The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Superheated Falcon Poo, Banana Babies, Gross (But Delicious) Bug Goop

Episode Date: December 22, 2021

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The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the 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 share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Sarah Chodosh. And I'm Lauren Leffert. Lauren, welcome to the show. Thanks. It's great to be here.

Listeners, Lauren is a former recent Popsie intern. And Lauren, do you want to just say a little bit about yourself before we get into the show? Sure, yeah. So in addition to being a former recent Popsie intern, I am also an almost intern at Audubon News, so that's exciting. And I'm a graduate student at NYU's School of Journalism, aspiring career science journalist. Amazing. 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, et cetera. And then we 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. Sarah, why don't you start with your teas? I'm going to talk about banana babies, not the... frozen delicacy where you freeze a banana and covered in chocolate, which is apparently a thing

called banana babies that I found a lot trying to Google this topic, but a different kind of banana baby. All right. Okay. Lauren, what about you? I'm going to talk about how superheated falcon poop is like two degrees of scientific separation away from the origins and evolution of our planet. Oh.

Oh my. blown away by the falcon poop. Yeah. Always excited to hear more about falcon poop in any context, really. So my tease is that bees can make a special kind of honey using bug poop and pee instead of flower nectar. And spotted lantern fly excretions make an especially tasty goop. Wow. Finally something positive to come out of the lanternfly invasion.

Yeah. Sarah, it's been a while since I had you on. Why don't you pick our first fact? Pick it or go? Oh, pick it. Okay, great, because I was going to pick yours. I know that was a wild card. I don't really do that. No, I was going to vote for yours. Okay, excellent. Great. Okay. I literally just found a lantern fly. Like, I thought they were all gone. And then I, one, attacked my window yesterday. So I'm very interested. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No. So we're going to talk more about lanternflies in the course of this fact. I am going to use it as an excuse to give people, little PSA. Because I did actually, you know, listeners, I'll get more into this, but spotted

lanternflies, very invasive. You're supposed to kill them on site. And I have literally seen more than one acquaintance of mine on social media post a picture being like, what is this beautiful bug I'm seeing everywhere? Delightful. And then like three comments down, they're like, I have been forced. This is not delightful. I'm so sorry. They are so pretty, though. Yeah, I hate killing them, but I do kill them with a vengeance. Yeah. I had that conversation with my mom this past weekend. I, like, showed her a picture, and she was like, oh, I see those everywhere. They're beautiful. No. God damn it. They're tricking us. Yeah, we really, they've got much better PR than the USDA has right now, I would say. We need to set a, we need like a smear campaign or something. I mean, like literally. Okay. So, bees,

what are they? We don't need to get into that. they make honey by consuming a very sugary liquid, some of which goes into an extra stomach called a crop where it mixes with enzymes that help preserve it. And then back at the hive, a bee will puke this nectar into a fellow bee's mouth. This part I did not know. They puke from mouth to mouth to pass it on.

And in this fashion, they go on until it gets dropped into a honeycomb. And then they fan it with their wings to evaporate as much water as possible. So that gets it to that really gooey texture that we know and love. And then they secrete another liquid from their abdomens. There's a lot of secretions involved in the process of making honey. And that hardens into wax, which seals off the cell that the honey is in. And then it can sit indefinitely to feed future bees. I've seen it written that it takes tens of thousands of pukes to make a plastic bear's worth of honey. So that is beautiful. Something for everyone to keep in mind. I love honey, but I did recently realize it is like one of very few things that I actually can't eat.

It's very bad for my stomach. Fructose is really hard for me. So there is something kind of cathartic for me about being like so much puke is involved in the process of honey creation. No shade to anyone who's still able to enjoy it. I was going to say that we should like in addition to like weirdest thing merch, we should have weirdest thing honey. That's just like like 10,000 puke honey or something like that. Oh my gosh. I would love that. If I ever take to keeping bees and sell my honey, I would call it 10-thes-th

and puke honey. I love that. So while the sweet stuff that turns into honey often comes from flowers, that is the quintessential process, bees can munch on other forms of sugar in a pinch, including probably the waste secretions of the invasive spotted lanternfly. So, according to this awesome Atlas Obscura article by Alexandra Jones from March 2021, which I'll link to on popsight.com slash weird, Philadelphia beekeepers recently encountered a very strange honey harvest. In 2019, they noticed their hives smelled like candied bacon, and the resulting honey was like unusually thick, and it was very dark. It was like a reddish brown, and there are certain sugar sources that can make for darker honey.

but this was like quite dark. So they figured something must be going on, and a Penn State University apiculturist named Robin Underwood set out to analyze samples of this unusual honey. And she thinks the spotted lanternfly could be to blame, or, you know, maybe blame is not the right word because it sounds like this honey is pretty delicious. So the spotted lanternfly, which is this, as we've discussed,

heartbreakingly beautiful and absolutely ecologically devastating little leaf hopper, which is native to China, was first seen in Pennsylvania in September of 2014. It's since spread throughout the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, and these bugs, they feed on dozens of species of plants, including a lot of food crops, and they cause a lot of damage in the process. In addition to all the nibbling, they also secrete the sticky waste, which is basically, like poop or pee, but, you know, bugs are, it's not a one-to-one comparison to humans, but this is the waste product that is left over when they digest their food. And it's called honey-dew. And it tends to attract molds that kill the affected plants. So, sorry, they call it

honey-dew? They call it honey-dew. Like the melon? Yeah, yeah, like, do the taste, well, because here's the thing. I also was like, that's already a thing. But it, I think this name for it is quite old. And it is like, it looks like dew on the plants. In fact, I think a lot of times stuff that I thought was like sap on trees is actually bug shit, apparently. Whoa. All right. So it's like this glistening, you know, sticky layer on the outside of. a plant. And it's very sweet if you if you care to eat it, I guess. If you care to lick the plant. So honey, honey do. That's kind of beautiful actually. It is, but unfortunately it also attracts mold that kills the affected plants. So if you're wondering why we have to hate lanternfly so much, it's because they don't just eat things into oblivion. But the stuff that they don't finish eating,

they then like help cultivate deadly mold on it. So, um, real bummer. Honey do, everything beautiful is bad. Honey dodo indeed, Lauren. Thank you. Um, so it seems likely that Philadelphia honeybees,

at least in the months leading up to that 2019 harvest, we're munching on spotted lanternfly honeydew. Penn State's Underwood found traces of a bitter chemical called aelandthon, though I'm realizing I did not look up the pronounce. for that, but it is a bitter chemical. And it was in this distinctive honey sample. So it's produced by a tree that spotted lanternflies are known to favor. It's called the Tree of Heaven, which as it so happens, is also an invasive species.

Great. Yeah. So we already know that honey made by bees who feed on the nectar of the flowers of this tree. it's like pretty typical in terms of color and viscosity. It has notes of grape and passion fruit. The honey-dew honey was more like a dried fruit or a fig with like caramel notes and the scent of dried leaves. I haven't tasted it,

but the general consensus is that it's got like a lot of depth. There's a lot going on and it's very different. Like if you had like your average store about honey next to this honey, you would be like, is this even honey? And this isn't too surprising because honey made from honey do of aphids. So like, affids are known to produce a lot of, you know, sticky crap on trees. And bees are known to sometimes eat it and make honey with it. And that's already quite popular.

And it's known for being very thick and earthy and woody. I didn't know there were like honey Somaliers. I didn't know there were people like whose job it was to come up with descriptions of honey that involve like leaves. Yeah. No, there are. I mean, look, I think like pretty much any food that like turns out differently based on the botanicals involved or like the process of preparing those ingredients, like there's going to be some some school of experts somewhere or at least some hipsters at shops in Philadelphia saying it tastes like forest floor. And yeah, it seems like there's a pretty strong consensus that at least, so something I learned in the course of. of researching this is that like there are actually at least two distinct kinds of honey.

And one of them is honey do, which is confusing because it's honey made from honey do. And it's referred to as honey do. I feel like we should have two different names for those two different things. But anyway, it's apparently already well known that when bees use this bug excrement as their sugar source, the resulting honey is like fundamentally different. even on the chemical level, there's been some research on this really fundamentally different from honey made from flowers, which makes sense because it's still sugar from plants, but it's had this extra step in between in a bug's digestive system. So it's like, you know, twice digested.

Yum. Like twice baked potatoes. Exactly. Yeah, refried beans. Just cook it twice. It's better that way. Yeah. So yeah, bees are known to snack on honeydew when it's like a more plentiful food source than flower nectar. So we don't know how often they'll go for spotted lantern fly pea and create this intoxicating brew. It could be something that becomes more and more common as these bugs spread. Or it could still just be something that kind of like randomly happens to some hives somewhere sometimes. Of course, bees can get sugar from all sorts of sources, and these all affect their honey's properties, just to go through a few fun examples. In 2012, some French bees got into an M&M factory's waste vats, and they produced a blue and green honey, and the articles coming out of France at that time are pretty hilarious. I am sorry for anyone who lost their honey crop that year, but a lot of indignant quills. quotes from French beekeepers being like, well, it tastes like honey, but I would never call it honey because how dare. It's from M&M's. Wow. So stuck up. I would love blue honey. Right. Well, I feel... From the M&M region of France. Yeah, exactly. No, otherwise it's just

sparkling honey. But yeah, there was a lot of people apparently could just not sell their their honey that year. And then the M&M factory had to start like covering their their waste to keep bees from getting into it. But like it makes sense because bees will just go for the easiest food source and a literal like bucket full of sugar water is very easy. Okay. So here's another fun one. Bees that feed on rhododendron nectar produce honey containing a neurotoxin that induces lightheadedness or even hallucin. hallucinations in small doses and can actually cause seizures or death in excess. It's largely known as mad honey and is most common in Turkey.

And it's said that when Roman soldiers invaded the Black Sea in 67 BC, their enemies scattered mad honeycomb along their path and then attacked them while they were intoxicated. Whoa. What? Yeah. That's wild because like rhododendrons are such a common like plant to just like have. of in suburban areas. I feel like, I get, I mean, I guess there's not enough rhododendrons that it's like just rhododendron honey, but that's wild. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting too because like a lot of

plants that we think of as being dangerous, um, it's not actually their flowers that have like the dangerous chemical properties. So for example, you can eat poison oak honey and it's totally safe. Um, because, you know, it's, it's like the, the oils on the leaves that make poison oak give us a nasty skin reaction. So, and there are a few other examples of things like that. So, like, there are some plants that if bees really go hog wild on a single nectar source and that nectar has dangerous properties. I'm also not sure if it's every, like, species of rhododendron flower that this applies to.

I mean, mad honey does primarily come from turkey, so presumably it's more of a thing for certain varietals than others. But yeah, like for the most part, if you're keeping bees, you don't have to worry too much, like that they're bringing back poisonous honey. I don't think it's something that comes up very often. But, yeah, if anyone ever offers you hallucinogenic honey, you should believe them. You should assume that that honey is going to mess you up. Are people, like, making this intentionally in Turkey?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. In fact, in researching it, I found at least one like Etsy seller claiming to sell it. I would not recommend that. Etsy's gone next level when you could get hallucinogenic honey. I mean, I am all for consenting adults enjoying, you know, consciousness, expanding activities in moderation and safely. I don't think that buying hallucinogenic honey on Etsy is the way to do that. There's other better ways to hallucinate people. Yeah, yep, yep.

Like, make your own bad honey, I guess. I don't know. That feels like a lot of work. Yeah, it seems a lot of work, a lot of upfront investment. And also, I really cannot speak to the safe dosing thereof. So do your research, please. Yeah, and then there's like more straightforward stuff, like all sorts of plants that if, if bees are around, they'll affect the flavor of the honey.

Eucalyptus produces a hint of like menthol taste in the honey, which I have never gotten to try, but sounds like it might be, you know, refreshing if you're sick. Coffee honey tends to be very dark and rich. Alfalfa apparently creates a bit of spice. and most free blossoms produce honey. That's kind of fruity. Though apparently a lot of orange blossom honey is just artificially flavored. So, you know, read the back of that label.

So circling back to the spotted lanternfly, I'm not going to stumble through a description of this bug on the air because I'm not an entomologist. They're spotted. They're very pretty. But you should give them a Google and keep an eye out because unfortunately, again, these are bugs you want to kill on site for the sake of all. plant life in your area. Also, they are very good at jumping.

So, like, you really got to get them the second you see them. If you take a second to admire them, that's how they get you. Do not hesitate. Yeah. Anyway, on a lighter note, the spotted lanternfly honey is called Doom Bloom, which is great. And at least at the time of this recording, you can buy it on the Philadelphia Bee Company website. I'll link to that on the article for this episode, which you can find at poptseye.com slash weird.

Wow. I need to get a sample of this because I have a friend who collects weird honey, just like, which I'm going to be honest until this episode, I didn't fully have an appreciation for how different it could be. The only honey I've ever tried that was like, oh, this is a totally different thing is like manuka honey. But who has the funds to buy manuka honey? Yeah, I was thinking about your B-Fax episode. from last season in this. And I was like, I don't think we got too much into flavor.

We just talked about manuka honey. But yeah. What's a manuka? Great question. A manuka is a tree. It's a tree that's native to New Zealand. So it's super expensive because it's like one of the only honeies where you have to test it legally. It has to have like a certain, there's some chemical that gets into the honey.

It has to be from the manuka region of France. that's a joke just to be clear for folks it is not from the manukeration of France there is no manucuration of France yeah they have to like test it so it's like it's fancy honey and it's really really dark and very thick and very very expensive and I think most of the stuff that you buy in the US is like crappy but if you fly all the way to New Zealand you can still buy it for a lot of money yeah also a big upfront cost in that sort of investment. Yes.

Many hours on a plane. I feel like doom bloom is just an extension of like the spotted lanternfly PR team's genius though. It does make them sound really cool and delicious. Yeah. Well, and like definitely in researching kind of weird honey flavors, like the big takeaway is that like the most expensive honeies are the ones that are, I don't know, they're couple where for whatever reason the nectar source is either rare or requires a lot of like weird

logistics like chestnut honey is very um coveted because because of chestnut blight in the u.s. there are very few chestnut trees so just like you you are unlikely to come across a um a beekeeper who has access to you know enough chestnut trees for there to be chestnut honey um And similarly, there's like honey from Heather is apparently I did not write this down, so I'm going to be very vague about it so as not to misrepresent it. But in like the highlands where the heather is, the blooming of the heather doesn't coincide with like peak bee season. and like the bees are already pretty dormant by the time the heather is blooming.

So the beekeepers have to kind of, I don't know if they perk up the bees or they'd like get some heather to wave around in front of them. I don't know. Give them a little adderall, get them up an atom. Exactly. But whatever they have to do, which I have not researched, so I cannot speak to, they have to like make it all happen because the bees aren't just going to like wake up one day and be like, oh yes, it's time to go eat these flies.

flowers. So yeah. This was my next question was like, to what degree do people like, I don't know, like all these weird honeies? I'm just very curious how many people like, is it just like, oh, I happen to live near a grove of this thing. So if I kept bees, I could make this very valuable honey. Like, are people going to start cultivating spotted lanternflies to make this very weird honey? I don't know. Oh gosh. I hope no. I hope not. Please don't do that. I don't think it's that good. I mean, there are lots of good honeies in the world. We don't need this. particular one. Yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a lot of it, the reason these like special, unique honeies tend to cost a lot is that like you have to either put in a lot of work or like

be in very lucky circumstances for them to come to be. So, yeah. Well, and that's why I think so much honey is just branded as like wildflower honey because it's like, you know, we have bees and they go out. And so sometimes the flavors are more interesting than others. But, you know, those people aren't promising. Like, this is definitely blueberry honey or, you know, whatever. Does bees harvesting the spotted lanternfly honey do make it any less harmful to trees somehow? Oh, that's a good question. I think the bees are, their mouths are very tiny.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably not because I don't think they, they're eating enough of it. But I don't know. Maybe. That would be a nice silver line. adding here in addition to the delicious honey. Anyway, those are all my honey facts for today. 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?

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I'm eyeing mood.com's delta 9 THC buttercream caramels because in addition to not being able to have THC, I also can't have dairy right now. So the idea of having a caramel that also me mellows me out and sends you to Dreamland sounds very nice. And speaking of fun edibles, mood.com has delta9 THC freezer pops. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code weirdest. That's code weirdest for 20% off. Okay, we're back. And Sarah, what banana babies?

If not the ones in my freezer. Which banana babies? What banana babies? Okay. So, we're going to go back a little bit to the beginning of the 20th centuries when bananas were a really exotic fruit. I feel like this is a thing we've talked about on the podcast before. Yeah, we talked about their introduction at the World Fair, where people like paid the equivalent of like $20 a banana and ate them. out of foil with a fork, even though they literally come ready to be eaten with your hands.

They come in a handy package, but yeah, you got to make them fancy if you're going to pay $20. So, yeah, so, you know, in the early 1900s, bananas were an exotic fruit. They were, like, after the introduction at the World Fair, they, like, became more and more common and became more widely available. And because of the combination of being a little bit exotic, but also, like, people could buy them, bananas kind of became this like superfood because like in much the way exactly like assailles now or like goji berries or like whatever insert whatever like fruit slash grain that like America that you feel superior for exactly you got to go to whole foods to get it maybe something like that

so bananas for like that if whole foods existed then bananas would be the thing that they're like look at this super fruit they're like look at this superfoods they're like was actually an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that noted that bananas were, quote, sealed by nature in practically germ-free and germ-proof packages. Also, just crucially for it to have super food status, it has to be something that lots of people all over the world have been eating since the beginning of time. Yes. And that white people had just come across at a world fair.

It has to be a thing that, like, wealthy white people are like, hey, other people eat this food, and they are clearly living better lives than we are. And so we must go and take it. And predictably, like, I mean, bananas now, you could just buy bananas. They're like 40 cents at Trader Joe's or something like that. And so someday I say I'm sure we'll be like that. But yeah, there was this like, there was an astoundingly widespread sense that bananas were somehow like curative. in no really particular way, just like they must be good. They must be healthy and good, and they come in germ-proof packages. So, yeah, and this idea was so widespread, like, even among experts, that some doctors took to trying to cure their patients' various ailments with bananas. And one of those was Sidney Haas, who was a pediatrician who was working in New York City at the time, and he focused especially on researching celiac disease, which was like, so now we know celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder.

I have celiac disease. I'm just going to put that out there up front. I'm particularly interested in this because I have it and I also eat a lot of bananas. So now we know it's an autoimmune disorder and basically like your body's immune system has decided that the gluten protein is a threat. But in the 1920s, nobody knew that. They just knew it was some kind of nutritional disorder and that it was pretty deadly. So 30% of kids who had celiac died of their celiac disease back then. Yikes. And that's because they basically wasted away. Like, if you have celiac and you eat gluten, which like bread being incredibly common, lots of kids ate lots of gluten, and it just destroys the lining of your intestines and you can't absorb nutrients

and then you just, you waste away. Like, you basically die of malnutrition. But Haas had recently gone to a town in Puerto Rico with, I guess, a bunch of people with celiac disease. It's like unclear to me why he was just like randomly visiting this town in Puerto Rico. But he noted that there were people with celiac who ate a lot of bread who had tons of health issues. But the banana farmers, who mostly ate bananas, did not and concluded that obviously bananas must cure celiac disease. Ah yes. That does. Clearly. I love, I love, I love. I mean, we still have this problem today, but I feel like especially in the earlier history of science, people just really ignoring all confounding variables. Yeah, it's astounding to me how much of statistical probability and like correlation

doesn't equal causation happens. Like the idea that you'd go to some random town in Puerto Rico and be like, ah, the people who eat mostly bananas do not suffer from this disease and therefore it must cure celiac disease. But that was his conclusion. And so he came back to the US and he started giving his patients who were like, to be fair, very sick like on their deathbeds and like had, there were no options. Like these these kids were just considered to like probably they were going to die. And if they didn't die, they were going to live like very sad, malnourished lives. And so to be fair to him, like everyone was looking for any kind of solution. Yeah. It wasn't bananas in the end. But like, the thing, the thing was, he came back. He came back. He started giving his patients a very strict

diet of bananas and milk and broth and a little bit of meat, but I think mostly bananas, like an astounding number of bananas at the time. And the results were really miraculous. Like all these kids who previously were wasting away, they like, they went into remission and they started gaining weight and they like grew at a normal rate to the other children. And they were saved. Like it was, there's the famous story about when insulin was invented that like all these kids in the diabetic ward who were in what we now know are like diabetic comas were given insulin and they all miraculously woke up. Like it was like, But a slow version of it essentially were like over a couple of weeks.

They suddenly just got better and they were just like healthy kids again. And then of course that was just fueled that bananas were some kind of miracle food because like look they cured these children. They gave them gluten-free carbs. They were so hungry. But yes, sure, bananas. Yeah. Another physician tried to cure diabetes with bananas. It apparently did help people lose weight.

but I have to imagine that this poor doctor maybe just told them you could eat only bananas and like anyone would lose weight on that diet. And I don't know that it actually did anything for the diabetes. But anyway, Haas went all in on the banana diet. He was like, I have cured celiac disease. Like, this is it. Celiac disease is not a problem anymore. And a lot of other doctors also thought he had cured celiac.

But as Rachel just pointed out, what he had actually done was just remove gluten unintentionally from these children. diets and that is why they got better they could have eaten like literally any other fruit or just literally anything except for wheat barley or rye and they would have gotten better but um unfortunately that also meant that a lot of hoss's banana babies which i don't know who coined the term banana babies but uh apparently like the banana babies themselves liked that phrase um but it meant that once they got older they a lot of them reintroduced wheat into their diet because their doctor told them that he had cured their celiac disease and that they could just start eating wheat again. And so they did. And those people just spent their whole lives thinking

that periodically they just had horrendous gastrointestinal issues and that there was just no reason. And like literally in those people's medical records, it got noted that they didn't have celiac disease anymore. And so nobody ever said like, hey, perhaps bananas did not cure you. So, like if you were diagnosed with celiac prior to the 1950s, you went back to eating gluten, and then you just found out later that, like, actually none of that was true, and you've just been poisoning yourself your whole life. Oh, dang. Yeah.

Not, I mean, in the end, a happy ending for the banana babies, because most of those people live to, like, see the gluten-free diet. But anyway, the doctor who actually discovered the real culprit was gluten was Vilum Dicca, Dickey, I don't know, it's Dutch, and despite living there, I never learned to pronounce it properly. But he was a Dutch pediatrician who was living in the Netherlands during World War II. And his patients also died at really high rates unclear. I tried to look up whether he tried the banana diet. Couldn't figure that out. But his patients were doing really terribly, so I guess maybe not on the banana diet. And we're just unresponsive to medical

interventions right up until the height of World War II. So the Netherlands having been like inviating didn't take it over very early by the Nazis were like they were mostly safe in terms of bombings but what hit them really hard was famine essentially like famously the Dutch resorted to eating tulip bulbs to stay alive because they didn't have enough calories and a very strange side effect of the lack of food was that all of these kids with celiac disease suddenly got better oh wow because there was no bread which was otherwise a pretty large component of the diet so while the rest of the country was starving to death, all of this pediatricians patients just like got better, all of them suddenly. Like the mortality rate went from roughly 30% to zero. And it prompted him to realize that

maybe it was not bananas that could cure celiac disease, but perhaps it was the bread that they were eating. So he is now credited as it's not a cure. Like it's a treatment. You just stop eating the thing that puts you into pain. And he went on to promote the gluten-free diet as the like currently still only treatment for celiac disease. Haas did not like that his banana-based glory was being taken away from him. I can imagine. He did not love looking like a little bit of an idiot in the process. And as far as I can tell, until he died,

he insisted that bananas were definitely the cure for celiac disease and insisted that the gluten-free diet was all crap. So not a great man in the end, even though I guess he did try. and those those are the banana babies significantly less fun than bananas covered in chocolate which I do yeah when you mentioned you were going to do this topic Sarah I did also Google it and I like it was like oh there must be something really interesting about the person who first decided to cover bananas and chocolate and it's much more tragic than that

yeah I wish I were here to just talk about bananas covered in chocolate although they are gluten-free so oh nice bringing it all back around I know Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Okay, we're back. And Lauren, tell us about some falcon poop, please.

Cool. Yeah. So in 2016, this new mineral called Tendunculite was just, described and accepted into the international mineral associations list of official minerals, which alone isn't like a super big deal. New minerals are discovered all the time. But tounculate doesn't form like deep in the earth under intense pressure over millions of years or whatever.

It forms when a European kestrel, which is a type of falcon, poops near a burning coal fire, usually like a mine or a dump. So the bird poop gets heated by the fire and the gas from the burning coal reacts with the uric acid in the falcon feces to create this new compound that like officially fits the definition of a mineral, which according to mineralogist Daniel Hummer is a naturally occurring crystalline substance with a definite structure and makeup. And that that like naturally occurring bit is, um, is important. So Tenunculate was like first discovered on this mountain whose name I certainly can't pronounce Mount Razvim Chor. I don't know in Russia by some

Russian scientists, and it had been submitted for a visual classification like a bunch of times, but it wasn't accepted until 2016 because the scientists had to prove that this process of falcon poop becoming crystallized mineral could happen without human intervention. So they had to find a place on earth where coal deposits had burned hot enough and nearby enough to bird poo to make tenunculate without human involvement. It couldn't be near a man-made mine or a coal dump or a human started fire. And to be honest, I am not totally sure how that part happened. But according to Daniel Hummer, it did.

The Russians proved that this process had or could theoretically happen naturally. And so the mineral got into the books. But that is not the most exciting or interesting part. It doesn't end there. Because Tenunculate is kind of this wild example of like a much bigger paradigm shifting idea in geology and mineral study, which is that life on Earth has happened. had like a huge impact on the minerals on earth and vice versa. The reason I found out about the falcon poop and the coal fires is because I was talking to

Daniel Hummer about his work related to mineral evolution, which is this concept first proposed in 2008 by this other mineralogist, Bob Hazen, who had been Hummer's PhD advisor. That part's probably not that important. But when you think of evolution, maybe you think of like natural selection or Galapagos Finches or like Darwin or DNA. but it's not just living things that evolve. At its core, evolution just means increase in complexity, going from one thing to a few different things.

So Bob Hazen had this idea that this huge amount of mineral diversity on Earth evolved or went from a small number of things to a big number of things, in part because of the interplay between life and geology. And to get more specific and give an example, lots of minerals are like the product of chemical reactions. minerals form because chemicals mixed together under heat and pressure and like new things come out of them so chemical reactions need components right and before there was life on earth earth's atmosphere had no oxygen in it like at all and oxygen molecules are key to this whole category of chemical

reactions called a redox or oxidation reduction reactions and the first life forms on earth were these little photosynthetic bacteria that like used air and light and water to create energy. So they photosynthesized and started adding oxygen to the oceans and air. And eventually you end up with like a fully oxygenated atmosphere with air circulating around, unlocking a whole bunch of new possible chemical reactions to create more minerals. This is called like the great oxygenation event. And it mediates according to the hypothesis of mineral evolution, this huge explosion of mineral diversity, all thanks to Earth's first life, these like really unimpressive looking cyanobacteria.

So this is the biggest single event that mineral evolution points to, but the basis of this theory is that there are lots and lots of ways big and small that living things and rocks are altering each other's environments and determining each other's evolution or co-evolving. Again, circling back to tenunculate, this crystal structure that like could not exist without birds pooping near a fire. And the flip side of this is that, like, lots of life forms need minerals to survive and evolve, too. So if you think about, like, the iron in your own blood, that had to come from somewhere. And it means that early life probably evolved in an iron-rich mineral environment. So as part of their research on mineral evolution, Hazen, Hummer, and a bunch of other scientists put together the carbon mineral challenge. It was a project running from 2015 through spring of 2019 that amateur mineral collectors and professionals alike could participate in. The researchers predicted a bunch of new carbon minerals and places they might be found based on their assumptions about this co-evolution of life and rocks.

And then basically like dared everyone to go out and find them. That's so cool. Yeah. And so they were kind of looking for like these missing links. They had predicted like this whole map of like where you would find. carbon stuff because of geological events in history. And the focus was on carbon because similar to oxygen, it's central to life on earth. It shows up in a lot of different organisms and mineral structures.

And the project ended up identifying 31 new minerals, which included Tenunculate, which is how they found and recorded eventually this like Falcon poop mineral. But there's certainly like a lot more left to do. And it's a whole new field of research that's pretty young. young. So there's a lot of interesting research happening there. He's in, the guy who invented this idea or came up with this hypothesis, says that, like, previously no one in the field of geology really put much time into the context of how minerals were forming or how they were changing the environment around them. But his hope is that by,

like, embracing this idea, more people will get involved in mineral study and we'll learn a lot more about the Earth's history, the origins of life, and what the future might look like because according to him like human life on earth and this seems really obvious at this point is like heavily impacting everything around us we're changing the atmosphere completely we're changing like water chemistry and so we're impacting the mineral record um and the goal i think at this point in the mineral evolution field is to kind of figure out what that means for the future of both like the physical geology of earth as well as like all the living things that inhabited In Hazen's own words, quote, we need to understand minerals to give us the story of our planet.

So, yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you. I didn't say it. He did. He was an incredibly convincing person to talk to. But you got the quote. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's so cool.

Also, like, I love, I don't know. You really do think minerals as being things that, like, form. in the earth and I think of rocks as being like so far removed from living things that you kind of forget that like fundamentally it is just organic stuff smushed for a long time and maybe some minerals are organic stuff smushed for not a long time. Just hanging out by some hot coals. Yeah, it's just like the byproduct of stuff happening around what. whatever forms. I don't know. In talking to these mineralologists, they, Hummer in particular,

got, like, very passionate in describing, like, how the people first trying to decipher the origins of life went wrong in all their experiments because they were, like, heating up water in, like, a high oxygen environment, and they, like, introduced some amino acids. And he was like, but there were no minerals. How is life supposed to form without any minerals at all? And I know scientists are always like very passionate about their specific thing that they do but i think he had a point i think like obviously we're surrounded with minerals all the time and there's constant feedback totally that is beautiful also minerals are like a much broader category than i thought like the definition you gave i was like well i feel like a most anything could be a mineral that's such a huge

bucket that's why when you play 20 questions it's animal vegetable or mineral almost everything that's not an animal or vegetable. Yeah, I learned a lot about minerals in looking this. And like, it's similar, again, to a lot of fields of science where, like, people argue about it amongst themselves all the time. Like, Amber, I think, is not considered a mineral, and it's like a whole, it's a whole thing. It was for a while, it was for a while, I should actually probably fact check that. But I think, I think you're right. I mean, you should.

but I think you're right. Yeah, there is like a long time where anything associated with living things, like for its mineral formation couldn't be considered a mineral, but then that has like slowly started to shift and now it's like really starting to shift. Another wild thing is that they're using this idea of mineral evolution to like study space minerals too, which I was super confused about because in theory a lot of the space minerals we're studying are like forming in the absence of life. But apparently you can just kind of apply the same consequences.

concept to like anything that might be impacting mineral formation. It got very esoteric and weird. Bob Hazen showed me like a bunch of these graphs. He's trying to figure out how to like organize the mineral family tree, kind of like how we have evolutionary trees for living things and animals. And so far he has like these like central events in like a sunburst thing that links to other sunbursts. It looks kind of like a neural network.

So that's where we're at right now. very cool so what's the weirdest thing we learned this week oh mine is none of our actual teas is mine is the honey-dew that's that's definitely the weirdest thing i learned yeah i think i think i would agree with that it also made me want honey so great excellent i'm glad i have made everyone crave um a thing i can no longer eat without having excruciating stomach pain. I guess excruciating stomach pain was kind of a meta-narrative. I was just going to say, somehow we both ended up talking about things that we can't eat.

Good issues. A psalis metanarrative. You also shouldn't eat to nunkulate for what it's worth. That's true. Great. 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 rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

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