The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week - Your Car is Full of Spiders, the Cloud Whisperer, She Who Invented N95 Masks and Bugles

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Welcome to Season 4! For this first episode, Kendra Pierre-Louis, former Popsci editor and current reporter for the Gimlet podcast How To Save a Planet, joins the weirdos as a guest host. The weirdest things we learned this week range from thousands of cars being recalled due to spider infestations, to the story of a woman who invented N95 masks from bras. 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 in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories!  Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Sara Chodosh: www.twitter.com/schodosh Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: www.twitter.com/billycadden Edited by Jessica Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ --- 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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That's code weirdest for 20% off. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room.

Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton.com. Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and heck 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 sure 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 Trodosh. I'm Kendra Peelewis. Kendra, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much for having me. It is a very special day. We're to sing listeners because in addition to having one of our favorite Popsie alum's Kendra on, we are back for season four. We have.

Thank you. That's what I was looking for. But yeah, we really missed you all. And we will be back fortnightly for the foreseeable future. We have some really, fun, timely bonus episodes planned. So thanks so much for sticking with us and coming back. And we're really psyched to get season four rolling. As I said, Kendra is one of our favorite former Popsie staffers, but she's also a reporter for the show How to Save a Planet,

which is brand new in which we're really excited for weirdest thing listeners to check out. Kendra, would you like to say a little bit about the show? Sure. It's a brand new podcast that's really focused on climate change solutions. I call it sort of like climate change meets schoolhouse rock. It's really designed to help people kind of figure out what they can do on sort of a big picture scale to help fight climate change. It's less about sort of individual actions. So we're not telling anyone to stop using straws and more sort of like what can you do on a community scale or what can you do in your community to help move the needle on climate change. Awesome. That is exactly the kind of thing. We need.

need. So we're really excited to check it out. And I know that Weirdest Thing listeners will enjoy it as well. So folks, you can get that wherever you get your podcasts. And with that, we're going to get into the show. So on the Weirdest, like I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little factor tease about some kind of story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, really, really, really missing our weirdest thing listeners, 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, would you like to start with your tease? I will be talking today about the spiders that caused a mass recall of tens of thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of cars. Car spiders. Oh, great. Car spiders. Just what we needed, I know. Spiders in cars.

Excellent. Kendra, what's your tease? Mine, I guess, is sort of speaking to this present moment, which is that xenophobia caused the death of thousands of people. Weirdest thing. Always up for some depressing but important facts about xenophobia. And I'm always happy to deliver. Gloom and doom is your beat.

With a smile. So my tease is that I would like to talk about ribbons, bras, and N95 masks. Wow. Yeah. What a combo. Truly a combo. So what do we want to start with?

I think I need to hear about car spiders because I don't need any more like sense of impending doom in my life. And I would like to know how concerned I should be about spiders cars and the intersection thereof immediately. I am also on team car spiders, mostly because I want to know how do car spiders. is rank next to car rats, you know, because early in quarantine, there were all of these occurrences of people finding rats nesting in their vehicles because they weren't driving them. And I'm just wondering in the hierarchy of car pestilence, if you will. What you should be more worried about. That's the 2021 Disney film we can all look for in two.

Cars and rats and spiders. Oh, boy. Well, the good news is that I can assuage all your fears because, Well, you know what? No, I'm going to take that back. I can assuage some of your fears. So, okay, so we're going to go back in time just a little bit. And just for those people who are not car people, which I am not a car person, though I did recently purchase a car for the first time, we're talking today about the Mazda 6, which is apparently quite a popular car that has been around since like roughly 2002, I believe. It's a pretty standard, I would even call it a boring

sedan, but the 2009 and 2010 models had a very unusual problem, which is that spiders loved them. Specifically, it seemed to be the yellow sack spider, which is, I thought it sounded large and terrifying, I think based just on the word sack, but it's actually a little tiny spider, like just a few millimeters, and it builds these very dense webs. And in March of 2011, Mazda had to recall 52,000 Mazda 6s because these little spiders were building webs inside one of the vent lines that came out of the gas tank. The webs were apparently so dense that the fumes coming out of it got blocked up and the pressure would build inside the gas tank, which is not a good thing. And it would cause either the fuel line or the gas tank itself to crack, where it would. which is not a great thing when you have a flammable liquid in large quantities.

Who was the poor person who figured this out? There were a few people that this happened to, unfortunately. I mean, I don't think, I think it was probably the mechanics who discovered the spiders because people just came in because they had, like, leaking gas. It was a fire risk, obviously, because you just have, like, loose gas. But there weren't actually any records of car fires caused by spiders, which is some relief. That's good. That means we can laugh about the car spiders. Exactly. Yeah. Nobody died from the car spiders. They were just a little bit freaked out maybe.

So Mazda figured out the problem and they decided, well, they could fix the cars by basically retrofitting them with a little spring-loaded mechanism to keep the spiders out. So they recalled of the cars and they retrofitted them. And then on all their new models going forward, they also added like a piece of software that I'm not going to claim to fully understand it. But somehow the software changed. I don't understand cars. Cars are basically just big computers now. They are. Three years later, though. In 2014.

Wait. I have a question. Go, Jess. Was it a spidey sense software? It was. Okay. Incredible. Carry on.

So in 2014, Mazda unfortunately had to recall like most of the same cars because apparently the spring alone could not keep the spiders out. The spiders came back. It had to update all of the software as well. Apparently the software is more effective than just the springs. So they did manage to fix those people's cars. But the real mystery was, of course, why? Why were there spiders in people's fuel vent lines? Apparently, according to like every single news article I could find about this, it's that Yellow Sack spiders just love the smell of gasoline. Some people like the smell of gasoline. I am not a huge fan, but apparently the spiders just really love it. I heard the story in a YouTube video that was about like car manufacturer

fails. And I thought it seemed crazy. And so I googled it because it seemed like, I mean, it seems like an urban legend. Yeah, exactly. I just thought this is, it was like a good video, but I just thought they've got it wrong. Like they definitely have. have it wrong. There's no way. Well, your problem here is that it's full of spiders. Exactly. So I actually found an old Popsye article wildly that seemed to confirm the story. It was basically saying, like, yes, people found spiders in their fuel vent lines. And that is actually what caused the tanks to crack. But I just kept thinking, like, why? Why would a spider be attracted to gasoline? Like, in nature what would be the purpose of that? That just seems crazy to me. So the Pops I article

talked about something that's called cuticular hydrocarbons, which are basically, I did not know what these were, but as the name implies, they are hydrocarbons inside the cuticles of insects. Insects all like have exoskeletons and in their, the outermost layer is called the cuticle, and that's mostly made of chitin, but there's also this waxy outer layer that keeps the cuticle from getting dried out. And the more we learn about this, the more it seems that there's actually a lot going on in that outer layer, namely that it has a bunch of hydrocarbons that seem to be signaling molecules to other insects. Ah. So spiders seem to like, at least some of them, seem to be able to discriminate between their own kin and also and other spiders by sensing these

hydrocarbons. And ants apparently do a similar thing. And apparently some spiders, actually mimic like ants hydrocarbons to trick the ants into coming towards them and then they eat the ants. That does sound familiar. I believe I have seen research on this. As someone who has been dealing with an ant infestation all summer, I am on the side of the spiders. I'm just putting that out there. Eat the ants. Eat out the ants. That's fair. I mean, I don't like spiders near me, I will admit, but they are unquestionably good for our planet. They are wonderful creatures. I just don't want to see them. So like that kind of seemed to answer the question for me.

I was like, yeah, so okay, they're not attracted to gasoline per se. Like there's just some hydrocarbon in the gasoline and that must happen to smell like other spiders maybe. Maybe it's just a very comforting scent for them. I don't really know. But there was one line in this pop-side story that I could not ignore, which is that the writer interviewed an entomologist. And it said, entomologist Chris Butler says they should be called, quote, sealing spiders because they can be found on the ceilings of practically any house. So it shouldn't be surprising that they're in cars or automobile factories. They're kind of everywhere. I was like, well, hang on. If they're everywhere,

maybe, like, is this just all a big coincidence? Like, Mazda just got really unlucky. So I tried to do more research because, like, literally, every news article says, it's definitely the spiders because the spiders just love gasoline. Unquestioned. Definitely, they just love gasoline. I found a single paper. It wasn't even a full paper. It was like an abstract that was presented at an Indiana University like research day. And it's entitled testing an urban myth. Do spiders really love the smell of gasoline? Apparently the answer is no. Yellow Sack spiders were like, we're not particularly attracted to gasoline odors. They did a sort of very simple experiment where they got a bunch of mostly juvenile spiders but also some adult spiders and they would give them, you know, two

sides basically of a little enclosure, one that had a gas melt and one that didn't. And they didn't seem to prefer the area that had a gas melt. But what they were attracted to was pieces of tubing. It's a series of tubes. It is. Yeah. So it seems like maybe it's the pipes themselves. So like I went back, and again in this old Popsai article, it says there were only like 10 cases of car spiders that prompted this Mazda 6 recall. I guess that's enough for them to issue. recall. I mean, so it did crack a gas line. So yeah, I'm guessing it's that it was just a serious enough issue that even a small number of cases was like, well, we can't have people with cracked gas tanks. We must recall them. It could also just be that like other people have spiders and cars,

but they're just in annoying ways. And there was something about the design of Mazda's gasline in particular that made it so when the spiders were attracted to that particular tubing, it was kind of catastrophic. Yeah. So that seemed to be it. One thing that I did find is that Mazda 6s have two pipes coming out of their fuel tank, which is apparently unusual. Again, I know nothing about cars, but apparently that is unusual. I couldn't find anything that was like, like they did some kind of redesign in 2009, and I couldn't figure out did it have that design before, or did they change it for this 2009 redesign? And that was what caused it. I don't really know. But the pipes thing does kind of seem to hold up because Toyota had a recall for

870,000 cars in 2013, which was because the spiders, not necessarily yellow sack spiders, it doesn't, I guess Toyota didn't really get into the species of spider, but just some kind of spider. These spiders were building webs inside of the drainage tube that came out of the air conditioning system and they blocked the condensation and so water would build up in the tube and then it would drip down onto the control board, which caused it to short circuit. Most of the time it just turned the airbag warning light on accidentally, but in a handful of cases, the airbag would just deploy randomly, which is extremely dangerous. And there really shouldn't be gas fumes in the AC system, like more so than there is in any other part of like your garage. Right. So I'm kind of thinking

that maybe just spiders like tubes. Maybe they just enjoy that environment. And like exactly, like Kendra said, like there's spiders in your car, probably. You just don't know that they're there. Yeah. So car spiders. I don't know if that's any relief. You maybe don't need to worry about them, but they are there almost unquestionably. So sorry about that. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts. Okay. And we're back. And Kendra, how about you T us up with a big societal downer, please? You know, that's kind of my other middle name is big societal downer. it's very your brand you know it's my stage name um when when i feel like gloom is her beat isn't um quite dark enough so i want to take you back way back a long long time ago when i could still remember no um i want to take you back to 1900 and the scene is galveston texas which um i don't know what you know about galveston texas but it's an island on the gulf of mexico and at the time it was a fourth largest city in Texas. It had 38,000 people, but still it's an island sort of dangling in the Gulf of

Mexico. So it was, you know, a hurricane risk. And this is 1900. And there weren't any satellite observations, you know, oftentimes were told weather forecasting was pretty rudimentary. And so there was this massive hurricane that struck the island on September 8th. And it killed over 10,000 people. So, like, Or at least those are the official estimates. So a quarter of the population. And when you look at photos from Galveston, which like beforehand, it was like this beautiful sort of stereotype of a 1900 city, you know, like these beautiful structures. And then afterwards, it just decimated. Almost no buildings are standing.

A lot of the structures were wooden. And so it's like sticks, like match sticks almost, only building-wise. And there are people, their bodies. Like you're seeing bodies in between like the wood. And the official narrative was sort of like weather forecasting was terrible. They didn't see the storm coming. Oops. However.

And I learned about this by reading Al Roker. Yes, that Al Roker's book, Storm of the Century. And it's just like there's a chapter in there. And to know why so many people died, you have to look not to Texas, but to Cuba. And in Cuba, there was a Jesuit priest by the name of Father Benito Viennes, I think, and he was a weather nerd. If podcasts had existed in 1900, he definitely would have had a weather podcast. He spent all of his time filling these storm notebooks with descriptions of clouds, and he cross-referenced those cloud formations with instrument readings that he was taking at the time.

And when ship captains would dock in Havana, he would like ask them about the weather. that they'd seen when they were at sea, and he would, like, collect all of these newspaper clippings and telegraph reports. And he ended up becoming this, like, weather genius, specifically at cloud formations and how they relate to hurricanes. And so on September 3rd, I believe, our saintly father, if you will, was staring at these clouds, and he was able to deduce two kind of salient things that there was a hurricane coming and where it was heading. And he could even tell that it was a big one. And so he had this whole model and he could tell that a hurricane had formed and calculate how roughly how far away it was and gauge how fast it was moving and

even track its path. These are all things that we do in 2020 using satellites, right? Right. This man did it like because he could read the clouds. Wow. Okay. And you're probably wondering why I was wondering, well, why didn't he warn the Texans? But why? Just that it'd help you out. a little bit. Thank you. Because the U.S. Weather Bureau director, Willis Moore, that's like the forerunner of the National Weather Service, hated Cubans. He thought that they were backwards. He felt that you couldn't predict weather forecasting. And he thought that they were backwards and rudimentary and like rustic. And so the way and that like their weather forecasts were wrong and

they were panicking populations. And so he essentially banned. to all weather forecasting out of Cuba. Wow. That's great. So he tried. He couldn't tell anyone like what he was seeing. And then Father, you know, tried, like, using Western Union to send telegraphs to, like, tell people, like, weather forecasts. And they couldn't stop Western Union because it was a private entity from sending these telegraphs.

But what they could do was incentivize them to send these weather forecasts, like, the lowest tier. So none of the telegrams got out. Oh, no. Oh. this feels upsettingly parallel to some current situations we're running into with sending information. No idea what you're talking about. Everything is fine. And he was convinced that the forecast were the superstitious lore of backward people that he believed lacked Yankee grit and know-how.

And so because of that. Oh, God. That Yankee grit need is more Yankee grit and know-how. And so, like, there's this narrative. actually if you like pull up the Texas history like website like loving Texas history the official kind of narrative is that like nobody saw this hurricane coming it sucked we've learned so much about hurricanes because of Galveston when even in 1900 it was preventable and that does not at all sound like a situation we are currently living through no what are you talking about Kendra and then when

it all went down he just like lied and eradicated the history and was like no it never happened And so it took like way later for people to put the pieces together and recognize that like all of these people died me loosely. So that is, I don't know if it's my weirdest thing. It's certainly my darkest thing. But anyway, you can do hurricane forecasting by reading clouds. So that's a cool takeaway. Yeah. Well, and I'm like really curious about when did U.S. forecasting realize clouds were important? I didn't realize in 1900 we were still like, none of that cloud witchcraft. Yeah, I was going to ask, like, when did we name cloud types?

And were me naming them based on actual information? Or was it just people who were like, this cloud shape is this thing? I don't know what it means, but we're going to call it that. That is a very excellent question that I am incapable of answering because I was too busy being filled with rage at the racism. Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of, I read this. amazing book whose name I'm going to completely blank on, but I will post when we put this podcast episode up, but was basically about the Polynesian navigators who managed to find basically

every single island in the Pacific and inhabit it to some degree at some point. And how when the Europeans came along and discovered the islands that they basically were completely flummoxed as to how the Polynesians were able to navigate through the waters. And they even tried to get some of the most expert navigators to teach the European captains, like, how did they do it? But the Europeans just seem to have, like, given up. Like, it was just kind of too hard. And they were like, well, we'll just keep using our maps that don't really seem to be working that well

and that causes to just sail right by islands that we didn't know we're there. Clouds in general are amazing. Like the things you can tell from just knowing what different cloud types are is incredible. Yeah. And it was also like in this case, like because of the relationship with the Catholic Church in Cuba, like a lot of the weather center was all sort of based around this observatory that Father Vinias kind of created in 1858. But another father, father, father gone what? I don't know. Everything I say that's not in English, I say with a weird French accent. So I'm sorry for people who speak Spanish. I'm really sorry. But he observes. reserved a big halo around the moon and the halo didn't dissipate. And then at dawn, the sky turned a deep red and there were Sears clouds and they were moving from the west by north and northwest by north with the focus on those same points. And to him, that meant that the storm had gained in

intensity, had gained in structure. It had prevailing winds and it was pushing northwest. And he, from like, the model that Father Vinius had created, he thought he could tell exactly where the storm was going to be and it was going to be the Texas Gulf Coast. So they knew. Like it wasn't, you know what I mean like, and to understand sort of what played out in Galveston, like, they did not know a storm is coming. So there's often like the ocean behaves kind of strangely before a hurricane makes landfall. So people actually flooded to the beach to be like, because the water had kind of receded. So when the storm, yeah. So when the storm came in, people were physically running from the waves because the water is the deadliest part of the hurricane.

And there are all of these accounts of people like the people who managed to survive often survived because they made it. to the top floor of these structures that were barely intact. There are stories of people making it to the top floor of these structures and then waiting until the last possible second as a structure was collapsing to jump out of a window before the structure collapsed so they wouldn't get trapped in the rebel. So when I say they had no notice, I mean, they literally had no notice. That is wild. There was like some vague like tropical storm warning, but it's kind, you know, like when we get a tropical storm warning in New York City what that means. You know, like, we just had one a couple weeks ago. It was like that. It was like,

oh, this is annoying. It might be kind of rainy. Like it wasn't that level of like, oh, you might die. And everyone you love might die. Man, the importance of international collaboration cannot be overstated. And, yeah, and just sort of recognizing, I don't know, that other people can know things. What? They can. And I mean, I've been teasing with it, but it was really painful like revisiting this, I think. I think I read this before the pandemic, but it was really painful revisiting it like in preparation for this because you could look at Taiwan, you could look at South Korea, you could look at Hong Kong, you could look at New Zealand. There are all of these countries that chose different options than we did with dealing with COVID. And so often

people would say, oh, we're not China or not these other countries. And it's like, well, we could be. We had the option. Yeah. So there's one more thing that I want to point out to you, which is the head of the weather service, Willis Moore, who had blocked the forecast. He was eventually fired from the Weather Bureau, but not because of this, but because he was trying to secure a cabinet post, and he had somehow done some sort of improper conduct in his campaign.

So eventually there was some justice coming to the shady dude, but unfortunately it wasn't through the form of professional consequences for helping to facilitate the deaths of thousands and thousands of people. All right. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact. Okay, we're back and it is time for my fact. So I'm curious, have either of you guys ever heard a story about the N95 mask in relation to Braziers? Uh, no. I actually have, but that's because I'm supremely online. I am not online enough. Okay. So I'm going to get into it.

Some people have rightfully pointed out that N95 masks, which are those cup-shaped filtering masks that fit really closely to your face, they look quite a lot like a bra cup. And I had been aware there was some connection, but as is so often the case, stories about design and engineering and science and especially women involved in them. It was kind of oversimplified to the point of implying that, like, they were looking for a mask shape. And a woman was like, you know what would do great? A bra cup. And the actual story is way better than that and introduced me to a woman who may be the love of my life, even though she unfortunately passed away about five years ago.

I still think maybe we're meant to be together. So let's get into it. Sarah Little Turnbull was born. was born in Manhattan in 1917 to a pair of very poor Jewish immigrants from Russia. She was actually born Sarah Finkelstein, and she earned a scholarship to Parsons School of Design. And after that, she started working at House Beautiful Magazine, and that was in 1937. And she eventually became their decorating editor, and she held that job for two decades. And even at this point in her career, she's credited with no small amount of influence on

post-war American culture. To name one example, she encouraged the kind of shared casual living space that would become known as the family room, which was really not a widely discussed concept until like the 40s when there started to be more of a focus on like family leisure and bonding and recreation in the home and things like that. And she also like encouraged young women entering the workforce to get roommates. I hadn't really thought about it, but like it's true that when not many women like went to college and then worked. There wasn't really a concept of young ladies moving in together unless they were like spinsters slash lesbians. And things like that. She was just kind of a think fluencer of her day. Meanwhile, she started to do some design

consulting work to pay her sister's medical bills. Her sister was very sick at the time. And she says that when she made up her fee, because she didn't know what to charge. She just did it by adding together all of the recent health care expenses, and she was shocked when clients agreed to pay it. So she kind of accidentally managed to not shortchange herself in the way that most women in the design world were being shortchanged. But her real impact started in the late 50s, which is when she set off on her own to be a design consultant full-time. And by the way, that's where the name Sarah Little comes in. She's known as Sarah Little Turnbull. So she was 4 foot 11 and people frequently called her Little Sarah.

And, you know, people seem to have widely accepted that she just like took this in stride. But I have to say that her changing her name to Sarah Little seems to me like she just wanted people to shut the fuck up about her height. I was just going to say it before they did. But yeah, her professional name was Sarah Little. And it was also very apt because her consulting career really got long. when she wrote this article called Forgetting the Little Women or something to that effect, which was about focusing on designing products with the consumer in mind in a way that we kind of take for granted today. I mean, not all companies do it as well as others, but you assume that a product

is getting made so that people can use it. But at the time, most companies were designing just what the major retail buyers said they wanted. So it was very much focused on aesthetics, and like fitting the status quo. And she was saying like, you know, you have to think about the women who will be using appliances in the kitchens and things like that. And that was like very radical at the time. And so it got her a lot of attention. That brings us to the N95 mask, or at least it almost does.

So 3M, which is like huge conglomerate, tons of material science, 3M was one of several companies that found Sarah's spin on human-centric design really refined. refreshing. So they hired her as a consultant. But as it was the mid-20th century and Sarah was a diminutive Jewish woman, they put her in a questionable division, gift wrap, and fabric. 3M had developed some new non-woven materials that they were hoping would improve their electrical tape. But that had failed. And so then the material had been relegated to use in decorative ribbons. So Sarah's first move was to design the first pre-made gift bows. You know, those like magic bows that like you peel the backing off or you'd like pull a tab and it forms a bow.

She came up with that. She also made it clear to 3M that she had dozens of more innovative ideas for this material, which again, they had really just like punted over to ribbon material when it hadn't worked out the way they wanted it to. So that led to her giving a famous presentation to management that was entitled just why. And the point being, you know, why they should be investing more research into product designs for their non-woven fabric business. And she presented at least 100 product concepts at that meeting, which is just mind-blowing to me.

She was basically saying, here's this material that you have me making gift wrap out of. And here are 100 more lucrative things. I could be doing with it. And predictably, given the fact that they had put her on gift wrap duty to begin with, the product they went for out of those 100 products was a bra. The idea was that the non-woven fabric would help it keep a fixed shape in the molded cup while still staying breathable. And while she was developing that, she was also spending a lot of time caring for sick relatives. And boom, she realized the shape of the cup she had designed would make a tighter and more comfortable seal than the flimsy masks she saw doctors wearing.

Unfortunately, it turned out that that particular material did not actually filter out microbes. So when 3M did put out the resulting mask in the early 70s, it was for construction dust and volcanic ash, but it was not actually used in a medical setting the way Sarah had imagined it. But of course, today with improved filters and respirators, those 3M masks are widely used to prevent the spread of disease. So, as we have said on popsight.com, valved masks only filter the air you breathe in, not the air you breathe out. So we do not recommend them for going about your daily business to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

However, they are hugely important for healthcare professionals. And, you know, that bra cup inspired design is essentially the same. And it was because Sarah Little was this person who could look at gift wrap material and say, what the heck else can I make with this? And I found as recently as 2009 this very serious industry magazine, I'm not going to call it out by name, but it was talking about the like pervasive myth of the N95 mask coming from a brawl cup design. And it said that evidence showed that the ideas had been developed simultaneously at best, which is sort of true.

But the thing that drove me crazy is that Sarah Little was not mentioned once. It was just this whole like, wherever could this thing about N95 masks and bras have come from? The information was all out there. Sarah Little was still doing her thing. But I think it's only recently, as people have started to get more interested in the early contributions, of women and people of color in science and engineering that people have really realized that Sarah Little Turnbull is a fantastic historical character. Now, I just need to make sure that our listeners understand how incredibly prolific Sarah's

career was. So here are just some examples of her work. She's responsible for the first successful boxed chocolate cake sold in England because... What? Because she was tasked with figuring out why American box cake products were not selling. They were totally flopping. And she considered herself kind of like a designer informed by cultural anthropology. So she did tons of traveling to be like, how are people using the product?

How are people using objects that could inspire products and things like that? And so she took her like typical trip to England and was really like, She could not figure out why people didn't want to use this cake mix. And then she went for high tea. And what they served her as cake was totally different from American cake. And just nobody had bothered to learn the difference between cake in England and America, which as we know from watching the Great British Bake Off is significant. So they actually then ended up being able to sell multiple products because they were able to make

one box product that was even more moist than an American cake and sell it as a pudding. And then they were able to make a denser cake that, you know, you didn't need to eat with a fork to sell as cake. So for Corning, which was another company she did a lot of work with, she developed those freezer to oven to countertop Corningware dishes. And she did it by using materials developed for ballistic missiles. So another very typical Sarah move to be like, well, there are things that get really hot. Surely we could put some of that into a baking dish.

So you know those very ubiquitous lid tops on like Corningware or on Dutch ovens where it's just kind of like a raised round handle that is designed to just very easily just like grip it and lift it in one motion? So she developed. She developed that for Corningware by watching how tigers grasped their prey. Oh, my God. What inspiration. Yeah, she also had a hand in developing the first glass cooktops for them.

And then the most amazing thing she has done for the world. Bugles. Oh, my God. The snack. The best snack. Wow. Bugles. Her expertise was very wide-ranging because I feel like today there's like materials, people who would work on like, you know, the stickiness of post-it notes.

And then there's other people who invent new snack foods to make everyone become addicted to. So that's wild that she did all of that. And those were just the products she's openly associated with. I'm really glad you said that, Sarah, because one thing that Sarah Little said a lot when she was alive was that, like, she was really just the idea guy. and that that was nothing without brilliant execution. So she was often very quiet, happily so, about which products had come from her. But she spent decades as a long-term consultant for companies that included Procter and Gamble, Coca-Cola, General Mills, Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Marks & Spencer, American Can, DuPont, Ford, Nissan, Pfizer, Revell, Elizabeth Arden,

Lever Brothers, Motorola, NASA, and Volvo. So, one can only imagine. First of all, American can is a great name. So straightforward. I love that. Also, I love that bugles, like on the long list of things she did, I love that bugles was one of the things that she was like, that. I want credit for that thing.

Yeah, you know what? Because, like, they're great. You get to put them on your hands and have little witchy fingers. Oh, yeah. And they taste delicious. Who doesn't love a bugle? Yeah, I would insist upon getting credit for the bugle as well if I were And she had a really cool life.

She described herself as like a penthouse living, diamond and fur wearing Manhattan power woman up until she got married, which she did it. Hell yeah. She did it 48, which like, I love that for her. Yeah. She did not want it until she wanted it. And then she met Jim Turnbull and she wanted it. And they moved out to Washington State. And in the 80s, she got into academia and she ran a lab at Stanford.

She retired at 88, died at 97 in 2015. And as I said, I love her. Wow, I love her too. This is for sure my new crush, 100%. What I really want now is like a sort of madman style show, but just about her instead of a Don Draper character. I had exactly that thought where I was like, Peggy is almost an homage to this person,

but on like the ad side. And also like as cool as Peggy is on that show, not nearly as cool as Sarah Little was in real life. Yeah, I feel like what I want is like Sarah Little giving presentations to like rooms full of dudes and just like blowing their minds. Bougals, corningware, baking dishes. Amazing. I'm picturing that scene with the carousel thing, but like, oh, or the toasted, tell them it's toasted. But Sarah Little, oh, this is so good.

Wow, I need to pitch this idea. Yeah. All right. Well, we've figured out our life plan for the next 10 years. So we'll get storyboarding. But what was the weirdest thing we learned this week? Because I have to go with car swiders. I also second car spiders. Wow. I am honored. Both of both of yours were deeply weird, but also deeply upsetting in their own ways. Thank you, Sarah. And I think it's really the Popsie brand. That's true. And Kendra, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. The weirdest thing I learned this week is a popular science podcast. We're available on all major podcast platforms, so subscribe wherever you're listening now. And if you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

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