The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Skyscraper Death Ray, History of Hot Tubs, Our Sun's Death

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

This episode celebrates our latest digital issue going live! The weirdest things we learned this week range from a skyscraper that can fry an egg to the Italian legacy of hot tubs. 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 Corinne Iozzio: www.twitter.com/CorinneIOZO Purbita Saha: www.twitter.com/hahabita Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 ocean front 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 Prabita Saha. and I'm Corinna Iosie. Welcome, everyone, to The Weirdest Thing, and it is a very special episode for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is the final episode of Season 4, which is crazy. Weirdest Thing has existed for several years now. We have more listeners than we ever dreamed of, and we're so grateful to you all, and we also need a little break, so we're taking it. But we will be back in the fall.

We will let you know as soon as we have an exact date so you can mark your calendars. And I think we're ready to announce this. We are hoping to have a live show between now and then. And more information will be coming your way soon. But our favorite spot caveat in New York City is back open with tons of COVID-safe guidelines. and we are hoping to do a hybrid show. So a few select folks who buy tickets super fast. We'll get to hang out with us in person.

And as many of you want to, we'll be able to join in live virtually. So more on that soon. Keep an eye on the feed and on our Twitter, which is weirdest underscore thing for more info, because you are not going to want to miss out on that. And this episode is also very special for another reason. Corinne, our EIC is here, and that means one thing. What does it mean, Corinne? It can only mean that there's a magazine about to happen. A magazine of foot.

A magazine. There's a magazine looming. Yes, my quarterly appearance on weirdest thing, if you all have noticed, the pattern is often tied to when we have a new issue coming out. So yesterday, the 13th of July, the heat issue digital edition came out. And we knew that this one was going to feel super topical. That's why we did it in the summer. But we're now on our second heat wave in as many weeks in New York City. So it's probably about on the nose as they're going to get. But, you know, the way that we are, we like to be creative about what heat means.

So you do have your dose of how are we all going to survive without boiling to death. But we also look at other cool, hot things. the story behind the NASA probes that are going to Venus finally after like a decades long drought. And what happens when the United States used to mine a real crap ton of uranium? And now we have all of this radioactive waste. What do we do with it? So it's a really fun issue. There are some truly excellent reads in there.

If you head to popsye.com slash subscribe. It's how you get in on the action and it's there for you. and if you subscribe, you actually will get the previous issue as well and all of the digital issues that have come before it for more than 15 years. So please, please, go read it. What a steal. But seriously, we work very hard on the magazine. All three people on this episode in particular work very hard on the magazine. And we're super proud of it. I mean, it's just great. I'm biased, obviously, but you should check it out. The hot issue has incredible variety. We have like hotness as in like Hot or not, sexy times, et cetera.

We've got hot springs. We've got heat stress. That one's less fun, but important, I would say. And we figured we would all get together to talk about all things hot today in honor of the heat issue, a little amuse-boosh, if you will. Also, I am in my incredibly hot unventilated pantry recording, so it's just heat all the way down here. today. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, making a dang magazine in the year of our Lord 2021, 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, why don't you start with your tease? want to talk about buildings that can melt cars and fry eggs. Seems like a sensible thing for a building to do. They're very talented. All right, Pervita, what about your teas? I'm going to talk about how the sun is going to burn out and whether that fate is actually as cemented as astronomers think it is. Fun.

Just a light, like casual story. Mine is about the thrilling history of the hot tub. Tubbs that are hot. I haven't been

in a hot tub in decades, I think. Oh my gosh. I go on an annual New Year's Eve trip with a couple of friends and like literally our only rule for the house you Brent is that it has to have an outdoor hot tub. Some people get really, really weirded out by hot tub, and I don't understand those people. I think it's fair, like, I think it's fair for it to not be your thing.

It is sitting in basically like a bowl of soup with a bunch of other people, sometimes strangers. So like, I respect that. Not wanting that, but I love, I take baths way too often. I love being in a warm tub. What can I say? So what do we want to start with? How about the death of the sun? I don't know.

I just feel like we should kick off on that high note. Just something light. Let's get into it. Okay, let's do it. So this is a story that we did cover in the magazine and highly recommend reading it among our pages or even online. It was written by our contributing writer Raul Rao. But I know it sounds very disson.

but I see it as good news because through the reporting of this story, I learned that the sun is only halfway through its lifespan, which means we still have another five billion years before it consumes most of the solar system. See, that sounds pretty good. I feel like even my most optimistic estimates for like how long humanity is going to be hanging around fall short of that. And if we aren't around that long, if we haven't figured out a new place to live, that's like on us. We have a lot of lead time. Yeah, we just need to keep this planet alive for another few eons to see that day. I haven't seen the movie Sunshine by Danny Boyle.

I love that way. I think it came out like a decade or two ago. The timeline that is presented in that, I think, is like 2057, when the sun is, like, all of a sudden burning out and we need to send astronauts to like give it a little nuclear jumpstart. So for those of you who are planning your lives around 2057, rest assured. I'm sorry, are you telling me that Killian Murphy was not presenting genuine factual information to me? I'm sorry, you can continue on with that fantasy if you like. But the reality is, but the reality is the sun is going to keep on burning until its hydrogen core runs out, which it still has

quite a bit of. But in about five billion years, when that core starts to get low, the sun, before it gets super, super hot, it's going to cool down. And as you might know, our sun in our solar system is not really as big as far as stars go. It is called a dwarf star. So to get to that next stage of stardom, it's going to start to cool and expand a little. And that's how it gets to that red giant stage. But unlucky for us, as it grows into a red giant, it's going to consume our planet, as well as our neighbors, Venus and Mars. So, you know, Martian colony probably will not save us either. Sorry, Elon.

Sorry, Elon. And all the other billionaires who are, you know, racing. The world's most ridiculous space race, yes. Yeah, the first time I ever met Bill Nye, he was going on a rant about how he was like, People always think that Mars is going to be like the next gold rush, the next frontier. And he's like, it's not fucking California. Also, like, it takes, it just, like, you have to lean into all of our problems to get there, right? Like, it takes so much fuel and energy to bust out of an atmosphere.

And then you have to figure out what the hell you're going to do when you get there. It's, sorry, it makes me very mad. Okay. So after the sun happily consumes us, and we all become one with the solar core of the universe. That's nice. It's going to switch fuel sources, which is kind of cool. So once it moves on to helium as its fuel source, the core is going to get raging hot, hotter than it's ever been. And some estimates hold that that could be up to 300 degrees million Kelvin, which is...

even hotter in Fahrenheit. So once it moves on to helium, there's a bit of a quicker process. It's called a helium flash. So it burns through like 6% of that helium source in just a matter of minutes, which is pretty neat. But then its lifespan continues very slowly,

and it just totters toward the end of its extinction. So another few million years go by, and once it gets low on helium, it's going to start to expand again to the outer reaches of the universe, looking for more, for any remaining hydrogen or helium or anything it can use to power its very feeble, feeble solar body at this point. Once it gets to the end of that stage, it puts on a light show known as a planetary nebula. So basically it's shedding light energy that I imagine will be very beautiful, but we won't be around to see it. And then finally, it gets to that white dwarf stage of stardom where that's basically the end of the road. It's its core is super tiny, not much going on. And again, it's going to live for a couple more billion years, but it's not going to look like much. It's, you know, at the end, just pure blackness.

So lots of heat, but lots of coldness and lots of nothingness as well, which is all very interesting. And again, this kind of projection. by astronomers is modeled off what we've seen from other galaxies and other stars continuing toward their deaths. But one thing that's interesting is that astronomers can see, you know, light years and light years away to what's happening with other stars and stars much bigger than our own sun. You know, stars that start as red giants and are supposed to go out in this massive explosion called supernovas. But not all stars, even ones, you know, packed with helium and packed with energy,

follow the same trajectory, which opens up this question of, okay, is the sun even going to follow the path that, you know, has been set by many other dwarf stars? So last year, for example, there was a super giant in the Spiral Galaxy NGC, 6946. Very, very far away. Yeah, heard of it? Have you been there? So this star, I think it was maybe 25 times larger than our son. It was supposed to go out in a giant, giant hot supernova.

But it ended up just kind of collapsing into a little black hole and just vanishing. So astronomers have kind of run models against this explosion and, you know, what's supposed to be expected of supernovas. and yeah, they think that this kind of fate for a star where it just goes out with a whimper rather than this beautiful and fiery light show, it might be more common than we think. So we could wait five billion years to see what happens to our star, but the destiny might not be as set as we think. experts who are on this beat are going to continue tracking distant stars. One interesting one that even the public has had an eye on is Beteljuice. Is that how you say it?

That's a great question because obviously, you know, the instinct is to say beetle juice, but I think what you just said is more correct. I thought it was Beetlejuice, but I could be totally wrong. It's just one of those things that you realize you've been making assumptions and never been forced to say out loud. Yes. I think actually it is said Beetlejuice. It's just spelled less literally than, you know, the movie. And hit Broadway musical starring my friend.

He did start it in my heart and he was, he is on the soundtrack. It was like you just went out of your way to not say it three times. Are you frightened? Yeah, you have not said it wants. Okay. I'll take it. one for the team. Beatle Betel Beedalgease, which is a red giant itself. You can see it up in the sky, but people got a little triggered last year because it started to look faint. So there was this idea

that maybe it was well on its way to a death march. It does seem to be brighter in the sky again. So I think the most recent reports, which we also wrote about on popsci.com, was that there there was some sort of dust cloud or flare up. It still is continuing toward its death march, but it might not be as imminent as we think. So that's one that will be tracked and will give us more understanding of, you know, how red giants go out, but also how our own sun might go out.

Also important to remember that, you know, with stars like beetle betel jose, they are very, very different. distance. So by the time we're even seeing the effects or picking up on, you know, the energy waves, they are probably long gone. So you're saying it could already be dead? Bye. I mean, yeah, I didn't even... Dark.

Glad that sunshine was wrong for many, many reasons. Nuclear solutions, never the way. but That movie is a romp I love it But you know It's not It's definitely one of those movies where You know when people are like

Oh how inaccurate I'm like Oh that was not the point It's a slasher movie in space I know Wait it is Oh so one of the criticisms of it Frequently

Look I will defend this movie Until the ends of the earth One of the frequent criticisms is that it feels like the genre changes for like the last act because it suddenly turns into like a thriller. I see. But I love that. I think it's great. Well, I will write a new sunshine that spans a 5 billion and then 100 trillion year timeline until the sun is truly a white dwarf.

So stay tuned. I can't wait. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. 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.

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have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has Delta 9-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. All right, we're back. And Corin, I think you have some death ray buildings. Yes, I do. Um, So the story starts in London in the summer of 2013. This guy named Martin Lindsay parked his jaguar in what we would colloquially refer to as the shadow of a construction site in the city of London, which is sort of the historic downtown. It's really close to landmarks like the Tower of London and St. Paul's Cathedral and places like that.

So he returned to his car later on to discover that parts of it had melted. Oh, dear. Not on the list of things I worry about happening to my vehicle. Which parts? All I could find was panels, so I'm not sure. That could mean anything from like the hood panels to the dashboard. But let me get into this and I will fully tell you that I would not be surprised if it was plastic, but it is not totally out of the realm of possibility for it to have been something even with a higher melting point. Wow. Because the construction site that this car was parked across from was at 20 Fenchurch Street. It's a building called the Wauke-Tockey. And it's called the Wauke-Toki, because it kind of looks like a cartoon Wauke-Tucky.

It's this weird sort of curvy building. It's about, it's 38 stories tall. And it has this bulbous top, like an old school toy walkie-talkie. And it's not just that the top is bulbous. It's bulbous and it sort of curves in like this concave sea shape towards the facade, especially at the top of it. And so what happens when you have a big shiny glass thing that then curves is that it then, for a couple hours a day, this structure in particular, about two hours a day, creates this concentrated light on the street. It's a concave mirror just beaming sunlight and UV radiation and infrared and all of that yummy, toasty stuff straight down. Oh, no.

Architects must be stopped. It's really truly horrifying, right? So I saw a couple reports of a couple different temperatures in this zone. I saw one that was 106 degrees Fahrenheit and another that was 243 degrees Fahrenheit. Those are very different. Yes. It's a pretty big range because, you know, things like cloud cover do affect it. Like the spot waxes and wanes in its temperature, but also I'm sure that the reporter's going and like pointing infrared thermometers at the ground didn't have the world's most precise instruments. So fortunately, the developers paid for this guy to repair his jaguar, which was very nice of them.

Sometime earlier, not too long before the jaguar, parts of a van melted. like a floor mat outside a nearby shop melted a little bit. And naturally reporters got a hold of this and a guy from a place called City AM in London went and literally fried an egg on the sidewalk. A classic move. Yeah. So, okay, cool. Oops. Oops.

I can't believe that happened. So, you know, and everybody was scratching their heads. And to some degrees, so was the architect. So the architect is this guy named Rafael Vignoli. He's pretty famous. And he gave an interview with The Guardian as everybody started referring to this building as the death ray. They stopped calling it the Waki. It wasn't the Waukee talking talking.

It was Waukey Scorchy, which, sorry, guys, you can do better. But they did do better. They also called it the Fry Scraper. Oh, that's good. That is a great. So he sort of shrugged it off and said, yeah, some of our models said that this might happen. and we were supposed to have these, like, louver windows at the top that aren't like a straight pane of glass, but a little bit more almost like a blind to kind of reduce the amount of reflection.

But I don't know, somehow in development, we ended up not using those. And he also said that London isn't supposed to be sunny, so global warming must be the problem. Okay. Okay, I'll say it again. Architects must be stopped. Yes. Yes. And to be fair, like London is a pretty cloudy, rainy place, right? It sits right on the Atlantic jet stream, so it gets the crap end of a lot of weather systems. It's not generally super

sunny, but it's also like not the rainiest or cloudiest place in the world. We have more days of rain on average in New York City than they have in London. So, okay, not super sunny. So, okay, not super duper buying that. It also wasn't necessarily super duper sunny during all of these like melting and frying thing incidents. Right. It seems like you would just need the sun

to literally be able to hit the building. It wouldn't necessarily have to be like a blazing, you know. But also we know all of the invisible light, right, that comes with the sun. Right? And everything. So it's not like you don't even need direct sunlight to be burned by the sun. We know this. Oh, don't I know it? Oh, yes. I am well schooled in being burned when it's cloudy.

And, you know, maybe there's something to London is getting a little bit sunnier than it used to be. Because of global warming, again, the jet stream changes the weather patterns. Spring of 2020, London had the most sunshine days that it had ever had in the spring. like a record that it held since like the middle of the 20th century, but that even after this year, that seems to be an outlier. And also we're talking about 2013 here. Also, it's like climate change is real and a problem and it's changing the weather in crazy ways. I still think it's a bad call to design a building that sometimes may turn into a death right, even if you think it is unlikely in that particular location. So, yes, all of this. This is nuts, right? And okay, maybe we'll give him a little credence.

London isn't usually the sunny. Benefit of the doubt. Fine. London has somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,600 sunshine hours a year, but a place where Mr. Vignoli had made a building that did this before has 3,800 hours of sunshine a year. Where was that? There's a building, a hotel complex in Las Vegas called the Vidaara. Las Vegas?

Las Vegas. Vegas. And he's like, son? I don't, ooh, sun. Like, oh. So have cars melted in, in Vegas? No. So what happens with the Vidara is that this death ray thing that when you look at models of it does look like some bond villain dystopian nightmare. Sure. Where it just concentrates into like a laser beam practically from the curvatures of these buildings. So the Vidara is like almost three like nested buildings, like mid-century modern nesting tables. And this death ray creates a 10 to 15 foot patch of excruciatingly scorchingly, literally hair burningly hot temperatures on the pool deck where people are. What? There's a pool.

They'll be fine. The pool, one person put a, you know, a guest put a temperature gun on the pool. The pool was 106 degrees. Whoa. Okay. So this spot moves and they had tried to do some stuff like some anti-reflective things on the glass. But yeah, didn't super duper work. So this is like, this is, and this is all happening in 2010, 2012.

So before he designed another building that did this. And physicists actually looked at the Vidara Hotel complex and they studied it. and they modeled it and they created one group of researchers created a miniature of it to figure out just how fast this effect happens. They built a tiny little model and they put it on a little wood floor.

Within minutes the wood floor was 230 degrees. Then they said, what would happen if we switch the wood thing for like a dark color thing, like a black piece of paper? 482 degrees within seconds. So, yeah.

And like I said, they got really good at modeling this. And, you know, it's that same effect. It creates what's called acoustic surface, which is like if you have a glass of water on a sunny day and you sort of get that prismatic effect where it's casting onto the table next to it on the opposite side of the sunshine, you'll get that really, really bright stripe of light in the middle. Right.

And that's just like, again, the reflecting parabolic nature of it, just really pushing all the light into one place. it's like a laser weapon. It's terrifying. And I'm not even being super hyperbolic when I say that it is a weapon. The first time that we historically have known people to use or encounter this effect was Archimedes, circa like 200 BCE at the Battle of Syracuse, took a bunch of mirrors and used it to cook the enemy's boats. Yikes.

So very smart. though. Very, very crafty. Kudos to Archimedes. Yeah. And I actually ended up finding this because of the Archimedes story, which was cut from a story that's in the issue about something called concentrated solar power, which is basically doing this on purpose to spin a turbine.

Right. Which is good. We like that. But it's like, what the heck architects? But also they're sort of, I have a little bit. of sympathy for the situation that they're in because when you're dealing with glass structures, right, you also need to be concerned with the conditions indoors, right? That you're not magnifying the solar radiation inside and toasting it inside and then

you need a bunch of air conditioning and that's a whole other set of problems. So you got to make it so that the light and the radiation bounces off the outside of the building. But what happens is they forget that there's other sources. stuff on the outside of the building. It's not they're not architecting the street outside, Corinne. No, no, they're not. But maybe they should be actually thinking about that.

And again, these are the two big vignoli examples. The Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, people have cooked hot dogs on the sidewalk. Wow. And they had to end up working out a solution. They basically like sandblasted or sanded down the outside of the building to make it less shiny. there's a structure in Dallas, Texas, called the museum tower that not only blinds drivers, which is not great. It also killed all of the bamboo that was like supposed to be foliage helping to line the facade. And bamboo is hardy as hell. This is what I'm saying. And it's also like you have

the foliage to help offset the building and it's just, ugh, God. And so it's really, really disturbing. And it's not super well represented in building codes, right, that this is a problem. And so now the physicists especially have very sophisticated computer modeling, they're able to see just how deadly these things are. Like if you're in the death ray of one of these buildings, the radiation, which is the visible and the not visible light, can be like 12x more intense than not in the death ray. Cool.

So people like to say that the death ray thing is an exaggeration. Journalists are getting a little bit crazy. Yikes. Yeah. So now there's a contingent of physicists who are doing lots and lots of work on this and studying it and saying to the architects like, let us help you. Yeah. Is Raphael going to make any updates to his two buildings? I think he might be done.

So they did actually do some tweaks to the Vidara and the Fry Sgraper. The Vidara, it's a wonderful invention called Umbrellas. They have like a really robust awning thing that goes over the pool deck now. And the Fry Sgraper basically has an awning that shields the radiation from the top of the building. I see. Yeah. But yeah, so like I said, the physicists are just really trying to help them figure out had a balance like indoor comfort with exterior impact.

Sure. And this is, because it's not a problem that's going to go away. We don't want to bake inside because we don't want to bake outside, but if we're not baking inside, then oops, we're accidentally baking things outside. And it's just a whole thing that we just got to figure it out. Yeah. Hope it was worth it, Raphael, for those ugly awnings on your buildings down. Oh.

And also the walkie-talkie is just a, But ugly building. Oh, oh, Corinne. Not pulling any punches here. No, it's really unattractive. All right. We'll take a quick break,

and then we'll be back with one more fact. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill four-burner gas grill on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49.99. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price-in-valid May 14th or May 27th.

U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Okay, we're back, and it's time for a little hot tub time machine. Woo-hoo! I've actually never seen that movie. It's time. I guess so. Okay, so when I set out to learn the history of the hot tub,

The first, like, five pages of Google search results were all from companies that sell hot tubs, which is absolutely my least favorite genre of history article. I run into this problem a lot. But it's like, just, FYI, if you're ever looking for something like the history of hot tubs, you don't want to get it from, like, spas.com. Because it's just, like, chances are it wasn't sourced super scrupulously. and also they obviously have a bias toward creating, like, a compelling narrative about, you know, how this thing was invented and why it's important to humans. Anyway, so I didn't use any of those articles, but I had to wade through a bunch of them. And then I found this amazing Atlas Obscura article from 2015 by Rich Paulus, which made this all

possible. So thank you so much. That was really my jumping off point. So, okay. first question where do you all think the word jacuzzi comes from i want to make a really bad and nothing is coming to be is it italian for the word butt bubble um no please cut that out i beg you we did talk about breathing through our butts that's a scientific concept it's true um so actually um it is the name um

of the northern Italian immigrants who designed and popularized jets for at-home tubs, which blew my mind, first of all, because it's not a very Italian name. Everything I could find suggest it's probably changed spelling from something like yakuzy. But anybody who is Italian or speaks Italian knows that a word with like a J at the front of it is just like not done. It's not what we do. So I assume that at least when they first immigrated, this family went as the yakuzis, or yakuzis, rather, but... That sounds Japanese. Well, there is a lot of pronunciation similarity between the two languages.

Oh, cool. Okay. So they became the jacuzis at some point, as so many of our ancestors did in their very surname changes. And yeah, I'd argue that, like, there are a few surnames that have become so completely synonymous with, like, a generic product, right? I really just had no idea that there was anyone with the last name, Jacozy. So the Whirlpool Legacy begins when Giovanni Jacuzzi, born in 1855, decides he can't stomach seeing any of his 13 children lost to World War I. So he orders them all to leave Europe and, you know, find fortune where they may, and they gradually make their way to all settling in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So the family then starts to make a name for themselves as inventors, particularly the oldest son, Raquelah jacuzzi, which also confused me because Raquelah is usually a female name. It is my name in Italian, but his name was Raquelah. And he designed a new kind of plane propeller, which was wildly successful. It was used by like Charles Lindbergh, the military, everybody. And then he eventually designed an airplane, actually the first one to feature an enclosed cabin. So I was like, how have I never heard of this like super enterprising first generation family before? And that plane had several successful test flights and almost got a contract for delivering U.S. mail by air.

But for reasons that are unclear, it crashed and killed four passengers. during what was supposed to be like the final round of testing before they got their big contracts. So the same patriarch who had kept his sons out of the war said they now also had to stay out of the air. He had lost one son in this crash and that was enough. So instead, Raquel used some of the principles of fans and pumps that he had, you know, mastered for creating propellers to design a farm irrigation system. And then when he died, his brother, Candido, took over the business. But how do we get from planes to agriculture to hot tubs? I will explain.

So in the 40s, Candido's son Ken caught strep throat, and without antibiotic, strep can turn into rheumatic fever, which can cause all sorts of organ damage and even death and lots of other problems. And Ken survived, but he ended up developing rheumatoid arthritis as a child, which is obviously awful. and his doctors recommended hydrotherapy. So hydrotherapy, broadly speaking, is the use of water to treat illness, and it's usually immersion in water.

And it dates back to at least ancient Greece. Hippocrates suggested that dangerous imbalances of bodily fluids could be remedied with bathing or perspiring, so, you know, either soaking in water or being in like a sauna type situation, balance your humors, etc. And then the Romans were even more into this idea of bathing for health, and they actually famously built baths pretty much everywhere they invaded and occupied. So there are ancient Roman baths, like in lots of places that are not Rome. Hydrotherapy fell out of favor, at least in Europe, during the dark and middle ages, because hanging out nude with your buddies was frowned upon by the church. The Moors helped bring the back into popularity around the 13th century because other forms of communal bathing had

been very popular in Asia throughout this time. But their reputation would take a hit every time there was like a plague or a surge of syphilis or what have you, where people just wouldn't want to be again hanging out naked with their buddies anymore. And then from the 17th century onward, baths became this big wellness trend for the wealthy and you would actually go and like take the waters at dedicated health spas. And this kind of persisted, evolved and changed. But like, like, that's what hydrotherapy continued to be into the early 1900s. So by the time Ken Jacozy developed rheumatoid arthritis, many doctors were offering, like, indoor hydrotherapy facilities for their patients.

And in fact, there was also an extreme dark side to this, where hydrotherapy was basically used to the point of torture in mental asylums. you'll see in a lot of like period pieces about asylums in like the 19th and early 20th century where people are like literally locked in to these super hot tubs for hours at a time. It's also I read an article in the Atlantic that suggested that like the first showers as we know them were actually invented as a way to like continuously pour cold water on a patient's head.

truly awful. Any benefits were probably just because they were shocking people or exhausting them to the point of being more docile. Very glad that that aspect of hydrotherapy is no longer in fashion. But soaking for your aching joints, yeah, who can say no to that? And Candido looked at the setup at the facility that he was bringing his son to and he decided he could replicate that kind of of warm circulating water effect with a pump in their tub at home. And he did. And those pumps sold like hotcakes. And then by 1968, the family was selling a self-contained jacuzzi tub. And by the 70s, other companies were, you know, producing those acrylic shells that are the hot tubs we are familiar with today. I actually found this really awesome 1996 article in the LA Times all about the decline of the hot tub, which is really funny to me because I was like, that's like a response to like something like 1970s swinger culture or something you are precisely right um yeah this article basically argue that in the 70s and 80s hot tubs were associated with hippies and swingers and what have you um the kind of people who wanted to hang out naked with their buddies that is like what hot tubs had become known for in the 70s and 80s um and so then there were probably multiple factors, but a big one was that the atmosphere of fear and misinformation around the

early AIDS epidemic made those settings and that kind of social interaction seem really unappealing to people and, in fact, you know, became very stigmatized, even though you do not get HIV from sitting in hot tubs. I absolutely promise. This article actually quotes realtors saying that a house having a built-in hot tub decreases its value. Wow. wild. But the 1996 article does recognize that hot tubs are seeing a slight upswing because people are seeking them out not for partying but for relaxing. And it was really funny to read kind of the 1996 perspective on like the start of the wellness industry. I think it's safe to say they've made a solid comeback. We had one at my house when I was kid. It was great. Spent a lot of time

hopping from like a snowbank into the hot tub and feeling like, um, the master of the universe, you know. And so yeah, the, I guess, you know, one major question that remains is like, is sitting in a hot tub good for you? Uh, obviously you don't want to get overheated. You don't want to get dehydrated. But I did write a whole article recently about how to optimize your bath taking experience based on like the best available evidence. Um, and I'll link to that in the post for this episode on popsye.com slash weird. But the bottom line is that, like, there are certain health benefits that seem to be associated with regularly, you know, taking warm baths, but there has not been a ton of research on it. And it's really not possible

to say definitively for most of the, like, purported benefits. And things are even murkier for, like, you know, back in the day going to take the waters often had to do with being in a particular place where like the water itself was thought to be special because of mineral content or whatever. And there's even less research on that because, of course, the possible mechanisms are different for every location. But if you like sitting in hot tubs with your friends, I say, go for it. Have fun. The ANIC data says that it is very good for you. The anti-Data says it's a nice way to chill out. And we all need more of that in our lives, I think.

One myth that I've heard a lot growing up is that you get more UTIs from hot tubes. So I have a couple of thoughts on that. First of all, sitting around in a damp bathing suit for longer than necessary. Definitely a great way to get a yeast infection, a UTI, whatever. Anytime you're in damp clothes, you should change out of them as soon as possible. And follow up to that. You know, there are definitely some people who say that just like sitting in a tub more often is going to make you more prone to UTIs and yeast infections.

Again, I think this is something there's not awesome data on. But I did read a lot of stuff, you know, quoting OBGYNs and dermatologists. And it seems like it probably is mostly about. whether there's stuff in the water that is irritating to you in particular and whether that, you know, irritates mucus membranes to a point that leads you vulnerable to infections. So I would say, always dry off, always change your clothes. And like, if you regularly are in baths or communal hot tub situations, like pay attention to how your body feels. Because if your skin feels irritated, then there probably was something and they're not great for you. And it's worth investigating

whether there are safer hot tub environs for you to enjoy. That's good. It's nice. Thank you. I write about vaginas a lot, so. I was ready. Okay, so what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? For me, it's the death ray buildings.

Yeah, me too. That was just very visceral. Corinne ran away with it. I mean, I do love the Yakuzi dynasty, though. It does make me happy to know that that's someone's name. Yes. All right. Well, that is it for season four of the weirdest thing I learned this week.

We will be back in the fall and keep an eye on this feed and on popside.com and our Twitter at Weirdest underscore Thing for more information about our upcoming live show and when we'll be back and other good stuff like that. Also, if you're not a member of our Facebook group, definitely check it out. You can find it by searching Weirdest Thing on Facebook. And it's a great place to keep in touch with that. us while we are in between seasons. Thanks so much for listening. We will be back very soon. Bye. 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 popsai.com slash 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.

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