The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Taxidermy Robots, Talking to Dolphins (and Aliens), Methuselah the Fish

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Laura Krantz returns to discuss how talking to dolphins may help us communicate with aliens! Plus, Rachel talks about dead spider claw machines (and other robot taxidermy), and Chelsey talks about the oldest fish ever. 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 Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  Here's a special, (limited time) deal for our listeners to get you started RIGHT NOW, Get 55% off at https://Babbel.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m. 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 Feltman. I'm Chelsea B. Coombs.

And I'm Laura Krantz. Laura, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you back. I am thrilled to be back here talking about weird things with all of you. Amazing. Listeners, if you don't recall, Laura has been on before talking about Bigfoot, et cetera. And you're back with us today because you have a new book. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that before we get into the show?

Yeah, totally. So the name of the book, it's called Is There Anybody Out There? And it is a middle grade. So this is kids ages roughly 8 to 13, nonfiction book about all the ways that we're searching for extraterrestrial life. And it's based off of the second season of my podcast, Wild Thing. And the goal is to try and help kids figure out science fact versus science fiction. And also, you know, maybe help the adults in their lives a little bit, too. because I've seen a lot of crazy stuff lately about alien mummies out of Mexico. And it's like, getting grip. Love that little guy. Yeah.

Yeah. He looks totally real. Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah. He looks like he's been on a Zembek a little too long. Yeah. He looks like he's been coated in powdered sugar is what it looks like.

Yeah, I did get kind of frustrated with humanity when that guy was giving his. his testimony and so many people were being like, they're just saying it now. They're aliens. And I'm like, this is some dude. He's just some dude. Who's been caught lying about this before? Wait, really? He's been caught lying. He did this exact same thing like several years ago with the same like, you know, Navy doctor who was the expert. They both did it and they got busted. And it's like the mummies that they had were actual Peruvian mummies of people. So. Oh, wow. That's also offensive and gross.

I didn't even know about that part. Yeah. I don't know what these ones are. Like, you know, supposedly they are not of human origin, but they could be a statue for hell's sake. Right. Right. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, when people are like, oh, man, the government's not even trying to hide

it now. I'm like, this is literally just a man saying things just because he's doing it to the government. Doesn't mean it's real. Anyway, that's how I've. feel about that. Yeah. 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, looking for aliens, et cetera, 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, except not really because I've decided we're all winners here now because. So. Chelsea, what's your tease? So my tease is that the oldest living aquarium fish has been around for at least 15 U.S. presidents and maybe as many as 18. What? That's a lot of presidents. It's a lot of presidents. A lot of terms, too.

Damn. Right? I love a big old happy fish. I can't wait to hear more. Awesome. Hope he's happy. Now I'm worried. Maybe I jinxed it.

Okay. Laura, what's your tease? So there is a linguistics law called Zipf's law. I'll spill that for you later, which shows that all human languages follow the same patterns. And it turns out that the vocalizations of dolphins and some types of birds also follow these patterns. So there are scientists that think that we can decode dolphin. We are well on our way to being able to communicate with aliens should they ever reach out. Ooh.

Awesome. Exciting. Also, more importantly, communicating with dolphins. Yeah, right? I honestly was like, well, the dolphin thing's really a standalone. Like, that's sweet. Cool. My tease is that I am going to talk about robots made from the living dead. What? Cool. Like Frankenstein? Yeah. Well, that's certainly how people are talking about it. Frankenstein's monster.

Yeah. Whoa. Wow. Wow. A bunch of interesting. intellectuals on this podcast right now. Nothing gets past us. Okay, yeah. So I'll start with my shambling corpse of a story. So this comes from the 2023 Ig Nobel Awards, which we love here on Weirdest thing. We've talked about them before.

For listeners who don't remember, in 2007, the government plans for a so-called gay bomb won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. We have an episode about that. It's a great one. Actually, that was our episode with Annie from Deps of Wikipedia. So it's a good one. Recommend circling back if it doesn't ring a bell. But anyway, as that what I just said all might make you realize, the Igno bells are kind of a joke.

But they're an annual award ceremony for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. And they were held in September. And one of the stories in particular really stuck out to me. There were a few. Maybe I'll do a highlight real at the end. I'm focusing on this one for today. And maybe this study did like huge numbers when it came out in August 22. I would have missed it because I was languishing in a Scottish dormitory hall with COVID

and nothing but a bottle of tickly cough cough syrup and cool ranch Doritos to keep me company. But hopefully it's new to some of you because it was new to me. So last year, researchers from Rice University coined the ominous phrase necrobotics to describe a bold new field. they'd ventured into, and that is necro for dead and botics for robotics. And in a move that makes me think of those big mouth, Billy Bass, the singing sensation things that got really big in the late 90s, the researchers had used dead spiders to create robotic claw hands. All of this started in 2019 when mechanical engineers were setting up a new lab at Rice and they noticed a dead spider at the end of a hallway. And they got to wondering,

why spiders always curl up their legs so tight when they die. You always find them all curled up. Yeah. And it's funny, I saw a couple of articles about this study that seemed to be implying that the mechanical engineers had discovered why this is true. That is not the case. People who study arachnids already knew why this happens. The mechanical engineers did not pretend they figured this out. They Googled it. They did a quick search, I think, is the language they used. And learned that spiders have a hydraulic pressure system that controls their limbs, which is pretty cool. Basically, a spider has flexor muscles that naturally keep its legs contracted into a closed position,

but they don't have muscles to move the legs back out. they open them by applying hydraulic pressure. Basically, instead of blood, they have hemolymph, which is kind of this like blood analog that arachnids and some other creatures have. And it's used to move nutrients around. But it also acts as hydraulic fluid to make the goal like, you know, hydraulic sounds. And when the body compresses the hemolymph, it creates force. through these channels and the limbs, and that causes them to extend. And then the flexor muscles, like, balance that to, like, make the leg joints be in the place they need to be. And this is, there are, like, some benefits to this. Like, the flux your muscle is able to be really big because there isn't, like, a counteracting other muscle that also needs to take up space and energy.

And then also there are some jumping spiders. They use the hydraulics to make the jumping happen, which is. Makes sense and is very exciting for them, I imagine. But yeah, when a spider dies, they're no longer pumping fluid into their little hydraulic leg chambers to keep them open. So they go into their default state of being curled up, like a little fist. So once the mechanical engineers learned this from probably Wikipedia, they decided to see if they could harness that claw machine-like mechanism, which wasn't totally wild for them because they are focused on soft robotics. You know, the field that figures out how to make robots out of squishy things for various reasons. You know, if you're talking about robots with like a medical or surgical application,

it's great to be able to create a robot that has dexterity without having hard edges because that, you know, limits risk of unintentional damage during surgery. Think of Baymax from Big Cura 6. A squishy robot is also just like safer for humans to be around. And then also for things like sort of search. and rescue robots, having them be like flexible and getting into cramped spaces. Soft robots are also exciting for that application. So a lot of times when you hear soft robotics, you see something that looks kind of worm-like or sort of like cephalopod-ish made out of silicone, et cetera. But people are,

it's a pretty new field and people are always trying new things. And in this case, they were like, why don't we try a dead spider? And so they did. Really, all they had to do when you think about it is find a way to like repump the hydraulic pressure. And apparently it was only like the first or second idea they had of how to do this. It worked. They just inserted a needle into like the internal valves that wolf spiders use to fill up their own hydraulics when they're alive. They superglued the needle in place. And then attached a syringe full of air. And I will link to a video on popside.com slash weird. But like literally just puffing in the air makes the legs open back up and then by working the syringe they can control the the grippy legs. And it's like a little claw machine.

They found that the dead spiders could pick up more than 130% of their own body weight. Though keep in mind, that is 0.35 millinutons. And there are 1,000 millinutons in a newton. and you would feel a newton of force one newton if you held two full-sized snicker bars in your hand that would be the force of those two candy bars so you know relatively speaking we're talking very small gripping power but they're also small spiders so good for them uh they are able to get the spider grasper through 1,000 open closed cycles according to their paper They did note that without any kind of treatment, the corpse would cease to be functional after about two days because of dehydration. The joints would get brittle. So they were experimenting with like beeswax and that definitely helped preserve them a little longer. And, you know, they were like if we were going to pursue this further, definitely like other better coatings would be the next step. You may be wondering why. Dear God, why. And, you know, they have, they named a few, like, oh, you know, working with very small components and it's, you know, you don't make something out of metal or plastic.

You're using material that already exists and we'll biodegrade. Sure, sure. The one thing they said that I found actually intriguing and compelling was that this could be used in field work to capture and collect and, like, redirect in place small insects and live specimens. without damaging them because it's like built-in camouflage. And that I think is cute and genuinely like pretty ingenious. And, you know, do researchers doing that kind of scientific fieldwork want these dead spider hands? That's a question for them.

But it at least is a reasonable use case. You may not be surprised to hear the people freaked out about the study. There was even a paper written and published in the Journal of Human Geography called Along Came a Spider, Dot, Dot, Dot, and Capitalism Killed It. Beautiful. And I have to say that paper was unlike the spider paper behind a paywall. So I am reserving judgment. But they do say that these procedures designed to convert death into useful, productive labor, pretend a deepening of necrocapitalism and the violence of science.

Now, necrocapitalism is real and bad. That is capitalism that relies on like the destruction of workers and humans' lives, which, you know, look around. The violence of science, the violence of science. Don't love that phrase. So. But I just. don't know that the researchers playing with already dead spiders from the hallway are the big bad when it comes to the future of necrocapitalism. I do not think this is a slippery slope

into Frankenstein's monster. I'm just going to say it. I'm sorry. I don't think it is. You may be wondering, since they coined this term, necrobotics, and this was about a year ago, is the field booming? Are other people doing necrobotics? Has this indeed portended a deepening of necrocapitalism and the violence of science? Probably not. I was not able to find a lot of people looking to make robots out of dead stuff. Though I found a few examples, one of which I'm very excited to tell you about before I wrap this fact up. So earlier this year, a team used taxidermied birds to engineer drones. like flap their wings. I have to say I don't think I'm worried about anyone mistaking them for real birds anytime soon. Many of the headlines were like secrets by bird drones being crafted out of birds and I don't, they don't look very good. They should be very proud of what they did from an engineering standpoint. Don't get me wrong. But I don't think this is going to create fodder for the birds aren't real people today. Another study used muscle tissue from a dead mouse to

power like a very, very tiny experimental robot. But what really thrilled me is that I found an article about custom robotic wildlife, which is a 25-year-old small family business. Oh. They've been here. They've been out here doing the thing. They're based in Wisconsin, and they specialize in adding high-tech capabilities to taxidermy. Why? You may ask. Sometimes for rich people who want like a lion in their business lobby following people around with its eyeballs, sure, but mostly not that. Not that. That's not their bread and butter. What they love to do is create convincing decoys of wildlife to catch would-be poachers. Oh. Yeah, which is actually, it turns out, like a big thing. They get their materials both from hunters and a lot from

roadkill, actually. And the robots they make cost about $2,000 a pop. But the Humane Society Wildlife Land Trust has actually. facilitated the donation of at least 30 decoys to federal and state agencies since 2004. So this is like mainstream good thing that's happening. And yeah, basically they will build a decoy of an animal that is like local and commonly hunted in the area that they suspect that people are hunting illegally. And they'll give it some kind of action to full. hunters. It sounds like it's probably evolved a lot in the 25 years they've been doing it, but it's remote controlled, like its tail will flick, its eyes will move, just enough that it can pass for

like a stunned deer or what have you. And then it's not like these just like sit around in the woods everywhere waiting for, though I would love to like unexpectedly come across the taxidermy robot deer in the woods. I think I would probably feel like I would probably end up with like Truman Show syndrome. I think that would really mess me up, actually. So basically, where there are areas where they're suspicious, they'll stage a lure and then they'll hide and operate the remote control. So like some wildlife protector dude will be like hiding in a bush, making the deer move its tail around. And then literally you'll like wait for someone to shoot it. And then be like, we've got you surrounded. You just shot a rubit. Which is so fun to be. Just.

We're a really goofy, silly thing. They say that every year they make like 100 deer, 20 to 30 turkeys, and 15 or so elk. They've also made wolves, bears, moose, pheasants, squirrels, and more. And when this article was published a couple years ago, they were currently working on a white-tilled deer that the National Park Service had requested be able to poop. That's great. I don't know why, but that's what they requested. And they did a lot of trial and error getting it to lift its tail. And they decided that brown M&Ms were a great stand in from a distance.

Peanut or plane? Great question. He did say that his kids had a blast eating all the other colors so that they could save the brown M&Ms. His kids are big participants in the business. this article is very cute. I'll link to it on pops out.com slash weird. And then he was like, maybe we'll, maybe this will start a side business for us making unique candy dispensers that are just like a butt of a, you know, that wouldn't be for me. But apparently somewhere out there, this deer that poops M&Ms is helping to protect

other deer from poachers, which is incredible. Really, that was not what I was expecting to find when I Googled turning dead animal into robot, which is a thing I googled this morning. And yeah, you know, the Ignoble Awards are great. Some of the other winners this year, someone years ago studied like how many people have to be looking up at the sky before other random people will stop and look up at the sky, for example. I don't think it takes many because I'm definitely one of those people that if someone's looking at the sky, I'm like, what are you? they looking at. Right, because it's not like the sky is, you figure something must be happening. Right. For somebody to be looking up. There was a study about, oh, the jaie-vous you get when you write the same word over and over again. So like when the familiar becomes weird and unfamiliar, and I definitely get that with repeating words. So that's a great study. There's also, there's one about how much the swimming motion of large numbers of anchovies who've gathered to have sex contributes to ocean

mixing. Classic Ig Nobel topic. And then the last one I was going to mention, oh, they awarded someone who a geologist who wrote an essay about why geologists sometimes lick rocks, which is a thing that geologists do. And it made me think of a guest who I want to have on sometime of the future. to talk about that specifically because she can really spin a yarn about all the reasons you might lick a rock. So stay tuned for that. Anyway, loving Nobel. And do I love these spider claws? I don't know. But that's my middle of the road take on these guys. Okay, 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 canomous company that ships federal

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Okay, we're back. And Laura, tell me about languages and aliens at Dolphin. Please. Where to begin? Actually, I do know where to begin. So we are going to start back in 1936 when an evil little man with a crappy little mustache announced the opening of the 1936 Olympic Games. So it's been 84, no, how many years? Probably 86 years since that happened at this point. And so the transmission of that broadcast, which was one of the very first on this planet that was strong enough to get into space, it's traveled 86 light years well outside our own solar system.

And that broadcast is one of a trickle that quickly grew into a waterfall of radio and television signals that have rippled out from Earth over decades out into the universe. So an extraterrestrial civilization in the right place at the right time with the right technology might know that we are here. But most of these are incidental. Our direct messages to potential alien contacts, at least the official ones, have been few and far between. Because what would we say to them?

and who speaks for us as a planet? Are we sure we want to be yelling into the void? And also, where do we send that message? The question about whether we're sure if we should be yelling into the void, that is a little divisive. Stephen Hawking came out and was like, you know, this is a good way to get the aliens to come here

and then have a Christopher Columbus moment when, you know, old world meets New World, which could be problematic. But most scientists, I think, are fairly comfortable with the fact that if there are aliens, out there there pretty far away. And so the thought is, you know, 20 years ago is the best time to plant a tree. The best second best time is now.

Same thing with sending a message out to the aliens. So some of the message we have sent have included one that was on the Arcebo telescope, RIP, because that thing is defunct, sadly, and they are not going to rebuild it, which makes me very sad. There were also the golden records that were attached to Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, and those are reaching the end of our solar system at this point, and they may finally get to a point where we're no longer getting the signal. I don't know about you guys, but like a month ago or a month and a half ago when they lost a signal to Voyager 1, I was a little distraught. I was like,

it's all alone out there in space. I feel the same way about like Wally. And there's like a Mars rover that sings happy birthday to itself on its birthday. And like, I think I cry every time. I'm just like, It's so sad. Yeah. So Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 is still out there with those golden records on there. And the records, you know, they had all kinds of information about sound that, you know, these sounds and images that supposedly portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth on this very slim chance that some sort of intelligent aliens might find them.

There's one person that I have spoken to. interviewed for both the book and the podcast. Her name is Sherry Wells Jensen, and she's a professor of linguistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. And she is in love with Voyager. She talks about it all the time. She gets, first thing she does when she gets up in the morning is check to see where they are and just, you know, see how they're doing. Check in. How are they, you know, they're pretty far away. Want to make sure they're okay. And, you know, she says, if an alien species were to get our message, they're going to be, you know, kind of think we're kind of navel-gazy and whether they'll, if they actually understand the message, because it's going to be like, we are here,

we did this, we did that, which I'm pretty sure any species that sends out a message is going to do that because the only thing you really know is yourself. So, you know, right about what you know. But it's like a first date. You got to ask questions to you. Yeah. The problem is, and here's a real issue is if we send out a message, like let's say Alpha Centauri, it's only 4.2, 4.4.4.4.4.4. three light years away, that message will take four and a half years to get there. And then let's say they crack, there's aliens there. First of all, first step, there's aliens there. Second, they crack our message. Third, they write us back in a reasonable amount of time. It's not like the emails that you send out that never, no one ever responds to because email, that's passe. They write us back. Let's say they

write us back within a year. That's nine years round trip for that message. It's like, hello. for nine years. And then we get something back. So that's kind of funny to think about. But she thinks that using math is probably one of the best ways to communicate because the idea is that math is probably a little bit more universal. So, you know, a lot of the messages do involve math and binary code and they may come back to us someday. We'll see. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but one of the other messages that we sent out, in 2008, there's a British University called the University of Leicester, and they worked with the Doritos company to transmit a 30-second video clip into space to the aliens. And it's essentially a Doritos ad. And it's a tribe

of tortilla chips. The best humidity has to offer. What can we say? I mean, you do like, you said you like the cool ranch Doritos. I do, I do like a Dorito. Yeah. I won't lie. But this act, is really messed up because it's a tribe of tortilla chips who are sacrificing one of their own to the god of salsa and there's no dialogue and this is supposed to be a snapshot of life on earth and I'm like I don't know what message that is but I don't think aliens are going to they're going to think we're savages I mean I don't know that we're tortilla chips yeah exactly which is maybe maybe a flattering portrayal of humankind but yeah So anyway, like we've sent out these crazy messages.

We haven't really been particularly direct. We're getting better at that. There's a group called Medi that it's messaging extraterrestrial intelligence. And they are sending messages out that are a little bit more targeted towards planets where we think there might be life. But again, those are pretty far away. And the other thing that this linguistics professor, Dr. Wilson, and told me about it, she's like, you know, think about language. Think about how we look at Shakespeare 500 years on. And we struggle with the language. Like, it's in English and we're like, what did he mean by

that? So we send a message to space. Let's say it takes 500 years to get where it's going. It takes another 500. A response takes another 500 to get back. And we kind of are going to, we're going to have a little problem because we may not even be able to read the that we sent initially, let alone translate the thing that comes back to us. So it's kind of an interesting thought process. She says we need to sort of establish a monastery of people who just pass down linguistics knowledge year after year and keep track of all the language things. So by the time we do get that message in a thousand years, we'll be ready for it because we'll have done all the step work leading up to that point. So, you know, if you want to join the intergalactic monkhood of linguistics, you know.

Honestly, maybe. Yeah, it might not be really the worst idea. So that is how a lot of people are thinking about talking to aliens. But the thing that I found the most interesting was like, what would we do if we got a message back from aliens? And for that, I ended up talking to a guy named Lawrence Doyle. He's an astrophysicist, but he's also associated with the same. SETI Institute. This is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And he started an astrophysicist, but he kind of made this right-word turn into animal linguistics because he felt, you know,

if we want to try and talk to intergalactic species, we have a great opportunity to practice right here on Earth by talking to all of the other animals around us and trying to figure out how to communicate with them. And so he does some, you know, applied information theory to non-human communication systems. And one of the things that this involved was trying to figure out how you can communicate with using a minimal amount of equipment. And, you know, what's the minimal amount of information that was needed to get a message across? And how can you tell if a message is, you know, advanced based on the information that's coming in? So what he did was he used hydrophones to record or listen to underwater sound. And he was working with a couple of his colleagues,

Brenda McCowan and Sean Hanser, who were both involved in marine biology. And so what he was doing was using this law called Zipf's Law to see if any sorts of animal communications would stack up to, you know, being seen as actual communication as an actual language. So Zip's Law, this started back in 1932, I believe. And George Zipf, Z-I-P-F, say it three times fast. He was a linguist that had his students count the letters in the book Ulysses to see how many. I know. Ulysses is a slog as it is. I don't think I ever finished it. It is 700 pages. It is 265,22 words. And he had his students count the letters. I'm so glad I did not have him as a professor. So how many E's, how many T's, you know, and so on down the line. I also hope they didn't have to double check their work,

because that would be a real bummer. So what he found, Zipf, is that the second most common letter occurred approximately half as often as the first most common. And the third most common occurred one third as often as the first, and so on down the line. So if you graph this out on a lot of algorithmic scale, the information shows up is basically a downward 45 degrees slope, a minus one slope. So he was like, okay, well, that's interesting. And then he did it for Chinese. He did it for Russian.

He did it for Hindi. He did it for all these different languages. And, you know, with some small variations, they basically all match the same downward minus one slope, which is pretty wild. And it also means that language is math. And that's a little depressing. because math is never my strong suit. So anyway, back to Lawrence Doyle, he takes these recorded dolphin whistles that had been classified

by his colleague, Dr. McCowan, and he plots them, and he gets a minus one slope. Cool. Which is, yeah, right? I mean, Matt Groening was already on to this with The Simpsons and all those like dolphins talking episodes, like Matt clearly knew, but the rest of us are catching up. Also, the Simpsons, as we know, predicts the future for pretty much everything. So they did a minus one slope for the dolphins. And then this part was crazy to me.

They've got the recordings of baby dolphins. And they found that those matched the same algorithmic scale as human babies. So it's a downward slope of 0.3 for both baby dolphins and baby humans, which also blew my mind. So they're, like, babbling until they get to, like, adult dolphin language, same as humans. And I just, like, what are they saying? That's what I want to know. And see, this is the problem is, like, we don't know what they're saying.

Since then, other scientists have tried to apply Zip's Law to various animals. They have found out that African penguins in 2020 scientists down there found out that African penguins squeaks and such mimics or follow Zipzlaw. Spider monkeys do not. Or I'm sorry, not spider monkeys. Squirrel monkeys do not. Ground squirrels do not. My cats definitely do not.

They just want food. I mean, I already know what they're saying. I don't really have that translated. And it might have to do this linguistic stuff. They think might have something to do with how complex societies are. But essentially, like, A, the animals are smarter than we thought. Big news there.

I mean, we already kind of knew that part. And then this is an opportunity to try, if we can figure out what dolphins are saying, and we can translate it. Like, it kind of sets us up pretty nicely if aliens ever do end up sending a message, which, I mean, it just kind of blows my mind that this is even a possibility.

So over the course of Dr. Doyle's research on the dolphins, he also started looking into whales. and he discovered that the language of humpback whales has specific rules to it, similar to human language. It allows them to communicate even if they don't hear everything that the other whales are saying. So you know if you're on a phone call and like the person, the connection is kind of crappy and you lose a couple of words. You can still understand what someone is saying.

Wales have the same thing. This is called syntax. And syntax is how words and phrases are arranged in a sentence so that it makes sense. we think humans for the longest time have thought they were the only ones who could communicate this way, but they were finding out that whales could communicate over huge distances and lose like one seventh or one eighth of the words, the words that they were saying and still be able to find each other and locate and meet up. And that kind of, I mean, I'm just like, whoa, it's so cool. And I kind of want to drop everything I'm doing and just focus on animal communication. Yeah. I mean, it's,

so complex, but kind of when you break it down, it's a little bit simpler, I guess, than we would think it would be. Yeah. And you kind of wonder, like, are these universal laws? Would these apply to an alien language? Like how it obviously depends on how advanced society would be, because as we saw with creatures on Earth, you have to be at a certain level of complexity in order to communicate this way. But, I mean, I really hope we get a message soon. That'd be amazing. For a number of reasons. Yeah. Or a rival. We could do something like a rival. That was pretty sweet. True. Yeah. Got to call Amy Adams. I assume she's actually a linguistics expert. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Once you've starred in a movie and a certain role, you're like, then it's like, you know, it's hard sci-fi.

So I assume by the time she finished filming, like she. 100%. Yeah. I love that. I also, every time I talk to people who do animal behavior and animal communication, I'm like, like, why don't I study this? I know. Isn't it fascinating? I really am disappointed in my cats, though. Like, I did spend some time sort of like trying to differentiate. And yeah, I'm like they're not really.

My cat just screams. Mine's asleep on the couch right now. He's just lazy. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra. Extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG.

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This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. All right, we're back. And I want to hear about a very old fish. I think we all do. You know, we're all just waiting to be old, I guess, at this point. But it's surprisingly difficult to tell how old a fish actually is. And in the past, if you wanted to know a fish's age, you had to use a ring counting method like you use with trees. But with these strange calcium carbonate structures that are located directly behind the brain called odoliths.

And unfortunately, that means having to be able to. to kill the fish, which is obviously bad if you're working with... I know. Right. If you're working with endangered species like the Australian lungfish. So let me tell you a little bit about this particular fish. Australian lungfish are really cool. And because they evolved at least 380 million years ago, they're sometimes referred to as living fossils.

They're really long and they have this flat snout. and they kind of remind me of an axolottle with kind of how easy it is to anthropomorphize their faces. And along the way, they also evolved a lung that lets them breathe air, which is good because in their natural habitat, the water quality varies quite a lot. And the water can even dry up, especially with human interference, you know, people making dams and diverting water, all that kind of stuff. So one Australian lungfish in particular has been around for a long, long time. And her name is appropriately, Methuselah. So I'm going to assume that she was given this name, which originates from a character in the Bible, who died at the tender age of 969, after she had been around for a while.

And not when she arrived at the Steinhardt Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences in November 19. So just for context, in November 1938, FDR was president, typhoid Mary died at age 69, and Albert Hoffman synthesized LSD for the first time. So, you know, take yourself back to 1938 and, you know, you'll be right there in a very enjoyable time, except not really. So Methuselah is actually a legend and a sweetie, who apparently loves figs and getting belly rubs. And there's like a video of this. It's so adorable. Like her little, like, I don't know if you would call him a trainer or like her keeper, like is feeding her and like literally like touching her like she's like a dog. It's so cute. But no one knew exactly how old she was. They were just kind of going off of their

her arrival date to the museum, which would put her around 84 years old because it was 84 years ago. luckily, two scientists, Dr. Ben Main of CSIRO, which is basically like Australia's NSF, and Dr. David T. Roberts of Seekwater, the Queensland Government Bulk Water Supply Authority, so kind of weird like government government roles trying to figure the fish problem out. But they created a non-invasive way to actually estimate the age of fish using their DNA. And that's really important because it helps us predict. how populations will grow in the future. And we can use that data to aid in the conservation of these important species. So I'm going to have to give a little bit of a genetics talk. This is like my background. So I'm going to try and make it as easy as possible. But, you know, I guess raise your hand if you're alone.

Like, I won't see it, but good for you. So one way DNA is modified in a non-permanent way is through methylation, which is the addition of a methyl group to a particular DNA. DNA base to change its gene expression. So if that methyl group is in the way, that particular gene can't be transcribed into RNA and it isn't expressed. And that's just one example of something called epigenetics. So doctors Maine and Roberts found that they could create an epigenetic clock for the Australian lungfish and other species of fish by tracking how many spots in certain age-related genes were methylated. And all they needed, instead of,

of, you know, those weird calcium carbonate things in, like, behind a fish's brain was just a tiny tissue sample from a fin. So not anything that's going to kill the fish, which is great when you have probably the oldest living aquarium fish ever. So using this method, they found out that our girl, Methusla, is probably around 92 years old, although taking into account the method's margin of error, she could be as old as 101. So she outlived the 231 other fish from Fiji and Australia that arrived with her to the Cal Cal Academy, you know, back in 1938, which honestly, that sounds really like sad. And, you know, she's just there by herself.

She doesn't have. All of her friends are dead. I know. Yeah. It's really sad. But, you know, she seems like she's got a pretty good life. You know, she gets those belly rubs. She loves that.

But what's really cool is thinking about how there are probably millions of people who have seen Methuselah since 1938. And it's kind of a cool way to like connect humans over time. And I know it's kind of like philosophical, whatever. But I found that really interesting to think about. And that's what makes her as far as we know the oldest living aquarium fish. So in conclusion, long live Methuselah. She is an icon and she is the moment. Queen of the Fish.

Right? I love her. Me too. I kind of want a T-shirt. Can we get a T-shirt with her name and a picture? We really should. I mean, she's very cute. Like, it's like an ugly kind of cute, you know?

Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at pictures of her, and I also find her face very cute. Yeah. I would give her some of the belly rubs. Oh, yeah. It would be an honor. Well, a lot of good weird stuff today. A lot of great animals, including dead ones.

I know. It's like we're going from the dead spiders to the longest living fish. And I'm just like, Methuselah, hang on. It'll be okay. The Circle of Life. Laura, thanks so much for coming on. Would you remind our listeners what your new book is called and where they can find you? Yes.

Thank you for having me. The book is called Is There Anybody Out There? out on October 3rd, so after this has aired. And you can find it in all bookstores and online. And it's got these amazing illustrations in it from a guy named Raphael Nobri. They're really, really cool. So yeah, keep a lookout. And it might help you guys be prepared for the alien invasion that is undoubtedly coming. Oh, yeah, obviously. I'm ready for sure. I mean, yeah, if the Mexican Peruvian mummies or any indication? If that's what they look like, I can take them.

I got more meat on my bones than that. So, not worried. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share,

tweet us at Weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition, First Citizens Bank.