The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Poodle Science, The Great Pigeon Race Disaster, Artificial Hips

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the science of the poodle haircuts to the most dangerous pigeon race in history. 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!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Rob Verger: www.twitter.com/RobVerger 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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that's where I will always. I was going to get to my hip will go on. But I lost the word. At Popular Science, we 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 share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned

this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Rob Verne. 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 came across while reporting an article, checking angry emails, talking to our interesting co-workers, et cetera. And then we decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. 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. So, Rob, welcome. Thank you so much. Since it's your first time, why don't you start with your teeth? I would like to talk about a 20th century surgeon who did an experiment in his own thigh.

Oh, interesting. We love a self-term. experimenting surgeons here on weirdest thing for sure. Eleanor, what's your tease? I would like to talk about why poodles have such weird haircuts. Oh, all right. And there's science. Oh, good. Mine is about the great pigeon race disaster of 1997. Naturally. And that's the whole tease. I'm really interested in the thigh surgery. So, Rob, if you would kick us off, that would be swell. Awesome. I would love to. So as anybody knows who's been around me in the office for the past eight months or so, I had my hip replaced. What? I know. It's shocking. Rob, you're doing great. I never, ever talk about it around the office, but I did. I had a hip replacement, and it's a long story. I won't bore you with the details, but

it sent me down this journalistic path to kind of investigate the tech that goes into hip replacements today and the kind of crazy history thereof of how kind of surgeons figured out to do hip replacements. And so we're kind of a long article about it for popular science. While reporting it, I discovered this surgeon named John Charnley, who is a British surgeon, and he lived in the 20th century, and he was very focused on trying to make the best possible hip replacement, which is something that surgeons actually had to figure out. There wasn't a book. It wasn't like on the sixth day God created hip replacement surgery. And here's how you do it. They had to figure it out.

A quick history lesson on the topic is in like the 40s and 50s in the United States. The way surgeons did it is they took. took a piece of metal, which was like a metal spike with a ball on top of it and pounded it into the top of the femur where the real bony ball used to be. That is really impressively medieval. That is so upsetting. Yeah. It couldn't be more terrifying if it tried. Totally upsetting.

And for a couple reasons, this didn't really work that well. And you can probably imagine why. One is that the metal implant could kind of get loose in the femur because it wasn't cemented in place. And the other is that that metal ball just went straight into the natural bony sock. And you can just imagine how painful that would have been. Rising grind, am I right? Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

So this guy, John Charley, British surgeon, he was a kind of a tinkerer who wanted to figure out how to fix people's joints. So he took what other surgeons had already done, which was this kind of metal prosthesis in the joint. But he introduced a Teflon liner so that it's not just metal against bone. It was metal against Teflon, which sounds like it should work really well. and it didn't, unfortunately. Teflon was nice because the metal could rub against it without a lot of friction. So if you think about it, it's like a Teflon artificial socket that they actually made themselves with like a lave. He put it in about 300 patients and it wore down really rapidly as the metal was rubbing against it.

Yeah. I mean, I've had a lot of frying pans in my day, so I know how that works. Exactly. So it wore down and it created these little particles that caused lots of problems. and the Teflon socket got loose. So all of those surgeries, those initial surgeries in the 60s, totally failed. And that was bad. Yeah.

This brings me to his experiment. So Charlie realized that the Teflon had failed and decided to use a new material called polyethylene or high molecular weight polyethylene, which is these really long strands of molecules that all kind of wrap around each other. And it's a much better material for putting in a hip than Teflon is. It's unclear when he did it, but he actually did this self-experiment to make sure that the polyethylene. Ethylene would be better in patients than the Teflon was. Because my understanding is that when the Teflon joints failed in all those patients, about 300 of them, Charlie just took the artificial joints out. And it's not clear what he put back in their place.

Like, these people may have just been people with no hips. Oh, boy. What happens if you are a person with no hip? I think that leg does not work. You know, we take so much medical progress for granted, but it came at the expense of failures. So he did this experiment where he, put a little bit of teflon in his thigh under his skin and also put a little bit of polyethylene

in his thigh under his skin. He did this kind of just to make sure, hey, let's hope the new material is better than the old one, which totally failed. And he even wrote a letter into the Lancet, which is this prestigious medical journal that's been around for a long time describing his self-experiment as a kind of warning to other surgeons saying, hey, don't put teflon in people's bodies. Instead, put polyethylene, because people were starting to think about using Teflon and in fake knees as well. In The Lancet, he said, I have had introduced subcutaneously into my thigh by means of a wide-borne needle and trocar, two specimens of PTFE, which is Teflon, and one specimen of high-density polyethylene prepared in finely divided form. And he let about nine months go by.

It's like about the gestation period of a baby. And he saw that the Teflon had kind of caused problems in his thigh and the polyethylene hadn't. So that gave him some confidence that the polyethylene would be a better thing to put in people's bodies than Teflon. What kind of problems? They were kind of palpable as nodules. So these little bits of Teflon were kind of getting inflamed. They were like nodules and the poly or polyethylene wasn't causing that problem.

So yeah, he did this experiment and it taught him about what materials are good to put in artificial hips and which aren't. And after these Teflon disasters, he started using polyethylene and the same. experiment in his own body kind of helped give him the confidence to do that. And then future patients got hips with polyethylene in them and a version of that same kind of plastic is now in my body today. Wow. All because some man put it in his thigh. Exactly. So thank you John Charlie for experimenting on yourself and 300 patients. Who weren't you? Who were not me to figure out how to make a good modern hip replacement. And there's this other great line in his biography that I want to read,

which is just this nice little tidbit that caught my eye. His biographer is talking about this experiment, and he also wrote, certainly his self-experiment showed an element of courage, and indeed rashness, which can but be admired, although it was not quite so dramatic as the bone graft, which he had taken from his leg in 1946. So I don't know anything about that experiment or bone graft, but it's a whole other story.

Wow. Okay, well, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to jump in with my fact, which, as I said, is about the Great Pigeon Race Disaster of 1997. Maybe we never forget. Yeah, truly, truly never forget. The thing I love about this is that when you hear the Great Pigeon Race disaster, I mean, it sounds like some shenanigans the Victorians would get up to. But 1997 is pretty recent in the scheme of things we talk about on the weirdest thing I learned this week.

And indeed, pigeon racing is still a thing. homing pigeons, so named for their ability to find their way home to roost from very far away, are still trained to race in competitions. And there's a lot of prize money on the table. It is a lucrative and cutthroat sport. First, I want to talk a little bit about how this works, right? Homing pigeons, they have this ability to find their way home from all sorts of distant places. And it's probably some like combination of ways that they do it. A lot of researchers think that the homing ability is based on what we would call a map and compass model.

So the compass feature allows birds to orient themselves in space, and the map feature allows them to determine where they are relative to a goal site. So not only can they navigate, but they know where home is all the time. And the fact that that's such a complex way of getting around the world means that it's probably some combination of factors that make it work. It might be different from breed to breed, from pigeon to pigeon even, but we don't really know exactly how homing pigeons find their way around, but we do know that they are very good at it. And you can train a pigeon to come back to a particular place. And so pigeon racing is where you take trained birds to one or several locations and then you time their return back to their roost. It's not without controversy because some animal rights advocates rightfully argue that we're putting birds in danger unnecessary. And one of the reasons they think this is the 1997 pigeon race disaster.

So I have to thank Dr. George B. Johnson from Washington University, who wrote up a really detailed analysis of this incident that I will link to on popside.com. The day is Sunday, June 29, 1997. And we are celebrating the centenary of the Royal Pigeon Racing Association. More than 60,000 homing pigeons are released at 6,000. 30 in the morning from a field in southern France. And they're flying home to England 400 to 500 miles away, depending on where their roosts are. And it started out pretty typically for a pigeon race. At 11, they had pretty much all made it to the English Channel and were starting to cross.

They should have gotten to their roost by, you know, the afternoon. But they didn't. Dun, dun, done, duh. What happened? Around 20,000 birds started showing up a few days later, like later than expected. And 40,000 were just totally lost. They never showed up. And these were champion racing pigeons.

They had always found their way home no matter what. And they were gone without a trace. It wasn't like the newbies all disappeared. No, these were 40,000 of the best racing pigeons in England. And they were gone. Sounds like a case for the FBI. of England. Bert Maclin.

No, they seem to vanish into thin air, and this isn't just upsetting for, like, sentimental reasons either. Recently, a Belgian racing pigeon named Bolt, after Usain Bolt, was sold to a Chinese businessman for a world record price of $310,000 or $400,000. This was in 2013. That's a lot of... That's a pricey pigeon. Yeah, it is a pricey pigeon. So champion pigeons can be very expensive.

So obviously, I'm sure many of these bird owners. were upset to lose their birds, but they were also losing investments. But not just the owners were concerned and not just PETA was concerned, they had seemed to vanish into thin air. So scientists were interested, too. So of course, they didn't actually vanish into thin air. You can't just lose 40,000 birds. And also pigeons show up pretty much everywhere.

So it's very likely that they were all over the place. And no one was like, there it is, one of the lost champion pigeons that I saw on the front page of the newspaper. Disgusting. Arrman. Exactly. But in studying this event, some scientists noticed one interesting fact that is maybe a big clue. So at the very same time that the racing pigeons were crossing the channel, the Concord airliner was flying on its flight from Paris to New York and crossing the channel as well. A supersonic flight? Yeah. Ooh, okay. And what comes with supersonic flights? A boom. Exactly. Some scientists think that one factor in pigeon navigation is, the ability to hear infrasound. This is controversial. Not everybody is on board with this. But the idea is that they can hear infrasound, which are sounds too low for the human ear to hear.

We do perceive them unconsciously. There's actually a trend of putting them into horror movie soundtracks because they make us kind of unsettled. It's like an evolutionary thing because imagine how big something would have to be to make sounds that low naturally. Is it kind of like a low rumbling ominous sound? Yeah, except one that you can even hear. So like the lowest rumble, but lower. Very scary. So, yeah, humans perceive infrasound.

It freaks us out, but we don't hear it. And some scientists think that, again, one factor in pigeon navigation is maybe they can perceive infrasound. So they use, like, naturally occurring infrasounds from nature to create their constantly evolving map. Here's the theory that the sonic boom covered the channel, you know, swept over the whole area. and all the pigeons inside of that area became instantly disoriented. This is not without its critics. You know, there are people who think that pigeons don't even navigate this way, so it's totally moot. There are people who think it's just a weird coincidence that the Concord was flying through at that time.

But it was the most compelling theory that I found. So if this theory is true, the 20,000 birds that showed up were the slowest. So they hadn't gone over the channel yet when the plane passed. So the reason they showed up so late is that they were just carrying on. on their like slow bumbly way. And so the rest of them. The tortoise and the hair was right all along. Absolutely.

And so the rest of them, the fastest 40,000 of the bunch were gone. So the idea is that they just got scattered off into all directions because they were so disoriented and that by the time they recovered, they could not find their way back home. But there's a happy ending. Good. Because one bird made it back after five years. Oh my God. Whoa.

This 66-year-old man is home in England, and he goes out into his yard. He says, is that Champion White Tail? And it was. It was Champion White Tail, the world-class pigeon racing pigeon. Oh, my God. And it later came to light once this was, like, reported in the news. Somebody in France was like, oh, yeah, I saw that pigeon and, like, took care of it for a while and then brought it to a place to release it. But that had been like a couple years before.

So apparently champion had then just like taken a jaunt around the countryside before going home. But yeah, he was like in good shape and he still had his tag from the race, which is, you know, how they could be super sure that it was the true champion. Champion, aptly named, holds the record for the slowest pigeon race ever. Oh, wow. Which is how I actually found this fact. I was doing a scavenger hunt at the Museum of Natural History. there was a tiny plaque about the record for the slowest pigeon race over 400 miles in five years. Did the humans on the Concord get where they're going safely?

As far as I know, yes. Okay. Just check me. So yes, pigeon races are still a thing, though apparently there's declining membership. But in some countries, it's still very popular. You can make a lot of money, like prizes of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I even found out that there are allegedly instances of pigeon doping. Oh.

Yeah. Wow, like Lance Armstrong pigeons. Yeah. So there was an incident where one of the pigeon racing organizations like collected blood samples to study. And a lot of them had stuff like Tylenol, which is like, you know, maybe not a nefarious thing to give your pigeon, but something that the average person would not feed to the average pigeon. So one wonders why. A couple news outlets reported that there were pigeons with cocaine in their system, but that apparently was not true.

It was caffeine and was bisreported. But yeah, so I guess people just, they were sending their pigeons off on these like 400-mile races and they just need to give them a little pep to get them through. I love that story so much because I really feel like pigeons should be celebrated. A lot of New Yorkers say nasty things about pigeons and I really like hearing this story. Oh, good. I'm glad. They are our city's pride and joy, for sure.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey, weirdos, looking for awesome popular science merch. We've got you covered at popsight.threadlist.com. Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, mugs, and other great swag with iconic vintage covers or modern designs. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite pop-sai shows, like the weirdest thing I learned this week. All that and more at popside.threadlist.com. That's P-O-P-S-C-I-threadless.com. Okay, we're back.

And Eleanor, I would love to hear your fact. Thank you. I'm here to talk about poodles. We have all seen poodles before, but I brought some visuals nonetheless. So I was really interested in the poodle haircut. It is strange. Some may say hideous. It definitely doesn't do the dog's justice.

And I was curious why it might exist. So let's start at the very top. There are two types of poodle cuts that one may see on the floor of, let's say, the Westminster Dog Show. The first is what we have here is the English saddle, observe. Yeah, that one's very weird. It's the shaved arm with the poofies at the end. Right. Or as the American Kennel Club calls them the Pom Pond with an N at the end.

They spelled it that way twice in the document, so I think it was intentional. So that's the English saddle. And then even more horrifying. We have the Continental Cut. And this is the one where the dogs... It's like a little pompador. Yeah. Are shaved so that they look like King Louis.

And they have two little rumpus adorning little fluffs. And then their butts are extremely exposed. And so I was really curious about, you know, why we would do this. There are a lot of weird things that people do to dogs. This is probably not even in the top ten. But it seemed like it must be something that maybe served some kind of purpose just because it was so outlandish. And I actually found a really interesting history. So I do have to say that as with all things, dog breeds, these things are disputed.

People have opinions. They have feelings, a lot of them. But the kind of general consensus is that in the late 16th century or early 17th century in Germany or what would now be Germany. This is just like some, you know, Central European state that we don't recognize anymore. Poodles were being bred as water retrievers. And so they were working dogs. Like, you know, you would shoot a bird. The bird would fall from the sky.

And then you would send your dog out to retrieve it for you. Maybe a pigeon. Indeed, probably a pigeon. And, you know, it was just beneath you to go and get it. And so, you know, if it fell in a pond, you would want a water retriever, not just an everyday land retriever. And so these dogs were being bred for the specific purpose. Poodle I learned. This is from a slate article called the genesis of the poodle hairdo. Puddle is actually derived from the German word puddle, which comes from their word for splash, and is the root of the English word puddle because they spent a lot of time in water.

And so the idea was that when you would send your dog out there, though, and it was just, it had its like naturally grown hair, which on a poodle, my family has one, a standard poodle, like their hair is extremely dense. Like their code is quite thick. And so if you just send them out there, the way that they are, you know, naturally in their birthday suit, they drown. Oh. And so then the solution might be, well, let's shave them all down. But then their organs fail, and they also get rheumatism in their joints because they're so cold. They're so cold. And what's not good to spend that much time in cold water.

So the solution. Dog sweaters. Naturally was dog sweaters. No, they did not think of that, sadly. so they just decided to give them horrible haircuts. So as silly as these things are, what we're actually seeing is some very key points of protection. You know, looking at the continental style,

we have the four little palms on the very bottoms of their feet, so that's protecting their ankles. And then most crucially, in all of these haircuts, like their abdomen is protected. So their lungs and their heart and their liver and all of that will stay warm. And then it's cut away on their faces. In one, you kind of have a little bit of fur left,

and the other it's completely removed. And that's, you know, so that they can grab these dead birds that their owner shot without getting blood in their fur, which is obviously so beautiful. So that is sort of the origin of the poodle cut at its most practical. And so now you might ask, well, when did it get thus ridiculous? Because this is not something that just happens by accident for champion dogs. It takes four hours minimum of prep to get them looking competition, So it starts prior to the actual event where you have to reshape, sand down, et cetera, the actual coat.

And then the day of the event, you have to do the fluffing, which can take quite literally hours. Oh, my hair flufing can take literal hours. So just imagine on this astounding, noble steed. Majestic beast. Indeed. That actually started when the French adopted the poodle. I think that, like, you know, the idea that they're, like, poodle huns in Germany is kind of surprising because they are so closely associated with, like, French royalty. In the 18th century, Louis XVIth loved poodles, and they sort of became, you know, like a staple of Versailles.

And so he really liked the smaller varieties, and he decided to just, like, really, like, ratchet up the intensity of their working haircuts. You sort of get these extravagant kind of looks that are mimicking what the people in the French court were actually. wearing. And they looked absurd. They looked so absurd and they wanted their doggies to look like them. So that is sort of where this modern poodle haircut that we see today comes from. And I actually went, as you may know, to the Westminster Dog Show in New York City. It's an annual event held at Madison Square Garden. And I have to say it, it was off the chain. People were really, really excited to be there with all those doggos. A lot of guttural screaming, like you would experience at like a football game, but just for a tiny dog named Bean, who was robbed. He was

named Best in Show. People were screaming on the way out. There was booing. It was really something. And so today, this kind of standard for these haircuts, as well as just for the poodle in general, are maintained by the American Kennel Club, which the Westminster Dog Show also recognizes the AKC standards. And so I was like looking through like what these standards actually are, because, you know, people talk all the time about just how insane, like, dog breeding is. Right. Because it's like these things were all, like, 150, 200 years ago. We just, like, invented some, like, really carefully defined and super, like, genetically unsound dog breeds.

And then we're like, this is all there can be. Yeah. I'm going to marry this mother to her son and have a perfect dog that's also dying. Or whatever. And so I was looking at the American Kennel Club standards for the poodle, and they're hilarious. I printed out this three-page document. It starts with carriage and condition. And this is where they describe the general appearance of what a poodle should look like when it's at the Westminster Dog Show.

They have some very specific rules. So physically, the poodle is supposed to be a square dog. You can't make this up. And so that's like the main thing is that they're well proportioned. Specifically when it comes to proportion, which is a sub item for general appearance, It says that the length of the body from the breastbone to the point of the rump approximates the height from the highest point of the shoulders to the ground. So that's where you get this square idea, is that their proportions all around should just be like,

you can just flip them. And they're always the same. And then the other thing, though, is that they also judge them, I kid you not, for their personalities. And so a poodle is literally supposed to be proud. Oh, so it's the personality as it pertains to the breed. It's not like we're looking for a good boy. No, not at all. If a poodle was a good boy who would be kicked off the Westminster Dog Show stage, that is not what they want from a poodle.

If I were a poodle, I would be kicked off. Yeah. It says specifically of the temperament, right, that a poodle should be carrying himself proudly, very active, intelligent. The poodle has about him an air of distinction and dignity peculiar to himself. major fault shyness or sharpness I really thought it was going to say with an air of disdain

that's I think what they are looking for They just don't want to say in so many words But every breed has its own AKC temperament requirements So the beagle is supposed to be like Happy Go Lucky Sure

You can't have a mean beagle You can't have like a nice poodle That does not conform to type You wouldn't want like a proud beagle No that would be so offensive I can't believe you even said it. I'm sorry. Yeah, so they have both these, you know, very specific physical markers for each breed as well as for their kind of personalities.

And what's really interesting is that there is this event prior to the Westminster Dog Show, which a lot of people like really like to watch on live stream. Like I saw so many people talking about it on Twitter where all of the dogs of a breed are brought out together. And the one that gets to compete for Best in Show is selected. So you just have like 30 corgis moving around in a circle. And so the corgi judge goes around and judges all of the corgies and picks the one with the best shape and personality. The one that's the most corg of all the corg. It's like best of the breed, right? Yeah.

And so then the best of breed is advanced. And then what you have in best in show is that all of the breed, the best in breeds are analyzed and the best dog of all of them wins. Yeah, it's just like really fascinating because that judge of the best in show then has to know like the three page long requirements of every individual breed in. order to judge the best dog of them all. It's pretty incredible, like, the lengths people go to. You know, I was reading some of the reportage on, like, what it takes to get to the Westminster dog show, and people often spend, like, $250,000 a year trying to advance their dogs to these elite levels of competition, and there is no prize money. You get the silver chalice, but the real thing that you're getting is that your dog, the price of its sperm goes up dramatically after

it's been judged to be perfectly square and rude. And so, yeah, I mean, it's just one of these things I feel like we've come back to a lot where, you know, like Victorians, the French royalty, all of these people had a hand in creating a very strange culture of kind of creepy dog breeds. And the one other thing that I was going to say, just on the topic of poodles, is that among the challenges that they face as a result of being purebred, like when they are purebred, is that they have this thing called bloat. Have you guys heard of this? I mean, I've heard of bloat. Yeah. I don't know how poodles bloat. Yes.

There's this phenomenon in barrel-chested dogs that some studies have indicated is more common in purebreds, where the intestine actually flips, and so it cuts them off from, like, being able to burp or from being able to fart or from, like, doing anything else. And as a result, their chest cavity starts expanding, and, like, left untreated, it will literally crowd out all of their organs and they'll die. And my childhood dog, a purebred poodle, had bloat, and we were able to save him. But it was just one of those moments where it's like, yeah, like, you buy this dog because they're, like, pretty and charming. And then, like, they start to kind of fall apart on you because at the same time that they have, like, these funny haircuts, like, they're also being carefully bred for things that don't matter and not for their health. Wow. Bummer.

Yeah. But anyway, you can adopt a dog. And you could adopt, like, you know, a dog that just needs a homin isn't just pure bread and has good genes. Yay. Good genes are a variety of genes. Exactly. The best genes are multiple genes. Poor poodles.

Guys, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I think it was the wonderful pigeon story you told. Oh, thank you. Yeah. And the connection with supersonic flight. I mean, that's awesome. I would give poodles my vote. because I have spent my whole life thinking poodles look ridiculous, and it never occurred

to me to ask why. And Eleanor, your greatest strength is that you always ask why. Thank you. I'm going to have to give it to pigeons. Okay, great. Then I win. So your greatest strengths don't matter. Congratulations.

Yay. Thanks. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms. So subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, 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 pupside.

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