The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Rat Sommeliers, Pneumatic Tube Flirting, Why Periods Hurt

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Kate Downey joins the show to explain how little we actually know about why periods hurt so dang bad. Plus, Rachel divulges how to flirt using tubes, and Laura talks about the cutest, sweetest little rat sommeliers. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get 20% off your first order of Liquid I.V. when you go to https://www.liquid-iv.com/ and use code WEIRDEST at checkout. Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://www.Zocdoc.com/WEIRDEST to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Felton. I'm Laura Bises.

And I'm Kate Downey. Kate, welcome to the show. Hi, thank you for having me. It's so great to have you, and I'm really excited to share your new show with our listeners. Would you tell them a little bit about it? Yeah, absolutely. The show is called cramped. It is a 10-episode limited series about my experience with severe period cramps,

why it took me 22 years to get a diagnosis and treatment. and it really digs into the systemic and structural issues when it comes to treating women's bodies. Yeah, it's an awesome show, really excited to have you on to share some weird facts, perhaps related to it. And I hope our listeners will check it out. When you said cramped at first, I thought maybe it was on claustrophobia. So that went like a bit of a different direction than I initially expected. But, you know, so if you need a sequel, there you go. Yeah. One of the other podcast, like you check to see if there are other podcasts with that name. And there is another podcast that is the whole concept of the podcast is it's four people on one couch having a conversation. That is fun. That is also print.

Yep. All right. Let's get into the show. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, sitting on the couch, etc. 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. Laura, what's your tease? Rats can kind of be semeliers. I mean, I've seen Ratatouille. You don't have to tell me.

No, no. And anybody who has seen that can tell you not only can they be semeliers, but they can also wash their hands with some pretty impressive. dexterity. So, but yes, actual rats, not wonderful animated rats. Kate, what's your tease? So we don't know why period cramps hurt. We thought we did, but we don't. Great. Awesome.

Wild. I love a wild what from Jess. It's always had to unmute for that one. I know. Seriously. Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

My tease is that back in the day, you might flirt with someone via pneumatic tube. I think we should bring it back. That sounds pleasant. Yeah. I can get us started with that if we would like. Yeah. Start with tubes. Always start with tubes.

Yeah, always start with tubes. Absolutely. So one of the points I make in the dating and courtship chapter of my book, Been There Done That Arousing History of Sex. available wherever books are sold. And you should read it. Or you can listen to me read it if you get the audiobook. So one of the points I make is that whatever the hot new technology is, people will probably

find a way to use it for dating and also for making porn, but that's another chapter of the book that we're not talking about today. So for instance, in the 80s, people would go into little studios and record their bios on VHS tapes that could be sent around to prospective partners. And you can actually find examples of this on like found footage sites and it's pretty delightful and awful. And I believe an episode of Full House. Yeah.

Like the New Year's Eve one or something. It definitely showed up on some sitcoms. Time capsule. Yeah. And in the 1700s, a woman named Helen Morrison put out what might be the first personal ad in her local paper looking for a husband. according to some sources, the mayor of her town then had her committed for a month in response. But by the 19th and 20th century, that's true.

What didn't they commit women for? I was going to say, that seems pretty light on the, you know, what they commit people. Yeah, only one month? Oh, come on. Slap on the wrist. But by the 19th and 20th century, that was a very common practice. If you look back at newspapers from that time, people are just single and ready to mingle, a lot of lonely hearts. So like I said, if a technology exists, people are probably going to find out how to use it for stuff related to sex.

But what about dating with pneumatic tubes? Yes. So first, a little bit about the tubes in question. If you've never gone through a bank or a pharmacy drive-through, which it occurs to me that some people may simply not have done, a pneumatic tube is a system. that propels cylindrical containers around using compressed air or vacuums or a combination thereof. It's very steampunk. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And they were invented in 1799 and really took off in the Victorian era, first for the purpose of sending telegrams from dispatch stations to nearby buildings. So sort of expanding the range of where a telegraph station could insta deliver a message to without sending somebody out on foot. They were also really big at the stock exchange, starting in the 1800s, again, for just like quick communication.

Anything you could put on a piece of paper, you could get to someone really fast with a pneumatic tube. And one fun use in London in the late 1800s was that there was a tube between the Aberdeen Fish Market Office and the main post office, because fish go bad really quickly. So being able to rapidly communicate about the stock and who wanted to buy them was huge for Aberdeen fish market.

That's like sometimes at the bank they would put a little lollipop in there. This is a little bit smellier, but more nutritious, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, I don't think they would actually put the fish themselves in. No, just correspondence refish. Got it. My brain went a little crazy there. Me too.

No. I did the say, I was like, yeah, the fish would go bad really fast. So they put the fish in the pneumatic tubes to get them there really quickly. Actually, since you mentioned it, like one of the things that comes up a lot when you research pneumatic tubes is that it's essentially the same technology that they use in fish cannons where they like propel the fish over dams. So we do kind of put fish in pneumatic tubes all the time. The fish put themselves in there. I'm sorry I brought us on that journey. Apologies.

No, never, never apologized for sending us on a journey. Retail stores would also have them so salespeople could like, leave tasks like making change and referencing customers credit records to other employees in a centralized location. And it also just like meant that there wasn't a ton of money in the cash register up front, which was especially good when department stores used to kind of literally be people standing at like individual tables and sort of, you know, doing that very old-timey one-on-one salesmanship. It's good that they didn't also have to carry around a bunch of money. They were doing enough stuff. And one place where pneumatic tubes really took off was in sending at one point a bunch of postal systems, including the USPS, we're using a lot of pneumatic tubes.

According to a 1930 issue of popular science, once the USPS even shipped a sick cat through the tubes to a veterinarian. And apparently, though actually, I'm not sure was the USPS. It may have been a different postal service. But anyway, definitely a postal service. And apparently he arrived just fine And he jumped out of the canister And the quote is something like With a speed approaching the tubes themselves

I can imagine that cat was a little peeved Yes If I knew anything about cats He wasn't thrilled But he did get to the vet So that's good And yeah pneumatic tubes might seem kind of silly But they were way faster than other methods

of delivering mail And they were faster than telegrams But the rise of the telephone basically made the point of instant mail kind of moot. The one thing I think it's important to note is that pneumatic tubes would still be faster today than all the ways we have of getting and sending packages. And it would probably be a way less chaotic and exploitative way for us to feed our desire for instant delivery.

And definitely it has a lower carbon footprint than everything being, you know, brought around by Amazon trucks that make that horrible screeching noise when they drive by. but the issue is the high cost of putting in the system. So, you know, for a while pneumatic tubes were like the hot thing because there was simply no other way to pretty much instantly send a message or small package across town. Then once we got over that because we were like, you can just pick up the phone, then we abandoned the idea of pneumatic tubes.

And now it truly would probably be good for us to get back into them. but the sort of cost of entry is too high. That being said, there are ars replaces where pneumatic tubes are used, which I will get to in a second. There were a lot of proposals and even rails put down for blowing human passengers through pneumatic tubes. Of course, protected in little capsules, but while some of those capsules were like train car style, others showed people like laying down like they were in a coffin, just getting shot through. At a world's fair at some point? I think so, yeah.

Yeah, there were definitely the... I do remember reading about this. There were demonstrations. And it seems like basically what happened is like similar to the telephone thing. It just didn't get far enough along before, like, the much simpler idea of mass rail travel took off. Though don't tell Elon that because Hyperloop is basically a pneumatic tube. But again, putting in the systems is just like a huge cost. And we have trains.

Trains exist. I remember when I was researching the New York City subway system and how they made decisions about like, hey, is it going to be steam trains? Is it going to be electric? Like, how are we going to do this? They considered pneumatic tubes and a pneumatic train. And I think there was actually, I think there actually was a pneumatic like people mover in between a couple of blocks in like downtown New York. Like as a prototype or something early on. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And it, they couldn't keep. seal like it was not reasonable. Yeah, pneumatic tubes definitely way more practical for non-living smaller objects. So apparently up to and including cat. It's like lollipop up to cat. Yeah. That's like your solid, you know, that's your scale. There are also systems that collect trash using pneumatic tubes. That started in Sweden in the 1960s, but they're still used in several places, including in the Magic Kingdom in Disney World. Plus, on,

Roosevelt Island where they manage the trash of more than 10,000 people. And in Stockholm, there's like 120,000 households that have these vacuum tubes for taking their trash. And it means there are no trash trucks. And according to the Swedish company that takes care of them in Sweden, they can curb emissions by as much as 90%, just by getting rid of sort of the above ground moving of waste. And pneumatic tubes are still really common in hospitals. That's one place where a technology for, you know, getting specimens and x-rays and notes across the building really fast didn't emerge in time to supplant the pneumatic tube. So instead, the pneumatic tube technology has just gotten better and better. So they still are there, you know, vacuuming and blowing away.

But my favorite use of pneumatic tubes from history is that people used to use them to form. flirt at der club. Insert Adam Driver. Right. Or, yeah, or Broad City. But I was thinking of Adam Driver in Megalopolis. That makes more sense. That makes more steampunk sense.

So in a 2017 Atlas Obscura article, Michael Waters shared how Nightclub patrons in Berlin, starting in the 1920s, used pneumatic tubes to send messages to other tables. The Rezi and the Femina were two clubs that were said to have spearheaded. this trend. The resi had live other, so other tables at the same club. Yeah. Or between, okay. Yeah. So this is just like instead of getting up and walking over to a table. Or setting a drink. So here's the idea. Like let me set the scene. You're at a club. If you're at the resi, they have live music, space for a thousand people. You're sitting at your table. It's very cabaret style. You know, you're there for a show. They apparently had this very popular show starting in 1928 with like,

They called it a water jet ballet or something and it had like flashing lights. It was like the Bellagio, but inside in 1920 in Berlin. Why isn't that a musical? Right? Well, anyway, another journey, but whoa. Yeah. So, yeah, picture this. You're truly seated for a show.

It's not like a get up and mosh club. And everyone's table has a glowing light above it with a number. And you have phones and pneumatic tubes. So if you see a cutie from across the way, I don't think the idea is that instead of talking to them in person, you send a message, but you might get things going while you're sitting at your respective tables, just like send a cheeky little hello. And then, you know, you can also, that can also be the whole activity. You can just sort of be flirting with each other in a very low stakes way from across the club all night if that's what you want. But then, of course, the evening can go wherever you want it to. So it's texting.

Yes, it is texting. It's tube texting. It's tube texting. I like that. And it's also sort of like air dropping because you can tube text with a stranger just because you see them across the way. The tubes were stylized to look like golden snakes so you like put your message in a snake mouth.

It's like very sexy stuff, honestly. And yeah, the phones at tables were a big thing. You actually, I didn't realize this, but in Cabaret there's the telephone song that like has people communicating over telephone. And I'm very familiar with Cabaret. I did tech for a production. My dad was in when I was a kid. And it never occurred to me like, oh, why are there phones at their tables?

Why is this? You know, it didn't occur to me that they were referencing a real popular thing that happened in these in these Vimar clubs. To be fair, there's a lot in that musical. That would be that you should ask questions about. Yeah. And then you go, okay, fine. Yeah, yeah.

You could even apparently ask the switchboard. You could, you know, write something down and put it in the tube. And the switchboard could send another patron a gift from a list of available options. So you could really. That's like on Twitch. Yeah. Yeah. It's like streaming gifts.

Yeah. What is that called? But I know what you mean. That's so much nicer than where my brain went. My brain went right to the hunger games and like air dropping. Really? No. But yeah.

sounds more. That sounds a lot nicer. Never mind. Yeah. Well, Femina was twice as big and had more than 225 table telephones with instructions in German and English. So it was very, very tourist and expat friendly. Though apparently one know that I found really funny, Rezi at least did have women working in the switchboard room who would censor anything too obscene. I wasn't able to find a primary source to say sort of what their guidelines were. I would truly love. to know that, but I imagine like if you sent like an unsolicited sketch of your penis, they'd be like, no. Keep it. But the thing is that like the Weimar Republic was really, it was a very sexy time. People were very cool. So I can't imagine that the censors were total drips about it. I think it was truly like getting rid of trolls,

which sounds so nice. Like I would love it. Yeah. I would be so much more on board for, Rangers feeling empowered to flirt with me if there was some woman like checking it to be like, I think, I think she'll be into this. I think this is worth sending through. So bring it back, honestly. Almost like a chaperone on a date, but not, not as creepy or not as, you know, it's like a chaperone that has your real best interest in mind, not just like your, your virtue or something. Yeah. It's a wing woman content moderator. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully who is highly paid. I would take that job. That honestly sounds like a great job.

Yeah. You'd be in every great gossip. You'd be in everybody's business. Yeah. You could be so, it would satisfy the nosiness so much. Absolutely. It would be like hearing confession without having to be a priest kind of. Yeah.

I do know that there's, there is at least one restaurant that has a fondue place in the West Village that has nights where they do like, like, like past messages where it's like you can send a message to any table on. on a scrap of paper, which I didn't realize is probably trying to evoke this, because I think it was also a thing in Paris for a while. But again, if there are pneumatic tubes, I'm not interested. So that's why we're not recording this there, because it's phone is not new. Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. Yeah. And I will just end by saying, this is not the only romantic tube I found on record. On Valentine's Day 2020, the government communications headquarters, which is an intelligence agency in the UK, revealed that back in the 1950s, a linguist who worked there used the communication tubes to send a proposal to his girlfriend. Apparently he

was shy and kind of afraid to ask her in person. And she worked as an analyst on the Soviet Air Force, so like it does sound like she was probably like, you know, kind of a boss. So I get it. He was intimidated, he should be so lucky. Apparently, she walked over to accept in person after receiving her pneumatic proposal. And according to historians that work for this intelligence agency, agents also like to send each other eclares because they fit perfectly in the pneumatic tube containers. I was going to say it's tube-shaped. It's tube-shaped tube treats. And I really love that, especially, it just makes it better that they were intelligence agents. Like, it's really, Where's that movie?

Yeah. The movie ideas we come up with on this podcast alone. Yeah. Gold mine. Gold mine. So yeah, that's a history of pneumatic tubes and using them to get laid. And again, I really think like we should bring back this model at the club. And we should also definitely reconsider putting in some pneumatic tube systems for all of our,

like DoorDash deliveries because we just got the little robo delivery guys in Jersey City and they are they're not doing well we had a rainstorm the other day the flooded street and it was

I'm not going to say it was sad because honestly there was something kind of satisfying about it but it did I was like wow that person's food is going to be cold this is not the solution we've been told so anyway pneumatic tubes Have we considered a series of tubes?

That's my pitch. That's your pitch to make society better. I buy it. Honestly, more tube-based everything, I think, is the answer. Yeah. It also would, having a tube-based infrastructure would lead to more walkable cities. Exactly. Yeah.

It would reduce smog. Get cars off the road. Get tubes in the ground. Yeah. Order your thing on Amazon. go walk to the tube office to collect it. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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I'm eyeing mood.com's delta-9 THC buttercream caramels because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me mellows me out and sends into Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has delta9 THC freezer pops. 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. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals

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All I can think of is everything everywhere all at once and Rakokoo-yes. Rack-a-Koo-Koo-Koo-Koo-Y? Yes, Rack-Koo-Koo-Koo-Y. Yes, I think that was probably my favorite part of that movie. Many great parts, but that was like. Many great that was, because it was just like, what? It was so perfect. But, yes, so Ratatoui came out.

2007, if you don't know, a mouse can cook amazing food and ends up with a nice little restaurant in Paris. Now, these rats aren't exactly cooking yet, but they might be able to help tell wines apart. This research was published earlier this year in the journal Animal Cognition, and it found that the rats could actually successfully tell the difference between two varieties of white wine. Would either of you like to venture a guess as to which varieties of white wine? There's a lot. Maybe one is chardonnay, because I feel like that's the oakiness could, I believe that a rat could distinguish that. And then truly, I have no idea what the other one would be.

Something basic. Salmignon blanc, Pino Gris. Yeah, I was going to say Sambion Blanc and Chardonnay, because those just feel like the two most opposite tasting white wines. You got one. They were Riesling and Savenerang Blanc. I first thought that it was going to be Chardonnay as well because of like that, you know, like that's, I mean, I'm not a wino, but if I'm going to drink white wine, like, that's kind of the, shardiné is kind of the one that, like, I find has, like, the best taste of the white, of white wines. Anyway, Rizeling and Servignon Blanc. rats have about 1,200 genes that function as smell receptors compared to 400 for humans. So quite a bit more.

But we kind of have, you know, much higher levels of cognitive processing. So we kind of what we lack. It's not the smell genes. It's what you do with them. Exactly, Rachel. Yeah, basically we have words that we can use to talk about. Why, you know, wine, you know, bouquet, mouth feel, flavor profile, all of that. that kind of makes up for our lack of smeller genes when it comes compared to rats.

This team from the University of Trento, University of Lincoln, University of London, and the University of Vienna, so a nice little international group of researchers used a type of test called a go-no-go scenario in the lab. Go-no-go scenarios basically mean that the subject in a lab experiment has to make a decision in order to move on to the next stage. And this one was designed to see if the rats could learn and detect various odor categories in a more complex setup. They took nine adult male domesticated rats who had been previously trained on another odor categorization test. So they kind of already knew that their smellers worked.

They weren't just picking rats that maybe were very good at mazes. They wanted to go with ones who had at least some experience in doing smell-based tests. For this new task, they were trained to discriminate between. the wines with the two distinct grape varieties, Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc. So they were each assigned a variety. So if the rat was training on Riesling, it would receive a reward if it selected the Riesling.

But if it selected the incorrect one, it would not get the reward. So it wouldn't be shocked or anything. It wasn't like that. It was just rewarded on if they got something right. Also, they weren't drinking the wine. Sadly, no. That was my question.

I was expecting that. But now then I'm thinking it's rude, I'm like, that would have been really bad. That would have been horrible. You can't give lab mice a bunch of wine. No, you know. Only in Pixar. Only in Pixar and Disney movies, can you know?

They were just going by smell. A little bit as a treat. The reds can have a little wine as a treat. Right. At the end of the test, you can have the wine as a treat on Friday afternoon. But also, also rodents actually eat a lot, end up consuming a lot of fermented fruit. Right. Yeah.

Fingley alcohol. Right. Right. They can party. They can party. So they were exposed to multiple different types of these wines from distinct vintages and places of origin. So it was, you know, reeslings from all sorts of, all sorts of different countries and fields. Now, the reeling group included rats named Badger, Hero, Edison, and Sean.

They were also numbers. The important data we need. I mean, I was going to put the numbers in there, too. But I'm just going with the names. You're going to remember that. you're not going to remember rat number three. And the Servignon Blanc group included Darren, Lionel, Peanuts, Thomas, and Schrodinger. Solid rat names.

Real mix of, real mix of, acceptable rat names, like Peanuts and Thomas. Why not? No remys or a mill or, you know, none of the rats from the movie, which I think they were probably like, ah, cliche at this point. We can't do that. Everyone's expecting this rat to be named Remy. So during the training stage of the experiment, each of the nine rats was put into a box that had a little nose poke hole and two levers. There was also a little carousel of eight paper cups, which is adorable.

I will include a graphic description of the experiment in the show notes. This little carousel with the eight cups was right at the nose pole. There were four Sovereux and four Rieslings. The rats were then conditioned to expect a treat when one type, the type in their group, was present. This was to teach them the aromas to associate with each type of wine. This training step continued until the rafts could get 80% correct responses for at least three consecutive training sessions. So quite a while. This was the kind of test that they did multiple times to see, you know, to kind of weed out that they could do it.

And obviously after training comes the test. the testing stage was basically the same setup, except after about five seconds, they were timed, which I don't know if you're like me, but timed, so hats off to these rats for doing that. After five seconds, the rats were rewarded with a sugar pellet if they pressed the correct lever, so their specific wine group, and they would get a reward if they got that right. If they pressed the wrong lever, the lever itself would be retracted and there would be kind of a light that shined. and then they did not get their reward. I know. I always, I mean, even though they're not getting it right, that's why I couldn't do this kind of work, I would still feel bad and be like, here you go.

Take the wine anyway or take the sugar pellet anyway. Not the wine. Again, don't give rats wine. I have a question. Why? We're getting to that. Okay. We're getting to that. First, most importantly, the results. Everyone always wants to know, well, how did they do? they were generally able to distinguish between the two types of wine that they were trained on. They most frequently chose the lever for the wines that matched the variety that they were rewarded with. And then once they kind of got that sense that they could do this, they took that testing stage one step further to see if they could detect them among new wines. So they introduced, you know, another novel confounding variable to see how well they did.

while the rat semiliers correctly distinguished 94% of the trained wines and only 65% of the new wines, they did get better at testing these new wines the more they were exposed to it. So yes, it did decrease when they were exposed to wines that they weren't trained on, but they did show some signs of improvement when some other confounding variables were thrown into the mix. In total, and we're going to single out a rat here, So, you know, get ready. Eight out of the nine rats were more likely to recognize the novel wines and six actually showed some significant levels of discernment. So six out of nine, not bad.

That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good success ratio. The one who stood out here a little bit was peanuts. Peanuts was the only one out of the nine that fully completed the training phase, but then had a little bit of a strange response. during the testing. Oh. Unlike the others, he did not successfully identify the new wines. Instead, he showed a higher rate of incorrect responses and pressed the lever for the more non-rewarded wines than in the rewarded category.

So he pressed more for reeling despite being on team Sauvignon Blanc. The authors believe that Peanuts results actually indicates that he has some natural differences in his olfactory processing system or differences in memory. He might just have a hold, he might just have a more discerning sense of smell and appreciate the different elements of each variety of award, of each variety of the rewarded of itself. So while he's not named Remy, because that would have definitely been, you know, a little, you know, a little bit on the nose, peanuts might be a little bit more like the fictional Remy and that he has a little bit more of an appreciation of different smells and different

aromas within the wine grapes. Yes. So in general, this just kind of, this gets back to Kate's question, which is always the question when you read a fun study like this of like, all right, why? Why did we devote to lab? Unless it is a very complicated way to cheat on wine tasting. Right. Right.

To have like a little, you know, kind of like retic. Tuy style, you know, the rat could be telling you, the bouquet is very earthy, you know, so you could sound wise at a, at a wine tasting. You can just, you can be blindfolded and sip a glass of mystery white wine, put it under the table to your rat, and the rat can tug on your shirt and be like, you could be like, Savillon Blanc, Savian Blanc, but not peanuts. Don't bring peanuts to the wine taste. Well, you could bring peanuts, but he would just probably get over overwhelmed and all excited because he would like everything.

I love peanuts. Anyway, so this just shows that there is a complex olfactory categorization or the ability to categorize NID something by smell doesn't necessarily need language. And it could be more widespread in non-human animals. Like how we said rats have 1,200 smell receptor genes, humans have 400, we make up for it in our language. This shows that, well, yes, that is still true. It might not be quite as strong. And they might actually have just as pretty complicated olfactory categorization. In future experiments, because we need to know more, always, the team hopes to test to see

if rats could maybe tell wines apart by region or origin, kind of like we were just fantasizing about it. And, you know, a perfect world. We'd have our little rat semiliate, let help us sound cool at wine tasting. And while, again, a rat som is not exactly going to be selecting wine the next time you go out to eat, this kind of research shows to the, you know, the wide variety of skills and how a rat's wide variety of skills and how there is so much more to these rodents than their bad reputation. So justice for rats, justice for peanuts, rats as psalms.

Rats as similes. Wow. I love it. Let's do rat tattooey too. Yeah. There we go. Oh, wait. They have one.

Yeah. Do that? I probably. Why wouldn't they? They're right. All right. We're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

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Oh, am I? No help is coming. Send help. Rated R. Now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. Okay, we're back. And Kate, upset B. Please. Yeah, please. Yeah, get ready to live where I've been living for the last year, which is extreme rage. So for context, I get severe period cramps. I have since I was 14. And for the last year, I've been making the podcast cramped where I tried to find answers to what I think are very basic questions. about my body and my cramps. Turns out when you try to look into these basic questions and get them answered, there may not be answers out there because of how female bodies are treated in the medical system. So obviously, if we're talking about severe period pain,

my question was, what's causing it? And I've had this question for 22 years. I'm in pain. What is causing this pain? Like, truly, what is happening inside my body? So I went ahead. I went and did the research. I looked up the medical papers. I, you know, found the best information that the internet could give me. And I'm curious, do you two know what causes period pain? I mean, the thing that I assume is what turned out to be wrong is what I've always told

is that it's contractions of the uterus. Though I did. There's, there's so much that is just like, I got to adulthood and then realized that what I was told in middle school, I'm like, wait, let me, should I double check that? That it's like completely wrong. So anyway, I assume that's wrong. Well, yeah, it's not completely right, at least. So based on what I could find on the internet and in medical papers, I learned about something called prostaglandins, which are released when your progesterone dips,

right before you get your period. So these little, they're not exactly hormones, but they're like hormones in that they are messengers. They get released when you have that progesterone dip. The prostaglandins bind with receptors in your uterine muscle, and they basically just tell the uterine muscle to constrict or cramp. And that muscle constriction, that squeezing, is what starts your period.

It squeezes the blood out of your uterus. And what all the medical papers say is, is that severe period pain is what happens when there are too many prostaglandins and they are telling your uter, because the normal way for a muscle to contract, right, is it contracts and then releases and then contracts and then releases. That's how all our muscles work. And that's so that blood, oxygenated blood, can get back to that muscle fiber

and, you know, deliver it oxygen. If a muscle squeezes and keeps squeezing, it doesn't relax and then squeeze again, This actually keeps, it basically is squeezing so tight that oxygenated blood can't get to that muscle. And then what happens is something called ischemia, which is a big medical word, but it basically is the word for a Charlie horse. Right. If your muscle is squeezed so tight that fresh oxygen can't get to it, your body reads that as pain because the muscle will die if it doesn't get oxygen. And so it wants to bring your attention to it.

And so if that's like in your arm, you can kind of shake your arm out. But you can't really do that with your uterus. And so that's, the medical community has since the 1970s, which is when prostaglandins were discovered, since the 1970s, that has been like, that's what is causing period pain. So also that is why ibuprofen and other enseds work often on period pain. because nseds like ibuprofen are prostaglandin blockers. Okay. So they actually like block the, they lower production of prostaglandin

and they also block the prostate glandin from connecting to the receptors in the muscles. Something I learned researching for this podcast, though, is that the most effective way to take ibuprofen or any ns is actually before you're cramping. So up to 48 hours before you. you expect to get your period. If you get severe period pain, you can start taking ibuprofen and or any other endset, and it will actually, like, reduce the level of prostaglin and that gets produced in the first place.

That's really cool. For some of us, yeah, for some of us like me. Oh, sorry, go ahead. It makes a lot. Well, so I get pretty bad migraines. And when I would get headaches as a kid, my mom would always say take it before, take your medicine before it gets to so it doesn't get ahead of you. Like, that was like my little.

kind of way of remembering it because like once it's like it's kind of like extreme thirst or extreme hunger once it gets to a certain point it's too far gone and it can't it can't work yeah and so for a lot of people like me who get severe period pain once it gets to a certain point you start throwing up and you can't keep meds down and so it's too late I have a friend who calls this her pill window between when cramps start and when throwing up starts it's like you get got to get something in there. But yeah, the most effective way to take ibuprofen or any other n-sad is before the pain starts, which is counterintuitive, but that's the best way.

So hopefully that can help somebody out there. But it turns out this may not be as true. The ibuprofen thing is true, but the prosodygladins and ischemia being the cause of all period pain, not true. And I learned this by taking a field trip to a lab in Evanston, Illinois, called the GYRL lab, the gynecology research lab, which spells girl. And it is a lab that it is a lab that gets NIH funding to study period pain. And they are doing what I thought was really basic research, but it's just happening now. Yeah.

What, like, so one of the. How now? How many, I mean, not to put you on the spot with like an exact number of years, but like how now are we talking? The study where they are looking into the mechanism of period pain, which is like medical speak for what's causing this period pain, has been going on for a couple of years. Wow. That's it. It started very recently. Wow. Okay.

Yeah. And so when I, oh yeah, get ready. when I explain to you how this study works, you're going to be like, really? We don't know that. So what they are doing is they are having people who are cramping, people who are actively having dysmenorrhea, come into the lab, go into an MRI.

To be like, what's literally just what's happening. Well, and that part has been done before. The part that hasn't been done before is they are giving the person who is cramping a little bulb to squeeze when they are feeling pain. So they can take the MRI image of what the uterus is doing and what is happening inside the body and match it up to when the person says they are experiencing pain. Because nobody ever looked at that before. That's wild.

Once you're getting somebody in the MRI to not be like. And also does it hurt? It's hard to look, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And so what would you expect to see? I guess I would expect that after a prolonged, you know, squeezing of the muscle, people start to have the pain or when the muscle is squeezing sometimes maybe. But yeah.

Yeah. And that's not what they find. What? So what they find is that. that the uterine, the contractile event, they call it, where the uterus is actually squeezing, is actually pretty long, like 90 seconds. But the amount of time that someone is squeezing the bulb and saying they are in pain, they squeeze it, they hold it until they are not in as much pain, and then they release it.

And those squeezes are, first of all, different for everyone. That's the thing that they are finding across the board is everyone is experiencing period pain very differently. And for some people, they are only experiencing pain for maybe like 30 seconds while the uterus is squeezing that whole time. Some people are experiencing pain before the uterine contraction starts. Some people are experiencing pain in the middle and some people are experiencing pain after it ends. So clearly, something is going on beyond just the uterus contracting. And they have theories, but they're not totally sure yet. So one theory is that your, is that the body and the other muscles near the uterus can

like feel a cramp coming and kind of like grease themselves and tighten. Yeah. Exactly. And that may be what contributes to the pain before the uterine cramp. It could be that the, that after the uterine cramp, blood rushing in, so what's called reperfusion, actually creates pain. Right. And it could be something totally different.

It could have something to do with how our brains interpret the signals from our organs. Because while we know a lot about the kind of pain where you touch a stove and it hurts, we know a lot about those pain signals. We don't know a lot about what's called visceral pain, which is like organ sensation, like how you feel what's happening in our organs. And so it could be something crazy happening with the, the pain pathways and the signals and how our brain is interpreting what's happening in our organs. Wow.

The other, like a sort of add, a sort of bonus is they've done additional research at this lab into what's called insid-resistant dysmenorrhea. Dismanorea is just the medical term for period pain. So when you take ibuprofen and it doesn't work and nothing happens, which some people experience that all the time. Some people, it'll work sometimes. it won't work other times, but about 25% of people who have severe cramping have insed resistant dysmenorrhea. So this is a huge problem because we don't really have alternative

treatments, right? We kind of just throw inseds at period cramps and if that doesn't work, you're kind of up a creek. And they found something really crazy, which is they gave some people inseds, they watched them take the pills, did a blood draw 90 minutes later, later tested the blood, no sign of the ensign. No sign after 90 minutes. Wow. And they confirmed it. They like had it tested by an independent lab.

And yeah, no sign of the insides in the bloodstream. So then it's like, where did they go? What happened? Did they fall out? Yeah. Exactly. And so there's something happening here that we don't understand that we don't know yet. And because we are decades and decades behind in our research into female bodies, this will probably remain a mystery for a little while longer.

But the good news is the folks at the GYRL lab as well as countless teams across the country. Not countless. There's not that many of them. There are other teams across the country also looking into the mechanisms of period pain, whether they are caused by vaginal microbiome changes. likely there are lots and lots of different factors, and every person feeling period pain is feeling it for slightly different reasons. Just like the way we feel a cold or the way we get a stomach bug, it's different in every single person. So hopefully they have told me that realistically in the next 10 to 15 years, there will be new

treatments and more targeted treatments for severe period pain, which is very cool. Yeah, that's really cool. maybe around the same time that we can give more than just an ibuprofen for an IUD insertion because that also doesn't really work. Yeah. Nope. That is a whole. It's connected.

Obviously it's connected. Yeah. But yeah, it's not taken seriously. It's not considered an invasive procedure. And that is when I got an IUD put in, I was like, oh, is it going to hurt? and they were like, oh, it'll just be some cramping pain. And I was like, who's cramping pain? Because if it's mine, absolutely.

It's mine, bye. I'm out. Yeah. Wow. Well, Kate, thanks so much for sharing some of what you've learned while making cramped. And I'm sure our listeners are going to rush to check out the rest of it. And thanks so much for coming on today. Thank you.

Thank you for sharing your two. and rat thoughts. That's what we do. It's what we do. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff.

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