The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Radioactive Horses, Sipping on Pee, Sleeping With One Eye Open

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

The weirdest things we learned this week range from vertically sleeping whales to fake motion sickness cures. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Click here to follow our sibling podcast, Ask Us Anything!  -- Follow our team on Twitter! Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/CorinneIOZO 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

Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100 day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest.

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

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not sure those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors

of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Prubita Saha. and I'm Corinne Iosio. Everyone, welcome. Corinne, lovely to have you here. It's been a minute. It's been probably round about three months. Yes, exactly. And that leads us to the question of why you're here.

Not that we're not always happy to have you, but you're here because it is a very special occasion here at Popular Science. Would you like to tell our listeners why? Yes. So I'm here because our new issue went live. And you notice that I say went live as opposed to, went on sale on newsstands. And that's because this is the first issue of popular science that is available fully and exclusively as a digital magazine. And this is going to be how we bring

magazines to our subscribers going forward. And it's actually really exciting because it opens us up to all kinds of cool opportunities, new tech, new products that we can play with and offer to folks. So subscribers not only will get their quarterly dose of all the best science and tech stories, but also access to digital magazines of popular science going all the way back to 2002. And in the future, first access to like any cool new editorial stuff that we roll out. So we're really, really excited for this change. And specifically about this first issue because this issue came largely from Rachel. And it's about how important it is after the last year that we've had for us to just find some

chill and some calm because I don't think it's any exaggeration that we've all been a little bit wound. Just a little bit. Just a little bit. And we've probably been wound so long that unwinding is going to take some time and some effort. So that's what this issue is about. It's about helping us unwind, but also talking about how important it is for things to just be still sometimes in the wild, in our homes, in our minds. And we're just really, really pumped. But in a chill way. We are calm, we are collected, we are excited.

Yes. Now go take a nap. But listen to this episode first. And if you want to read the issue, if you want to subscribe so you get first access to all the cool new stuff we're doing, it's all over popside.com on our social channels, or you can go straight to popside.com slash digital. Super exciting. And all three people on this episode worked really hard on the calm issue. I have had some decidedly not calm days getting this out. So, but, you know, we, we love making magazines at Popsie. And we're really excited to be making a magazine in a new and exciting way. And so yeah, we definitely, if you like listening to Weirdest Thing, you will definitely.

love reading popular science. And if you've never picked up an issue before, well, now all you got to do is scroly, scroly on your phone. You don't even got to go to a new stand-a-place. So zero excuses. Also, to further entice weirdest thing listeners, your favorite host, Rachel Feltman, had a couple outer body and inner body. I don't know if that sounds creepy experiences. It's true. I did drugs for this issue. And I wrote about it in a feature. And that's not what I'm talking about today on Weirdest Thing. You will have to go pick up a digital copy if you want to hear about me being on ketamine.

It's really great. Rachel did an excellent job. I've never wanted to trip as much as I did after reading Rachel's story. Thank you so much. But today we are here to just give you, you know, a little bit of like an amuse-bush of stories that may or may not have anything to do with the calm issue itself, but that all kind of, you know, fit the theme so that you can enjoy those, you know, in your ears and then go enjoy some popular science with your eyeballs. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each

offering up a little tease about some kind of story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, going in decay holes, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Corinne, as our illustrious editor-in-chief, would you like to start with your tease? My tease is that sleeping with one eye open is so much more than a cheesy threat from a bad gangster movie. What? Lord of the Rings, Gandalf? Is that the bad gangster movie?

Just my favorite gangster movie. You know, I never thought of it that way, but I guess, yes, that is true. Perbina, how about your teas? I learned that ginger ale may not be a better way to suppress motion sickness than drinking pee from young children. Oh, my God. Sorry, I'm going to need a minute with that. that. All right.

Okay. My tease is it's possible that one of the best things we've ever done for the natural world is to create an area

so toxic that humans could no longer live in it. That's your turn. I was thinking of that meme, the glee meme with Jane Lynch, like, I am going to create an environment so toxic. Anyway, that's what my fact is about. It's that meme on like an ecological political scale. I'm sorry, I can't, I need to get childhood pee versus ginger ale out of my brain. Can we just get that over?

Do that, get it over with, get it done, move on. Well, I learned a lot about motion sickness. Do either of you get motion sickness and on what kinds of vehicles do you get motion sickness on? It happens to me like cars or buses, but only if I'm trying to read. Like my eyes and my brain are arguing with each other and then I just get burpee and erpy. Yeah, for me it's like annoyingly inconsistent. Like I don't think of myself as someone who gets car sick, but if I'm in a car for the first time in a long, time, which as a like city girl sometimes happens or if I'm reading. And then yeah, I don't

think of myself as someone who gets seasick, but I've definitely, like one time I went on like a whale watching boat in very choppy winter waters. And that was very unpleasant. So yes, short answer. I've been known to to get some some icky tummy feelings, you know. Yeah, so you both kind of hit on the explanation and the solution for motion sickness in your tiny, tiny stories right there. But I've been thinking about it because I really want to go on a pelagic trip, which is basically you go on a fishing boat or a ferry boat, travel hundreds of miles out at sea to go see seabirds. And you can do this off the southern coast of New Jersey or even out of Brooklyn. And I've been on boats before, but, you know, going on one for 24 hours, I have no idea how miserable I will be. So to talk, just to start off, Corinne kind of mentioned why motion sickness actually happens.

And like you said, Corinne, it's kind of exacerbated when you are reading something or your eyes are just fixed on something stationary while the rest of your surroundings are moving. So there's pretty good historic documentation of the phenomenon, and I found a really good journal article written by neurobiologists from Munich, who, weirdly enough, traced motion sickness through classic texts like The Odyssey and the Sikku Kanchu, which is a ancient collection of Chinese books. And they just, just found a whole array of descriptions of nausea and dizziness relating to ships, carts, and even camels, because again, we're talking about world cultures here, not just people in New Jersey and New York. For a second, I thought we were talking about the camels getting motion sickness.

And I was like, it's nice that they cared. But no, it makes sense that people riding them would also get motion sickness. Camels might get motion sickness. Yeah, if you put them on a boat, probably. They'd probably be very very very much. very upset in a lot of ways if we put the lot about. Let's really go back and look at Noan the Ark and study that. That's right where my head was still. But the Latin origins of nausea supposedly stem from the word sea sickness. So back like centuries ago, they were very fixed on just that phenomenon itself.

And what's interesting is that each culture connected the ailment to different body parts. The Greeks and Romans blamed their stomachs, the Chinese blamed their livers, but they also connected it to the brain, which technically all of those are correct, but the brain is more correct than the rest. So what's happening when you get motion sickness is that your body, like different parts of your body thinks that it's traveling at different speeds. So your eyes, again, if you're looking at, you know, a fixed target like an enemy four in the distance or a watching a sea shanty video on TikTok. As one does. It doesn't realize that it's moving, that your body is moving. But your vestibular system, which is located in your inner ear and detects motion, that knows exactly what pace you're going at and how you're traveling. And of course, that mismatch grows even stronger if you hit choppy waves or hit traffic or turbulence in a plane, whatnot.

And that all amplifies the nausea that you feel in the rest of your body. So what's cool is that evolutionary biologists have also looked at motion sickness. And they've traced it back all the way to hagfish and lamp rays, which are ancestors to... Both very freaky looking fish. Yeah. Amazing looking. Hackfish prolific slimer. Just make slime all day.

Lamprey. Horrifying toothface. Lots of teeth. It's very toothy. Their whole face is teeth. Very Guillermo del Toro. Yes. Yeah.

And Popsai, we have a great article about this on our website. But again, yeah, they traced. They didn't exactly trace motion sickness because they couldn't go back and ask hagfish how they felt on choppy seas. But they saw that both of these the remains of these organisms had vestibular systems. So they kind of connected the dots and realized that they must have felt some sort of disconnect to when they were hitting turbulence in the water. So as evolutionary biologists often do, they came to a soft. conclusion that there was a survival benefit to this. It's probably because your body wants

to avoid being in someplace that's not stable, whether it be the surface of the water or even a tree top that's shaking in the wind. And it kind of drives an organism to move to someplace safer so that they don't feel those ill consequences. So anyway, that's all theoretical. But pretty cool roots there. Anyway, this is the calm issue. So I'm going to have to talk about less queasy portion. This is the calm issue. So you're going to have to talk about drinking pee.

Yay, here we go. Can we just get to it, please? I did not get to interview anyone about drinking children's pee. But again, we're going to go off some ancient text here. So again, since these civilizations didn't quite understand the stimuli for motion sickness, they thought it could be anything from winds like miasma, which for a long time, people thought bad winds would make you sick, to really rank smells or even the buildup of phlegm in the sinuses, since they couldn't really find.

they couldn't really understand the mechanism in the brain. They tried some really, you know, out there grassroots remedies to try and cure it. It reminds me of there's like a web comic that people send to me periodically that's like an old-timey doctor being like, you have ghosts in your blood. You're going to do cocaine about it. Oh, that took a leap. No, it's just we're going to try. some stuff. Yeah, here we go. Balancing bile and flams of various colors and viscosity

and just seeing what might work. Get my potions. And these weren't even, I don't even know if these were like physicians and doctors who were prescribing these things. I think sometimes they were just army generals who were like, we got across the sea and take over this, you know, little coastal Hamlet, so do what you got to do to rough it out. So some people in the middle ages would make this mixture out of wormwood, which I think we know is slightly poisonous at least now. Wine, vinegar, olive oil, and mint, and rub it like under their noses, which is kind of cute. In East Asia, they would drink raindrops that rolled off the end of bamboo shoots, which is very poetic. actually sounds quite refreshing. And others tried more unpalatable plants like white hellbore.

I might be pronouncing that wrong, but it sounds right just to clear out the stomach so that there would be nothing to throw up in the end. But the most unpalatable, and I think it was the Romans that came up with this, is that some sailors would pray to the sea gods and goddesses, and then drink young boys pee just because there was some sort of superstition attached to that. And again, no questioning it, no understanding if it actually worked or not. So the reason I tease that is because ginger ale kind of looks like pee, and ginger ale is often... Sorry. I'm never, oh, man, there's ginger ale in my pantry.

is looking forward to it and now I'm not. It doesn't look like pee if you mix it with whiskey. So there you go. Thank you for that. I've often heard that, you know, gingerail is kind of this cure-all to nausea and specifically motion sickness. Like my mom would always make me order ginger ale on the plane. So I was curious if it actually worked. It's true that ginger has.

a somewhat calming and healing quality for your stomach when it's feeling off. But ginger ale doesn't really have that much. I don't think it has any ginger in it. But what if it's like my like bougie, hipster extra spicy ginger ale? Yeah, like what if I go to like the Jamaican ginger beer section? Right. Another potent ginger ale. If you can see chunks of ginger at the murky bottom of your ginger. rail, then maybe you can take it on an overnight.

Sorry, can you say it again? You cut out a little. Yeah, I was just asking that we not use the word chunks in this context. It's not really working for me. It's not making the ginger ale feel more soothing, is all I'm saying. Yeah, so I was a little sad to hear that. But luckily, there are some actually tried and tested. solutions to motion sickness. If you're going the, again, kind of grassroots route and just going

with plain food, I found that the Cleveland Clinic suggested a long list of basic foods that don't taste like much. And that's the point. You want to have something in your stomach that passes through easily that maybe has a tiny bit of salt because the electrolytes are good when the nausea is set off. But you don't want a complex meal that is going to turn up more stomach acid to help break it down. And sugar is not good either. So check the label for grams of sugar on your ginger ale. But yeah, things like, that's why a lot of people recommend saltines. So that that does hold up as a good, good motion sickness cure. Applesauce, yogurt, bananas, I don't know.

I think you get the point there. But if you need a serious fix for your motion sickness, of course, dromene, way to go. And they also have, I've never tried these. There are also like over-the-counter patches that you put behind your ear, which is kind of cool because it's getting right, you know, right to the solution there. It's called scopylene. And basically what it does is it inhibits the production of histamine,

which most people know is what, you know, really triggers in allergic reactions. But it also, like, makes your stomach and liver convuls when it's in hyperdrive in your body. Ooh. Yeah, that's what sets off the gut juice. So. Oh, Fabita, are you, like, determined for us to come out of this a little bit, like, erpy in the tummies? Yeah, so that you can go try all these motion sickness cures that I've mentioned.

Okay, so very important question. Is it the same as a saltine? Because I think that's all I have. I think are cheese it's slightly, I guess they're baked, not fried. You definitely don't want, like, oily, greasy stuff. Okay. Maybe like the extra toasty cheeses. That's also an excellent recommendation, just in general for snack food people.

Yes, they're the best. We've come a long way. It's interesting to see that motion sickness is so set off by what it seems like modern technology and modern conveniences like cars and transportation. also video games, a lot of like first person role player games because they're getting you so in the situation. It's kind of the opposite. Like your eyes are moving along with the world you're in as you're playing. But your inner ear is not sensing motion because your body isn't moving. So it's still triggering the same response in your brain.

And our DIY editor, Sandra, she, actually talked to a cyber sickness expert, which it's amazing that this exists, about what to do if you feel severe motion sickness while playing video games. And it kind of goes back to the C-legs concept. Like sometimes the best, really the best cure is to get used to it. So with video games, you just, you know, if you're picking up a new one, just play it in short spurts. build up that time, get used to the environment. Also drinking water and catching a fresh breeze helps. But yeah, could be said that you could say the same thing for getting on a boat, but I don't know if I'm ready to relocate to see just yet. Okay, we're going to take a quick

break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Hey weirdos, it's Corinne, the editor-in-chief here at popular science, jumping in to let you know about our brand new digital exclusive magazines. These quarterly issues feature our award-winning science journalism, the very best gadgets, and of course, journeys down science's weirdest rabbit holes. But being an official popular science subscriber gets you so much more than that. Our desktop and mobile apps have a catalog of more than 15 years of back issues. My favorite new feature? Siri or Google Assistant will read you the magazine.

That means you can listen to Popsai like you would listen to a podcast. To get in on the action, go to popside.com slash subscribe. Our very first digital issue, which is all about the science and necessity of finding chill, is already there waiting for you to dig in. Okay, we're back, and I'm going to talk about how humans are maybe even worse for the planet than toxic waste. It has a calm angle, I promise. This one is actually inspired by one of the stories in the magazine. So if you find it intriguing, you should definitely check out the issue to learn even more.

So, yeah, almost exactly 35 years ago on April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant became the site of the worst nuclear disaster the world had ever seen and thankfully has seen since. While the accident itself only directly killed two people and led to the site. the deaths of several dozen others due to acute radiation poisoning. The lowest existing estimates based on scientific modeling suggests that at least 9,000 people will ultimately die of conditions tied to the radiation exposure that resulted from the power plant meltdown. It's obviously a very open-ended question, but from what I understand, that 9,000 figure was actually like, considered like controversially low by some scientists. So big, big bad. If you are interested in

learning more about Chernobyl in general, I definitely recommend watching the HBO miniseries, but also reading all of the articles about why the HBO miniseries isn't actually that accurate. I feel like it's really good TV and the stuff they did write, they did really right. Like, it's not completely unscientific. It's not completely a historic. I think in a lot of ways it does a great job of capturing some truth about how it played out, but also some of

the medical and scientific stuff is fudged. So again, would definitely watch it, would definitely also Google some supplemental reading lest you come away from it with a complete misunderstanding of how nuclear power plans

or radiation poisoning work. But anyway, in the immediate aftermath, there was this 19-mile radius, pretty arbitrary radius chosen, surrounding the Chernobyl plant, and it was roped off and evacuated. But what we call the exclusion zone today is actually more like 1,000 square miles. So that's where they went back and said, oh boy, this is going to be a long-term problem. And they determined how much of Ukraine and parts of the exclusion zone are in what's now Belarus. Where was it really not going to be safe for people to live for quite some time? And ultimately there were around 350,000 people permanently relocated. So you have this area that's like the size of some U.S. states, I think is about the size of

Delaware, so, you know, not a big state, but a whole state that's just empty. Now there are some people who live there. I found very conflicting reports on the numbers, but I think in the mid-aught, someone did a survey and thought there were like round about 100, certainly less than 200 people, mostly seniors who just have zero interest in leaving, managed to avoid detection and kind of running around the woods whenever people came around looking. And after some amount of time, the government just decided they could just keep doing that. I think generally the expectation is that they wouldn't like offer tons of services to people

who insisted on living in the exclusion zone, but they weren't going to drag them out of their kicking and screaming. And so animals who were stuck in these like highly contaminated areas obviously did not do well in the immediate aftermath of the meltdown. Because if radiation that powerful doesn't kill you outright, it can definitely cause damage to your DNA in a way that leads to all sorts of cancers and can lead to all sorts of mutations in your offspring. So it was generally assumed when this larger exclusion zone was created and these teams of municipal workers known as the liquidators were like going in and literally just like burying contaminated material and like triaging the area. It was generally assumed that the exclusion

zone would eventually just be devoid of life. But that's not really what happened. So starting in the late 80s, scientists started doing some aerial surveys of the area, specifically to count animals that they knew were local and were maybe still poking around, elk, roe deer, and wild boar. And they actually saw populations slowly but steadily increasing. But they were only doing these surveys once a year at most, and it was all kind of rough and not the most scientifically robust. So they started to look closer in the mid-90s, and that's when it became apparent that biodiversity was actually already back to being on par with like the other side of the exclusion zone border. So that's when things got really interesting.

So as of the most recent surveys, Chernobyl's animal populations are just as robust as they are in nature reserves in uncontaminated areas of Belarus, which is right over the border. So not even just like your standard woods, but in nature preserves. And in some cases, animals are actually doing better in the exclusion zone. Gray wolves in particular are seven times more abundant there than they are in comparable parts of Belarus. There are hundreds of species of birds thriving there. Amphibians seem to have developed adaptations to radiation, which you can read more about in our latest issue of Popsai. and Chivalski's horse congratulations to me

for pronouncing that extremely Eastern European word so this is a kind of horse that had virtually disappeared in the wild and wasn't doing that great in captivity either and it was this very like romanticized wildesque horse and so a couple dozen of them I think were introduced in the exclusion

zone in 1998, and they're now more than 150 of them. They make up like a solid chunk of the known populations of Chivalski's horses in the world. And so there's actually, sorry, were they purposefully introduced or they just made their way there? I was also not totally clear on this, but it seems that conservationists brought them there. Because by then it had become clear that lots of animals were thriving in the exclusion zone. And the thought with these horses is that they might be a good case study to show that, like, Chernobyl is now actually a good place to let animals rebuild wild populations. Because, yeah, yes, it's a little bit radioactive.

In some cases, very radioactive. But there are no people there, except for, like, 100 really tenacious. old Ukrainians. But, yeah, so how does this work? I mean, for one thing, the contamination isn't evenly spread out. In the moments and days and weeks after the meltdown, the wind and rain patterns had a huge effect on where the most radioactive material was going to settle. So it's not like there's just like a blanket, like fog rolling over, you know, a perfect round area.

around the place where the nuclear meltdown is happening. And then there are also hot spots where workers buried contaminated materials. And side note, not all of these are marked. So yes, there is now starting to be robust tourism around the exclusion zone. But like, go at your own risk because if your guide allows you to be a little too adventurous, you could definitely stumble upon an unmarked super hot zone. So yeah, you know, like, please be careful. But yeah, even just like in terms of the natural weather patterns,

like there's this patch of trees that are, it's known as like the red forest or the ginger forest. And it's where just like all of these massive pines were just killed instantly because the amount of radiation that blew into the, there was so high. And it's still one of the most radioactive places on the planet. And, you know, it's not far from where lots of these animals are thriving. So yeah, the exclusion zone is not just this like homogenously radioactive place. There are areas where the levels of radiation are actually

quite low and where, you know, again, animals may have in the immediate aftermath really suffered some very ill effects. This is not to say that it was all peachy keen for animals living in the exclusion zone. And there's also still a lot of work to be done to understand exactly how various types of animals are affected. You know, there's some controversy about whether certain species might be more susceptible to the radiation or might be more exposed to it because of what they eat or how they live. But what we do know is that for a surprising number of animals, the immediate negative effects of the radiation were totally outweighed. by the long-term benefits of people not being around. Because, you know, before human industry moved in, before Pripyat was this bustling area full of nuclear power plants and, you know, people cutting down timber and stuff, it was a beautiful forest and a wetland area. And so now that

people are gone, those ecosystems are coming back. And without people to bother them, These animals are thriving. So I love this because I think, you know, the message here is, let's blow everything up and start over. It's that the impact we have on the environments we live in is like so massive. I think we often can't even begin to wrap our heads around it. And, you know, the wildlife of Chernobyl is bouncing back in such an amazing way that now conservation is. are talking about like how do we continue to protect the exclusion zone? Like how do we keep people from coming back in now that it might be safe to do so?

Because we accidentally created this nature reserve. And yeah, I just love that. I love the little radioactive critters of Chernobyl. If I was a Disney princess, they would be my animal attendance. I would have some like three-eyed frogs, some very happy. gray wolves, a lot of birds singing weird songs because of radiation. And we would just have a grand old time. You forgot about the beautiful horse that you will ride on.

Yes. The majestic creature that only exists in your kingdom. Exactly. That's true. Very shaggy. They're very thick shaggy horses. I just want to like snuffle their little things. Yeah.

There's like the most hugable looking horses I've ever seen, I would say. So except for like miniature horses. You know, a little Sebastian is going to be the most huggable horse. Nothing is Little Sebastian. Like, we can't even go there. But, yeah, like I said, we have an awesome page in our charted section of the magazine about what's going down in the exclusion zone. So definitely go get your copy of that.

I think it's very interesting that the best comparison for what's happening with the landscape in that exclusion zone is what's happening in Fukushima. Even though those nuclear disasters were very different, the geography was very different, I'm sure the wildlife is very different. So I wonder, not that I'm hoping another nuclear disaster will happen so that there's another point on the map to look toward, but there are so many nuclear plants that are shutting down and remediating, and those should provide more examples of, you know, how this can be, how this can be achieved after so much devastation.

Yeah, and then it's just all this wildlife, basically, like, the natural equivalent of, I thought they would never leave. Yeah. No, and I think it's also interesting for Bita because it's like, you know, the thing, the thing that makes these sites unique is the abruptness and totality with which people left the area. while similar ecosystems not far away continue to be inhabited as normal because, you know, the radiation didn't blow that way. And I do wonder if maybe there are some other kind of indirectly human-made disasters like increased wildfires or, you know, sea level rise.

you know, as we see places become less habitable because of human-induced global warming, I wonder if we'll start to see more sites where even if the exodus is slower, we'll be able to say like, yeah, humans live there. And then now it's just one stubborn old lady and a bunch of horses. That'll be me. Live action version of Snow White. It's just me on the crumbling. Jersey shore.

No, but also the horses need to be tiny. Dwar horses, little horses. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back. And Corinne, tell us why we should be sleeping with one eye open or something. I don't know. It seemed like there was a threat in there. Yeah, and the more I researched this, the more I was like, is this calm?

I think it is, but you'll tell me at the end. So I'm going to start back in 2007. A group of researchers were studying the habits of sperm whales, and they were in some small boats off the coast of Chile. And they're just scooting along, and they realized that in their drifting, they had drifted into a pod of slumbering sperm whales. And if you haven't seen sperm whales a snoozen, it is quite something. We'll post a picture of it for you. but they basically sleep vertically, either nose up or tail up, and they just kind of bobbed there like corks. It's really very, very beautiful and pleasing. So they happened upon these whales, and they were just sound asleep.

And they got up really close, and then nothing was happening. The whales weren't responding. They weren't moving. They didn't think they were dead, but it was a little bit strange. And the whales finally responded when one of the boats accidentally booped one of the whales. And then they woke up. So what's unusual here isn't the posture that these whales were sleeping in. It wasn't that they were sleeping in a sort of uniform formation. What was weird was that they didn't seem to be reacting to these boats, which was pretty lucky for the researchers,

because in normal circumstances, they were kind of accidentally drifting into a moby dick kind of situation, like if these whales had reacted to these boats coming, it could have gotten really, really dangerous. These are massive creatures. So it was really surprising that the whales just didn't react. And it was surprising because whales, as far as people who study cetaceans know, don't get hard, passed out asleep like this. They typically, what's been observed in whales and other marine mammals and some other species is something called unit. hemispheric sleep. Basically, the brain sleeps one side at a time. And to understand this, it basically means, so when we get into like a nice deep sleep, right, that nice deep REM where our muscles are all

relaxed and our eyes are all twitchy, our brain waves slow down. It's called slow wave sleep. And typically, what we see in whales is that this slow wave sleep is only happening in one side of their brain at a time. And this is pretty necessary when you are a mammal and you live in water for lots of reasons, right? You want to avoid predators, namely, you want to have some awareness of your surroundings, but also you need to surface to breathe. When sperm whales sleep in this vertical posture, sometimes their heads are above water, but a lot of the time they're not, and their blowhole certainly isn't. So it's about, you know, avoiding predators, avoiding threats. And when one side of the brain is asleep, actually, these whales are sleeping with one eye open. It's not just that, you know, they can feel

the lapping waves against them of something approaching. They're actually halfway awake and looking for stuff. In whales, when they're sleeping, and in this case, this particular sperm whale behavior is called drifting. They're just half in and half out. And these whales were freaking out. And like I said, it's a behavior, a sleeping pattern that we see in lots of marine mammals. We've seen it in seals and beluga whales and in dolphins. You know, anything that needs to stay a little bit awake to stay a lot bit alive. And, you know, the patterns change depending on the animal species. Some of them do it for different reasons. Dolphins, for example, do this to maintain like the integrity of a pod. So they're not necessarily sleeping with one eye open, waiting for someone to come get them. They're sleeping with one eye open and it faces inward into the pod so that they can make sure that the pod, that the family, that the whole neighborhood is staying together.

That's really nice. Isn't that sweet? They just want to make sure that their friends are still there. And other marine mammals can actually switch between full brain sleep and half brain sleep. There are some species of seals that when they're on land go full snoozen, totally passed out. But when they're in the water, obviously they have to breathe. So they predominantly sleep one half of their brain at a time. So this isn't exclusive to marine mammals either.

We see this in flocking birds often. And mallards, it's also really sweet because it is about a group mentality. So mallards, they'll sleep all in a row and who's ever on the ends is on alert so that the people in the middle can get a nap. So if you're on the right flank, your left eye is open. And if you're on the left flank, your right eye is open, and then they take turns, which is very sweet. And some migratory birds actually do this in flight. They're kind of just cruising along in the flock, and again, keeping one eye open to make sure that, like, they're still all together. So, again, we see this a lot. And that's why it was so surprising to see these whales completely, completely passed out.

Because we had never seen whales behave like this before. And that's largely because most of the observations come in captivity. Because you can put a tracker on a whale and you can see its movements and you can see its depths, but you're not going to see its brainwave activity. And if you look at the EEG of like an awake brain hemisphere versus a snoozing brain, brain hemisphere, it is off the charts different. Like the slow wave sleep is like that nice, cool, just like very chill, sort of low wave. And then the awake side of the brain is awake awake, like needles bouncing all over the place with sensory inputs. Is there one, at least in the sperm

whales, is there one side, one hemisphere that they shut down more often? Or is it, are they equally switching between the two? It seems that they're, from what I can tell, they're equally switching between the two because, you know, the ocean is a 360 degree place. So they kind of need to protect from all sides. But there is sort of right-brain, left-brainness. And we'll get to that in a second in some instances. So, right, so we didn't know this. And it was a really big surprise because we've only seen animals in captivity, dolphins and killer whales where we can monitor their brain wave activity because we largely have these creatures in captivity. But that also, you know, again, to Rachel's point about humans imprint and impact on animals, like it makes me feel

really bad even more so for the animals kept in captivity. Just like, are they ever, they never chill. They literally are never able to just wind all the way down because they're in an unfamiliar place or what is a familiar place, but a place that is not natural to them. And their brains are just a little bit wound and they can never fully sleep because they are sensing constant motion and a constant threat that they naturally wouldn't be encountering. And it got me wondering about if this is exclusive to the animal kingdom. And I say that as in we are not animals, which we know that we are. but do people do this too, right? Is there still part of our lizard brain that never really shuts down if we perceive a threat? And it turns out that that might a little bit be true in some cases. Do you know that thing that happens when you've just moved or you're on vacation and you're in an unfamiliar place for the first time that first night's sleep is kind of garbage?

Yeah, totally. So we're not 100% certain. if this is the case. But it does seem that there is some hemispheric switching happening in our brains in these cases. So there are only a couple studies that I found. One was in 2016 from Brown University and Georgia Tech. And they basically discovered that something that they called a first night effect. Specifically in your first sleep cycle, so the first couple hours of sleep, people's left brain and right brain activities did not match. One half of the brain, was in total slow wave sleep and the other half of the brain was still firing a little bit. What we're seeing, and Prabita, this goes back to your point, that the left side of their brains

kind of didn't wind all the way down while the right side of their brains went into that full, chill, slow wave sleep. And then another study in 2019 figured out a potential mechanism that we can see this happening. And what they did was they looked at MRIs of 80 participants as they drifted off to sleep and they looked at the differences in activity in each hemisphere on its own and activity crossing between hemispheres. So basically what happens is as we fall asleep, the communications that happen between the right side and the left side start to slow down, but the communications that happen either only on the right side or only on the left side kind of don't really change. So this shows that our brains are still a little bit wired to be on alert if something is screwed up.

and we perceive that something is wrong, right? And this goes back to, there's all kinds of things that really can negatively impact our sleep. And we go through a lot of that in the issue, in a great package. We talk about all of the factors that conspire against us getting a good night's sleep and some of the things you might be able to do about it. And a lot of those are very practical temperature, noise, light. But it could also just come down to we are uncomfortable in a new space or in our existing space for whatever reason. I thought you were just going to say we are just uncomfortable. We are just uncomfortable.

As people with our corporeal existence. That's a theme I keep coming back to here on Reuss thing. No. But it just could be that our brains think that something's not right and it's unfamiliar and our lizard parts of our brains are still not okay with that. So consistency is key. The sleep doctors would say good habits. good patterns. And yeah, I don't know if that was a chill thought. I tried to bring it to a

chill place. But it's basically the sperm whales are not chill and they need more chill. Can't the sperm whales just get some sleep? As do you all. Yeah. I mean, as someone with adult ADHD, my lizard brain is never chill. We're always on alert for threats, which is, you know, a pretty, pretty cursed existence in modern life, but I guess it has its upsides. But yeah, I was thinking about our sleep package in the calm issue as you were talking Korean. That was by Eleanor Cummins, who was previously a frequent host unruidest thing and has a lot of really actionable information along with, you know, a lot of very mind-blowing information about how little we know about sleep. Yeah, we're still. And it's a little, how little we

know about sleep, how little we know about the brain. And for so many of us, like, sleep is like, can you just figure out this one thing? I just really, really feel like I need an answer. I'm so tired. They must have studied that or have started studying it in war veterans. Like, people who spent four or five years out on the ground in Afghanistan or Iraq, I imagine their sense of sleep is much different. You know, their sense of alertness going through. the night. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, that would make a lot of sense, and it would jive with a lot of what we know about the long-term effects of post-traumatic stress disorder also, just like something in our, something in the brain is a little bit unsettled. Well, your opener for the sperm

oil scene was very common. I tried. It was all I had. It's so cool that they can sleep both ways. Snout or what are their noses called? Nose up or nose down? Yes. Buts up, butts down. You can think about it like that too. That's better.

So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I keep coming back to the P thing, which wasn't really the point of the fact. No, it wasn't, but it's just it will be what stays with me. I went clickbaiting. I would say the half-brain sleep, just because it's so extensive. Yeah. Well, also the other thing about that is that, like, I remember, like, learning in elementary school that, like, dolphins sleep with half their brain. But no one explained further because no one, none of the people telling me that fact had any further information.

So I'm thrilled to finally learn more. I'm happy to elucidate it for you. as little as we do know. It's more perhaps than you were given in fourth grade. Precisely. Well, listeners, definitely head to popsci.com or any of our social channels or the weirdest thing social channels. We will make sure you have every opportunity to find and access the latest issue of pop-sci. It is all about being chill. And yes, it has me talking about being really high on drugs. For science.

Yeah, for science. And for my health. So definitely check that out. 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 read and review us on Apple Podcasts. It helps other weirdos find the show.

For more information on the stories you heard in this episode, come find us at popseye.com. Weird. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsye.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, with editing and audio engineering by Just Bodie. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition. For citizens back.