The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Forbidden Experiment, Too Annoying To Die, Bonny Clabber

Episode Date: August 28, 2024

This week, Danielle Bainbridge joins the show to talk a very dark, forbidden experiment. Plus, Rachel talks about milk spoiling in thunderstorms (allegedly), and Sara Kiley explains how sometimes it's better to be annoying than deadly. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Make switching seasons a breeze with Quince's high-quality closet essentials. Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Live it up this summer and make progress towards your financial goals with Chime. Open your account in minutes at https://chime.com/WEIRDEST. Chime. Feels like progress. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice. You talking to me. Kayak. Got that right. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and text 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 Feldman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Danielle Bainbridge. Danielle, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you.

Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to talk about some weird facts today. Amazing. Would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? Okay. I'm Daniel Bainbridge. I'm a professor at Northwestern University in the departments of theater, performance studies, and African American studies. Oh, wait. I just remembered that it's actually black studies now. They've changed the name of the department. And I also am a web series creator and host. And most notably, I created a series called PBS Origin of Everything. Yeah, which is a great series. I love it.

So really excited to have you on to talk about some weird things. 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, et cetera. Decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. then once we've all had time to spin our little science and history yarns we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was except we don't actually pick a winner anymore and also I never make guests go first even if their fact sounds really really cool so but you know listeners they know how it works Sarah Kylie what's your tease today so my tease is about a specific species of frog and their sticky secret weapon

Hmm. That sounds fun. My tease is that scientists used to think that maybe thunderstorms made milk go sour, and I also have a lot of facts about sour milk now. That's just the fact journey I went on this morning. Danielle, what's your tease? My tease is that some ancient cultures believe that they could figure out what language God spoke to Adam and Eve through testing children. And so this is like a kind of a weird darker history, but still, still an interesting one. Yeah. Listen, we love, we love weird dark history here too. And I am very excited to hear more about that. Sarah Kylie, why don't you kick us off with sticky frogs? Yay!

For some reason, when I said that, all I could think of were those sticky hands, you know, that you'd flick at like the gym ceiling at school. me about the frogs though. No, luckily the story is way less covered in lint than those little hands. I just remember carrying them around in your pocket and then they would not be sticky anymore. They just would be gray. Okay, anyway, moving on.

So I'm going to start the story with a little backdrop. So we'll get into the specific of this one wonderful frog momentarily. But to start, we're going to talk about how animals will pretty much go to any effort to not get eaten. And that includes releasing some like really yucky or even toxic chemicals to ward off predators. And this obviously is not special to one specific species or even like a class of animals. Like think of how different a skunk is from a Texas horned lizard, but they both squirt out like really weird stuff from their bodies when threatened. Of course, when it comes to a skunk that's notoriously stinky anal gland liquid. And when it comes to the horned lizard, it's chemical-filled

blood squirting out from their eyes. And bugs do it too. Another example of a gross thing getting sprayed at you by an angry animal was a bombardier beetles. And they will explode noxious chemicals in your direction at like 12 degrees Fahrenheit. So lots of creatures are interested in fighting for their lives by spraying stuff at you. And some animals go beyond just like emitting something that's like yucky or toxic. And it can get sticky.

And this is the case for species varying from sea cucumbers to salamanders. And it may sound dumb, but at first, like, doing this research, I was like, why? Why sticky? It almost seems kind of, like, counterintuitive. Like, if you're eating a snack and it's like, oh, this snack is sticking to me, I should eat it even more. But then I started, like, thinking my mind, I was like, okay, for other people that may have the same first thought, imagine you're taking, like, a bite of a beautiful, crispy, heavenly grilled cheese sandwich, but then it glued your mouth shut. But you're just not going to have a second bite and you're going to be so mad that you're going to forget about the grilled cheese and you're just going to only be focused on the fact that your mouth is glued shut. And if, you know, your sandwich could grow legs and run away, it would have a lot of time to do that. Yeah.

And certainly, especially if you didn't have like a nice, a nice, like, beverageino to deal with the situation. And in the animal kingdom, they... There are no beverageinos. There's no side of an apparel spritz when it comes to whatever you're finding in the jungle if you're a snake or like some big. scary mammal. But yeah, so sticky, yucky, generally speaking. So yeah, several species of frogs, salamanders, succumbes, cucumbers, and other animals developed this defense mechanism, and it works for a handful of reasons, namely incapacitating and distracting a predator and preventing it from attacking again, or even better giving your predator such like an aggressive ick that

they're more concerned with getting away from you than eating you. So very, very effective. And this also happens for scientists when they're trying to catch frogs out in places like Peru, which is what happened with Belgian biologist Kim Rollins, who is the author of a new study. This study came out in July in Nature Communications, and it unpacks the science of the sticky, specifically the sticky of the tomato frog. So I will let us meet our wonderful candidate, and I will absolutely horribly butcher its scientific name, as always, but I believe it's Dyscopis Genetti. And it's a really, really cute little orange-y-colored frog.

It only lives in Madagascar. It loves some swampy, marshy, tropical, subtropical climates. And like pretty much all amphibians, it's covered in mucus. And that's, you know, to keep their little froggy skin nice and moist and helps them breathe through their skin. It's kind of like when you go outside and you just like have to cover your whole face with aquifer because it's like windy. That's what I picture with the frog.

I'm like, I wish. I wish I could breathe through my skin. Like, they're slugging. They are keeping it moist, keeping it fresh, keeping it alive. So yeah, a dry frog is not a happy or probably not a living frog. And some frogs around the world, like we talked about, like the famed poison dart frog is one of the most famous ones. Use their mucus as a medium to poison their predators. But the problem is with poison, the process can be slow. And this is what Rollins told the New York Times in a piece they did about this. That has been pulled up in my tabs during the duration of my research on this. So thank you New York Times for the help. And this is true. A small predator that takes on like a

poison dart frog is like doomed from the get go. That's just too much poison. But if a big predator happen to take on like a buffo toad, they create a way less potent poison in their moment of terror and it might like not feel, you know, if I in my research in this, I also found a lot of websites of what to happen if your dog licks a toad. So let's just say a dog licks one of these toads. And in the moment, like obviously, like the frog is freaking out. But the dog in this situation might not feel like particularly different until it's too late for the frog. So basically, if your dog licks a poisonous toad, take it to the vet immediately and they will probably, there's a chance they'll be okay. But, you know, the Bufo Toad's story is like already over. Like,

It's kind of more of like a poetic justice for the predator versus like an actual like saving grace. You know what I mean? If you're not like as poisonous as the big badass like famed poisonous frogs. So you can try your hand at poison, but it might not work out. But glue responses are these sticky, sticky things that come out of the mucus instead of say poison. They happen pretty much instantaneously after one of these little tomato frogs, they get bit. And so another study author and a doctoral student, Shabnam Zaman, explained this in a really cute video.

So I will post a link to that video if anybody wants a more visual from one of the authors themselves. But she had this very cute little metaphor about, you know, like princesses kissing frogs. And so in her words, like if a snake princess takes a nibble of like an adorable frog prince, the stress of all that going down triggers the release of the thick viscous glue. substance and it gives the prince frog a chance to escape. From the study, they also wrote about how, like, this is especially true for predators with limited dexterity, because you can't really ingest something, like, if it's sticking to you.

And so not only are they forced to release the amphibian, but it's just, like, it creates a problem. It's just a nightmare for the eater. So not only is it, like, yuck, but they immediately have some other business going on dealing with this. So there's the bonus of like, okay, I got away, but also this predator is not coming to take a snack out of me again. And while this is like super fascinating and it is found in species all over the world, it's not really a well-studied, you know, concept. Not so much as, you know, we tend to know quite a bit about poison in terms of like, you know, creatures throwing that

out there. But yeah, stickiness is a little bit, a little bit more off the beaten path. And so what the rest of this, you know, the rest of the study and their science squad out in Belgium is where a lot of them are based. They took some of these captive tomato frogs and they handled them just enough to like get them a little stressed so that they get there. And then they did some investigating on the resulting goop from this interaction. And one such investigation that they did was they glued it, they used it to glue Legos together to see how much pressure the glue could take. Like I don't know, I don't know where. It's great. And we get to see. some Legos in action in the video, so lucky us.

But yeah, so they basically glued these Lego bricks together, and they found that the two little Lego bricks plus glue, they can support 10 liters of water, like a 10 liter bucket of water without the bricks breaking apart. So that's like two pounds of water, which is pretty, I mean, two Lego blocks. Like that seems like kind of a lot. So it's pretty impressive for like a dash of like frog juice

and some little pieces of plastic. but beyond just a very scientific game of building blocks. They took the glue to the microscope and like kind of compared it to other animal-based but not necessarily defensive glues, like the stuff that muscles use to like tack on to rocks. As it turns out, the proteins that make tomato frog glue, so gluey are also unique. So instead of being like rigid and defined like the way we think about most proteins, it's floppy and quote unquote acts like a cooked spaghetti is what the study author said. So like it's full of these sticky sugars.

And then it like, so like you would, if anybody has ever like gotten like really into their pasta making and thrown a spaghetti at the wall, you'll know that it will like kind of just like finagle its way up there and stick as hard as it can. Like it will find a way. And that's kind of what's going on with the proteins in this glue. And there's a second protein that makes them stick to each other. So you've got like a really sticky, really malleable substance here that is like, you know, willing to get into the little cracks of things to stick. And according to the authors, the results of their research indicate that the base ingredients of this glue exist in most other non-glue-producing amphibians, except obviously at a smaller scale. And in fact, the genes that make these proteins were found in nearly all of the amphibians they compared and contrasted the tomato frog to, even if there's only like five known families of frog that do this and are officially found to be using glue to fight folks off. And some of these species are, as we have run into a million times over and over in ecology, they are very, very separate and they've been separated evolutionarily for over 100 million years. So there's one in Mozambique that also is like this cute little frog with some sticky solutions. But yeah, so that's kind of the gist, is that we are learning about this really unique defense mechanism and, you know, the obvious coolness of parallel evolution.

And something I kind of like took away from it was, I found to be beautiful is that like annoying your predators can be more effective than poisoning them. And I think that's beautiful. I think it's great. That's my lesson is like, you know, when life gets hard, you can be sticky. You don't have to be poisonous. Yeah. And that's that. Yeah.

Yeah. Sometimes you have to be poisonous. But like sometimes being sticky is enough. And that's a beautiful thing. Know your predator, know your enemy. And then you can assess because sometimes the sticky wins, as our little tomato frogs have proven. So exciting stuff. Just be ungovernable, as the memes say.

All right, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with some more facts. Did you know that there's an online cannabis company that ships federally legal THC right to your door? I'm talking about mood.com. They have an incredible line of cannabis gummies and a lot more. and you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code weirdest. I'm not a smoker myself, but I do love the occasional weed gummy to, you know, help me go off to Dreamland, and I can't have one right now because I have a new kit, and, you know, I definitely miss it a little bit.

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Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hank says, on 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 I'm going to jump in with my fact. Shadow to Andrew Coletti at Atlas Obscura. They wrote an awesome article about this recently. I will definitely link to it at Popside.com slash weird and on my Patreon. But I had to jump on and do this fact, particularly because it relates to to Scientific American, which is where I host my other podcast, Science Quickly, another, I only do old science magazines, I guess.

And so, yeah, on July 12, 1858, Scientific American published a letter to the editor called Lightning and Milk, Straightforward. It was written by John Dean Caten, who, I'm going to get back to a second, because it seems like he was an interesting dude. I'm not going to go so far as to say he was a cool dude, but like relative to the extremely low bar for the kinds of dudes who had time to write into scientific American back in the 19th century. He was an interesting figure. So the letter starts, it may not be generally understood by scientific men, but it is well known to dairy men and housewives that a violent thunderstorm turned sweet into sour milk.

And according to Alice Obscura, this was a widely held truth in Europe and North America for a long time. Back in the late 1600s, a Flemish alchemist wrote that at the time when it thunders, beer, milk, etc., turn sour, spelled SOWER, of course, in the cellars. The thunder doth everywhere introduce corruption and putrefaction, which goes so hard as a sentence. Love that for this Flemish alchemist. And there were different theories about this. So Noah Webster, the dictionary dude, he thought that maybe it had to do with the. drop in barometric pressure around storms. Other folks thought maybe the lightning created in creating ozone or some other kind of gas that that might react with the milk and make it go sour. Other people

thought it was the electricity itself, but this was just like considered sort of a common sense folk science fact that like thunderstorms made milk go bad. And Canton goes on to, describe, he actually set up his own experiment. He was sort of a hobbyist scientist, which was a thing you did in the 1800s if you were a rich guy. And he described his experimental setup. He wanted to see if it was like the lightning strike that was doing this to milk. So he said to ascertain whether electricity has any direct agency in producing the result, I passed a current of electricity from a Daniel battery of three cells, the rubble containing fresh milk. And he basically like connected it to some copper wires.

He just, he, he jolted some milk. He defibrillated a little bowl of milk. And apparently he included with his letter the part of the positive end of the copper wire that had been immersed in the milk bowl. And he told them that they would see for themselves that it was, quote, encrusted with coagulated milk, which like I can't. Yeah, I can't imagine that the scientific American offices were thrilled to receive that in the post.

I also think that probably would have been true of the wire if he had just sent them like a milky wire in the post, it probably would have been curdled. It's kind of got there. Yeah. It's so gross to think about. Yeah. So they had to take his word for it. But he included a lot of details about what happened about like how the milk frothed or didn't frothed on either end of the wire. And he was like the negative end of the wire was so not covered in chunky milk.

It's fascinating. But ultimately, he used some litmus paper to check the pH of the zapped milk against another dish of milk from the same source. And he was like, there's no change. So he concluded this isn't actually a product of the electrical charge. And very astutely, he said that the milk solids he saw were probably the result of the positive end of the copper wire forming sulfuric acid as it had a charge going through it. And that attracted Kurds because he noted he then did the experiment with a platinum wire and that failed to produce this curdling effect.

So he did, you know, he was he was isolating his variables. He was very seriously pursuing this question. And there's such a fun little post script tacked on to the letter from Scientific American. They were like, after the above had been put in type, they received another letter from Judge Katen. and he said that he had written that first one in a haste. He'd been so excited. He just shot it off right away. And he failed to add that in his opinion,

what was causing milk to go sour during thunderstorms was probably the temperature and condition of the atmosphere. And they were like, we have also expressed these views before in Scientific American. And they also added that they were like, some of our contemporaries have claimed that they have done similar experiments. and found that the milk did curdle, but such statements are not worthy of the confidence of the above communication. So, yeah, yeah, brutal.

And yeah, like I said, there's a lot of side notes in this because the sort of main historical lightning milk thing comes entirely from Atlas Obscureas article. So as always, I got to add some of my own flavor. And one of my little sidebars is that John Dean Katton was I don't know, kind of just an interesting historical figure. He was an amateur scientist. He loved learning about the natural world.

He was very into what Darwin was doing. He was also in Illinois Supreme Court Justice. And a few years before he did this milk experiment, he heard a case against abolitionist Owen Lovejoy who'd been convicted under the State Act of 1829, which made it illegal to harbor any black person who didn't present their certificate of freedom to you. And Ceyton, in his charge of the jury, said,

like, listen, the Constitution of this state says slavery can't exist here, so as soon as somebody is here, they can't be enslaved. And that was apparently the first time the courts of Illinois declared that living in a free territory meant you were entitled to your freedom. I will add that apparently abolitionists of the day were like, we don't like this guy. He's more of a states rights guy than an actual anti-slavery guy. And he was, of course, a Democrat back when that meant you were a conservative, which is why I hedge my, I'm not going to say this is a cool dude statement with, by the standards of guys who were rich and white enough to do silly science experiments of the 1800s, an interesting historical figure. Also, I guess it's just, it says something about

the Supreme Court today that I'm like, wow, very chill that he was like, I don't personally feel strongly about the basic human rights of other people, but based on the laws we have and my previously stated ideologies and logic, I got to say, these people need to be allowed to their lives as opposed to just being like as a conservative i got to say it's no for me dog so i just you know some that i don't know that things are better it's just what i'm saying speaking of being rich he was also an enthusiastic early adopter of the telegraph uh and he helped bring the first telegraph lines into illinois and he made so much money doing that that he was sometimes called the telegraphed king of the west which i guess is why he had time to do silly silly milk experiments but enough

about this mildly interesting historical figure who stuck wires into cow juice back to the milk itself. This wouldn't actually be scientific Americans last say on the subject. In 1878, they published something by a Dr. Malvern W. Illis, who he wrote that he had been conducting his own experiments involving sending a jolt through milk. And he said that the current did caused notable curdling, which brought the milk to a state of, quote, Bonnie Kleber, Bonnie clabber, which is a northern and midland U.S. phrase that probably comes from the Irish Gaelic Bonnier Claibor for thickened milk. Claver was apparently an old Celtic word that meant something was like dirty, nasty, muddy, and it would be applied to beverages in a derogatory fashion.

So like gruel, beverage gruel. And I had to pull a little tangent about Boneyclauber because I was like, what a word. I simply must know more. And Miriam Webster has a quote from, let's see, in 1635, the Earl of Stratford said that Bonnie Cliber is the bravest, freshest drink you have ever tasted. I don't know what bravest and freshest mean to get them in that context. But other people were like, no, it's so gross. there's a historian who said this about it. He was like, you know, one important staple of the backcountry

diet was clabber, this dish of sour milk, curds, and weigh. It was eaten by youngsters and adults throughout the back country as it had been in North Britain for many centuries. But in southern England, it was called spoiled milk and fed to animals. In the borderlands, it was called Bonnie Cleber and served two people. And travelers apparently found this dish so repellent that they preferred to not eat at all. But meanwhile, in rural areas of the southern U.S., it was commonly eaten for breakfast with brown sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, or molasses, or black pepper and cream and fruit. And I'm like, it sounds probably pretty delicious. So, you know, one man's Bonnie Clabber is another man's spoiled milk. And yeah, you'll still see Bonnie Clibber as a recommended substitute for buttermilk in

Irish soda bread recipes. It has a big Appalachian history in particular. particular, probably brought by Scott's Irish immigrants, though sort of like the meaning of what this product is. These days it's like either basically just another word for buttermilk or it's pretty much cottage cheese. And it seems like it was like another weird different third thing back in the day. I found one article on the appellation use of the term Bonnie clabber that concluded that while it's now pretty much synonymous with buttermilk or cottage cheese, if you wanted to really replicate the like OG dish, you would need to take unpasteurized milk, which is probably the quote, sour milk that it was based on because it would have, you know, naturally had lots of

bacteria in it. It would like start to have funky little colonies growing pretty much immediately once it was no longer in the cow. And then you would churn it in a butter churn to make genuine buttermilk and then add homemade cottage cheese to get the right curd content. And that that is what they think it was like there are several modern products that are similar to the general vibe. We have Masi in South Africa, which is curdled fermented sour milk snack, Swedish film julk, which is going to become relevant in a second and is again just kind of, you know, like a quirk. We still love fermented dairy products. It's just I think we've gotten a little more particular about what stage of funkiness they should be at.

And perhaps at this time in history, that was something you had less control over and people just rode the wave. You got to respect it. My last fun, Bonnie Clapper aside is that there's a brand of baking powder. I actually have it in my kitchen right now called Clabber Girl. That was always just a nonsense string of letters to me. It turns out it's called that because until baking powder gained popularity, clabber or sourd milk was often used as a leavening agent. you know, like when you have buttermilk in a recipe. So there you go. But what I find really interesting getting back to the actual thunderstorms turning milk sour thing is that it's been really sticky,

which I wrote down in my notes before the sticky frog conversation. Like just a few weeks ago, someone posted on the subreddit, Ask Food Historians, asking like what the heck their Swedish grandma was talking about when she said that film would either form or like, like get ruined, like get too curdled if a thunderstorm got too bad. And the mod actually jumped in being like food historians are not the right people to ask about what happens to dairy in a thunderstorm. Keep this to the discussion of historical beliefs on the topic. And nevertheless, many people spitballed on what might be happening up to and including someone

speculating on how thunderstorms might change cow behavior and therefore change their milk. Four years ago, someone else posted in Ask UK, the subreddit, saying that they're in anecdotal evidence suggests this does happen. And every time they look for an answer, the jury seems to be out, which is wild, because the jury is not out, which I'll get you in a second. The people just keep being like, it's so weird what goes on with thunderstorms and milk. I love, I love folk wisdom. I love how things can just persist. And I love how sometimes there's a little bit of truth to them, like this one, which is why they're so sticky. People were not stupid. They just did not have all the information. But today, even though we have more information, sometimes, we just like believe in things. In 1994, someone wrote to new scientists claiming that they had read a scientific explanation for this, but it couldn't explain the milk curdling they had experienced during a thunderstorm. And they wanted help finding the real answer. So anyways, yeah, sorry to tease this out. Someone did actually crack this way back in 1891. He was just absolutely high on like the fact that we now knew what microbes were. This was Aaron L. Trudwell. And he decided to

compare the effects on, he was like, okay, it's probably microbes. It's probably the little guys in the milk are making it go funky. And so he decided to try to control for the variable of electricity or control for the variable of bacteria. So he took pasteurized and like raw milk and did a very similar electrical charge experiment. And he found that pasteurized milk was way less likely to curdle in like a simulated lightning storm environment than raw dairy was. And so he very sensibly concluded that what was happening had more to do with the bacterial growth than anything else, not some like transformation connected to the electricity and that there was just like something about the environment of a thunderstorm that made bacteria more likely to grow. And he correctly deduced, not unlike the judge spitballed years before,

that it was favorable conditions of the atmosphere. As a 1927 guide to dairy production from the University of Wisconsin, very poetically put it, a thick, sultry atmosphere usually precedes thundershowers and bacteria love a thick sultry atmosphere. So it's hot, it's damp, and milk that's got bacteria in it is going to get funkier. And it just happens that in a summer thunderstorm,

when it is particularly hot and damp, if your milk's about to go and then you see it go, what you remember is that, you know, there was a boom crash, lightning flash, and you're like, it was the thunderstorm that did it. And yeah, this belief, you know, may have persisted as folk wisdom longer in places with more raw dairy, you know, as history went on, or that had more fermented products like buttermilk sitting around that they relied on a lot, you know, places like Sweden, where or Appalachia, where they were doing a lot of bonny clabber, and also places with, you know, less reliable electricity and refrigeration, like much of Appalachia, because you can imagine, you know,

even though today it is still, you are more likely to lose your power during a thunderstorm than the average day, you can imagine that if you're in a place with, you know, a less robust grid, especially a few decades ago, that's even more likely. And so you just are more likely to have things be particularly swampy when that thunderstorm rolls through and your milk's going bad. This is relevant today because raw dairy is actually getting more popular, even though it's potentially a way to catch bird flu now that the virus has spread to cattle. I talk about this on my scientific American show science quickly a lot because I'm like,

Guys, listen, bodily autonomy is super important. You are allowed to choose what you eat. And I also understand not being into the industrialized farming system. Very reasonable to not trust it. Now is simply not the time to explore a raw milk habit. It's just not the right time. I actually talked to some experts about this when I got to host an episode of Science Friday, which fun fact, I'm doing again this Friday, the 30th.

So you should tune in. And one of them made such an excellent point that the reasons most people give for seeking out raw dairy, which is, again, they trust small farms more than industrial dairy operations. Super fair. They think it's fresher, more wholesome, what have you. All of this can be achieved by buying pasteurized milk from a small local farm. None of the other supposed benefits of raw milk, like people saying it's better for lactose intolerant people, or boost the immune system or retains more vitamins.

none of those have any evidence to back them up. And meanwhile, you are always putting yourself at risk when you drink raw milk. It's not about a farm being particularly clean or dirty, which I think is something that's understandably kind of hard for people to wrap their head around, you know, no matter how lovely and pastoral and clean a local farm looks. Cow udders are inherently covered in poop and stuff. It's just poop bacteria is everywhere. say this all the time. It's fine, but that's why we have pasteurization. So, yeah, the bacteria can make you sick. The viruses can make you sick. We've come so far. We used to have such fragile, bacterial-laden dairy that just things getting a little humid could mean everything

turned into cottage cheese. So we've got it really good today, at least when it comes to the integrity of our dairy products. So don't take that for granted, is what I'm saying. Make the most of it. Find some Bucci pasteurized small batch milk and enjoy it in good health. And then maybe make some funky yogurt products because we now have the power to decide exactly how fermented and funky and sour our milk byproducts get to be. What a magical thing. Incredible. Wow.

That was a journey. That was a journey. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, I really, I just, I found so many. I'm not going to say I love milk because I'm very lactose to tolerate. But I appreciate it. I have a healthy appreciation for, I don't know, our species has such a long history of doing wild stuff with dairy.

And I think that's so cool. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. 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.

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Explore Google Fi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. Google Fi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Okay, we're back. And Daniel, you know, we've talked about a couple gross things. And now we have some upsetting stuff, perhaps. So I would love to hear more about these old language experiments. Yeah, so this isn't exactly like a knee-slapper,

and it definitely isn't as gross as sticky frogs or curdled milk. But I dove into the history of language deprivation studies or experiments for today's episode. So I don't remember what I was researching. It was something for some of. other episode, and I came across this sort of weird rabbit hole of thinking about language deprivation studies. So basically, by the 20th century, this was starting to be called the forbidden experiment because it was deemed so unimaginably cruel that people had major ethical issues with enacting these studies. But ultimately, before we had our sort of modern sensibilities

and scientific standards. These studies were reported to have been done on small children or infant children to either see, in some cases, this is like the rumored idea that they were trying to figure out what language God spoke to Adam and Eve, so what language would children originally speak if they weren't exposed to language? And now we understand that language acquisition is something that happens like through exposure to other people and to language itself. But at the time, there was a belief that, you know, people could actually do.

just come forth with language without actually being exposed to a language. So the first recorded case that I found, or the one that seemed to have the most legs, was the pharaoh, I'm going to butcher his name, Sarmtik, the first. He was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, and around 600 BC, he was said to have isolated two newborns with a isolated shepherd who was instructed not to speak to them. And he wanted to see which language they spoke first, the two children. Supposedly, the first word that the children spoke, according to an article from Slate, was Bakos, which is an ancient Phrygian word for bread. But contemporary historians think this might have been like a willful interpretation of baby babel.

So that they were actually like going like, ba-baba or like, you know, da-da or something. And they just said, oh, they only had sheep to hang out with. I was not a say. Making sheep noises. Exactly. So they think that this was just like baby babble that they decided was a word and made a conclusion based off of that. A sadder, if you can imagine, experiment was done by Frederick II, who was the Holy Roman Emperor in the 13th century. And in the chronicle of Salimbenne, I want to say it's pronounced, he reportedly separated a group of children and had them nursed, so fed, you know, and changed, etc. But, that the nurse women were instructed not to speak to them to see which language that they would come forward with first. And according to the Chronicle of Salimbenet, it is reported that, quote, he labored in vain for the children could not live without clapping of hands and gestures

and gladness of countenance and blandishments. So basically the children, it seems, the insinuation hears that they did not survive because they were deprived of social communication and touch. and also of language. So they didn't really develop. And this is something that then became widely known. And again, like I said, it started to be called the Forbidden Experiment. There was a moment in, I believe, the 1970s when there was a desire to perform this experiment with monkeys,

but it was never fully realized because of ethical concerns. Again, because we shouldn't be torturing live things to see if they can actually acquire language. There are some accidental case studies that have emerged in the 20th century from the 60s or 1970s, excuse me, to the 1990s. So three most notable cases were a young girl named Jeannie, who was discovered in California, who was said to not have been socialized by her family and was then made a word of the state. She was discovered in 1970, around the age of 13, and she had not developed spoken language. And so there were many sort of hospital studies that were done on Jeannie to think about language acquisition. But ultimately, her mother stopped the studies, I want to say, by the time she was an adult.

And she never developed full language acquisition, but she did become something of like a well-known media case because of this extreme case. So another young girl, her name was Oksana. She was born in the Ukraine and discovered in the 1980s. And due to neglect, when she was a toddler, she actually started hands. hanging out with dogs and developed mannerisms and habits of the dogs that she was socialized with, but not human habits. So that also became a case study that people, you know, widely studied and followed her for many years. And I believe she's still alive and, you know, living and, you know, socialized and doing other things. And then another sort of standout case study was in the 1990s

of a young boy named John who was discovered in Uganda. And after his father had, I believe, murdered his mother, he ran away and was raised in the jungle by monkeys. And then developed habits of, like, climbing trees, being able to communicate with them. And then later was discovered after what they estimate was about a year and then able to acquire language. So we know that all of these case studies are the result of neglect, either intentional or accidental. But we also know now that language acquisition can happen in a variety of ways. So I did want to

bring it back around to a more positive note because this is kind of a downer. There is a really great PBS documentary called Evolution, the Mind's Big Bang, about deaf children who developed a sign language, an official sign language in Nicaragua based on sort of basic what they called home signs. So the kind of like gesturing and miming that people will do if they don't know sign language, but they're trying to communicate with a non-hearing person. So they call that home sign. So these children were brought to a school for the deaf and they combined what they learned from home sign into making an official sign language. And I think that was kind of a cool way of not only acquiring your own language, but developing it on your own. And like kind of working with a variety of caregivers

to like actually think about how we acquire language and think about how we can like make language more expansive and work for all people. So again, this is the forbidden experiment. No one's ever going to actually do it. And if they did, they would end up very far in jail. But some of the key takeaways that I've learned is that there is a natural curiosity throughout history about the ideals of like nature versus nurture. What does it mean to be raised in a certain environment versus what does it mean to have

like natural, whatever that may mean, instincts towards a certain thing? And then some of these experiments were like tied to religiosity, but some of them were explicitly tied to the idea of just wanting to know what the first languages were or what cultures were more ancient than other cultures, which obviously we could figure out through other methods. And then the ethical standards of science today prohibit this kind of experiment on animals, on humans on anything. And many of the children supposedly submitted to this treatment in ancient history did not

survive or thrive. So language acquisition is largely learned from our environment and not necessarily innate is what I've gathered. And there's good reason why this has been dubbed today the forbidden experiment. Yeah. I think like my favorite positive takeaway from this stuff is always just how deeply innate it is for humans to want to communicate with whoever and whatever is around them. Like we have so deep to be involved as a social species that like the the reason the only versions of this experiment that exist are so horrible is because you have to it's not as simple as just not talking to a kid a kid will will find ways to try to communicate with you if you don't talk to it and I think that's really that's a really

cool thing about humans thank you so much for for sharing that that is obviously like gives me the shivers, but I think there is like something really, I don't know, incredible about the human mind in there. Thanks so much for joining us, Danielle. This has been great. Would you remind listeners where they can find more of your work? Yeah. So right now you can find videos that I've done and shows that I've done on the PBS Origin of Everything channel. So that's Pb... I think it's YouTube.com slash PBS Origins. I should be more quick with the URL, but that is what I remember. And then you could also find me on Twitter at Quirky Professor or on Instagram at Quirky Professor underscore. The Weirdest Thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts,

including me, Rachel Thaltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, Weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week.

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