you're packing your present or something. I mean, it's probably relatively clean-ish because the microbes have done a lot of the workup digesting anything that's negative that's in their high gut.

Yeah, right? It's basically like particle board at that point. Or could it be like kindling in a campfire or something? Yeah. Oh, you know, I've never tried burning termite poop. I mean, my brain's just still on the apocalypse. So, you know, that's where I'm going. That's where we need to make a fire, ladies.

and I want to use the termite poop, termite poop to do that. It would be a good team in the apocalypse, right? Yeah. Because we'd be like, well, actually, you're really good at collecting the termite poop. And you're really good at making fire. Let's put those together. Yeah. Yeah.

I love that. So we probably don't know, like, there's one thing that's clear when we study insects is that we don't have enough entomologists doing the work to really study everything in the, like, the detail that we want to in the minutia. And that definitely is true for termites. lot of what people have done to study termites have been to study kind of prevention of infestation of the very small number of termites that are pests. So there's not as many people that study termite evolution, although there are some.

And there certainly isn't enough people to really look across the 2,900 species or so to see subtle differences in this hexagonal poop. Like in general, we say they all have six-sided poop, but like, is there subtle variation? Right? Because some termites are really large compared to other termites that are very small, right? They do vary slightly in the diet that they're having, because like I said, some are grass feeders, some are kind of filtering soil, and some are feeding dead wood in rotting trees, and some are feeding, you know, sopping wet, rotting wood.

Like that is an experiment waiting to happen, right, to see how that affects the subtle shape. And like, although they're very, they're very small, we can do very tiny dissections to look at aspects of their hindgut. So we probably could do very nice tiny dissections to look at the little. look at their kind of rectal pads and the resulting poop that comes out. Wow. Bugs are awesome.

They really are. I know. Thank you so much for coming on. I learned so much about termite poop. And what a delight. Can you remind listeners, you know, where they can see more of your work or, you know, hear you talk about bugs more? Yeah, I don't, I will say, I don't talk as much about termite poop as you might think.

Although my first insect job I ever had was dissecting damselfly poop when I was an undergraduate. It was my first science job was someone had brought back damselfly poop from these nymphs, damselfineumps that develop in vermilion plants. And I had to squish them on a slide and then look under the microscope and try and figure out what they had been eating. Since they eat other insects that have fluoritized body parts, you could kind of tell if they ate beetles or mosquitoes or things like that. So maybe it is my destiny that now I'm talking to you on the show about food.

But in general, I think, like, you can find me out and about. I am the host of the Insectarium show on PBS Terra, but you can often find me giving public talks here at the American Museum of Natural History. And you can find out more about information about me through the American Museum of Natural History website, and also through the Black in Natural History, museum organization and entomologists of color. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts,

including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.