Wonderful! - Wonderful! 265: Very Science One

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

Rachel's favorite telephantscope! Griffin's favorite stained-glass monster!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFoundation for Black Women’s Wellness: http://ffbww.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. I've just showered. Can you tell? Do you smell me, babe? Do you smell me, babe? I don't.

Oh, man, babe. I mean, I would if I were right next to you, but we- You probably would. I smell exclusive. We arranged the office as such that I cannot smell you from the systems. Oh my God, I just realized. I forgot to moisturize. Do we need to stop? Maybe. I've been trying to be good about i think it's too late i think it's

over now i think you missed your window from what i understand about moisturization you're supposed to do it right after you shower right as to lock in the freshness uh-huh everything's open oh god you gotta fill it up with moisture all the hard I've done. Now what if you go shower again? Now we're talking. Get juicy again. Seal that in. Of course, then you'll be double dry, and so you'll need to double moisturize. Double moisturize.

I can do that. You'll be slippery. I can do that. And you might fall and hurt yourself. Probably. That's my concern. I'll probably, yeah. And to get you some gripper socks like we have for Gus, you know, little treads on the bottom that would be huge for me actually i feel like i have at times owned

gripper socks in my life and there's a sense of security that comes along i mean they give them to you at trampoline parks hospitals and hospitals those are the two big ones so the slipperiest places no i've got a lot that could and will go wrong today. But doing a slip in the kitchen on the hardwood floors is no longer one of those possibilities. Because of the gripper socks. I could also just wear shoes all the time. Become a real sneakerhead. No, because you know we don't wear shoes in the house, Griffin.

That's true. You are wearing slippies right now, which feels like a cheat code. Well, these don't go outside. I guess they don't. Although sometimes they do when I have to bring the trash can out. Yeah, or a son goes wayward. Sometimes a son will just fucking go. Gus is at the point now where he has a fair amount of language skills, but there's also some habits.

And one of them is just leading us to the door. Yeah. As if like, and now we're going going outside i've determined our plans for now yeah we've established a pretty bad pattern with him of thinking that he is he is the one that is in charge of our sort of daily direction the outside thing gets me so excited though yeah because i i think i have a deep fear about our children just surrendering to the indoors at a very young age and so when they want to go outside i will drop everything and be like yes yes let us go outside if only but a minute i'm sure they will make that decision eventually but because we certainly made the decision to be inside you say

that but i was much more of an outdoor kid i think than you yeah i mean you went to art camp and stuff yeah i was outdoors like every summer i was outdoors all the time yeah i mean i was too man i went to i went to church camp and then sometimes we did like capture the flag and stuff so only we called it capture the bible and we would hide our bible not somewhere dirty because you're not supposed to do that anyway and then a team would run with it across field and you'd have to try and tackle them yeah that's basically it it sounds weird actually when someone who didn't do it says it like i feel like you're not giving it a fair shake maybe this is wonderful it's a show we talk about things we

like that is good and we do like oh did we start this show and this is uh this this week we're gonna start things off a little differently by doing a small wonder uh and maybe you could start us off by doing your small wonder or i could start us off by doing your small wonder, or I could start us off by doing a small wonder. And that's what's going to happen now. I'm going to say something that's going to make me sound like a real jock. Oh, shit. When it comes to hand weights. Here we go.

Here we go. Let me get comfortable. I really like the kettlebell yeah and i i think it's because it seems more fun to me and and it seems like more of a toy than a hand weight oh yeah i'm always playing with these things i can't stop myself they're like funko pops the reason i would never go into the label of jock is that I have not consistently incorporated fitness into my life ever. But when I do approach a weight, I like it to be a kettlebell. You watch a lot of sports. We watch a lot of sports.

Just hockey. We watch a lot of sport. Sport, period, yes. And you have thoughts about kettlebells. Babe, lean into it. You know? I have never possessed a protein powder. I feel like that's the final frontier.

What's stopping you? Nothing. Going to the store and buying the protein powder. It's the only gate between you and your destiny. I'm going to say the Great Wolf Lodge. We had our first Great Wolf Lodge experience this past weekend. If you don't know what that is it is a chain of resort feels there's nothing luxurious about the great wolf lodge no it is entirely utilitarian experience but it would like by definition be like a resort

for kids for children it is a refreshing change of pace from the things that we usually do uh where you know we'll go to a convention or some sort of event uh that will be entirely adult focused and bring our kids with us and then struggle to find things for them to do this is the inverse where you have your bowling your laser tag arcades a thing called magic quest which is like man i don't know an interactive technological treasure hunt throughout the hotel and then the water park of course water park has got it all we were there for about 36 hours and i i thought i would die at several points we came home and the four of us got the best night of sleep I think we've ever. We all slept until like 8 o'clock.

It was outrageous. I think I was trying to figure out like Disney is obviously much larger. Sure. Why am I more tired than I am at Disney? And I think it's just because Disney, by nature of rides you are sitting sometimes or standing still another feature of disney great wolf lodge no sitting i got very excited in the arcade there of course with a almost two-year-old is very easy to just sit in front of an arcade machine and never pay any money and there was one like a space invaders i forget what it's called but it's yeah i mean that is basically

like a chair in front of space invaders and gus really liked it and so i got to sit yeah for minutes at a time yeah it was huge huge for us it was a fun time though it wore us wore us out but it was it was fun it delighted the children and it it takes a mental load off to not have to struggle to like think of things to do to like keep your kids active and entertained and stuff. Things to do is like 80% of the reason we moved to this city. That's true. You know, like this is very important to us. That's true. You go first this week, I believe.

Yes. So it's funny that you um mentioned your smell okay are you gonna talk about my smell is your topic my smell i would love to hear you sort of put put words you put your poet's tongue to my body wow that one i want to give space around that can we just sit in silence Wow. That one. I want to give space around that. Can we just sit in silence for a while? Can we just acknowledge and give that the space it needs and give it a little grace maybe even?

What's your subject this week? It is olfactometers. This is cool. It is like a device to measure smell. This is sci-fi. This is real. Gene Roddenberry sort of. I'm going to show you a device to measure smell. This is sci-fi. This is real. This is Gene Roddenberry sort of. I'm going to show you a picture.

Hollow projection. It better look like a fucking nose. Well, no. Well, okay. It's like a telescope for your nose. It's like an elephant telescope. A telephant telescope. An elephant scope.

A telephant. No, that just sounds like a scope for elephants. Yeah, I don't think that portmanteau's in there. You would think it's deceptive. You think there's a great portmanteau there, but there's really not. So I'm going to take you on the journey that I went on. Teleskint? No, sorry, go ahead.

So this morning, Griffin was complaining a lot about the bad smell that our son made in his diaper. With his butt. And then he lit a candle, very fragrant, but in the- Very Christmassy candle. Positive direction, I think. I like that candle. It's a little, it's very balsam forward, is what I'll say. Yeah.

It definitely does smell like several months ago in our house right now. And then I decided I was going to make like a thai peanut sauce uh like chicken thing for dinner in our crock pot and i realized like my morning has been full of smells very fragrant uh i wonder what you didn't you say this you were not there for i wasn't and let me just say i sorry you were alone. I've been interfacing with diapers for six years now. This one was special. This was a specially bad one. I don't want people to hear you say Griffin smelled the diaper and got scared.

This one was bad. It was basically the first thing you said to me when I came down this morning. I wanted you to share it with me because you had missed the inciting event. just came downstairs you were like is it christmas but you didn't have to be there for the un-christmas that happened um yeah so anyway so i was thinking about smell okay and and then i was thinking about like what is what is the science of smell and i'm not really interested i think in how humans smell i'm more interested in like the science of smell and i'm not really interested i think in how humans smell i'm more interested in like the science around determining smell and whether or not there's like a whole field behind it and of course there is yeah um the thing i found first though was the

saint croix sensory descriptor wheel which was published in 2002 that lists types of smells and then subcategories under that that's fascinating so we've got floral we've got fruity we've got vegetable we've got earthy fishy chemical medicinal and then finally offensive okay i'm i would push so and under each of these categories they have these subheadings. Oh, wow. Okay. Because sometimes you're like, oh, I wonder, you know, what would we call, I don't know.

Most of these are pretty clearly fit where they would fit. I was going to push back against vegetable, but then I thought like, does, you know. Celery, corn, cucumber, dill, garlic. Grass. Grass, I think would be earthy. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, butill, garlic. Grass? Grass, I think, would be earthy. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, but offensive, I think, is an interesting category. Offensive feels like it's a catch-all for everything.

It's not anything else. A lot of it is like, you know, decay-y, you know, wasty kind of smells. But burnt is also in there. Okay. Which is kind of fun. Sure. And so then I was like, well, tell me more. well tell me burnt can be good like campfire smell is good but then i guess do we wrap back around to is that

i mean it's burning wood now is that earthy burnt wood is earthy okay it's under the earthy list cool asked asked and answered that's what we do on this show. So when I found this St. Croix sensory descriptor wheel, of course, I was like, well, I got to find out about this St. Croix sensory, which is a lab located. There's actually two locations now. It started in Minnesota, and there's now one in Canada. They got different smells up there. Toronto. Yeah. in canada uh specifically smells up there toronto yeah uh and then i found a new york times article uh that really just kind of got the whole thing together so it got the basically the guy behind the st croix sensory this is an article published january 2022 by the new york times and it's all about chuck mcginley who invented that machine, the nose telescope.

He calls it the nose ranger. Now, wait a minute. Is that a double barrel nose telescope, or is he using two of them? I think we're seeing the side more with the dial, whereas in that other picture. Oh, I see. Okay.

We couldn't see, but the dial is over here. Now I see it. Okay, cool. Just a different vantage point. How on God's green earth could that machine possibly work? So there have been machines like that for a while. This, of course, the Nasal Ranger is like the most precise. Go, go, Nasal Ranger.

I need the Nasal Ranger to come fucking morph my shit. Olfactometers were invented more than a century ago. That's, okay. I can't believe that this thing exists, let alone has existed for over 10 decades. Well, so here's the thing about smells, right? So a smell, you know, it can be just like a, like a, oh, hey, this smells like this. Or it can be like a real warning. Like, you know, pollution and different hazards can cause like severe effects to like your eyes, nose and throat. Right.

You know? Like this morning's diaper. Like this morning's diaper. Which would be in the offensive category, which we know now. But this guy, Chuckcginley um got started it's actually interesting so a lot of this falls under the vantage point of like environmental protection uh and so he got connected to it through the minnesota pollution control agency um before that he was at 3m and he was involved with the creation of scratch and sniff

technology. That's amazing. He said he had a very small part. He was very quick to say in the interview, it was not me, I was not the guy, but that's where I came from. Okay, I respect that. So he, in the interview in the New York Times times he talked about moving to the minnesota pollution control agency and kind of talking about his experience and the interviewer for him in this position at the time says the odor position pays more that's cool that's not what i would want to be called so he was hired as part of the agency's odor inspection team. This feels like some real blue collar comedy tour. You know what I mean?

Federal odor inspector. Yeah. I could see Lawrence the Cable Gentleman being like, yeah, my wife is a odor inspector, but not by choice. That's really good, honey. I tapped into something. So Chuck and his son, Mike, are in charge of this lab, St. Croix Sensory. And initially it was all around pollution. Their clients were largely like sewage treatment plants, people who were concerned basically

about putting out smells into the world. Yeah. But now they have taken on some fun tasks, including testing work for food and consumer goods, as well as recipes for immersive theater troops and museums. Cool. So some of the examples for a local theater production, he created 22 smells, including one to mimic an old woman's apartment.

So a real 4DX experience in live theater. The other example, when a detergent company wanted to test the smell of freshly laundered towels that had previously been mildew, it couldn't spend six months waiting for towels to mildew.

So Mike developed a mold smell. They couldn't wait six months? How urgent was this? I mean, I guess you don't just keep mildewing towels. When you invest your resources, you're going to pay a bunch of people to sit around for six months and wait for a towel to mold? Well, no, I wouldn't have a full-time mildew watcher.

But these are salaried employees who've got nothing to do. Yeah, that's fair. This one's interesting. A group was hired to, they were trained to categorize and to describe smells so like what i was telling you floral earthy whatever uh and then they conducted a test for a cat litter brand so they worked in a room lined with stainless steel boxes each with a small hole designed for nasal masks which is another invention that this mcginley guy made. And inside the boxes were different litter formations and a control, which was sand,

all freshly deposited with urine and poop. Oh, it's the worst room. That they had sourced from feline-owning friends. I heard about this. It's the worst room. The worst room. They were trying to figure out what's the worst room we could make.

And then someone was like, what if we made a room that was just cat litter from with i had different peas and poops in it all over it and it won the prize to go through and deeply smell worst job worst job worst room yeah but i'm glad someone's doing it i guess okay so the way the nasal ranger works is it quantifies the perceived odor level as dilutions to threshold. This is determined as the number of dilution needed to make the ambient air odor just detectable. So they start out at kind of the highest level, and then they like dial this thing to a point, and then they measure how long that dial is so determine so it measures this the power of the stink interesting okay that kind of makes sense to me i thought it made it so you could

smell far away stinks better but it sounds like it's more a measurement of atmospheric non-stink to stink yeah there's a video online um and i showed you a stilt from that video, and the woman is explaining how to use it. And basically, she's like, we come out to the site, and we just smell what we can smell normally. And then we put up the nasal ranger, and we start at like a 60, and then just dial until we get to where it disappears. That's fascinating. Everything you've said today has been fascinating so far. I know. I feel like I knew about some of this just from my brother's inexplicable obsession with fragrance.

Yeah. And the fragrance market. This was recently featured on Stephen Colbert. market this was recently featured on stephen colbert apparently a location i can't remember where had had enlisted the services of this lab and the nasal ranger because they were trying to detect like marijuana like fields okay so they were trying to figure out where they were and they wanted to use the nasal ranger to like pinpoint it. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. I could think of about a million more fun ways of using a machine like this.

But I suppose, you know, do with it what you will. How do I get my hands on one of these things? So they're like $3,400. Worth it. Sure. Okay. I mean, you can go to the website. I think you'd get hooked up.

Okay. Well, if you see a transaction in our bank account for Stinkonomics Incorporated for $3,400, you will know what that is for. And then you'll see me using it. That'll probably be an even more sort of explicit clue that I've purchased a stinkometer. I forget what it's called. Nasal ranger. Come on. Nasal ranger.

Way better things we could call it than a nasal ranger. Stink. See, to me, it conjures an Old West kind of like. Okay. Like a lone hero. I mean, the lone ranger. You've just added the word to it. That's what I'm thinking.

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county fair, dreamers. This is Steeplechase. The Adventure Zone. Every Thursday at MaximumFun.org. My topic may surprise you. It's not exactly on brand for me. But what is my brand? A lot of critics are talking. Eating bananas.

That was the most hurtful. Eating bananas without taking the peel off. That's the most hurtful thing you've ever done. Putting amoebas in your mouth. God, jeez, Rachel. You're holding two daggers dripping with my blood you're really really pleased with yourself right now i'm i anybody else no way you saying those things and seeing how delighted you literally have one hand to your mouth like i'm trying to think of a third thing that's even worse holy shit

butterflies that's the third thing now butterflies my three things are eating bananas eating nintendo toys not eating but just sort of admiring butterflies i have a note in my notes talking about how i don't want to eat a butterfly so we're gonna circle back up we're gonna hit that okay really hard um i'm not a big bug guy sort of in general but objectively speaking i think the fact that butterflies exist pretty fucking bonkers they're pretty they're pretty wild when you look at the arc of a butterfly and i would like to

discuss that and break that down with you yeah i mean they're so pretty so pretty you're just walking around and all of a sudden there's just like a little little stained glass monster just like just hovering by you there are a lot of bugs that fly but most of them are not pretty not yeah right like most i'm sure all bugs are beautiful in the lord's eyes but a lot of them leave a lot of opportunity on the table sort of aesthetically speaking but butterflies are living their best lives every day just picturing you raiding bugs like hot or not i could do that for sure i don't know anything about bugs, but I know what I like. And I like butterflies.

And let me say a lot of people who love butterflies and talk about how much they love butterflies also hate moths. I'm not one of those guys. I think moths are great too. Sometimes they're hairy. That's great for me. A nice, a big, fat, hairy moth. Cute. I love all that.

Yeah, and moths have patterns too, you know? Like that's exciting sure but today we're going to mostly be focusing on butterflies uh they've been around for 200 million years or so we've got uh fossil data sort of tracking them back that far uh they actually did evolve from moths they just got a big glow up i guess uh there's some 18,500 species of butterflies which is a lot. And they're on every continent except Antarctica because that would be a very cold butterfly. They are polymorphic, which means that – I mean it means that animals within the same sort of subset or species can look dramatically different, can have all of these different sort of markers,

leopards and, you know, any other number of patterned animals like that. Their patterns can be camouflage or they can be aposematic, which means they look poisonous or otherwise sort of threatening to an animal, which makes you not want to eat it and on that note i will say butterflies are crushing it in that regard i've never seen a butterfly i've been like yum what's an insect that you have seen and thought yeah i mean i have eaten an insect before once at the cincinnati zoo on a church trip oh do you have like a grasshopper or something it was like a like a tiny little meal worm sort of experience whoa tiny one not like a grub it didn't it wasn't wiggling um i think

i've eaten a cricket too yeah i've had crickets before yes whatever um they're migratory everybody knows that right but i didn't understand it i imagine a lot of people don't either just how migratory they are. Because you hear about the monarch butterfly, right? Monarch butterfly, originally native to North America, has ended up in other parts of the world for the past couple hundred years. And folks aren't 100% sure either a big wind got a butterfly all the way over to Europe and Asia and Europe and Asia and Africa, or, you know, they ended up on a boat, which must have been pretty disorienting for them. That seems more likely. They, the monarch butterfly, you know, they travel coast to coast. They can travel up to

3,000 miles to reach warmer climates before the winter strikes. But the British painted lady butterfly performs a migration that spans 9,000 miles round trip going between tropical Africa and the Arctic Circle. And it's a route that takes six whole generations to complete. Can you imagine if we were like we're going on a road trip? Our great, great, great grandchildren will arrive there. That is beautiful. I mean, if you think about the immigrant experience, it is often to provide your children a better life. But I think you assume that you're going to get to see some of that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But butterfly lifespans range pretty dramatically. They can live up to like a year, but most of live like a matter of weeks uh in their adult stage uh and everybody who's read the very hungry caterpillar knows all about the the life cycle right i'm not telling you anything you don't know they lay eggs on a leaf they pop out the egg they eat and they eat and eat and eat and eat until they cannot move uh and then they poop out a little bit of uh silk to attach themselves

to a leaf or a stick and then they form a chrysalis and then they turn into a butterfly yeah um that process i'd like to get a little bit deeper into i would also yes that i would like you to do it because i don't know that i fully okay we've i don't think we usually do that on this show where they're like we just are like let me take it for you go now um so first off some caterpillars most caterpillars obviously chill going around eating a leaf eating through one big juicy orange but they're still hungry right some of them are predators uh they eat stuff like ant eggs and larva some species of caterpillar uh some caterpillars form a symbiotic relationship with ant colonies where

the ants will like protect them in their larval form uh in exchange for the caterpillars collecting honeydew secretions for the ant colonies wild there's one i can't remember i think it's uh blue butterfly i forget blue caterpillar i forget what it's called uh it actually tricks the ants and it being like let's form a partnership and then the ants take the caterpillar larva to their nest and the caterpillar just eats all their eggs and larva and just has just like a real nice sort of buffet situation going for them which is diabolical um obviously the most interesting thing about butterflies is that they you know climb into a little sleeping bag made out of skin and then essentially dissolve and then they come out two weeks later completely different most butterflies don't spin cocoons i'm terrible at like keeping

the mnemonic device straight of like between moths and butterflies which ones do cocoons which ones do chrysalises there's a mnemonic device no that's what i'm saying there should be okay um some some butterflies do you know spin spin cocoons around themselves, but most of them just do a chrysalis, which essentially just means that they molt, like, their skin. it dissolves into goo and they just kind of hope that in the two weeks it takes for them to turn into a butterfly no like super nasty bird comes and has the worst gusher ever that process that takes place inside the chrysalis is called hollow metabolism and it's the wildest shit in nature caterpillars aren't the only bugs that uh do this right there's actually quite a few insects that if you think about their larval form to their adult form or their imago form uh just dramatically different unrecognizable right butterflies aren't the only one to get away with

it but uh their particular steez is bonkers they literally uh shed their skin, which they do several times throughout their caterpillar lifestyle. What's the word I'm looking for? They molt, right? And then while they're sort of inside of their own skin, they digest themselves using the same juices that they use to eat and process food. Okay. And then they turn their body into a bunch of what are called imaginal cells, which sounds very, very frivolous and delightful. Imaginal cells are basically cells that can be repurposed into anything, right? They can be, you could have your antenna that you dissolve down that could turn out to be part of a wing.

Because it turns into this sort of free form building block cell that can be repurposed. How have we not harnessed this technology to like cure cancer? Doesn't it seem like we should- Or become big butterfly men. Okay, over that. Yeah. Of course that. Curing cancer, obviously an important sort of target for humanity. To be able to start as one cell and turn into any kind of cell you want.

It's wild. Yeah. And for a long time, we didn't know like sort of how it worked. And we still don't exactly know, but basically there's like a deep genome, like deeply, deeply embedded inside the caterpillar that once it's just this bag of free form unassigned cells, they start to cluster together into these various systems that the genome kind of recognizes and then kind of like takes the wheel from there after it reaches a certain tipping point. That whole time that this hollow metabolism is happening inside of the chrysalis, the caterpillar's immune system is fighting it. Whoa. The caterpillar's immune system is like,

I don't know what the fuck is going on in here, but this is not a caterpillar. I am 100, I have one job here, and it's to make sure that the caterpillar's a caterpillar, and it feels like something pretty fishy is going on around here. But then eventually, this genome sort of starts to weave these different systems together. And then the butterfly takes over. And I have so many more questions now as a result of this segment.

Like, how does a caterpillar know when it is supposed to come a butterfly this is the well i mean it's it's i mean like so many things it it is instinct right it's like it's got better and make a skin bag for myself well literally they are driven by appetite to eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and grow because they have to uh or or else they'll die and then does the skin bag just start forming around them without even them doing anything no because they have to post up right they have to find a a secluded place yeah but like when bears hibernate it's like cold like i get there's a trigger like so sometimes actually some uh butterfly species can actually uh do a do their pupil stage extended over like a couple of months to actually pupate during the

winter um not all of them do that but it is something that they can't do the smart ones the smart ones do right um but i think it's just that they are constantly molting they're molting they're you know larval caterpillar stage has like several phases and they must just reach one where they have gotten so big literally too big for their britches splitting at the seams and they're like oh shit it's just wild now that you talked about that immune system being like wait this you're not supposed to be this makes me wonder well like but their biology is driving them to be this yeah there's a lot of big stuff to unpack here i mean when you start to think about like the what is it the ship of thesis is that what it's called you're asking the wrong girl. Does a butterfly remember it was a caterpillar? If its fucking brain got digested and then turned into a butterfly, but like, is it capable of being like, oh, damn, I should hit up Tony.

We used to chop it up when we were caterpillar. Are they like, you know, this butterfly forms. Okay. But I think I actually liked being a caterpillar better. Yeah. I don't I don't I don't know that that wisdom. Can we bring a butterfly into the studio to ask some questions i'm literally looking uh this up like as we speak

uh yeah it's it's not like completely known how much butterflies if anything can can remember their caterpillar lives a lot of it is i mean some of the sort of instinct stuff. They did a test, let's see, researchers at Georgetown University actually did a test where they trained caterpillars to dislike the smell of ethyl acetate. And then they sort of trained them to avoid the smell. And then they transformed into, it was actually moths uh and most of them still remembered to stay away from the ethyl acetate that's a fascinating i seriously thought they were like showing themselves like pictures like remember this guy this is your dad how could you forget no right like you talk about memory is such an abstract thing yeah right picturing them like

putting little mirrors in front of them every day right one day they look in the mirror and they're like wait what i don't know i mean we get when you consider this sort of whole process through Yeah. Right. Picturing them like putting little mirrors in front of them every day. Right. And then one day they look in the mirror and they're like, wait, what? I don't know. I mean, we get – when you consider this sort of whole process through a human lens, it is horrifying. Which I think is maybe part of the reason why we're so fascinated with them. Partially because they look so cool, but also partially because they literally – they break down at this cellular level and then turn into something completely. It's not like a direct evolutionary process where you're like, oh, that antenna just turned into a bigger antenna. Yeah.

I mean, that's the thing. Humans transform, obviously, through our lifetime. And times like puberty are pretty big, crazy, weird times. But we still look like people at the end of it you know yeah ship of theseus is what i was trying to remember it's the thing where they if you take a ship and then you replace it board by board until it's completely new parts it's still the same ship right uh i don't know i don't mean to start a sort of existential nosedive with this segment because yeah right uh i don't get that when I look at butterflies.

But at the same time, I don't know, it is kind of hard to avoid and it is kind of like rad, right? That we have all of these preconceived notions of like what it means to exist and to have form and function and then butterflies just sort of aren't as concerned with all of that

well and it's always been used as this like symbol of like you know kind of like becoming the most beautiful version of yourself no it's melted yes you're my butterfly sugar baby do you know what you're saying right now when you say that? It's more like when somebody blossoms into a more attractive version of themselves, a lot of times people will say like, oh, the caterpillar became the butterfly. But even that's not, it would be like if I went on a retreat, a solo monastic cloistered mission, just me. And then I came back and I was a bicycle. My human cells.

I get nervous because I'd see you eating a lot and I'd be like, I wonder what's going on with Griffin. I wonder what's going on. And then I'd be like, hey, I got to go up to the Smoky Mountains. Oh, man, you came back a bicycle. Yeah. And you might not even remember me. No, probably not. That's sad.

Unless you start training me now to be afraid of your smell. It's beautiful. Anyway, butterflies are fucking cool. I think, you know, I'm not going around looking at pictures of butterflies all the time, but when I think about how all of the sort of idiosyncratic ways that they, that they live, it's, it's endlessly fascinating to me. And I was happy to learn more about them.

Yeah, that's cool. So that's it for this show. Very science. I know. Very science. I know. Very science one this one. I know. We probably said a lot of wrong things.

Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But they felt right enough to me. Yeah. I mean, you know, and this is like reading Rainbow. Like, you don't have to take my word for it. Oh, that's good.

Like, go look it up. Thanks to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you to the Maximum Fun Network for having us on the network. Wonderful, wonderful bunch of folks there. And we have a new graphic novel that is out. It's out. This week.

It's the Adventure Zone 11th hour graphic novel, the fifth book in the series. It's if you like Groundhog Day or time loop sort of adventures, what's the Blumhouse, the Happy Death Day, I think is one. There's so many of these types of things this is one of them i'm glad that you said that because i feel like a lot of times you guys refer

to the arcs and for me it doesn't conjure exactly what was happening in the story yeah and so it's helpful for you to be like you know it's the one where they did the same thing over and over again and tried to get but that sounds bad when you say it that way. Okay. It's a book where the same thing keeps happening over and over again. No. I like – I mean that's the kind of sci-fi that I like. Sure. You know, where it's like it's not about like, you know, crazy monsters with a thousand arms. There are some of those though.

But that's okay. Anyway, you can find that at all great booksellers. And I mean if you go to macroy.family, you can find links to just like everything, man. Our YouTube channel, for instance, the Macroy family. We've been doing streams where we play classic Nintendo and Super Nintendo games all together in an online lobby. And that's been a hell of a lot of fun. You can find a bunch of stuff there, too. That's going to do it though for this episode

of Science Corner with well we can't say corner. I guess there's four corners in this. We're allowed to have multiple corners. We have poetry corner. We have science corner. I feel like gaming corner maybe I just have my own corner where I

just Griffin stuff. Yeah where I keep my games and my figurines, all my wonderful, you know... I got my big bust of Deadpool, you know? Well, we have a lot of corners. I mean, maybe it's just a, you know, it's like a... Octagonal. Yeah, right?

Because there's music, there's nostalgia, there's food. Those don't have to go in the corner. We can scatter those across the floor. So what necessitates a corner? I think it's a place you go and you have to be in a certain headspace for it. Okay. Okay. That's good.

When you come to Science Corner, we put on our science hats and put away childish jokes and teach. Become teachers. teachers yeah that's interesting most noble profession and then when we do poetry corner you kind of do that but i i just kind of sit there and i'm the pupil I am in my pupil stage. When you read poetry to me, I turn into a flesh bag of unassigned cells. But I come out the other end, beautiful butterfly. Every time? Yeah. It's really exhausting. Yeah.

Goodbye. I'm on. Hey! I'm on. I'm on. Hey! I'm on. Hey! I'm on. Hey! I'm on. Hey! MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned.

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