The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Economy of "Frozen," Hopping Space Robots, Animals on Drugs

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from the science and economics of the kingdom in the movie "Frozen" to the most (and least) wholesome scientific studies of animals on drugs. 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 Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Mary Beth Griggs: www.twitter.com/MaryBethGriggs Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terms apply. 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 Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins.

And I'm Marybeth Greggs. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of fact or story that we picked up in the course of our writing, editing, reporting, et cetera. And 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 to vote on what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Marybeth, why don't you start with your teeth?

Okay. I am going to be talking this week about tiny little robots that hop around in space. Whoa. Very cool. I wanted to talk about the dark economic history behind the Disney film Frozen. Wow. Did not see that coming. All right.

I am going to talk about animals on drugs. That's always a good one. All sorts of drugs. Oh, my gosh. What should we talk about first? Frozen. Yeah, I think that, like, I don't know what Eleanor's fact is going to be, the T's is a great one. So Europe. All right. I was reading recently a Wikipedia entry that's just a bunch of

events that happened in New York City. And one was just called the Frozen Water Trade. And I was obviously intrigued. It was not, well, time stamped, but it led me down a really wondrous rabbit hole. So in the 19th century and into the 20th century as well, it was really hard to get your hands on ice. And then this is a hard to believe, given that we could all at any moment get our hands on some ice for zero to few dollars. But at the time, like most parts of the world, did not have naturally occurring ice, were not able to store foods, refrigerated meats or fruit and they also just couldn't cool the heck down which was a really big problem so apparently at its peak this industry was worth like six hundred and sixty million dollars in today's money and that

was like when it was still heavily subsidized by governments that were trying to like you know they were moving ice um you know for the army they were moving it for patients and hospitals so like the prices were artificially depressed and still it was this huge industry and so I was talking about this with Sarah, one of our editors and a frequent weirdest thing contributor. She kind of poohed my fact. But she was like, oh, yeah, everyone knows this. What did you think was going on at the start of Frozen? And the answer was I hadn't not much about the start of Frozen at all.

But when you go back and look at it, it is like a bunch of like men in some, you know, maybe like northern European country, just like sawing blocks of ice out of a lake. And that was how this industry functioned for like almost like 100, 50, like 200 years. So basically the idea was that these places that had an abundance of ice would literally turn them into, you know, giant bricks. And then those could be stored and shipped around the world. And the guy who came up with this idea, his name was Frederick Tudor. So what were people doing before this idea? Like there were a lot of like very troublesome like kind of alchemical processes, right? Like salt peter was like a really like big

idea. So that's like potassium nitrate. And like you could use that to cool water. down. But then also people just would like literally like dunk their pajamas in water and then like hope that that cooled them off overnight, which is like my personal nightmare. That sounds so uncomfortable. So they were just like all of these sort of like hodgepodge ways of like trying to like simmer down. And when Frederick Tudor like he just got like literally seems like an evangelical kind of zeal, like he was like we have to like start shipping ice around the world. And this was his big vision. And he went broke. He was in debtors prisons, like, on and off throughout his not-so-great career until he became the ice king. And the ice king was a moniker bestowed upon him because he figured out a way to

take blocks of ice from the northeast of the United States. Like Henry David Thoreau writes about ice being taken from, like, the ponds that he frequented. And he figured out how you could insulate it with sawdust, and in big enough quantities, ship it around the world. So he started shipping it to Calcutta on the far east side of India. And so it was a 14,000 mile journey. It took four months for the ice to get there. But at that time, the British who were colonizing India were just like totally overwhelmed by the heat. Like they were not accustomed to it and they were not adapting well and they were very grumpy. And so they were willing to pay just like huge sums of money for this ice to be shipped like all over the world for them. And so that is sort of how Frederick

Tudor, like, made his name. And it's just very interesting to, like, think about what it must have felt like to finally get your hands on something that could cool you down. There was a really great article recently in Atlas Obscura that was, like, talking about what it was like when it arrived in India. And for the British, they had maybe had, you know, ice that was created through these other methods, right, like the Salt Peter method, but just weren't really able to get their hands on it anymore. Or maybe they had their own blocks of ice from, you know, that were stored from like a winter in England that they could then you know use in the summer

but for the people in India who had never like tried this before it was a very shocking experience apparently so British colonists were writing about how and though little children still continued to seek and to suck it as though it were a sweet meat

they no longer consider it as the novelty which when first holding it in their nearly paralyzed fingers they declared an amazement had burnt them so that's like after a few years of this industry. So it was just like a kind of like magical thing that people wanted their money back when it melted too fast.

Just like a lot of sort of kinks in this, you know, like new economy that Tudor had created. And another thing I thought was like so fascinating too was that before this man decided that he would single-handedly make ICE a thing, people did not really have like an appetite for it. Like there is, he would go around to like bars and he would be like, look, like, let me just convince you to sell a chilled beverage and a not chilled beverage at the same price and just like let people actually decide without any market interference and like see what they pick.

And everyone picked the chilled beverages like without a doubt. And so this, this was, but this wasn't something that they'd considered before. Like he talks about how when he was, you know, like on the road trying to, you know, sell people on this, they would be really skeptical because he was always like, you know, hoarding like chunks of ice to cool down his own drinks. But then after like, you know, after a sip or two, like that very sort of like apocryphal idea, they would be changed by this like chilled beverage. And so that was, yeah, kind of what I had been thinking about this week. There are a lot of other cool ice facts, like the idea that there were boom towns, right, like that were just emerged to service this ice ice. industry. So like along the Kennebec River in Maine, there were just like these like towns that

would sort of like pop up overnight during the season because people like came in droves to, you know, sort of chop up the ice on the river and then sell it around the world. It like totally dominated. This was the only way really to get ice. It definitely outperformed like Salt Peter or any of these like older methods. But then it just disappeared and now it sounds so hilarious. It's great. Yeah, but it wasn't until like World War. War I that we actually had the sort of like refrigerating systems, which had long been sort of speculated about. But it wasn't really until the World War I era that people were like, okay, we're going to

start doing like artificial refrigerants. And then we'll be able to have freezers. And then you just put water in the freezer and like out comes your own ice. So people got too excited about it basically. And that is why we are no longer like chopping up lakes and sending them around the world, we're just doing it in our own kitchens. Whoops. Wow.

All this is making me think of, do you guys remember the Laura Ingalls Wilder book where the guy she marries? Almanso, right? I never read the series. Oh, my gosh. I know. I was scared to say it. So there is an entire book about his life in like this northeastern area where they actually

went out and harvested ice. And he gets very concerned because they use like one of those two hands. sandaled saws and he was worried that like someone was going to have to go underneath the ice and like pull down on the saw in order to like saw through it. Kids are stupid. It's adorable. But they ended up cutting these like huge blocks of ice and storing it just like you said in sawdust. Right. And there, so there was like this whole infrastructure.

Like you could have built a map just around ice houses that like popped up all over the world because the idea is that like they were able with a little bit of insulation like sawdust. they were able to keep them in such high concentrations that the ice sort of kept itself from melting. Yeah, like almost like a glacier, but like artificially in an ice house. So you would stack them like 80 feet high, these blocks. And then if you sort of drained off any of the melt that did occur, that would kind of keep it more intact and you could preserve it.

But yeah, so they were just like these huge facilities and then they were, you know, trying to like move them between them and sort of give people ice. but what I think is wild about all of this is that even though it was a huge, successful and really profitable industry, 90% of ice they think was lost before it actually got to the consumer.

So this entire industry was just the 10% that they actually could preserve. Even the best methods of kind of keeping it cool did not. I mean, like that would be horrible. Can you imagine losing 90% of your product? There's no way you could get away with that today, but they were like, this is good enough.

But yeah, I guess when you compare it too to like saltpeter, it makes a lot of sense why people were willing to put up with it. Because this process, I found, you guys, I found this like extremely long article about what it was like in the Regency era to try to cool down. Oh my gosh. And it is this beautiful explanation of how Salt Peter works. So basically you would take like a wooden tub and it should be sort of like wider at the top than at the bottom. then you would put in the potassium nitrate on the outside of a sheet of like lead or zinc. And then he would just try to insulate that cooling mixture and slowly bring the water temperature down. Apparently five to seven pounds of salt peter when pulverized could bring down the temperature of the water 25 to 30 degrees in 15 minutes, which sounds pretty significant.

it would stay that way only for two hours. But even then that's not like frozen, that's not like ice, right? That's just like cold or water. So I totally get why people were like we're just going to, yeah, we're going to take these frozen blocks. Also, isn't saltpeter like super bad for you if you eat it? Oh yeah. You definitely don't want to put that in your mouth. But people definitely did put it in guns.

That was the other thing that the sort of British regency period was they were like, Salt Peter sort of occurs naturally in certain environments. And so they would just like delicately like scrape it off the side of buildings where they could find it. And like there was like it was essentially like a decades long manhunt for any like a bit of saltpetre they could get their hands on because it was just so versatile. But yeah, also bad for your kidneys. The other thing that I thought was interesting was that there was this thing called like Iceman's knees where you would just get like bloody like and aching like arthritic knees from the process of like cutting the ice out of the like. Lots of other injuries and sort of like also job displacement. Like in British colonial India, there was an entire like, you know, sector of jobs that were just to like help manage the rich people's temperature.

And those went away as ice became more and more accessible. Wow. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with more facts. Me, more. I am a robot. Listen to Last Week in Tech. Thanks for that introduction, Robot. I'm Stan Horacek, one of the hosts of Last Week in Tech, a podcast from the popular science

editors, where we take a look back at the week's big technology stories, including everything from new products, social media, and even future tech, yes, like robots. You can listen on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, wherever you get podcasts, or if you are a robot, just stick your antenna up in the air and tune into our frequency. Listen, or I will destroy all humans. Thanks, robot. But please do it because he's not joking. Okay, we're back.

And I think we should hop into some space robot territory. Hop, hop, hop. I'm so delighted by this. It's very exciting. So we found out this week that Japan's Heabusa II mission actually managed to land. For the first time, we have managed to land human rovers on an asteroid. It's very exciting. So this is a Japanese mission that has headed out to an asteroid called Ryu.

Or Ryu, I'm not going to pronounce that, right? I'm sorry. Essentially, it's really thrilling because it's there, it's orbiting, and this is a really, really small planetary body. And so you can't just have our normal rovers, which go through like the seven minutes of hell that go down to the Mars surface and, you know, manage to roll around after that. in this case, the gravity is so low that if you had a robot just like rolling along on the surface, it would actually just kind of float off into space. Whoa. And so.

Just get traction and just swoop right up. Yeah, yeah. And it's just like, this is not going to be so great. And so Japan had actually tried to do this before. They tried it with the first Hayabusa mission, which was launched in 2003. It landed on Idaquawa in 2005. and actually did manage, like the main spacecraft, managed to get a sample of the asteroid, which it returned to Earth in 2010.

So this is all very exciting and thrilling. But it was supposed to send down a little hopping rover. Unfortunately, that first time, it didn't make it there. The calculation, they sent the command to launch the rover as the spacecraft was actually going up and away from the asteroid. It missed, it just, it missed Iroquo and went off into space. And there's this, what I found. No.

It's just, it's very sad to me. But you can see, like, this is the asteroid. And then that little tiny, tiny dot in the middle of this yellow circle. Oh. It's like Sandra Bullock in that movie. It's very depressing. And so it just, yeah, it went off into space, ended up circling the sun. I'm sure it had a very happy, you know, it's cold.

It's, anyways, it's out there. We don't need to dwell on it. But they decided to try again with this next mission. And so Minerva 2, which are these robots, it stands for, it is, of course, an acronym because space missions have to have acronyms. Yeah, it's micro-nanono, let's see, experimental robot vehicle for the asteroid. It's a Minerva.

Not what I would have guessed. Yeah. I love that for the asteroid in there. For the asteroid. You have to get the A in there somehow. This time they launched two different rovers, and they're going to launch two more next year, which is very, very thrilling. So Rover 1A and Rover 1B actually made it down to the surface,

which I found very thrilling because these are just these are tiny tiny little robots they're not that big they're just let's see it's like a rumba it is like a rumba and it's it's got it's a diameter of 18 centimeters a height of seven centimeters and about 1.1 kilogram so that's about two pounds I think that's literally rumba size yeah it's very small didn't they just send rumba to space not quite they sent rumbas

with thorns on them to space great So you can see in the little picture that they have. Oh, wow. It's like a tricked out Roomba. It's a tricked out Roomba. DJ Roomba. Yeah. This is like some DJ Roomba stuff.

And they've got these little thorns that are coming off of it are, and you can, there's a great artist illustration that we're going to put on our website for you guys to see too. But just picture for now a Roomba ringed with thorns and you'll have an idea of what we're looking at. Crowned in thorns. It is. It is. Beautiful. It is. It spikes.

It's like a little punk rumba. Yeah. We have a great image of this on our website, which is how I happened across it in the first place. That was because we were reporting on this first image that was sent back by one of the rovers. And these little thorns actually measure temperature and they've got optical sensors. They're very tricked out little robots. But the way that they move around and this picture that was. sent back to us was taken mid-hop.

And I am just so excited about the idea of these robots hopping around. And so what happens is they've got a motor inside that turns over, and that sends it just flying through the air. And it goes, and you can really see that in the picture. There's like movement there. It looks like it is going. It's not going very fast, but it can travel like a surprisingly long distance. Like one of its hops can take it about.

50 feet. Wow. Yeah. Which is wild. That's about the same as the record for an animal, which is a snow leopard going about 49 feet. Kangaroos are about 40. Humans are very lame and we can only, the longest long jump was at 29 feet, four inches.

Whoa. I have to say that. That is, I'm sorry. That is really good on what I thought a human being could do. Yeah, that is really impressive. But still, you got trumped to buy the. the DJ Roomba. DJ Roomba.

DJ Roomba for the win. Yeah. No, that was Mike Powell in 1991. And what was amazing about that particular long jump record was that bless his heart. He said it right after his teammates set the record for 8.91 meters

and then he comes along with 8.95. Yeah. And they never spoke again. Yeah. That looked like it was kind of painful moment. But exciting. This distance that it covers,

it takes, because of the little gravity, it's just kind of floating along. So it floats along for 15 minutes before it lands back down. That's amazing. It's fantastic. I love that it hops because when the feeling lander tried to hop onto a comet and failed. It was because it landed and kind of bounced and bounced too much. and just ended up with its solar panels in the wrong place, and it slowly died. And we eventually found it. It was very sad.

Everybody did great work on filet. It was not a failure. It was just that the robot did not actually do the thing. It did not do the thing. Which happens a lot. But I love that this robot is supposed to just like bounce and flip all over. Yeah. And it does it autonomously. So this is, it is hopping on its own.

It is deciding when it hops and it is, it is just a robot that knows its own mind. It knows its own mind. And it's great. And yeah, and the hopping idea has actually been around for a while. The Russians tried it with Phobos 2 back in 1989 where they were going to send a rover down to one of Mars's moons. And unfortunately, they lost contact with the spacecraft before they had like the chance to actually send it down to the surface. But this is an idea that has been around for a while. and it's just so exciting to see it actually working.

And I mean, it's just, for me, it's weird and wonderful to imagine these rovers just kind of like hopping around on an asteroid. And the fact that there's two of them now, Rover 1A and Rover 1B, and there will be Rover 2A and Rover 2B next year, which is really exciting. It's like Jimmy Neutron meets 2001 a space Odyssey. I'm pumped about it. these bots are made for hoppin and that's just what they'll do Nancy Sinatra's so proud of you right now could you tell us about some of the

science they're hoping to do on the asteroid or do they just love watching robots hop because that would also be a valid acceptable in my mind take my tax dollars yes yeah we'll take Japan's tax dollars in this case but we'll get there we're going to get there

there's some missions in the works But yeah, I mean, this is something where we're going to find out a lot about asteroid surfaces because we don't know that much about what is going on on an asteroid. We've got the sample from Hayabusa, but the original like the OG Hayabusa mission, but we're going to get some more data now. And that's really exciting because we still don't know a lot about what makes up these rocks in the outer solar system. What we have now is just the stuff that happens to hit us in the form of meteorites. And that's not exactly a great sample size. So if we can go out and actually figure out what's out there, that's pretty exciting for people that are studying the origins of the solar system

and also potentially space mining, that sort of thing. This is kind of the idea is we want to know what these are made of, where they came from. And we're going to pick up a lot of data from not only this mission, not only from these rovers, but also from they're going to be doing some more sample return, which will be. be pretty exciting. Awesome. Very cool. Love those little robots.

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Okay, we're back, and now I'll get into my fact, which is about animals on drugs, so many drugs, all different sorts. A few days ago, I edited an article by our intern, Charlie Wood. about a new study wherein scientists dosed octopuses with ecstasy. Which, you know, I love octopuses. I'm not going to say I love ecstasy, but it's a really interesting drug. It's fascinating. So I was like, hell yeah, great study. And looking into it more, honestly, this is one of the most wholesome-sounding animal studies

I have ever delved into, full stop. We'll get to that in a minute. And we'll get to the least wholesome animal study I've ever found. Oh, no. So why do this study at all? Because octopuses are super intelligent. They can recognize individual humans. They can solve all sorts of puzzles. But their brains are super different from our own. And our last common ancestor existed like 500 million years ago. So the question is, how does something with a brain more similar to a snail than a humans achieve that level of cognition? which is not to say that people don't believe it can be so. You know, animal researchers now realize quite clearly that it can be so,

but it's an intriguing question because we understand why the other great apes have similar cognition to our own because we are very close on the evolutionary tree. We can point to structures of their brain that work exactly the same as structures in our brain. So when you're looking at something like an octopus that has evolved completely different, differently and does not have any of those structures where you can say like, yeah, that's where the smart stuff goes. You know, it kind of gives us an interesting way to figure out what the common denominators are, even when there are so few common denominators, which is a really interesting way to get at kind

of the very earliest evolutionary origins of, you know, like higher level cognition. It also helps you know if you should invite octopi, octopuses to Coachella. Exactly. Also very important. So one way to investigate that is to figure out whether drugs affect us in the same way because, you know, drugs influence very specific pathways and receptors in our brain. So if animals are having the same sort of behavioral effects, it, you know, kind of points out what neuroreceptors might be equally important for them. MDMA is known for making humans super social. MDMA is ecstasy, by the way, in case you are not up with the lingo. Also known as Molly, people may refer to themselves as rolling.

MDMA is known for making humans real cuddly and lovey-dovey, and octopuses are on the whole really socially isolated critters. We're starting to occasionally find individual species of octopus that hang out with each other more, but generally speaking, most octopus only get along while they're mating. Other than that, they are the lone wolves of the sea. Wow. And so researchers wondered, would MDMA turn them into more social creatures? Bump, bum, bum, bum. First they had to do some dosage trial and error, because initially the tripping octopuses

were like flashing all different colors and then blanching white and showing. They were just like wigging out to use the scientific term. and they eventually found that the proper dose was like much lower than the first one they had tried and that it was actually pretty much the same as you would give a human pound for pound which is intriguing wait they originally tried to give an octopus more than a human would take more than um we're talking about like relative weight right so they gave them more per like ounce of their body really but it was also um it's not like they were like 14 feeding the octopus as this. They were putting them in a water bath

with the ecstasy in it. Oh, I see. So I think they were... Like ambient ecstasy. Yes. So it was totally unclear how much it would take. Can you imagine like putting an octopus in a water bath with drugs and then it just starts like disco balling out in all these different colors? I would be terrified. Oh. I'm so for the poor octopuses. All of the octopuses involved in the study by the way are happy and healthy. None of them suffer. any ill effects long term, but they did have some bad trips momentarily. So they got the dosage right.

And then they found that the effects were strikingly similar as well. So I love the setup of this experiment. It's really adorable. They had this three-chambered tank, and the middle tank was empty. And then one chamber had an octopus in like a little enclosure, so it couldn't move around. And then on the other side, there was a, quote, novel object, which was either a Chewbacca or Stormtrooper Star Wars. figurine. I want to know how often they swap those out because frankly I think that that is an

important experiment condition and really depends on what side of the force the octopus being tested favors. So their data may need some work. Secondary analysis over here. Yeah. So they dropped sober test subjects into the middle tank for 30 minutes and measured where they chose to spend their time. So sober octopus has spent most of their time with the action figure. And when they did venture into the tank that had another octopus in it, they would squish themselves into a corner and just maybe occasionally reach out a tentacle, like, very nervously. Yeah, they were not having a good time at that party.

After they took MDMA, which the researchers did by, like, dunking them in a beaker full of ecstasy water for 10 minutes, followed by rinse to avoid contamination. Then when they put them back in the tank, They spent almost all their time in the social chamber. And they were, quote, all loosey-goosey with all five arms hugged around the enclosure that the other octopus was in. Also, the researcher said anecdotally, they saw a lot of goofiness, like making tent shapes with their bodies and doing what looked like water acrobatics and spending a long time sitting stroking an airstone in the tank. So they were really rolling. as one would say.

The common thread seems to be this molecule serotonin, because MDMA works in part by latching onto the pumps in the brain that usually suck pre-floating serotonin, and it reverses them. So you get like a super heavy dose of this chemical that makes us really happy and social and friendly. And it seems that the same thing happens in octopuses, which is really intriguing because it suggests that this function of serotonin in the brain has existed for a long, long time. because this animal we haven't shared a common ancestor with for 500 million years plus

seems to have the same response to getting an uptick of serotonin. Reading about this made me ask, what other experiments have we done with animals on drugs? I told you, this is the most wholesome one because it just made a bunch of octopuses hug each other. Oh, no, I'm so worried now. So I'm only going to talk about one really upsetting study very briefly. Just lest we forget that there is a dark side to give us.

recreational drugs to animals. I found a one that we actually covered on Pops that back in 2010. It's a study funded in part by Taser International, where researchers got sheep high on meth and then tased them to see whether the drug raised risk of cardiac arrest. The obvious drive there being that Taser wanted to prove that police officers who tased people high on meth wouldn't be risking killing them. So I hate that on all those.

Institutional review board was like onward. I mean, I think they argue that it was like a humanitarian endeavor because tasers are non-lethal. Anyway, it's... Save the sheep. I just like it strongly. The one upside is that the sheep were at least anesthetized while receiving their post-methystok. Okay. One more.

Okay. More wholesome drug study. Okay. So doing this research reminded me of... that meme of spider webs crafted under the influence of different drugs. So good. And thinking about it, I mean, I haven't seen them in a few years. And thinking about it, I was like, there's no way those pictures are real.

Like, you've got the half-ass marijuana web and like a hilariously incomplete web on sleeping pills and a haphazard speed web. And I was like, it's too perfect. That can't be real. But it is totally real. Yay. Oh, my God. And I learned a lot about this experiment from a few sources,

but kudos to Mike Pearl, who wrote a great article on Vice About it a few years back. The researcher behind these experiments initially was not interested in particularly in studying. He wasn't just like, what happens when you give a spider meth? His colleague was trying to document the web-making behaviors of spiders, but hated that they all made their webs at two in the morning and was like, can you give them something that confuses them enough that they'll make webs at other times of the day. So he was just trying to see how you might addle the mind of a spider

enough that it would make webs all the dang time, I guess. And that did not work. They kept making them at the same time. They just got funky. So I have some pictures that will also link to one pop-side because NASA actually ended up repeating these studies later. So this is a normal web, and then this is a web on marijuana. That jazz cabbage.

Wow. So the marijuana one is way not as like... It's not tight. Yeah. Not as regimented, shall be like that. And then this is on Benny's, so like, you know, speed. Oh, God. And... That's what it looks like when I tried to crochet.

Yeah. This is caffeine. Oh, yikes. Yeah, so caffeine, that's the one that people love to share because they're like, so rethink that cup of coffee while you're studying. It looks bad. But we'll get back to why it looks so bad in a second. This one is, oh, this is sleeping pills.

I love this. They just didn't even try. It's like super minimal. It's like five lines. It's really beautiful. And then LSD was really interesting because low doses of LSD actually made them more meticulous. Like the spacing between the web was like more perfect. But then the more LSD you gave them the weirder it got.

And then eventually they just like didn't do it anymore. but it was like a very interesting transition from actually like higher performing almost neurotically woven webs to really like psychedelic three-dimensional webs to nothing because they were too busy tripping and what's interesting is that this didn't really tell us so much about drugs it told us more about like how spiders weave webs and how innate it is because Because the interesting thing, given how different our brains are from spiders, it's not as if the spiders are actually experiencing the same thing we experience on these drugs. What's interesting is that spider to spider, the way the drugs change the web weaving, is super consistent. So it indicates that, you know, there is such, like, basic neurobehaveia that is dictating how spiders weave their webs, that if you give them a substance, it will change how.

how that web is woven in a really particular way. It's not like the spiders like, I have the munchies. I'm not going to weave this dang web. It's not like that. And the interesting thing about the caffeine is that probably the reason the caffeine one is arguably the most messed up, which is so funny because we don't think of caffeine as a drug that messes us up. It's because spiders are among a group of animals that are actually they will die if they consume, like, pretty moderate levels of caffeine.

Oh, wow. So this is more about them being in like, I think, physical distress than them being like addled on that wacky caffeine. So yeah, really interesting. And I'm super jazzed that these images are real and what they are labeled as because I assumed it was too good to be true. Also really intriguing that the LSD web starts out as more. meticulous on low doses because as some of you may know, microdosing on LSD is becoming like a very

popular like brain hacking thing. You know, the idea that on really low doses it makes you more focused and that you do better on creative work. So again, spiders are too different from us for us to draw any generalizations about what LSD might do to their webmaking. But it is, it is an interesting parallel. And that's really all you can get from giving drugs to animals is interesting parallels and electrocuted sheep. That's my fact. I loved it. That's incredible.

So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Oh. Hmm. This is something to consider. It's a tough week. It is a tough week. I thought I knew how the ice trade worked, but I really learned a lot. from that.

Thank you. Yeah. So I'm going to give ice. Really? Yeah. I liked learning about Frederick Tudor, the Ice King, because I think. Suck it, Sarah. Yeah.

Yeah. And I really like that we've got this comparison, even though, like, it's not direct between the Ice Queen and Frozen. Absolutely. And the Ice King. Well said. Who made all his money. It's time to remix. That soundtrack.

Wow. Thank you guys. Let's all have a cold beverage. Oh, yeah. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show.

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