The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Best Dog, Carnivorous Mushrooms, Naming Groups of Animals

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the world's best dog to mushrooms that eat animals. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepsies Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by: Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman Lexi Krupp: www.twitter.com/KruppLexi --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost! Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water.

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. Make every get-together chill. This Memorial Day, get up to an extra $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG.

Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot. Tackle pool towels and camp laundry with a large capacity washer. And host in style with a fridge-serving craft ice, mini-craft ice, cube dice, and crushed ice. Shop appliance savings now through June 3rd at the Home Depot. Offer valid May 14th through June 3rd, US-only. Free delivery on appliance purchases of $998 or more. See Store Online for details. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week.

And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Fultman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Sarah Trodosh. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week,

we start out by each kind of teasing a little nugget of information from something that we picked up, either while reporting a story, reading some other great science journalism, or just kind of clicking around on Wikipedia and Twitter, which is also a really important part of being a science journalist. And then we all vote on which story is just so interesting that we have to learn more right away. And once we've all spun our science yarns, we reconvene and try to decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was.

Sarah, why don't you give us your teas first? Thank you. My fact is that in 1993, James Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio fame wrote a book. I'm ready. I'm ready. All right. James Lipton wrote a book that revived a 15th century vocabulary game that gave us the term a pride of lions. I watched so much inside the actor's studio with my sister.

She's an opera singer and aspiring actress. or she as an actress was aspiring when we were like 12, you know. As every 12-year-old, us at some point. My goodness. Wow, James Lipton. Okay, I'm psyched. Eleanor. I don't know how to follow that up.

I love James Lipton more than anyone. I, too, watch inside the actor's studio as a kid pretending to be home and sick. That's the only way anyone watched that. Because it wasn't on at night. No, it was like 11 a.m. on Bravo. Yeah. Oh my God. Oh my God. Yes. Okay. My tease is dogs.

Specifically, the best boy of them all. The best? Sorry? Like the best boy, like the... The best dog of them all. Why is he the best? Well, that's the story. Okay. Sorry. All right. So the best boy.

The tease is that he's the best and you don't know why yet. The tease was too good. Yeah. All right. My tease is mushrooms eating people. Dream. I love it. it. I mean, mushrooms eating people is great, but I kind of think we should maybe

go with the best boy, like maybe we should start out with something light. Because I want to know what the best boy is. Yeah. There's two, the curiosity gap is just too much for me. This is clickbait, Eleanor, and I must have it. All right, I will say about your best best boy.

I, actually, right before we're recording on Friday, I just published a story that is sort of exploring the, the magic of canine noses and how difficult it is to replicate them. You can go to popside.com to read that story. Yes, you can. And in the process of reporting it, I came across the story of this little dog named Barry.

He was a very famous dog in Switzerland because he is credited with saving the lives of about 40 people. So in the Great St. Bernard Pass in Switzerland, it was like for a thousand years, basically, a place where pilgrims would travel through as they moved through the Alps in Europe. And obviously a lot of them got lost. It's at very high altitude so it can snow like any month of the year. And there's a large potential for tragedy. And so in the mid-17th century, the monks working at this hospice, as it was called. So basically sort of like just like a station for people as they moved through, you know,

a place to stay, a hostel. really, they decided to bring on dogs to like search for people who got lost in the Alps in the snow. This one dog became incredibly famous. He is like literally like the stuff of legend. I have a photo of Barry here. It looks like gilded. Is he in front of an actual gold wall? Is that a stuffed berry? I believe it is a stuffed berry. Yeah. Is it the berry stuffed? So it is berry's fur placed on, as a lot of taxidermia is placed on a sort of like cast mold of the berry. I see. And he's wearing the silly.

How he's alive? Well, I mean, he died naturally, but this is getting ahead of the stirring. Sorry. So. He just looks for splendid. Go to popsight.com to see more. Yeah, he's incredible. He really does.

And he's wearing this little like barrel around his neck because there was a legend. It's not true. that these dogs carried like a whiskey flask with them wherever they went because they were just the most helpful. So was that what St. Bernard's used to look like? Because that does not look like what St. Bernard's looked like today. Yes. So this is part of the story.

So, okay, so he is credited with saving a half-frozen boy who he flipped onto his back and carried his safety as well as 39 other people. And it's also said that he was bayoneted to death by one of Napoleon's soldiers who mistook him for a wolf. these are not true things Oh that's good What is true is that he

He definitely saved a lot of people The dog sort of pack Over the like 200 years Where the monks were doing this Are credited with saving 2,000 lives Of sort of like wayward pilgrims They actually have this amazing legacy That you already hinted at

Which is that they are the sort of like Err dog that became the St. Bernard breed So this dog They think that the Romans may have brought like a dog from Asia that they were breeding for a time, it was like short-haired.

And so the monks in this past had those dogs. Like the pass sort of sits, it's in Switzerland, but it sits right above like modern Italy. In the 1800s, they were finally convinced that the dogs were too cold all the time. So for just like centuries they'd been

suffering. So they decided to breed them with like a longer hair breed. Some people, I found were suggesting that it was like bred with Newfoundland dogs but but it's not really um sure but yeah like Barry was sort of like a kind of like he didn't have the jowls that you now think of and his head was much slimmer his skull by the way is on display in a museum because they love this guy that much um I hope people love me enough to put my skull on display in a museum it's too bad honestly that we don't like because we have wax museums but we don't we don't do the same

thing with people we don't feel that it's okay to like stuff them and place them on Except for Jeremy Bentham, who has been, yeah, Jeremy Bentham. He's, like, stuffed at the University College London, and his head rolled off. Is this the weirdest thing I learned this week? It's the weirdest thing I learned this week. He wanted to be taxidermine upon death. So, like, the way it works is that they tried to do, like, a basic taxidermy process, but it doesn't take very well to humans.

Like, your skin gets really leathery and you look horrible. and so now they have this like wax mold of his body but on his real bones and it was recently brought to New York as part of an exhibit but most of the time it just like sits in this in this college university hall somehow the wax on top of the real bones is so much worse than if it was just his mummified body yeah so anyway I was just like very taken by this idea that like a dog could sort of become like a real dog could become a national hero in that way like I feel like there are like like some famous dogs in the United States. Baltho? Yeah, and I was going to say like Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dog Fala, who I'm just a big fan of, a little Scotty. But like nothing really like on this level. Like there have been like movies made in Switzerland.

Like the breed is like now the like the official national breed, the St. Bernard. Like it's just. Oh, that's sad because there's a dog that is the Swiss mountain dog. And that's not the national dog of Switzerland. Yeah, I think that the more I've looked into that they may, like, countries may have many dogs that they're trying to preserve, but, but, yeah, Barry's pretty special. This was sort of the first case of dogs being used in, like, search and

recovery, but, like, we were talking about all the different ways that they've since become really useful for, like, their olfactory ability. You, Sarah had, like, one specific kind of thing that you were talking about. Yeah, so I found this fact that when, especially during the 9-11 search and rescue operations because there were so many dead bodies in the rubble that they were trying to dig up. The dogs who were out there looking for the bodies got really depressed because they kept finding dead people and they're trained differently. Like there's cadaver dogs and then there's live search and rescue dogs.

And so they planted like just like the firefighters would just like hide in the rubble and then the dogs would find the firefighters and they would be like, oh, you're such a good boy, you did it so good. And I found this. I did find a reference to it in like a newspaper from 2001. but I don't like other than that I didn't find a ton of references so like someone on Twitter tell me if I'm wrong totally wrong about this but this is a story I've heard repeated like many many times that is more tragic than I even thought it was yeah because like I was reading up on the St. Bernard

and you know they were talking about how they're no longer really used for search and rescue because they're too heavy to retrieve with like a helicopter in an emergency new the new room the slobber alone they slabber so much yeah so probably used to be frozen on their face, I imagine, in the Alps. The slobber thing, did you know, is because of the shape of their jowls. Like, Nufilins have the same thing. They don't produce more saliva than other dogs. They just don't swallow it.

It just comes out of their mouth. What did we do to dogs? We should talk about that next. Sarah has written a lot about dog breeding and the terrible, terrible things we've done. It is terrible. Well, it's kind of interesting because, as you can, hopefully you're all looking. at bobside.com so you can see the picture of Barry. So resplendent.

Yeah, he's adorable. But you would never look at him and say, like, oh, that's definitely a St. Bernard. But he was alive before purebred dogs were a thing, which, like, I'm not sure how many people know that just the Victorians were the ones who decided purebred dogs should exist. And they're the reason that all purebred dogs now have, like, really awful health problems. Yeah. No, it's definitely, like, tragic sort of thinking about. about like how recent this is.

Like the, the berry dogs were originally, like, of that era. They now as a group have been sort of referred to as berry dogs. They were like the size of German shepherds at the beginning. Interesting. But then the, eventually the, what is it called the stud list was closed,

which is essentially like a euphemism for being like, now we're only breeding the dogs we already have. They were literally, not euphemistically. They were called stud books. Right, right. But like, yeah. So during the Victorian era,

as Sarah said, once people decided that purebred dogs were going to be a thing, that meant deciding which dogs counted as being members of each breed. So they made these specifications, and then you had to go and presumably pay and have somebody examine your dog. Of course you had to pay. Of course. That was why it existed. Of course you had to pay. And only if they fit these criteria that had been set, could they be put on this list of pure bred dogs? And then the stud list was closed. Yeah, so and the gene pool with it, which is not, not great biologically. For the record, my family owns purebred dog, so like I, I love them. I love all dogs, let's be honest, but if you're a purebred dog breeder, please don't at me. Don't close off the gene pool.

It's a bad idea. Yeah, Eleanor wrote that story for the magazine about the Lundahunt. Right, yeah, there's a Norwegian dog that had the severe bottle. They think that there were two bottlenecks where there were only five dogs left of the species. So they had like a relational coefficient of like 85% or something. Like they were so inbred. And a relational coefficient. Like they're talking about how just how inbred they are. Like when you're like looking at the like trying to like parse the genes and see where they come from, like 85% of them just sort of like turn back into a circle and we're like, oh, this is the same source.

So, like, if you, like, the offspring of two siblings, I think has a relational coefficient of, like, 0.25. Right. And, like, many, many, many purebred. All of them have a relational coefficient over to 0.25. Yeah. And so then if you just keep inbreeding the same relatives, it gets worse and worse. And so there's been an effort in Norway to sort of, like, rehabilitate these dogs and breed in other sort of similar species so that they don't have all of these, like, intestinal issues. and, you know, kind of make them healthier again.

But it has been met with a lot of resistance. People definitely really still hold the idea of a purebred dog very close, and they think that, you know, you're sort of diluting the brand, honestly. I was going to say purity, but brand was a nicer way to put that. This was supposed to be our happy story. And it was kind of telling him a little bit of a bummer note. I will say that Barry was not bayoneted, and he died peacefully. with the monks he loved in 1814.

That's so sweet. That's good. That was a nice end note. Yeah. On that note, let's take a quick break. It's been scientifically proven that Monday is the worst day of the week, or at least it used to be, because now that's when you can expect new episodes of Pop Size other podcasts last week in tech.

Every week we recap the big technology stories that you may have missed while you were furiously refreshing your Twitter feed, hoping that Elon Musk tweeted something else really ridiculous. You could subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitch, pocketcasts, or SoundCloud. Now, back to the weirdest thing I learned this week. And we're back to the weirdest thing I learned this week. And I think Sarah is going to tell us about regale you with James Lippton quotes.

Not even quotes. So as a reminder, my fact was that James Lipton in 1993 wrote a book reviving a 15th century vocabulary game that gave us the term a pride of lions. So I came across this fact because I made. made a snarky comment in our morning meeting the other day about collective nouns. I think Joe, our editor and Chief Joe Brown, said, like, a parliament of owls. And I was like, that was just a bunch of old white dudes in the 17th century who thought, like, a parliament of owls, that's so funny.

And as it turns out, I was wrong. It was a 15th century man who thought that parliament of owls was really funny. But actually, it began with a woman. What? I know. I was really disappointed to find this out. I mean, it was mostly men who perpetuated it. But so I spent a lot of time looking at collective nouns or terms of venery, as they were known.

Venary today means like a sexual indulgence, but back then it meant hunting. Okay. Weird. Weird. So it began with a woman named Juliana Berners or perhaps Julian's Bernice or Julian's Barnes. No one seems to be totally clear. A barn of Julian's. Got it.

She was a prioress in Herfordshire in England. And she wrote, The Book of St. Albans, or the Boke of St. Albans, spelling was questionable in the late medieval area. Yeah, old bookie. Yeah. It was published in 1486. It was probably her.

There was like a third of the book is attributed to her, And then over time, people just distributed the entire thing. Just treatises on hawking, hunting, and heraldry. Oh. I know. Those were her three loves, because I guess as a prioress, as a woman, you didn't have to marry. And I think she was some kind of royal prioress. So she had money, I guess.

And so she got to just hunt and hawk and herald. That's pretty dope. Heraldry is like coats of arms. Right. It was the first book to have color images to be printed. printed in England, and then for like centuries, it was the only book to be printed in more than two colors, which is just a fun little side fact I found. But in the hunting section, there is a list called The Companies of Beasties and Fowlies, which is adorable. And it's 165 collective nouns for animals and also a bunch of joke ones, like a diligence of messengers, a superfluity, superfluity.

I'm not really sure. a superfluity of nuns. And I'm sorry to disappoint, we got a gaggle of women from this book, which is a little, I always find a gaggle of women to be kind of demeaning. Maybe they used to say a giggle of women. So she compiled this list, I guess, or someone did under her name. And this whole book was just like, it was a handbook for gentlemen, you know, lest you go on a hunt and you accidentally use the wrong term for a group of boars.

and everyone laughed at you and knows that you're not really a nobleborn. I have some collective downs because I figured I couldn't bring this up without sharing some, such as a sleuth of bears or a sloth of bears, which I think is pretty confusing. A sounder. A whole sloth of them. An erst of bees. That's weird. I also found a grist of bees.

A hive. A sonder of... Called a hive. Please. Or a swarm. Yeah. Depending on the situation. A sounder of boars, but only if there's 12 or more.

It's got to stop and count. You have to count. A skull of foxes, a plague of grackles. What's a grackle? A grackle's a bird. Okay. Like a big black one. Okay.

A kettle of hawks. A flother of jellyfish. That's a good one. I really like the word flutter. A kindle of kittens. That's cute. Yeah. A bouquet of pheasants and a murmuration of starlings,

which I thought was interesting because a murmuration is actually like when you have like a bunch of, especially birds, but also insects like a huge cloud of them and they sort of like seem to move as one big cloud of things. That's called a murmuration.

But apparently it's also for a group of starlings. So it was originally in the book of St. Albans. And then the tradition got revived again in 1595 by Jervais Markham who wrote The Gentleman's Academic. And then there was another reprinting of the original book of St. Albans, but with like a forward added to it in 1881 because Victorians loved it, as you can

imagine. They loved their collective nouns and how arbitrarily aeriodite it was to know all the proper terms for the groups of animals. They did love the arbitrarily erudite. Yeah, but I brought it up because I think it's interesting that like now some of them like a pride of lions or a pod of dolphins or whales, I think is the same term. Now we kind of think of some of those as somehow science. scientifically accurate, but they were all just groups for names invented by mostly men, it seems to make other men feel like they weren't noble enough. And that's kind of weird. I did also stumble upon in the Wikipedia, like the discussion page where the editors talk

about what gets to be on the page of the list of collective nouns for animals. There is a paragraph where someone suggested literally, a few days after the infamous binders full of women comment from Mitt Romney. Someone suggested that they add binders full of women to that list. And then there were a bunch of people being like, this was just used as a popular reference. This term has only existed for a few days. We couldn't possibly add it to this venerated list of Wikipedia collective nouns.

Which I think is especially ironic because they're all just made up. Like, I know all words are made up, but these especially were just literally someone was like a shrewdness of eight. Let's do that. We're going to go with that for now. That's amazing. Yeah. Speaking of the idea, though, that all words are fake, I was reading this fascinating Atlas, obscure story that was talking about how all of the words that we use that are, like, kind of associated with scary things, like, bears and stuff like that, are really, like, a proxy word for what the true word was one time when you didn't want to speak the word to conjure the thing. So, like, the words that have been handed down are actually sort of, like, safety fill-ins for the true thing.

Tell us some of the true scary words. I want to conjure a bear. I don't remember. Well, we don't know because, like, they haven't been passed down. This was sort of, like, in an oral tradition. Wow. And so everything, we sort of, like, have a shadow language now. Wait, so what were some of the words, though, that have been passed down that were just meant to not conjure things?

So one example that they were talking about, which is less about like the natural world than about like spirituality was talking about how like in the Talmud and in like Judaism like Yahweh is also sort of like a shadow language word for how you refer to God because you don't actually use his real name. And so like there are a bunch of different like even my using Yahweh is sort of like a sort of like random chance kind of situation because there were a bunch of different ways that it that this shadow word was used and referred to in Pernetian. announced. And so it's just, you know, we are left with sort of that remnant of it. And if you dig back, you see, you know, a little bit more. But you can't ever really go back to the source when people were just sort of like speaking these things and making rules around it. I just think linguistics is like a really underappreciated world. I don't know. I feel like I went through this. We're just going to talk about my personal journey now. I feel like when you're in high school and you're a nerd, you kind of have this idea that, because you know all the

grammar rules, you should correct other people on their grammar and that that's a very important thing for you to do in society is to tell other people when they are wrong about grammar. And that was limited to high school for you. I feel like I know. Let's be honest, it wasn't just high school. But then I took a philosophy of language class, like a couple of them. And man, I just came out of those classes feeling like, I mean, the purpose of all language is just to communicate. And as long as we're communicating, why does it, why does it matter? Who cares? That's really beautiful. I enjoy, like, honestly, why should we spend our energy correcting other people on their grammar, except when you have to edit a magazine? So I actually do spend a lot of my time.

You found the application. Changing. But even then, sometimes, sometimes our copy editor, she'll change things. And I'm like, this is, I think, I think this is worse. And every, everyone knows what I mean, why does it matter? And then she has to tell me, like, this is how you run a magazine. Thanks, Cindy. Yeah, we love you, Cindy. We do. Yeah, the other linguistic sort of interesting concept that I have at the tip of my tongue is how, like, following, well, the Korean war is still ongoing, right, on the peninsula.

But following the division of the two countries, like, the North Korean language has changed a lot from the shared Korean language. And so, like, people are still able to fairly effectively. communicate, but it's a very different sort of like accent and some of the words have also changed. And, you know, people sort of talk about how, because their political rhetoric is like extremely like horrible. Like, I mean, like really amazing. Like the like top officials in public statements like curse and call people all kinds of bad names, which I guess we're getting a little bit more familiar now with ourselves. But that it has like actually like altered the language. And there's now sort of like different, I don't know if you would call them dialects,

but yeah, sort of different subgroups now of the Korean language. Yeah, I think we forget how quickly language evolves and that we can, I mean, people are always annoyed when dictionaries add new words that they feel like just somehow aren't wordy enough to be a word yet. But, I mean, I don't know, I think that's a nice thing. I like words and I'm all for adding more words. Absolutely. All right, well, I'm going to go conjure a bear and then we'll be back with some more weird facts.

Do you wear your pride on your sleeve? Popular Science is partnering with Out in STEM to make limited edition t-shirts with a rainbow popsye logo. 100% of the profits go to Out in STEM, a nonprofit that empowers the LGBTQ community in science, tech, engineering, and math fields. Scoop one up before they're gone. And share on social with the hashtag SciPride. That's SCI Pride.

Well, that was a great ad. And here we are for some more great facts. My fact this week is less a weird thing that I learned and more weird thing that I remembered. I think you're disqualified. Yes. Pog's hat's over. Bye. Shut it down.

I was kind of tooling around on the internet looking for stuff about food products that have poop in them or come from poop because someone had tweeted at Sophie Bushwick, one of our editors, about tea from insect poop. And I was looking for more info. I found one scientific paper, and I was like, this really isn't enough to talk about other than the fact that there is tea made from insect poop

purports to have many medicinal properties. Many people love it. I haven't tried it. But that caught me to, like, a bunch of weird stuff. I was looking at different alcohols that are traditionally made by people, usually young women chewing up grain and spitting them in glasses and leaving them to ferment. And then got on this article somewhere about the use of different food products in weird ways.

And I found the Infinity Burial Suit, which is this thing that started as kind of almost like an art concept and then a TED Talk and now is a real product. and it is a suit that you wear instead of being buried in a coffin, and it is designed with a bunch of microbes, including fungi, and it's designed for you to be consumed by those microorganisms when you're buried. My dream. Also, same.

Yeah. Absolutely my dream. The thing that I got really excited about is that the suit uses oyster mushrooms, which are delicious and one of the easiest things to forage. and it reminded me that I could talk about carnivorous fungi, which I love. I did a little bit of mycology, which is a study of fungi back in college, running around the woods with a basket collecting mushrooms. Wow. Which is literally like what mycologists do.

It's the best job description ever. I don't think enough people know or we all would have made different life choices. If I wasn't a science writer, I would absolutely be in mycology right now. which would mean I would probably be in the woods right now. The path not taken. Yeah. Man. But oyster mushrooms, delicious.

A lot of people have eaten them, even who aren't very adventurous, about eating mushrooms because they're pretty easy to get in the store. They're those ones that look kind of, I mean, they look like oysters. They look kind of flat. The gills are on the bottom. They have a very nice but not particularly powerful flavor. They're pretty versatile. And you'll see them growing on dead trees,

but also live trees, usually in kind of these nice fruiting clusters. Great mouth feel. Yes, like all mushrooms, really. I did not know that mouthful was a real word until like last year when someone used it, and I was like, come on. It's not just a makeup word here. Sorry. It's as real as a parliament of owls. So just like there are carnivorous plants, there are some carnivorous mushrooms.

By the way, my favorite mushroom fact is that, they are actually more closely related to humans than they are to plants. When you grow mycelium, so mycelium is the filaments that fungi send out into the earth and that they then use to build their fruiting bodies. When you build a block of mycelium, it makes a great insulator, and it also feels a lot of human skin. And I was like, that's probably because it basically is. I'm gagging.

We have a block of mycelium, and it touches you back. It does. And so speaking of mushrooms that touch you back, some mushrooms are also carnivorous. And the oyster mushroom is especially cool because they'll encounter a nematode, just a very tiny, tiny worm. It's bigger than the mushrooms fill in it, but like not that much bigger. Most carnivorous mushrooms will have some kind of apparatus on the heafi that's meant to like stick to the nematode, like physically stick it in place.

The oyster mushrooms, when there are nematodes present, the heifi will produce these appendages that secrete little droplets of a potent nematoxin. So the nematodes will then be attracted to them because it smells like food. And as soon as the nematode encounters the toxin, it's like frozen. place. It's totally immobilized. But they're still alive. Researchers think that the reason it doesn't just kill them is because that would attract bacteria who would also try to eat the nematode. So instead... Eliminate the competition. Exactly. And they may actually release further antibiotics to keep the paralyzed nematode free of microbial

growth so that they can infiltrate it. And basically just the mushroom grows its mycelium into this tiny nematode until it has killed it by like suffocating it or destroying its organs and then it consumes it. I have never seen human centipede because I cannot handle horror of any kind, but this is sort of what I imagine happens in that movie. Sure. Let me read this caption from one of the photos that Rachel brought. When a nematode barges through a field of droplets, it is paralyzed within minutes. Like that is... Barges through a field.

Beautifully written. one, but two, also so sad for the little nematone. And that's by George Barron. Barron and Thorne did the premiere work on these. And also, so in this one news article I was reading about them, there was something about how the discovery that oyster mushrooms can consume meat was like, quote, one of those great scientific accidents involving a forgotten petri dish. And I couldn't find anything else, any other source saying this,

but it was in like a real newspaper at one time. I don't know how good of a source that is, but saying that they had been collecting carnivorous fungi from soil and growing them on petri dishes, but then one got left behind and grew for so long that it produced a fruiting body, and they saw it was an oyster mushroom. So they had been collecting, you know,

the mycelium from the soil that they saw were attacking and eating nematodes, but they did not actually know that those were related to these fruiting bodies until later. Which is wild to think about now because now we have such a robust knowledge of the DNA of different mushrooms. But I guess at the time, it was like, you know,

you either had the mycelium in the ground connected to a fruiting body or you didn't really know which mushroom it came from or which mushroom it produced rather. Sorry mycelium. I think it's super wild that oyster mushrooms, which are some of the least dangerous mushrooms for a forager to get, at least as I was taught.

There's not a lot you can confuse them for that will really hurt you. But they're super dangerous to nematodes in like a really scary alien way. And it is like largely, at least in nature, right, when you're not like building a suit. It is like pretty specific to the nematode. Like, you're not, when no one else is in danger, it's just, it's just the nematodes. Right. Because if you're thinking about how it works, you know, first of all, this nematode specific toxin, both in design and dose. So, you know, a human, you know, a small animal in the forest, let alone a human, is not going to be affected by that toxin. So you would have to be like laying in the dirt so that the mycelium was all around you.

and you would have to stay still long enough for them to spend. To enter your mouth. Yes. And given our relative size, because a nematode, you know, yes, mycelium can burst through a nematode's body in less than a day. But they're very wee. They're tiny little things, not much wider than a human hair. So if you think about like how long a humid would just have to be like, yep, this is it. I'm waiting for death, waiting for this mushroom to keep growing inside me until I die.

It's nigh impossible. You would starve to death first, I think, or die of dehydration. So there's this term micro-remediation for, you know, when a fungi are breaking down components of something, kind of reusing it. They're really good at cleaning up really bad stuff. They're really good at, like, pulling heavy metals from the soil. people have tested cleaning up toxins like polychlorinated by fennels with oyster mushrooms and other mushrooms. And so the death suit, the infinity barrel suit, sorry, uses, the idea is that the mushrooms will help break down the kinds of things that are in your body when you die, you know, the chemicals that we've picked up in the course of being humans who deal with pollution. and eat terrible things and put cosmetics that are super unregulated on our faces and things like that

and that it will be better for the environment than if they were just leaching into the soil. Wow, I think that's so cool. Okay, so that sort of reminds me of like, in the Zoroastrian religion in, like, Iran, they treat their dead by putting them on these towers to be sort of washed away by rain and eaten by vultures. And so what has happened is in the modern era, because practicing Zoroastrian still do this, the vultures have become sick and died off. They think largely because they've been consuming all of the horrible things we put into our bodies and aren't able to withstand it.

That's awful. Yeah, that's just really cool, though, the idea. That has actual repercussions, the kind of toxins that you're talking about. So having a way to sort of isolate them or remove them from the larger environment is really cool. Did you know that when vultures eat prey, they very often go for the butt first? Wow, thank you how we got butts in there, first of all. It's one of the weakest points of entry on any animal. Wait, is that why it is?

Yeah, well, especially when they're eating animals like a hippo or something. I see. Or an elephant. Polk the tuckus. And they also, like, scientists are studying the microbiome of vulture guts because they're like, how do they do it? Yeah. We'd love to get some of that. That's incredible.

Because I was going to say it seems like you probably wouldn't maybe not want to go for the butt first because you're just going for the part that has the most potentially hazardous bacteria for you. But they just... It's all relative when you're a mulster eating a rotting corpse. Speaking of eating a rotting corpse, though, the people who make infinity barrels who do not recommend eating mushrooms that you find on top of one of their graves. Damn it.

Because research is still ongoing with regards to what compounds show up in the fruiting bodies if the mushroom has helped freak them down. We know that they can have heavy metals in them, just like plants, can leach heavy metals from soil and get in your body if you eat them. So definitely learn to forage for mushrooms. Probably don't eat them off of dead people.

Okay, it's time to vote. What was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Definitely the taxidermied man. Yeah, it was a taxid man. Whose name I forgot. Jeremy Bentham. For the first time in the podcast history, we're going to have a fact win

that was not actually a pitched fact. Thank you all so much. I'm honored. Yeah, that was wild. That's one I'm going to keep sharing with friends and family. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Pocketcasts, or SoundCloud. And if you like us, please rate and review us on iTunes. Leave a weird fact in your review, and we might feature it on the show. You can buy our merch, including limited edition, SciPride T-shirts,

and The Weirdest Thing I Learn This Week tote bags at popsai.threadlist.com. Our theme music was produced by Billy Cadden. Our editors are Jason Letterman and Lexi Krupp. 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 for Citizens Bank.

You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allolotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.