The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Worm Time in Whale City, Neanderthal Funk, Old-Timey Sauna Science

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Defector's Sabrina Imbler joins the show this week to talk about whale falls! Plus, Rachel talks about how a bunch of dudes sat in saunas for science, and Sara Kiley explains why Neanderthals probably stunk at smelling their own funk. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman  Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening or by using this link: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Check out Weirdest Thing on YouTube: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeekYouTube If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, email, Tweet, or send this link to a friend: bit.ly/WeirdestThingILearnedThisWeek Thanks to our sponsors!  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/WEIRDEST and get on your way to being your best self. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Sarah Kylie Watson. I'm Sabrina Imbler. Sabrina, welcome to the show. Woo! Thank you so much for having me. Listeners, Sabrina is one of my favorite science writers, truly, and they just wrote a really excellent book that I know our listeners are really going to

enjoy. So we wanted to have them on to talk about some of the weird stuff you might find in there. Sabrina, would you like to tell listeners a little bit about yourself and the amazing book you wrote? Thank you for that introduction. Yeah, I guess I am a science writer. I write for this website called Defector, which mainly covers sports. But I have my own little column where I write about creatures. And I had a book come out in December called How Far the Light Reaches, which is an essay collection about sea creatures and also myself, where I attempt. to tell my own story alongside like 10 sea creatures, although I should say, as a sister science podcast, one of the creatures is a goldfish, not technically a sea creature, but they do live in estuaries, so cuspy. Have you gotten any reader feedback being like, I was promised sea creatures only? No, I haven't. And maybe no one really minds. I just feel like when the subtitle was proposed to me, like how far the light reaches a life and 10 sea creature.

Like there was the part of me that was like, nine. It's just nine. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And I'm really excited to hear some maybe weird creature facts, I presume, about ocean animals or otherwise. So let's get into it. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease 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. Sarah Kylie, what's your tease? Okay, well, today I'm here to talk about how Neanderthals probably had no idea how stinky they really were. Relatable. Which is relatable. Sometimes I wish I had less of an idea of how stinky I was. My tease is that I want to talk about a group of 18th century dudes, pals, who hung out in very hot rooms together in the name of science. Awesome.

That sounds relaxing. Yeah. Listen, it's not many things that dudes in the history of science did together that I can say. like the vibes seem like they were good here. But it seems like the vibes were pretty good there. So, Runa, what's your tease? My tease is I want to talk about how whales can be like cities on the seafloor. And those cities can be around for thousands of years.

Ooh. I love that. I love that. New whale city. Rents are steep here. Sarah Kylie. I want to hear about stinky Neanderthals first. I would love to get started with that.

Yay, we love stinky stuff. So, yeah, talk about stinky Neanderthals. Well, Neanderthals probably weren't that stinky compared to other stinky things, but they just didn't know, probably. That's the whole gist. But if someone has ever, unfortunately, told you that you stink and you are woefully unaware, that you're probably aware of the fact that human noses kind of monitor out. our own body odor. So you don't smell that bad to yourself, even if you're like friends and

roommates are like, you stink, which is a blessing and a curse. The way this works is quite simple. It's not that you don't stink, it's that you're so used to your own stink that it doesn't phase you anymore, which is a little bit scary. In fact, it's like kind of like comforting and familiar to have your own stink. So, I mean, if you're constantly sniffing yourself, you'd probably have like a breakdown because of all the sensory input of all the stinks of your like microbes and your sweat and your farts and your bad breath and all of that. Like if you would just smell all of your smells all the time, it'd be horrible. Wait, can I just do an interjection? Which is to say that earlier this year, my partner had a stink intervention for me because

Oh my gosh. I sweat so much at night and I think that I am just accustomed to this and I, yeah, am not really smelling my own stink and they like sat me down and they were like, I need to tell you something and I've been thinking about it for years and then they told me that I just like stunk a lot and needed to um yeah like wear a different shirt every night so that like I wasn't wearing the same stinky shirt which maybe makes sense but I wasn't thinking about it so I just wanted to say that I can really relate and um I I yeah I resonate with the Neanderthals now. It shows such um such like care and love in my mind for your partner to do that because because it's a difficult thing to intervene on.

And also, it's nobody's fault. Sometimes we just smell that. I had a friend in college who we had to do something really similar where it was like, listen, man, we love you. And it's starting to become like a known fact that you stink up a room. How did he take it? He did not. Well.

And in our defense, he had literally not been showering because he felt he had discovered that he didn't need it. It was a whole, listen, the human mind is an incredible organ and often a self-sabotaging one. But yeah, like, we too know so many senses, because otherwise, like, how would we ever do anything? Do anything, yeah. Yeah, so.

Yeah, so lesson number one from my story, if you have a friend or loved one that stinks, tell them kindly and tell them that you also can't smell yourself. So by telling them that they stink, you're also asking if you stink. So it's reciprocal. I thought of what other relevant thing, which is that a friend of mine was not borderies in the U.S. and he came to school in the U.S.

And his roommate was like, what deodor do you use? And he was like, oh, that's not, we don't really do that. And he was like, so I think you should try it. And he was like, as soon as he started using it, he suddenly was like aware of the difference. And then he went home and his little sister broke his deodorant. And he was, how do you break deodorant? And he like did not have access to deodorant. I'm sure he could have gotten it.

But he's just that little, yeah. I think she just like, she was like messing with him. She like probably threw it away. And he was like, now I know I smell. We were secure about it. No, and it was such an unfortunate situation. And of course, his little sister was like, you're crazy. You never used this before.

Why? And it's true. You know, his roommate both ruined his life and saved his future social interactions in the U.S. But it's all relative. I feel like it's that moment when you're like inside Plato's cave and you're like, these are shadows. And then you're like, I can never go back. but I'm mourning like the life that I led, the simpler life.

The simpler life. Oh. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So we'll get back into the world before deodorant where you couldn't even have like a pesky sister break it. You just stunk. It was just stink time.

But yeah, so you get used to your own stink. That's why you don't notice it. And it's not just your own stink after a while. Eventually you get used to like stinks in your, you know, area. Like if your roommate makes Brussels sprouts all the time and it always smells like Brussels sprouts, like you'll probably eventually get used to it. Or like if your dog has like particularly rancid toots, like you probably like are pretty used to them after a while even though sometimes they can be really bad.

But smell is a difference detector, which is actually something that a psychologist Pamela Dalton said to you, Rachel, like 10 years ago in an article that I found, which is always my favorite thing to do. I'm like, surprise. Is that the pheromone article I wrote? I don't know. It was in the Washington Post. It'll be linked in my thing.

Okay, but, okay, I believe you. I'll take your word for it. It'll be somewhere. It was something. But yeah, so when something smells different, that's kind of when your nose comes into play. So if something that doesn't smell like your B.O. or Bressel sprouts or dog tuts happens in your vicinity,

you're like, oh, what is that? Your brain figures it out. because yeah if our brain went oh no to every single time we sniffed ourselves um crazy times um but Dalton um said these these um smell receptors turn off the ones that are like smelling your B-O and stuff um and they eventually die and get replaced um before our usual stanks start to smell stinky again so they you do smell stinky to yourself every once in a while but those things turn off die and revisit apparently what a life I know like fast. fascinating stuff. And apparently if we didn't, if this didn't happen, we'd all lose our sense of

smell by the time we were one. So very exciting stuff. So all your stank detectors are dying and rebirthing and smelling things. So and there is a rumor that has popped up a few times throughout history that humans have a bad sense of smell, but honestly like it's not that bad. Like when we can bear our sense of smell to other animals, we've just like adapted differently. Like we don't like sniff the ground looking for truffles like pigs. or sniff other animal's butts and stuff like that. So humans have done pretty okay with the smell that we've been given without having to do stuff like that. So we'll give our sense of smell a little bit of credit for the next bit.

But yeah, just in the same way, we don't smell the same way as truffle pigs. And even like when you're talking about dogs, like how bloodhounds sniff something versus like how a chihuahua sniff something. Everybody has different sniffing techniques and capabilities within a species, between similar species, yada, yada, yada. But a couple of scientists recently reconstructed odor receptors from the genomes of three Neanderthals, one Denisovin, an ancient human, and a database of modern human genomes, in order to kind of figure out how our ancient cousins sniff stuff in comparison to the way we do it today. And y'all probably know, but I'm going to do a little debrief on who our ancient relatives are just in case there's somebody out there. But Denisovans were an ancient human that about 765,000 years ago shared a common ancestors with Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. This population basically split eventually.

Homo sapiens stayed and hung out in Africa while Neanderthal-densovan types moved towards Eurasia. 430,000 years ago, Denisovans and Neanderthal splits, Denisovans went into Eastern Asia, Neanderthals went into Europe. So that's the basic gist. So why they split, there's a lot of them. one idea that the Arctic ice sheet like broke, it's expanded into the Black Sea, which cut Europe off from Asia and then divided the two. So they turned it to two different things. But Denisovans, Neanderthals and ancient Homo sapiens were still like hooking up with each other. So there's all

of this stuff you can dive into it whenever you'd like, but 5% of the Denisovin genome lives on in people living in Southeast Asia, especially Papua New Guinea. Neanderthals contribute like 1 to 4% of the genomes of non-African modern humans based on where your ancestors came from. And like 40,000 years ago, that would have been as high as 6 to 9%. So we're different, but not that different. Anyway, back to stink. So the scientists took and they looked at three different olfactory receptors across the Neanderthal-Denisovin and ancient Homo sapien genomes.

And they found 11 receptors in the ancient humans, meaning Neanderthal-Densoven, that had unique DNA that didn't appear in modern homo sapiens. So they built out these unique receptors in a lab by mutating human receptors to match the amino acid sequence of the Neanderthal or the Denisovans. So they had a bunch of different little things set up. So they had three different Neanderthal samples, the Denisovin, yada, yada. So we've got a couple of lab-made noses of ancient people. And so voila, ancient noses. And then they wafted a bunch of stinks around these receptors in the most scientific way possible.

So I don't know how one would do that when there's not a nose, but they figured it out, which is amazing. I love science. And then they watched and saw which receptors lit up with activity accordingly with the stinks. So what they found is all three of these cousins, you know, Agent Homo sapien, Agent Neanderthal, Agent Denisovan, they had kind of the same range of smelling. There was no like sniffing superpower. So nobody was like the truffle hunting, sadly. but sensitivity levels had like quite the range. Denisovans, and they had more of a sensitive nose than humans, especially when it came to sweet stuff.

Floral scents didn't like hit quite as hard, so they weren't out sniffing the roses, but they were four times better at picking up sulfur smells and three times better at picking up balsamic smells with like vanilla chocolate. Balsamic smells? Apparently, that's what it's called. That's an iconic category. Balsamic smells. What's your favorite kind of smell? Balsamic smells. Balsamic makes me think of vinegar, so I don't know.

But we'll see. But they're really good at smelling honey too. And so I was reading a bunch of articles about this. So this research came out, I think, like, in January. So earlier this year. And insiders Morgan McFall Johnson put it in this like perfect little anecdote to talk about the denisove and the smell. So this is what they wrote. So if you walk through the woods and pass a beehive, you may catch a

the sweet scent of honey in the wind and suddenly be flooded with memories, having tea with grandma or eating warm biscuits on Sunday morning. If you were taking that walk 300,000 years ago with a Denisovan, by the time you smelled that honey, your companion might have already been climbing up the tree for a sugary sweet. So there you go. That's kind of the difference, I guess, between how we perceive honey versus how our Denisovan cousins would have. But Neanderthals, on the other hand had a different weakness or like maybe it's a strength, I don't know. They couldn't smell body odors as well as denisovans or humans. One Neanderthal that they tested actually had a genetic mutation that really slimmed down their ability to smell.

Androstadino? But it's a chemical. It's a chemical we associate with urine and sweat smells. So yucky smells. And so one out of the three. three Neanderthals that they tested was like literally genetically mutated so they couldn't smell sweat and urine, which these guys were living in caves, which like totally cool. I'm basically living in my basement, which is a cave too. So we all do it. But, you know, they're all probably

like living pretty close to each other and in each other's space. And so we didn't have deodorant. So nobody's sister could even break it. There was nothing going on. So it was probably pretty good that the Neanderthals weren't like losing their minds over how stinky everybody was. So super power or weakness, you can decide on your own. And to be fair, the Neanderthal nose with the mutation represented a population living in the high altitude of Siberia. The other Neander noses didn't have this. And in all actuality, the Neanderthal noses only had two different smell-related genes

than humans. And so there's obviously a lot of caveats of this study. So we've got to go over them. But, so take it all with a grain of salt or a pinch of honey is what I've also called it. Obviously, the sample size is tiny, like one Denisovan, three Neanderthals, one each in human. And considering your sense of smell is like different from individual to individual, there's always the chance that the noses recreated here aren't the average nose. Like if someone was to recreate like Anthony Bordane's nose compared to my nose, like it would be very different. Like he's like a legendary chef food expert and I regularly get excited about air fry or chicken nuggets.

So there's just going to be some diversity going on. But at the end of the day, the just of the story here is that our sense of smell isn't that different from our ancient relatives. And if someone tells you your B.O. is especially funky one day. At least you're probably not living in as much denial as you would be if you were a Siberian Neanderthal. And that's that. I love that. It's really this whole time I've been thinking about like the kind of ongoing debate over whether, you know, deodorants without antipers. sprint or without something, you know, really effective like a baking soda, et cetera, or like

certain kinds of acids, whether you actually have an adjustment period where you get less stinky or you have an adjustment period where you notice your stink less. A lot of companies that make the most like gentle natural deodorants will say, oh, it's going to take like two weeks for your body to stop overproducing all of that really mellowedious bacteria and then it'll work and it's like I will say that uh you know for any for anyone who uh wants to be able to sweat uh but also does not want to smell bad no sponsorship here but the megababe uh they have a sensitive skin baking soda deodorant which is the only one I've used that has not made my skin fall off my body. And then they have another one

that's basically made with like, it's got like AHAs in it. So it's like the same kind of stuff you would use on your face for acne, which is really smart because that's, you know, it eats up the stink bacteria. Anyway, also it's fine to be to be stinky. There's, there should be no shame. I'm pro stinky. I'm, it's fine. I'm very pro stink. I just get annoyed when really expensive body care companies trying to convince people that it's totally just that they smell less and not that they're just getting used to smelling worse. Don't go crazy over the prices of deodorant. Do what is best for you.

And if that is stink, stink with your whole heart. Yeah, stink with crap. Has anyone here used crystal deodorant? I haven't. I have known people who did because I went to a very hippie liberal arts college. I definitely have been told by people who use it that it works better than a lot of

alternatives, but I don't know. I have no date on that. I have no idea what that is. I guess I like, yeah, like I also have been in crystal deodorant circles. I have not part took in myself, but I think my mind just like can't compute the idea. I'm like imagining like a rose quartz like in a pit, just like scrubbing a pit and I'm like That doesn't make any sense.

But maybe this is like, I should just read more about it and not just being judgmental. I mean, like, I don't think you're wrong. I think many people who sell crystal deodorants are basically selling people. Like a gloss off or your pits? Yeah, but I think it's like more like a block of Himaly and salt on your armpits. Like there is some, there is some transfer of substance. That sounds high risk. I don't want to put salt near my armpit.

I am not a crystal deodorant expert. I'm going to get so much hate from the crystal deodorant community. But only love for the crystal deodorant. Somebody explain it to me, though, please. How's it? How's it work? No one knows. All right.

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Hilton, for the stay. Okay, we're back. And, Sabrina, I want to hear about whale cities under the sea. Or wherever they are. I don't know. Where are they? They're definitely under the sea, although I would love to see a whale.

city on land because I would promptly move there. And I hope it's walkable. So I am here to talk about whale falls, which is basically the phenomenon of when a whale dies in the ocean and sinks to the bottom of the seafloor. And like as early as the 1920s, 1930s, like scientists had wondered, like, hey, like, when a whale dies, like, where does it go? And, like, what happens to it? But there was not really the technology to visit the seafloor and observe it themselves. So there were just a couple of, like, speculative papers. And no one really thought about it after that.

But then in 1987, there was just, like, this routine survey of the seafloor in the Pacific Ocean. And Sonar picked up on this, like, enormous... sort of linear thing just like remains like thousands of feet below the ocean. And it turned out to be a 65 foot long whale skeleton that had just sunk to the bottom of the ocean and was just being feasted on by like clams and muscles and limpets and snails. And this was scientist's first encounter with a whale fall, which is a very common phenomenon because as you might expect, like whales' most die in the ocean. And they do beach on land and we do weird things like blowing them up or like trying to bury

them like it always goes bad for us. But whale falls are actually really interesting because in the deep sea there is like basically no food. Lots of organisms that live in the deep sea just are accustomed to going like long stretches of time without food. And there is sort of this constant rain of food called. marine snow, which is basically like tiny bits of organic matter and like flesh and poop and snot.

That sort of drifts down. Yeah. I mean, I'm delicious. Speaking of stinky. I know, it's kind of like I feel like I imagine like cloudy with a chance of meatballs, but it's just like poop. I've always found the term marine snow to be so beautiful for something that the, literally means like crumbling floating flesh and poop.

I know it is really beautiful. It's like who's that like what's Marines nose PR person and like they should be making killing. But I mean it's like so, so beautiful. If you just look at those like footage from like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute of like, you know, a strange creature sort of drifting and it's like just these little white flecks. Like it is it is so beautiful. you think about, you know, it's poop and snot, and you're like, poop can be beautiful, too. It's true. Yeah. So essentially, marine snow is, like, falling constantly, just this drizzle of

food, but you can't really, like, subsist easily on marine snow, especially if you're, like, pretty large, because it is just kind of eaten as it falls. So if you're on the sea floor, it's like, you're just getting, like, the shred, the tiniest shreds of poop that, like, no one else wanted to eat. So when a whale falls in the ocean, it's like a buffet. It's like, I always think about like on Survivor. Yeah. Do you watch Survivor? I love Survivor. Yeah. I think about it as like the merge feast where it's like people have been starving for weeks and like they are hungry and you're just like put out this platter of like a suckling pig and like their eyes just like glaze over. So that's why I'm imagine like a whale fall, what the reception is on the deep sea floor to a whale fall. It's like a

food oasis and it can support just like communities of marine organisms for decades. Wow. Yeah. And I read somewhere in the process of researching my book that one whale fall from like one of the nine great whales, meaning like the really big whales, so like blues, grays, fins, that can bring about the same amount of organic material as a thousand years of marine. snow. Oh, it's a blizzard. It's a blizzard. We eat in tonight. But yeah, so more about these cities. So whale falls have three really famous stages and one like fourth secret stage. That is my favorite stage. But we'll come to that later. The first stage is called the mobile scaventer stage and it basically works as you might expect like a whale sinks. It's fleshy. It's

blubbery. Deep sea creatures from very far away can smell the odor plume that is being emitted from the probably, well actually definitely very stinky carcass. And they can also hear, right, like sound travels really, really easily in the deep sea or in the sea in general. And you can hear like a shark just like going to town. And you're like, what is that shark eating? Like I want to know. I'm going to swim on over. And so this is the stage where organisms that can move. mobile scavengers just like go to town on the carcass so there are sleeper sharks and like fish called rat tails there are hagfish there are isopods which are like the roly polis that get really big and kind of purple and like live on the bottom of the ocean and they just like

chow down on the whale chunks of flesh are going everywhere like if you've ever seen footage of this stage it really it's like I'm like I'm glad I'm not there it's like pretty scary Yeah. Yeah. So this stage, it lasts for up to two years because whales are just so big. So, like, I don't know. It just, it's wild to me to think that, like, a shark could go and, like, eat this whale, but, like, just not be done for months and months and months.

Like, that's how big they are. And then the next stage is called the enrichment opportunist stage. And this also lasts for, like, up to two years. And this is the stage where the, like, weirder creatures get involved. So one of my favorite stages. But essentially from like this very messy feeding bonanza where everyone just ripping off chunks of flesh, like there are just sort of nutrients embedded in the sediment surrounding the whale skeleton. And so that means it's worm time. And they're just like worms like polychaid worms just slithering around in the silt like eating the nutrients in the silt.

There are also some crustaceans called comma shrimp going to town like bacteria. sets in there's some leftover blabber like people not people creatures are feasting um and once that stage is done then it's like the weirdest stage which is called the solophilic stage um which is a word that whenever i like whenever it's used in a like interview that i'm doing and then i put it into my transcription service it always says self-fulfilling which i think it's kind of beautiful there's nothing more fulfilling than sulfur. But this basically is a stage where

there is still like a lot of nutrients but they're trapped inside the whale bone. And so this is another kind of worm time where these creatures called bone eating worms basically colonize the whale skeleton. And they look really strange.

They kind of look like little red palm trees from the outside. And then they sort of have a trunk. And then at the bottom there these like green roots. And they burrow their green roots and also like their gonads, like inside the whalebone. And then they secrete an acid to dissolve the bone and then eat the oil inside with the help of symbiotic bacteria.

The ocean floor is so weird. Like, what? Okay. I'm going to have a nightmare about that later. I mean, I really think the theme of this episode is sulfur. Who can smell it? Who's interested in it? But I mean, I think they're cute.

They just are like these little worms with like feathery plumes, like the red, the little red like gill like plumes at the top of them. But they're quite small. And so when you like look at a whale skeleton, it can almost look like there's like a red shag carpet over the bones. Like that's how many worms there are. just going to town, eating the oils. And kind of like deep sea anglerfish, these worms have like a cool male-female dynamic where female worms are the ones that you sort of see with like the big red plumes.

They're eating. They're secreting acid as they do. But males are really, really tiny. They're called dwarf males. So kind of like how female anglerfish is really big and the males are very tiny and will sort of attached to her body. A similar thing happens. And these bone worms where like one female bone eating worm can have like tens of just little dwarf males like attached to her, um, which I love. You love to see it. Why have one boyfriend when you can have 10 miniature boyfriends?

Just yeah, tiny little guys. They're just short kings. They are short kings. I, yeah, no, I, I wish that more short kings were like this short. But these worms actually like evolved around 40 million years ago, which is around the same time that like whales evolved. So they definitely like evolved alongside whales because they just depend on these mass windfalls of bone to subsist to, yeah, to continue. which is also kind of sad because when I was learning about whale falls, I was also just looking at whales in like the North Atlantic, which is where whaling happened famously and tragically. And this one researcher, Craig Smith from the University of Hawaii, he's like the whale fall guy. He found the first one. He just knows more about whale falls than like any other person. He estimates actually that like after. after whaling removed just like thousands and thousands of whales from the waters of the North Atlantic,

um, like today's population of whales, I think is just around 25% of like pre-whaling levels. That like ripple of death sort of caused the secondary extinction of like up to a third of these communities that specialize on whale falls and have evolved to sort of depend on these spontaneous and yet kind of like expected, you know, windfalls of food. Like you never know where it's going to be or where it's going to like fall in the ocean, but there will be enough to sustain your species.

And when I learned that, I don't know. I have like a tender spot in my heart for any creature that is like soft and doesn't fossilize. And like I just felt really sad that we were not going to know all of these like potential bone worms or like other kind of worms that that lived and thrived and now are probably no longer. Yeah. I was talking to someone recently and was made a reference to, you know, Hudson, New York being an old whaling town. And they were like, what? That can't be right. There aren't enough whales to support a whaling town near Hudson. I was like, yeah, that's because of all the whales. That's the point. Like, where do you think they are? What? Oh, no. That's so funny. Yeah, it was a real bummer. Did you see that there are dolphins in the Bronx again? I saw.

I hope they're having a great time. I know. I was like, congratulations, but like stay safe. Yeah. I mentioned earlier there are like three well-known stages of whale fall, but then there's one last secret stage, which was my favorite. And like when I first learned about whale falls, I guess just by virtue of like loving the sea, I didn't learn about this one until I was actually doing.

my research, but it's called the reef stage. And it basically begins when every part of organic material, like inside the whale has been, you know, feasted on by the worms or the bacteria. And it's pretty much just like bone, which you might think, like, the whale has already given so much, like this whale city was, you know, like Austin. It's like a center of culture. But is now, you know, it's served its purpose. But the thing about the deep sea floor is that it's like mostly mud and silt, which it's fine if you're an octopus, right? You're like going around or like a fish.

You can swim. But if you're something like a sponge, you can't just like live in mud. Like there's nothing to hold on to. And so these sassile creatures really depend on hard substrate to root somewhere. like larva is always looking for hard substrate to root onto. And there are rocks in the deep sea. There are polymetallic nodules. But a whale skeleton can also be like really valuable substrate.

And so there was like this, everything in the deep sea is like a subversible was somewhere at some point and saw just this like whale skeleton that appeared to be thousands of years old because it was encrusted in Maine. which is like it forms when it's like a chemical precipitated out of seawater and sort of why everyone is really interested in polymetallic nodules for deep sea mining. But this whale skeleton was encrusted in manganese and there were just these like three anemones just sitting on top of the whale just filter feeding like ready for whatever marine snow would drift by. And yeah, this whale skeleton was like thousands of years but was still a city. in a way, maybe like a hamlet.

But I was like, that's so special. Like, whales just keep on giving. And that is my, that's my fact about whale falls. I love it. I love it. Yeah. Oh, my gosh. It's like, the nominees are like on like the Roman Coliseum of whale cities.

Like, they're like, oh, it's so nice. It's old. The really cool stuff's happened here, but I'm still going to chill. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's really amazing to think about, a life cycle that has like that long of a tail, you know, like,

it's just, it's certainly not like the way we think about, um, life and decay, uh, on land today. And yeah, it's just amazing to think of like, this mass of creature that like, you know, need to take so much energy from the ocean to support its big, big, massive, wonderful blubbery. life and then it gives back so much for so long. It's very Lion King, like, vibes, but in the ocean. That's beautiful.

Yeah, the whales are not short kings, but we do love them. They're big boys. It's all good. Amazing. All right, we're going to take one more quick break, and then we'll be back with one more fact. Peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds.

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and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Okay, we're back. And I'm going to talk about some guys in the 1700s. Sonning. Thank God. Yeah. So this story comes from a paper I read about in the public domain review, which is a really fun place to tool around, looking at weird images and stories from history. And it's called experiments and observations in a heated.

room, which sounds like the name of a one-act play, which was my first thought upon seeing it. And that was why I clicked and had to learn more. And frankly, I think the 1774 paper probably should be turned into a one-act play. It was by British physician and scientist Charles Blagden. And it recounts his experience being invited to the home of the scientist George Fordyce to see the man's very, very hot roof. That's all that happened. Nice.

Four days had constructed, and this is 1774, he had constructed a series of like fairly well-sealed rooms that were basically saunas, like they had stoves and pipes radiating heat into them and thermometers mounted on the walls. I wasn't able to find much about like what the interior of the room was. like and I I wish we knew more because I feel like it probably was really silly in there somehow. I don't know. I just feel like it must have must have looked silly. But according to Blagden's paper and the sequel he published in 1775, which I think was literally called like more observations from a heated room. Sequel. Yeah, yeah, really, really brilliant creative mind. He and several other gentlemen

worked with Fordyce to test the limits of the human body with regard to heat. And they started out just like hanging out in a 100 degree Fahrenheit room, which is not particularly impressive. And there's a lot of, you know, he writes about Fordyce first like demonstrating to them. And he like walks in and he like immediately like starts taking object of clothing off. And there's a lot of writing about like how much she was sweating just like sweat every. everywhere. Wow. That's me every single night. So I get it. This is just 100 degrees. Like this is just like somebody's room in New York in August. This is just like your radiator's on and you don't have the window open. So yeah, not particularly impressive. And their initial observations were like pretty banal. Like wow, he's sweating. Very very like British. They were a base. at the concept of heat. But by the time they finished their second bout of experiments in 1775,

they had worked their way up to 260 degrees Fahrenheit. So quite hot, genuinely. And they made a lot of observations, again, that seem obvious now, in addition to just like, wow, he sweat a lot. It was hot. He didn't like it. They noticed that at those high. temperatures, it was actually more comfortable to have clothing on than to be naked since the

radiating heat would like literally scorch the skin much more quickly than it actually raised core body temperature. And of course, this is something that people who lived in hot places already knew. You know, we see lightweight full coverage clothing in, you know, many desert cultures. And that is now like the wisdom that you are given when you are going to a hot, sunny place like you don't that you don't want the sun radiating onto your bare skin that will make you feel even hotter but you do need it to breathe so that you can sweat and yeah that that also relates back to another pretty major finding they recorded their own temperatures and they demonstrated that while body temperature did raise given time in a hot room it didn't go anywhere near as high as the

room itself and like now of course we know your body temperature doesn't go up to 260 degrees, you would be super dead. But that was really a revelation at the time. You would be cooked. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, keep, it's more to keep in mind that the first thermometer is designed to measure human temperature only even showed up in the 1600s, and they really weren't a part of standard clinical medicine until the 1800s. So the fact that they were even measuring their own temperatures as part of this experiment was like pretty novel. And And so yeah, we can't rib on them too much for not knowing that like you wouldn't just become 250 degrees in a hot room. And at one point, and this is the best part, to prove that this was due to something about living bodies and not some failure of the room's heat to like be hot, they brought in both a dog and several steaks.

So the dog, like the men, was like fine in the heat. And they were able to measure his temperature, though. Some historians are like, he's not sure how accurate that was because the dog kind of gave him a hard time about getting the thermometer in. The dog's like I hate the hot room. Yeah, no, I don't think the dog likes the hot room. And I don't, this is the one aspect of the experiment that I don't love. But the dog was fine. Like they did not leave the dog in distress.

They like brought the dog in, you know, sat with the dog in the hot room. And they were like, yeah, we're all kind of, you know, we're getting warmer and like our heart rates are going up. But we're fine. And the steak, which Blagden argued was made of like the same basic stuff as the men of the dog, which is not wrong. What is the more interesting kind of control groups that have ever seen for an experience? The steak got thoroughly cooked, in fact, even quite dry in the hottest room. So that was his way of showing like it's definitely like hot places heat thing. So there's something about a living body that like keeps you from heating up.

And again, this was like a big deal. Like no one have really shown this. I will say that like obviously people who lived in hotter climates had by and necessity certainly figured a lot of this out, but this was the first time somebody was measuring temperatures in a room. And again, for men in Britain, it probably was truly a revelation and not just the first literal confirmation. And yeah, they also noted that they could tolerate higher heat and drier rooms and correctly surmised that this was because water carried the heat to the body more efficiently than air and that sweating, which is more effective when the air has

more room to take out moisture and evaporate your sweat, was the key to the body's heat-destroying powers. That's another thing. Blagden kept referring to the body's ability to, quote, destroy heat. Destroy it. You know, not quite right, but, you know, he was, he was onto something that, like, sweating with key and the dryness of the air affected your ability to sweat efficiently and that like there was something that living bodies could do that like kept the heat from heating them. So it really was again like pretty novel. I mean this is a guy who the other thing he's known for is being he was he worked with two of the scientists at the center of what

was called the water controversy where they literally were arguing about who had figured out that water was a compound and not like an element. Like chemistry was so new modern chemistry as we know it. So really all of these questions

were like completely unanswered up into this point, at least in terms of like formal data-based science. So yeah, this guy being like, you heard it here first. The human body can destroy heat. was it was not as silly as it sounds to us now.

And again, he was one of maybe be-first Western scientists to connect sweat and thermoregulation. But again, it's very reasonable to assume that people living in hotter climates had figured this out because they sweat a lot and it was hot. But the vibe of this paper is so delightfully bewildered. Like these guys clearly were like, oh my God, no one has ever moved from a hot room to a cold one at such speed. Like this is innovation. Just really you get the sense that they were giddy with this self-experimentation adventure they were on. And given the general tendency in the history of medicine and science for folks to experiment on other people without their informed consent, I have to say that excluding the inclusion of the dog who I hope at least got to like eat the steak afterwards.

Exactly. I do find the image of these dudes hanging out in Saunas together to be like pretty charming and wholesome, relatively speaking. I think it's worth pointing out that they were being a bit obtuse about the temperatures previously endured by humankind. In his initial paper, Blagden actually made a reference to the experience. of M. Tillett, which it was the botanist and middle worker Mathew Tillet. And in 1760, Matthew had been trying to figure out how to heat green enough to kill pests without actually damaging the green for consumption. And he ran into trouble with his data because he was using a thermometer attached to a long shovel to get the exact temperature inside these giant baking ovens he was using. But the temperature went down in the time it took to take the shovel out. And at least according to the way he wrote it down, the girl who was tending the oven was like, I can just walk in and like mark the level of the thermometer with a pencil for you.

And apparently said she felt no inconvenience in the 288 degree furnace. And then he and his colleague proceeded to basically goof off with a bunch of random items in the oven to see how the heat affected them. they like baked eggs in there. They stood in there. They like waved their arms around and they were like, oh, my watch is hot, but my skin's not hot. What's up with that?

This was in 1760, so just a few years before the sauna boys had their little adventure. And yeah, Blagden notes that the maid in question endured temperatures of 280 degrees and up for like more than 10 minutes. and he basically seems to be saying that he thinks girls who work by hot stoves probably get used to working by hot stoves and it seems like this is his nod to the very obvious reality

that he and his friends did not actually find and test the upper limits of human heat endurance but other than that he does seem to like be kind of ignoring the fact that many people live in hot places and you know that it's it's just kind of a a silly a silly little sauna jaunt um we now know that black did was

very correct about the importance of moisture in the air uh the more humid it is the less heat we can take before our body start breaking down uh because we're not able to dump heat back into the air by way of evaporating sweat so i guess we do kind of destroy heat by perspiring in a way um yeah so forecast of 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley can be as physiologically tolerable as like a sub 90 degree day in a swampy area like, you know, D.C. And so listeners, if you don't know, maybe you've been seeing the phrase wet bulb temperature more often. I will link to an explainer on wet bulb on website.com slash weird. But that's becoming a more common term in weather forecast because it's a measurement of the combo of heat and humidity.

And it's the number that matters in terms of how dangerous it is to spend time outside. So once it gets to 95 Fahrenheit wet bulb, give or take a couple degrees, like we are in trouble. And at 100% humidity, we reach that level at only around 87 degrees Fahrenheit. So it doesn't have to be very hot for things to get very dangerous. And conversely, like, that's why you can sit in. a sauna and enjoy it or not based on how much you like saunas. But yeah, it is important to remember that like there is a big difference between the temperature you can endure in a dry room versus a humid one.

In 2010 at the last ever world sauna championships, there was a contestant who died and another one ended up in intensive care. And that was in a sauna that was, you know, only 230 degrees. but it was a wet sauna. So that's incredibly dangerous. That is way hotter than is safe. I had no idea there were sauna championships. Does that just test like how long you can sauna for?

Yeah. Yeah. So the world championships, you know, there may be smaller competitions that have been around longer and are maybe still around. But this one, I think it was from the 90s. And that last one was in 2010 because it was such a needless tragedy. right? But the idea was it was very much like an endurance saying because it is really an endurance sport to like sit in a sauna longer than everyone else. But yeah, they just literally sat

in saunas that were very hot and you wanted to be the last person in the sauna. And unfortunately both be the two finalists really they said they were fine until one of them was very clearly not fine and that contest has has not continued since then for obvious reasons. But yeah, it's a steam room is not a sauna. So know your limits and hydrate, hydrate, hydrate so much. On a lighter note to wrap us up, I have a quick aside about the guy who built the hot room, Dr. Fordeis. Because I was like, who is this man?

And the thing is that, like, I didn't find anything about, like, his journey to creating these hot rooms. What I found about him is that he was memorialized in a local restaurant guide in the early 1800s for having an absolutely bananas diet. Of course. So there was this restaurant called Dollies. And he ate there every day. for more than 20 years, he had decided, based on his research in anatomy, that man had become accustomed to eat more often than nature actually required. And that actually, like a noble lion, a man should just eat one big meal a day. Which is like a TikTok about snake meal. I don't know if I think

about snake meal a lot. But he did snake meal. And so he did he did this. He did a little. And so he did this experiment, experiment, by going to his favorite restaurant every day at 4 o'clock for decades. He would come in, he would sit down, and they had a spot reserve for him because he was the 4 o'clock snake meal guy. And they would give him a tankard full of ale, a bottle of port wine, and a quarter pint of brandy. And... Okay. Where's the food? It's coming, it's coming.

But it's not good. So as soon as he arrived, the cookwood would start cooking the meal he always ate, which I'll get to a second. But he would start with a, you know, a little appetizer, which would be sometimes half a broiled chicken, sometimes a plate of fish. And then once he finished that, he would have a glass of brandy, and then he would be delivered a pound and a half, a rump steak, and he would devour it. And this is from the restaurant guide from the 1800s. We say devour because he always ate so rapidly that one might imagine that he was hurrying away to a patient to deprive death of a dinner. I guess he was trying to be like a lie.

Oh, my gosh. And I'll see it's probably hungry. You know, he only ate once a day. So he was probably very hungry. And at the point, kind of drunk. Yeah. So he would eat his pound and a half of red meat that had been preceded by half a chicken. And then he would finish drinking.

He would have drank all of the booze, the brandy, the port, and the tankard of ale. And that would take him about 90 minutes altogether. And he had an old he always had a six o'clock chemistry lecture and so he would go there apparently not take a nap. He would just go give a drunk chemistry lecture with the meat sweat. And then that he wouldn't eat again until the next day at 4 p.m. Is that related to the sauna experiments? No, but it also tracks for me.

I think that is that is the man who would build a series of hot rooms that that invite all his scientist friends over to test them out. Wow. Whenever I learn about like an ancient guy, not ancient, like a like a, like an, you know, an antediluvian guy like that, I'm always like, what were his poops like? His poops were probably crazy. Horrific. Horrific, I'm sure.

Yeah. I do have a some, I have a friend who sometimes speculates that when people go on like all meat diets that aren't like well-balanced all-meat diets with like a bunch of you know um fats and organ meats and stuff but when people are literally like I switched to eating only ground bison and now I'm so amazing it's like they probably have like they probably have like celiac or like iBS and they were like eating a bunch of veggies that weren't good for them and they think they're just like they think they've um they've unlocked the secret to life and in the universe and everything and really they just like shouldn't have been eating broccoli and everything else was fine.

Something I think about a lot. But yeah, no, I also wonder what this man's poops were like. I wonder what his breath was like. I wonder what his 6 p.m. chemistry lecture was like. That's what I'm thinking about. But yeah, that's that is the story of the sauna boys. and who actually learned quite a lot and did it with a great attitude. So what was the weirdest thing we learned this week?

I honestly, I almost am ready to give up the concept of us picking a winner at the end of every show because I always like everybody's facts so much. I mean, oh, I interrupted you. No, please. I'm going to say maybe I'm suffering from recency bias, but the diet of that man I will think about for days. No, I want to watch the biopic on the Sonna Boys. Like, I'm going to, like, who is going to play The Meat Man? Wow. Imagine if it were truly like a black box theater production and the whole theater was heated as well so you could like feel like one of those dirty.

experiences. Yeah. Everyone has to drink a mead. Just the meat smell. There's just steaks cooking in the corner. That's when you know the show is over. Amazing. Sabrina, remind listeners where they can find your book.

Yeah, my book is called How Far the Light Reaches. You can get it at any local bookstore. Please don't get it from Amazon if you can. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been great. Thank you so much for having me. I had so much fun.

And I'm like scared to eat beef again because it's become something repulsive in my mind. Just make sure you have a pound and a half. You'll be fine. As you just start with the chicken, half the chicken to prime the pump. 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. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion. You're welcome. Columbia. Engineer for whatever.