Unexplainable - Let’s play Unexplainable or Not

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

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Please play responsibly. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, and this is the first ever episode of Unexplainable or Not, the game show where we finally get some answers. For our inaugural guest, we got one of the hosts of Today Explained, Sean Ramos for him. He taught me everything I know, including when using a canned laugh track is high art. Wow. Welcome, Sean. Thank you for having me.

How does it feel to be a guest on another show? I've heard every episode, and I'm very excited to be playing a game with you guys. All right, let's do it. Unexplainable or not is a game show where you have to guess what we know and what we don't. You're going to hear three stories about scientific mysteries and the scientists searching for answers.

But one of the mysteries has just been solved. After you hear all three mysteries, you'll get a chance to guess. Which one do you think scientists have actually figured out? Here's the stakes. If you get it right, we'll tell all our listeners that today explained is a way better show than unexplainable. If you get it wrong, you got to tell all your listeners why unexplainable is the greatest show around. Wow.

Blows today explained out of the water. Do you accept the terms? As your biggest fan, I do. I do. Wonderful. Okay. And for all you at home playing along, remember, only one of these scientific questions has actually been solved. This week, we're doing animal miscelled.

First up, we got a mystery about sharks. Unexplainable producer, Manding Wins, got this one. Hi, Sean. Hi, Mandy. I don't think we've ever spoken before, so... No, is that true? A little intro then. Whoops.

I know you're good. To be fair, you were hired during the COVID-19 pandemic. That's true. I hardly know if anyone on my team is real. Anyway, the mystery I'm bringing you today is the question, do sharks sleep? Okay. Specifically, the species of sharks sleep. like great whites and hammerheads, that need to be continuously swimming

in order to survive because that's how they push oxygen-rich water through their gills. They never stop swimming, they don't lie still, they don't close their eyes or anything. And so I spoke to this researcher in Canada, Mike Kelly.

Okay. And so he was telling me that one reason why we don't know exactly if these sharks sleep is because sleep doesn't look the same in all animals. So when we think of sleep, we think of like an obvious state

of staying still, they have their eyes closed, non-responsive and there's also like associated brain states like REM and non-REM sleep. But some animals, for example, don't experience REM sleep. And so it's a little trickier than just looking at an animal and being like, oh, they're sleeping. Okay. And sharks in particular are really, really hard to study because they're hard to keep track of like the ocean is huge and they're just a tiny blip. And sharks are also really hard to keep in captivity. So there's like very little research on sleep and sharks in general.

I understand why it's hard to study sharks and, you know, why it's difficult to keep them in captivity, but can't you study, like, smaller sharks? Like maybe, I don't know, a baby shark? That's a good question. Maybe you just got to tell these scientists to study baby sharks. I don't know. Come on, Canadian shark guy. Step up.

Well, I mean, it's not baby sharks, but scientists have research on sharks that don't need to swim all the time. and it seems like these sharks, they can sleep when they stop moving. But for the rest of the sharks that need to be continuously swimming all the time, we still don't know if they sleep. Okay. So, Mike, walk me through some theories. The first is that these sharks don't sleep at all.

But he thinks it's unlikely because pretty much all animals sleep. Another is that these sharks do sleep by turning half their brains off at a time so that it allows them to stay awake and keep swimming. And this is something that actually some other animals also do, like some dolphins and birds. So there's precedent for it. Another theory is that sharks, they sleep in currents. Has the Shark Cam team discovered what white sharks do at night?

So there is this viral video that came out a while ago of a great white facing a current. Emma's jaws gap open. Moving ever so slightly. She appears to be in an almost catatonic state. And people were like, it sleeps, evidence of sleep. Could Emma be napping? But it's hard to tell. This is just a video, so we don't know what's going on in its brain.

And then there's also another kind of wacky idea that sharks do sleep, and they might be able to do so through something called vertical migration. Some species of sharks do really deep dives from kind of the top of the ocean to the bottom. And it's possible that they might be doing these like uncontrolled free fall descents, to push water through their gills. Cool. And then they're also sleeping. So that's kind of like a little bit of a more out there theory.

But Mike was telling me that, you know, understanding if sharks sleep or not and how they sleep, it might help us understand sleep better in general. Like, sleep in us is still something that's like a huge question mark. Like, we don't know why we sleep. We don't know why we spend a third of our lives sleeping. Wait, we don't know why we sleep? I feel like I sleep because I'm freaking tired. But like we don't know like why sleep has evolved so persistently.

One of the most basic things we do is still a big mystery, even though it's so, it's one of the rudimentary parts of being alive. Yeah. And sharks in particular are some of the oldest living vertebrates, like they evolved 450 million years ago. So understanding if they sleep and how it might help us understand the function of sleep and how it evolved in humans and other vertebrates in the first place. But for now, we don't know.

So, Sean, what do you make of this first mystery? Do sharks sleep? What's your reaction? I mean, the thing I love about your show is the thing I love about this mystery. I didn't even know this was a mystery. I didn't know we didn't know about sharks not sleeping or sleeping. It's a lot we don't know. All these things you think you know, it turns out we don't know.

I would like to get some marine biologists in a room and ask them what they've been wasting their time on while this whole time we don't know what sharks are doing for like, you know, half their lives or whatever. Seems like something we should figure out. Right? Or maybe, as is I think the nature of this game, we have figured it out, but you're not telling me yet? Completely possible. I see. Only two of these mysteries are still mysteries. One of them has been solved. Okay.

Next up, we got a mystery about ice frogs. from Unexplanable Reporter Bird Pinkerton. Hello, Sean. We have actually spoken before. Yes, it's true. I want you to picture this. So every winter in countries all around the world, there are species of frogs that freeze solid.

Like they super slow down, their heart stop beating, their blood stop circulating, and yet, when temperatures get warmer again, they just kind of thaw out. True story? Yes. True, I'm not making this up. Wow. Researchers have kind of, they figured out like a fair amount about how they freeze, but what we still don't know, probably, is how they're able to do this, how they're able to sort of thaw out and restart themselves and basically have zero negative effects.

It's especially shocking for me, who up until two minutes ago didn't even know this happened. And now, yes, I too want to know how it happens. Sean, I'm beginning to think that you don't know anything. I used to live in a country where this probably happened, which was Canada. And one time when I was leaving swim practice, my nanny, who was like walking me and my brother out, stepped on a frog. And it exploded under her foot. And then she walked off the frog. And it was kind of like a little bit of a biology lesson for me.

Oh, no. Well, here's the thing is that I don't think that they can come back from that. That frog was dead. But these frogs. Let me tell you what happens to them. So I talked to this scientist named Clara de Moral, who has studied these frogs in the past. And she told me that while we're still confused about the thawing, like, we do know a fair amount about the freezing. So basically what happens is something will trigger the freezing and part of the frog's body.

So the example she gave me is like maybe an ice crystal hits like the frog's leg. And then the ice just starts to like travel across their body, like freezing as it goes. it's traveling across their skin. And this triggers like a whole bunch of responses in the frog. The frog is like mummifying itself almost. It's like pumping itself full of these things called cryoprotectants. So what you end up with is like a frog mummy, basically, with a big ball of ice at its center and then just like this little dried out frog body on the outside.

And so I asked her like, is it dead? Like, it seems pretty dead. And she laughed and she said, quote, oh, God, no, no. I mean, excellent question. Well, it depends on your definition of death. Because with these frogs, like, when the temperatures get a little bit warmer again, they just sort of thaw out.

We don't really understand how they, like, kickstart their heart. And she says that if we can figure out how they do this, how they kickstart themselves, like, we probably can't freeze a whole, human that's probably out of the realm of possibility in case you were curious, like perhaps I was curious. But we could potentially freeze organs better. So part of the problem with organ transplantation is that you have to like get the organ out of one body and into another one as fast as possible and they have to travel sometimes a great distance. So if we could find a way to like properly freeze them and kickstart them again, that would be amazing. But right,

now it's unsolved, probably. So, Sean, that's our second mystery that may or may not be solved, how a frozen zombie frog can come back to life. What do you think about that one? Frozen mummy frog. Excuse you. Sorry, frozen mummy frog. Thank you, Bird. I'll tell you how I'm feeling, Hassanfeld. I'm feeling fearful that I will not guess correctly which of these unexplainables has become not unexplainable, because these are two very strong. contenders, and there's a third one around the corner, I'm presuming. There is a third one, and the third one is my story. Oh, no.

I've got a mystery for you. And it's all about wombats. Do you know what a wombat is? I think so. Is it a mammal? It's a mammal. It's a specific kind of mammal called the marsupial, so, you know, the ones with the baby and the pouch thing.

Oh, yeah. I can send you a picture, actually. this is what it looks like. Yeah, that's kind of what I pictured, like a hedgehoggy kind of thing. Yeah, basically. It's from Australia. It's actually pretty big, though.

It's like the size of a koala. Okay. And I'm going to show you it's poop. Oh, you're going to send me a photo of that too. Tell me what you see. I see an HR complaint. No, I'm just kidding. Oh, I see what looks like tofu,

but like ashy tofu. Yeah, it's cubic poop. It's the only cubic poop. poop that we know of. And it's really weird because, like, there's not a lot of cubes and squares in nature. Plus, the pipes in the wombat body are, like, wet and round. So how does that kind of make something that ends up as this two centimeter by two centimeter by four centimeter dry poop cube? I've seen something about this. Well, yeah, we've known for a long time that they poop cubes. But the mystery is how they do it. Are there theories?

We have theories. Okay. So the first theory that I tend to get when I tell people that wombat's poop cubes is square butthole. But that's not the case, is it? It's not the case. They CT scanned the butthole, super round butthole. Yeah. Another theory I've heard is that wombats kind of mold their poop into cubes.

Oh, afterwards? Like, they play with their poop? That's a theory that's been suggested. I don't think anyone's actually seen a wombat do this. They look too clumsy for that. quite frankly. That seems fair. And the last theory that seems most promising is that they have these, like, really dry

poops, and they have these long digestive tracts. And because it stays in there so long, something is happening that's making it into cubes, but a lot of animals have dry poops, and their poops aren't cubes. The one thing we do know, or we think we know here, is why. Really? So I talked to this scientist, Patricia Young, And she told me that wombat's like to mark their territory. So they'll poop on like a high spot, usually on like a high rock or a precipice or something.

And because their poop is so dry, if it was, you know, round, like a little pellet or something, it would just roll off the rock. So it actually helps them to have these kind of flat poops to sit up on the rocks and kind of be signs for wombats all around. Like, this is my wombat territory. Okay. But how they do this is so mysterious because, you know, again, perfect squares are pretty rare in nature, especially with animals. And ultimately, figuring this out isn't one of those we could fully understand sleep or we could fully understand reanimation from death type deals. You know, Patricia told me that she was just into this idea because she thought it was fun and she thought poop was funny. That's the one that seems the easiest to figure out.

You don't got to put a shark in captivity. You don't got to get inside a frozen frog. You just got to watch a poop. So that's the question, Sean, for the game. Are we presenting something that you think is going in the direction you're thinking? Or are we playing you? Oh. Are you guys going to play?

Okay. It's the moment of truth. You've got shark sleep, wombat, poop, frozen mummy frogs. They're all mysteries. Or at least they were all mysteries. until recently. This is the moment? This is it?

This is the moment. Oh, so much pressure. I want to get it right. You'll have a chance to guess after the break. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level.

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You lost. Okay. We're back. It's unexplainable or not. Sean, welcome back. Thank you for having me. So we got three potential mysteries here. Two of them are still actually mysteries, but one of them has been solved.

Mystery one, do the sharks that have to move all the time sleep? Mystery two, how do ice frogs thaw themselves out? And mystery three, how do wombat's poop cubes? Shark's sleeping, frogs freezing, wombat's pooping. Which do we know why? How? How? Everything in me says I should guess wombat's pooping

because it's the one I heard about in the past five years. So now I'm just trying to read your faces. I got to say wombat's pooping. Is it just because you're familiar? with it? Literally, I didn't even know the other two were phenomena, so I got to pick the one I've heard of. And I got to assume I heard of it because maybe I pay attention to the news enough to hear about scientific developments. Okay, so fingers are crossed. Before telling you the answer, let me just share my audio here. Last chance to change her answer. No, I'm not going to change.

I've committed. All right, Sean, here's your answer. So I did a whole series of P and Poopoved research, And that's the third portion of it. So urination, defecation, and wombat poop. Oh my God. What a track record. One for one. Congratulations. Trust your instincts, folks.

Trust your instincts. It's explainable. So I'm sweating. I'm a little sweaty. Amazing. Sean, I actually found out about this whole wombat poop thing from the Every Little Thing podcast. And I really wanted to talk to the scientists who solved the wombat.

bat poop mystery. So I called up Patricia Yang. Right now, I'm an assistant professor at National Ching Huai University in Taiwan. She's a physicist and an engineer, and she's also a poop expert. I studied pee and poop for a very long time, and that is my thesis topic. So she was like really confident in her poop knowledge. And at one point she was at this conference presenting on all the types of poop. And this professor comes up to her, and he's like, have you heard of wombat poop? their squares. And Patricia's like, Okay, I have to be polite.

That is a formal conference. So I said, oh, good to let me know. I would check later. But my real, real reaction is not going to happen. There's nothing square in biology. Shut up. That's my reaction, okay? So she did some research on her own,

got over her initial skepticism, and she realized that as an engineer, she might actually be the perfect person to finally solve this wombat problem. I think most of people think that's a biology problem, But that's actually an engineering problem. So first she was like, okay, where is the poop becoming cubed?

So she got in touch with this wombat scientist in Australia who sent her a wombat intestine, and it was full of cubes. It's happening before it exits the wombat. Exactly. And this wombat scientist told her there might be something up with the shape of the intestine itself. So because she's an engineer, Patricia decided to figure out exactly what was going on here, like whether the intestine could actually be forming the poop into cubes. Yeah.

So she was like, okay, I'll put some markings on the intestine and I'll stretch it. And if it's uniform all around, the markings will, you know, stretch uniformly. But she still needed to do the stretching. So she went and got this long balloon. So I inserted the balloon into the intestine, slowly in front of the balloon and see how the intestine expanded. Wow. And when the balloon, you know, inflated and expanded the intestine, some of the markings on the intestine stretched more and some of them stretched less.

So she's like, okay, there must be something weird here going on with the shape. Like the intestine isn't uniform all the way around. So she cut it open, put it in a machine. What did she cut open? The intestine? She cut open the intestine. She took like a slice of the intestine, put it in a machine, stretched it with this machine in more precise ways. and she saw that some of the walls of the intestine are thicker and stiffer,

and some of them are thinner and softer. And then when she ran this through a mathematical model, she realized that the thicker parts actually contract faster than the thinner parts. Cool. So after a few cycles of contracting, the thicker parts end up forming corners, and then ultimately you end up with poop squares. What a wonderful world. It's a wonderful world.

And what I love about this, too, is that she actually won the Ig Nobel Prize in physics for this research. So this prize acknowledged these research that first make you laugh, then later make you think. Sounds more fun. Sounds more fun. And that's exactly what Patricia was going for when she started on this research. You know, she was going for, like, laugh, fun, poop. I don't really set myself to save the world or something. I just won't get fun.

Let myself laugh at that moment. But then after she published this research, a doctor reached out to her and was like, I think your wombat cube poop research could actually help cancer research. He said the early syndrome of the colon cancer, you might have a portion on the colon that's stiff and thicker than the other portion. And that can cause poop to be cornered and flat-sided sometimes. So she says that like if you see poop with flat sides or corners when you look at your poop, then go to see a doctor. Wow.

And honestly, to me, like, this is the greatest part of trying to figure out unanswered questions, right? Like, this is a question that started as unexplainable. Patricia followed it where it naturally went and ended up adding to our knowledge of cancer research. So, you know, yeah, if you want to change the world, study poop. And let's get together and figure out if sharks are sleeping or not. It feels doable. So, Sean, one less thing before you go. Because you won, we have to tell everyone how great.

today explained is, but we also have a prize for you. Oh my goodness. A special prize. Is it a cubic poop? It's not a cubic poop. I think it's better, but depending on how much you like cubic poops, it might not be better. I'm going to play you a song. That's what I'm going to do.

Oh, my gosh. Here we go. I love songs. Have you seen a wombat poop? Their poops are shaped like cubes. And scientists forever didn't know how they passed through us. Round intestine and but holes. Wow.

So they took a balloon and inflated it into the intestine and stretched it to see how much it grew. And they saw that the thick and thin parts made the cubes. Beautiful. Informative. Give it the Grammy. That's basically it. Thank you, Sean. I look forward to listening to other people fail. to get the unexplainable or not right. But I'm walking out proud today

that I did not fail today explained or you guys. It's nice to notch the first W in the history of Unexplainable or not. Thank you for having me. Only down from here, Sean. Yes. Let's hope so. Thank you to our producers, Manding Wend.

Thank you. And Bird Pinkerton. You're welcome. And thank you, audience, for joining us. If you want to come on the show and present one of these mysteries, or if you want to be a contestant, let us know. Write us at Unexplanable at Vox.com.

If you have a mystery, let us know too. We're always looking for more unexplainable questions. And thanks for joining us on the first episode of Unexplainable or Not. I'm Meredith Hodnott, senior producer of Unexplanable, and I just wanted to pop in here and say, Today Explained is absolutely the greatest show around. It's so smart, it's so fun, it's so sharp, Even if it wasn't the wager of the game, I'd still be singing their praises, but it is, so I have to.

The Today Explained team is wicked talented, they're so hardworking, and the show is excellent. Check it out wherever you listen to these podcast things, or, you know, maybe even on your local radio station. This episode was produced by Noam Hassanfeld and me, Meredith Hodnott, reporting by Noam, Mandy Nguyen and Bird Pinkerton. It was edited by Catherine Wells and Brian Resnick, music by Noam, mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala, and fact-checking by Zoe Mullick. Thank you so much to Sean for being our very first contestant, and if you have any thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us. We're at Unexplanable at vox.com. You would also love it if you wrote us a little review, a little rating, show us some love, you know?

Unexplanable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. We're off next week, but we will be back in your feed, October 19th. Have you seen a wombat's poop? Their poops are shaped like cubes, and scientists forever didn't know how they passed through. The wombat's round intestine and bot, oh, that's big, poop.