The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The First Constellations, Surprisingly Spicy History, Kids Find the Darndest Fossils

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Moiya McTier joins the show to talk about math, the first constellations, and more! Plus, Rachel explains why children are master fossil discoverers, and Sara Kiley divulges a surprising spicy origin. 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  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!  Get 20% OFF @honeylove by going to https://www.honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod If you’re looking for a simpler, effective investment for your health, try AG1, and get 5 free AG1 Travel Packs and a FREE 1 year supply of Vitamin D with your first purchase. Go to https://drinkAG1.com/WEIRDEST Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's code weirdest for 20% off. 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 ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and 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 Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Moia McTeer. Moia, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I have listened to the show for a long time. So to be on it is incredible. That's so flattering to hear because you are like one of the coolest people I've ever met. Why don't you tell our listeners why that is? Who are you? What do you do? Yes. Hello. I'm a doctor of astrophysics. So I'm an astrophysicist. I'm also a folklorist and I'm a science communicator and that means it is my mission in life to help people understand the world around us better through a lens of science. I do that across lots of platforms. So if I may list a few things. Oh, please. Thank you. So I host two of my own podcasts. One of them is

about astronomy for people who are afraid of space. It's called Pale Blue Pod. The other is about fictional world building through science and it's called ex-o-lore. I host a YouTube show for PBS that It is all about world mythology called Fate and Fabled. And I wrote a book that came out last year called The Milky Way, an autobiography of our galaxy. Keyword, autobiography. So I wrote it from the Milky Way's point of view. It's very sassy, very irreverent. And that's how I met you, Rachel.

We met at a dinner for authors who are part of the same literary agency. Yes. And the rest is history. Yes. your book is fantastic and I'm already excited to dive into your podcast and listeners, you should definitely check them out and we'll remind you at the end of the show. So don't worry, don't stress. You don't have to leave right now to go find them. But you can if you want.

We'll still be here when you get back. That's fine. That's the nice thing about podcasts. You can pause and come back whenever you want. Exactly, exactly. 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 we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, looking at the stars, etc.

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 in like a competitive way where there's a winner anymore. I have decided recently. But will I rewrite the intro? TBD. It's collaborative weirdness.

It's true. It's true. We're just going to reflect. on all the weird things we learned. So Sarah Kylie, why don't you start with your teas? Yay! Okay, well, so my tease is that the chili pepper has a surprising origin story, and according to brand new research,

it didn't necessarily start where you think it would. Ooh. Oh, dun-d-da-da. All right. Well, I'm intrigued. Moya, what's your tease? My tease is that in 2016, scientists learned that a special type of geometry was actually 1,400 years older than they previously thought.

Ooh, math facts. We don't do enough math facts on this show or anywhere, so I'm psyched. My tease is that I want to talk about why kids are so darn good at finding ancient artifact. Why do they keep being cute news stories about children pulling swords out of lakes and stuff like that? Can science explain? Possibly. I'll just do it. I love that. I really want to know about that. Okay, great. I can get started. Also, I didn't realize until I was saying it that there is, you know, kind of a thematic folklore tie-in. So, you know, definitely did that on purpose for you, Moia. But so this story is more of a collection of weird stories and fun things. And it started because I read a news item about how a few months ago, an eight-year-old girl named Elise was playing at recess at her school in Norway.

And she bent down to pick up, it seems like a piece of litter. She, the translated news item from Norway just said she was picking up a stray shard of glass. And I'm going to believe it was because she was very safety-minded. Must protect the other children around me. Exactly, yeah. And instead, she saw like this really interesting rock by it. She was like, I'm going to pick that up instead. And then her teacher was like,

Elise, I'm so sorry, I'm going to have to confiscate this rock because I'm pretty sure it's an object of historical significant. Ain't when that happened. And apparently teachers in Norway are all like well-schooled in how to handle archaeological finds on the plague. ground, at least based on the tone of this local news report I read a translation of. They were very, like, matter of fact about, like, yes, of course, Elise's teacher knew that she should notify the Vestland County Council and send the Rock over to them as you do.

It's part of teacher training. Yeah, exactly. Viking stuff just appears. Right? You have your Viking artifact drills. So it turned out to be a Neolithic dagger. It was made of Flint, who was more than 4,000 years old. And archaeologists were like, this one is beautiful.

It's a rare find. It's in such great shape. And it's from a period when humans were transitioning into agricultural lifestyles and maybe spending a little bit more time on these tools that they carved because they were no longer just either hunting or sleeping or running. for their lives. You know, a very important transition into culture as we know it. And it's just chilling on a playground. Yeah, yeah. And it was about 12 centimeters long, so like a pretty sizable weapon for a small child to pick up. Archaeologists did not find any

related items on the schoolgrounds, which they did dig up because, you know, they wanted to know. So they think the dagger was probably just kind of like left there by someone passing through. And in fact, Flint, which is a sedimentary rock, doesn't actually occur naturally in Norway, which I didn't realize that Flint is a place by place, case by chast, the sedimentary rock. I thought it was just kind of a generic rock, but it's not. So that was probably... The name brand rock. Right. It was probably very offensive to some geology.

I just said that about Flint. I'm so sorry. But now I know. And so because we know that Flint doesn't occur naturally in Norway, they were like, it definitely came from somewhere else, maybe right over there in Denmark, maybe somewhere farther. But the idea is that like this was part of someone's everyday carry and they were moseying through. And now it's here on this playground for at least to find. I will definitely link to the articles on popside.com slash weird. There's not much additional information, but there is a picture. of Elise looking incredibly unimpressed with the world as she stands over her find. And the quote from her is, it was nice.

So at least, I mean, she's right. Yeah, it was nice. It wasn't necessarily the highlight of Elise's year. But I think when she grows out, she'll probably be pretty excited that this happened. And yeah, so that got me thinking about how it doesn't. like there's a pretty regular clip of news stories coming out about a kid accidentally finding some, you know, amazing artifact. And I was like, it'll be cool to just kind of pull up some of those stories to share, you know, a few fun ones. We love kids having fun and learning about

science. And then I did actually find some commentary on like why kids are such great fossil hunters. So I can share that too. My guess now is that it's the tiny hands. The tiny hands help. That is you're on the right track. So in 2006, the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club in New Zealand took a group of young Kiwis to go fossil hunting. And the kids found a 30 million-year-old giant penguin skeleton.

Oh, my God. Which to me, coming across the bones of a giant ancient bird as a child, would have been horrifying, but I have to imagine that if you're from New Zealand, you know, the concept of giant birds is much less shocking. Less frightening. Is that where the albatross is? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, they know it then. Yeah, exactly. And so it was the most complete fossilized skeleton of an ancient giant penguin yet discovered in 2006. So that was already very exciting for them. And then 15 years later, in 2021, it was actually confirmed as a new. species, which was fun because these people who are now grown-ups were like, oh, gosh, yeah, wow, I remember we found those giant bird bones. That's pretty cool. Another story is that in 2014,

two different kids, 110 and 111, found prehistoric projectiles from different eras on the same stretch of New Jersey beach within weeks of each other. So my old hometown paper, the Daily Journal, had a real field day with that. Like, is this? that's a rising trend with kids finding prehistoric protectiles. Probably not. But you never know. The bubble will burst pretty soon. Yeah, exactly.

But you never know what you might find when you're down the shore. So mostly you'll find like garbage. So be careful. In 2015, a four-year-old boy named Wiley, this one is fun. He was out with his dad, a zookeeper, who thought that they might find some interesting stuff in the dirt that had been done. dug up for a new shopping center in their neighborhood. He was like, I tend to take my four-year-old out fossil hunting whenever there's like an interesting patch of dirt to do so in. And you would like

finding some fish vertebrae, blah, blah, blah, you know, because this area used to be underwater. And then the four-year-old Wiley like toddled off and then came back with a piece of phone and his dad, the seekeeper was like, where did you find this? Because it was a hundred-year-old. million-year-old dinosaur bone. What? Yeah. And in the article about this, Wiley was reportedly a little camera shy, but he did agree to show TV news anchors how to dig for fossils. So that's very sweet.

I hope he grows up to be a paleontologist or archaeologist. And what's funny is that, you know, in a lot of these articles, you know, that is what the reporters ask them. They're like, are you going to be a paleontologist now? And sometimes they're like, yeah. And sometimes they're like, no, I want to be a veterinarian. Well, you're ahead. That makes sense. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. You've already mastered this field. In 2018, there was a really popular story because it's just very, very whimsical. Feels like something out of a Disney Channel original movie would have been called, like, Little Lady of the Lake or something. thing, but a Swedish eight-year-old named Saga reached into the water at her family's lake house and pulled out a three-foot long sword, 33 inches long. As one does. And she was like, look, dad, I have a sword.

And he was like, ah. It turned out to be. How did she even lift it? Well, so it was very, very rusted. You know, it was not a, I think most of the structural integrity of the sword was gone. And it was 1,500 years old. But even though it was a very rusty, and I think like the end of it had kind of like fallen off, it was very well preserved. It had, it scabbard, which was made of wooden leather, was still attached.

So what's fun with this story is that the archaeologist asked her to keep it a secret because they were worried that like looters would show up and swarm the lake looking for like antiques and treasures to seal. But when the archaeologists were like, okay, we've done our excavation here. They gave her the all clear. And then she got to tell her class and she got to throw an ice cream party at school, which seems very appropriate. And the press dubbed her the Queen of Sweden, of course, because of the similarity to the Arthurian myth. Again, I really think there's a lot of Disney Channel original movie potential here. So where is it? 10 more years. It's true. It'll be there. Yeah, yeah. In 2019, a 12-year-old boy named Jackson Hepner in Ohio,

he was playing around in a creek bed, and then he saw like an old, jagged object jutting out the mud, and it turned out to be a seven-inch-long mammoth tooth tooth tooth. And I'll link to this. He wrote a letter to the archaeologist being like, I hope you can give me the tooth back soon because I wanted to show my friend. So unfortunately, I think he probably was disappointed. But he was very proud. out of the find and very excited. And yeah, there are actually some countries where they are very deliberately asking for kids to help, you know, find artifacts. In 2021, the Libyan Department of Antiquities honored six children who had found relics

from different eras at different times just by chance while playing in the vicinity of an ancient city in East Libya. authority said the artifacts were like sculptures, one of them was a marble carriage pulled by four forces, assorted sculptures and antiquities. But the Department of Antiquities had launched an awareness campaign to encourage youth and other citizens to keep an eye out for artifacts and turn them in instead of selling them because there had been a real like loss of history because of, you know, looting and things being sold on the private market and things being, you know, just brought home with nobody knowing their historical value. So they were like, truly children, if you see something that might be a marble carriage pulled by four horses, say something.

And yeah, I think that's great. Also in 2021, a four-year-old named Lily Wilder who's very cute. All these children are cute, but I got to say, Lully's very, very photogenic, very charismatic little tyke. She was walking with her parents on the beach in South Wales, and she spotted a fossilized dinosaur footprint that turned out to be 220 million years old. So that's pretty fantastic. And, yeah, I promised, you know, I would have something to say about, like,

are kids particularly good at finding fossils, artifacts, etc.? The answer is like, it's probably not that kids find these things more often than adults. You know, for obvious reason, a kid finding something is more likely to end up in the news than an adult finding something. But that doesn't mean that kids aren't like inherently really good little archaeologists. And this 2019 Atlas Obscura article by Jessica Lee Hester explains why by talking to a few experts. Basically, the archaeologist that she spoke to agreed that kids do have like an inherent edge over other amateur diggers if they choose to apply it. Basically, they're curious, they're closer to the ground, which makes a big difference. Keep in mind, a lot of these things just kind of look like rocks.

So being a couple feet away from the ground can really make it possible to spot something that is not very different from the other things around it. They also tend to not mind or even relish in getting dirty, which is often a pretty crucial aspect of like accidentally finding something. You have to be, you know, digging in the dirt. They're also, I love this. A couple of different archaeologists pointed this out. They're not self-conscious about trying to find something or how they might look when they find something. Like this one archaeologist was like, you know, as part of my work, I'm often on all. floors or like creating my neck close to the ground squinting at something. And most adults wouldn't

do that casually, you know, they would have to really believe that they were about to find something amazing. And a kid just has to be like, what's that? And so yeah, there are all of these aspects of being a small, curious human that actually make you really good at doing archaeology. And the other thing is that you have fewer preconceptions. So on the one hand, like, let's be real. Many times when a kid see something and thinks it might be special, they are incorrect. You know, like kids being like, ah, this must be a shark tooth. And you're like, that is a pointy rock.

I'm so sorry. But it's a very special rock. You're allowed to love the rock. But things like that. But on the other hand, you know, a couple archaeologists pointed out, that can be a real asset. That openness to the idea that anything you look at might be something really special. Like one guy said, you know, my mind is basically tuning out pebbles when I look down at the ground.

And that means he might not spot something that he's never seen before if it looks too much like a pebble. And kids, but also other first time, you know, amateur archaeologists might be more willing to be like, I don't know, that could be something. Let's go look at it closer. So yeah, not having those sort of blinders on is a real asset. So disclaimer time. Remember, like, look down to the ground every once in a while. Something cool might be there. But if you find something you think might be special, handle it carefully. Or if it's like firmly stuck in the ground, just leave it there. You don't want to damage it trying to get it out. And you want to reach out to your closest universities archaeology department because they'll be able to look after it, you know, figure out what it is,

and maybe you'll get to have an ice cream party, you know. And then just one related thing I found while looking for these stories that is it exactly the same kind of thing, but just really delighted me is that at the Children's Workshop School, which is a public school in downtown Manhattan, And a teacher started leading closet archaeology digs in 2015. Do you guys want to guess what this is? The cynic in me is like, is this teacher asking the children to go through their personal closet to clean it up and like find anything that might have been lost? No, but I think that is what most teachers would mean when they deal up with an activity called closet archaeology. Oh my gosh.

So they do these digs, starting in 2015. Every year she leads eight-year-olds in lifting up a section of the old floorboards in the closet of her classroom. Because underneath there is still like the dirt packed, you know, kind of foundation. I don't know exactly what you call it. But underneath the floorboards, there is packed dirt. And so every year they take some time to lift up these floorboards inside the closet and dig. and dig around in the dirt. And the school was built in 1913,

so they find stuff like doodles, receipts, candy wrappers, and toys from the early 20th century. And in fact, they have successfully contacted the like 70 plus year old people who, you know, doodled or signed their crush's name.

And it's just really delightful. And then here's this one quote from, one of the eight-year-olds, these are eight-year-olds doing these archaeological digs. He said, I really love history, especially ancient history. Oh, no.

I love that this eight-year-old thinks that 1913 is ancient history. I also think that like 30-year-olds are decrepit and on death's doors. That's true. That's true. They probably were like, oh, wow. this this gum was sold in 1920 mom do you remember that um but i really i love this activity i think it's brilliant um i and it's clear that the kids are it seems like the new york post covers it every few years um and the kids are just like beaming they're they're wearing gloves they're covered in dirt

they're proudly holding up truly a piece of trash from 100 years ago and their like history is blowing my bite. And I know there should be like old trash is interesting. Give it a couple thousand years and it will be an artifact. And I love that for them. So that's my whole story, my collection of children, finding significant object of the dirt. Wow. That warms my heart so much.

I just love the idea of finding a dinosaur bone somewhere. I was never so lucky, but I guess there's still a chance if I crawl around on all fours sometimes. That might be all it takes. That's the spirit. Also, you know, Sir Kylie, like, I know you've spent time in Scotland. Scotland's definitely the place to crawl around in the dirt looking for stuff. Oh, absolutely. A lot of little swimming fossils around there.

Yeah. Next time I go, I'll be getting married, so I'll be crawling around in my wedding dress looking for dinosaurs. Yeah. Something old. You can find your something old there. True. And it will be something borrowed because you will have to send it to the University of Glasgow. Yes. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? And talking about mood.com, they have an incredible line of cannabis dummies and a lot more.

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Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Okay, we're back. And Sir Kylie, talk to me about some peppers, some spice, a little bit of spice. Some spicy peppers. Yep. So when you think of the chili pepper, you probably think about South America, which like, makes sense. Until very recently, scientists believed that chili peppers evolved in South America almost 15 million years ago. So yeah. And then in a 22 article from the New York Times, journalist LaGai Amashan wrote that archaeologists had found evidence that Chilees were harvested from the wild for cooking some 9,000 years ago. And what is now, Mexico and by around 4,000 BCE, they had been domesticated for regular use in meals.

So people had been eating these for thousands of years. And then a different perspective from the Chili Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University, they say that chili peppers originated in the lowlands of Brazil as a small red, round, quote unquote, berry-like fruit. And birds are probably the reason that they were able to spread around outside of. low lens of Brazil. But yeah, so like evolutionarily speaking, 15 million years is really not that long. So, but we didn't really know what had happened before 15 million years ago when it came to the chili peppers.

But the spicy little fruits actually have a much longer backstory. So I'm going to get to that in just a second. But first, as I like to do, let's nerd out about the pepper itself. You're going to get a bunch of pepper facts. So chili peppers are varieties of the berry fruit of plants. that are in the capsicum. Capcissum, I believe. Capsaism.

Those are members of the Nightshade family. And nightshades make up a ton of the most important plants in your pantry. So tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes, eggplants, all that stuff. And then they also have a lot of toxic cousins, the Belladonna, Mandrake, tobacco, etc. So we've got like the essentials and the avoids in this family of plants. And they're kind of like found everywhere in the world, but they tend to be the happiest in tropical Latin America where they're abundant and widely distributed. Within this giant family of flowering plants, there are 102 genera and about 2,000 plus species.

But only around 50 species of these plants are found in the U.S. and Canada combined. So the largest genus Solonum contains some, like most of them. So there's like 2,200 species and 2,000 of them. are in the family that includes like potatoes and tomatoes. The next one that is the most important, obviously, for this story is the capesum. I know I'm going to mess that up. Pepper plants, so exciting stuff. There's like 30 species of them.

And basically they include a bunch of different freshly fruited peppers, including the mild bell peppers that you could like eat. And then there's the hot chili peppers like cayenne, which you can make into relish or condiments or pickle them or ground them and use them as a spice. Put it on your mac and cheese. It'll change your life. That sounds fabulous. Okay, I may be doing that later.

But the remaining nightshades are the tobacco plants, and then there's like 80 other species that are poisonous that are all in the tobacco genus, and then a bunch of little genera of garden ornamental plants like petunias. So there's a lot going on in this big family tree. So that's the basics. But as we've seen time and time again, if you go far enough into the history of literally anything, especially when we're talking about evolutionary history of a plant, you're going to find probably smaller, weirder, and more primitive additions of your favorite food or your favorite plant that existed millions of years before anybody knew about it.

And it turns out that Peppers 2 had a several million-year-old relative that nobody knew about until very, very recently. So, Flashward, we're in 2021, and a postdoc and an undergrad student, at CU Boulder, meet up at the University's Museum of Natural History to check out some specimen in the collection from the Green River Formation, which is located in northwestern Colorado and southwestern Wyoming. And so this place, if you like fossils, then you know about the Green River Formation, because it's known for basically teaching us everything we know about the Eocene era in this area. And the Eocene is this geological epic that lasted 56 to 33.9 million.

years ago. So a while ago, but not too much of a while ago. And it's the dawn of new fauna. And it's kind of like the second epoch in the paleogene period in the Cenozoic era, which or Cenozoic era, excuse me, which is what we're still in today. So long time ago, but not that long ago. And so while Colorado was still physically located at the same latitude it basically is today, the climate was really, really different. So we're talking like a moist temperate or subtropical temperatures. You know, it's averaging around. around the 60s was just a little bit different than, you know, if you show up, if you show up in Denver now, you're probably going to be cold.

Terrible snowboarding weather. Yeah, exactly. You were not going here to snowboard. But there are tons and tons and tons of fossils. Like the Smithsonian alone has 35,000 rocks with fossils in them from here. And each one of those contains, like, multiple fossils in each one of them. And there's lots of, like, flowers and spiders and feathers and reptiles. They found crocodiles here, which is like kind of cements the idea of a warm and toasty

climate because there are not crocs running around in Colorado now, which would be something. To be a very different life. So what I'm hearing is that Colorado used to be Florida. Basically, there's a lot going on. There's a lot going on. And oh, another fun story that came out relatively recently is like the world's oldest bat skeleton was found in this like formation as well. So there's weird, um, weird mammals too, not just weird reptiles. and there's all sorts of plants, palms, sequoars, cattails, and stuff that you see in North America these days. But you could also find other species that are common or even restricted to places in like Eastern Asia. So it's just, there was a lot going on and it was a lot different than today's Western U.S.

So bring us back to 2021 and we're in the History Museum and these two researchers spot a fossil that had a really weird but typical nightshade trait, which are these teeny tiny spikes at the end of a fruiting stem. They're like a little tooth kind of thing. They're called calyx teeth and they grip onto the pepper kind of like how like a fancy ring is like pronged to hold onto a gem. So there are 300,000 species of plants out there on the planet. And one of the authors, they said in a release when this came out about a month ago, that the only plants with these little teeth make up like 80 or 90 species total.

So it's very, very weird. coincidence that there's another like random species of calyx teeth plant or it's a really really old pepper so this pepper dates back like 50 million years ago so they found two of these fossils

and then they found another one at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and they were all from the Green River formation and exhibited early chili pepper-esque traits and all of these specimens were originally found in the 90s but like as things go it takes the right person and the right time to know what they're looking at. So the pair compared these newfound pepper-like things

with the timeline of another ancient Nye Shade fossil in Colombia that was part of the Tomitio sub tribe. And what do you know? They pieced it together that night shades were already evolving and distributing all the way across the Americas 50 million years ago. So the chili pepper, the oldest chili pepper that we found, is from Colorado, which is very, very random. And in today's Colorado, there's not really any night shades.

There's a few native nightshades, but there's no native chili pepper. So you can't even find a chili pepper there now. But what some experts theorize is that, like, fruit-eating birds, which have been around even longer than this chili pepper, so like 10 million years longer than this chili pepper. We're probably, you know, carrying seeds on their feathers or poop or muddy little bird feet. They're dragging species all over these different continents. And with this super old specimen found the new idea. that birds maybe picked up peppers or other nightshades in North America and then brought them

down to South America. And that kind of switches up a lot about what we potentially know about such a crucial group of plants. Not to mention, you know, scientists thought that the nightshades evolved like 15 million years ago or in the evolutionary blink of an eye. So now we have like 40 million more years of evolution to unpack with this plant. So it's not just like poof the peppers were here. It's like, okay, no surprise. There have been peppers for a lot longer, and they are not from where we thought they were at all. And so what I love about this story is that sometimes I feel like we think about where things like come from, quote unquote, a lot and forget that evolution happened without any knowledge or care of what humans one day would like deem as borders. And so I'm

going to read a little bit more from Michan's article now, because they wrote it like a year before this information even came out, but they kind of captured the other. of chili peppers in society pretty well. So this is what they wrote. These peppers indigenous to the Western Hemisphere and later embraced in Asian Africa were long treated as outsiders in North America and much of Europe, what we call the Western world. Although they arrived in Europe and were cultivated there, beginning in the late 15th century, little trace of them may be found in cookbooks before the 18th and 19th centuries, when the elite allowed them into their kitchens, as chronicled by French anthropologists as their cats. For that matter,

it's only in recent years that Americans have begun to come around. Consumption per capita in the United States more than doubled from 1980 to 2020, according to a study published in agronomy last year. With those who make Chile's a regular part of their diet more likely to be non-white, a site of the country's changing demographics and younger than 65, and or identifies food explorers, those who have pride themselves on their interest and knowledge of top-notch, unique, gourmet, new, or exotic ingredients. So the moral of the story from this is, is plants and food are probably a lot more homegrown and less quote unquote exotic than we like to think. The history of food is just as complex as anything.

And food you're like thinking your mind like, ooh, that's weird. It may have literally have origins in your own backyard. So yeah, that's it. And I have one final fun fact. But according to the researchers on the paper, we don't really know what it looked or tasted like. But its closest relatives were really spicy. So apparently this old pepper, this Colorado pepper was quite spicy. But yeah, that's that.

Well, I feel like little peppers tend to be. Little naughty peppers. You got to pack it into a small area because, you know, you got to intimidate people around you. I was, I'm glad you ended with that fact because I was so curious. I was like, what pepper is it most similar to? That's awesome. And now makes me think that we owe the origin of shows like hot ones. you know, to the Colorado area.

When I was looking into this, I also found a bunch of recipes for like Colorado chili with peppers. I was like, oh gosh, it all comes full circle. Like everyone in Colorado go out and get a bowl of chili today. Make it extra spicy to be accurate. Yeah. No, I remember, you know, ages ago on weirdest thing, I talked about the origin of the tomato and how it was.

There are a lot of myths about, you know, white Europeans being afraid of the tomato. And some of them are false. And some of them are even weirder than the memes that people share. But it's true that people were like, you know what this looks like is deadly nightshade. Why? Because, you know, they didn't have, you know, they didn't have like a garden full of peppers and tomatoes and, you know, ground cherries to look at. The only related plant they knew was one that was absolutely deadly.

So it was kind of more understandable than a lot of, you know, weird history. Factoid.com sort of narrative suggests. And then, yeah, I definitely, I feel like one day I'm going to do an episode about, like, Seshuan peppercorns and chilies and the like incredible, like unique evolutionary trajectories of those ingredients that have become such quintessential pairings now. So I love thinking about where plants came from and where we eat them now and how it's absolutely based on where birds pooped, you know. Lovely.

The birds are in control. Like, it's fine. Yeah, they've always been. Okay, cool. We're going to take one more 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 $1,000 off select top brand appliances like LG. Plus, get free delivery at the Home Depot.

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Plus, unlimited plants started $35 a month. Now that's a deal. that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet.

So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks co-pilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which, little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot, handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. Okay, we're back. And, uh, wait, talk about some geometry. Yes. So that was, that was in my teaser. I think that the geometry is going to come in at the end. And first, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about ancient Babylon.

Yes. I was being sneaky. So I actually did. I did learn this fact this week as I was researching for an episode of Pale Blue Pod about Jupiter. And I wanted to look into the history of Jupiter, the history of the study of Jupiter, because I can't pinpoint a time when we discovered Jupiter like you can for the outer planets in the solar system, because we've always known about Jupiter because you can see it with your unaided eye. So thinking about the kind of origins of Jupiter study, you have to go back to ancient Babylon. Babylon existed from around 2,000 BCE, and it fell around 500 BCE, but it was, you know, like a slow thing, a slow gradual falling of an empire. But we have known for a really long time that ancient Babylonians meticulously observed the night sky.

And that's not novel. Pretty much every ancient civilization would have kept track of stuff in the night sky to keep track of time, to navigate. but the ancient Babylonians seemed to be special in that, at least according to our records, they were one of the first civilizations to look up at the sky and assign divine meaning to what happened in the night sky. So they actually interpreted the motion of stuff in the sky as the will or the behavior or like the messages from their gods. And then that was adopted by the Greeks.

The ancient Greek word for constellation, Katastersmi, was, it meant messages. from the gods or placement from the gods. And so there's this whole trend of ancient civilizations looking at the night sky and saying, oh, the moon moved that way. That means this God wants us to do this thing. But they, so there's, there's some debate about whether or not we can call ancient Babylonian scientists because they were doing cool math and science, but they were doing it so that they could appease their gods.

Right. They were still doing the work. I think we can still give them credit for all of the amazing things they did. They split the circular sky up into 360 degrees. So they came up with the like the 360 degrees circle that we use today. They tracked the motion of planets. They even learned how to predict when eclipses would happen. And many of the popular Western constellations that we still think about today, like the crab or or the bull, they were originally defined by Babylonians and then adopted by the Greeks and then stolen by the Romans and then given to us.

they even were instrumental in figuring out how our calendar works. So there were seven wandering sheep or wandering stars that were especially important to the ancient Babylonians. And they were considered wandering because when you look at the night sky and you don't know anything about the physics of stars or the three-dimensional nature of space, what you can distinguish is there are stars. that seem to stay fixed relative to each other, so they don't move relative to each other. And we now know that those are very distant stars. They're so distant that they don't seem to move. But distinguished from that, distinct from that, are wandering stars that do seem to move relative to each other. And those are the seven visible bright objects in our sky. Would you like to try naming the seven?

So I feel like Mars, Jupiter, Venus. Yep. Mercury. There you go. Yeah, you got four. And then, I mean, like, Beetlejuice is that one? Beetlejuice is one of the fixed ones. A not wandering star.

So you have four. Sarah Kylie, would you like to, I know this is a deviation from the tip of weirdest thing format. No, no, no. We love a quiz. Great. Oh, my gosh. I know I'm going to fail this quiz.

I don't think I've like ever grown up somewhere where I can see the stars. But yeah, no. That's okay. I'm going to get Rachel Hurford for. What are some of the brightest objects that we can see moving in the sky that we haven't named yet? Like meteors? I don't know. Even brighter than that.

The moon in the sun. Oh, man. Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. I need another. cup of coffee. But it did feel like a trick answer.

It is kind of a trick answer because I ask you, what are the seven wandering stars? And then you start naming planets and you're not going to think to name the moon and the sun. But I love this because of the seven objects, sun, moon, mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, which I think is the only one, the only planet you didn't name. Only one of those seven objects is actually a star. Yeah. True.

But those seven objects gave us the seven-day week that we have now. I had no idea. Yeah. And it's less obvious in English because we're a Germanic language. So we have days of the week that are named after like Norse gods. But if you speak Spanish or if you speak other Latin-based languages, you can really see that it is more closely related to the names of these seven objects. Yeah, wow. Now I'm thinking about it. It's blowing my mind.

I know. Like lunace, martes, mirkalase, right? It is named after these seven objects. One of the most important of these objects was Jupiter. And that's because they associated the planet Jupiter, which they didn't call Jupiter, with Babylon's patron god Marduk. They called the planet, which they thought was a wandering star. They called it Nibiru. And they called it Nibiru. it was said to be the god Marduk's celestial seat. So I like to think of it as almost like Marduk's spaceship. Yeah. And they're like, that's Marduk's palace up there. And so they paid extra attention to Jupiter or Nibiru because it represented their patron god.

And eventually Marduk ended up being a very important god across all of Mesopotamia because the Babylonians were so influential in their day. Hmm. That's so cool. Yes. I love thinking about ancient Babylon, and soon I'm going to tell you about a scientist who specializes in ancient Babylonian astronomy. But first, I have to tell you a bit about Jupiter. So over the course of a year, Jupiter does appear, if you're tracking its motion, it does appear to rise and fall in relation to the sun's path across the sky. And we call the sun's path across the sky the ecliptic. So Jupiter's motion is often called, it. its displacement from the ecliptic. And that just means that it is, it's moving in an arc across the sky. So it changes angle, it changes direction over time.

And anytime you're changing direction and you're changing your angle, that is associated with a change in velocity, because velocity is more specific than speed. It is speed in a certain direction. So Babylonians were tracking Jupiter's motion across the sky, enough to predict where it would be ahead of time. And for over a thousand years, scholars thought that they were doing that with simple arithmetic.

So counting, addition, subtraction, maybe some multiplication and division. But in 2016, Dr. Mathieu-Austin-driver, I think that's how I'm supposed to say it. There's a sneaky J in Austin Driver somewhere. But Dr. Austin-Driver published a paper in the journal Science, claiming that the ancient Babylonians actually used an advanced form of abstract geometry and not arithmetic to track and predict the position of Jupiter.

This dude is so cool. I know nothing about who he is as a person. It might be like a Feynman situation. I don't know. But his mind seems really interesting. Dr. Asenjriver has two PhDs. I'm very tempted to call him Dr. Dr. Dawson Driver. One of his PhDs, his first one is in astrophysics.

His second one is in Assyriology, so studying Assyria, which was this big region of ancient Mesopotamia. He is literally a world expert specifically in ancient Babylonian astronomy and astrology and mathematics related to the sky. Like, I love that. That is so cool. Right. And so he published his paper in 2016. in January, which means he was doing much of the work in 2014 and 2015. So in 2015, he was studying four clay tablets covered in Cuneiform writing.

Cuneiform is what we think, the first writing system among humans. And these tablets come from about 350 to 50 BCE. So after what most people would consider the fall of the Babylonian Empire, but still around the same time and something that comes after can be influenced by the dominating culture before. So these four clay tablets described the process of calculating the area of a trapezoid. So like that shape that's kind of like a rectangle or a parallelogram, but it's slanted. So they described how to calculate the area of a trapezoid and divide that trapezoid into different parts. And for a long time, it wasn't clear what, like, why they were describing how to calculate the area of a trapezoid until Dr. Austin Driver, Dr. Dr. Austin Driver, I'm sorry, found a fourth clay tablet that actually had a trapezoid on it with some numbers that matched the numbers on the other three tablets.

And so in 2015, he was like, he had this aha moment where he was like, oh, this, this, this, this, tablet with the trapezoid on it is describing Jupiter or Nibiru, and it has the same numbers as these other three tablets. So they put them together and we're able to figure out that instead of mapping Jupiter's position over time to track it, which would be a concrete representation of what you can physically see in space. Instead of doing that, the trapezoid showed the planet's velocity over time. Whoa. And that's a lot more abstract because you don't see velocity with your eyes. They weren't just like looking out at the sky, seeing a shape or a pattern there, and then depicting it on their tablets. They were abstracting, which is really cool. So this works,

because if you calculate the area of a given section of that trapezoid that represents Jupiter's velocity over time, then you can calculate Jupiter's position or its displacement from the ecliptic at a given time. Because to get the area of this trapezoid, you're essentially multiplying the dimensions of the trapezoid. And if you multiply velocity times time, you get position or distance. Wow. It's so cool. Not only were they thinking abstractly, but they were using a type of math that would give them a position that, like, they could have used arithmetic for.

Like they were being more advanced than they needed to, and I love that for them. So scholars previously thought that this type of abstract geometry wasn't invented until the 1400s, of course, at Oxford, because they couldn't fathom the idea that this type of math was invented by a bunch of brown people 3,000 years ago. Yeah, you know, the tale is all the time. Of course. And so a quote from the abstract of this paper, the last line in the abstract is, this surprising discovery changes. our ideas about how Babylonian astronomers worked and may have influenced Western science. What do you mean may have? They did.

We already know it did. We already know that they gave us the seven days of the week. They gave us the constellations. They, of course, they knew geometry because they literally gave us the 360 degrees of a circle that we still use today. And clearly, based on these tablets, they were doing a type of math way earlier than we thought existed. So I think the thought I will end with is, can we please stop saying that big concepts like math were invented by a particular group at a particular time, especially if we're going to

say it was like white people in the 1400s? Maybe let's stop doing that. That's so long for math to not exist. We're all just guessing until then. I'm just hoping for the best. This does really make me want to dig into the history of when different types of math popped up in different parts of the world because I never really thought about the differences between arithmetic, algebra, and geometry except for the fact

that it was different classes in like elementary and middle school. But yeah, it's an interesting history that I will dig into at some point. Awesome. I love this. And it's true that like the hoops people have dumped through to avoid

like ascribing technical brilliance to ancient peoples, particularly ones who were not white, astonishing. So many history channel documentaries about how maybe aliens built things would not exist if we could just believe. Yeah, let's get rid of all those. That people learned how to do stuff. Yeah, I love that. Well, like I said, I have decided after several episodes of saying, oh, I got to stop to do this thing.

We are no longer going to say, what was the weirdest thing we learned this week and pretend that there's one winner? Because I just, we're always sharing so many wonderful weird things on weirdest thing. And I don't like pressuring people into picking which one they thought was best. I think we talked about a lot of cool stuff today. And, Moia, thank you so much for coming on. Before I forget, I do want to make sure listeners know that we are selling tickets to our next live show at Caviot in New York City. It's on August 24th. So definitely check that out.

If you Google, weirdest thing, caveat, New York City, it'll come up. But also we'll have a link in the show notes. And we are selling streaming tickets. So if you can't or think you might not be able to join us in person, definitely grab a ticket to catch the live stream. It's going to be a lot of fun. Yay. Moia, thank you so much for coming on the show. Would you remind listeners what the name of your book and podcasts are and where they can find you?

Yes, thank you so much for having me. I'm so glad we met at that author dinner. Me too. And I'm sure we'll see each other in the future. But you can find me on the internet at Go Astro Mo on all the social media platforms. And you can find my podcasts, Pale Blue Pod, and ExoLore. You can find my YouTube show, Fate and Fabled. And you can find my book, which I think I am maybe most proud of across that list.

And it's called The Milky Way, an autobiography of our galaxy. Also, if you're into audiobooks, I read the audiobook. So if you like my voice, you can hear more of it in many places. Perfect. I'm sold. 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.