The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - The Poison King, the Seismic DONK, Contagious Peeing

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Trace Dominguez joins the show to explain just how inconceivable building up an immunity to iocane powder (or other poisons) is. Sara Kiley also discusses unidentified seismic objects, and Rachel talks about how peeing together transcends species. 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! Get Started today at https://chime.com/WEIRDEST. Chime. Feels like progress. Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://www.Zocdoc.com/WEIRDEST to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 dummies and a lot more. And you can get 20% off your first order at mood.com with promo code Weirdest. It's third party lab tested and ships directly to you in a discreet box. Best of all, everything's backed by Mood's 100 day satisfaction guarantee. And like I said, you can get 20% off with code Weirdest. So if you're looking to try some new cannabis products, head on over to mood.com. Get 20% off your first order now with code Weirdest.

That's code Weirdest for 20% off. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans 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. 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. nice work. Now Hank says a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. 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 Feldman.

I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. And I'm Trace Dominguez. Trace, welcome to the show. Yay! Yeah, hi. I've listened for like several episodes. I've been so excited about it. I'm so excited to be here.

Yeah, we're so excited to have you. Would you introduce yourself to our listeners? Tell them a little bit about you? Yeah, I've been a science communicator for about 15 years making things like Seeker and DNews. And now I've been working for myself for a long time. I make a podcast called That's Absurd. please elaborate where we answer silly questions that people send us with as much science research as we can find. Sometimes there's none. And we just do our best. That's great. Yeah. And I

host a PBS show called Stargazers about astronomy. So really fun. Oh, yeah. I love that. Lots of stuff that weirdos will be very into. So I'm sure they'll be checking those out if they don't already. I'm sure a lot of them are like, yeah, trace. Maybe. Working on the internet is like, are there people on the other side of those numbers? That is so true. That is so true. By the time this airs, we will have had our next live show caveat. But I'm at this stage right now.

It's like a week out. And I'm like, I don't think anyone actually listens to this show. No one's going to be there. And then inevitably, there's someone who's like, I flew here from Wisconsin just for this. I'm like, oh, that's awesome. Oh, I love that. So fingers crossed, that happens again. And I'm not finally proven right about their secretly being no way.

like listening to the show. That's great. But anyway, let's get into it. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and 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.

Not really. It's fine. Sir Kylie, what's your tease? Yay. Okay. Well, I am going to tell y'all about the event that sent the world vibrating for nine days. Wow. And not just with anxiety. Well, plenty of anxiety, too. A bit of both.

A little bit. My tea is that I'm going to talk about contagious urination. The sensation sweeping the nation. Hopefully not. But Trace, what's your tease? We had a question come in, and it's about the Princess Bride, so I had to answer it. Wow. Excellent. I'm very excited.

I hate when guests give such good teases because I never make guests go first. But Sarah Kylie, why do we talk about what got the earth moving? Yeah. Ooh, yay. Okay. Well, let's do this thing. For most people, September 16th, 2023 was a pretty normal day. but for seismologists, it was anything but.

And the strangeness didn't stop for more than a week. I'm here to tell you about the time that the Earth literally rang and super spooky vibrations for more than a week. Wow. So, these strange vibrations started in East Greenland, but in the space of an hour, the hums had spread via the Earth's crust and reached all the way to the other end of the world in Antarctica.

Across the entire world, seismic monitoring stations, the ones we usually use to like keep an eye on earthquakes and stuff, they started lighting up in response. But the strange global phenomenon wasn't like an earthquake. Typically, seismologists can tell right away if an earthquake is coming simply because of the sounds. Earthquake vibrations are chaotic. Stephen Hicks, one of the scientists who help uncover this whole mystery, basically he called earthquake noise a quote unquote rich orchestra of rumbles and paint. which is a science. That a psychologist would say that. Like, I mean, it's kind of a sleigh.

It is really nice. Yeah. So it's beautiful. And of course to my untrained ear, it kind of just sounds like the scratch on a record. I went through and did this USGS video quiz to kind of test to see if I could tell what a quick sound like. And it's for a while ago, but it plays this noise that the seismometer hears. And then you guess what event it was and I got it right. So it is a distinct sound that even.

that even like somebody who doesn't know anything about earthquakes could guess. But basically the story is that earthquakes and events like rock avalanches have this distinct sound that even someone who has never touched a seismometer in their life can at least make an educated guess about. There's a visual element here too. With the regular seismic events, it looks like the car crash that sounds like a big oscillating crash captured in just a few seconds and then it simmers down and gives you like a, whoa, what just happened here vibe. but the September 2023 noise was nothing like this

instead every 90 seconds you'd hear this one like don't noise or as the others would more scientifically call it a single simple sign wave oscillating every 90 seconds so not a car crash but a donk and it looks really creepy too like it's just this long graph of like nothingness and then every so often you'd hear this

donk again as a weird line on the graph Like, so really, really weird. And as you can imagine, the scientists were like, what the heck is going on here? So they gave it an appropriately freaky little nickname, the USO or the unidentified seismic object. So we got a little like seismology joke going on here as well. Honestly, like good band name. Yeah. Exactly.

Unidentified seismic object, I would totally go see them. Totally, yeah. Exactly. So I love it. I love the USO. But so explaining the U.S.O, there's a bunch of things at play here, so I'll get into it. So obviously Greenland is where it started, but the specific place in Greenland where it started was the Dixon Fjord. And this fjord is uninhabited and technically exists outside of or inside of one of Greenland's National Park.

So it's like the middle of nowhere. And this fjord is part of a network of like spindly, almost like root-looking fjords that exist about 120 miles away from the ocean. So we're kind of a little landlocked. So that's about how far Raleigh, where I grew up is, is from the Atlantic Ocean or Sacramento from the Pacific Ocean. So it's not close. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not beach. Yeah, it's not a beach town. No.

So we're really in the middle of Greenland. And if you were just surrounded by these high mountaintops that are like 3,000 feet high, so we're big mountains and their shores are these like appropriately steep, like very steep little edges on this, you know, icy little river. and the mountainous sides are littered with ravines that hold these glaciers that then like kind of plunge into the icy waters of the fjord. If you can get a visual picture. And in my mind, I kind of like think of these mountains as like giant ice molds holding onto the world's weirdest ice cubes. So you've got a little melty business going on. You've got some weird shaped ice cubes. But these glaciers hold the beginning of the USO.

And according to sensors that had already been placed into the Dixon Fjord, the levels of the. water in the fjord have a twice daily rise and fall thanks to ocean tides, which is normal. But on the 16th, when the U.S.O. began, there's a clear spike, which is a tsunami alert, basically. And tsunamis are basically just a big sea wave caused by some kind of like undersea eruption or earthquake. And out of the open ocean, these waves are kind of just like whatever. But it's when they get closer and closer to land that they start to like really big and scary and tower, yeah, tower over us. And this makes sense, like less ocean, more big wave for to, you know, go on top of.

Yeah. But unfortunately, in the case of the Dixon Fjord and the USO, the water level monitors only captured levels every 15 minutes. So we'll never like really know how big this wave was because it didn't capture like the peak waviness of the tsunami. But we know there was a tsunami. And we saw the aftermath. So photos after the tsunami showed that the glacier was like, once there, it's

completely wiped out. So 10 meters of glacier pretty much just like shucked off the top of this once really like beautiful icy landscape. Big plop. Big plop energy going on. And so there's a mountain peak that's like more than a kilometer high. It's just like missing now. It's just disappeared. Whoa. And like even a year after this event and again nobody saw this we're in the middle of nowhere. Even a year after the event chunks of rock from the mountains just like roll down into the fjord leaving these like sentimenty clumps so it's still kind of like the aftermath is still aftermassing and it's a really really weird scene to see i'll send some like photos and videos there are a lot of researchers obviously since this buzzed around the entire world so there's a lot of

cool pictures and videos so i will cool might be well it's cold there's a cold pictures so i mean green so i will share those it's greenland but but yeah so it looks completely different after this you know, mysterious tsunami takes place. Luckily, nobody died or got hurt, but there is a research station that was like about 50 miles inland from the ocean, so closer than the ocean, obviously. And it got completely trash. So this tsunami was not playing games.

Wow. So it's a big deal that no, and we're just trying to figure out what the heck happened here. And so according to the team of like 60 plus expert seismologists from all over the world, they published their findings on this event, last year and it's basically the root of it is a climate change induced landslide so let me get let me get you in there what i know this there's like layers to this one so everyone put on your climate science cap and in this region of the world yeah the mountains are the ice cube container sitting in your fridge

holding water that becomes glaciers but because these are naturally occurring and not made at IKEA, obviously, the mountains and glaciers kind of layer and fit over each other in weird ways. So some places you might have like ice mountain right close to each other. In some places it might be more steep. It's just a little funky. But basically underneath the mountain atop that eventually disappears as the photos show, there was a steeply plunging glacier. And this glacier, like so many others in a warming climate, has been struggling to stay icy.

And the authors found that this glacier had been thinning by up to 30 meters in the past handful of decades. and the glacier could no longer support the mountaintop. And so the scientists look back at their weird seismographs with the 90-second donks and found that at the very beginning of the timeline, there was this weird, like record-scratchy, typical seismic event sound after all. And this, of course, is the landslide itself. With this key insight, they could kind of map the path of the mountaintop's doom as it falls down through the glacier, wiping out everything in sight

and then triggering a literal tsunami. Wow. So, so we got a little background, but what about the 90-second weird sounds? We still haven't really unpacked all of that fun stuff. For this, the seismologist, again, looked at the massive map of stations that caught the U.S.O. to begin with. And according to the authors, a handful of stations recorded a side-to-side-snaking kind of motion called a love wave.

And the remaining stations recorded a railie wave, which is up and down moving wave. The love waves were mostly found along a southwest to northeast line across the globe, but the railies in the opposite direction, creating kind of like an X marks the spot over the Dixon Fjord. Nice. So, very exciting stuff. And according to the authors, this can only be caused by a force oscillating back and forth inside the Dixon Fjord. So what's bonging back and forth in there? The tsunami transformed into a Fjord transverse sache.

And a sache is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed. body of water. Whoa. I think Jess has talked about Asatia's before, unless I'm misremembering. No, because sometimes they happen in, like, Michigan, because it's like such a weird, exactly, like system of water. Yes, like these, like contained places still get the waves that go bonk, bonk, bonk, and in the Dixon Fjord, I kind of like picture it as like nature's lazy river.

Like, it's pushing you back and forth. So, I mean, obviously you would. never want to be in this lazy river. I mean, speak for yourself. Yeah, I would try it. Give me a wetsuit, you know, maybe like a white claw. I'd do it. You know, it could be fun.

If you get a white claw, what wouldn't I try? That is very true. True, yeah, yeah, that's true. Like, the world is your oyster, the world is your lazy river at that point. So, go crazy. But yeah, so thanks to the size, depth and shape of the Dixon, it's kind of like this like arm shape it's again I will share some photos with the curious listeners but there's this wild wave balking around in there every 90 seconds for for nine days and sations on their own aren't really a

big deal they happen in lakes and stuff like we just discussed because of wind patterns and what have you but this one lasting for nine days was a little bit odd and there's never been such a slowly dissipating sation recorded history according to the authors so the scientists mapped out the fjord in like super duper close detail to watch a recreation of the tsunami as it settled down through this like bent arm like shape of the fjord over more than a week and after all there's like this is far away from the ocean so there's no big body of water for this wave to be like bye back to the ocean like no it's stuck in there and so these waves sent seismic energy through the fjord's mountainous walls and that then sent the energy through the crust of the entire planet and that alerted seismologists around

the world. So there you have it. And again, what I think is so interesting about this is like it's such a random event that happened like in like again, 124 miles inland in Greenland. And it sent like some of the brightest minds on the world into a tizzy. Like they're like what the heck is going on? And the and the root cause of it again is just like weird stuff happening with climate change. Which climate change is just making everything act up. So we're going to keep seeing weird stuff happened as I mean, a lot of the world is already seen and known. Yeah, it's just going to keep giving us strange stuff to unpack, strange mysteries to unravel as nature just changes. But, I mean, on a positive note, it does show that we're all in the climate change journey together.

Like, if a little wave, a little, a big wave in Greenland can kind of like just, again, send off alarms across the entire planet in an hour. Like, we're all in it together. And so we might as well all phone. focus on it. And that is my tale. And that is why people should check out your work at 1-5C. Exactly. If you want to hear me

or hear me. Read my explanations of strange atmospheric stuff more often. That's where to find it. Wow, that's wild. It made me think of that Calvin and Hobbs line where scientific progress goes

blank or whatever. And it's like in this case it goes donk. Yeah. Don't. It literally is a... And I love some animanapia. So like don't was what I heard. That's good. But I would also, if anyone's bored, ever listen to some of these seismic,

because they are fun. Yeah. Fun to hear. You're like, ooh, that sounds messy. Yeah, because it was. Don't let the seismic all the foot. We can listen to the dogs too. Yeah.

Yes, exactly. Wow. Yeah, it's like the burning man of standing waves, you know. know. Like, last for nine days. Everybody's talking about it. It's in the middle of nowhere. Everybody's confused. Throws people into a tizzy. Weird stuff is happening. This is, that's what it is. It's a burning man of standing weights. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly. Yeah. That's cool. 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

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What's going on? So recently a study came out looking at this never-before-described phenomenon of contagious urination in chimpanzees are very close animal relatives. Basically, this came about because some researchers who worked with chimps at the Kumamoto sanctuary in Japan noticed that their primate charges seemed prone to going to bathroom together at the same time. And they were like, isn't that interesting? And, you know, it reminded them He reminded them of a few things. It reminded them of contagious yawning, which many people are familiar with, but I'll get

into a little bit more in a second. But it also reminded them of like the very human phenomenon of people going to the bathroom together. There is apparently a Japanese term for this. Tsarishan, Japanese is not one of the many languages I have studied and given up. So that was simply my best attempt. But that literally translates to peeing together. But it refers to like, you know, the social phenomenon of things.

people peeing in groups. And there's also, I love this, the study authors actually included this in their press release, but it is an idiom I had already encountered before. An Italian, have not taken Italian in a very long time. I asked my sister, Tulsi Feltman, who is a language genius, to send me a pronouncer. So if this is bad, it's not her fault either, but, you know, I tried. but that's he non pisha in company

or a ladro or a spia and that translates to anyone who won't pee with someone

else is either a thief or a spy what? He's like what's he hiding? Sneaky.

Yeah, classic Italian idiom Yeah, everybody knows that one. Yeah,

it doesn't come up much honestly, but I had seen it at least once before on like a goofy idiom list. So I love when scientists, you know, pull great cultural context for their

press releases, great job folks, the great people of Kyoto University. So they were really curious, you know, is this like a behavioral phenomenon that may be like evolved before humans were humans? So of course, a great way to investigate that is to look at similar behavior in chimps. Now, of course, like I said, these were chimps in captivity. So we always have the caveat of like we don't know if similar stuff is happening out in the wild. And they were also only looking at 20 captive chimps. But I will say, they recorded over 600 hours of observation and 1,328 urination events. What the?

Whoa. They did get a lot of data. Yeah. They really put in the time and the effort. They made it their number one job. They really did. Their number one priority. And so all of that being said, this is like very preliminary.

We can't make sweeping generalizations about chimps based on this study, let alone sweeping generalizations about like primates and, you know, humans. But they did find some interesting stuff. First of all, they were able to verify that observation they had made. where they were like, anecdotally, it seems like the chimps like to pee together, like that they tend. Okay. When one starts peeing, others tend to start. And it was a primatologist and an Anishi who like first got invested in this and was, you know,

spearheading the study. And they collected all of that data from like more than a thousand urination events. And they like statistically analyze them and then made like computer models to sort of compare the events they'd witnessed versus sort of like what a random distribution of urination events would be. Honestly, I really hope one of them was asked like,

hey man. Hey, what's up? Yeah. Hey, Sheila, how was your day? Yeah. Like, what do you do for, what do you, like, you're at a networking event or like you're at a bar? What do you do for work? Well, I've been statistically

analyzing Chimpee for life. I've been really into Chimpee lately. And, yeah, they were first of all, able to verify that, like, there was a statistically improbable, you know, cluster of urination events. So, like, chimps were more likely to peevee after other chimps had peed. It couldn't just be explained by, you know, yeah, there was a trend. It wasn't random happening. They also found that chimps that were, like, physical.

physically closer, like basically if a chimp was like, you know, sort of in visual range of another chimp, they were more likely to be inspired by the other chimp peeing. They also found that there was a flowdown effect in terms of... Yeah, yeah. In terms of social hierarchy, so basically a higher ranking chimp was more likely to set off a trend. of other chimps peeing than they, and a low-ranking chimp was more likely to take the cue from another chip to pee. Which was interesting because they saw that effect, but they didn't see that chimps were more likely to, you know, be inspired to pee together based on social closeness. So like chimps that spent more time together generally didn't, were more likely to pee together.

Okay. And the reason that that was kind of surprising is because the much more famous and better studied contagious social phenomenon we know of is yawning. And so what's really interesting is that like a lot of species yawn, actually Andrew Gallup, who's an evolutionary biologist who studies and talks about yawning a lot, says that yawning probably first arose like 400 million years ago in John Fish. So it's like definitely. Sleepy fish. Yeah, yeah. Definitely not like a primate specific or even mammalian specific behavior. But while many, many animals do spontaneously yawn, contagious yawning is actually only common in social animals and becomes more and more prevalent as like animals get more social.

You know, in the, you know, animal behavior sense of social where we're talking about like animals living in groups, communicating with each other, you know, having. social behaviors be like a really important part of their evolution, we see contagious yawning become more prevalent. We still don't know like exactly why contagious yawning is a thing, but there's been a lot of research on it because of course humans do it too, but there are lots of other animals we can study it in, which is always very convenient, including of course, chimps. And we know that like a lot of things that we refer to as sort of mirroring behaviors where it's like monkey see, monkey do, it's more likely to have an effect when it's people that we sort of already have a connection with. And that doesn't have to be like literally like they're a family member, but it's like

a person who you're sort of already queued into being in a group with, you know, people you're like sitting in a classroom with as opposed to like a random person on the street as you walk by yawning. That doesn't mean a random person on the street walking by you can't also make you yawn. But the effect is heightened when we have these stronger social bonds because it does seem to have something to do with, like, empathy, even if it's not necessarily about an emotional connection. It's, it very clearly seems to have something to do with, like, the bonds between members of a group. There's been a lot of research on, you know, how much it just has to do with, like, state signaling and, like, sort of getting us all on the same page. There's been some research on whether it's

about queuing to other members of your group that you are sleepy so that other people are more alert. Andrew Gallup actually did this study where he like had, he like tried to induce contagious yawning and then also had people looking at photos and trying to identify like predator animals versus like frogs. And he was like when people were yawning in groups, they got better at identifying like poisonous snakes but not better than identifying frogs. So like maybe, you know, the idea there being that like maybe the, the, the, you know, the, you know, the, you know, the, yawn and the oxygen to your brain. Actually, no, he actually just said that the oxygen to your brain thing is debugged. It's very confusing. Anyway, I'm not going to get into debt. But the idea is that maybe

that like the yawn is sort of queuing you to be like, yeah, I know you're sleepy, but wake up, you know, stuff is happening. And that that might be all part of sort of like a group collective, you know, predator protection response. That being said, there's a lot we don't know about yawning. But it very clearly like evolved for some social purpose, even if that purpose is like obscure and weird. And we even, there's even some research. This was another one that Andrew Gallup was a part of showing that people who have like higher testing rates of psychopathic traits, like antisocial traits behaviorally, are less susceptible to contagious yawning. So again, hinting that it's about, you know, like connecting and empathy and like getting on the same wavelength.

So, yeah, really interesting stuff in contagious yawn world, including this, like, very solid connection between, you know, social closeness. And in contagious urination, apparently that is not a thing. So whatever contagious urination is happening, it doesn't seem to be, like, based on the same mechanisms or purpose as contagious yawning. I mean, all this talk about yawning, I feel like tried to not be yawning. I've been wanting to yawn for this entire discussion. So real. So we're still left with many questions about contagious urination in chimps. You know, for all we know, this could be a phenomenon exclusive to this one community of chimps in Japan.

We have seen chimps start trends. There were chimps who like started trends of like putting grass behind their ears as like decoration. It's like maybe there's just this hyperlocalized group urination trend in chimps. Unlikely, but could be. But the researchers did suggest some like, you know, other potential explanations for why this might happen. You know, they're like it might it might still be like a social bonding thing, especially, you know, the hierarchy stuff they saw. It could be like sort of a sign of like dominance and submission in their social hierarchy that it's like it's only okay to go to the bathroom when the higher up chimps do it. And in terms of like the purpose, they suggested a couple of things that I thought were interesting.

You know, they were saying it might be that chimps evolved to like get number one out of the way when they see other chumps doing it in case they like are getting ready to go do something important. It's like, you know, has everybody gone to the bathroom for one last time before we get in the car? Yeah, like a road shirt. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then another suggestion that I thought was really interesting was that there would be some benefit to them. Keeping all of their urine, like, contained to as small an area as possible.

The toilet area. Yeah. Well, that's true. That's true. But not even from a hygiene standpoint, like literally so that there are fewer places where predators could smell them. So just sort of like being like we're not like peeing willy-nilly all over the forest where, you know, lots of predators could come across it and get back to us. But we're like doing, like we're picking the time and the place where that's going to happen.

Or maybe the girlies just like to go together, you know? We can't be sure. But I thought this is a really fun headline. I'm not surprised that it like made a lot of traction even though, even though it's very preliminary. and there's so little we can say about why these gyms aren't being contagiously. But I love science, you know. I love studies where it's a researcher who's like, ha, and they just keep following that thread. They're not afraid to go to their colleagues and say, we got to start counting the urination events.

You know, we'd never learn anything if it wasn't for scientists being willing to ask questions like that. So is this study going to be groundbreaking? going to crack human behavior and evolution wide open? I don't know. Probably not. But it could one day and I love that it exists.

It made a real splash. Oh, man. Oh, it really did. I was thinking about like when I was a kid, we would all go to pee together. Yeah. Like when you're in scouts or whatever

and you're camping and you're all like, okay, I'm going to go pee. And everybody's like, I got to go pee. So you just go to the woods and pee. everybody's peeing out a different tree. Yeah. But you're all peeing at the same time.

Yeah. There's a whole word for it in Japanese, fairly. And Italian. Yeah. If you don't want to give up your secret of being a spy, make sure to peeve with your friends. Spies and thieves, you're on notice. All right, we're going to take one more quick break,

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Okay, we're back. And I was promised some Princess Bride Science. I'm very excited. classic, the classic book, I guess, and also film. Yeah. So on our podcast, we get questions from all these different people. And one of our favorites that I did last year was the question, how long would it have

taken Wesley to build up his immunity to Iocaine powder? That is a great question. I was from someone named Tessa on Spotify. And I, like, really, I went too hard into this in our episode. I think it's like a 40-minute answer. Oh, my God. It's too many. It's too many minutes.

But what do you guys know about, like, poison and, like, immunity and stuff? Not enough. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not enough. I, of course, know the scene you're talking about. Right.

Do you want to reenact it or, like, are we allowed to do licensing? I don't know. I don't know that I want to test those waters. But, yeah, I can't say I know much about, like, how. how that would actually work. Right. Yeah, I didn't either. That's why I picked it because I was like, we've all,

everybody who's seen this movie knows the scene, right? Yeah. There's a, he pills out this thing, he pours it in the wine, they both drink the wine, and then spoiler alert for this, you know, brand new film. One of them dies. So, there you go. Yeah. And he, and the main character, you know, Wesley has allegedly built up an immunity to this poison.

And I thought, is that even possible? So there's this story from like ancient history of Mithridates, the sixth, also known as the Poison King. Ooh. And so, yeah, really great name, also a good name. Yeah. And it was Northeastern Turkey, this person who was not a good dude, by the way, just like not a good guy. Oh, the Poison King was a good guy. He's not a humanitarian name of Poison.

Yeah, you're right. Surprising no one, I guess. He wasn't a great guy. So Mithridates the fifth, that would be his pops, was poisoned, probably in a conspiracy by his own wife and other people. So then Mithridates the sixth takeover, and the brother Crestes, they were kids. And so the widowed wife took over as the region of the kingdom. And then six was nearly the victim of several quote-unquote accidents and went on to become the king as well. So became super paranoid about being poisoned. Again, surprising no one. And started allegedly, again, this is all like, what we say on our podcast is if this is

like a famous story about a famous person who is probably also powerful, it's probably not true. Most of the time, probably not true. It's just good PR. And that's fine. But allegedly, Mithridates would drink poison and antidotes like every day to try and like make themselves immune to poison. And this has been written in a bunch of different places.

throughout history, the world history encyclopedia says, you know, even like Pliny the elder was writing about this dude. And Mithridate is like the thing that it's called now. And it's this like mythical, you know, antidote for every poison. And I found like a bunch of different things that might be in it. I can read you the list. It's long. Costemary, sweet flag, hypercureum, gum, Sagipenum, cacia juice, illyrian isis, cardamom. Nice. Anise. You know, spicy Little mold wine Yeah, a little bit of mold wine.

Rose leaves, poppy tears, parsley, cashe, sacksifer, darnel, Long Pepper Storax, Historic, Historian, Parkinson's, Hypotricus juice. Like, it goes on, like, 50 ingredients. Everything is everything. And then honey. A little honey.

Yeah. You know. Antimicribal properties. I'm just imagining, like, a manservant being like, yeah, here's your poison for the day. As you always insist, it's definitely

we are definitely giving you the thing you've asked for the poison. The king. Yeah, exactly. It's really just like really yucky tea or something and like, yeah, here's your poison, dude. So this is like part of this ancient history is, you know, oh, we can get this immunity to poisons. But poisons don't really work that way. So this is why I brought this fact because I thought it was really neat. A lot of people think about poison and they're like, oh, yeah, you can just get this immunity to poison.

You just try a little bit of it every day or whatever. And this is sort of where that comes from. But if you think about what poisons are, they're mostly from minerals, animals, or plants. So, like, there are salts of lead or mercury copper, arsenic, antimony, you know, super anciently known poisons. You could get lead poisoning. You can get aluminum poison. You know, you can get these, like, metal poisonings. arsenic is an elemental poisoning that's found naturally in the environment.

You can get in drinking water. Then there are animal poisons, things like, you know, poison frogs and salamanders and stuff. And then there are plants with poison. So like Belladonna, you know, like Hemlock, Hellebore, like really awesome, super literary, amazing names. And these poisons don't act the same way. most mechanisms of action of like an alkaloid poison, like caffeine, it's an alkaloid, right? And it affects your brain. It affects like the caffeine molecule attaches to a receptor that makes you do a thing that you would have done anyway.

Like it just boosts, use this caffeine chemical to naturally boost your physiology. So hemlock affects your motor nerves with paralysis and aphyxia with an alkaloid chemical called conionine and it tastes super bitter by the way i don't know i don't know who was out there like what scientist to your point of like you know according to the poison case yeah yeah just always be like in stuff yeah they'd be like the dude who got stung by all the bees and was like that one felt crunchy you know like i just it's just smit sorry i love yes schmidt yeah the scientists are the best someone said it tasted herbie grassy and mildly lemony like mildly lemony dirt and it smells intense and unpleasant And I was like, yeah, it's hemlock.

Of course it does. So anyway, these alkaloid chemicals just act like a regular chemical would that you might ingest anyway. How do you become immune to that? I guess you could like you drink a bunch of caffeine. Over time, you start to build up a tolerance or alcohol, other things that you can consume. But stuff like cyanide, stuff like arsenic, you're not going to become immune to, because cyanide binds with iron molecules that render the body unable to derive ATP

from oxygen. Like you have a little, you've just, you just no longer have ATP being made. Like you can't just be like, oh, I just don't need that ATP. I'm going to build up a tolerance. I've built up a non-ATP tolerance. So I started looking into it and Iocaine is a fictional thing, right? It's not a real thing that they became immune to in this movie. But it is very similar to something like arsenic.

It's not an alkaloid. It's probably heavy metal related. It's not organic. So then I started thinking, what could you build up a tolerance for? Like the animal ones seem to be good. For that. I mean, they're not good. But so then I started looking into venom versus poison.

So poison is like, and for the mnemonic I use is like, poison is I get you and venom is you get me. Right. Yeah. Okay. So like poison has an eye in it, I get you. Venom has an M in it, you get me. Yeah. So you bit me, you stung me. Poison is I inhaled or absorbed or ingested it.

Yes. Because poison like cyanide interferes with life at like a chemical level, venom is more like a super digestive juice. Like you, like that's like digesting your cells. They have enzymes that like break down your tissue, like super saliva. It's real gross. Yeah. Like there are snakes that bite their prey and it just basically predigests it.

so that when they consume it, it's easier for them to digest it. Good soup. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you know what it is? It's the snake version of a soup dumpling, which I love a soup dumpling, but it's just, you know, mouse shape. Create something to think about. Yeah.

We'll have soup dumplings later. But we have antibodies against that. So that might be something that we could come up against. And without giving too much away from our episode, I'm like skimming through my script from our episode. So there's a lot more in our episode, obviously. But the cool thing that I found was, what do we know about Iocaine? Right? Like when they describe Iocaine, they say it's, you know, it's a powder.

It's odorless, colorless, dissolves instantly in liquid. And it's one of the more deadly poisons known to man. No. One of the most toxic venom to mice is the, The inland Taipan, oxyuranis microleptidotus. And what else do we know about Iocaine? It comes from Australia. As everyone knows, Australia is entirely people with criminals.

Right? Yeah, yeah. The inland Tai Pan is from Australia. Whoa. So, one of the most venomous inland, the inland Tai Pan contains a spreading factor called hyalurinidase enzyme, that increases the rate of absorption of that specific venom. So from the UC San Diego's website,

it says the inland Tai Pan is the most venomous terrestrial snake known to man, perhaps the most toxic of all snakes in the world, and venomation signifies a true medical emergency the venom can cause, neurotoxic, hemolytic, and coagulopathic reactions. Paralysis or death can ensue rapidly. And for that, I say inconceivable. Right? Because if you think about it, maybe instead of becoming immune to Iocaine as some like arsenic-like powder, it was a powdered version of an Australian inland Taipan venom that he was just ingesting at small amounts, building antibodies to.

And then, anyway, I thought maybe less inconceivable then. Like, I thought that's kind of cool. Like, venoms and poisons, I find so interesting. because of exactly what we're talking about, right? Some of the poisons literally just chemically interfere with your body's processes, which is so wild to think about that like it does the same thing that like drinking a cup of coffee makes you feel like stimulated and having some arsenic just stops your body making energy and you die. And it's just like, what?

Whose idea was that? How is that possible? Yeah. You could tell that this, that natural things, not always good. Yeah. Arsenic, very natural. So natural. But very deadly.

And then like venoms are so neat because it is that like kind of predigestion stuff, which I don't know. It's just so fascinating to me. So the fact that I found is, again, that you probably can't become immune to a poison, even though that's generally what people discuss. But a venom, you know, it's really just like protein and more like a saliva, which is super. So like more like eating a little bit of peanuts. every day. Just a little bit of peanuts every day. Hoping you, hoping they will make your throat close up one day.

Hopefully. Don't do that without a doctor's help, folks. I see a lot of people in TikTok being like, I can do this. I'm like, no. Please go. Go do it. Do it in an ER parking lot with a pizza. Yeah, do it close to someone who can help you.

I have an allergy to shrimp now. I didn't used to. I used to like go to a lobster and like tear it up. That happened to my little brother too. came on all of a sudden. Yeah. It's devastating. And it's like with shellfish, it's always like frequently it's like unclear if it's the iodine or which is very common in shellfish or the shellfish itself.

But it's sort of it's like you don't want to mess around with that. I have a friend who thought he was allergic to shellfish and then one day there was a spill at work and he put on a new pair of jeans that he had just bought and got a really intense reaction all over the little. over half of his body. It turned out it was the iodide in the wash of the jeans. So shellfish itself, not a problem. But you can't, like, avoid the whole iodine issue in shellfish. So it doesn't really matter. But yeah, anyway, my little brother, who is a chef, you know, just about to graduate

culinary school, can no green shrimp. And is real, real mad about that. So I, my, you know, sympathies, trace. Yeah, I'm married to a Brazilian. And I don't know if you know this about Brazilians. They love shrimp. They do love shrimp. Like a lot.

Like we went to my wife's uncle's house, and they're like, Tracy, we made you some chicken, because they had like a thousand peel and eat shrimp. And I got like one pan-fried chicken breast at the end of the table. Oh, no. And they were having a blast. The chicken was fine. Yeah, bodies are crazy. They can just decide something's poison. Apparently, they can't decide poison's not poison, though.

Is that true? Yeah. They have hard time with that. Yeah, yeah, and we apparently do. Yeah, it was really fun to learn more about it. That's awesome. Well, I definitely have to go check out that episode of your podcast to hear the full dive because that was awesome. Would you remind listeners what your show is called so they can find it?

Yeah, the show's called That's Absurd. Please elaborate. Find it anywhere you get a podcast. And I'll break some news here because I don't know when this is coming out, but we're going to launch video soon. You're the first to know. You're the first. You two are the first to know. Yay, I'm so excited.

Or three, I guess, yeah, are the first to know. Because we are going to start putting video out of the podcast as well. But this episode that I'm referring to is called You Can Iokane or Iokan it. And it's also got a question about what if we had a unary number system instead of a binary system? Like could a computer be built with just literally like zero or not zero? Julian had a fun time. I mean, he thought it was fun. I'm not.

I still don't understand how zero and one would make a computer. Right, yeah. So it was a fun episode, one of our favorites from last year. So it was really, but yeah, you can find it anywhere you get your podcast.

And we have a website where you can submit questions or you can even call us on the phone, which is pretty cool. We get new questions every day. Kind of to go back to your point about like having your stage, like live show. Yeah. The cool part about getting questions is you do get some of that like audience.

Like there's an audience. There are people. They're asking us questions. Oh, my God. God, so thank you. You know, so that's really awesome. Yeah, I love that. We used to have a voice memo feature that the platform doesn't offer anymore. And it's always on my, you know, to-do list of when I suddenly have more time and resources for the show to have some kind of voicemail box, because it is so great to hear from people. Weirdest thing listeners, if you're listening and you wish you could still

call us on the phone, let me know. If people want something, I'll make it happen. But right now, I'm just assuming it's for my own, you know, my own kicks. So will it ever happen? Probably not, because I got too much to do. But in the meantime, you can call Trace. Yeah. Yeah, 302 tape show, T-I-P-E-S-H-O. Awesome.

Well, thanks so much for coming on. This has been great. That was so fun. Yay. Yeah. Thanks for teaching me about, you know, waves and seismics and P. And lots of P. And lots of P.

P. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts. including me, Rachel Fultman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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