The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Time Balls, Bug Culture, Traffic Mimes

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Balint Kacsoh of SciAnts_Streams joins the show today to talk about how flies have their own sort of culture. Plus, Jess hops behind the mic to discuss mimes mocking traffic offenders, and Rachel divulges the story of London's legendary timekeepers. 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 Link to Balint's Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/sciants_streams -- 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! Open your account in 2 minutes 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.  No matter how you say it, don’t overpay for it. Shop data plans at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Get 20% off your first order of Liquid I.V. when you go to ⁠https://www.liquid-iv.com/⁠ and use code WEIRDEST at checkout. 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

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. 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 Possible. I'm Rachel Fulman. I'm Jess Bodhi. And I'm Bled Cacho. Woo! Welcome to the show.

Jess. Would you introduce our guest? Yes. So this is one of my pals from Twitch. We met just by happenstance because I think you rated me once. I was playing a really fun indie game called Superliminal, which is a real, it's I love that game. It's like a cool puzzle game. And I saw your username and I was like, oh my God, are you a science gamer, Twitch person?

Because I make a, you know, me and my pal Rachel make this awesome science show. Well, and you have to share what the username is. Oh, science streams. Also, Twitch Ambassador. They're wonderful. You and your wife run your guys channel. Tell us a little bit about it. Yeah, so my wife and I, we both run the channel together, like Jess said.

We have our PhDs in molecular biology from Dartmouth. We have our masters in biology from Embermph. memory and we did our postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania and we believe that science should be accessible to everyone. And so we started a Twitch channel under that premise and we're here today as Twitch ambassadors. Yeah, it's so sick you'll got ambassador. That's so amazing. It's still shocking.

I can't believe it actually happened. You guys deserve it. You deserve it. To be honest, I don't know what that means, but it sounds really impressive and I'm very happy for you. It's a very prestigious thing. Instead of like your Twitch partner badge, which is already a huge deal, you get like a multicolored Twitch partner badge. And it's like you're kind of like a liaison between Twitch staff and like Twitch the rest of us.

Very cool. So it's set up, I mean, you can speak more than me. I believe since 2017 when they started, there's 180 ambassadors total. And we're the first and only so far that do educational content. Hell yeah. You're like a prefect or head boy kind of. I've been reading a lot of Harry Potter fan fiction. lately.

I mean, what science, if not magic, but real, right? That is so true. Also, I should clarify for listeners, all the Harry Potter fan fiction I read is super gay and would make JK Rowling very mad. Yes. Hell yeah. And it's written better than her, yeah. Well, let's get into the weirdest thing I learned this week.

On the weirdest thing I learn 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 in a chill way where we often don't actually decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Jess, what's your tease? My tease is traffic mimes.

No, you don't need to say anymore. Two words, iconic. My tease is that I'm going to talk about the real time lords and ladies of the old din days. Uh-huh. And what's your tease? Fruit flies, screaming, and fear. Oh. Well, just traffic mimes is just so powerful.

I think you need to kick us off. I would love to. Okay. So this was the fact that I found while scrolling. good old Atlas Obscura, you know, the best. Faithful. Yes. And I found a piece written by Abby Cole about mimes directing traffic. And so yesterday I sent my fact into Rachel and I was like,

oh, this fact is like cool and funny and relevant. And it's like a cool scientific finding, you know, it was like a great fact. So I was like, Rachel, this is what I want to talk about. And she was like, perfection. So I was like, great. And all that is still true. But mere hours after choosing my fact. I had a traffic-related incident where I really could have used a mime. Everything is

fine. I will explain. Well, I'm fine, but where are the mimes when you need them? That's what I'm saying. They really would have come in handy. So, okay, first, picture this. Bogota, which I believe how you pronounce, the capital of Colombia and South America, it's rush hour. 5 p.m. Cars at a standstill. Trucks honking. Mopeds are weaving. in and out of traffic, trying to care where they need to go. All of this under the blistering Colombian sun. Everyone's just roasting. People are getting pissed.

But then a breath of fresh air. Not literally and not like, you know, my favorite refreshing beverage when I'm really sweaty. An ice cold, cool blue Gatorade non-spawn. I love blue Gator. My grandma recently, because my grandpa had the flu or something, and he's fine. But my grandma was taking care of him and she was like, I've been giving him that alligator juice. And I was like, that alligator juice.

And I was like, they live in Florida. So I was like, the what? Like is this something, some bootleg beverage? It was just Gatorade. It was merely just Gatorade. Oh, I love it. And I think we should all call it alligator juice. That alligator juice.

Yeah. But yeah. So anyway. Next time you go down to see your grandparent you to visit Gatorland. What's Gatorland? Gatorland is like a bootleg theme park. with just alligators everywhere.

They just celebrated their 50-year anniversary. Oh my God. Okay, I need to investigate that. Oh, my God. So, yeah, this was not ice, cool, cool, cool, cool, blue, ice cold, cool, blue Gatorade or alligator juice or whatever. This breath of fresh air is a fellow in white face paint and black eyeliner and a striped shirt. Yes, a mime.

So here in the city, If you honk a bit too aggressively, this mime is going to hold up their little gloves at you in horror. Or, you know, let's say you're doing a little jaywalking. This mime will do like an exaggerated version of what you're doing to mock you, which I love. But also if you do things right, like, you know, nice little family waits for the walk signal and they go. Like the mimes will do like a little cartwheel or like applause or some other nonverbal praise. And you know, why? Why not?

Yeah, true. But there is a reason for this. So let's go back to the beginning. Back in like 1994, 1995, this is pre-mime. Bogota had 1,500 traffic-related deaths annually, which is a lot. And they had just elected a new mayor named Antonus Macchus, who fired 1,800 traffic cops in exchange for 20 mimes. Hell yeah, honestly. Yes, I agree.

I agree. And this dude, okay, so this new mayor, he isn't just like some guy who likes mimes, which maybe he is also that, but who's to say? He had this whole plan. So he was a former professor of math and psychology. So he wanted to like use that knowledge to completely transform the city and its traffic problem with mimes. And really, so he was kind of just bummed that like when the government had tried to meet traffic, like violent traffic incidents with force, like when they tried to solve stuff with

violence and force, that didn't work, which like, you know, imagine that. But he was like, you know, I'm really sad about this. Let's find a different way. And he said mimes. So in the beginning, his mimes had to follow like very strict rules. So they held up, the only thing they really did was hold up signs that said correcto and incorrecto. And they would just hold them up. Mime tells you incorrecto devastating. I mean, I would be devastated. Yeah. And though simple, or perhaps maybe like because it was simple, it started to work.

So by 1998, traffic violence decreased by 50%. Wow. Which is crazy to think that. So they added more mimes. Their ranks climbed to over 400 around the city. So still a small percentage because Bogota has. seven million people total. But still, the mines were like such a success and they were so drama they had become like kind of famous around the city. Yeah, it's very camp. It's so camp. I love it.

So that official mine program did end in the late 90s, so it went on for like five to seven years ish officially, but the people love it so much that they still carry out this tradition 30 years later and it's spread to other Latin American countries. So, uh, so. Some governments in South America even hand out thumbs up or thumbs down cards to people to encourage folks to like get out there in mime, which I love. And like, why does this work? So there was a recent behavioral science study looking at this. Researchers think that when people are willing to engage with the mimes and like play along, that they're forced to rethink these everyday interactions with their larger community. Like they're taking a more active part in their communities.

They care more about them, that kind of thing. And basically makes folks less passive and encourage them to engage and like care about their community, which makes complete sense. And something I think that a lot of Americans could benefit from too, frankly. And this is what one behavioral science researcher said about this whole thing is that, quote, instead of thinking that only politicians can solve the problem or that the problem will never be resolved because that's just the way we are here. The mime scheme shows that it's a collective responsibility to change, end quote, which I like a lot. Yeah, that's great. I love that. And I think that that could be a notion brought to all culture, not just mime or traffic culture, but, you know, I'd like I said, you can see traffic mimes in other

countries now like Peru and Venezuela. And apparently, Bolivia has traffic zebras. Like people in like zebra suits. Like you would get on Halloween or something. Which I guess is also kind of a take on mime culture. Sure. Yeah. And okay.

So back to the U.S. Do I think this could work in the U.S.? Maybe. Somebody would shoot the mine. That was my fear. That was my fear. And you know, like I think it's important to think about too because like when they introduced this in Colombia, it was still like an issue. It was still an issue where like

violence was a lot of the problem. And so they were still able to implement this. But I think it's probably because, you know, back in the 90s, people elected this mayor because he wanted to fix things with nonviolence. They were all already kind of like on board with that. And the mimes were rolled out slowly. And it was a gradual influx of traffic mimes and people kind of primed for it. And yeah, I would fear for mime safety. in America. I do think maybe there could be a nice way to implement something like this. Yeah, yeah.

But, but yeah, like I mentioned at the top of the top of my fact, this is top of mind for me me because complete and total dickhead locked eyes with me out on the road and sideswept my car. Because he wanted to like merge in front of me despite me being already halfway in front of him and having the right of way and following the traffic laws and signs. So it's all fine. My mirror, my side mirror is a little bit screwed up. And then he didn't stop.

He kept driving, even though I know, I know he knows. I know he knows. However, I did, you know, I got really mad, but I stayed super calm. And I called my mom on my, like, you know, I'm doing a classic hand motion. Like, I'm calling my mom on my phone. I'm using my car's Bluetooth. And I'm like, mom, you'll live. Never believe what just happened.

You know, when in doubt, call your mom. And I got a picture of its license plate, and it's like a commercial truck vehicle. Oh, yeah. So I'm like, oh, you're going down, loser. I am going to contact this truck company and be like, hello, your driver of license plate. Bad. It sucks. And you need to pay for a new side mirror for me.

So anyway, also, like if a mime would have been like, what? You know, I can't, the audio listeners are not going to benefit from this, but like, you know, a crazy exaggerated movement. Or they could have put the car in a box. I do think, you know, any of those options. It's useful for the mime to be like, what you're doing is clown behavior. Yes. Yes. I'm here to remind you of that.

Exactly. So, anyway, mime. Mimery would have been. Like, I would have loved that. But at the very least, hopefully, I can get him in trouble at his job. So that's my traffic mime story. Justice for Jess. Wow.

I'm really, like, the mimes in particular, it's such a wild image. And I love that. It's interesting, too, like the difference between the imagery of what a mime looks like versus what a traffic cop. could look like and seeing like how in Bogota like that's the image that calmed people right to lead to that decrease in the violence so is like is it the nonverbal stuff is it the appearance is it a little bit of both and what was it that really drove people to be like you know what I will take that extra moment right and it just like so endearing you know yeah I don't know what it is but yeah made people engage with their communities so nice all right we're going to take a quick break and

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So I recently came across the story of Ruth Bellville, who is known as the Greenwich Time Lady because she literally sold people time, or at least she sold people THE time, which at the time was very novel. So I need to rewind a little bit to sort of set the scene for Ruth's business. So back in 1675, King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory. He wanted to like get better. at navigating the seas. He asked for a small observatory to be built at the highest point in Greenwich Park. And then almost a century later, the Royal Astronomer published the first

nautical almanac, which showed the observatory's findings with seafarers all over the world and allowed them to pinpoint their longitude. So basically, people were using marine chronometers, which were kind of the first precision timepieces. Time pieces go back thousands of years. It's pretty wild how long back into history, people were able to keep time pretty precisely. But precision timepieces, as we would now consider them, really started because of marine navigation. So you would have this super precise timepiece on a ship that would be set to Greenwich Mean Time, so the time over at the Royal Observatory. And then you would use the sky and celestial navigation to figure out how

different the time was where you were and that would help you calculate your longitude relative to Greenwich, which was huge. That was groundbreaking. People had simply not really done that before. Of course, people did incredible navigation. Polynesian wayfarers did amazing celestial navigation thousands of years ago, but for Europeans, this was groundbreaking. And all of this sets the scene for the very idea of having like one time that everyone agrees that it is. Up until a certain point in the 1800s, every town in the London area kept its own local time based on the position of the sun. So for example, there was a 16-minute difference between London and Plymouth.

Fast forward to 1833 and the Royal Observatory started getting into time balls, which are exactly what they sound like. The first one was like five feet across. It was made of a wooden frame covered in leather. And it was raised to the top of a 16-foot mast. And then basically, every day at exactly 1 o'clock, the observatory would drop the ball so that men who were working out on the Thames and people who were making timekeeping devices in Clerkenwell could know the time.

And yes, this is what the ball drop is referencing. balls dropping because of a certain time happening used to be a thing. No way. Oh my God. Yeah. People went absolutely nuts for the time ball. They loved it. They wanted more time balls.

So the observatory built more so that they were visible from more places because again, up until this time, people told what time it was by the position of the sun. And in a pre-industrial society, that's really all you need. Why get more precise than that? Sun goes up, sun goes down. Sometimes the sun's high. in the sky, you know, that really tells you everything you need to know. But now the Industrial Revolution has happened, is happening.

And suddenly people want to agree on stuff happening at certain times. In particular, railways made this a big problem. Suddenly, if you had a 16-minute difference in what time you agreed it was, huge issue. And like passenger rail wasn't so much a thing yet. But for like shipping and business, it just started to actually actually. actually matter. So telegraphs meant there was an actual way to share what time it was. So they'd be like, wow, there's not just an unsolvable existential problem.

Like there is actually something we can do about this. And eventually, telegraph signals would control the time balls, which implies it was once just dudes watching really carefully for one o'clock to happen. And wow, respect. So thus began Greenwich Mean Time, first known as Railway Time for this reason. which is just, I think is really interesting because we now will kind of take for granted that we have this unified time system, but it used to be a very new idea. And just to fast forward a little bit before I rewind again, in 1880, this became official law and not just sort of a thing most people did. That happened because people kept showing up to court at the wrong time and being like, well, sorry, to me it was 9 a.m.

I don't know what to tell you. So over in Plymouth, it was 9 a.m., what's your issue? So they were like, okay, now we're all agreeing that we use Greenwich Mean Time. That is the time. So if you have a court date, you get there based on Greenwich Mean Time. And yeah, then that was that. But in those decades between time starting to matter because of factories and trains and whatnot, and clocks becoming common, what did people do?

Well, the answer is kind of goofy. So in the early 19th century, any business that wanted an accurate time in the London area, so clockmakers, for example, banks, they would basically send an employee to the Royal Observatory to bang on the door and be like, let me see your clock. Because the Royal Observatory was the keeper of Greenwich Mean Time. They had the high precision chronometer that was referenced by all these ships at sea, and that was what Greenwich Mean Time was. And so if you wanted to be sure you were matching Greenwich Mead Time, you had to go see it.

And then keep in mind, most people weren't carrying around accurate time pieces yet. They had less advanced clocks that would very quickly lose their time. So you had to reset them over and over again. So yeah, people would just show up. They would, I assume, send their unpaid interns and be like, what time is it? And eventually somebody aren't really fed up about this. They were like, you can't, we can't have all these bank interns and clock making apprentices showing up, demanding to know what time it is.

So they limited their access to once a week on a Monday. It's like everyone had to show up and get their time for the week and just be satisfied with that. And a man named John Bellville who worked at the Royal Observatory or had worked. I've seen some sort of conflicting notes on what actually his title was at this time. But at least for a while, he had been an apprentice at the Royal Observatory. And he saw a market for telling people what time it was. And by the way, in 1852, they would come up with a better solution for this than just saying,

you can't bang on our door more than once a week. put a giant clock on the outside of their gate that they kept up to date. Basically, they had gotten their first electric clock, so that made having multiple clocks that were set to Greenwich Mean Time and all referenced the one really good clock that made that viable. So eventually it would be just like, look at the big clock on the gate, point to the side. That's what time it is.

But there were like almost 20 years when people were demanding to know what time it was, and that giant gate clock didn't exist yet. So that's where John Belleville comes in. He might have worked at the Royal Observatory at the time. At the very least, he had been an apprentice at the Royal Observatory at some point. But he saw a market for telling people what time it was. So in 1836, he started charging people an annual fee to use his pocket watch. He had a very good pocket watch.

And once a week, he'd come by and visit them and share the time on his watch, which he kept accurate thanks to his access to the observatories' chronometers. So then everybody else did- What an entrepreneur. Yeah, seriously. Business mastermind. So yeah, they could adjust their own watches accordingly. And as a side note, I just really love this. The guy who oversaw him at the observatory for some time when he was younger said that he

was, quote, steady though not clever. I'm like, first of all, I just agree. I think this man sounds very clever. But I love that he was described as steady, and then he became literally a professional timekeeper. So this business thrived until John died in 1856. And by that time, the gate clock was up. It was showing people the time.

Anyone could get the time via telegraph if they really wanted to. But John's 200 subscribers knew and trusted the Pockwatch system. So they asked his widow Maria if she would be. take up the mantle of selling them the time. And she did that for another 36 years before retiring. Now, by this point, we're in the 1890s. Again, it seems very reasonable for this service to just die out with Maria. Telegraph Time was a very established technology.

There were commercial firms, one called the Standard Time Company, competing with the Post Office Telegraph Time to get customers. it wasn't actually as accurate or reliable as a pocket watch set regularly to the Greenwich Meantime clock. And apparently, according to historians, the post office had a reputation for like not always doing a good job sort of keeping people updated. And Maria Belville would always show up every week. So people were like, we need the time lady. And they asked her daughter Ruth to step in. And And she did, with the same pocket watch that had belonged to her father, which she called Arnold after the guy who had made it.

She carried it around London every week for another 48 years. She did have haters, at least one hater. This guy named St. John Wynne, who was a director of the Standard Time Company, tried to bring her down. And this is a great story. In 1908, he gave a speech of the United Wards Club, which was then published in the Times, And he criticized Belleville's business methods. He was like, this is so amusingly out of date.

It's, you know, he basically kind of crapped all over London and being like, it's wild that we don't have a better system for this. Do you know how bad it is? It's so bad that here's how people get their time. This is a quote. A woman possessed of a chronometer obtained permission from the astronomer royal at the time. Perhaps no mere man could have been successful. So, first of all, calling Ruth's mother a slut, how dare, to call it the observatory

and have it correct it as often as she pleased. The business is carried on to this day by her successor, still a female, I think. So hugely offensive, terrible man, hate him. He really wanted to promote that guy. Yeah, absolutely. He really wanted to promote the standard time company. He simply wanted her business. And this was printed in the Times, then a bunch of angry dudes wrote letters to the editor about

how it was really egregious that London didn't have a good public system for access to accurate time, which some other major cities did by then. But, twist, all of those angry men writing into the newspapers actually seemed to boost Ruth Belleville's business because people read it and were like, oh, I didn't know there was a lady I could pay to tell me the time. Or people were like, yeah, that's a great point. our city is really bad at telling us what time it is. And thank goodness they've given me the name of this reliable woman who will fix that problem for me. Apparently it became very fashionable to have this personal service instead of using the telegraph.

And if you could afford, like, thrice weekly updates, you were very, you know, that was very elite. So Ruth had like a great system. She would arrive at the Royal Observatory before, not at least once a week. She would always refer to her watch as Arnold, and she would say, Good Morning, Arnold's four seconds fast today. And somebody would check the watch. She would set it. She would get a certificate of accuracy. And then she would go and see her clients. Now, in 1924, the BBC started broadcasting the Pips and the sound of Big Ben, which meant anyone with the radio could tell what time it was. And then in 1936, there was the speech leaking clock, also called Tim, which meant you could dial the letters T-I-M and get the time.

By the time Ruth retired in 1940, this was very much of a bygone era. And even though it seems she had clients until the end, there wasn't really anyone scrambling for a replacement for her. Though she only retired because she was 86 and World War II made it unsafe for her to walk the streets. And then she passed away a couple of years later, reportedly with Arnold. by her side. But yeah, one other thing that I'm not getting it into,

because Ruth's story ended up being so great that I just spent the whole time reading about it. There was another pre-clock saturation job called a knocker-upper, which is of course just a very funny sounding thing. And these were people who would go around knocking on your windows to wake you up for work at the factory. Because again, there was this very awkward time

when people were used to relying on the sun. for getting up, but now they're moving into cities. They have factory jobs where your boss doesn't care about what time your body thinks it is. And there were actually a lot of times when people talk about knock-roppers, they'll be like, and alarm clocks were just impossible to get. And that's actually probably not true. Their alarm clocks have existed for thousands of years. There's some wild stuff about like water-based alarm clocks that people had in ancient Greece and ancient China.

That being said, the sort of like modern mechanical idea of an alarm clock, those were probably available and not wildly expensive, but they also weren't very reliable, and then people weren't used to using alarm clocks. So apparently a lot of people would have an alarm clock, but then often sleep through it. So the knocker-upper would be like, no, wake up. And again, this is a job that sort of went away as alarm clocks got better, people got more used to the industrial schedule, but I love the idea of people just like hoofing it to deal with the concept of time. And I think, honestly, I wish there were still more services

that involved like a trusted lady coming to your tour once a week to update you on something or other. Well, it kind of reminds me of like, I don't know, like the time being kind of decentralized like that reminds me of like pre-internet stuff. And like, I don't know, I think there's something kind of nice and special about having less access to stuff like that. Obviously, there's a lot of good reasons to have that stuff. But I don't know. Maybe this is just me being nostalgic for time before the internet. But yeah, I don't know. The old days when you got that hotel wake-up call instead of setting a phone alarm. Yeah, I forgot about that. Well, I'm nostalgic for it.

You can still do that at most hotels, I think. Maybe we should start doing that again. Let's bring that back. Yeah. Honestly, I think somebody could probably really make a killing, like, like rebranding the wake-up call as like a boutique service. Oh, somebody make that. It could be a gold mine and also really cool and fun. I think I read a romance novel once where the plot was that she was supposed to find a wake-up call service for her boss, but none of them would take him because he was so mean. Oh my God. And then like one morning she did it out of desperation.

like, you know, told him what a jerk he was. You know, it's a good, good plot device. I don't remember if the book was good. That was a great plot device. Yeah. Anyway, bring it back. Agree. In the billionaire romance novel world, apparently wake up calls are still a thing. So, yeah, they do still exist.

All right, we're going to take one more break and then be back with one more fact. No one goes to Hank's for 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 work.

Now, Hank has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Copilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365 copilot.com slash work. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, Use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills,

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Refreshers contain caffeine. Copyright 2026, the Coca-Cola Company. Sprite is a registered trademark of the Coca-Cola Company. Okay, we're back, and we have one more fact. Belinda, what's your fact? So something that I'm always interested in is how do organisms communicate and what are they talking about? Especially if you get to something simple, like a bug, right? It's a bug.

There's always a question of, do they even have a brain and how smart they are? Can they talk about things that are important? So I came across a paper that claims that they have culture. And the researchers are defining culture as preferences that are passed on between generations of information. and not genetically. And so what they did... Bug culture? Bug culture.

I love bug culture. So they did mating preferences because that's an easy thing to study. So what they did was they put females and males into different colored dust and made them look a little bit different. So there was like a blue fly and a pink fly and a yellow fly. And they made them really, you know, they took a female fly that was unmated. So the males preferred that female fly right away. they didn't know that it was something about the yellow dust or the blue, but you had a group of naive observer flies,

or these are the students that are watching this interaction happen, and they're seeing the males pick the yellow fruit fly or the blue flute fry every time, whoever was the more attractive actually to them. And it turns out that those individuals that were watching these flies, without any other experience beyond just watching them, then formed this preference. No way. And so they, without any actual stimulus,

than preferred the color fly that they watched that was successfully made it with. Unrealistic beauty standard, snap. Yeah, watching in TV, right? Like, that's what's told to you is beautiful and now that's what you go after. Now I have to be blue. I mean, you know, smurf costumes.

We're good. We're good. You're so right. You're so right. But so I was really curious to see if this can transmit to something that's more biologically relevant, right? And one thing that I always think is interesting is a fear response.

Right. To me, if I ever I see a behavior, I'm like, all right, that's either a sexual selection. So some reason to be more attracted to a maid or it's some kind of predation risk. How could it have evolved? So it turns out you can give fruit flies a variety of different predators. You can put them in the same container with them. You can put them in with spiders that will actually end up eating them. And you can watch them bounce around like a piece of popcorn kernel in their container,

are trying to escape from the spider, you know, they never actually do, but they are like visibly changing their behavior. And same with something that doesn't hurt them, but only infects their babies. So if there's a parasitic wasp that infects the offspring of the fruit fly, so the larval state, but is no threat to the adult, the adult still has fundamental behavioral changes. So the question is, right, can this be transmitted in that cultural sense the same way as that color preference. And so researchers did a variety of genetic experiments as well as physical separations and showed that, yeah, this fear of spiders and being afraid of them can be transmitted visually. And it is a maintained behavior in those observer flies. So it's not just a transient

where the observer fly watches there a fear happening of a spider and they're afraid as long as they see the spider. But rather for days after the experience, those flies had never caught the whiff of the predator, but just have seen it or have seen an individual that had been exposed to a predator in the absence of the original predator itself, they show physiological changes. So they are able to communicate that, yes, there has been a predator threat, and that not only results in a behavioral change, but changes in the germlines. The ovaries of fruit flies have fundamentally changed as a result of this exposure. Wow. And so that has, it makes sense that it's transient, right? Because then you can see like you can adapt quickly to the

environment, depending on what predatory needs or are available. If there's no predators, right, you don't have to change anything. Presumably, if you're laying at an egg site, you're closely related to the individuals laying there. So from a genetic fitness standpoint, it makes sense. But it's just something really cool that it happens in a fruit fly. It happens across multiple different phenomena. So predation, the color preference, right? And it's this through visual cues, insects are usually thought of as like not really good visual animals minus like the praying mantis. But even for them, they have this built in search image in their brains that's innate that they look for and it has this really, really potent level of information.

Well, that's wild. I love bug culture. And it goes to show like what else in terms of bug culture exists that we don't account for. So I think that's what I find really exciting about these facts as well as not to just It's not just an endgame, right? It's like, well, that's in one instance of one organism, right? What happens with everything else on a day-to-day basis that's maybe more relevant to what goes on their lives? And researchers attested multiple species as well.

One really interesting study was if you place two species, the same species, side by side, and one group is dead, the one that's watching has a shortened lifespan. So if they see dead individuals, cons specifics of their same species, those that have seen death live a shorter lifespan. Spooky. I see dead fruit flies. But if you put it a different species of fruit fly, so a close relative, not like a totally, not like a housefly even, just a close relative of a fruit fly, you put a close relative in that's dead. Doesn't affect them. I think that's not my problem. And it makes sense, right? Like, well, I'm resistant to whatever he died from. I don't need to remember about that.

Yeah. But it's just really cool to be able to have this visual information conferred and this like spread of fear and in the information of it and see how it can be contained, how transient it is, how it's remembered by these animals. And I think it's kind of relevant to today's culture as well because there's a lot of fears that we may have and hopefully it's not permanent. Right. And so that's that was my interesting fact for the day. Wow. I love it. Bug culture.

It is wild that they can learn that stuff and pass it down just by like, watching right and so because a lot of the researchers talk a be a little faction right a lot of insects can smell really well and it turns out again just like building containers they're side by side so they can't actually smell each other they can see exactly or the alternative is that they did they remove the ability for the insect to smell oh yeah it's really it's really easy to do because all the receptors are what are called heterodimers so it's a pair of receptors one is always this gene called orco one and then you have orco number two through whatever you get to.

And it's that pair that allows them to smell something. So if you get rid of Orko I, they can't smell a thing. And so you can genetically ablate it, put them together, and you get the exact same result. Well, and it does make me wonder, too, like you were saying, like, what else are they learning by watching? Like, if, you know, if we're able to just see this one thing, like, what else do they know? And it's something right you're looking for. And even like that is, why were you even looking for something like that? This idea wasn't to put dust on them to see.

It's just, it's really, the reason I liked it so much, because I find it was so clever of an idea. And then it actually panned out. So it just goes to show, I think, how little we still know about the natural world, where it's like, you know, in these papers, we're ranging from 2018 to 2022 that I was seeing. And there's still, like, this visual transfer of information that is so fundamental to the behavior of the animal, but it's just now being published on.

Right. Yeah, and fruit flies are like, we've looked at fruit flies so much. They're such a classic model organism. So if there's so much we don't know about them, wow. Right. It's like 100 plus years of research. And just now it's like, oh, they're talking to each other about being scared. Uh-oh.

Yeah. But are they scared of us? That's what I want to know. I want to make sure they're fine with it. Yeah. No, that was really cool. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been a great app.

And Jess, thanks again for coming on this time of the mic. Always great to have you. Glad to be here, even when my dog is causing a ruckus. Would you actually both remind our listeners where they can find your Twitch streams? Because Jess, I feel like it's been a while since we plugged. Yes, I would love to. So I stream, I'm just Capricorn on Twitch, all one word. And I stream mostly Monday, Wednesday, Thursday nights.

And I also publish YouTube videos. And I do a lot of like JRP style stuff, some Eldon Ring stuff, some Bloodbourne stuff. When is this coming out? I think it will have already passed by that time. Yes, I'm doing a big charity stream, but that will have already happened for reproductive rights. But yeah, so that's what I get up to. We get into some science stuff occasionally, but not as much as Belint does. So please tell us about science streams.

Well, first of all, thank you all very much for having me on today. This is an absolute blast. This was so fun. We loved having you. I love the show. And it's been a blast catching up on some of the older episodes as well. So again, thank you all for having you. We are, so my wife and I run our Twitch stream.

It is science streams. So S-C-I-A-N-T-S- underscore streams. And we'll put those in the description and everything, too. Awesome. And we, like Jess said, we do science content every day. So Mondays we look at stuff under the microscope, including 30 million-year-old Amber with insects. Tuesdays we build models. Wednesdays we do art.

Thursdays we play games, talk about the science behind them. Science news on Friday. He might get a grab bag of anything on Saturday. And then we usually do IRL content on Sunday going out into the world, doing fossil hunts, museum tours, aquariums, and more. Awesome. Definitely. Think listeners should check that out. The Weirdest Thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, 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 goal. because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition.

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