The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Poisonous Wallpaper, Cruise Ship Poop, The Best Ultramarathon Runners

Episode Date: July 11, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from poisonous wallpaper that people voluntarily put in their homes to an exploration of what happens to poop on a cruise ship. 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 on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Claire Maldarelli: www.twitter.com/camaldarelli Amy Schellenbaum: www.twitter.com/acsbaum Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- 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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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the same. 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 a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other 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 Feldman. I'm Amy Schellenbaum. And I'm Claire Maldorelli. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease for some kind of fact that we've picked up in the course of reading, writing, reporting, wasting time on Reddit, you know, all the things we do in our jobs. And then we decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. When we've all had the chance to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. and now you can also vote for your favorite on Twitter and Facebook. For example, last episode we actually had a tie among the editors present,

and thanks to our online poll, I was declared the winner. So I think the polls are great. Fix. Amy, it's your first time on. Why don't you give us your teas first? Okay. So imagine you are on family vacation. You're living it up on a cruise ship.

You are probably wearing matching t-shirts, bettering your croissants, and shoveling 24-hour soft serve, you're a modern-day Caligula, you're eating six meals a day, so does everybody else around you? And do you know what this means? It means you and thousands of other people on this boat

produce a lot of poop. You look around, and you realize the sheer amount of feces on this boat. And it's dizzying. And you have one big question. Where does, The poop. Go. Wow.

That's my teaser. Well, you've just raised the teaser to an art form. Claire, how about you? What have you got for us this week? Women are better than men in one crazy sport. Ooh. So my fact is about people spending like a century using something that they knew was toxic. and putting it literally everywhere.

Cool. Scared. I'm scared. Amy, your poop teaser was just so magnificent as a teaser that I think you have to go first. Yeah, you really killed it. Okay, cool. So even if you do not understand the appeal of a cruise and, like, being on a boat with thousands of other people and this boat weighs thousands of tons and you're on it for several days. and you're on it for several days.

Even if you don't understand that, you have to be kind of amazed or maybe disgusted by the logistics of the cruise experience. I mean, if you look at the world's largest cruise ship, it holds 9,000 people, which is more than the capital of Vermont. That's crazy. So our entire city is set to sea. I've always kind of been fascinated by how giant cruise liners work. I mean, how do they feed so many people, so much food?

It's just really an uncertain amount of food. And this is just one of my many questions. questions. So I reported out a story last year, so this is not the weirdest thing I learned this week. It's just a weird thing I learned at one time in my life somewhat recently. But I have thought about it this week, yes. If you know almost nothing about a cruise ship, you know that there is a lot of food and a lot of my research had to do with that, storing it, transporting it, disposing of it, it going through your body and what happens to it after that. I spoke to somebody at Carnival and they said that in an average voyage, which is six to nine days,

they go through 23,000 pounds of flour. Think of how many cookies you can make from, like, one pound of flour? That's 23,000 pounds of flour. And they also go through 231,000 pounds of pineapple, and that's pretty much, that's almost primarily for cocktails. Wait, so, and they have to bring all of that with them. Yes. So you can't just have, like, a shipment come in from Amazon.

Totally, exactly. And use pineapples. And you can't even really get it. You have to do a lot of planning at ports, too. So most of the time they're storing food in, like, ballroom-sized fridges and freezers below the passenger decks. I mean, cold food storage alone spans thousands of square feet. So that's wild to me.

And they, like, use, like, trolleys and have this, a lot of secret sort of hidden escalators and elevators and things like that to get the food. where it needs to go. So that's kind of where they keep the food. And so all the food waste that hasn't, let's say, been processed by a human body, is usually either landed, as they say, shoreside, or they kind of pulpit on board, and it basically goes through a macerator until its liquid sludge, and then they dry it up. And, you know, this is a quote from a cruise line engineer, when we're a certain distance from the coast, we tip it over the side and feed the fish. So this isn't like putting banana peels

And like the tops of 231,000 pounds of pineapple In the ocean Basically they they by the time the organic mass is like Would be going to see And a lot of times they land at shoreside as I said By the time that organic mass is going to see It's similar according to one of my sources To like coffee grounds and consistency

Yeah but with all that eating comes a lot of pooping Which is kind of was to me always the most fascinating question whenever I was on cruise ships because everyone poops. Everyone poops and there are so many people and like you have a finite amount of space on a ship. So this is a city so there is a sewage farm on board and basically upon flushing vacuum section lines like those on an airplane like lavatory, suck the contents out of the toilet and then whip them into something known as a marine sanitation device which is in

or near the ender room. These are big machines that basically siphon out all the water and then treat that liquid until, quote, you can drink it if you want. And then they send that water out to sea. So we don't drink it. You don't drink it. I don't know if that's a PR thing or wet, but. Would it be better to drink it?

Like if it is safe to drink, wouldn't it be a more? Or use it in the toilets again? Yeah. Like, why are we sending it to sea? Yeah. No astronauts drink their recycled pee. Yeah. And in fact, it's all.

Same. No, just kidding, I don't. Self-sustainable person. I'm pretty sure the pee recycler is in the Russian part of ISS. Oh, yeah, we don't, right? Right, but U.S. astronauts have been known to drink the recycled Russian pee. Because, like, why not? Anyways, back to poop.

Okay, so then they send that water out to sea. So then you got, this might be a little bit too graphic for this podcast, but I'm sorry. Tis the nature of the beast. And so then you got this sort of like dense, sludgy material that they do not send out to sea. And it is stored in a tank that's got aerobic bacteria in it. And that bacteria go to town on the poop until the ship hits the port and it is offloaded. And this certainly varies. But the engineer I got to talk to said that they usually offload it about once a month.

Oh, meaning that they have enough storage space in case someone needs to poop like 10 times a day. Yeah, and if they're like you're really drying it out, I do wonder how much mass that actually is, but also doesn't your body kind of dry it out before, isn't poop already kind of dried out food? Only if you don't drink enough and your bowels aren't healthy. Yeah, that's true. Sorry.

Yeah. So that's my fact. Okay, what happens if there is like a neurovirus, and people are just like pooping everywhere and the tank fills up. Do you have to like go back? I don't think that. Poop emergency? The poop overflow.

No one else poop. Well, we're full. I think in the very rare case where that happens where there's like some sort of pooping disaster, it's not because the tanks are full. It's because this happened in a recent year, but it was because the power went out and basically, When the power went out, all these machines that keep this city functioning no longer work, and it requires a lot of power to, you know, suck the poop out of toilets and also to process it in such a way as to be sufficiently and efficiently stored.

So what happened? What did they tell people? I mean, you got to go and you got to go. Especially when you have a virus. I don't know, I think it was just a disaster. Yeah, I have heard that described as the cruise. from hell. So I think it just went badly, is how it went. But you say you still would go on a cruise again, knowing all of this about poop and cruises and what? Yeah, I mean, what's down below.

Yeah. Truthfully, I would, but also like, I don't know. I do think that they're kind of fun. I haven't been on one a long time. So, you know, full disclosure, my dad actually sells cruises. So part of my, part of my, like, interest. Your obsession is from childhood. Not even an obsession, but my interest in how cruise ships work are because I have been on a lot of cruises and I have been wondering like what goes on behind the scenes and the more you go on them

the more you're like, how does this even work? We're in the ocean or on a river and it shouldn't be possible for the issue they wanted to do something that was like a dollhouse sort of style treatment and it was for the big machines issue and I suggested a cruise ship Just so I could get some answers.

It's some justification to ask some questions. And, you know, unsurprisingly, a lot of cruise lines were slightly reluctant to talk about things. Like poop. Like poop. And garbage and also exhaust. But I actually was, in my reporting, my general kind of conclusion was that the way that they process things was not as environmentally bad as I, kind of thought it was. Having no information, I had assumed that they were

just like... Like, just terrible. Yeah, just horrible. Right? And it's not like they're great, but that human population is going to be pooping and producing garbage somewhere else, right? Right. And I was kind of pleasantly surprised

when I was learning about like all the developments are doing with like exhaust scrubbers and sort of trying to clean up their act, especially because there are so many so many cruises now happening at once. And bigger and bigger ships. And huge ships, really

truthfully frighteningly big ships with like 85 water slides. Not really that's hyperbole but with several water slides. That means even more poop. Yeah. But also larger engine rooms.

To put the poop in. Yeah, exactly. Oh man. Imagine if they made a poop powered ship. Wow. Wow. Steal my idea. We'll take a quick break and then we'll be right back.

Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for the weirdest thing on Facebook. So, Claire, you were going to tell us about a, um, weird sport fact? Yes, I am. All right, so like I said in the teaser, it's this sport that women, apparently, or it's kind of controversial, but we think that women are tending to beat men in this.

And so I'm going to kind of drag it out for you. So people have always assumed kind of in the history of all endurance sports, so things like cycling or marathon running and things like that, that men will always beat women. So that's been mostly what we've seen in most major marathons, even today, the top man finisher will always be about 15 minutes faster than the top female finisher. But back in like the 1990s, 1992 and 93, there is like a team of researchers who were looking at sort of the trend in women's running and cycling and things like that and thought, you know, over the course of the time that women have been competing, they've been increasing so significantly. Their times have been going down. They've just been getting.

getting so much faster that are they going to quickly or eventually at least outpace men, which we thought wasn't physiologically capable. We're not physiologically capable of doing that. So here's like a little historical background, which I found really interesting, which I don't think that we talk about that much. The first woman to actually compete in the prestigious and famous Boston Marathon was a woman named Catherine Switzer, and that was in 1967. She actually signed up for the race as K. Switzer, and so people didn't know if she

she was a man or they just assumed that she was a man. And so when they saw a woman out there, actually the race officials and a bunch of spectators tried to like push her out of the race physically, physically push her out. And her boyfriend actually had to like punch some people to keep her in the race. And she finished, but it wasn't until 1972 then that women were actually legally or officially allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon. And at that same year on my birthday, June 23rd, that they enacted into law, the educational amendment Title IX, which basically says that no person in the United States

shall on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in any educational program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. And so that's both high school and NCAA college sports. And it actually really was the turning point for women in sports. So in 1972, there were only 30,000 women in the entire country that participated in NCAA sports. And that's supposed to 170,000 men. and then in high school sports, there were just 295,000 girls in the entire country participating in sports. And then today, because of Title IX, there are 2.6 million girls playing high school sports and 150,000 in college. So it was this big, big change for women. So along with that, there are also these increasing numbers of women participating in non-high school sports and, like, adult amateur sports.

And so we had all these marathons popping up and cycling races and things like that. And so that's kind of where the researchers were looking at. They're saying, oh, my gosh, women are doing so well, so fast. They've only been competing for 40 years. What can they do? But it turns out that that's sort of largely been disproven for most sports, like the marathon and like 5Ks and cycling sports. Women tend to go about 10% slower than men in all sports.

It's based on a number of different factors, things like you're very, VO2 max, which is the maximum amount of oxygen you can use at one time and sort of like your muscle structure and like bone density and things like that that sort of push men over the edge than women. But this is in all cases except for one sport, which is ultra running. An ultra marathon is anything over like a normal marathon. Normal marathon is 26.2 miles. So an ultra- Marathon can be, you know, 27 miles, but the majority of the races are around 50K, which is 31 miles, up to, like, the premier races, which are 100 miles. And you're running all at one time, so it's not like you sleep during it. So usually these take about, like, 31 hours to do.

So researchers are super curious. They're like, what is this about ultra-marathon running that is, you know, different, like physiologically about, you know, running these long distances that women tend to, um, beat them. And so the big overarching answer is that we still don't completely know. And a big reason for that is because of almost all of the studies done on endurance sports are all done on men. I mean, there are so few women athletic studies out there. And so we don't know how women's mental cycles play in, how our hormonal fluctuations, and things like that that are just so different in men than women. We just don't know. But there's been a number of increasing studies.

And so what they found, which I thought was really interesting, is that women tend to have better form than men. And so when you're running a 5K, like Amy has done, your form doesn't really matter as much. Like the time doesn't add up because you're just kind of doing an all-out sprint for 3.1 miles. And so if you do have like a bad form, it doesn't add up. But if you're doing 100 miles, that form is going to come. like come more into play.

And so we found through these studies where they basically look at how you're running on a treadmill or how you're just like running outside and take pictures and videos and stuff that women just tend to have better form over the long term than men. For 100 miles, are people a lot more prone to injury? Obviously, they must be right. Or is it just that people, amateurs don't try to run 100 miles so they're less injuries? Yeah, so amateurs tend not to run a hundred miles. At once, usually, like, you've competed in like 5Ks, 10Ks, half full marathons before you do, but not all.

But usually it's someone who's like very much into running. Injuries are in any level of running. So I don't know if it's, I don't know if it's more prone in ultra marathon running, but I would say that there's injuries throughout any level. So it's likely that the better form contributes to a faster time rather than, say, getting injured and then slowing down because of an injury. Yeah, so I would think that this is assuming that you don't get injured during the race, and so you're finishing it.

You're finishing those 100 miles. So the next one which I thought was really cool was fatigability, which is basically your exercise-induced reduction in performance. So if you ran a half marathon, which is 13.1 miles, if you have this, you know, if you haven't trained enough and you have this fatigue ability, it'll happen around like mile 11 or 12 because you've just run for too long. And you have that factor playing in. So researchers have done studies where they had a group of women, a group of men kind of hold something in their arms,

and how long that women can do it versus men of, you know, maybe not the same weight, but of similar to their weight themselves. And they found that women were able to hold on to it three times longer than men have. And they don't really know why women have a stronger or not as intense fatigue ability than men. but it's something that they're like really researching into. Three times longer is significant. Yeah, that is very much longer. And then another factor is blood flow.

So men's muscles tend to be larger on average than women's muscles. And so when your heart pumps all of this through, your heart has to work harder to get to all these muscles than women. And so women are just, you know, in that way more efficient. And so, again, when you're doing these ultra, races, it comes more into play when you're doing longer distances. And so the last one, which I also thought was really cool, is your mental game. So just looking at sort of men's splits, which are like every mile, like what your time is. So say you did a 5K, your first mile is eight minutes. Your

second mile is 815, 830. So men are getting slower. And then comparatively, women, when they do these ultra races, there are times are going down. So they're doing something called negative splits, whereas men are doing these positive splits. And so when you do positive splits, meaning you get slower over time, you have an increased chance of having muscle fatigueability and something called bonking, which you just sort of run out of energy.

And so they think several of these things are sort of like coming into play, but a lot of it, like women's bone structure or sort of the amount of body fat women have compared to men and also their hormones versus men's hormones. All of this, we sort of really don't know. And researchers think that all of this stuff can really come into play. And it would be incredibly interesting.

We just have to do a lot more studies on women and athletes. So one question I have, I know you're really passionate about running. Full disclosure. I like running. But I'm curious, like, what your take is on whether ultramarathons are, like, good for your body. because whenever I read accounts of them from people who have run them, including people who are like, I am going to keep doing this as long as I can for the rest of my life.

I love it so much. The way they describe the physical process, it reminds me of like when salmon swim upstream and like cannibalize their bodies in order to get to where they need to spawn. Like it sounds so viscerally terrible the way it is breaking your body down for energy as you run. So on that note. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. interesting. I think that's something that people tend to forget is when you are doing these

100 mile races, you are not doing like six minute miles, seven minute miles. They're much slower and it's like, you know, slow and steady wins the race. And a really cool book that sort of described this ability that all humans have is called Born to Run. And it was about the Talamahara, a Mexican tribe who live sort of in the mountains in northern Mexico. And essentially what they do to hunt down their prey is simply outrun them. So if there's a deer or another animal that they're trying to kill, they'll just follow them until for hours and hours on end until that animal just breaks down from fatigue and passes out. And at that point, they kill them and eat them. And so, but the whole point of the book was to say that we all have this ability in us to

run and to run long and slow. And so perhaps ultra-marathon running is more natural than a really fast 5K or running under a four-minute mile. Isn't that book responsible for like the barefoot running craze and like the weird like glove shoes? All that is also true. I'm skeptical of that book for that reason. Yeah, it's actually really controversial what how like what we should be putting on our

feet. I mean, the Talamahara, like what the author said, they just wear this sort of like leather padding to sort of just protect their feet from the elements on the ground. And so that kind gave way to all of this sort of barefoot running. But now we have these, you know, sort of like energy feedback, spring loaded sneakers that are supposed to get you to under a men, at least under a two-hour marathon. And so it's, I think that we just don't know enough about, um, the effect of what's on our feet for running. I guess if you've never had supportive footwear, but like if you've grown up with supportive footwear and you are like already an adult and your, you know, your body machine is used to having arch support. Yeah, it's true. Those bones are all messed up. Exactly. So will we ever,

like we should just start, you know, young at barefoot running. Just never wear shoes. Just never wear shoes. Okay, we're going to take another short break, and then we'll be right back. It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet. On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories affect your daily life. New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud,

and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then. And now we're back to the weirdest thing I learned this week, and it is time for my weirdest thing. thing. As I said in my tease, this is a story of people using a really toxic thing, knowing it was really toxic, and it's unclear why they use it so much. Sheer hubris, I think, and I think there are lessons for us to learn from this today. Let's talk about the color of green. My favorite color. Is it really? Well, it's actually, it's tied with purple. I like them both so much. No, no,

but really, I think green is really nice color. It's color of the woods, color of grass, nature, things that are alive. It's great that you mentioned that, Amy, because it's true that we associate with being so natural and vibrant. But ironically, it is a very difficult dye to make without using a lot of very unnatural processes. I mean, we're not going to have a debate about what natural versus unnatural is here. But there's no, like, one thing in nature you can take the juice of and use to dye something else green.

So for a long time, people who wanted to make green had to blend blue and yellow, which people like hated because they thought that meant they weren't supposed to dye stuff green. Yeah, I had a lot of pants as a kid that were dyed green on the knees. But it was still, I mean, like when you get a grass stain, it's like a yellowy brown. It's not a nice green. It certainly does not capture the green of the grass, which was a thing that was very frustrating to people. Let me back up a little bit. I came to this story because we had an article on Popside.com about researchers finding three poison books in their library.

And it was because there was this arsenic paint in them. And what I thought was really interesting is that it wasn't on there for aesthetic purposes. It was probably applied to the inside of the cover to dissuade vermin from destroying the books. But it is like creating enough. It's basically off-gassing to the extent that they had to put these books in like a special area that was like, you know, beware of arsenic steak. Oh, my gosh. And the interesting thing there is that it just as easily could have been books that were dyed with arsenic for aesthetic purposes. Because there was a time when we used arsenic both to kill vermin and to dye stuff.

And nobody seemed to see the problem with that. It all starts with this guy named Carl Wilhelm Schill. He was a Swedish chemist. That's a name. Carl. And he actually is named. now credited with discovering oxygen, even though if somebody else got credit for it for a while. And he also described this color called Shields Green in 1775 made from copper arsenite.

And it was the first really vibrant, natural-looking green. And people were psyched. When Sheal put out Shields-Green, again, he knew it was poisonous, but he was like, everyone knows arsenic is poisonous. And he was not wrong. Like, people knew that arsenic was bad. They kept it in their house for killing vermin. But people did not necessarily understand that Shields Green had arsenic in it.

Further, they did not necessarily understand that it was levels of arsenic that were unsafe to consume. Well, okay, question. Yeah. Did they put it on the label? Like, really, like, this contains. Oh, nobody labeled anything. Well, there's the problem. Right, like, so the recipe was out there.

Like, chemists talked about it. But it wasn't like there was a list of ingredients on the back of every dye. And you would also get situations where people would order green dye and be sent Shields green because that was the best green dye. And they didn't necessarily have any connection to like the pigment world. They had no information about what was in this stuff. So let me get into wallpaper. There's this big wallpaper craze in the UK. There were a million rolls sold in 1830 and 30 million sold by 1870.

this annually. So 30 times the number of wallpaper rolls in four years. That is not that long to go. And at least four-fifths of them contain arsenic, according to research of the time. One researcher actually took samples from wallpaper and was unable to find one that didn't have arsenic. Because even though Shields Green is the most famous example, there were other colors that had arsenic in them too. It was very good for making vibrant color, and people were super into those colors. It's just that green was the one where there really was like no rival.

You couldn't replace it with something else and be like, well, this is just as good. William Morris, who was a designer, among other things, and very big in the like pre-Raphaelite, indoor arts and crafts movement, he was very much like, cover your house and vines. And also was very liberal and really pushed workers' rights in his family factories. he was also like air to an arsenic mine. Oh. So he designed tons of green wallpaper designs, which was not a coincidence, I don't think. I think he was like, I can double dip here. Right.

Efficiency. Right. And so doctors were starting to write about how it was probably not a good idea to put arsenic dye in wallpaper. But William Morris was super dismissive of this, which again was like pretty out of character for him. because he really championed safe conditions for workers. But when he had a lot to lose financially, he apparently did not care so much. And maybe was really convinced that it wasn't a problem.

Apparently his house had the wallpaper in it and no one ever got sick. So he was sure there must be something else that people hadn't thought of. Yeah, but I mean, if this wallpaper was produced over decades, wouldn't the people in the factories start getting incredibly ill and wouldn't... Yeah. A lot of people worked in factories.

Yeah. No, a lot of people were getting sick from painting wallpaper and other, you know, creating wallpaper and other goods that had green dye in them.

And he did eventually cave to pressure and stopped using Shills Green, but through the entirety of his life, there are examples of him complaining about how this was totally ridiculous. In 1815,

this chemist named Leopold Gamelan had noticed... These are great names. Yeah. Gamelan, I was like... Leopold. Oh, yeah.

So he noticed that rooms papered in Shills Green gave off a mouse-like odor when the paper was damp. So he was like... What is a mouse-like odor? You know, that's a great question. That's a great question. I get the impression they just mean it was like musky and unpleasant. Like where mice would be.

Right, right. Maybe something vaguely dead, unclear. But he suspected the real. reason people are getting sick is because the arsenic in the wallpaper is being released into the air. And up until then, there was this not totally unreasonable thought process that, like, if you weren't literally eating the arsenic, maybe it was okay. Smart boy, that leopold. Like, if you're not smoking. You're just around smoke. He also noted that often people would layer new wallpaper on top of old wallpaper, and that this situation

seemed to exacerbate the problem because the old wallpaper was like moldering under and was more likely to get damp and as it was like kind of rotting. In 1864, the Lancet, the medical journal actually warned of the dangers of arsenic wallpaper. Around that time, someone estimated that an average living room could hold around 30,000 milligrams of arsenic enough to theoretically kill over 100 people if it started creating fumes. And this became to me known as Gossio's disease after Bartolomio Gossio, another great name. And it killed children as late as there were cases in 1932, which is around when scientists

finally discovered that the culprit was trimethylarsine because there were enzymes in various fungi and bacteria that were replacing the oxygen atoms in the arsenic with methyl groups. So it was this it was this decomp reaction happening when it was damp and there were microbes that could thrive in there. And so it was around this time, you know, kind of late 1800s, early 1900s, that people were like, we really have to stop putting arsenic in everything. William Morris was like, enough. Fine. It's just really interesting to me because, again, there was no point in Schills Green's history that we didn't know that arsenic was talking. It was just that it was a good product in terms of providing what people wanted from it.

And the scientists who created it really did think that the risks were negligible in typical use case, meaning not literally eating it. So they were not aware of the fact that it could create these gas. that could kill you. And they thought that it was enough to assume that people knew there was arsenic in the thing and that they shouldn't eat it, not realizing that people were going to end up inadvertently ingesting it. And especially that, you know, the marginalized people who were working in factories, who had no choice about being exposed to, you know, dust and perhaps licking paint brushes, et cetera, every day, that those people were going to be, you know, really heavily exposed to arsenic. So why do you think we waited so long then? Like what was the deal?

Like why? There was money to be made. And I also think that there was a lot of like it was easy to pretend that it could be something else. Because there were doctors who figured this out very early on and who were very vocal about it. You know, there were doctors calling for arsenic-based pigments to be banned. But like people wanted to buy green wallpaper and other people wanted to sell it to them. And there was kind of enough reasonable doubt that it just went on for a really long time. I just keep thinking about how once I, my parents paid me $40 when I was a teenager to take off like 10 layers of wallpaper. And like, I definitely understand why you'd want to just put more wallpaper on top of the wallpaper. And then like that just kills you.

That stinks. An interesting connection to me is that women were also ingesting and putting arsenic on their face around the same time. And also dresses, right? I think there was that Jezebel story at some point. Maybe not. No, I think there have been a few articles on the subject. But this dye was also used in clothing.

And it wouldn't outright kill you, but you could definitely get, like, skin rashes from it. And so the question is, you know, why did people keep wearing Shield's green clothes? And it was because it was the fashion. It was the fashion. And it wasn't like people didn't realize they were getting skin rashes. Yeah.

And there's a lot of stuff in our cosmetics that could also not be good for us. Yeah. Modern cosmetics are like basically totally unregulated. But it does kind of, I do kind of love that we sit there. it's easy for us to sit here going like how could people keep using arsenic wallpaper but like sears enrobic was literally selling a product called dr rose's arsenic complexion wafers which were wafers you ate people were aware that arsenic was toxic and women were eating it um to make their skin paler uh i learned that i think there's a lot of thinking that you can use stuff that's bad for you to improve your life or even your body in some capacity. Right. And I think that thought is still very common.

Oh, yeah. And yeah, Sears and Robux's arsenic wafers were advertised as perfectly harmless. And I guess the lie being spun there was that they were like such a low amount of arsenic. That it wasn't the same as the arsenic that you were using to literally kill rats in your home. There's a lot to think about there in terms of consumer safety and the things we buy because a lot of people don't realize that cosmetics are not regulated by the FDA and certainly it's not like the whole industry is full of like bad faith actors like it's not like every product that's out there is horrible for you by any means but there are certainly I'm sure I am 100% sure that there are things that we don't think twice about using today that one

day will be like, but you knew it was poisonous. Back in the 2010. These women were just slapping all kinds of crap on their faces. And it was completely unregulated. Well, what do we think the weirdest thing we learned this week was? I think the ultramarathon fact was pretty wild. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, so is the arsenic.

I know. I'm going with arsenic. It's really like, I mean, I can't. It's really mind-blowing. I like my own fact, too. But, yeah, the arsenic one just has so many implications for even cosmetics and drugs now and just consumer awareness that I think is so important. I try to bring timely weird facts. It's true. If they're not about, like, dead people or sex magic, I want it to cover an issue of the day. But also running is fun. We should all do it.

Well, I don't actually think running is fun, but I agree with the sentiment that everyone should try. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsight.com. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden.

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