The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Vanishing Twins, The Poison Squad, Levitating Frogs

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

The weirdest things we learned this week range from levitating a frog with electromagnets to the idea that absorbing a twin in utero gives you superpowers. Whose story will be voted "The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week"? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/weirdest_thing #weirdestthingpod Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Eleanor Cummins: www.twitter.com/elliepses Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme Music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jason Lederman: www.twitter.com/Lederman --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/popular-science/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or their. 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. Antitula says, now you are family. Okay, all my life, I had a lump at the back of my neck right here, always a lump. Then I started menopause, and the lump got bigger from the hormonies. It started to grow. So I go to the doctor and he did The B-O, the B-O-B-O-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B-TUB-B-TUB-RUPS.

And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across making into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popper. I'm Rachel Feldman. I'm Eleanor Cummins. And I'm Jason Letterman. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease of some kind of fact or story that we picked up in the course of being fascinating people who work for Popular Science Magazine. And we decide which one we 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.

Jason, since you're a rare guest, why don't you start with your teas? Sure. I did some research into the only person to win both a Nobel Prize in Physics and its super sassy counterpart, the Ig Nobel Prize in Physics. Oh, that's the best description of the Ig Nobel I've ever heard. Oh, thank you. The super sassy counterpart. Elodore. I wanted to answer the question of if eating your twin in the room can give you superpowers.

Wow. And I did. She went there. Wow. Okay, cool. I am going to talk about how we finally stopped poisoning our own food thanks to a man who poisoned a bunch of test subjects. Thank God for that. Classic science experiments.

Woo! I would like to hear. about twins. Yeah, the twins I really just must know. As a twin, I'm very invested in this. You guys, I'm so excited. I'm going to explain your life to you, Jason. Okay. So, this all started, I was having a conversation with one of our colleagues about Marshawn Lynch, a great player of the football. And apparently, his mother told USA today, I'll just read the quote. I don't want to embellish this. I'm just going to read it as it is, you know, journalism. I'm ready. They just knew that Marcian was living off to placentas. She, referring to a doctor, told me that with

that, he would be an amazingly strong child. And I was like, let's learn more. Obviously, this is like a very extreme example of this, but there's definitely, I feel like this like cultural meme where you can just tell people all the time that like you ate your twin or they ate their twin and that it has all of these, you know, like mystical repercussions. Did that ever happen? Yeah, exactly. You know, like a doctor, your aunt, the aunt from Big Fat Greek Wedding, everyone's just talking about eating twins all the time.

So here's what I found out. It is definitely true that you can absorb your twin in the womb. Just important facts to establish. So it often happens really early in pregnancy, which means that there are typically like very few signs of it in most cases. So in Marshawn's situation, his doctors that delivered him knew that this had happened because there actually was like a second placenta. And so that's something you see sometimes where it's like there's this extra material that

was evidence of some sort of, you know, like fetal activity that did not come to a full conclusion. So there actually was a twin for Marshawn Lynch. There was a twin, right? But whether or not it gave him superpowers is the journey we are on. And so, yeah, so that's like fully possible. And so like Marcian's mom was probably one of the few people who actually had real evidence of this, right? But like we actually think that this phenomenon is pretty common.

And when it's identified, it's called the Vanishing Twin Syndrome, which is a great term for a syndrome if you ask me. Or a band. Yes, totally. And it's not like problematic most of the time, especially when it happens, you know, early in the pregnancy. But later in the pregnancy, it actually like can have. have a lot of serious consequences. When a twin, you know, dies in the womb, it can have repercussions for the baby that is still alive and put them at risk of different diseases or maybe even also dying just because,

you know, like, they're sharing a very small environment. Sure. And like the same factors could be acting on both of them. But also, like, you know, when you're sharing, you know, like essentially, as I understand, the placenta to be a blood sack, that there's like, you know, a lot of exchange. of materials and that can also you know affect you so so yeah you know it's just sort of like run of the

mill pregnancy shenanigans as I gather but this is where this gets really off the rails it can be much much much more severe so Aunt Tula you know she had a little teratoma and that's

actually really possible like the idea with the teeth and the spinal cord yeah and so you guys it's called fetus and fetu I'm going to cry before we get done with this I'm so scared I'm the freak who already knows what fetus and feetu is

oh yeah I don't so tell me everything my friend fetus and feet two okay so it was first identified in this 1808 case study that I read the entirety of at like 1030 last night so so basically this doctor keeps visiting this kid who has just like all of these like horrific signs

of some sort of like gastrointestinal disease. Like he's just sick all the time, this poor little guy, you know, 200 years ago. And he has this really hard mass in his stomach. But no one can figure out like what to do about it. It's not like there are a lot of tools at their disposal. And so then the kid dies and this doctor who had, you know, been unable to help him his whole life is persuaded by this other, his fellow doctor, Dr. Birkbeck, to do an autopsy.

quote, Dr. Birkbeck, whose zeal for such inquiries induced me to accompany him, persuaded him to do this autopsy. It's not something you want a reputation for having zeal for. Yeah, it's classic Birkbeck, you guys. It's very strange. And so they did this autopsy, and here is the conclusion. After having thus far ascertained the relative situation of the tumor, with an apostrophe for some reason, and removed it from the body, I punctured it.

78 ounces or 4 pounds 14 ounces of a limpid fluid escaped having the color of an infusion of green tea with a very slight tinge of blood. It gets worse. The opening was now dilated to expose the fleshy mass which had been felt during life and it may be easily conceived that we were greatly surprised on finding that this substance had unequivocally the shape and characters of a human fetus. there is a drawing that Oh no Yeah I didn't I didn't print out a picture Because I can't handle it There is a drawing like in this case study

Of like what they found And also the super graphic Wikipedia page shows modern photos Of this phenomenon But it is like a very identifiable super tiny human With like an arm and a fist And so it turns out that like you can absorb

not just some of the placental materials or the very like early stage twin in the womb, but like the entire like developing body of the other baby you're, you know, you're co-living with. Yeah. And so this is very rare. We're talking like 200 identified cases since this 1808 study. So very, very rare. But obviously like when it does happen, it is something that is very well covered because

it's just like, whoa, what? Bodies are scary. And so in 2015, sort of the most recent, very well documented case, a little girl, a newborn, she was like very sick. And doctors actually identified a spine, intestines, bones with bone marrow,

primitive, quote, that's a quote, brain matter, a rib cage and an umbilical cord inside her body that were not her own, that were those from a twin. Oh my God. And the doctors in this case study, you know, from 2015, they determined that the twins would have had to have been absorbed 10 weeks before their growth stopped.

So that's like very late in the game. But they also noted that, you know, like no one really understands absorption fully. And so it was like possible that the extra fetuses had actually been absorbed much earlier in the pregnancy and just continued to grow inside. He's terrifying. Yeah, and just continue to grow inside the baby that was ultimately born. That's really scary.

So not something to be super concerned about, but the vanishing twin syndrome, less so than this fetus and fetus situation, people think is maybe becoming more common because of in vitro fertilization. If you don't know, like with in vitro, when you're, you know, implanting fertilized eggs into your uterus, you're sort of trying to, like, maximize the odds that that works out. so you tend to put in more than just, you know, like one egg. And so that becomes a situation where if multiple pregnancies sort of start to go along and then some are maybe absorbed back, because the body wants to have as few fetuses as possible to deal with,

that you might just be seeing a lot more vanishing twin syndrome. All of this I found so fascinating, but I have not answered the question of, does eating your twin in the womb make you stronger? I tried Googling this. I literally Google now knows that I searched at like 1030 last night. Does absorbing twin make you stronger? Not great results.

What do you know? So I decided to ask a doctor, like a responsible person. Yes, thank you. I had a phone call with a doctor. Reporting. I talked to another human being today for you. And it actually turns out that absorbing your twin has like a lot of hazards. Like there is no research to suggest that it would be beneficial.

The doctor was like, I don't even know how you would try to like operationalize that. Like how would you try to go about studying, you know, some sort of benefit. But he was like, it's very clear that we have, you know, a lot of sort of negative side effects. So the doctor I spoke with was Nigel Panic and he just like launched. He was like, I like called him and he was like, huh? And I was like, it's me from public science. And he was like, oh, I've read a fair amount about vanishing. and just like got in it.

So essentially there are a lot of like sort of like adverse effects because it can create sort of like autoimmune and other issues. Right. Because you got somebody else's DNA in your body and your body's like, what? Yeah, it is not a typical situation. So, you know, we've seen like problems where it seems to be sort of related to, you know, some like autoimmune diseases or other sort of problems. Right, because your body just can't survey itself the way the rest of ours tend to, where it's like, this is foreign and this is me, because that line is blurred from basically the beginning.

And, you know, you sometimes see some of those like chimera qualities, right? Like where, you know, like a husky with one brown eye and one blue eye, like that sometimes like also happens in people. And like that could be evidence of this phenomenon. That's like neutral. There's nothing necessarily wrong there. but that chimera can cause problems. I actually found a case to keep up with this Sporto story I've crafted for us here of a bicyclist in 2005

who was accused of doping because of these discrepancies in his blood sample, but he came back and was like, I had a vanishing twin and this isn't my fault, which is so amazing. That's amazing. Yeah, Gina Collada, best name in journalism. The New York Times wrote about this and this controversy then ensued.

This doctor who also brought up Octo Mom. I love him. You know, he was like, there's really no way to test it, but everything seems to suggest that it really only is neutral or causes problems. So, yeah, that was the answer to Tula's Teratoma question posed by the incomparable film, My Big Fat Creek Wedding. Wow. Wow.

And also March on Lynch. Yeah, sorry, Marchon. Well, I mean, no, that's great, though. He can just take credit for being, like, the strongest dude around because it didn't have anything to do with that. He's even stronger because if anything, it could have been negative. There you go. Yeah.

Amazing. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back. Me, more. I am a robot. Listen to Last Week in Tech. Thanks for that introduction, Robot. I'm Stan Horacek, one of the hosts of Last Week in Tech,

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

All right, we're back. And I'm going to jump in with my fact. Before I get started, my fact this week was inspired by and largely informed by this new book called The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum. We get a lot of books on our desk from publishers more than we want. But I was excited to see this one because Deborah Blum is great, and especially on the subject of poison. Oh, yeah. So like don't mess.

The Poisoner's Handbook? Don't mess with her. Oh, God. So good. Is a big part of why I became a science writer. Actually, it came out right around. I know, I know. I just love poison.

No, but it came out right around the time that I was thinking about getting into this field and is just so compelling. and it's about kind of the birth of forensics and the height of poison. So anyway, the Poison Squad, not actually about intentionally poisoning people, but about, well, the tagline of the book is one chemist's single-minded crusade for food safety

at the turn of the 20th century. Romantic. So with that plug, let's get into it. Lots of people complain about all of the difficult to pronounce non-food food that's in our food. But most of us also know that food used to be full of like really egregiously non-food food.

We're talking like candies colored with poisonous metals, which we discussed a few episodes back in relation to deadly wallpaper. We're talking backyard leaves ground up and sold as green tea. In 1882, Massachusetts regulators testing ground clothes found that literally 100%

of the stuff on the market was fake. 100%. Yeah, it was mostly burned seashells. Canadian officials around the same time found that the same was true of dry mustard. All of the dry mustard for sale was fake. Basically, any ground spice was more likely to be charcoal or literal dust than an actual spice. One New York spice maker bought 5,000 pounds of coconut shells in a year to burn and grind up into various spices. And ketchup, as we discussed in our episode on ketchup grading standards, was often made,

from discarded pumpkin skin, dyed red, and pepped up with like vinegar and cayenne or paprika. It was a big problem. There was a lot of food that was just completely not what it said it was. Food adjacent. So milk was a great example of how off the rails this stuff was getting in the 19th century. Because basically it was this lack of regulation coupled with the Industrial Revolution and like people living in cities and buying packaged food instead of food. being responsible for creating their own food and buying it from people who live down the street.

Suddenly there was this huge market for food being made and produced and shipped at this huge scale, but there was no regulation whatsoever. So a really dangerous situation. And then also because people were living in cities and working in factories, their health was already like total crap. So it did not. They had no constitution to deal with this nonsense. sense. Milk was especially disgusting. This is all from the Poison Squad. Much of the stuff on the

market was what's known as swill milk, which was taken from cows, raised in their own filth, and fed on the leftover mash of distilleries. Like, it was a way for distilleries to make more money. Oh, my God. Basically, everything on the market was watered down. The cream was skimmed off to sell it a higher profit. And then because the watered down milk would be kind of bluish, they would add whitening agents like chalk and then like warm it up color wise with molasses. Oh my God. Yeah. Or just sell it a Star Wars blue milk.

Like this is an easy fix, you guys. And how did they make up for that missing layer of cream at the top? Well, according to Deborah Blum, some of them would squirt pureed calf brains at the top of the bottle. Rude. Truly horrifying. Don't eat brains. They'll give you prion disease. I mean, they won't necessarily give you prion diseases.

but as we discussed in our episode with organ meat. It's true. You don't want puried calf brains in your milk. No. Or really, I don't want them ever. But that's a personal choice. Right, exactly. And to top it all off, on top of the puried calf brains,

retailers were also starting to add preservatives to everything, but especially to milk to keep it fresh for longer as they're trying to, you know, ship it, sell in cities, what have you. And some of this was like good faith, like, we want. want our product to last as long as possible. But it was also very common during this time to actually try to turn back the clock on rotting food and be like,

we're going to add all these chemicals to it to make it fresh again. I think people thought that was like genuinely a thing they could do. It's like the alchemy of food science. Right. But they also knew they were selling people rotted meat. But like fresh cowbride.

And according to some, thousands of children were dying. in New York City alone every year due to tainted milk. Yikes. So like bacterial growth. Yeah, it's just absolutely disgusting. And so the question is how did we get from there to 1906 when Teddy Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act

and finally made it actually illegal to just put poisonous whatever in food? Thank you, Teddy. Good old TR. And it's largely thanks to a man named Harvey Washington Wiley, who we talked about in our ketchup episode. And more importantly, it's thanks to the men he poisoned. Oh, no.

We're going to say the title of the book, It's the Poison Squad. So it was a nickname given to a group of a dozen men brought on by the government to test food additives for safety. Because Wiley was on this personal crusade to make food safe. He was like, this cannot stand. There are calf braids in the milk. Also from naldehyde.

What are we going to do about it? And he and others kept pushing the government to regulate but one problem they came up against, in addition to just like the pursuit of capitalism over the well-being of poor children in cities was the people didn't know whether additives were actually that toxic. So up until then, human experiments on borax,

which was a very common preservative additive and also a cleaning product, as we know it now, up until then human experiments on it were basically limited to scientists self-josing and one guy who fed Borax to three kids

just three like randomly selected children of various ages he says they were fine John Marshall of the University of Pennsylvania is a chemist who ate enough to give himself diarrhea up until then that was really the only study saying that Borax was bad for humans but he ate like a lot of it

so that wasn't a hero Wiley's plan was to get a bunch of young, robust men as guinea picks because very sound logic, he was like, we're going to pick people who are really healthy and large, you know, generally speaking, so that we know that if things hurt them, they're going to hurt small children and elderly people,

sick people. They would get free room and board, and they'd be fed three closely measured meals a day with a control group and a group with the potentially dangerous additives. Wiley, of course, was like, who knows what we're going to find. Maybe Borax is totally fine for you. We need data. Maybe you die in this free room.

They did have to sign a waiver, but later on when he was called in front of a hearing to talk about whether it was okay that they did this, he was like, oh, I didn't think anything would happen. It's just like, we didn't know, so I figured I'd have the plan on waiver. So they made this like really nice space. He was like, you know, it has to be a pleasant environment. We have to know that everything is good except for these additives. We want these guys to be happy and healthy. So they got a bunch of people interested. He was worried maybe nobody would want to, but they got a bunch of responses.

Mostly because there were a lot of clerks working in the city on really low salaries. And the idea of not having to pay for food or rent for a few weeks was really appealing. Very problematic start. Yes, absolutely. And they actually got, the Chemistry Bureau received applications. from people all over the country. There's this one I'm going to read real quick. Dear sir, wrote one applicant,

I read in the paper of your experiments on diet. I have a stomach that can stand anything. I have a stomach that will surprise you. Oh. What do you think of it? My stomach can hold anything. So they got their crew together. I'm going to start writing cover letters

and advising people to just do that. Applying for anything? Try this. What do you think of it? If I said it could hold anything. So they ended up with clerks who were mostly actually from the agricultural department itself. Yes, they were men who, like, needed the monetary support, but they also weren't, like, hauling the entirely disenfranchised people of the city off the street.

Yeah, they weren't like, feed me anything. Yeah. And also, to be fair, they were getting probably the cleanest food anyone in America was eating. Because it was coated in Borax. No, incorrect. That was not what I meant. To ensure that the borax was the thing affecting their health, Wiley really carefully sourced food that was not dirty or contaminated in any way. The first farm to table meal.

No brain milk. Yes, precisely. One thing that I thought was really funny because I was familiar with the Poison Squad in broad brushstrokes before I started reading the book. but one factoid that surprised me is that I'd always heard that, you know, they dose the meals and that was it. The guys knew what they were getting into.

And what I found out is that they actually, they tried to hide it in the food, but the guys, like, caught on and just started eating less of the food that it was hidden in. So they ended up having to actually make them take borax pills with their dinner because they couldn't successfully hide the borax in the food without affecting how much the guys ate.

It's almost like humans don't want to be poisoned. Yeah, almost. One thing that is also really funny is that people in the press really fixated on the fact that they weren't allowed to snack outside of meals, like that they had to only eat the food that was part of the experiment. That, to me, is a scandal. They were like, they can't even have a friendly beer that was in a paper somewhere. And then there was this upstart newspaper man named George Rothwell Brown. He was at the Washington Post.

and he came across a really like dry description of the study and was like, I smell a story here. But then Wiley was like, we want people to take this seriously so we can't talk about how absurd it is that we're all sitting around eating borax. Like don't talk to George Ruffwell Brown. And so he started just like making up drama. He would like follow the participants around

and try to like get intel on them. But then he would just kind of make up stories about Like a paparazzo. Yeah. He was very much a paparato. And he then put out, he put out a bunch of stories about it. And Wiley was just like, oh my gosh, this guy, George is just like, you know, libeling us.

Libelling my poisoning of other people. But it came to a head when he wrote an article claiming that the borax had turned the subjects pink. Okay. And the best part is that women started to write to the chemical bureau asking how, how they could get those borax pink complexion. So the Washington Post did have to admit that George Rothwell Brown had just made that up. That was completely not true. So when all of a sudden done, the study was actually really valuable and the ones that followed

because Wiley found that low doses accumulated over time. The guys got more sick. He was kind of switching them back and forth between being guys who took the borrachians. and the ones who got clean food, which wasn't the best experimental practice, but it kept them from getting super sick. And it did show him that, you know, like the second time you were in the borax group,

you were sicker than the first time, and the third time you were sick than the second time, which showed him that it accumulated, that, you know, it didn't leave your system quickly enough for the acute dose to matter, which was really important when it came to this food contamination issue because most people were not eating huge amounts of borax, but they were eating it every day because it was in their milk and it was in their butter.

So even if you were just drinking a glass of milk a day, putting butter on bread, you were eating enough borax every day that over time it was going to have an impact on your health. Wow. Yeah, that's fascinating too because basically you would only be responding to the stuff that made you throw up in the moment and you'd be like, this is bad. Right. Whereas this was like where we can prove only with research.

Yeah, well, and even the animal studies leading up to this, generally what you would do is like give an animal some poison. And if it didn't die right away, you were like, it's fine. There is no long-term consideration. So yeah, this was really the first time people were looking at like, what does it mean to have something be a food additive where it's in your system in small amounts every day? Versus just saying like, yes, obviously if you eat a ton of arsenic, you'll die.

but like what's a little arsenic? It's a little bit every day. It's pretty bad. I listen to the wallpaper episode. I edited it. It's true. A little bit of arsenic every day is very bad. And with that, we're going to take a quick break. And then we'll be back with one more quick fact. Hey, palsy science merch. We've got you covered at popsai.threadless.com.

Pick up t-shirts, notebooks, and mugs with iconic vintage covers and illustrations ripped from the magazine. Plus, check out our podcast store and rep your favorite shows, like Last Week in Tech, and the weirdest thing I learned this week. That's popsai.threadless.com. P-O-P-S-C-I.thudlis.com. And we're back, and now our amazing and long-suffering producer, Jason Letterman, is going to share his fact. Oh, stop.

Yeah, so my fact is about the only person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize. And I came across this fact because every six weeks I write and host a live trivia show here at Popular Science. It's called Popsie Quiz Show because we're very original. Last week, one of the rounds was about Nobel Prizes and Ig Nobel Prizes.

So you may have heard this if you were watching, and if you're watching, thank you. So let me tell you a little bit about Andre Geim. He is a professor at the University of Manchester and was in 2010 when he

won and shared the Nobel Prize in physics with, and I'm going to I'm going to butcher this, Constantine Novoselov, Novoselov, for their groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene. Oh, love graphene. Yeah, graphing's great. Great material. Their experiments were in 2004, right?

So this is only six years after, which is not a whole lot of time. And even Geim himself in a Q&A with nature said, I slept quite soundly without much expectation the night before the Nobel Prize is for a Very short time for a Nobel Prize. Yeah, he said maybe he thought 2011, like maybe 2014, he didn't think six years. But what is graphene and why did it win a Nobel? Graphene is a 2D plane of graphite, and it's a single sheet pulled from a block. Okay.

Right. I have a quote here from Geim. He said, it's the thinnest possible material you can imagine. It also has the largest surface to weight ratio with one gram of graphene. You can cover several football. pitches. In Manchester, you know, we measure surface area in football pitches, which is soccer film. That is super thin. Yeah, it is. It's also the strongest material ever measured. It's the stiffest material we know. It's the most stretchable crystal. It's vibranium. It's vibranium.

True. That's not the full list of superlatives, but it's pretty impressive. A great earbook caption. It also conducts electricity and heat very efficiently. In fact, it's been modeled that it would take temperatures of 5,000 Kelvin or 8,540 degrees Fahrenheit or 4,726 degrees Celsius to melt graphene. Heat. Wow. Heat. So it can get very hot. It conducts electricity very well. But what's sort of amazing about this Nobel win is that at the time, there weren't a lot of

practical applications for it. And we're like still sort of figuring it out. like it's used in a lot of electronics parts and they think one day it could be used for fultable cell phone screens. Also, didn't we talk on the last week in tech about how they're trying to make it into hair dye too? Oh, I've definitely seen studies about graphing hair dye. Because it's like, it's like as thinner as thin as a human hair.

And so you could like have it as a color and just sort of like grafted onto your head. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. on our other podcast last week in tech, which all of our listeners should also check out. And Jason also produce it. I do also produce it.

And you've heard an ad for it where Stan Horacek pretended that he was a robot. I thought it was charming. Thank you. So I want to get back to the discovery of graphene in just a second and move 10 years earlier to 2000 when Guym won his Igno Bell. Whoa. Yeah. What is the Igno Bell?

So the Igno Bell is given out by a group called Improbable Research, and it's, quote, for achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think. So not for iguanas. If your research involved in iguana, it could. Oh, fair, true. And he laughed at the iguana. Right. So as an example of what an Igno Bell would be,

do you remember in 2015 Volkswagen went through the whole EPA emissions scandal that they were faking their data of how clean their cars were? Yes. So they won an Igno Bell in 2016 for solving the problem of excessive automobile pollution emissions by automatically, electromechanically, producing fewer emissions whenever the cars are being tested. Yes. So that's an example of what you get an Ig Nobel for. It's sassy and funny and makes you think about the research. Though not all of them throw that much shade.

That's true. That was a particularly shady one and I truly enjoyed it. So what did a man who is brilliant enough to win a Nobel Prize in Physics for a revolutionary material due to win an Ig Nobel Prize in Physics? And this is reading straight off the Improbable Research website. He and Sir Michael Barry won for using magnets to levitate a frog. Oh, yeah, that's good. Magnets, how do they work? How do they work?

So in the book, The Rise, Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery by Sarah Lewis. Lewis interviews Geim. And in 1997, he was at Radbound University Name Again, in the Netherlands. My Dutch is very good. Tulips. Yeah. That's about the extent of my Dutch.

Where he was looking into the effects of magnetism on water. And he has since said he doesn't quite remember why he did this or why he acted in such an unprofessional manner.

Interesting. But one day he decided to turn on his electromagnet to maximum power and poured the water straight onto it. Okay. And so what he found was there were little spheres of water.

And he was curious as to how these magnets were defying the Earth's gravity. And so from this, he started doing what he called Friday Night Experiments, where he does crazy things just to see if they'll work. Oh, man. Yeah. This guy must have been so popular. He sounds dope. He is cool as heck. And he also is like pretty funny when people ask him about this research.

He's just like, yeah, like if you don't have a sense of humor about it, what's the point? A joke is not funny ones you've had to explain it. Yeah. So one of his Friday night experiments was putting a frog in the water and seeing what would happen. And I actually brought a video with me that we will put up on popside.com. He recorded it? Yeah, he did. It was supplementary material to the April 1997 edition.

edition of the journal physics world. And people thought that this was an April Fool's joke when they first read it. I mean, were they wrong? They were not wrong. But I have this video. I am showing you the frog. We want the frog. You can see this frog in the sphere of water spinning around.

This is like a telitubbies clip. Wow, I don't know what I expected. It wasn't that. Wow. Yeah, it's just floating there, spinning around. It's crazy. Having fun, I hope. Parkour.

And so Gime's Nobel Prize is also partially due to a Friday night experiment because he was trying to figure out how to get graphene from graphite. And what he settled on was using a normal piece of adhesive tape of scotch tape on a pencil. Okay. And just put it on and peeled it off. And that's how they started to get graphene. is a more complicated process for getting the single layer, but that's how they got it off. There's a moral here.

I don't want to speculate about anyone's recreational activities, but I really feel like we may have some very specific legislation in the Netherlands to thank for the the discovery of graphene. And the Nobel Prize goes to Amsterdam's permissive marijuana culture. So to be fair, right, there are plenty of organizations, and the most notable is Google, where they will give time to people to work on their own projects. And Eleanor, I think you and I were talking about this the other day,

where, like, several of Google's big features have come out of people doing their own projects. And Geim says that since the beginning, of his career, 10% of his research has just been things along the lines of these Friday night experiments where it's him just messing around and seeing what is possible. And seeing what is possible. Well, I didn't think that I was going to get emotional about a frog on a magnet, but this seems like a very beautiful thing for us to have heard about. Thank you, Jason.

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me again. Oh, anytime. Anytime, since you are literally always in the room with us, it is a, it is no thing. I am the secret fourth person who is always here. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? I'm going to give it to twins. Yeah, twins has it.

Double trouble. I'm so happy. Eleanor, two weeks in a row, you've won. It's all downhill from here, you guys. I am very happy to have gotten to the bottom of this. Yeah, and thank you for haunting my nightmares forever. As always. As always.

The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. podcast, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever you're listening right now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on iTunes. It helps other weirdos find the show. You can buy our merch, including Weirdest Thing t-shirts, tote bags, and mugs at popside.threadlist.com. The show is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Faltman, and our editor, Jason Letterman. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest underscore Thing. Thanks for listening weirdos.

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