The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Radioactive Bananas, Self-Decapitating Sea Slugs, Maine's Jumping Frenchmen

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

Theoretical physicist Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein joins the show! The weirdest things we learned this week range from non-trinary particles to kleptoplasty. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  Click here to check out Chanda's book! -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week.

And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Sarah Tradosh. I'm Chonda Prescott Weinstein. Chonda, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. Yeah. So, listeners, as many of you follow us on Twitter and pay attention to the Twitter, science we are probably aware. Chonda is a brilliant physicist, science communicator, and now newly published author. So why don't you tell us about your new book before we get into the show? Yeah. My book is called The Disordered Cosmer, a Journey into You.

dark matter, space time, and dreams deferred. And I think the best summary is probably that it's a holistic look at the doing of particle physics and cosmology. So everything from the standard model of particle physics to how race and gender and gender identity and sexual orientation and all of these things shape how physics actually gets done. And what physics and astronomy should be in the future, what our relationship to colonialism and liberation work should be. Awesome. It is on my massive TBR pile, and I am very excited to get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting,

writing books, et cetera, and we 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. Sarah, would you like to start with your teas? I'm going to be talking about the jumping Frenchman of Maine, Frenchman plural. All French, all men? Yes, well, I assume so. All French, all jumping all the time. Interesting. Shanta, how about your teas? Your banana is emitting particles, and the particles are non-trinary. What am I talking about? Well, I sure don't know. So, I'm looking forward to finding out. You lost me at trinary. It's a good word. All right,

my tease is that I would like to talk about sea slugs who detox by cutting their own heads off. Look out goop. The next big craze. Yeah, it is. You know, Bethany, Brookhire, who a great science communicator on Twitter joked about like, you know, you lose weight, you get rid of toxins, real life hack, real wellness stuff. But yeah, that's just, just get rid of your whole head or your whole body, you know? Who needs to be a physical body? That is kind of what the wellness industry is about, isn't it? Anyway, what do we want to start with? I feel like maybe Sarah, it's been a while since you open the show. That's true. I usually pick such depressing things that I have to be sandwiched in between other people.

This one isn't sad. It's actually fine. Great. Well, then why don't you just leap into it? You know, I'm someone in New Hampshire. I'm really excited to learn about what my neighbors have been up to. Yeah, well, it was quite a while ago, so I don't know that there are any jumping Frenchman left in Maine.

The story begins in the 19th century. So it starts with a neurologist named George Miller Beard. he was a civil war veteran, a Yale graduate, and like quite a, quite a progressive man for his time, which is not that progressive for today, but that's okay. He, like, argued for a lot of reforms to protect people who had mental illnesses, which, like, at the time was a fairly revolutionary. He also coined the term neurasthenia, which is the idea of, like, fatigue that is caused by the hardships of modern life, which feels like very 21st century, but like in the 19th century, they were very fatigued by all of modern life.

Also as a side note, I learned that he like very publicly argued that President Garfield's assassin Charles Guito should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. I don't know like how sound that argument is because Charles Guito shot the president because he believed that his work during the 1880 campaign season was so crucial to Garfield's win that he should get like a consulship, like he should be posted to Paris as a thank you. And then when he didn't, because he played a very inconsequential role, he said that God told him that he needed to kill Garfield.

And he chose an ivory-handled gun to do it. Like he specifically bought one because he thought it would look good in a museum exhibit someday. because obviously it would be at a museum. It is not in a museum, although his brain is at the mutter museum in Philadelphia, which I think is kind of a strange irony. Anyway, everything I know about Charles Gatot and most of U.S. history, I learned from the musical assassins. So I can't really tell you anything about him, but I could sing a song about him, but I won't.

Oh, tragic. All right. I was hoping that was going to come, but maybe at the end of the podcast. Anyway, so Beard was a pretty progressive guy. And sometime, I think, like, roughly in the 1870s, possibly a little bit before, he seems to have, like, started hearing these stories about French-Canadian lumberjacks living in Maine who had these very strange behaviors. So, like, when they were startled, they would jump really violently. Like, obviously, we all jump a little bit.

That's the startle reflex. But this was, like, way out of proportion to the thing that was. startling. Sometimes they would like actually hit something. They also would repeat back phrases like seemingly automatically, which is called echolalia. They would also imitate other people's motions, like also like totally unconsciously and like seemingly involuntarily. That's called echopraxia. They would obey commands without thinking about it. So he talked about one guy who like he would sort of, if he suddenly like put his hand on this guy's shoulder, he would like, and tell him to throw his pipe across the room, he would just, like, throw the pipe,

like, seemingly unable to prevent himself from doing so. So Beardhead got, he went up to Maine to investigate these people. He found 50 total jumping Frenchmen of Maine. And he found, like, he went up there thinking that this was probably, like, a weird old folk tale. But he found that, like, it did seem to be a, legitimate disorder like these people actually could not control their movements in this very strange way he wrote when told to strike he strikes when told to throw it he throws it um any like any

startling noise seems to have triggered this uh although the lumberjacks had kind of varying degrees of severity and it's it's a little bit of an unsatisfying story in some ways because like nobody ever really figured out what this was about. They actually now call the disease jumping Frenchmen of Maine, which is possibly the strangest name for a disease I've ever heard, but it's in the like, like if you look up rare diseases, this is listed. There's one theory that it might actually be genetic somehow. So, I mean, this disease occurred in like a small, very isolated group of people and 14 of the 50 cases were found within just four families in that area. But it's also possible that it's a culture-bound syndrome, which is like a disease that only

seems to occur within a very specific culture or like within a particular group or society. So one example would be like ghost sickness, which is something found amongst like Navajo people and also some like Creek nations where people become really preoccupied by the deceased. They develop like loss of appetite, suffocating feelings, nightmares, general weakness. There's also a freight, I'm going to completely butcher this, buffet delirante, which is a French disease, like French as in France and also French-speaking nations. Oh, I was going to say French as in not Frenchmen of Maine, but France. No, no, the original French, but also like other nations where, like, anywhere that speaks French today seems to sometimes have this disease, it presents as, quote, fully formed thematically variable delusions and hallucinations against a background of some degree of clouding of consciousness. So those are like just two examples, but there's like, there's actually a lot of culture-bound syndromes.

And the jumping Frenchman of Maine being like unique to this. northern part of Maine is just sort of one example, but there's actually very, very similar, like almost exactly the same kind of, it's like an exaggeration of the startle response, basically. And there's really similar disorders that happen elsewhere in the world. So Lata, L-A-H is basically the same thing, but that's found in parts of Southeast Asia. And Mirjahit is a version that's found in Siberia. So they are all like formally classified as startle syndromes. even though we don't really have any sense of like what they actually are.

But the idea basically is like your startle response is like when you tense up all of your muscles when something really surprising happens. And there are like other startle response disorders basically, but that aren't like they don't have this culture bound kind of aspect to them. So hyper-ecllexia, I think, is an autosomal dominant. It's a genetic disorder that involves like an exaggerated startle response and also just general stiffness. So like people who have this tend to fall a lot, sometimes like really violently because they like can't control their muscles properly. There's episodic ataxia, which is also an autosomal dominant genetic disorder and is like what the name applies. So ataxia is like impaired coordination. So like being drunk essentially like slurred speech, falling, stumbling, epistency.

meaning like it happens periodically, like kind of without explanation, that's not brought on by a loud noise necessarily. Tarrette syndrome is like kind of a related disorder, although Tarrats' tics aren't induced by like a sound or something startling. But originally they thought that maybe the jumping Frenchman of Maine had some kind of like very strange form of Tourette's syndrome, which I think is just kind of wild. And I think like kind of weirder that this thing that sounded so ridiculous that it was thought to definitely just be an old wives tale about like weird French Canadian lumberjacks up in Maine is just like it's just an exaggerated version of a very normal thing. So that's the jumping Frenchman of Maine. I can't attest to whether there are

any any currently jumping Frenchman of Maine. But I do think that like the other like Lata and Mirjahit, I apologize. I'm definitely pronouncing both of those incredibly wrong. I think that those like still exist largely and like occur regularly. So maybe there's some jumping Frenchmen and we just don't know about them. Yeah, wow. That's fascinating. And I was wondering while you were talking like how is this different from Tourette's syndrome. I'll admit that until recently I didn't really know much of anything about Tourette's.

And my idea of what it was was really based on some like very ablest punchlines in 90s comedy films. just because that is all I had been exposed to. And I'll give you a link to add to your write-up of your fact on popside.com slash weird to this guy I started following on TikTok, who has really changed my perspective on Tourette's. His name is Glenn Cooney, and he's a dad from Guernsey in the UK. And he just posts videos of himself and his family as they like cook or go shopping or whatever. and those tasks are a lot more complicated for him than they are for a lot of people.

You know, for example, when he's cooking, his tics will often have him, you know, throwing stuff in the air or doing things that could potentially harm himself even. Like I saw one where he, like, put like, hot oil on his head. And, but the thing is, he has such patience and good humor with himself. And he is, like, perfectly capable of, cooking dinner for his family, having fun with his family. It just requires a different set of skills from him. And it's really eye-opening, honestly, because it really puts into perspective how much able-bodied people and also just, you know, people who maybe lived experience,

impairments, disabilities don't match this particular guy's lived experience take for granted in that, you know, when I open bag of salad, I am not going to. to tear the bag apart and throw this out at the ceiling unless that's something I really feel like doing, which maybe sometimes it is. And yeah, you know, in looking into this guy, as I enjoyed his videos, I found out that there were like a large group of people on TikTok who thought that he or other people who were posting stuff about their Tourette syndrome were faking it because they either like didn't think Tourette was real at all or they thought that it couldn't possibly look the way his Tourette's does, which is so wild to me.

You know, like, imagine your worldview being so small that you think your lived experience and the bounds of your imagination about other people's lived experiences must encompass all possible realms of existence. Anyway, super interesting. hope those Frenchmen in Maine, you know, managed to have a good time regardless. Yeah, I mean, what's more amazing to me is that they were managed to be lumberjacks despite this, because that's a profession with a lot of loud noises. True and sharp objects. Yeah, it seems, it seems somewhat hazardous, but maybe it worked because, you know, they were like all lumberjacks together and they all, like,

understood, and maybe they were just like hiding away from the world. Maybe it was good. I don't know. Really, really chill. Yeah, I guess I was going to say that. I think that for me, this all raising is the question of our sensibilities about what's normal and what's not, right? And this is actually a question that I raise in my book. And I think the, and now I'm actually forgetting what example specifically I use. But basically, like, you know, when we think about like people who are disabled, speaking as someone who is disabled, right, the question of like disability versus disabled, that often we can reframe the world as a disabling place, right? Which is like the bag of salad is designed for people who open bags of salad in a particular way. So if everybody

opened bags of salad in a different way, or if we were just aware that there's like a diverse set of ways that people need to be able to open bags, the bag would just be designed differently, right? And so I'm thinking about this particular example and the fact that there were actually like lots of other examples from around the world that came up with like different titles and stuff. And I'm thinking, you know, this gets framed as kind of like an oddity, but maybe it's actually not odd so much as something that gets hidden or under-discussed. And that I wonder how much our understanding would shift if it was normalized as like this is just, and I think like Tourette's is actually an interesting example from my perspective as someone

who used to be partners with somebody who had Tourette's. And I think it was something that like he maybe experienced shame about for a really long time. but the particular text that he exhibited became part of what I found attractive about him. They were part of what I found attractive about him. So I guess I'm just kind of wondering about how much of this is the parts of the world that get recorded and therefore we perceive the world to be normal in a kind of way.

So that's kind of interesting to me. Particularly, I was thinking especially the examples you brought up from some of the, indigenous communities here in the United States, I was thinking about persistent complex bereavement disorder, which I think just got added to the DSM. It sounded exactly like people were displaying persistent complex bereavement disorder, which is actually something that features heavily in Tracy Dion's wonderful, incredible new fantasy novel legend form. And she actually makes a point of educating readers about this disorder because so many people have had it, but because it didn't have a name,

it wasn't being properly treated. And so some of this from my point of view is like emergent phenomena, emergent inner consciousness, even though maybe they've always been there. So that was what I was thinking about when you were telling your story, Sarah, is I was like, this can't, unless there were something in the water, which like living next door to Maine, there might be. unless there was something in the water that does suggest that maybe there are pieces of like the human experience and sets of behaviors that we just don't understand yet.

Yeah, it's a great point. And I mean, it's also interesting to me that like this was considered by a lot of people seemingly to be like obviously fake basically. Like they must have been exaggerating or like this was somehow intentional, which is like kind of an insane thing to think like why, why would they fake something like this? why would anyone fix something like this? But yeah, that like it took someone in this case like, you know, a white male neurologist to come in and like give it a name for people to be like, oh, this is a legitimate thing.

I think about this a lot also like obviously in the last year. There's been a lot of reason to talk about anxiety. And like such a high fraction of people experience anxiety, either like periodically slash like episodically or like just regularly in their lives. But we treat that as like it's abnormal to be anxious. But like the percentage of people who experience anxiety regularly suggest that it's actually pretty normal. And we just don't treat it that way.

Yeah. I think I hope that one of the things that we take from the pandemic with us is actually these lessons about how lots of people can struggle with mental health. And maybe that's actually the norm. Yeah. I think that that would be a useful lesson for us to take away. Yeah. Things I would like to take with us like that and I would like to leave behind the pandemic.

Great. Yeah, very much so. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Okay, we're back. And I would love to hear about what the heck my bananas are doing. Yes. I don't know. Right.

So I said your banana is emitting particles. and the particles are non-trinary. So what am I talking about? So any particle physicists who are listening would say the neutrino, of course. So neutrinos are my favorite particle in what I would like to call the particle menagerie that we call the standard model of particle physics. So to get to the banana, we're going to go on a little bit of a journey through the particle menagerie. So I like to tell people that the standard model is everything that we have ever.

ever seen, but it isn't everything that we have ever physically felt. What I mean by this is that it's a theory that describes all of the particles we have ever detected and three of the fundamental forces. So that's the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. And if you don't know what those things are, that's fine. You should pick up my book and it will help you. Gravity is missing from the pictures. You might have noticed that I didn't mention gravity. And that's why I said the standard model doesn't describe everything we have ever physically felt, because we definitely feel gravity on a regular basis. Other things that are missing from the standard model include a particle that can make up the dark matter,

which seems to be the majority of the matter in the universe. It's also my area of expertise, which is really the only reason that I'm mentioning it is because it would be weird for me to talk about the standard model and not talk about the fact that the dark matter is missing from it. That's a pretty big miss because dark matter is the majority of the matter in the universe, and it's not in the standard model of particle physics. It's also missing a particle that can explain dark energy, which seems to drive cosmic acceleration. So space time is expanding. The expansion is accelerating. We don't really know why.

Dark energy maybe explains it, and it's also the majority of the energy in the universe. So that's like another big mess for the standard model. So I guess I was supposed to be advertising the standard model, but I'm kind of trashing their first. right now. So even though the standard model is missing a lot of important stuff, it is in many ways a major achievement because it describes the basic building blocks of everything that we have been able to see so far, either through a telescope or through a particle collider. Everything that we can see with our eyes is made up of things that are described in the standard model. So here are the names of the particles of the standard model of particle physics. There's the

Quark family, which has six members, up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. There's the lepton family, which also has six members, the electron, the muon, and the tau, plus three neutrinos, the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino, and the tau neutrino. So before I, we, we get in deeper with neutrinos, I'm going to complete my picture of the standard model. So those are all the particles that make up the familiar matter of everyday life. But there are other important particles in the standard model two, namely the ones that we call, and I'm making error quotes for everyone who's listening, force mediators. This is a fancy way of saying that they are what enact the forces between particles. So one is already pretty familiar to folks.

That's the photon. It's the mediator of the electromagnetic force. You've probably heard of that. If you're like a Marble comics fan like me, the word photon definitely gets thrown around. not in like a strictly correct sense, physically speaking, but you've heard the word photon, right? So there are also gluons which mediate the strong nuclear force and the W and Z bosons, which mediate the weak nuclear force. And we could do like a completely different like fun facts episode about why these particles have all the names that they do. So finally, there's the Higgs boson, which was only finally detected in the last decade.

So maybe you've heard of it because physicists keep going on. mind about what a big achievement it is. And importantly, we believe the Higgs gives mass to particles in the standard model. That is to all of the particles except for the neutrino. So now we're going to come back to the very mysterious neutrino, which I swear really is coming out of your bananas. By the time I'm done, I swear everyone will understand that. So the first thing that is strange and fascinating about neutrinos is that we know they have a mass, but we don't know exactly what their masses, and we aren't exactly sure how they got their mass. So for the young folks who are listening, there are lots of questions here for you to be getting out there and trying to explore

and understand. The other thing to know is that there are 100 trillion neutrinos going through your body right now. Dang. Yeah. And so just another 100 trillion neutrinos just went through your body. again, 100 trillion neutrinos every second. They don't stick around. So they have really low mass. They're fast moving. We call them relativistic particles for that reason. Again, we know they're really low mass.

We don't know exactly what that number is. They're moving so quickly that they don't really have time to interact with our bodies. So even though we're being bombarded by them all the time, it doesn't have much of an effect on your body. So I don't want anybody to panic and think that they're being radiated by neutrinos. We're fine. You're good. And neutrinos are also the most abundant standard model particle in the universe, but because

they're so fast moving and because they're so low mass, we actually have a hard time capturing them, which is why we have so many open questions about them. So the other weird thing about these neutrinos that are passing through us is that they are non-trinary. So I'm going to take credit. I came up with non-trinary. I'm like super, as an agender woman, I'm like really proud of this linguistic innovation. That's a great word.

I love it. Yes, thank you. You might remember that I was just explaining that there are three types of neutrino, right? So again, there are the electron neutrinos, neon neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. So you might be sitting there saying to yourself, that sounds like there's a little, a trinary. Where does the non come in? Like there are set identities for the neutrinos. But actually neutrino identities are fluid. So when a neutrino is flying through space, it randomly will change into a different type of neutrino. So an electron neutrino can just

become a muon neutrino. A muon neutrino can just become a tau neutrino. And this phenomenon is known as neutrino oscillations, and it means that their identities are flexible or what we might socially understand as fluid. So we still don't have a good explanation for why this happens, but when we do, we expect it will give us insight into how they get their mass. So just to connect those open questions. So neutrinos are non-trinary. Okay, so I've told you there are a lot of neutrinos. Neutrinos are non-triinary. Neutrinos are also non-threatening. I haven't actually explained where they come from. So you might be wondering, okay, if they're moving fast, like, you know, why do they exist? Where are they coming from? We have no idea where they're going.

They're just kind of like flying through space. The 100 trillion flying through you right now are believed to come from the sun. So neutrinos are actually fantastic, or stars are actually fantastic neutrino factories because neutrinos are a common byproduct of nuclear fusion. So pretty much whenever there's a nuclear process, there are going to be neutrinos involved. Nuclear fusion is the engine that makes the sun and all stars continuously produce light. So in the case of the sun, the light is produced by hydrogen atoms being fused together and creating the next heaviest element. And neutrinos are actually a byproduct of this process. So it's not just creating photons, that we experience as light, it's also creating neutrinos.

And neutrinos are produced pretty much every time atoms are fused together and when they are actively broken apart. They also get made when atomic nuclei naturally decay. And this might sound like, you know, a fact that's pretty distant from everyday life, like you don't expect it to be part of everyday life. But if you are a voracious or even just casual banana consumer, I'm on the voracious side of the banana consumption spectrum. Same here. Excellent. Excellent.

That's the right way to live. Just FYI, that's the right way to live. Neutrino production due to atomic decay is actually part of your everyday life if you are a banana consumer, particularly a daily banana consumer. How is this at all possible? So as you may know, bananas have a lot of potassium in them, which is one reason they are good for you. They're particularly good for those of us who maybe have a disability that involves muscles tensing. I find that bananas really help me with my chronic pain issues. 0.01% of all naturally occurring potassium is an isotope called potassium 404.4.5% of all naturally occurring potassium is an isotope called potassium 40.

which means that bananas have some potassium 40 in them. So if some of the potassium out there is in this form, then some of the potassium that's in bananas is also going to be in this form. Potassium 40 is an isotope because it has a different number of neutrons than protons in it. In this case, 19 protons and 21 neutrons. And this isotope experiences a type of nuclear decay called beta decay, which happens because there is an excess of neutrons. One of the neutrons decays into a proton.

So as part of this decay, a neutrino is emitted. So each banana has 10 to the 17 potassium 40 atoms in it, and this translates to about 12 beta decays per second, leading to bananas emitting about 12 neutrinos per second. So your banana is emitting non-trinoes. trinary particles in addition to being delicious bananas are neutrino production factories. And so now when you sit down to enjoy your banana, you can say to yourself, my banana is awesome because it is delicious, it is nutritious, and it is emitting non-trinary

neutrinos. I love this. Have you guys, are you guys familiar with that, um, that XKCD comic where he, um, measures the amount of, like radiation that you are exposed to in units of bananas. It's really, it's, I'm going to, it doesn't make any sense when I'm explaining it just, just, we're going to put it on popside.com slash weird. It's really wonderful. We're going to link to it.

I will show you guys. It's, uh, it's delightful. This is going to make me enjoy my bananas even more. Banana for scale radioactivity edition. Yes. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Hey there, weirdos.

Claire Maldorelli here. I'm just popping in to let you know about a brand new podcast from the editors of popular science. It's called Ask Us Anything, and it's a bite-sized show that answers your most outlandish, mind-burning questions, from what the universe is made of to why not everyone can touch their toes. If you like the weirdest thing I learned this week, we promise you'll love Ask Us Anything, and you'll hear a few familiar voices, too. Check out new episodes of Ask Us Anything every Tuesday and Thursday, wherever you get podcasts. Okay, we're back. And Sarah, I think you were doing some frantic Googling of XKCD comics.

Yeah, I'm just doing a little live fact-checking here. It is not in units of bananas. There is a big radiation dose chart that the XKCD creator crew made, and eating one banana is on there as a dosage. So you can use the banana for scale. It is not in terms of bananas, although it does make me think that perhaps I should make a chart using bananas as a unit. But yeah, a little fact-checking there. always appreciate it. So I'm going to talk about some slugs. All right. So as I said, I'm going to talk about sea slugs who just cut their own heads off for fun. Who knows? But they do it. Yes.

This is totally, this is so metal. I love it. So, okay, sometimes animals, like, just shed parts of themselves and move on, which is called autotomy, not to be confused with autonomy. It's going to be really hard for me to say. one and not the other, but I'll try. And autotomy is really common in invertebrates, but even some vertebrates do it, including a couple of mammals. So, for example, if you're a crested gecko, you might drop your pudgy little tail at the drop of a hat, thanks to some especially brittle cells that are around the base of the tail. And that means you can just like

squirm out of a predator's grasp, you leave the wriggling tail behind to just. distract them, and you move on. And this is so common, actually, that in the wild, allegedly, most adult crested geckos just don't have tails. It's a trick you can only pull once, but they love to pull it. So for many other types of lizards, a dropped tail is not like a permanent body mod. The new appendages often grow back, though they usually look slightly different because they're like full of cartilage instead of new bone, so they might have slightly different shapes. They often are, their coloration is a little different because, you know, they're growing new cells. In some species, this is actually a common way to mess with potential mating

competitors because the lizards are less desirable and also move more awkwardly when they're tailless. Sometimes the tail shudder will return to eat what they've lost because the tails can be really important fat deposits, so you don't want to let that go to waste. And then, yeah, other than lizards, there are at least two species of African spiny mice that can shed and then regrow skin, sweat glands, hair follicles, fur, and cartilage as needed to escape trouble. So they have just like tear away, you know, flesh. They are not bothered by it. They just start over.

And of course, because they're the mammals that do this really well, scientists are very, very interested in what genes allow them to do this and whether they could help humans, like live forever and, you know, grow new wrinkilless faces and stuff like that, whatever we can get funding for. You know how science works. But all of that work is very, very preliminary. But yeah, in the invertebrate world, as you might imagine, it's just like full of animals that give up parts of themselves only to regrow them later, including, of course, sea cucumbers, which famously vomit up all of their internal organs. to avoid trouble. I tried to get, actually, for this episode, like, a good reason for, like,

what the purpose of them doing this is. And it seems to kind of be, like, and just, it's an evasive maneuver for when you can't physically evade, right? They, like, there's all this, like, sticky stuff that comes out. So it's almost, they almost, like, Spider-Man, whatever predators are bothering them. It's like a weird offering. Like, you can have this. part of me and then maybe the rest of me can leave. You can have this part of me to eat and also it's like sticky enough to distract you and then I will spend some time regrowing my entire self. But anyway, we're not here to talk about sea cucumbers. We're here to talk about sea slugs. Very different. So yeah, certain sea slugs may put all previously studied autotamus to shame.

A study came out in March showing that Elysia marginata and Elysia atroviridus, which are two closely related sea slugs, can decapitate themselves and then grow entirely new bodies. All of this started when study author Sayaka Mito, who was at the Nara Women's University in Japan at the time, came across a decidedly headless slug in her lab's collection. And at first she was like, oh no, poor thing, it's going to die. But then she noticed that its newly severed head was just like scooting around the tank and eating algae. Like, completely nonplussed. Yeah. She also looked at it and was like, I think it did this to itself. It looked like there had been some kind of like acid that had weakened the area and that it had just like, like, torn it out, like a perforated notebook page.

And then, much to her surprise, it survived for the three weeks that it took it to completely regenerate its body, organs and all. And I must reiterate that this was just ahead. It was starting from zero. So her lab's new study, which involved monitoring a bunch of these slugs throughout their entire life cycle, demonstrated that the two species often willingly decapitate themselves. Not always, but often. And in about a third of those cases, they're able to just completely create new bodies. Meanwhile, their former bodies like wriggle around in response to stimulus, and they can sometimes maintain heartbeats for months at a time before withering away.

So that's freaky. There is a great video that I'll link to on poptie.com slash weird with a very cute looking little green slug head that's just like bopping around. like a little cartoon character, it like pokes at its body. I don't know why. That's very morbid. I don't like that it's doing that, but it does. And the body, which looks very much like maybe like a leaf blown out of glass. It's like this very chunky, shiny leaf-looking thing. It wriggles. So again, kind of horrifying when you think about it, but really cute in the video, like so much of science. The universe is always more fantastical than we think it is. I think that...

Absolutely. Yes. Yeah, we truly could not make it up. No. The first question of many is, why? It's a big one. Why not, though, you know? Why not just stare off your body? Yeah, I mean, I too have a complicated relationship with my corporeality, so I see the appeal. But just start it over. Yep, yeah. Does not spark joy. So, yeah, why?

It's not totally clear yet. All we know for sure is that it happens. And in the case of one C slug in the experiment, it happened two times. I guess they needed a do-over. But one hypothesis the researchers have is that the slugs were reacting to the presence of parasites in their original bodies. And this would be an effective way to cleanse your body of parasites, just literally getting rid of your whole body. That needs more research. I think some of the, like in one of the species, there was a really good correlation between having the parasites and tearing off your head. And in the other there really wasn't. And, you know, it's also just one study. But, you know, when this happens in like lizards and those mice I talked about, it's about some kind of stress, whether it's something.

physically tugging at the easily lost appendage or it's like, ah, there are ants attacking me. If I drop this tail, they'll be distracted and go after the tail and I can leave. So it follows that like some kind of physical distress possibly related to an infection or parasites, whatever, would be most likely cause. But more work to be done. More slugs to watch decapitate themselves. And then the next question is how? we would love to get some of that for ourselves. We would love to know how they can just

start over with just ahead. It seems like some kind of chemical allows them to weaken a spot on their necks that's designed to allow for a clean break. Again, very similar, though probably different, you know, mechanism to like those geckos who have the really brittle base by their tail that's just like it's designed to be able to snap off when you want it to. And it's likely that they can survive without organs. Organs. Or, in the case, of their old bodies without head for such a long time for a really cool reason. It's because of kleptoplasti, which is one of my favorite words. Is that like stealing plastic surgery? Almost. No, so it's when they eat algae, they're actually able to retain the chloroplasts of the

algae cells that they eat. So, of course, listeners, those are the parts of the cell that allow plants to convert sunlight into energy via photosynthesis. So like I said, the slug bodies look kind of like beautiful blown glass leaves. There's a reason they look so much like leaves because they kind of are slug leaves. They retain this chloroplast in their own bodies and they're always getting at least some of their energy from the sun in addition to actually like eating and digesting the algae. So the researchers think that they may have like just enough photo synthesizing ability in their green little heads that it powers their, you know, weeks of regeneration. And, you know, more morbidly powers the still beating heart of the body they have left

behind until, I guess, it finally starves to death and starts withering away. I was going to try to get into the history of attempted head transplants in humans in this episode. But that is such a wild ride that I think I'm just going to save it for another one entirely. But yeah, I love these slugs. I love that they're out there doing it for themselves. Great stuff. Beautiful and disgusting, which is exactly what I want in my science. I just, I have to say, I found myself going over the various reasons why humans don't have this ability. Like, trying to have a conversation with myself about, you know, what would have been necessary for us to develop that capacity. I mean, I have lots of weird thoughts about things. Like, I think, like, the trap muscle was a mistake in humans.

Like, I actually just think it was, like, an evolutionary, like, error. I am this might just be me speaking as someone who has like chronic pain but I understand I frequently feel that many parts of my body are an evolutionary error so I get you there yeah I guess I just found myself experiencing envy throughout that that story me too me too uh all right well what was the weirdest thing we learned this week mine was the slugs to be honest very weird deeply weird Yeah, I'm going to have to go with the slugs, too. I think I'm supposed to advocate for neutrinos. There are a lot of them, so they'll be fine.

So many, just in your bananas, you know? Well, I'll be thinking about that fact probably every day for the rest of my life because I do eat a lot of bananas. Strong work. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Chonda, and everyone definitely check out the Disordered Cosmos, just on sale now. And you will love it. Thanks for having me.

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