The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Skin-Peeling Soup, Chlorinating the Ocean, Secret Drug Toilets

Episode Date: August 8, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from a soup that makes your skin peel off to secret drug-finding toilets in airports. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Lexi Krupp: www.twitter.com/KruppLexi Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. Help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right, so I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue.

Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak, got that right. At Popular Science, we report. and write dozens of science and tech stories every week.

And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of popular science. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Lexi Crut. So before we start the show, we actually have some really exciting, weird, wonderful news.

The weirdest thing is going to have a live show at Caviot in New York City on September 14. We'll have more information on that on Twitter and Facebook, so you should follow us at Popsie and Weirdest underscore Thing. It's going to be really fun. We've got some cool games and prizes planned. And you'll also just get to hear our weirdest, most unedited and uncensored facts. And we are working hard on those already. So we hope you'll be there. On the weirdest thing, we start by offering up little teases of stories we pick up in the course of reporting, reading, being on Twitter, talking to our friends, being smart, inquisitive, strange people. And then we just decide which one we absolutely have to hear more about first. Once we've

all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. And of course, you can vote on your own favorite weirdest thing on Twitter and Facebook because we're super democratic like that. So, Eleanor, why don't you start with your tease? I wanted to talk about a little known crime involving the chlorine five. Cool. Great. Love some chemical subterfuge.

Lexi. Yeah. What kind of soup would make your skin peel off your body in strips before you fell into a coma and died? Wow. Cool. What kind of soup doesn't do that? You've been eating soup wrong. So many comas.

Okay. My tease is that your airport might have a secret toilet somewhere, a secret drug toilet. This is really hard. I really want to know what soup will make my skin fall off. It seems like news I can use. Okay. So my story begins in 1596. There was a Dutch explorer named Wilhelm Berence.

and he was trying to sail, find a faster way to sail to Asia, which seems like it was a way that got a lot of these early explorers in trouble. So he and his crew are making their way across the Arctic Sea, and they're having sort of a rough go, so they figure it's time to cut their losses and turn around, but as they're journeying back, their ship gets totally trapped in ice. And it's right along this island called Novaya Zemlya, I'm sorry. I'm definitely saying that wrong.

So they're like, well, I guess we'll have to spend the winter here. But they're terrified of polar bears. And so no one can leave the boat by themselves. They're always in pairs. At some point, a bear climbs up onto the deck of the boat. It's a total mess. So they decide to build a cabin to spend the winter on this frozen island. This would be kind of romantic in any other setting.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's actually pretty impressive. They use wood from the ship to build this cabin. It's sort of warm in there. They have a little tub. Like, it looks. Wow. Yeah, I was like, wow, like, good job.

And at some point, they end up catching a polar bear, and they're like, yes, we can seek our revenge. These bears have been tormenting us. Very adult, rational thing to do. Yeah. So they're like, all right, we're going to eat this thing. So there's, I think it's a crew of 16 people, and three of them get really sick. Someone wrote what happened. They said, in three cases, the illness was so severe that they lost their skin from head to foot. Just misplaced it. Yeah. And so really the bears had the last

laughed. Wow. Yeah, right? Eleanor doesn't like it at all. That was so poignant. I'm upset. So that was the first case of poisoning by polar bear, but there are a few others on this English expedition in the late 1800s. These dudes, and this is where the soup comes in. I'm going to read it too. A bear was shot, which, although thin, appeared to be healthy,

and on the following day, a stew was prepared from the liver, heart, and kidneys. Although the heart and kidneys of bears had often been eaten without ill effects, the 19 men who partook of the soup of the stew all became sick. The first signs of distress occurred in two victims, two hours after the meal, and most of the others became ill during the night. The symptoms described were drowsiness, sluggishness, irritability, and desire to sleep, severe headache and vomiting.

During the second 24-hour period, the skin of 10 of the 19 of the patients began to peel around the mouth, beginning in spots and gradually spreading over larger areas. In some cases, the peeling was confined to the face, but in several it was general. The skin peeled from head to foot after eating bare liver. Wow. I'm just imagining, you know, baby foot, the Korean skincare product, you put it on your feet and it has a bunch of fruit enzymes, and then nothing happens for a couple days, but then all the dead skin, the skin on your feet starts dying and peeling off

so that you can have the fresh, uncalist foot of a baby, hence the name. And I'm just imagining just like full body baby foot. That's really upsetting. And death. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think these guys, it says actually, yeah, the bottom of the patient's feet could peel away.

But instead of leaving nice baby foot, it left underlying flesh, bloody and expression. Oh, my God. Oh, so like, not baby fat. Like, not just the upper layer of skin, like all. And like all skin. Devil foot. How? How does that even happen?

I feel like skin is pretty well attached to yourself and to your body. I'm just having a hard time imagining this organ that protects us from the outer world. Just like taking it off like a coat. Because you ate some polar bear for revenge. This is what happens when you eat your enemies. So Lexi, why does this happen? Do we know? We do know.

Oh, good. We do. At first, yeah, it was a total mystery. But in the 1940s, these scientists from the University of Cambridge were like, what the hell is going on? And they found that polar bear liver contains super high levels of vitamin A. And apparently all these guys were getting really sick from having a ton of vitamin A in their bodies. Do we know how much vitamin A is in like a polar polar pot? Hatay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. About 60 times more vitamin A is in a polar bear liver than our livers. Okay. Wow. Yeah. And do we know why vitamin A makes your skin fall off? Sort of. So your, so vitamin A is sort of different than a lot of other vitamins because it can't be dissolved in water. So you can't just pee it out. It's dissolved in fats, I believe. So our

livers take that excess vitamin A and process it. But when you're overloaded with vitamin A, if you eat polar bear liver, then it gets stuck in our, it's circulating in our blood. And that's when hits the fan. That's when your skin hits the fan because it flew off your body. Yeah. Oh, no. So I don't know if they like know why your skin peals off. And this, isn't super well documented besides these Arctic explorers. Makes sense that they haven't, like, tried to recreate that in the lab. Yeah, so I think, so I don't know what about this excess vitamin A makes your skin peel off. Just like general cell death of, on a large scale.

Yeah, yeah, your body's unhappy, severely unhappy. Like self-flaying unhappy. It's really about as unhappy. as a body can get. That's really disturbing. Wow. And the reason polar bear livers have so much vitamin A is because the seals they're eating have a ton of vitamin A because the fish they're eating have a ton of vitamin A.

Oh, right, because it bioaccumulates in the fat. So as you go up the food chain, it's just more and more and more. Yeah, exactly. Terrific chart. That's also why whales have such high levels of polychlorinated bifers. which are a compound that humans made for a long time because they're very useful, but they are also very toxic. So we don't make them anymore. But they keep showing up in animals in the wild and in sediment.

And they're especially high levels in like very fatty animals that are at the top of the food chain because it's just like, you know, you get the PCB's like nesting doll effect. And it's also why like you shouldn't eat a duck from an area with a PCB polluted river. there's a lot of fat and a duck. So there's a lot of PCBs in a duck. It's like the one thing I remember from college ecology. Don't eat a duck that came from a river in the United States, basically. Yeah, it's everywhere. So fats.

Avoid them or not. Fats are great. Fats are great. Just don't eat fats from a bear's liver. It's a good rule. And I think livers in general, can have a ton of vitamin A. And if you eat, I mean, I think to eat, you know,

if you're eating beef liver, you'd have to have like 100 pounds of it in order for this to happen. But yeah, liver is potent stuff. This is where frequent weirdest thing contributor and pop-sci editor Sarah would say, I love organ meat. It's true. She does love organ meat.

And she's not wrong. You know, if you're going to eat any meat, you should throw some Morgan meats in there occasionally, you know, in moderation and not from a polar bear. Shouldn't be eating polar bears anyway. They've got their own problems right now. Leave them alone. But also they're not eating seals anymore so much because the seals are too hard to get to. So they're turning to caribou, which is not an appropriate food source for them because it's higher in protein than in fat when they really need the fat. So they're just sort of starving to death.

Yeah. They're probably getting safer for us to eat, but we shouldn't partake. Climate change. Climate change. Making polar bear paté a thing. Great. Thanks. My favorite apocalypse food.

Okay, well, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more weird facts. Okay, pals, you love the weirdest thing I learned this week podcast. And now you can also love it as a Facebook group. Share your strangest facts and read all about the offbeat and outlandish, findings of other science lovers. We'll also be publishing some of the bonus info and ramblings that didn't make it into the final cut of the podcast. Just search for The Weirdest Thing on Facebook. And we're back, and it's time for Eleanor's weird chlorine hijinks.

Hello, and thank you. A couple weeks ago, I wrote a story that was sort of investigating the premise of a saltwater pool. And I got really deep into the history of chlorine, and there was one fact that stood out to me. A deep dive. Yeah, a deep dive into salt water. Saltwater pools. You know it. And then I got stuck on this one crazy fact. In 1989, there was an outbreak of fecal coliform bacteria, which happens fairly frequently, unfortunately, in lakes and rivers and sometimes along ocean coastlines. And obviously, fecal is not a good thing

for water. And so they shut down a few beaches along this community. in Wildwood Crest, New Jersey. Hey, I know where Wildwood is. Because of this, you know, high vehicle counts, they shut down the beaches and everyone is obviously upset. Local business people are worried about, you know, the risk to tourism, which is a big part of the economy there. And obviously people who live there would love to use the beaches that they pay to live near.

According to the initial New York Times report, in 1989, as this is happening, five businessmen dumped 100 gallons of chlorine in tablet form. Subsequent reports in the media from 1989 sort of pegged at different numbers. But either way, it was a lot of chlorine and definitely too much for the open ocean. Of course this happened in South Jersey.

In order to... I'm from there. Yes. In order to... She can say that. In order to clean it up. Because, you know, if you have a pool, you put chlorine in it in order to keep it clean.

Sure. They were like, this is the logical... solution to the ocean having poop in it. It was not the logical solution to the ocean having poop in it. And they were very swiftly rebuked by the public health authority and also the mayor of the town who they claimed gave them permission to do this. It was a whole big thing. It was written up in the New York Times and they were labeled the chlorine five. So what I think is really fascinating. Well, actually everything about it is interesting. One thing that's worth noting is that definitely the city took this seriously, but they were pretty lax on them. I don't think that they

found it funny, but I think that they probably found it pretty kind-hearted. And so instead of charging them the maximum fine, which could be $6,000 per person, they only charged them $200 each. That was like sort of the fine and sent them on their merry way never to chlorinate the ocean again. And so they were just like, yeah, we're really sorry we thought that this would be helpful. For the record, one of them was the owner of a pizza shop, the other of a pharmacy, and then the other three were all motel owners. Just trying to be good Samaritan. Yeah, exactly.

Trying so hard, failing so much harder. So I just thought that this was really interesting. The way that I found out about it was this really incredible history paper on our relationship with Corrine. And in this paper, the researcher who wrote it described. the long history of using chlorine to keep water clean, and then what he calls a moment when we all fell out of love with chlorine and sort of like cites this as an example of that flex point where we still believed in chlorine's magical powers,

but we're slowly discovering that it was kind of devastating. And so I think it is a very underrated part of American history, the chlorine 5, and what they tried and failed to do for the ocean. But it brings up a lot of scientific questions. One, why shouldn't you put chlorine in it? in the ocean. I know some of you are asking, and I'm worried for you, but I will explain. Chlorine is super harmful to fish. That's why a lot of times if you don't appropriately filter the water that you put in your fish tank, fish die, because a lot of the water that humans drink

is chlorinated by the local public utility to kind of clean it up. And while we can process that okay, when you put fish in that environment, their gills are so sensitive that they die instantly, if it's a lot of chlorine or, you know, over a few days, if it's sort of the levels that you typically see in tap water. So dumping that in the ocean, not great. Also, the other thing that is kind of worth noting is that fecal, coliform bacteria outbreaks are not great, but the ocean is a pretty, like, self-regulating, cleanish space. I mean, it's definitely a very large fish toilet but the fish know what they're doing, and it's not kind of the thing that you want to disrupt with a bunch of the chlorine tablets.

So the city of New York actually, I guess, has not learned this lesson, and they're planning on chlorinating some of the water in Flushing Creek in Queens to deal with this. It's called Combined Sewage Overflow. What happens when there's a huge rainstorm and our water processing plants can't handle all of the rainwater and the sewage water? So a lot of it just gets dumped into different water bodies all over the city. And this happens in a lot of places in the country.

But New York, it's pretty bad. And so the city was like, well, it's really expensive to build a huge storage tank. Let's just chlorinate the water as it's coming out of Flushing Creek. So it's happening, folks. Yeah, it's a surprisingly kind of like common phenomenon. It seems like one of those things where, you know, if you do it, in a very careful and controlled manner it works. I don't think that pushing that out into a fresh body of water is like a great plan.

That is very interesting to hear. It definitely seems like they're prioritizing not having poop in the water over fish being okay. The thing about the wildwood story, there are a couple things about the wildwood story that really strike me. One is the thought that anyone from South Jersey ever thought there wasn't a ton of poop in the water. I grew up going to those beaches and I have to say I'd be surprised if someone was like no poop in here

nothing to worry about, super clean and it's great. There's poop everywhere and South Jersey beaches are lovely. Follow up. I think it's really adorable that they thought that 100 gallons of chlorine would clean the ocean which is very large by volume. Larger than that. Quite large.

Yeah, it is It is just a comedy of errors in like many, many ways. Yeah, it definitely will not clean your shoreline. It will not clean the larger ocean. It's pretty hopeless and can definitely kill some fish along the way. Just for context, when we're talking about 100 gallons, you know, reportedly of chlorine that's dumped in the ocean, we're talking about like a few orders of magnitude bigger

than what you're dealing with your own sort of backyard pool system. I was thinking at these calculations and they're sort of confusing because it's about like the parts per million of chlorine in water. And so then it varies by the gallon of your pool and like suddenly your eyes are spinning. But the basic premise is that you only need a few ounces of chlorine to keep your backyard system in a healthy place. So when we're talking about, you know, dumping thousands of times more of that in the ocean, it gets kind of increasingly crazy and you're realizing just like how misinformed their actions were. Do you know how they got 100 gallons of chlorine?

I imagine, because this is not anything that I saw documented, that because they were motel owners that they must have pooled together their pool cleaning resources and then donated them to the cause of cleaning the ocean. Because chlorinating your pool is not cheap. That is a significant burden on pool owners, which is why to sort of come full circle, saltwater pools are so in vogue right now. among other reasons, because they are turning salt through a kind of catalyst. And out on the other side is coming sort of a natural form of chlorine that you don't have to pay for by dumping into your pool all the time.

Because you're just paying for the chlorinator. And then you get really slippery water to swim in. Yeah, what is that about? I could not find a great reason for why the why. water is just raved about. If you don't know about salt water pools, anyone who has one or has ever swammon will be happy to tell you about how incredible they are. But the idea is that the water is like less like abrasive on your skin and like less resistant. That's why I don't swim. It's too abrasive. It has like a silky sensation. Is it just because it's more basic? Well, so the

the best that anyone can offer, which is a huge preface to what I'm about to. to say is that because the composition of the water is like more similar to our bodies which are slightly saline that it's causing like less of an osmotic gradient so we are just sort of like floating around like in you know water that is more similar to our bodies it's like being back in the womb yes that is basically the comparison that deserves to be made there um yeah and then there's also this idea right that like and this is another reason to maybe not chlorinate the ocean, that when mixed with urine and other sort of naturally occurring bodily chemicals, pools, when they're chlorinated, can release really harmful chloride ions,

which are the thing that caused the pool smell. FYI, if you didn't know, it's actually these chloride ions bouncing around. So people are peeing in there? Yes, that is how you know people are peeing in there. And then also it can be, you know, a danger. in terms of off-gassing and stuff like that. It's why you don't want to pee in a chlorinated pool, and it's also why you don't want to chlorinate a fish toilet bowl,

aka the ocean. Oh, wow. That's really disturbing, thinking about all of the chlorinated smelling public pools out there. Yeah, that's people peeing. Yeah, though, again, like, poop is everywhere. Peas also ever, you know. Yeah. Don't.

There are probably things you should be more worried about. That's true. We should all go swimming. But they are huge vectors for disease. And if you're sick, don't go in one. That's my thing. Don't freak out because some little kid next to you is peeing. But if you're the person who has the power to be like, I kind of have diarrhea today. Don't get in a place where other people are swimming.

That's how people get sick, even if they're chlorinated. It's about personal responsibility, folks. It is. Wow. Love that fish toilet bowl. Let's take a quick break. It's really easy to get confused by all of the tech news flying around the internet. On last week in tech, the popular science tech team explains everything and tells you how all of these stories affect your daily life.

New episodes post every Monday on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, and pretty much anywhere else you can listen to podcasts. We'll talk to you then. Okay, we're back, and we have time for one more fact, my fact. Secret drug toilets. I guess they're not really secret, but they were surprised. surprising to me, I was in John F. Kennedy International Airport in our fair New York City. My boyfriend's a structural engineer who's done some work at the airport and he was like,

hey, one time I did something in the infirmary and I got to see where the secret drug toilet is. He was like, surely you know about that. And I was like, no, tell me everything. And I'm mad. I'm always mad when someone can tell me something about poop that I don't already know. That seems like a direct insult. I did learn all about this drug toilet. And JFK, I wasn't able to get an exact answer on how many airports in the U.S. have the same drug toilet. But apparently when JFK got it, it was very special. They were one of like two airports.

And so this is a special toilet that is in the infirmary so that when people who are suspected of carrying drugs in their GI tracks come into the airport and are held, it automatically washes any non-fegal. material that comes out in your excretions. And it's great for the people who work at the airport who are monitoring your time in holding because it means they don't have to like sift through poop in a bedpan looking for possible drugs. I can see why JFK was excited about it. Yeah. They were psyched for their drug toilet. And certainly there are other airports that have them. It's like not a thing that a lot of them advertise. It's not a secret, but not many people need to know about the secret drug toilets. It's like on a banner outside terminal too.

The best drug toilet in New York City. But it was really fascinating to me that someone designed a toilet for the express purpose of making it easier and more hygienic to find illicit drugs in poop. Very specific problem. Yeah, really specific problem. And not always necessary, according to a lot of people in Canada, Corrections Canada was going to spend over $200,000 on drug collecting toilets, called the Drug By You Ranger. It's like a Wild West cartoon character, but it's just a special toilet. Just a special little guy.

And the creator said in this article about Canada, considering buying a bunch of drug toilets, he explained how they work. He said everything they pass goes into a hermetically sealed agitation unit with a viewing panel. So you can watch it all happen. Water and detergent sprays come into the agitation area and basically blow away the debris. He said, so you're left with whatever item you're looking for, which is all nice and clean and smells kind of pleasant. What a detail to add. Yeah, exactly. And he claimed in this article that they were in every major airport in Canada, which certainly does not seem to be true in the U.S.

though it's possible that since JFK got theirs, everyone else was like, we need our own drug toilet. So then I was like, how much of a problem is this really? I am aware that sometimes drugs are brought into the country in people's tum-tems. But I was curious, you know, what do we know about this problem? What have the toilet seen? Yeah, what have the toilet seen? And, you know, it's not like JFK has come up.

out and said, like how many people they've held in captivity while they wait for them to poop. But these stories do hit the news every once in a while. There was one really recently, actually, where a 24-year-old, this is according to Newsweek, but I did find it reported in several other outlets as well, he was in Essex, England, and he was a suspected drug meal. And the way that they prove that they should keep you there is that they do x-rays, more specific, sensitive x-rays than the ones that everybody goes through. So, like, if you're acting weird, specifically like there might be something that's not food inside you, they will do a more sensitive x-ray,

and then they'll be like, okay, we can see these packets. So now we just have to wait for you to pass them so that we can prove their drugs. The problem is that you don't want to give people laxatives because if there's any intestinal movement, which is prompted by a laxative, it can cause the package to break. Like a slip and slide.

Exactly. Exactly. And cocaine and heroin are both generally in those little packets in more than lethal doses for each packet. And people can smuggle hundreds of them at once. So you don't want to do that. And also, like, that is the most sensitive area for absorption, right? Yes, because you're bypassing, like, the first couple stages of digestion. So just, like, hit the bloodstream. So much heroin and cocaine. Very bad. And also, a lot of times the people who are bringing these drugs in, they are not criminal masterminds. They are disenfranchis. people who have either been coerced or paid money that they really need to do this. No one does this for fun. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We really do not want these drug packages bursting in people. Nobody wants that.

And this 24-year-old had a lot of gumption. He refused to poop for 47 days, managed not to poop for 47 days. Then police actually decided that they had to let him go. He was refusing medical assistance while he was in custody, and they were like, this kid needs to poop. So they let him go, though he did actually get re-arrested on separate charges, like pretty shortly thereafter. But I thought that was just fascinating that he was able to wade it out. They were basically like, we want to apprehend these drugs, but we also don't want you to die. Right.

They were like, we have an ethical responsibility to not allow you to commit suicide by constipation. Right. So the first recorded case probably if he was successful. They were probably just really impressed. He really deserved a shot. Like I said, he did get re-arrested on separate charges, but not before he had, you know, willingly gone to get medical assistance. He'd pooped before he was arrested again. He pooped.

Wouldn't you feel like a freaking superhero for the rest of your life? I would start running marathon. I would be like, this is nothing. Send me to Mars. But what was it like when he actually did poop after 47 days? That I don't know. Bad. Do I wish I knew?

Maybe a little bit. It is really fascinating. And I was like how much in danger of dying by poop was this kid? A logical question. And how long can you go without pooping? That's a thing I googled. Probably not the most rare Google. No.

And a lot of the results I got were pretty useless. But this is a show where we keep looking. We find the primary literature on the subject. And basically, how long you can go without pooping varies from person to person. You know, for most people, if you're pooping less than a couple times a week, you should maybe see a doctor. But it's really about, like, what's normal for you. Maybe you have very slow leisurely bowels. Then there's impaction, which is what happens when stool kind of piles up and it's in there long enough to harden.

So you're creating kind of this growing mass of hardening poop. It's like turning a colon to a diamond. Exactly. Exactly, exactly, Eleanor. Maybe fossilized down there, who knows? And so when that mass is growing, because it's keeping the new poo from getting out, if that backup reaches the intestines, it can perforate the intestines. And then, of course, poop is pretty acidic and full of lots of, you know,

a whole smorgasbord of bacteria. So if that gets into the abdominal cavity, you can have a life-threatening infection. These kinds of intestinal obstructions that lead to problems, especially lead to death are very rare. And one study from 1994 I found found that they're way more common in people who have some kind of cognitive impairment. And that severe symptoms that other people can notice don't tend to show up until the last like 24 hours before death. Because you have to be really able to ignore like discomfort and knowing that you haven't pooped for a long time to have this kind of rupture followed by sepsis. There's at least one known case of someone who was otherwise.

as healthy, but who went two to three months without having a bowel movement and who actually her abdomen became so distended that she went into cardiac arrest. So it is totally possible to die of constipation-related conditions that have nothing to do with perforated bowels and infections. But of course, the cardiac arrest thing is even more rare than the infection. The human body is is wild. And not meant to store two months worth of poop. No. And that leads to the other question I had, which is like, how do you just shove a bunch of drugs in there?

How is that okay? How does that work? Where do you get the space? Yeah, 100 packets of cocaine. It's a lot. What does that look like? Like, yeah. So it turns out we have an article on that subject on popsye.com.

Oh, my God. What a good website. The thing is that there are two kinds of, uh, Wages to smuggle drugs. You can be a packer or a stuffer. A packer swallows, a stuffer inserts. Boxers are breathes. Whoa.

And it's all about how long the material needs to be hidden for. Because your GI tract is designed to hold things for a few days. You know, it can be a pretty slow moving train, especially if you kind of, a lot of times people will like train themselves on liquid diets for a few days before so that everything is moving very slowly. and they also will obviously take something like a modium to keep the poop from happening. It's generally assumed that people trafficking drugs in their stomachs are not going to eat while they have them

because they don't want to risk causing a bowel movement. But the rectum is more of a short-term storage solution. You know, it is also designed to store matter, but not for very long. So the kind of stereotypical, like, balloon full of heroin is for stuffing. Got it. And that's quite dangerous because it is prone to rupture.

But actually, when people are swallowing, it's like these very intricately made and packed little compartments. Because presumably the people sending you with the drugs don't want the packets to rupture either. So it's like very condensed. They're like super sealed. People have been caught carrying as much as five pounds. Whoa. Because it's really just as much as you can tolerate. I mean, think about how much you eat on Thanksgiving.

Yeah. Then imagine that you have a big incentive and a very empty stomach, and you just got to swallow some little packets of heroin. Do we know, like, how big a packet is? Like, should I be imagining, like, a quarter or, like, a silver dollar? There are some pictures on popside.com, but it's, like, a couple inches long, maybe, or maybe, like an inch to two inches long. Maybe they coat them with chocolate to try to make it a little more appealing.

Oh, wow. Yeah, maybe. What if you accidentally chew, like, bit down? That would be bad. You would have a lot of heroin in your mouth. That would be no good. So, yeah, I learned a lot about what the human body is capable of vis-a-vis smuggling foreign objects and retaining poop.

I feel like these packets have to be... I mean, that's impressive. They can survive in your stomach acid. It's like a gnarly place down there. Right, yeah. So we're talking about stuff that's like... It's like tripping. sealed. You know, you've got the kind of like latex layer around it and then it's, you know,

wrapped in some kind of sealant and then like latexed again. It's, it's not just like a little baggy. Which I did kind of assume. I thought that people were... Like swine ziplocks. Exactly. Finding this Popsight article that referred to the rectum as a short-term storage solution and was really one of the highlights of my week. So what do we think the weirdest thing we learned this week was? Wow. They were all really weird, honestly.

I think the drug toilet. Yeah, I think so, too. See, I was going to say chlorine. Wow, thank you. But I think that's just a little bit of hometown pride for me. It's a real wildwood story. I love it too. But, yeah, the drug toilet was just beyond anything I ever thought I would learn today.

The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like the show, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popsye. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden. Our editor is Jason Letterman. 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. First Citizens Bank. Ryan Reynolds here

for Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment.

Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.