The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Space Squirrels, the Most Beautiful Youth, Glass Brains

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

John Green joins the show to talk about how Everything is Tuberculosis -- which is coincidentally the name of his new book. Plus, Lauren talks about sending squirrels into space, and Rachel explains how brains can (very rarely) turn to glass. Check out John's new book: https://everythingistb.com/ 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 an additional 20% OFF the @honeylove Holiday sale by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST #honeylovepod If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech 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 Feldman. And I'm Lauren Lefford. And I'm John Green. John, welcome to the show.

Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled. Well, you and Hank are some of our most frequently requested guests from fans. I have to, it's really my own fault. Since I had Bill Nye on, everybody thinks I just have a group chat with all of their favorite nerds. And they're like, why don't you just have the Green Brothers on? And I'm like, well, they're very busy.

They don't know them personally. I'm actually not that busy, but Hank is, Hank is. Well, we're thrilled to have you. And I understand you have a new book to tell us about. I do have a new book coming out. It's called Everything is Tuberculosis. It's about the history and present of tuberculosis, not just through a science lens, although the science lens is super important to me, but also through the lens of social history

and anthropology and lots of other lenses. So I'm excited for the book. It comes out on March 18th, and yeah, it's exciting. Awesome. Well, congratulations on that, and we are excited to hear some weird stuff from the book, I hope. But let's get right into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little teard. about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, 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 in a, you know, casual, non-competitive way. Lauren, welcome back. What's your tease? Thank you. It's great to be back.

My tease this week is squirrels could be the key to getting human, into deep space. What can't they do? I can't wait to hear more about that. It makes me wonder whether it's like squirrel intelligence or squirrel meat. Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. Squirrel farms on Mars.

That's the future. Yeah. That's what we need. That's what's been missing. Yeah, I got to whisper that in Elon's ear. It's going to change the entire course of the federal government. Change the game. John, what's your tease?

My tease is that the fella who helped invent the industrial revolution also tried to cure tuberculosis. Hmm, a busy guy. My tease is that today I'm going to talk about how if you're very, very lucky, parts of you might turn into glass one day. Oh. Yeah. Fingers crossed. I want to hear the squirrel stuff. Yeah.

The squirrel stuff is, that is the tease. to beat. So Lauren, I think you got to kick us off. Okay. Yeah. I hope I didn't oversell it. But the squirrels are pretty incredible. So I hope they, I hope they keep you engaged listeners and the people in this video conferencing room, whatever this platform is called. Okay. So I'm not quite a weirdest thing regular yet. So I don't 100% know the drill. But is it okay if I start with a question? Like, can I ask you about the question to start? Okay. So can each of you just like, very briefly, a couple words. Tell me what you imagine when you picture a hibernating animal.

Like when you think about a hibernating bear or groundhog, what is it doing? I feel like it's actually sort of turning around in its den just like yawning and then going back to sleep. And then like an hour later kind of turning around and it's den again and yawning again. So just in a perpetual state of trying to like settle down and get comfy for a big one nap. That's just the, that's what I imagine. Maybe that's because that's how I sleep. Like, not particularly restfully. Not very well.

That's what I'm, it can't be great sleep. So that's my imagination, but I have no idea. I, as usual, I am like the wrong person to do a like straw man pull on because all I can think about is that one of the facts I've been working on for weirdest thing is something about how bare. is apparently like stuff their butts with moss before hibernating, which I'm still working on fact checking, by the way, but people in the internet say that they do. I did not know that one, but that's intriguing to me. TBD. There's a reason it's not my fact today. But yeah, so right now when you say hibernating animal, I'm just like moss in butt. That's all. But again, I'm usually the wrong person

to ask these kinds of questions too. I think it's beautiful that you can take us down a completely different path, a mossy butt path as opposed to where I was trying to get us to go, which was closer to John's answer, which I think is most people's idea, is that hybrid-nating animals are sleeping, right? Like, that's what we're kind of taught at an early age in elementary school education. It's what I thought up until a couple months ago that all hibernating animals are just taking like a big long snooze. The bear has on some flannel pajamas.

It's like curled up through the winter, literal sleepy time tea bear stuff. The problem is that it's basically totally wrong. Hybernation is way more complicated than just a long nap. So much is happening. Happenating. So much is happening in a hibernating animal's body. It's like a complete transformation of brain and organ systems. It is closer to death than sleep is what a few scientists I've interviewed told me.

What a metal phrase. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, like, completely unprompted, two separate scientists said that exact sentence, it is closer to death than sleep. And there's a lot about it. We still don't understand. But some really, really big research players are interested in figuring it out, namely NASA, the European Space Agency, and a handful of other private aerospace companies. Why, you might ask, because learning how to get humans to hibernate could be fundamental to compelling humans into deep space. For a whole lot of reasons I plan to explain, not just the super obvious ones, but first we have to talk about squirrels, not the ones that live in trees, but the ones that live underground. So there's a bunch of different species of ground squirrels, a lot of which are hibernators and in like a particularly extreme way. So one species, 13-line ground squirrels, they live across North America in the prairies from Texas,

up into Canada. They can hibernate without any food or water for more than half the year, like up to eight months at a time. And like nothing. No calories in, no liquids in. While they're in hibernation torpor, their metabolic rate crashes by as much as 95%. Their heart and respiration rates go down to just a few beats or breaths per minute. Their brainwaves plateau, totally flat, negligible activity. Quote, it's even less activity than a state is what Kelly drew, a hibernation scientist at the University of Fairbanks in Alaska told me. And kind of like indicative of all of this biological craziness, their body temperature falls below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. And a different species, Arctic ground squirrels, their body's actually super cool.

So their temperature falls below freezing, like their core body temperature. Ice crystals don't form though. Science is still trying to figure out why and how that's possible. But despite not actually being frozen, a hibernating ground squirrel does feel like it's just been chilling in your freezer. I got to hold one at Yale Medical School lab run by Elena Gracheva. So I was holding this like 13-lined hibernating ground squirrel. And the very first thought I had was this is a squirrel popsicle. Its little body was like it was curled up.

It was like almost completely rigid. I was wearing a glove, but it was so cold I could feel it through it. It was like holding a big, heavy or big for an ice cube, but like small for an animal. Squirrelsicle in my hands. It was kind of mind-blowing. So all that happens, like these squirrel bodies basically almost entirely shut down. They're teetering on the brink of life. And then suddenly, still in hibernation, the squirrels become active and alert.

So kind of, John, you were right about this, that there's some back and forth between like sleeping in air quotes, torpor. and then activity. So the squirrels, they'll have about two to three weeks at a time of complete torpor, like, at that, like, comatose stage. Sounds like me the last couple weeks, actually. Yeah. Fair. And then suddenly they're, like, active again for one to two days at a time.

They have these sudden bursts of activity. But still, they don't get hungry. They don't get thirsty. They don't eat or drink. And they don't leave their burrows. So there's still, like, this whole suite of biological suppression happening. but they like come back online and then they go back into Torpor again. One scientist told me they still don't know 100% why this is happening,

but in her view, it's kind of like why you have to start a car every so often in the winter. They just got to get like all their systems back in sync and online and then they can go into Torpor again. And throughout all of this process, which goes on for months, a few things are notably not happening. So they're not really losing muscle density. Wow. They maintain their kind of squirrel swole throughout this entire process. They lose a lot of weight, but it's almost entirely like the burnable fat that they were purposefully storing for that purpose. They start hibernation in kind of a quasi-squareled diabetic state because they had to bulk up so much.

Yeah, they were looking. Now they're going to cut. They're going to come out. And that diabetic state, it like completely abates without leaving any lasting harm. harm to their bodies or pancreases, their little squirrel pancreases. They don't incur any brain or organ damage from like the severe deprivation. And in fact, their body systems might be like recovering and they might have some organ regeneration going on during all of this. Research indicates they're like not aging. It's like it slows to the point where they're aging. Yeah. Sounds good. It's

starting to sound pretty good. And the squirrel species that hibernates, they live a lot longer than the ones that don't. We're talking, these are rodents with like nine-year lifespans versus arboreal tree squirrels that don't hibernate that live maybe like two to three years. So it's not really sleep, but it is kind of like the ultimate and restorative rest. And like you said, Rachel, it sounds pretty good, right? It makes you wonder like, hmm, what if we could do that? And, you know, again, if you're thinking that, you're on the same page as NASA, who has been floating the possibility of human hibernation since the 1960s. And so now we're getting to the space travel part. There's a lot of difficulty in getting people out beyond Earth's orbit for long-term space travel or planetary

habitation, becoming an interplanetary species. A lot of those challenges could be potentially addressed by harnessing the power of squirrel hibernation. So for one, you know, there's the issue of time and aging. If we're sending people on missions that take years or decades to complete, the idea of putting their like bodily decline on hold while in transit, obviously appealing. But then there's kind of like the less apparent difficulty of transporting all of the resources human need for survival. So again, squirrels underground, they go months without any food or water. Food and water is super heavy. Transporting it takes a lot of fuel. One way to cut back on all of that might be putting astronauts into some sort of like torpor-esque reduced metabolic state.

And at the same time, the process could help with some of the health issues that astronauts experience in space. So muscle wasting is a huge issue at low gravity. Astronauts, as it is, even just out on the International Space Station, have to exercise hours a day to prevent their bodies from disintegrating, even on short visits of just a couple weeks. But what if they didn't have to? What if they could just chill out in hibernation torpor and their muscles would stay perfectly intact? Another big one is cosmic radiation exposure. And this is actually what the European Space Agency is kind of like most interested in at this particular moment. But traveling in space means getting continually bombarded with x-rays and gamma rays at levels way higher than what we experience on Earth.

That makes astronauts at increased risk of cancers. But again, hibernation could help because body systems slow down so much that cell and DNA replication also slow down. So there's just way fewer chances for radiation to damage cells genetic codes when an animal is in torpor. Yeah. So you could knock out like four or five difficulties of human space travel with just one squirrelsicle. Thank you for laughing. I love the phrase in torpor. I want to be in torpor more often.

Yeah. Same. He wants to sleep when you could be in torpor. Yeah. You could enter. You could almost die. but not quite. But then emerge from it stronger with all your same muscles in a slightly stronger pancreas.

Yeah, sounds dope. Have they considered simply letting the squirrels go to space? Great question. I think they might do better than us. You know, we should maybe consider just letting the squirrels take the rings on all of it. Or did squirrels deserve Mars? Squirrels wouldn't be a bad next sentient species to come after us, you know? Like, I often think it'll be raccoons,

because they almost have opposable thumbs, which seems like a massive advantage. That's so true. But maybe it'll be squirrels. Maybe we'll have smart, smart squirrels being like, squirrels of the future at their squirrel colleges examining human studies, human history, and just being like, well, they made some miscalculations.

Yeah, they'll have the humans locked in the, like, room-sized freezers where they can poke in products. And I just, I do think squirrels, I mean, I don't know about opposable, but they do have their little squirrel hands. I think they could do some intricate research with those. Yeah, they could at least do some knitting. Oh, yeah. Oh, tiny squirrel sweaters.

Squirrel's making tiny squirrel sweaters. How big are these squirrelsicles? You said it was like a large ice cube or a small frozen animal. But like, is it fit in your hand? Yeah. I would say like single, again, this is audio. So me showing something on a screen is not helping anyone listening to this. but it's like a, my hand is pretty small for a human hand,

and I was comfortably holding one in like kind of one and a half cupped palms. So, yeah, I would say they're honestly like, because they don't have the huge bushy tail. So it's like if you took a tree squirrel and you just like chopped off the bushy tail, you'd have about the size comparison. And then they make themselves very compact in the torpor state. So they're like really as curled up as they get. possibly be. Right.

Higher density than I would have imagined in such a small animal. Okay. Do you want to hear a little bit more about squirrel hibernation? Absolutely. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Or I guess about trying to get people into squirrel hibernation state.

So, yeah, there's this idea among a certain subset of researchers that if we study this, we could maybe do it in people. And as with basically like every bit of science that starts to veer sort of into the sci-fi, we're a little, we're kind of far for making it happen. Lots of animals hibernate, including a few primate species. There are at least three species of dwarf lemurs on Madagascar that are known to hibernate, which one scientist told me means that, you know, the blueprint for hibernation is somewhere in our primate bodies. But nobody really thinks we're going to be able to safely induce complete and total. reversible torporate humans anytime soon. Instead, the more realistic aim might be something like a drug cocktail that triggers metabolic suppression. So already when we go to sleep, our metabolic

rate falls by about 15%. And so the question is like, what if we could double that? And the science is, it's getting closer. A handful of labs have really been digging deep with hibernating squirrel research. They're pioneering new neuron imaging techniques to get a better sense of how brains are actually changing on like a region by region neuron by neuron basis to coordinate the whole hibernation symphony. They have been tracking how hormone shifts contribute to hibernation and kind of what chemical messengers are responsible for all of the stuff that's happening in a body of a hibernating animal. Some research from Kelly Drew, the Alaska professor I mentioned before, has keyed in on this one type of cell receptor as a target for triggering torpor.

So if you selectively stimulate or block these specific receptors, in certain organs. It can either induce or interrupt torpor in the squirrels. And then Drew's lab replicated this in rats and pigs and shows that, and they showed that the same sort of method could lower body temperature, even in these animals that don't normally hibernate. So it is all, it's kind of coming together. And I think kind of the takeaway is if you shoot for decoding squirrel hibernation, you might land among the stars. Yeah, I pre-wrote some, like, goofy bits. Thank you. That's a good line. For your polite laughter. And I just like, even if it doesn't, even if hibernation research isn't

really going to get us to Neptune in our lifetimes, caveat, it could, it could offer a big biomedical boost on Earth processes like organ transplantation, open heart surgeries, stroke recovery, all things that kind of require cooling the human body, better. ways to do that safely and effectively can make a big difference. And then Elena Gracheva's lab at Yale, part of what they're working on is this kind of like malleable appetite suppression activation feature of hibernation. You know, for people undergoing treatments like chemotherapy where appetite becomes super suppressed and it's really hard to eat and maintain healthy body weight, if we could figure out how squirrels get their appetite rev back up during hibernation, we could maybe improve

quality of life for people undergoing certain cancer treatments. And it's really a testament to how much fundamental biological research can kind of uncover and unlock. You know, we all know about hibernating animals, but I think for me personally, I just went around assuming that I knew what it meant until I learned just a little bit more. And there's there's so much lurking beneath the surface of hibernation and you just have to start burrowing like a ground squirrel. Oh, nice. Well done. I love that. That was great. I didn't prepare any puns. I didn't realize that part of the show. I can try and help you out.

All right. Thank you. Thank you in advance. Inject some puns. Welcome or unwelcome. Pons are always welcome, please. Come on. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some 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. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland. And I can't

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While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Okay, we're back. And John, tell me some stuff about tuberculosis, please. Oh, I mean, with pleasure. How much time do you have? So it's important to remember that even though we think of tuberculosis,

or at least I think, thought of tuberculosis as a disease of, like, British Romantic poets, not as a disease of the present, that it's actually still the deadliest infectious disease in the world. It's curable. It's been curable since the 1950s, but it still kills over a million people a year because we've done a really poor job of getting the cure to the people who need it. But in 18th and 19th century, England, as England was industrializing, the death rate from tuberculosis was astonishingly high. Like one guy referred to it as the frightful tuberculization of humanity, which I've always liked as a line. And about one in three people in early 19th century England were dying of tuberculosis.

And the statistics were fairly similar in the U.S. as we industrialized. And what we now understand is that industrialization is really closely associated with tuberculosis because tuberculosis thrives in crowded working and living conditions like tenements and crowded factories, and so it was just the perfect recipe for tuberculosis. We didn't know that at the time. So at the time we thought TB was probably inherited. that like it was a disease that ran in families. And we also thought that it went along with this personality called spesitica,

which is one of my favorite, I don't know if it's Latin or Greek, but one of my favorite foreign language phrases. And that was this idea that like there was a certain personality type associated with having tuberculosis. And women especially, this was seen as being very beautiful people, but also in men, like having tuberculosis made you super hot. And also it made you super sensitive. So people who got tuberculosis tended to be very,

very alive to, you know, the beauty of the fluttering birds and whatnot. Sure. Like John Keats. Is there like a Buzzfeed quiz that I could take to find out? Totally. You probably have Spesitica, you know. I just from this story about the squirrels, it showed a lot of empathy for the squirrels, and I feel like that's revealing.

So you probably have it. But so this, so, so, so that's sort of the milieu in which we're talking here is, is a world in which TB is called consumption because it consumes the body so completely. It causes the, it causes intense stomach pain and so it's hard to eat, but also it wastes the body away the disease itself does. And so TB is called consumption and it's believed to be inherited and it's associated with hotness and kindness and generosity and being super sensitive. Now, you may have heard of James Watt.

We know about James Watt because he created so much power in the world that we actually named a unit of power after him. So we have certain a number of watts in our light bulbs and whatnot. And James Watt was responsible for really important innovations around the steam engine to make steam engines much more efficient so that we could get, you know, fueled both get more coal because we use steam engines. to clear out flooded coal planes, but also to use coal to make steam engines that could make everything from manufacturing clothing to now, you know, manufacturing the squirrel space shuttles that we're going to build for the ground squirrels of the future to go into deep space. They're tiny suits.

They're little tiny suits. All of this is possible because of the Industrial Revolution, right? Like blueberries in January is a result of the industrial revolution. The extent to which the industrial revolution has changed our lives is impossible to even get our heads around, I think. But James Watt was a huge part of that. He also did other things. He also came up with a new way of bleaching textiles, which was great news because before that we mostly bleached textiles with human urine. Right.

Which isn't the best, in my opinion. Rachel, you said it right. Like you just like knew that. Yeah. There's probably been on a previous episode of the pod. Yeah, I definitely, I talked about the like the urine industry that existed back when it was our like best bleaching agent. Yeah. There was a urine industry.

Yeah. Wasn't the best work you could get, but it was work. I did get a press release in my email the other day that the like first half the subject header was just liquid gold. And I like didn't open it. Yeah. Maybe the urine industry is making a. come back. Oh, God. I wouldn't be that surprised. It's all natural, I suppose. But anyway, James Watt came up with a different way of bleaching textiles. He also came up with this fascinating

machine that copied sculptures. On one side, it would sort of like map the sculpture, and then on the other side, it would recreate the sculpture using, it was really cool. So he did a bunch of cool stuff, but then in the late 18th, early 19th century, he abandoned all his other work because because he became obsessed with trying to find a cure for consumption. He was like, we have got to cure this. And he thought this partly because his daughter, Jesse, had died of the disease when she was 15 and partly because his son Gregory was now sick with the disease. Gregory was a fascinating character in his own right.

He was very hot, apparently. One of his friends called him literally the most beautiful youth I ever saw. Wow. Which is, you know, that's nice. Yeah. Who among us wouldn't want to be literally? literally the most beautiful youth that someone ever saw. I guess not if it meant that you had to die of the consumption.

That's true. Was it the TB? Right. What made him so beautiful? Was it natural or was it Mabelene? So anyway, James Watt is trying to figure out a way to deal with consumption. And the idea that he comes up with actually makes a ton of sense, not for reasons that he knew, but it does make a ton of sense.

His idea was that you need to decrease the amount of oxygen available to the the lungs by feeding the lungs more nitrous oxide by like forcing nitrous oxide into the lungs. Now, that did not work. The contraption that he invented did not successfully treat tuberculosis, but he was on to something because the bacterium that causes tuberculosis is highly aerobic. And so still, to this day, sometimes in real emergencies will collapse down a lung so that the bacteria can't get access to oxygen so that it starts to die away. Oh, wow. We used to call it in the early 20th century, we used to, this surgery was done all the time

in sanatoria, and we would basically collapse a lung down to, quote, unquote, let it rest. Not that dissimilar from putting it in torpor, I suppose. Yeah. But then how do you manage the fact that humans also need the oxygen? Yeah, so the other lung would be left inflated. and then the idea is that the one lung would do all the work. James Watt didn't understand that humans need oxygen in order to be good, I don't think. I don't know that for sure, but I'm pretty sure he didn't know that or you wouldn't have known that.

This is a science podcast, though, so someone's going to correct me. It's a catastrophe. I'm going to walk back what I just said. I don't know James Watt's situation re-oxygen. Unfortunately, not to end the story on a bummer, Gregory Watt ended up dying of tuberculosis because his dad's contraption didn't work and there was no other treatment available at the time. We didn't know about antibiotics. We didn't know about the fact that tuberculosis is caused by microorganisms.

And so his son ended up dying like about 75% of people who develop active TB and can't get access to treatment. And James Watt was really never the same after he lost his two kids, as you can imagine. it was devastating for him and for his family. So I don't like to end on a bummer note, but unfortunately, the story of tuberculosis is full of bummers. Yeah. I mean, makes sense. This is, this doesn't have to be in the final cut if it's not. But I've always, I am unclear on what, like, the timeline and progression of a tuberculosis infection is.

Because I have in my head this image of people spending, like, years in sanatoria, taking the air upstate or whatever. Right. Yeah, no, that's a real. image. People would often, like, I write in the book about this woman who went into a TB sanatorium when she was about three years old and didn't leave until she was 16, and lots of people never left. So it's common for the disease to take years to make you really sick, and then once you're really, really sick, maybe months or even years to die. It is usually, not always, but usually a slow-moving disease. And the reason for that is really interesting.

which is that TB has this thick, fatty cell wall. And so as a result, it has a much lower replication rate because it takes forever relative to bacteria time to make this thick fatty cell wall. And so TB just replicates more slowly than a pathogen like E. coli. Like I think TB doubles about once per day in lab settings and E. coli doubles about once every like 20 minutes. Sure. Whoa. So it's a vastly different.

kind of bacteria. And as a result, we need vastly different ways of treating it. So, like, if you get a strip throat infection, you take seven to ten days of antibiotics, and you're probably cured from that infection. If you get TB, it takes four to six months of antibiotics, even if you have relatively drug-sensitive TB. And then if you have a form of TB that's resistant to some of those drugs, it can take up to 12 or even 18 months of antibiotic treatment to be cured. Wow. And can I just keep asking a couple of I do. I mean, this is literally my jam. This is what I think about at night. How is it transmitted? Like, did James contract TB from his children?

He didn't, which is weird. And that's one of the reasons why it took us so long to figure out that TB was contagious. Because sometimes, like Louis XIII died of tuberculosis. Lots of wealthy, famous people did. Charles Dickens called it the disease that wealth never ward it off, which is especially ironic, given that today it's a disease that wealth pretty much. entirely wards off. But it was weird because, like, Louis the 13th would die of tuberculosis, but then, like, his wife and his children wouldn't. Or in the case of Louis the 14th, his child died of tuberculosis, but he never got it. Why does this happen? Well, we still don't totally understand that. TB is extremely infectious, like, or in the sense that if you go, a year of untreated tuberculosis will lead to between 10 and 15 new tuberculosis infections.

But there's a lot at work. For one thing, the vast majority of people who get a TB infection will never become sick. They have what we call latent TB where the body finds a way to control the tuberculosis by surrounding it with white blood cells that we call tubercles, which is one of my favorite words. It's where we get the word tuberculosis from. And so in most people who contract TB, the disease will lie dormant for a lifetime. It's only about 10 to 10% of people who eventually become sick with what we call active TB. And once you even, once you have active TB, the disease's course is extremely unpredictable. Sometimes you can die within a few months. Sometimes you can live with it for decades or even for a lifetime.

Yeah. So still still a lot to learn. Yeah. I mean we are we are pretty far down the line of our understanding of tuberculosis after living with it for 300,000 years. But we, there's still a lot that we don't know and a lot that we don't understand. We don't understand why some people get active tuberculosis. We know there are risk factors for it. Like malnutrition is the biggest risk factor. About half of the 10 million people who will get sick with TB this year are also malnourished. Diabetes is a big risk factor. HIV AIDS infection is a risk factor. But there's still a lot we don't understand about how tuberculosis spreads, why it becomes active, when it becomes active. But we know that we can prevent and cure this disease. And we know we can

could live in a world without tuberculosis, and I wish we would choose that world. But right now we're kind of choosing the opposite world. Yeah, very, very relevant and prescient. Yeah, I mean, just in the last couple weeks, we've seen a huge pullback in the overall amount of funding for tuberculosis response, which is especially catastrophic because one of the reasons that it's really important to continue your treatment, like through those four, six, or 12 or however many months, is because if you have a pause in treatment, you're much more likely to develop drug resists.

So in the book, I write about one young boy who's really at the center of the book, this kid named Henry who's trying to survive drug-resistant TB in Sierra Leone. And the reason he developed drug-resistant TB in the first place is that there was a pause in his treatment. And now we're pausing the treatment for untold number of people for tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people. Oh, gosh. Is it both unconscionable, you know, at a human level and also just a public health nightmare?

Yeah, a really bad all around. really bad public health decision to put us in a situation where we have much more drug-resistant tuberculosis floating around and we're giving the bacteria so many new opportunities to develop resistance, including developing resistance to our best tools against it, our newest tools against it, which, like, I try not to be an alarmist, but that does freak me out because a world where we go back to the early 20th century when my great-uncle died of tuberculosis, when tuberculosis was was killing so many people. In the early 20th century, there were almost as many hospital beds for tuberculosis patients as there were for all other diseases combined. I do not want to go back

to that world. Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, Lauren, were you going to say something? I was just going to say bleak. Yeah, like I said, I don't mean to be a bummer. No, it's, yeah, I'm just imagining a world where that's true. And then also we have circulating H5N1 pandemic. Yeah, yeah. I just want to emphasize that My book is super fun and funny. But it does. It's a real light. It's a beach read. It is, it is.

I tried, I tried to make it as much of a beach read as you can make it while still being about tuberculosis. Yeah. Well, if anyone can do it, it's, it's you. So a light, but impactful read on a huge public health issue. Can I ask one question that is not about tuberculosis, but is about the. sculpture copy machine. I saw you wanting to be like, wait, freeze frame. Tell me about the sculptures. Like, it was like a mechanical contraption that could translate a three-dimensional thing on one side into a replica on the other side. That is exactly what it was. Wow. So you can actually see this at the Science Museum in London. You can see this incredible sculpture making machine. I just looked it up on the internet just now. And it, it, it, it,

It was basically, yeah, on one side. Let me see if I can get a picture of it so that I can actually describe it for you. What I'm picturing is like one of those like desk toys where you press your hand into the pins and you get a, you know, make a hand shape on the other side through the pins. Yeah, but but this this machine also carved the sculptures. It also carved the copy at the same time. So on the one, on the one hand, it would be looking at sort of negative space. And on the other hand, it would be creating positive space. It's called, he called it the equal sculpture machine.

But like this is, this is stuff that we struggle to achieve even with like complex robotics. Well, I want to be clear that this was not a great sculpture copy machine. So. So you're saying, yeah. Don't, don't picture a 3D printer. Okay. I'm still in. No, no, no.

James Watt was an amazing, amazing genius. And the fact that he abandoned his work to focus on tuberculosis during the crisis in his family, I think, is a real testament to his love for those kids. Yeah, absolutely. And the importance of the illness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

We're going to take one more quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connection stays strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now, that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today.

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which is definitely the kind of thing I love to talk about and may have even talked about on Weirers thing before. It peaked in like the 16th century, but does still exist. And basically people start to believe that they're made of glass and could shatter at any moment. But that is not what we're getting into today. We are going to talk about how you can actually turn into class. or at least parts of you can. Body goals.

Yeah, body goals. Right. It's just the existing beauty standards weren't already unrealistic enough. Now I've got to become glass. Yeah, from glass skin to literal physical solid glass. Body. So back in 2020, researchers described some very unique remains

from a victim of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. And I think these remains had actually been found in the 60s, but people are still actively investigating specimens from Mount Missuvius. And there were these glassy black fragments. We're talking like, you know, maybe a couple of centimeters at most in some pieces even smaller than that. That they pulled out of this unfortunate Missuvian skull. And back in 2020, they were like, we're pretty sure that these are brain matter, even though they kind of look like obsidian.

So that's cool and interesting. And they speculated that the brain went through a process called vitrification, which is where extremely high heat followed by rapid cooling can turn a material into glass. Unsurprisingly, some people were like, you can't just say that somebody's brain turned into glass. You don't know that. That's sort of rock by somebody's skull. So we're going to get into what they have found in a more recent study. But first, like a little bit about sort of what we mean when we say this is glass.

When we say that something either fully or partially becomes glassy, we just mean it's forming a non-crystalline or amorphous solid. And if you're like, oh, like no big deal then. I thought we met glass, glass. First of all, that is what glass is. of all, this would be a big deal because it would mark the only known instance of an animal's tissue being vitrified. There are some rare known instances of maybe plant matter being vitrified, but organic

materials being vitrified in general just is not considered very common. Mostly because it's like what has to happen is that things have to solidify before crystallizing, which is very hard for water. So if you're made of mostly water, that pretty much rules out vitrification in almost all circumstances. So is the difference between glass and a mineral just that minerals are crystalline solids and glass isn't? Yeah. I mean, I don't know that that's the only difference. But like what makes a mineral become glass is the change in the structure.

So yeah. Okay. Because there's, I, the, my very first weirdest thing appearance, I, like, talked about falcon poop becoming mineralized and, like, turning into tenunculum and how that, like, changed the entire course of how we thought about planetary evolution. But, so I've heard of poop becoming mineral, but never brain becoming glass. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, sort of petrification, like something becoming stony, way more common. Got it, got it. Glass hard to make, especially when there's water involved. Right. And so yeah, usually when people talk about vitrification, it's because of processes that, you know, we carry out using a lot of energy and materials that aren't full of water. Like in ceramics, you know, there are different ways you can make ceramics non-porous.

A lot of times things are glazed to make them impermeable, which is really important for making food safe objects because otherwise like water and bacteria and stuff can get in there. So like porcelain and bone china are examples of vitrified pottery. We're basically, you know, the way that they're fired sort of ups the ratio of like glassy structures versus non-glassy structures to make it non-porous. Also, you know, we see this fun fact in candy making. You know, if you cool sugar slowly, you'll get like rock candy, you'll get crystallized sugar. But if you cool it really rapidly, you can do other cool stuff like cotton candy.

So sort of glassy. So cotton candy is glass? It's like fiberglass. Yeah. Yeah. That's like why it looks so similar to fiberglass is that it's sort of these thin strands of glassy sugars. So I should be eating the insulation in my home.

No, very bad. Don't do that. And there's also a couple of things we do that we call vitrification. might have heard of the vitrification of nuclear waste. You basically like mix the spent nuclear fuel with like glass making materials like silica, and then you can turn it into an inert glassy thing that, you know, you don't have to worry about it leaching into anything else. And then also now when people do IVF, generally speaking, eggs and embryos are flash frozen with vitrification so that they don't form ice crystals that can damage the cells. So anytime you

hear people talking about cryogenics, they're talking about vitrifying those cells. So there are, in fact, many instances where we turn stuff glassy, but it requires a lot of work. It's very tricky to do. And this is, you know, supposedly an instance where nature did it for us. Is everything vitrified, like, the hard, shiny texture we associate? Like, do embryos and IVF, like, become hard during that process? That's such a good question. And I don't have the answer to that. But I do know that the cells are, they're in a glassy state in terms of being solid without

being crystallized. So I guess probably yes is the answer. But also we're talking about, you know, such tiny objects that I probably doesn't come up much sort of wet there. I guess the idea that they have a texture, like I couldn't feel it anyway. But it's wild that that's reversible. Yeah, yeah.

Takes a lot, you know, took a lot of research to figure out. But unsurprisingly, the success rates are much higher when you use sort of a vitrification process than the other freezing processes that came before. Because again, you know, the big thing you're trying to avoid is cellular damage and water crystallizing is, you know, bad news bears when it comes to trying not to damaged cells. So in this new study on this guy from the Vesuvius eruptions brain, they started

by like analyzing the heck out of this crumbly glass to both confirm that it was a brain and figure out what it took to make it all glassy. And so first of all, on the proving it's a brain front, they looked at what made up this glassy. material and they found mostly carbon and oxygen and other things that brains are made of, like proteins and fats. So that was very exciting. But then what was really cool is that when they used, you know, really high-powered microscopy on the brain, they found really well-preserved brain structures like neurons and axons. And that really ruled out like other known natural brain preservation instances, like suponification, which just talked about on a previous episode.

I don't think anyone actually looked at this like crumbly rock and said, I think this is a soap brain like from a bog body. But still, I think the point was there was really kind of unprecedented level of detail in the brain structures. They were able to find, you know, looking under very high powered microscopes, which supports the idea that this was like, a very rare special preservation event. And then they also tested it by heating it up in different ways to show that it acted like a glass. And it did. So that was very exciting.

Again, we're getting closer to this is a brain and it's made of glass. And once they were satisfied with all that, they decided to try to figure out how this happened. So they were looking at how the material changed at like. like different heats and being heated at different speeds. And eventually they landed on almost a thousand degrees Fahrenheit as being the fictive temperature, which just means the temperature at which material will turn into glass. So that told them, you know, if you want a human brain to turn into glass, you need it to be at about 510 degrees Celsius, which is almost 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Though, like I said, it also has to cool down really rapidly, so rapidly that it bypasses the normal crystallization process. But one thing that was interesting about that temperature threshold they found is that it actually ruled out the pyroclastic flow of the eruption as causing this. So that's that stereotypical rush of gas and rock and ash, the like big, you know, big scary cloud tumbling out of an eruption because it wouldn't have actually gotten hot enough. And even more importantly, maybe it would have lingered too long to create this like rapid cool down effect.

So we know we're pretty sure this is a brain. We're pretty sure it turned into glass. But how did it happen? Luckily, they have an idea. That's so wild though. Yeah. It's absolutely crazy. Did they replicate this?

replicate this? Have they made glass brains in labs now? I don't think they've made glass brains in the lab, but I hope they'll start. So researchers were already pretty sure that there were multiple so-called deadly events on the day of Asuvius erupted, and there had already been theories about a really hot cloud of ash sort of sweeping through before the pyroclastic flow actually arrived. There was one study in 2010 that actually suggested that this like, blazing hot ash that was like hot enough to like melt objects, probably killed most of the people who died, which is, you know, how we sort of got the very evocative remains of people

in some cases sort of still going about their daily business or, you know, being in bed when this happened, which is what happened to the guy whose brain turned to class. He was chilling in bed. So these scientists think that a hot cloud of ash, like really, really hot, around a thousand degrees or higher, briefly surged through the place that this man was sleeping. And then as it dissipated very quickly, the brain also cooled extremely quickly at a rate of about a thousand degrees Celsius per second. So like instant. Instant. Yeah, exactly.

Like it came and went, which is really wild to me. I definitely want to see more research on sort of the dynamics of that. But, you know, apparently it could have been done. That just, it feels that like even if it feels like even if you made a hot brain and then put it in a bucket of ice water that it wouldn't cool that quickly. Yeah. It's like half a second of cooling to get below, like to get the 500 C heat gone. Exactly. Was it really windy?

Like how did that happen? Well, it does. Was it like snowing? No, it was summer. So that's also, I think, a big question left to answer. But the thing is we know that whatever happened to this guy's brain was weird, even given the set of circumstances that he was in. Because there have been about 2,000 bodies unearthed in the area. And this is the only time we've seen any signs of this, let alone, you know, anything that we can investigate further.

further. So it's very, like, I don't know, I've covered a couple of things on weirder saying that come from, like, the Journal of Forensics where it's sort of like a weird, like, final destination style death where the case report is just like, wow, so many things had to happen for this to happen. And I feel like this is sort of the, this guy's sort of the original, like, that's wild. This will never happen again. What happened to everyone else's brain? Well, that is a great question. And, um, They were probably just cooked in a way that did not lead to them being preserved along with their non-soft tissues.

Because another thing that they think the sort of like perfect symphony of factors that led to this guy's brain being vitrified is that almost immediately after this rapid heating and cool down, then the pyroclastic flow arrived and he was buried in. in the like ash and rock of the paraclastic flow. And if it had been closer to the fictive temperature of the brain, it probably would have messed things up. It probably would have just kind of like melted the brain. But it was just cool enough, but it was like, you know,

100 or 200 degrees cooler than the ash cloud that had just come through. That instead it just sort of covered him and made his body more likely to be preserved. And a reason they think that, you know, we didn't see large parts of this guy's body or even his whole brain turned into glass as this, you know, wild set of factors came together, is that it took the protection of his skull to allow some small part of the brain to go through this, that like the skull protected the brain enough from the temperature surge that maybe just like the little. little most innermost part of the brain didn't instantly cook and was able to go through this process while the rest of him, you know, went through what a body more typically goes through when things are suddenly excruciatingly fatally hot. So basically, this is a wild thing. It'll never happen again. It happened to this one guy. Never say never. Yeah, I know, never say never say never. I have a question about that. Yeah. You began both your tees and this bit by saying

if you're exceptionally lucky, your brain might turn into glass. And I just want to push back on that a little bit. I'm not sure that you could qualify this person as exceptionally lucky. That's fair. That's fair. Relative to the other 2000 plus people around him, I would say, a cool thing happened. A cool thing, a rare... Really hot and then rapidly cool thing happened. Yeah, it's really hot and rapidly cool thing. Yeah, but it's true.

This is obviously not actually a lucky event, but it is very lucky for these scientists who are very, very excited to figure out how this could have possibly happened. What I love about this is that they have figured out, like, what circumstances allowed this to happen, and it's still sort of not enough. They're like, they're still, like you said, like did a breeze come through exactly the right moment.

Clearly, this was even weirder than just the way this volcano erupted and the way the human skull works allowed this to happen. Clearly, there was like a Rube Goldberg machine of circumstances, many of which will probably never know. But it's cool that it happens. It can happen. Your brain can turn to glass. There's a chance.

I'm glad you clarified it wasn't the whole brain. because initially I was like, oh, man, a few centimeters of glass. That's kind of a dig at this guy. Whole brain just a couple bits. But I'm also bummed that it's not the whole brain because I was envisioning that it would be like a really cool like desk toy object. Yeah. Glass brain.

Totally. It does sound like it would be like a very beautiful, the sort of thing you would get at like a curio shop in New York City for thousands of dollars. A conversation starter. I will say I'll say. I'll link to more info on poptide.com slash weird as always, and there'll be some photos. And it does look really cool, very zoomed in.

Because it just looks like volcanic glass. It's not brain shaped, which would obviously be even cooler. But apparently, you know, the researchers have noted it's very crumbly, it's very fragile, even just like in getting the samples and handling them, they've like broken apart a lot. So it's possible that there was more of like a respectable chunk of recognizable brain in glass form at some point, but it was damaged by the time we got there. Or maybe it was truly just like this tiny, tiny little bit, which would make sense given how apparently absolutely bananas unlikely this whole process was.

But yeah, that's the story of the glass brain from this guy at Mount Vesuvius. So something to hope for if you end up being studied by archaeos. you know, thousands of years from now. I'm just going to root against that outcome overall personally, but I... Yeah, that's fair. I hope we have archaeologist a couple thousand years from now. That'd be a huge win. Yeah.

Yeah. I would donate my brain to glassification if that's what it meant. Yeah. I mean, I always tell people I'm working on my bog body. I'm ready for somebody. I don't even need there's the reason for the study they're doing to be super compelling, Just like bog me up, baby. I'm best.

The thing about being a bog body is you do get to keep your hair in kind of like an incredible and luscious way, I am, which is pretty pream. There's a lot of upsides. There's just the one major downside. Sure, sure. Of being a body. Yeah, but you're going to be a body eventually. Right.

No, no, but that still seems like an undesirable outcome to me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like just because it's inevitable doesn't mean that I'm thrilled about it. Yeah, no, that's fair. That's fair. Why didn't, I mean, I feel like I should know this, but why didn't everyone who was in Pompeii at the time of the Vesuvius eruption not just turned to ash? Like, isn't that like hotter than a cremation oven sort of temperatures? So I think a lot of people were probably kind of just turned to ash or at least destroyed really quickly.

But one of the reasons scientists are so interested in the victims of Vesuvius is that it was just such an extreme event that exactly where you were at any given moment had. a really big impact, not just on how you died, but what happened to you afterwards. I think a lot of people, what they know about Vesuvius kind of begins and ends with those, again, super evocative images of people who just fell where they stood and were preserved there. What you're seeing when you look at those bodies are actually plastered cass, and those come from people who were killed by the rushes of hot ash and gas that I mentioned, which caused instant death from thermal shock in some cases and suffocation in others, and also covered those people in layers of ash, which then cooled down and hardened faster than the body's decomposed.

So that left behind these really eerie negative spaces in the shape of those people. And then in the late 1800s, an archaeologist started filling those cavities with plaster, which seems kind of like a wild thing for an archaeologist to decide to do. But it did make these really interesting and spooky casts of those victims. But then some people who were further away or, I don't know, I think maybe just happened to avoid those blasts of hot ash and gas for who knows what reason, maybe the way the wind was blowing. They were killed by falling debris. And some were even killed by earthquakes that happened later. So a lot of those folks were trapped under rubble in their homes and perhaps not exposed to as much heat or ash.

So that made their preservation process very different. And then you have some people who were trapped in their homes as temperatures surged. Or in one case, there were a bunch of people who were in these clusters of boathouses, possibly because they were trying to escape the city. And those buildings basically turned into ovens. And there's a lot of debate about exactly what happened to their bodies and how quickly, because the heat was so sudden and extreme. But the general consensus is that their soft tissues were destroyed very quickly.

We do still see a lot of skeletal remains from them, and scientists still aren't totally sure why some of them aren't totally charred. Again, it kind of speaks to the very specific thermodynamics of this incredibly intense event that happened. It's obviously pretty gnarly, but it's kind of surprising after all these years how much scientists don't know. There's a lot of science still to do. So, yeah, it's very cool stuff or very, very hot stuff. hot and then cool. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Cold squirrels, hot brains. Tuberculosis. We had it all today. Yeah, Lauren, when you were talking about safely, rapidly cooling cells, I was like, well, I'm about I'm about unsafefully and rapidly cooling cells. Maybe the squirrel scientists and the archaeologists at Vesuvia should, uh, should collapse. They should get together. Yeah, they should. Yeah, there's some overlap for sure.

Figure some stuff out. John, thanks so much for coming on today. this has been great. Would you remind our listeners what your book is called so that they can go find it? My book is called Everything is tuberculosis and it's been so great to be with you. Thank you for giving me the chance to be on a podcast I enjoy so much. Thank you so much. That means a lot. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, along with Jess Bodey, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff.

If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos.