What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Jellyfish can learn from their mistakes even though they have no brains

By Rachel Feltman

Before we can talk about how jellyfish learn, we have to talk about the fact that they have no brains. That probably doesn’t surprise you if you’re thinking of the human brain as the archetype of the organ. 

But a brain is really just a cluster of nerve cells that control the body they’re in. Exactly what that cluster looks like can vary a lot, especially among invertebrates, where they’re often very simple structures called ganglia. But most of them have some kind of centralized nerve center. Jellyfish are some of the only animals that lack this structure entirely. Others include sea cucumbers, sea urchins, coral, and other marine creatures known for their deep intellectual pursuits. 
In a new study, researchers showed that the Caribbean box jellyfish can actually learn from experience, no brain required. Some scientists say this could mean that individual neurons are capable of learning. To learn more about the experiment—and its implications for our own cognitive abilities—check out this week’s episode.

Fact: Hollywood quicksand peaked in popularity back in the 1960s—but how does the real stuff work?

By Jess Boddy

Quicksand used to be everywhere in movies. It was every 10-year-old’s worst fear in the ’90s. One day you’re just livin life, walkin around, and then BAM!!!!!! Sucked into quicksand, sometimes up to your waist, sometimes ALL THE WAY IN. and we all know the classic instructions: DO NOT MOVE! The more you move, the faster you sink.

And although we may remember quicksand best from movies like The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story, it was actually most popular as a story device back in the 1960s. And as one Slate writer posits, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that ’60s culture outside of film was steeped in quicksand, too—from the Vietnam war to policies nicknamed “the quicksand model.” And as decades progressed, quicksand fell out of fashion with bell bottoms and tie-dye, though it did persist to scare us all as kids in the ’80s and ’90s.

But does quicksand behave in real life like it does in the movies, making you disappear into the ground in less than a second? If you struggle, do you really sink faster? Listen to this week’s episode to hear the verdict, corroborated by both real-life experience, a Nature study, and the MythBusters.

The post Even without brains, jellyfish learn from their mistakes appeared first on Popular Science.

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If you remember chatting with SmarterChild back on AOL Instant Messenger back in the day, you know how far ChatGPT and Google Bard have come. But how do these so-called chatbots work—and what’s the best way to use them to our advantage?

Chatbots are AI programs that respond to questions in a way that makes them seem like real people. That sounds pretty sophisticated, right? And these bots are. But when it comes down to it, they’re doing one thing really well: predicting one word after another.

So for ChatGPT or Google Bard, these chatbots are based on what are called large language models. That’s a kind of algorithm, and it gets trained on what are basically fill-in-the-blank, Mad-Libs style questions. The result is a program that can take your prompt and spit out an answer in phrases or sentences.

But it’s important to remember that while they might appear pretty human-like, they are most definitely not—they’re only imitating us. They don’t have common sense, and they aren’t taught the rules of grammar like you or I were in school. They are also only as good as what they were schooled on—and they can also produce a lot of nonsense.

To hear all about the nuts and bolts of how chatbots work, and the potential danger (legal or otherwise) in using them, you can subscribe to PopSci+ and read the full story by Charlotte Hu, in addition to listening to our new episode of Ask Us Anything. 

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Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Scientists made a claw machine out of a dead spider

By Rachel Feltman

This story comes from the 2023 Ig Nobel Awards. We’ve talked about a few Ig Nobel winners on the show before. In 2007, the government plans for a so-called gay bomb won the Ig Nobel Peace Prize. Anyway, the Ig Nobels are an annual award ceremony for research that makes you laugh, then makes you think. They were held in September, and one of the stories in particular really stuck out to me.

Last year, researchers from Rice University coined the ominous phrase “necrobotics” to describe a bold new field they’d ventured into. That’s “necro” for dead and “botics” for robotics. 

In a move that makes me think of those Big Mouth Billy Bass The Singing Sensation things that got really popular in the late 90s, the researchers used dead spiders to create robotic claw hands. 

This started in 2019, when mechanical engineers were setting up their lab at Rice and noticed a dead spider at the edge of a hallway. They got to wondering why spiders always curl their legs up so tight when they die. As any arachnid-expert could have told them, spiders have a hydraulic pressure system that controls their limbs. Basically, a spider’s muscles naturally keep its legs contracted into a closed position. It opens them by applying hydraulic pressure. When they die, they can no longer pump fluid into their little hydraulic legs to keep them open. So they default to their curled up state. The researchers decided to see if they could harness that claw-machine-like mechanism. All they had to do was find a way to pump up the hydraulic pressure. 

They landed on inserting a needle into the internal valves that wolf spiders use to fill up their own hydraulics, then super gluing it into place and attaching a syringe full of air. Puffing the air into the spider legs made them open up. You might be surprised to learn this study stirred a bit of controversy from other academics. 

In searching for other examples of necrobotics, I came across Custom Robotic Wildlife. They’re a 25-year-old small family business in Wisconsin that specializes in adding high-tech capabilities to taxidermy. Why, you may ask? Usually, it’s to create convincing decoys of wildlife to catch would-be poachers. To learn more about their unique roadkill robots—including some that poop candy—check out this week’s episode. 

FACT: Learning to talk to dolphins might help us talk to theoretical aliens

By Laura Krantz

Humans have been broadcasting our presence for about 85 years now, with radio, television, and radar, essentially spamming space with all kinds of messages. Very few of those have actually been deliberate—like the one from the Arecibo Telescope (RIP), or the Doritos commercial we sent out in 2008. But these are essentially messages in a bottle, tossed into the great black ocean of space, and it doesn’t seem likely that anyone or anything is going to come across them. But what if they do? What would we do if something answers back? How on Earth would we even figure out what they’re saying? Enter Dr. Laurance Doyle, an astrophysicist and member of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. He thinks if we really want to get some practice trying to communicate with species other than ourselves, we don’t have to look to space—we’ve got plenty of opportunities right here. 

In 1932, a linguist by the name of George Zipf had his students count the letters in the book Ulysses to see how many there were of each letter. What he found is that the second most common letter occurred approximately half as often as the first most common. The third most common occurred one third as often as the first, and so on down the line. Graphed out using a logarithmic scale, this information showed up as a downward 45 degree slope, or a minus one slope. In the end, Zipf plotted dozens and dozens of languages and got that same minus one slope for all of them. This statistical distribution became known as Zipf’s Law and scientists think that if a message obeys Zipf’s Law, it indicates that it’s a real language, that meaningful knowledge is being transmitted.

Now, this was supposed to just apply to human communications. But Laurance and two colleagues, Dr. Brenda Mccowan and Dr. Sean Hanser, had an idea. Dr. Mccowan had recorded and classified the whistles of bottlenose dolphins and so Dr. Doyle graphed her data based on Zipf’s Law—and got a minus one slope for dolphin whistles. The dolphins are talking (which, of course, Matt Groening already knew…). It turns out that several bird species do this as well, including African penguins.

The problem, of course, is that we have no idea what they’re saying. Per Dr. Doyle’s line of thinking, that seems to provide us with an excellent opportunity to practice our translation abilities. Should we ever receive that extraterrestrial message, we might have better luck dissecting it. And, of course, our understanding of how different species communicate here on Earth might give us a sense of how advanced an alien civilization is based on the complexity of the signal.

Check out more stories like this on today’s episode, in addition to my new book, Is Anybody Out There? A Wild Thing Book.

FACT: The oldest living aquarium fish has been around for at least 15 US presidents and maybe as many as 18

By Chelsey B. Coombs

It’s surprisingly difficult to tell how old a fish is. In the past, if you wanted to know a fish’s age, you had to use a ring-counting method like you use with trees, but with these strange calcium carbonate structures located directly behind the brain called otoliths. And unfortunately, that means having to kill the fish, which is obviously bad if you’re working with endangered species like the Australian lungfish.

One Australian lungfish in particular has been around for a looooooong time, and her name is, appropriately, Methuselah. She arrived at the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences all the way back in November 1938.

Methuselah is a legend and a sweetie who apparently loves figs and getting belly rubs. But no one knew exactly how old she was – they were going off of her arrival date to the museum, which would put her around 84 years old.

Luckily, two scientists, Dr. Ben Mayne of CSIRO, which is like Australia’s NSF, and Dr. David T. Roberts of Seqwater, the Queensland Government Bulk Water Supply Authority, created a non-invasive way to estimate the age of fish using their DNA. That’s important because it helps us predict how populations will grow and we can use that data to aid in the conservation of these important species.

They found that our girl Methuselah is probably around 92 years old, although taking into account the method’s margin of error, she could be as old as 101. And that makes her, as far as we know, the oldest living aquarium fish.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Einstein’s brain got stolen, then got lost, then got used for some terrible “science” 

By Rachel Feltman

I’ve wanted to talk about Einstein’s noggin for a while, but I decided to finally take the leap because my hometown haunt the Mütter Museum has been in the news. The Mütter Museum is where medical students, history nerds and hot goth girls alike go to learn about the history of medicine through the lens of creepy and beautiful displays that include soapified corpses, phrenology skull collections, watermelon-sized ovarian cysts and fetuses with deadly congenital disorders.

I won’t go too deep into the current controversy, but the Mütter, which has been collecting and displaying medical paraphernalia and human remains since 1863, is under new management and overdue for an ethics review—and a lot of people are freaking out. You can hear my own rambling thoughts on the issue by listening to this week’s episode, but this piece by artist Riva Lehrer gets at the heart of the issue better than I ever could. 

One of the Mütter’s most commonly praised specimens is more ethically dubious than most visitors realize. It’s the brain of none other than Albert Einstein. 

First things first: Albert Einstein’s brain was straight up stolen. Einstein wanted to be cremated, but when he died of an aortic aneurysm in Princeton, New Jersey in 1955, the pathologist who presided over his autopsy, one Thomas Harvey, was like “surely he didn’t mean his brain” and just… kept it! When Einstein’s son Hans Albert found out, Harvey apparently convinced him that the scientific value of his father’s brain was such that cremating it would be a tragedy, and Hans demurred. But this happened after Einstein’s ashes had been scattered in a private moment by his family somewhere along the Delaware River, so you have to imagine Hans might have had a different answer if there had still been time to put the brain back with the rest of him. 

But despite Harvey’s big talk about using Einstein’s brain to unlock the secrets of genius, it would mostly get carried around the country for the next 30-odd years. 

Harvey lost his job at Princeton Hospital, then spent some time in Philadelphia, where he had the brain dissected into hundreds of blocks and mounted on thousands of slides. He then traveled throughout the midwest, occasionally giving universities some slivers of brain to study, apparently often carrying them in a beer cooler. But no one would actually publish research on Einstein’s brain until 1985. Several studies have cropped up since then, but they’ve all reached pretty dubious conclusions. To find out more about how Einstein’s actually-pretty-unremarkable brain has revealed our misguided obsession with innate intelligence, check out this week’s episode. 

FACT: A Miami county is fighting peacock overpopulation by giving the birds vasectomies

By Sandra Gutierrez

Parts of Miami-Dade county have been positively overrun by peacocks. This invasive species was brought from India and commercialized as “exotic yard ornaments” in the 1920s and 30s. They have since become sort of a symbol of Miami—they’re part of the scenery and people love them. 

But peacocks are not the brightest and can be kind of jerks. They’re known to peck and scratch dark-colored vehicles because they see their reflection and think it’s another male. There have also been reports of these colorful birds harassing kids holding food, and getting extremely territorial around mating season. To add insult to injury, peacocks poop everywhere, their feathers clog AC units, and they are very vocal—Miami residents have been complaining about the birds waking them up in the middle of the night and interrupting their Zoom calls with all their squawking.  

Controlling the peafowl overpopulation has been a challenge. Catching them can be somewhat  of a dangerous sport since they can grow to be up to 4-feet tall, and there’s regulation protecting the birds from being killed or captured. This is the context in which Pinecrest, a Miami-Dade county municipality, pitched a vasectomy initiative to wane the presence of peafowl within its borders. For every procedure, they’ll prevent up to 7 females from laying fertilized eggs, which is efficient but also expensive and labor-intensive. 

Avian vasectomies are pretty similar to human ones, as the anatomy is very similar. Unlike ducks, geese, and swans, peacocks don’t have a penis. Instead, they have a small bump of erectile tissue on the back wall of their cloaca called papilla. Just like in humans, vasectomies don’t prevent the release of seminal fluid, only of sperm, so the bird can continue to act as a dominant male.

We don’t know if this is going to solve the peacock problem at Miami-Dade, but research shows that just like what happens in humans and other mammals, avian vasectomies are safe and overall, don’t have reported negative effects: they don’t change breeding behavior, hormonal levels stay the same, and courtship and copulation post-surgery remain unaltered, so the peacocks should be just fine.

FACT: Hippos were nearly farmed in the US for meat

By Sarah Gailey

If you like Beyond Meat patties, wait’ll you try this beef alternative. In 1910, America had two big problems to solve: a shortage of meat, and an abundance of invasive water hyacinth choking off the Mississippi river delta. Congressman Robert Broussard proposed a bold solution—he suggested the importation of exotic livestock, including hippopotami, into the US. Broussard’s proposal would have resulted in one of the biggest land grabs in United States history, along with one of the most disastrous ecological and economic collapses in the world. Listen to find out just how big a bullet we dodged, and how close we came to being a nation overrun by feral, furious tanks made of ham. We also discuss the legacy of cocaine in Central America, the growth behaviors of one of the most invasive plants in the world, and (of course) the question of how hard it would be to castrate an unwilling hippo. Supplemental reading material includes Jon Mooallem’s deep dive and my book, American Hippo, an alternate history asking what kind of cowboys we might need to tame a hippopotamus-infested frontier.

The post American hippopotamus ranching almost took off 100 years ago appeared first on Popular Science.

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For nearly half a century, Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition has celebrated the beauty captured by extreme magnification. This year, the photomicrography contest was stacked: a panel of journalists and scientists selected winners from 1,900 entries submitted by researchers and photographers in 72 countries. Subjects as diverse as mutant fish, chemical reactions, and a speck of space rock became works of art when seen really, really up close.

Above, in first place, is a rodent’s optic nerve head. Blood vessels, each only 110 microns in diameter, radiate outward like the fizzing arms of a firework. The yellow star-like shapes surrounding the vessels are astrocytes, cellular helpers that maintain neuronal systems. Vision researchers at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia—Hassanain Qambari, assisted by Jayden Dickson—imaged the optic disc at 20x magnification as part of a study of diabetic retinopathy; this condition can cause blindness in people with diabetes.

“The visual system is a complex and highly specialized organ, with even relatively minor perturbations to the retinal circulation able to cause devastating vision loss,” Qambari said in a news release. “I entered the competition as a way to showcase the complexity of retinal microcirculation.” Below are other top photos, and you can see even more at Nikon’s Small World site.

[Related: 15 remarkable JWST images that reveal the wonders of our vast universe]

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The post 11 fiery shots of fall foliage around the US appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Leprosy is back. So where did it come from?

By Rachel Feltman

In early August, a case report in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal sounded the alarm on, you guessed it, an emerging infectious disease. But instead of a new strain of bird flu or some exotic new mosquito-borne parasite, the researchers were warning the medical community about the return of a real throwback: leprosy. Cases in the southeast have doubled over the last decade. Central Florida has such a disproportionate share of reported cases—81% of the 159 cases in 2020, to be exact—that the researchers suggest leprosy might now be endemic there, which means there’s a consistent, ongoing presence of the disease, as opposed to occasional outbreaks when someone brings it in from somewhere else. 

Like news reports on cases of the plague, which yes, people still get, this one set off a lot of frantic headlines about “biblical diseases” being back on the rise. Leprosy, which is officially called Hansen’s disease these days, is probably the most commonly referenced and least understood infectious disease in history. So let’s talk about how it got that way. 

First, the facts: Yes, Hansen’s disease, which is caused by the bacteria Mycobacterium leprae and M. lepromatosis, is contagious. But it’s extremely hard to catch. We aren’t even exactly sure how it’s transmitted, because we know casual contact, like sitting next to someone on public transportation or shaking hands with them, isn’t enough. Leprosy has been called a “wimp of a pathogen,” because it dies pretty much instantly once it’s outside of the body. It’s possible that the bacteria spreads through droplets from coughs and sneezes, but in any case, it seems like you only run the risk of catching it from someone if you have really prolonged close contact. 

Side note: You can also catch leprosy from touching or eating an infected armadillo. The nine-banded armadillo is known to carry the disease. Humans are thought to have transmitted it to them about 500 years ago. Red squirrels were recently found to carry it too, and the trade of their fur in medieval Europe may have fueled an epidemic at that time. 

Even if you’re in close contact with a person (or armadillo) with Hansen’s disease, you’re extremely unlikely to contract it. Only five percent of people who are exposed actually become infected, because most people’s immune systems are able to brush these bacteria off. Certain genetic variations are thought to play a role in determining susceptibility. Even then, the bacteria grows so slowly that it can take years or decades for you to develop symptoms. 

The first noticeable sign of leprosy is often the development of pale or pink coloured patches of skin that may be insensitive to temperature or pain. The loss of fingers and toes often associated with untreated Hansen’s disease isn’t because leprosy makes tissue fall off; it’s because it can cause nerve damage, and without pain receptors in fingers and toes, it’s very common to injure them without realizing and get infections, similar to what happens in people with severe and untreated diabetes. 

Luckily the disease is easily treated with antibiotics, and you stop being contagious within days of starting treatment.

So how did we get our overblown idea of what leprosy is? 

Our oldest physical evidence of Hansen’s disease dates back to 4,000 years ago. A skeleton was found in India that showed signs of the bone lesions that can occur if the disease is left untreated. While there are lots of earlier historical references to leprosy, it’s likely that these descriptions referred to all sorts of conditions that affected the skin, including syphilis, which actually is highly contagious. 

So: Conflation of many diseases, lack of certainty about how and when someone might contract Hansen’s disease, plus the very real issue of serious disease in a few folks led to an outsized fear of the relatively benign ailment. 

This stigma peaked in Western Europe during the Middle Ages, when people with Hansen’s disease were said to literally be doing their time in purgatory while still alive, and were banished to the edge of town to beg for alms. 

But this ridiculous stigma also has a pretty recent history. In 1865, Hawaii introduced laws allowing the arrest and removal of people with leprosy, and began housing them in isolation on the island of Molokai. Those laws weren’t lifted until 1969. As of 2015, there were still 16 former patients living there. 

If you live in an area where leprosy is on the rise, keep an eye out for symptoms and see your doctor about any mysterious rashes. But don’t be weird about it! Hansen’s disease is no reason to treat humans (or armadillos) with fear or disgust. 

FACT: Ancient people made high-tech tools out of space rocks

By Sara Kiley Watson

The Bronze Age, which lasted from around 3000 BCE to 1000 BCE was a step up, at least engineering wise, from the Stone Age. Humans essentially graduated from rock tools to metal tools—namely, duh, bronze. Bronze was made from melting tin and copper together, and could be made to use some pretty neat stuff, especially when it comes to weaponry.

As we know today, there are even stronger materials than bronze, and one of those is iron. And we still use a whole lot of iron in the modern world. The problem here is that to turn iron ore, which is relatively common throughout the world into usable iron, you need to know what you’re doing. So how did iron end up in a rare selection of Bronze Age tools, long before the art of smelting was commonplace? Meteors. Yep, some of the biggest and baddest characters of the ancient era, King Tut included, had superstrong tools made from space rocks long before humans really got the hang of iron.

FACT: Ancient tweezers made people scream so loud, people wrote noise complaints

By Laura Baisas

If you think waxing is bad, try plucking your armpit hair. That was par for the course in Roman Britain. A recent archaeological dig in the UK uncovered more than 50 tweezers dating back to the Roman occupation that were used to tweeze armpit hair. Roman author and politician Seneca once wrote a letter complaining about the noise coming from from the public baths, noting “the skinny armpit hair-plucker whose cries are shrill, so as to draw people’s attention, and never stop, except when he is doing his job and making someone else shriek for him.” Learn more about this agonizing fact in today’s episode.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Curly hair may have evolved to keep our heads cool

By Rachel Feltman

As a certified Curly Girl, I’ve always been fascinated by the different shapes human hair can take. But for most of modern history, science has woefully neglected the study of curly and tightly-coiled hair. Thankfully that’s starting to change, due in large part to the curiosity-driven research and advocacy of Dr. Tina Lasisi. You can read more about Lasisi and her work on the morphology and evolution of human hair here, in an awesome article by PopSci alum Hannah Seo. 

On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I dig into the findings of one of Lasisi’s most intriguing studies. In 2021, she and her colleagues were able to demonstrate that curls help keep our heads cool. Humans evolved to rely on thermoregulation from sweat, which uses evaporative cooling. But our big ol’ brains are prone to overheating, so in a perfect world, we don’t want them getting hot enough to produce sweat in the first place. That’s likely why we kept the fur on our heads while losing almost all the rest of it, which makes us look pretty bizarre lined up with other mammals and even other apes. Hair can block the radiant heat of the sun, thereby preventing it from scorching up our scalps and cooking our noggins. 

Here’s the problem: While hair does physically block sunlight from hitting our heads, it also serves as insulation, trapping any heat that makes it through. 

Because tighter curls tend to correspond with areas with higher UV exposure, globally speaking, Lasisi and her colleagues decided to test whether coils and ringlets did a better job of keeping heads cool than straight hair. They tested this using a delightfully odd looking setup involving mannequins with glamorous wigs and power cords plugged into their eye sockets. 

Sure enough, they found that wavy hair kept heads cooler than straight hair, while tighter cools provided the greatest cooling effect at all. And having any kind of hair was better than being bald, in terms of the sun’s ability to sizzle the skin atop your skull. 

Lasisi and her colleagues think that curls create a sort of spongy effect, allowing air to circulate freely and keeping heat from getting trapped there. Listen to this week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week to hear more interesting facts about the evolution of curls and coils.

FACT: Turkey Vultures projectile vomit in self defense

By Liz Clayton Fuller

Turkey Vultures are one of the heroes of the bird world. Often misunderstood, these incredible birds perform a service to society by eating carrion, the decaying flesh of dead animals. Carrion can carry (see what I did there) all kinds of toxins and diseases like anthrax, tuberculosis, and even rabies. Incredibly, Turkey Vultures can ingest all of the aforementioned contaminants unharmed because their stomachs are so highly acidic! The acidity of their stomachs makes their projectile vomiting strategy particularly effective. While consuming their carrion prey they stay nice and clean by having bald heads with no feathers and huge nostrils so that no bits of carrion get stuck to them. They also engage in a practice called “urohidrosis” which is where an animal urinates on itself in order to cool down when it gets hot out, so Turkey Vultures have certainly earned their reputation for being a little nasty—but still amazing.

So Turkey Vultures perform this incredible service to humanity by cleaning up carrion, but how do they find the carrion to take care of? Turkey Vultures have the largest and most powerful olfactory system in the bird world which helps them find their (already deceased) prey. Their sense of smell can lead them to carcasses miles away and in fact many other Vultures rely on Turkey Vultures to locate carrion and then they follow them to it! As for what kind of carrion is on the menu, they prefer freshly dead meat. It is a common misconception that Turkey Vultures stalk and kill their prey, but they only arrive after their prey is deceased. Other than the common denominator of being freshly dead, Turkey Vultures aren’t picky at all. In Tennessee alone I’ve seen them on the clean up crew of Armadillos, Skunks, Cow, Deer, Groundhogs, and more. So next time you see a Turkey Vulture soaring by, tell them thank you for being nature’s clean up crew!

Fact: Renegade Zambian astronauts tried to beat Americans to the moon

By Purbita Saha

In 1964 the world was buzzing about the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. But a feature in Time magazine brought forth a new contender: Zambia, a southern African country that had recently won independence from the British. In the article, a science teacher named Edward Makuka Nkoloso shared that he was training a team of 12 astronauts to catapult his nation to the surface of the moon. No, they weren’t literally building a space catapult—they had a claustrophobic barrel-shaped rocket—but the candidates were learning to walk on their hands because that’s how Nkoloso thought they would have to navigate inhospitable lunar terrain. Ultimately, the teacher settled on a crew of a teenage girl, a missionary, two cats, and his own dog, Cyclops. But without any funding, Nkoloso’s dream to send his country folk beyond Earth’s orbit fizzled into legend. No one could ever confirm if his endeavor was genuine or an attention-grabbing stunt—a 2014 short film called The Afronauts reimagines it as pure fiction.

Maybe Nkoloso would be proud of his region’s emerging importance in astronomy today. From the MeerKAT radio array to the Africa Millimeter Telescope, multinational teams of scientists are finding never-before-seen wonders in the stars, all thanks to the clear skies of southern Africa. If nothing else, the proud Zambian who was interviewed by Time more than 60 years ago had a vision for the future.

The post Turkey vultures have the ultimate self-defense technique: projectile vomiting appeared first on Popular Science.

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The oceans cover more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, but humans have only visited and mapped 5 percent of them. They remain one of the greatest, deepest mysteries close to home. With the help of scientists and photographers, however, we’re uncovering more wildlife and more about the flows and balances in oceans day by day. While we might never know everything that unfolds beneath the great blue waves, we can always keep our curiosities and appetites alive.

The post Sea the beauty of the world’s oceans with these 12 award-worthy photos appeared first on Popular Science.

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An unexpected and astonishing find located more than 2.5 million light-years from Earth took top honors at the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year awards this week. Amateur astronomers Marcel Drechsler, Xavier Strottner, and Yann Sainty captured an image of a massive plasma arc near the Andromeda Galaxy, a discovery that has resulted in scientists looking closer into the giant gas cloud.

“This astrophoto is as spectacular as [it is] valuable,” judge and astrophotographer László Francsics said in a press release. “It not only presents Andromeda in a new way, but also raises the quality of astrophotography to a higher level.”

[Related: How to get a great nightsky shot]

While “Andromeda, Unexpected” captured the prestigious overall winner title, other category winners also dazzled with photos of dancing auroras, neon sprites raining down from the night’s sky, and stunning far-off nebulas that might make you feel like a tiny earthling floating through space.

Sit back and scroll in awe at all the category winners, runners-up, and highly commended images from the 2023 Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year honorees.

Galaxy

Overall winner: Andromeda, Unexpected

Runner-Up: The Eyes Galaxies

Highly Commended: Neighbors

Aurora

Winner: Brushstroke

Runner-up: Circle of Light

Highly Commended: Fire on the Horizon

Our Moon

Winner: Mars-Set

Runner-Up: Sundown on the Terminator

Highly Commended: Last Full Moon of the Year Featuring a Colourful Corona During a Close Encounter with Mars

Our Sun

Winner: A Sun Question

Runner-Up: Dark Star

Highly Commended: The Great Solar Flare 

People & Space

Winner: Zeila

Runner-Up: A Visit to Tycho

Highly Commended: Close Encounters of The Haslingden Kind

Planets, Comets & Asteroids

Winner: Suspended in a Sunbeam

Runner-Up: Jupiter Close to Opposition

Highly Commended: Uranus with Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Oberon and Titania

Skyscapes

Winner: Grand Cosmic Fireworks

Runner-Up: Celestial Equator Above First World War Trench Memorial

Highly Commended: Noctilucent Night

Stars & Nebulae

Winner: New Class of Galactic Nebulae Around the Star YY Hya

Runner-Up: LDN 1448 et al.

Highly Commended: The Dark Wolf – Fenrir

The Sir Patrick Moore Prize for Best Newcomer

Winner: Sh2-132: Blinded by the Light

Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year

Winner: The Running Chicken Nebula

Runner-Up: Blue Spirit Drifting in the Clouds

Highly Commended: Lunar Occultation of Mars

Highly Commended: Roses Blooming in the Dark: NGC 2337

Highly Commended: Moon at Nightfall

Annie Maunder Prize for Image Innovation

Winner: Black Echo

The post 31 award-winning astronomy photos: From fiery horizons to whimsical auroras appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Ancient people survived the apocalypse in style

By Annalee Newitz

Around 1200 BCE in the Mediterranean region, there was an historical event that archaeologists often call the “Bronze Age Collapse.” Nobody is certain what happened, but there is strong evidence that there were earthquakes and social uprisings, which together left several large, wealthy cities in ruins. From Mycenae off the coast of Greece, to Ugarit in Syria, researchers have found the remains of fire, fighting, and destruction that signaled the end of the area’s great Bronze Age powers. But a new study reported in Antiquity journal reveals that civilization survived – albeit in humbler places.

A group called Bays of East Attica Regional Survey (BEARS for short) conducted a survey of surface-area remains from a thriving post-Bronze Age town in Porto Rafti, a coastal area southeast of Athens. Among the items left from households in the town, BEARS found fancy jewelry and ceramics, as well as obsidian tools imported from distant regions and complex collections of cookware that had previously been seen in elite kitchens on Mycenae. The archaeologists believe that this town continued to enjoy the luxuries of a Bronze Age city in their small coastal town because they had easy access to trade routes that allowed them to maintain social and economic relationships with other communities. 

So if you want to survive a massive social transformation in style, the best thing you can do is keep up good relationships with your neighbors.

FACT: Researchers thought that the remains of this powerful Copper Age leader were of a man. A tooth proved otherwise

By Chelsey B. Coombs

It’s really hard to tell someone’s sex from poorly preserved remains. While archaeologists have often relied on size differences they see in craniums and pelvises, those parts don’t always escape the sands of time.

In 2008, archaeologists came upon a burial chamber in Valencina, Spain, with an incredible treasure trove of goods, including an entire African elephant’s tusk, which was kind of weird to find in Europe, a large ceramic plate with traces of wine and cannabis, a flint dagger, an ivory comb, and just one person’s remains in it. Clearly, this was the burial site of an important person. The remains weren’t super well preserved and using the standard methods of analysis at the time, they determined they belonged to a man between 17 to 25 years old, who they dubbed the Ivory Man.

Since then, there have been advances in science that make determining human remains’ sex much easier, and they involve teeth. There’s a protein in our tooth enamel called amelogenin that comes in different forms based upon sex chromosomes, X and Y, and it’s often preserved pretty well. Using this methodology, in 2021, archaeologists determined that the Ivory Man was actually the Ivory Lady.

It’s fascinating because it shows there’s this huge sex and gender bias, present in all science, but in this case, archaeology, that has informed our ideas about what prehistoric society was like.

FACT: Birds have been using anti-bird spikes to build love nests and fortresses 

By Rachel Feltman

Researchers at the The Natural History Museum in Rotterdam have found that anti-bird spikes are being co-opted for pro-bird purposes: They’re showing up as building materials in nests. 

Birds using gnarly human materials in their nests isn’t news in and of itself. Published reports of nests made out of wire date back to 1933, and researchers have reported birds using barbed wire, nails and screws. One study even showed that pigeons in Canada were using old syringes for their (infamously terrible looking, but actually surprisingly adequate) nests. Generally speaking, birds are great at using our trash to build homes, for better and for worse.

The Rotterdam researchers reported on several bird nests made using anti-bird spikes, an example of hostile architecture. They found that crows were harvesting and using the spikes to shore up the stability of their nests, while magpies were using them to adorn the outside of their spherical nests. They believe that in addition to adding decor to the flashy magpie nests, the spikes may serve to deter larger birds and other potential predators. 

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Wildlife Photographer of the Year is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London.

From the tops of Mount Olympus in Pieria, Greece, to the sandy floors of Rijeka, Croatia, the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition explores nature’s magic through the “eyes” of cameras. With each shot and submission, photographers reveal unique moments in the great outdoors in luminous detail, letting us catch a glimpse of the hidden lives of animals, plants, and other natural elements. Maybe it’s from the bow of a weathered fishing boat, encrusted in sea salt, as a local fisherman hauls in the day’s catch under the Ecuadorian sunlight. Or maybe it’s from a chilly prairie covered in fresh snow, as a shaggy bison shakes powdery flakes from its fur.

As the founder and long-time organizer of Wildlife Photographer of the Year, the National History Museum in London has remained committed to sharing entries from eminent photographers who documented natural history subjects, expeditions, and museum exhibits. The winners of the 59th contest will be announced in October and will be followed by a new gallery at the museum. Until then, enjoy these highly commended images selected from thousands of award-worthy images by the judging panel.

The post 11 jaw-dropping photos of marsupials, mushrooms, and more appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Male mice are terrified of bananas

By Rachel Feltman

A while back, researchers at McGill University were studying pain sensitivity in mice and noticed something weird: When pregnant female mice—which were being used for another experiment—were kept close by, the male subjects started acting strangely. A grad student picked up on the fact that they were “aggressive” and had “super-high pain thresholds” when the pregnant females were in the area. 

So, not only is this a weird quirk that begs explanation, but it was also potentially messing up the study’s results—and maybe even the results of other, previously published studies where scientists had inadvertently skewed data by keeping pregnant mice around. The researchers decided to start a new experiment to investigate further. 

They zeroed in on the fact that soiled bedding from a pregnant female was enough to give males the superhuman (supermouse?) pain tolerance. A look at their hormonal levels also showed they were experiencing a spike in stress. They eventually isolated the chemical n-pentyl acetate, which can appear in female mouse urine, as the signal the males were reacting to.

Totally coincidentally, n-pentyl acetate is what gives bananas their signature odor. The researchers picked up some banana oil from a local supermarket and doused cotton balls in it to see if their presence would have the same effect. Sure enough, the banana funk raised stress hormones and lowered pain sensitivity. In both cases—urine and banana—the effect kicked in within five minutes and lasted about an hour. 

The researchers think this hormonal spike directly relates to a fight or flight response. Why would pregnant mice (and, as a result, bananas) have such an effect on young, healthy males? Because pregnant mice, generally speaking, can and will kick the absolute crap out of a young male mouse. 

Male mice, especially virgins (which researchers call “sexually naive”), have a tendency to try to kill babies. Rodents in general are more open to infanticide than we would like; females of many species will chow down on their children if something makes them smell unfamiliar, or if they have too many babies at once. Meanwhile, males of many species will go after pups that aren’t theirs. There have been some studies that suggest that introducing the smell of an unfamiliar male is enough to make certain rodent mamas stop caring for their pups, presumably because they assume some dude is going to come eat them and don’t want to waste energy on them in the meantime. 

By the way, young females without pups are also known to sometimes go bananas on other mice’s babies. They stop this behavior once they have kids of their own. Researchers have found that a whole region of the brain quiets down after a mouse gives birth, and that chemically blocking it can keep young ladies from getting infanticidal—while stimulating it can send any mouse on a baby-eating rampage. 

Research on the Chilean degu, an adorable rodent that nests in big social groups and does not put babies on the menu, suggests that there are genes that make a species more or less likely to go the infanticide route. Communal nesting may have evolved as an alternative to violent male competition. 

Back to mice: Studies have shown that a gene called Trpc2 is a big factor in determining whether a mouse is a parent-of-the-year—or at least a decent babysitter—or an infanticidal brute. Females who lack the Trpc2 gene act like males, which is to say they run around harassing pups and trying to mount other adult mice. When scientists engineered a male mouse with an activated Trpc2 gene, he reacted to the introduction of strange pups by building a nest and gently placing the foundlings inside. 

The protein that Trpc2 encodes is crucial in allowing animals to sense pheromones, which brings us back to the banana business. 

Basically, the researchers concluded that nursing mothers give off this chemical signal to say “don’t mess with me or my pups, or I will mess you up”—and males have evolved to actually listen, or at least get ready for the fight of their lives. 

Obviously this finding is kind of weird and funny, but it’s also important. Just like the researchers in this study, many scientists studying animal behavior in the lab are inadvertently introducing variables that mess up their data. The researchers point out that female pheromones, in particular, have been woefully underrepresented in the scientific literature—male animals are more likely to be studied, which is a known scientific bias and a huge problem in actually understanding how animals work. Plus, who knows: maybe even a grad student’s unfortunate choice of snack could insidiously skew an experimental result. 

FACT: One of our ancestors had extremely swole leg muscles

By Sara Kiley Watson

Human lineage split from chimpanzees (are our closest living relatives today) about seven million years ago, but early, primitive primates were evolving around 55 million years ago. Fast forward to 2 or 3 million years ago, and we’ve got the earliest tools being made, and also around the middle of when Australopithecus africanus’s reign, which had a bigger brain than its predecessors. Fast forward again to November 1974, and scientists discovered Lucy, a 40-percent complete fossil of a young female Australopithecus afarensis.

While the discovery of Lucy changed archeology forever, there are still loads of questions about who she was and how she lived. But recent research shows that Lucy was probably a lot more like modern humans than we realized when it comes to her ability to walk around on two legs—and she had the super-powered muscle mass in her legs to prove it.

FACT: Wildfires and fungal spores are dangerously intertwined

By Kasha Patel

If we learned anything from The Last of Us, it’s that some fungi can appear immutable and even indestructible. We take a tour on how fungal infections are linked with wildfire smoke, how fungi are adapting to warmer temperatures and why infections are hard to treat.

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The annual World Robot Conference wrapped up today in Beijing after a full week of humanoid, dog, butterfly, and industrial showcases. First launched in 2015, the WRC serves as a meetup for designers, investors, students, researchers, and curious visitors to check out the latest advancements in AI-powered machinery.

From four-legged assistants, to human-like expressive heads, to bipedal “cyborgs,” WRC offered some of the latest, greatest, and strangest projects currently in the works. Check out the gallery below highlighting which robots dazzled onlookers and could soon move from the conference showroom to the everyday world.

The post See the coolest and strangest machines from the World Robot Conference appeared first on Popular Science.

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Oh, the wonders scientists see in the field. Documenting the encounters can be an integral part of the discovery process, but it can also pull others into the experience. These seven photos and illustrations are the winners of this year’s BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition, which gets submissions from researchers all around the world each year. It includes four categories: “Research in Action,” “Protecting our planet,” “Plants and Fungi,” and “Paleoecology.”

See the full gallery of winners and their stories on the BMC Ecology and Evolution website. And explore last year’s winners here.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Ornithologists play bird chess so you don’t get pooped on

By Amanda Reed

A muderous scene descended on the University of Pittsburgh campus and surrounding Oakland neighborhood in fall 2017. Students and faculty would leave class at the Cathedral of Learning or leave the Carnegie Museum of Art and see hundreds of crows roosting in the trees. 

The university sought out the help of The National Aviary in Pittsburgh’s Northside neighborhood, which is the country’s largest aviary (aka bird zoo) and the only one with an honorary national distinction from Congress. However, the university couldn’t play any ol’ bird sounds to scare away the crows: Beloved peregrine falcons roost on top of the Cathedral of Learning, and choosing the wrong predator could scare away the crows and the falcons. The solution laid in the deep hoots of this common North American bird. This story is my magnum opus from college and I’m giving it the flowers it finally deserves. 

FACT: Crocodile dung was probably a better birth control method than you’d expect

By Rachel Feltman

Around 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, women were shoving crocodile turds up their vaginas in a bid to keep babies at bay. Shocking? Yes. Upsetting? A bit. Laughable? Well, no. Not really. To be clear, this tactic is far from advisable compared to modern-day options. Even so, it’s quite reasonable to suspect this horrifying method sorta kinda probably worked. 

The poo in question would have served as a physical barrier between the vagina and the cervix, which would have prevented some if not all sperm from meeting an egg. In fact, the moldable nature of a somewhat dried turd may have allowed for a more comfortable and effective barrier than a ready-made, hard object, such as a piece of wood or metal. We also know that, at least in some cases, ancient Egyptians were not relying on dung alone. They—smartly!—mixed honey (we now know this is a powerful antimicrobial agent, which would have helped keep this contraceptive from causing gnarly infections) with ground-up acacia leaves (these produce the known spermicide lactic acid, which is one of Phexxi’s active ingredients). It sounds awful. But, by god, it makes sense.

While we don’t know for sure how well such a concoction would have worked, the basic recipe of a physical barrier and a sperm-killing additive is a classic combo, found again and again across the ancient world. The Talmud references women using sponges soaked in vinegar: this, like the Egyptian version, would have provided a cervical barrier, while also making the vaginal pH less hospitable to sperm. Other cultures in antiquity used various toxic substances like lead, mixed with oil and honey, or ghee along with rock salt. Elephant dung made at least one appearance. Now, to my knowledge, no one has put these to the test in a modern experimental setting, for reasons I hope are obvious. But the mechanics make sense. 

This is not to say that doctors should tear up their prescription pads and send patients wading into the Nile. We’ve come a long way in our pursuit of reliable family planning. To give just the briefest of overviews: Folks tried to sneeze or high-kick the semen right out of them (this didn’t work). They inserted primitive precursors to IUDs that kept their cervixes permanently stuffed with metal or glass (ow). They took various herbs with varying degrees of success (and varying degrees of death). Less than 100 years ago, Lysol was almost literally marketing its corrosive cleaning fluid as a way to keep ones’ uterus spic-and-span and inhospitable to human life. 

To learn more about the wild history of human sex and related shenanigans, check out my book. 

FACT: A monkey took a selfie and set off a years-long legal battle

By Stan Horaczek

Copyright law is complicated, especially when wildlife gets involved. In the late 2010s, nature photographer David Slater spent several years in Indonesia to document the endangered Celebes crested macaques. Part of his creative process included setting up a camera on a tripod with a remote trigger cable. One of the monkeys grabbed the cable and started taking photos, which panned out to be adorable monkey selfies. That’s when the trouble started. Since the monkey had technically triggered the shutter by pushing the button on the remote, it seemed possible that the monkey would hold the intellectual property of the image. Since animals aren’t allowed to own IP, the image risked falling into the public domain, which would prevent Slater from licensing the image. This kicked off a legal battle that lasted nearly a decade in order to find out just what happens when a wild macaque tries its hand at professional photography.

The post Ancient Egyptians used crocodile dung for birth control—and it kind of worked appeared first on Popular Science.

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Every summer, bright lights seem to shoot out of the constellation named for Greek hero Perseus. And while falling space rocks might not sound as epic as slaying a legendary monster, the colorful shimmering light of this annual meteor shower is still quite a sight to behold. This year, the show started in mid-July and will last until the beginning of September, but just this weekend marked the peak of the season. The waning crescent moon allows the meteors to truly glow against a dark night-to-early-morning sky, when skywatchers have noted seeing up to 90 meteors shoot across the stars every hour.

If you missed this year’s peak, luckily the shower still looks great in photographs. Take a look at some of our favorites, and set a pre-dawn alarm if you want to try to catch the Perseids before they vanish in the fall.

The post 10 cosmically beautiful photos of the Perseid meteor shower from around the world appeared first on Popular Science.

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The tech on our phones is pretty incredible—and the cameras available to everyone with an iPhone are a good example. Some people have gone so far as to film documentaries using just their phone’s camera. And over the years, the ability of iPhone and Android cameras has gotten better and better, and there’s a plethora of tips online to help turn what could just be another Instagram post into something really special.

For the 16th year in a row, the iPhone Photography Awards has chosen a handful of especially beautiful shots from thousands of iPhone-taken submissions from around the world. Here are some of the winners, and some PopSci favorites.

The post Check out some of the winners of the latest iPhone Photography Awards appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Kids might just be better (amateur) archeologists than adults are 

By Rachel Feltman 

A few months ago, an eight year old girl named Elise was playing during recess at her school in Norway. She bent down to pick up a piece of litter, and noticed a nice rock. So she grabbed it. Her teacher was like, Elise, sorry, I have to confiscate this rock, because I’m pretty sure it’s an object of historical significance! Don’t you hate it when that happens?

It turned out to be a neolithic dagger—a more than 4,000 year old hunk of flint from the time when humans were transitioning to agricultural lifestyles. 

This story got me thinking about kids finding fossils and other ancient relics. There are so many news stories like this one! In 2006, the Hamilton Junior Naturalist Club in New Zealand took a group of children to go fossil-hunting. The kids found a 30-million-year-old giant penguin. In 2014, two different kids—one 10 and one 11—found prehistoric projectiles on the same stretch of New Jersey beach within weeks of one another. 

In 2015, a four-year-old named Wiley was out with his dad, a zookeeper, and spotted a 100-million-year-old dinosaur bone. In 2018, a Swedish eight-year-old named Saga reached into the water at her family’s lake house and pulled out a three-foot-long sword that turned out to be 1,500 years old. In 2019, a 12 year old Ohio boy named Jackson Hepner was playing around in a creek bed when he stumbled across an odd, jagged object jutting out of the mud. It turned out to be a 7-inch-long mammoth tooth. 

In 2021, the Libyan department of antiquities honored six children who had found relics from different eras by chance while playing in the vicinity of an ancient city. The department of antiquities had launched an awareness campaign to encourage youth and other citizens to keep an eye out for artifacts, and to turn them in instead of selling them. Also in 2021, a four year old named Lily Wilder was walking with her parents on the beach in South Wales and spotted a fossilized dinosaur footprint, which turned out to be 220 million years old. 

What gives? Is this just about newspapers being biased in favor of adorable kids covered in dirt? Almost certainly yes. But that doesn’t mean kids don’t have a very real edge over adults when it comes to finding fossils and other ancient treasures.

In a 2019 Atlas Obscura article, Jessica Leigh Hester spoke to several archaeologists who agreed that kids have the advantage when it comes to being an amateur relic hunter. They’re curious, they’re closer to the ground, they tend to relish in getting dirty, and they’re not self-conscious or nervous about scrabbling around or getting on the ground to take a closer look at something. 

As promised in this week’s episode, here’s more info on the “closet archeology” adventures happening in one NYC elementary school. We love ancient history! 

FACT: Spicy peppers may have a quite unlikely origin

By Sara Kiley Watson

Where do chili peppers come from? Many folks would say South America, and for good reason. Until very very recently, scientists believed that chili peppers evolved in South America at most 15 million years ago. Chili peppers are varieties of the berry-fruit of plants from the genus Capsicum, which are members of the nightshade family Solanaceae. Solanacea makes up a ton of the most important plants in your pantry—tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, tomatillos, eggplants. But it also has some toxic cousins: belladonna, mandrake, tobacco to name a few. These kinds of plants are found kind of everywhere in the world, but tend to be happiest in tropical latin america where they are abundant and widely distributed. 

But, these flavorful little fruits actually likely have a much longer back story—one that could start in an unexpected locale. In 2021, a postdoc and undergrad student in Colorado met up to check out some specimens in the collection from the Green River Formation. What they found could shake up the spicy history of this culinary favorite. 

FACT: The Babylonians were absolutely god-like at mathematics

By Moiya McTier

A paper from 2016 shows evidence that ancient Babylonians used an advanced form of abstract geometry 1400 years before it was thought to be invented in England. Dr. Mathieu Ossendrijver studied clay tablets that describe how the Babylonians used geometry instead of arithmetic to track the motion of Jupiter. They were interested in the big planet’s behavior because they thought it reflected the will of their patron god Marduk. We already knew Babylonians were influential astronomers, but now we know they were equally prodigious mathematicians! 

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ARE YOU a sucker for a good Wikipedia spiral? Do you love crushing the competition at trivia night? Are you determined to be the most interesting person at every party you go to? Then you’re going to love The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

On the hit Popular Science podcast, our hosts share the strangest, silliest, most fascinating stories they can find from science, history, technology, medicine, and more. From the history of doctor-prescribed cannibalism, to tales of the world’s most devastating butter-fueled fires, to the bizarre legacy of competitive guppy swallowing, this show has it all. Accidental death rays? Yes. Scientific scam artists? Obviously. Bugs with pee-related superpowers? All day long.

Live show: August 24 at Caveat in NYC

Join the podcast hosts for an evening of bizarre tales from science and history, hilariously educational visual aids, audience games, prizes and more. PopSci+ members get $5 off tickets for the show or livestream. To become a member and get the discount code (plus full access to all PopSci+ stories), sign up here.

Longtime Weirdos will love our line-up, which includes beloved show alums Claire Maldarelli and Sara Chodosh along with host Rachel Feltman and producer Jess Boddy. See you there!

And if you can’t make it, check out the regular podcast every other Wednesday morning on Apple, Anchor, and anywhere else you listen to podcasts.

The post Live from New York: ‘The Weirdest Thing’ podcast (in person!) appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Before humans ate chickens, we treasured them as exotic pets 

By Rachel Feltman 

This fact started with an article called “How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry” by ​​Kenny Torrella at Vox, which is as wild and interesting as it sounds. But in an effort to not just crib this one fantastic piece of reporting, I decided I’d pull a few random facts from farther back in chicken history. My mind is blown. 

It turns out that the origin of domesticated chickens is hotly contested. Until recently, it was fairly widely accepted that people were breeding jungle fowl in Asia as far back as 10,000 years ago. There wasn’t any evidence of butchering that long ago, though, so some suggested the birds were bred for cockfighting, not for eating. The oldest signs of chicken bones that people had slaughtered and snacked on came from the ancient city of Maresha, which is in the Judean Lowlands and sat at the crossroads of trade routes for Egypt and Jerusalem during the Iron Age, peaking between 400 and 200 BC. 

But in 2022, an international group of researchers called foul. They used radiocarbon dating to confirm the ages of 23 of the proposed earliest chickens found in western Eurasia and north-west Africa. In addition to finding that a lot of bones were younger than previously thought, the researchers also showed that those 10,000 year old cock fighting bones were actually from pheasants. 

According to the new analysis, the oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were found in central Thailand and dated to between 1650 BC and 1250 BC.

Based on the timing, which coincides with the rise of rice and millet cultivation in dry fields in that region, the researchers think domestication could have started when a few jungle fowl were tempted down from the trees and into human settlements by the abundance of free grain—sort of like the way the most docile wolves started hanging around human campfires. 

But we know based on the archaeological evidence that people didn’t start eating chickens for meat for hundreds of years. And according to the new study, as domesticated fowl spread across Asia and then throughout the Mediterranean along routes used by early Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician maritime traders, there was a clear pattern of the birds arriving several centuries before people started eating them. 

In early Southeast Asian sites, partial or whole skeletons of adult chickens were found placed in human graves. And in Europe, several of the earliest chickens, from around 50 BC to 100 AD, were buried alone or in human graves and show no signs of having been butchered. One grave chicken even showed evidence of a healed leg fracture, suggesting someone cared for it lovingly during its life. 

The researchers argue that these domesticated jungle fowl would have been some of the most colorful and friendly birds folks had ever encountered, making them sort of like pet parrots. So even if cultures didn’t actively revere them, it would have been understandable for them to see them as exotic and cute and cool to keep around. 

During the rise of the Roman Empire, we know that eggs became an extremely popular snack. It seems like the widespread adoption of chicken meat as a human food probably followed naturally from that industry. In England, chickens were not eaten regularly until around 1,700 years ago, and that happened at urban and military sites influenced by Roman occupation. 

Fast forward through the shipping error that started it all and a delightfully bizarre competition to breed the best possible chicken, and we come to the modern poultry industry. It’s… not great. Here’s what to look for on labels if you want to make sure your chicken is as ethically raised as possible. 

FACT: Sizing for women’s clothing is based on a whole lot of hooey

By Heather Radke

From the very beginning of my book research, I was certain that eugenicists must have had something to say about butts. They were, after all, obsessed with bodies, and obsessed with putting bodies in hierarchies. Butts are complex, fraught symbols and, by the time American eugenics had become massively popular in the early 20th century, they had become widely associated with racial categorization and female fertility, both major interests of the eugenics movement. Despite my certainty, though, it took a long time for me to find the connection between butts and eugenics. I read histories of eugenics, talked to archivists, and eventually interviewed a woman named Kate O’Connor, who was a PhD student at the University of Michigan studying the history of sterilization. It was in my interviews with Kate that I learned about two statues, called Norma and Normman. The statues were created by a gynecologist and a sculptor and were meant to be depictions of the most normal American man and woman—representations of bodies, and butts, that were perfect in their averageness. In order to attain this ideal for Normman, the creators mined army data and were relatively easily able to create a sculpture of an “ordinary American man.” Norma proved to be a much trickier project. At first it seemed there was no data set that offered a similar set of statistics for women that the army data did for men. But then, the sculptor and gynecologist found a WPA project, put together by a woman named Ruth O’Brien, that was designed to solve a century-old problem: the fit of women’s clothes. O’Brien had been trying to create standardized sizing for women’s ready-to-wear clothes. She sent “measuring squads” across the United States to measure thousands of women in order to design a system of sizes that would fit the most number of women possible. The squads took dozens of measurements and noted them all down to send back to O’Brien in Washington, with one exception. O’Brien had instructed them all to throw out data from non-white women. Her sizing scheme excluded women of color. For the gynecologist and sculptor, both committed eugenicists, this exclusion was a feature, not a bug — they were only interested in depicting the most normal white women. And that’s exactly what they did. They made a sculpture of the most normal woman with the most normal butt and displayed it in the American Museum of Natural history.

FACT: Parrots seem to really enjoy video chatting with other parrots.

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Pet loneliness is a huge problem because humans just can’t be there for their animals 24/7. There are over 20.6 million parrots kept as pets in the US, but they often don’t get enough enrichment like they would in the wild with a flock. That can lead to negative behaviors like pacing, excessive sleeping and vocalizations, feather-picking and even self-mutilation.
So scientists at Northeastern University, the MIT Media Lab and the University of Glasgow decided to create and test a parrot-to-parrot video calling system to find out if that could help.

During the introductory phase, the birds learned how to use a bell to ask their caregivers to video chat with other birds using Facebook Messenger. In the main phase of the study, a group of birds and owners would schedule a three-hour-long window in which they were all available to make and receive calls. During that time, the bell and the phone or tablet would come out, and the parrots could choose which of the other birds they wanted to call.

And it ended up being really successful! 100% of the caregiver participants said they believed their birds had at least a moderately positive experience, and some birds even learned new bird behaviors they’d never known how to do before. And while all of these calls were still facilitated by caregivers, this study could help inform new technology that would let parrots video call their friends whenever they wanted.

The post Before humans ate chickens, we treasured them as exotic pets appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Roaches are changing the way they have sex, and it’s all our fault (again)

By Rachel Feltman

A recent study showed that human interference may have had a big impact on the way German cockroaches romance one another—and this isn’t even the first time that’s happened. 

When it’s time to do the deed, a male cockroach will provide a “nuptial gift” to his female of choice. It’s a solution full of proteins, fats and sugars, so it’s sort of like giving chocolate to someone you’re trying to woo (if you secreted that chocolate from a gland under your wings). The goo contains maltose, which quickly turns into glucose when it hits a female’s saliva. 

The delicious gift entices the female to climb up onto her sugar daddy’s back for easier access, which gives him an opportunity to latch his hooked, telescoping penis (!) onto her reproductive tract. Then they face in opposite directions, attached at the bum, and stay that way for an hour and a half. And they say romance is dead! 

Humans screwed this process up in the late 20th century. Because roaches love sweet treats—nuptial and otherwise—researchers created pesticides containing glucose to tempt them into poisoning themselves. It worked so well that by the 1980s, there were German roach populations in Florida who no longer sought out sweet stuff to eat. Several other populations have shown similar mutations since then. Basically, hijacking the cockroach sweet tooth was so effective that bugs with weird sugar-hating mutations were doing all the baby-making. 

That’s a real problem for amorous male roaches. Last year, researchers confirmed that females with the glucose aversion mutation actively avoided male nuptial gifts. They’d run off from the mating attempt as soon as they got a taste of something other than fat and protein.

Unfortunately for us, it seems like roaches have created a solution all by themselves. In a study published in April, scientists showed that glucose-averse male cockroaches have developed two traits to deal with this issue. For one, they’ve started to secrete less maltose and more maltotriose. It’s a more complex sugar molecule that takes five minutes to break down into glucose in the female’s saliva. Females seem to like it better even when they don’t have the glucose-aversion mutation, and the long delay keeps glucose-averse maidens from scurrying off in disgust. The males have also gotten faster in doing their chocolate-to-penis bait and switch. It usually takes a male three to four seconds to lock their genitalia onto a female’s, but scientists say the ones they observed had shaved around a second off of that time. Meanwhile, the females seem to be developing changes in their saliva that make the process of turning maltose or maltotriose into glucose even slower. 

For more weird animal sex, check out my book!

FACT: Fire swamps à la Dark Souls and The Princess Bride have a real-life counterpart

By Jess Boddy

I was inspired to research this fact during a recent playthrough of Dark Souls I was doing on Twitch. As I traversed the infamous Blighttown swamp, zweihander in hand, it struck me how wild it is that there’s an entirely separate zone situated just beneath all of the poison gunk—a fire zone. And sometimes, as with the spider boss Quelaag, that fire seeps up through the poison gunk. And that made me think of The Princess Bride, a wonderful film that has a swamp where fire spurts from the ground. So I was thinking, why are fire swamps a thing? Could they exist in real life?

Reader, they can. There have been instances of people traversing swamps, either on foot or by boat, and they see a plume of flames. This is where a lot of swamp ghost stories come from. For example, in some European folklore, these fireballs were thought to be satanic sprites that could wield fire, and these were called will-o-the-wisps! 

So, yes, it happens in real life… but let’s say it’s NOT ghosts. Could it be a scientific phenomenon? Well, PopSci actually did a story on this back in 2018, and a microbiologist explains how bog water is stagnant and oxygen-deprived, creating the perfect environment for anaerobic bacteria, or microorganisms that live without oxygen. Sometimes, those microbes can create the right conditions for some flammable gasses to build up.

The notion of fire swamps even go back to 1783, in what many consider to be the very first American science experiment. George Washington, waiting in Princeton, New Jersey for the freshly-signed Treaty of Paris to arrive, fiercely debated with his soldiers on whether will-o-the-wisps were ghosts or science. (A classic debate.) They paddled down the river with a torch and a long stick, literally probing for an answer. Then, apparently, moments later, a “great, big flash” erupted from the water. So… fire swamp!

Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about real-life fire swamps and how Dark Souls’ connection of chaos and pyromancy also has roots in science.

FACT: Scientific scammers are everywhere. Here’s how to spot them

By Amanda Reed

Scientific scams are more common than we think. The “vaccines cause autism” study: scientific scam! The deeply flawed original 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield was retracted and he had his medical license revoked for it, but people still run with it today. Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos: scientific scam! Thernanos’ Edison testing device was not doing anything magical with fingerpricks of blood, and now she’s is serving time for it. What defines a scientific scam, or scientific misconduct? Per the National Academy of Sciences’ “On Being a Scientist: A Guide to Responsible Conduct in Research, scientific misconduct is “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” It ranges from using Photoshop to manipulate images and graphs to even abuse of confidentiality in peer review. But there are ways to spot them—you just have to listen to the episode to learn more. 

The post Fire swamps are more than just folk legend appeared first on Popular Science.

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“No one can mistake a frog for any other vertebrate,” writes herpetologist C. Kenneth Dodd Jr. in his newly published edition of Frogs of the United States and Canada. The jumpy amphibians share the “same basic body plan,” he notes: big eyes, short heads, “little or no neck,” and a compact form. This combined with powerful limbs helps the animals get around easily on both land and water.

And, boy, do they get around. About 7,400 frog species known to biologists dig, leap, and swim across the planet. In Dodd’s new guide—which also features many of his photographs—he focuses on the 114 native and introduced species that dwell north of the US-Mexico border. (Hawaii is the only state without local frogs, though coquis have taken over the island chain with their raucous chirps since being introduced in the 1980s.)

Frogs and their warty subset, toads, typically live by water, where adults lay eggs and swimming tadpoles awkwardly grow into their legs. Yet, when it comes to habitats, the amphibians are a diverse bunch, with some found in prairies and tropics while others hop high in the mountains. Let’s meet a few of the fun ones from Dodd’s book.

[Related: Behold, the tapir frog’s magnificent snout]

[Related: How did ancient frogs move between America and Australia?]

Buy Frogs of the United States and Canada by C. Kenneth Dodd Jr. here.

The post Check out some of the weirdest warty frogs in North America appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The dishwasher was invented by one of America’s first girlbosses

By Sara Kiley Watson

Behind many inventions are typically pretty interesting people. After all, to dream up and actually create some of the stuff we have on earth takes a lot of creativity and will, especially when it comes to the devices we often take for granted today. Take the dishwasher. 

You might not think about the dishwasher that often, but trust me, when you don’t have one, you’ll be thinking about it. Washing dishes, after all, is a chore. And back in the 1800s, chores were a full time job. But dishes were one aspect that frankly Josephine Cochrane didn’t have the time for. This is a story of an invention not driven by much more than frustration—and tells the tale of one of America’s first innovative girl bosses. 

FACT: This mysterious sickness put a million people to sleep

By Rachel Feltman 

In the graphic novel and Netflix series Sandman, the world is struck by a mysterious plague called the sleepy sickness, which leaves sufferers in a fairytale-esque slumber for decades. Believe it or not, this spooky sleepy sickness is based on a very real pandemic that happened during the early 20th century. And it’s one that scientists still don’t fully understand.

As you can probably guess, the real-life version of the sleepy sickness didn’t actually strike millions of people at once. But the truth is only a little less unsettling. 

This disease, which in extreme cases can cause victims to fall into a coma-like state, spread through the world for more than a decade starting in late 1916, and affected at least a million people during that time. 

The scariest thing about encephalitis lethargica is that we’re still not sure exactly what it is. 

Because we know so little about this illness, we also don’t know of any particularly effective treatments or cures for it. But the good news is that some of the people who survived the 20th century pandemic only to suffer from symptoms like muscle rigidity and catatonia did eventually recover. 

In the 1960s, neurologist and writer and absolute king of my heart Oliver Sacks treated several survivors who were living in a nursing home in the Bronx. He noticed that while they were thought to be totally unresponsive, most of them showed some kind of reaction to random bits of stimuli, like reflexively catching things tossed at them or reacting to music or touch. He decided to try treating them with L-DOPA, which is an amino acid that’s able to cross the blood-brain barrier and raise dopamine levels. The results were profound and shocking, with some patients regaining consciousness and the ability to interact with the world. That story is the subject of the book and film Awakenings, which I really recommend, along with all of Oliver Sacks’ work. Here’s a picture of him on a motorcycle being a gay icon. 
You can learn more about this unsettling plague by listening to this week’s episode—or by checking out my TikTok series about it!

The post The mysterious sickness that made a million of people fall asleep at once appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Pueblo peoples might have moved huge logs for over 60 miles by strapping them to their heads

By Sandra Gutierrez G. 

Researchers always seem to be wondering how ancient civilizations moved big stuff around, but they rarely get the opportunity to try their theories empirically. 

Enter a team of anthropologists and physiologists from the University of Colorado Boulder. In the true spirit of experimental science, they strapped 136-pound logs to their heads to figure out how Pueblo peoples from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico might have carried the timber necessary to build their extraordinary architecture. 

Chaco Canyon was the most important political and ceremonial center for the Ancestral Puebloans. There, they built their famous stone and adobe dwellings along the cliff walls, ritual structures called kivas, as well as semi-circular constructions known as great houses. 

Scientists calculate that 200 thousand timbers were used in the construction of this particular site—but there are no trees anywhere nearby. In 2001, tree-ring experts at the University of Arizona used chemical analyses and discovered that the wood in the Puebloan constructions was sourced from mountain ranges at least 46 miles away—the furthermost, Chuska mountains, are 62 miles away from Chaco Canyon. 

Puebloans had no wheel, no draft animals, nor any other type of modern carriage system that we know of. Plus, archeologists have not found scrape marks on the grounds around Chaco Canyon that would hint at the logs being dragged or pushed. So, logs as big as 16 feet and 190 pounds had to be carried by hand. 

There have been a number of theories but the researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder tested the one proposing that the timbers in the Chacoan constructions were actually moved only by a few people at a time using tumplines: a technique that involves carrying a load on the lower back by strapping it to the head. 

Three of the four authors of this study trained for three months to figure out if the theory was humanly possible and how long would it take them to transport a 132-pound pine timber over 15.5 miles using tumplines made out of nylon webbing and foam padding. 

Considering small breaks every 20 minutes and longer breaks every two and a half miles, researchers completed the test in a total time of 9 hours and 44 minutes, walking at an average speed of 2.8 miles per hour.

So yes, tumplines are a perfectly feasible method of carrying heavy timbers over long distances. Researchers say the tumplines were “surprisingly comfortable” and communication was key to coordinating the walk and avoiding the timber from swaying.

FACT: Wolves can help humans get into fewer car crashes 

By Rachel Feltman

Anyone who’s spent time driving in an even vaguely rural area knows that deer have a preternatural ability to get hit by human cars. In 2021, a study in Wisconsin found an interesting connection between the all-too-common phenomenon of deer collisions and the presence of wild wolves. According to 22 years of data, having wolves around means people hit deer less often. 

You might assume that’s because the wolves ate the deer. After all, deer populations have a tendency to run amok if there aren’t predators keeping them in check. Wolves eating deer could explain a six percent reduction in crashes, according to the study. But the researchers saw a 24 percent drop.

That remaining three-quarters of the impact came from “a landscape of fear.” Wolves tend to follow whatever the clearest path is in a wooded area, like a stream. When humans come in and build up the landscape, that means artificial clearings for things like roads, pipelines, and rail tracks. Deer are known to change their behavior and location to avoid predators. So when wolves are in town, they roam the roadside—and deers stay off the streets. 
The study estimates that wolves save Wisconsin about $10.9 million in losses each year by preventing car crashes, which more than covers what the state pays out to people who lose pets or livestock to wolves, which tends to be the biggest public objection to letting their populations bounce back. The researchers also noted that there were other potential economic benefits they hadn’t calculated, like the lowered risk in lyme disease transmission we see when deer populations are well managed.

FACT: Sometimes articles published in academic journals are totally made up

By Ali Hazelwood

In 1996, NYU physics professor Alan Sokal wrote and submitted a scholarly paper to the journal Social Text. The paper was accepted and published—and after a few weeks Sokal revealed that the paper was a hoax: it was full of nonsense and jargon, and he’d written it to demonstrate the pitfalls of the academic peer-review process.

The post This ancient civilization literally used their heads to move massive logs for miles appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: These insects have a pee-related superpower 

By Rachel Feltman

Glassy-winged sharpshooters aren’t exactly the most lovable bugs. They’ve got wiggly abdomens that they use to make vibrations to communicate when it’s time to mate, bulbous eyes, and red-veined wings. They’re also considered pests: when they and other sharpshooters feed off of grapevines, they leave a bacterium called Xylella fastidiosa behind that causes leaves to yellow and wither with a condition known as Pierce’s disease. That plague can wipe out more than half of a vineyard’s vines in a single outbreak, and is estimated to cost $100 million in lost grapevines and mitigation efforts in California alone. And unlike the blue-green sharpshooter that tends to spread the disease most in Napa and Sonoma counties and along the coast, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, which causes trouble in Southern California, is invasive—it likely came over from its natural habitat in the southeastern US on the back of a nursery plant in the early 1990s. 

But in addition to posing a threat to the wine industry, glassy-winged sharpshooters pose a more immediate threat to any humans who happen to pass by them: The threat of being sprayed with a constant mist of bug urine.

Learn more about the super-powered urinary capabilities of these insects by listening to this week’s episode—or by hopping on over to this article about the prolific pee-ers. 

FACT: A fear of clowns may stem from the makeup itself

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Despite the cultural cache that a fear of clowns holds, and the fact that it’s super common for pop culture to reference it, there hasn’t been much academic research on the fear of clowns.

So the authors of a new study from the International Journal of Mental Health decided to examine the fear of clowns in an international population with the appropriately named “Fear of Clowns Questionnaire,” which was adapted from the “Fear of Spiders Questionnaire.”

Out of 927 participants, 27% said they had a fear of clowns, with 5% saying they were extremely afraid of clowns. More women reported that they were afraid of clowns and they had a more extreme fear of clowns than men, which actually follows a similar pattern in phobias just generally.

The strongest factor the researchers found causing people’s fear of clowns was that a clown’s makeup keeps people guessing at what their actual intentions are. They may have a permanently happy face, but that conceals whether they’re angry or upset, so the authors believe that being unable to know what a clown is really thinking or what they might do puts us on edge.

FACT: In the 18^th Century, toilets were not just for poop

By Melissa Dunphy

We’ve all come across signs in toilets begging us not to flush anything other than waste and sewer-safe toilet paper for fear of clogging or damaging plumbing. But before modern sewer systems, no such rules applied. Colonial Americans who used privy pits—shafts dug into the ground beneath an outhouse—tossed all kinds of trash into the depths along with their sewage. Wine bottles, kitchen waste, unwanted ceramic plates and bowls, old buttons, toys, cannon balls, smoking pipes, waste from cottage industries such as tanning and metalwork, and anything else they needed to get rid of from their households often ended up down the toilet hole, since in addition to lacking sewage pipes, they also lacked the convenience of modern trash collection. If, for example, your horse died while you were too busy to find a better means of disposal, you might simply heave it into the privy instead. It certainly couldn’t have made the smell any worse.

During this time period, specialists known as nightsoil men were paid to manually clean out privies every now and then, but after sewer systems came along, many privies were simply filled in, trash intact. Modern archaeologists especially value these privy pits as rich time capsules that provide fascinating snapshots into the everyday lives of the people who once used them, demonstrating that just about any trash will become treasure if you wait long enough.

The post There’s a good reason why so many adults are scared of clowns appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: A bunch of 18th-century dudes hung out in very hot rooms together in the name of science 

By Rachel Feltman

This story comes from a paper I read about in the Public Domain Review called “Experiments and Observations in a Heated Room,” circa 1774, which sounds like the name of a one-act play, and frankly should have been turned into one. 

The paper, by British physician and scientist Charles Blagden, recounts his experience being invited to the home of the scientist George Fordyce to see the man’s very very hot rooms. 

Fordyce had constructed a series of sealed rooms that were basically saunas, with pipes radiating heat into them and thermometers mounted on the walls. According to Blagden’s paper—and the sequel he published in 1775—he and several other gentlemen worked with Fordyce to test the limits of the human body with regard to heat. 

They started out in a 100 degree Fahrenheit room, which is not particularly impressive. But by the time they finished their second bout of experiments in 1775, they’d worked their way up to 260 degrees.

They made a lot of observations that might seem obvious now. They noticed that, at those higher temperatures, it was actually more comfortable to have clothing on than to be naked, since the heat scorched the skin much more quickly than it actually raised core body temperature. Blagden also noted that they could tolerate higher heat in dryer rooms, and correctly surmised that this was because water carried the heat to the body more efficiently than air, and that sweating—which is more effective when the air has more room to take up moisture and evaporate your sweat—was the key to the body’s heat-destroying powers. He was one of the first western scientists to make this connection, though it’s reasonable to assume that people living in hotter climates had probably figured this out by necessity. Keep in mind that the first thermometers designed to measure human temperature only showed up in the 1600s, and they wouldn’t be part of standard clinical medicine until the 1800s. 

But it is worth pointing out that they were being a bit obtuse about the temperatures previously endured by humankind. In his initial paper, Blagden actually made reference to “the experiments of M. Tillet,”—the botanist and metalworker Mathieu Tillet. In 1760, while trying to figure out how to heat grain enough to kill pests without wrecking the crop, Tillet ran into trouble with his data. He was using a thermometer attached to a long shovel to get the exact temperature inside the sugar-baking ovens he was using, but the temperature went down in the time it took to take it out. The girl tending the oven offered to just walk in and mark the level of the thermometer with a pencil, and told the scientist, at least according to his notes, that she “felt no inconvenience” in the 288 degree furnace. He and his colleague proceeded to basically goof off with a bunch of random items in the oven to see how the heat affected them. Blagden notes that the maid in question endured temperatures of 280 degrees for upwards of 10 minutes, and basically seems to be saying that he thinks girls who work by hot stoves probably get used to working by hot stoves, seemingly as a nod to the very obvious reality that he and his friends did not actually find and test the upper limits of human heat endurance. 

We now know that Blagden was very correct about the importance of moisture in the air: The more humid it is, the less heat we can take before our bodies start breaking down, because we’re not able to dump heat back into the air by way of evaporating sweat. A forecast of 120 degrees in death valley can be as physiologically tolerable as a sub-90 degree day in a swampy area. 

When you see weather reports refer to the “wet bulb” temperature, that’s a measurement of the combo of heat and humidity. Once it gets to 95 F wet bulb, give or take a couple degrees, we’re in trouble. At 100 percent humidity, we can only handle temperatures up to 87 degrees. 

On a lighter note, here’s a quick aside about the guy who built the hot rooms, who was memorialized in a local restaurant guide in the early 1800s for his absolutely bananas diet. 

FACT: When whales die, they create entire cities

By Sabrina Imbler

In 1987, a submersible scanning the seafloor of the Santa Catalina Basin detected something unusually large, 1,240 meters below the surface of the sea. It was a 65-foot-long whale skeleton. The whale had been dead for years, but its remains had become a thriving community on the seafloor, feeding clams, mussels, limpets and snails.

A natural burial for a whale—dying in the ocean and sinking to the seafloor—is called a whale fall. Ecosystems this deep are food limited, and many creatures rely on the constant drizzle of decaying flesh, poop, dust, and snot called marine snow to survive. But a whale fall is like a spontaneous deep-sea banquet that can sustain entire communities for years. Scientists estimate one whale fall is the equivalent of a thousand years of marine snow.

Whale falls are devoured in multiple stages. First, mobile scavengers like sleeper sharks, hagfish, and isopods travel long distances to feast on the carcass. This stage can last for several years until all the soft tissue is chewed away. The next stage is called the enrichment-opportunist stage, where worms, crustaceans, and bacteria feast on the whale nutrients sunken into the surrounding sand. The third, sulfophilic stage, can last for decades. Here, bone-eating Osedax worms and sulfur-oxidizing bacteria break down the fat inside whale bones. The fourth and final stage of a whale fall is called the reef stage, can last somewhat indefinitely. Now, the whale has become hard substrate, where suspension feeders like anemones and sponges can latch on and grow.

Whale falls were much more abundant hundreds of years ago, before whale populations drastically diminished the number of whales sinking to the seafloor. This has likely led to a ripple of extinctions in species that specialize on whale falls and rely on these carcasses to complete their life cycles. One whale researcher suggests about a third of whale fall specialists may have already gone extinct in the North Atlantic, where whaling reduced populations by about 75 percent. It’s only fitting that a creature this awe-inspiring in life would also be so consequential in death.

FACT: Neanderthals couldn’t smell just how stinky they were

By Sara Kiley Watson

You probably have a unique aroma that you can’t smell at all. And in your brain, it’s not that you don’t stink—it’s that you’re so used to your own stink that it doesn’t phase you anymore. In fact your own odor is comfortingly kinda familiar. After all, if you were constantly sniffing yourself, you’d probably have a breakdown from the sensory input of all of the stinks of your microbes, sweat, farts, etc. So–when some of your self produced stink, well, stinks, your nose gets used to it. And really, it’s not just your own stink after a while, eventually you’ll get used to the smell of your pets and family members and favorite foods.

But smelling is unique to all species, and individuals. For a study published in December, scientists looked at 30 different olfactory receptors across the Neanderthal, Denisovian, and ancient homo sapien genomes. They found 11 receptors in the extinct humans that had unique DNA that didn’t appear in humans. 

Via a difference in receptors, Neanderthals had a bit of a superpower. They couldn’t smell body odors as well as their cousins—specifically one neanderthal had a genetic mutation that slimmed their ability to smell androstadienone, a chemical we associate with urine and sweat smells. Considering these guys were living in caves, building complex structures there from around 176,000 years ago, this probably came in handy when it comes to living in a world without deodorant. 

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The peak of the Eta Aquarids shower, a flurry of up to 30 meteors an hour, will happen soon: The best time to catch this year’s display is between May 5 and May 6. It’s the result of Earth barging through a cloud of space debris—imagine driving on the highway behind a sloppy gravel truck—but the stuff that’s disintegrating above our heads is actually dust and flakes left behind by Halley’s Comet, aka 1/P Halley.

Halley’s Comet is named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who in 1705 used Isaac Newton’s theories of physics to calculate the its orbit. The ball of dirty ice cruises around the sun, orbiting opposite Earth’s motion to pass beyond Neptune’s path, and swings back into Earthlings’ view every 75 or so years.

[Related: The biggest comet ever found is cruising through our solar system’s far reaches]

This happens with such regularity that Mark Twain, born in 1835, wrote that he “came in with Halley’s Comet“; the author expected “to go out with it” when it returned in 1910. (Sure enough, Twain died in April of that year.) The last time humans could spy the object in the sky, unaided, was in 1986. Those of us around in mid-2061 will have the chance to see it again.

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Ever worry that you will run out of places to explore in America? Lucky for you, there are 63 national parks and 424 national park sites across the country—it will take a long time to work your way through the 85 millions acres they encompass. And with additional sites being earmarked for conservation (West Virginia’s New River Gorge was just designated as a national park in 2021, for example), the list of destinations keeps growing and growing.

Remember, it takes some planning to visit the national parks, though the journey you make of it will be worthwhile. One way to optimize the experience is by targeting the lesser-known parks. Avoid the snaking lines at the Grand Canyon and take in the wrinkly sandstone at Capitol Reef. Skip the tortuous campsite-booking system at Acadia and sleep on the sands of Indiana Dunes. Smaller parks might mean fewer amenities and tour outfitters, but that’s where the real beauty of wilderness shines through. Let us know in the comments what your favorites and underrated choices are.

Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota

Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas

North Cascades National Park, Washington

Lassen Volcanic National Park, California

Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Congaree National Park, South Carolina

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, West Virginia

Indiana Dunes National Park, Indiana

Haleakalā National Park, Maui, Hawaii

Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: 1920s New York City architects hid spires in their buildings to sneakily become the tallest

By John Kennedy

In June 1930, the Empire State Building was ready to claim the title of world’s tallest, but its developers were at least a little bit worried the nearby Chrysler Building would sneakily unveil its final form and snatch the trophy right back.

This will-they-won’t-they suspense epitomized the architectural design slugfest between three (yes three) New York City buildings in the late 20s as they each tried to simply be bigger than all the others. The one you’re least likely to have realized was a part of this contest was 40 Wall Street, now known as the Trump Building. That’s because this 927-foot structure was, at best, only briefly No. 1 before the Chrysler developers secretly built a height-boosting spire inside the main structure and hoisted it into place, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Naturally, at least a few people working on the Empire State Building a few blocks away were worried the Chrysler architect, William Van Alen, had a similar trick up his sleeve for when their structure finally surpassed Chrysler’s 1,046-foot height. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about New York City’s race to the sky, and the underlying rivalry between former business partners that’s now set in stone and steel.

FACT: A bug that hadn’t been seen in decades showed up at a Walmart—and got identified over Zoom 

By Rachel Feltman

In 2020, Michael Skvarla had the unenviable task of leading an insect identification lab course over Zoom. The director of Penn State’s Insect Identification Lab was partway through describing a bug from his personal collection—one he’d labeled as an “antlion,” which is a dragonfly-like creature known for having predatory larvae most people call doodlebugs—when he froze. He was realizing, on Zoom and in real-time, that this wasn’t an antlion. He told the class they’d reclassify it together, and in a couple minutes they’d come to a shocking conclusion. 

It was actually Polystoechotes punctata, a member of a family of giant lacewing that’s existed for at least 100 million years.

A few quick caveats: Many news outlets referred to the giant lacewing as a “Jurassic-era insect,” but J. Ray Fisher, who works remotely from Fayateville for the University of Missouri and helped Skvarla confirm the insect’s identity, pointed out that this is a bit of a stretch. This is one of about 60 species with an evolutionary lineage that can be traced back to a common ancestor that originated in the Jurassic.

It’s also important to note that the giant lacewing is only “giant” in relation to other lacewings, which are smaller. The specimen Skvarla found has a wingspan of about two inches. 

So, this isn’t some massive bug that’s been missing since the days of the dinosaurs, or even one that’s been missing at all. You can still find it in the western US. But the species has been considered extirpated—that is to say, regionally extinct—in most of the country since 1950. If you look at the map of their recorded sightings, in the 1800s you see a few on the east coast, and in the early 20th century there are a handful around the midwest, but by the mid century the only citings are way out west. It’s not entirely clear why this happened, but most experts say that increased light pollution and invasive species drove them out.

Not only was Skvarla’s specimen from Arkansas—hundreds of miles east of any member of this species found for more than half a century—but he casually scooped it up from the facade of a Walmart in an urban area of Fayetteville. And this was way back in 2012. 

After that thrilling discovery via Zoom, Skvarla analyzed the bug’s DNA to confirm its identity. The big question now is whether there are more of them around. It’s possible that the Ozark mountains have some pockets of hitherto unknown giant lacewing populations. It’s also possible, as Fisher has pointed out to the press, that the bug just hitchhiked on a cross-country Walmart truck. 

FACT: Corpse wax is a thing in Elden Ring and the real world

By Jess Boddy

Last year, the masterpiece of a video game Elden Ring came out. I’ve been streaming it on Twitch basically ever since, and I’m still uncovering lore and secrets—many of which are science adjacent.

Something that the developer of Elden Ring, a company called FromSoftware, is very good at, is world building and lore. They tell these very deep, complex stories just through the environment—first in games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and now with Elden Ring. You’ve gotta explore the worlds they make and read item descriptions to understand what the heck is going on. It’s so rewarding and frankly, really fun to play games like that, kind of unraveling their stories one piece at a time. And Elden Ring is by far the most MASSIVE—there are like 10 different plots in Elden Ring that all kind of spin together in one way or another. And one of those stories has to do with corpse wax.

There’s one area of the game called Leyndell, Royal Capital. As the name suggests, it’s this big city kind of in the middle of the map. And as you explore the city, it’s clear some kind of tragedy went down there. And many of the buildings are totally sealed shut… but around some of the doorways, this orangey yellow, ooey-gooey substance is oozing out. The first time I saw it, I was like… I want to eat this. It looks like when you leave a fruit roll up in the car and it like melts. It looked delicious. Of course, the Elden Ring ooze is probably not delicious, because that was corpse wax. 

In real life, corpse wax is a thing that happens when a body SHOULD decompose, but it has a little too much moisture and very little or no oxygen. That is the perfect formula for a process called saponification to occur. Basically, anaerobic bacteria, the kind that don’t need oxygen to live, will go to town on a corpse’s body fat, and help set off a bunch of chemical reactions that turn that fat into a soapy, waxy substance called adipocere – aka, corpse wax. It starts off all ooey gooey, and then turns hard and brittle. That can actually kind of seal off the corpse, preserving it! Which is kind of an archeologist’s dream!

To hear all about how corpse wax in Elden Ring connects to real-life corpse wax mummies, check out this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

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In 1989, Chuck Berry and Carl Sagan partied it up at one of the biggest bashes of the summer—a celebration honoring the two Voyager spacecrafts, who were about to make a dramatic exit from our solar system. 

The twin probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched back in 1977, with only a five-year mission to take a gander at Jupiter and Saturn’s rings and moons, hauling the Golden Record containing messages and cultural snapshots from Earth (including Chuck Berry’s music). 

Obviously, the Voyager spacecrafts have persisted a lot longer than five years: 46 years, to be exact. They’re still careening through space at a distance between 12 and 14 billion miles from Earth. So how have they lasted four decades longer than expected? Much of it has to do with a bit of vintage hardware and a handful of software updates. You can find out more (and when the crafts’ expected death dates) by subscribing to PopSci+ and reading the full story by Tatyana Woodall, and by listening to our new episode of Ask Us Anything. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: We still don’t understand some of the most basic things about the lifecycle of American eels

By Ryan F. Mandelbaum

American and European Eels are species catadromous fish. This means that they live the opposite kind of life from a salmon—eels spend most of their life in freshwater rivers, and then spawn in the ocean. But when their hormones say it’s time to reproduce, they leave their homes in Europe and North America and all migrate to the same place: the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Sargasso Sea is the only sea bordered on all sides by water, so named because of the vast mats of sargassum seaweed floating on its surface. It’s a patch of calm, blue water produced by a gyre of ocean currents spinning clockwise across the Atlantic. It’s an important place for fish and seabirds alike who take refuge in its seaweed, including American and European eels.

Eels start their lives as small, transparent young, called glass eels. For a long time, scientists thought that these glass eels and American/European eels were different species; it wasn’t until 19th century biologist raised the glass eels in tanks that they realized that hey matured into the big yellow-brown adults. But to this day, their lifestyle has remained a mystery—no one has found a European Eel egg or observed one spawning, for example. They just know that the little guys appear in the Sargasso.

We’re starting to learn more about the strange lives of these eels, though. For example, we now know that the adults of both species undertake the epic migration to the sargasso, dissolving their guts in order to conserve energy for the journey and dying after spawning. Scientists detected adult American eels in the Sargasso for the first time in 2015. Another team announced detecting European eels migrating to the Sargasso last year. Both American and European eels are endangered, critically endangered in the case of the latter. They’re especially vulnerable to fishing, plus the damming of the rivers where they spend their lives after spawning. So It’s more important than ever that we understand the ecology of these enigmatic fish.

FACT: ‘Bog butter’ is exactly what it sounds like, and it might just be delicious

By Rachel Feltman 

In 1859, archeologists Edward Clibborn and James O’Laverty published a paper in the Ulster Journal of Archaeology titled, simply, “Bog Butter.” 

“For many years past there have been found, from time to time, in the bogs of Ireland—and especially in those of the North—wooden vessels filled with butter in a hardened state, and quite free from putrefaction,” they wrote. “Specimens of these vessels, generally very much broken, are to be seen in all our museums, but until now we have never met with one in nearly a perfect state.”

But in the County of Derry, they said, they’d found a bog butter vessel in excellent shape. Based on this and other specimens, they wrote, along with what they knew about the history of Irish dairy prep, they now felt confident that the substances and pots had to do with butter churning and cheese making.

This was a huge win for the bog butter enthusiast community: in the 1800s there was simply no way to suss out the molecular makeup of butter-like substances you found buried in bogs. That didn’t stop the study authors from sampling the “yellowish white” substance they found, which they said tasted “somewhat like cheese.” 

Bog butter is now considered one of the more common historical relics one might find in a bog, especially in Ireland. There have been nearly 500 reported specimens found, and the oldest known example is from 3,500 years ago. The most recent dates to as late as the 1800s, so researchers suspect the preservation method persisted in some rural pockets until pretty recently. 

In 2019, researchers used stable carbon isotope analysis on the individual fatty acids in 50 bog butter samples to finally show, definitively, that there was butter in them there bogs. 

So, why did people put butter into bogs? The answer is probably: lots of reasons! Why not put butter into a bog?

Researchers point out that it’s a common and misguided trope for archeologists to try to come up with a single explanation for a practice that spanned thousands of years. And not every bog butter is the same: some are in elaborate wooden vessels that predate the butter inside them by centuries, suggesting a longstanding practice of making and reusing bog butter pots, while others were seemingly dumped in without any protection. But their best guesses for those myriad reasons include protecting or hiding precious resources from enemies and authority figures (at times in Ireland you could literally pay your taxes with butter), offering up said precious dairy to gods or spirits, storing the butter to preserve it, or even using the bog process as a way of creating distinct flavors. 

To find out more about why bogs are freakishly good at preserving food—and how modern scientists went about making bog butter of their own—give this week’s episode a listen. 

FACT: You always get some splashback on you when peeing

By Purbita Saha

Why is peeing into a toilet or urinal so messy? This is actually a big head scratcher in fluid dynamics science. No matter how and where you pee, you’re bound to get a bit of splashback on yourself or your surroundings. This, of course, is amplified if you go no. 1 standing up. The amount of splashback also depends on the trajectory of your stream and the receptacle. Lessening the scatter effect could improve hygiene in public toilets—and make pee-recycling systems more efficient.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot of research on this topic. The Splash Lab, run by engineer Tadd Truscott, has been analyzing the behavior of pee once it rushes out of the human body for more than a decade now. Formerly based at Brigham Young University and now at Utah State University, the team uses giant spray jets and tanks to mimic the act of peeing and trace the splatter pattern of each single drop with high-speed cameras. 

Their takeaway was basically that once pee is airborne, it has a mind of its own. Once it’s traveled a few inches outside the urethra, the stream begins to break up. So, when it finally reaches the inside of a toilet bowl or the back of a urinal, it hits the hard surface as thousands of individual drops. That’s when all hell breaks loose.

Depending on the angle at which you pee, plus how much and how quickly you have to relieve yourself, the force of the droplets will guarantee splashback. Closing in the distance, ideally by sitting on or squatting over the toilet, can blunt the damage. You’ll still get some pee on your netherregions, but your clothes, the seat, the floor, and, god forbid, the ceiling should be protected.

If peeing straight down isn’t an option, get as close to the receptacle as possible. Then, pee at a gently sloping downward angle so that the back of the urinal or toilet bowl still captures the bulk of the splashback. Don’t send the stream down straight into the water or drain: Making contact with another surface can cause the droplets to separate and spread out even more.

Some of the findings from the Splash Lab have helped other researchers innovate streamlined urinal designs. A recent one from the University of Waterloo, nicknamed the “Nautiloo,” is shaped like a mollusc shell with a narrow long channel, raised edges, and a curved bottom to force the pee to stream down rather than break into oodles of droplets. It was also tested for urninators of different heights, which makes a difference. Others have experimented with inserts that mimic desert moss from Mongolia to actually absorb or filter the pee to prevent splashback. But none of these are available for public restrooms or your personal bathroom just yet. So for now, it’s best to suck it up and pop a squat. And then maybe clean up after with a bidet attachment.

The post ‘Bog butter’ is exactly what it sounds like: delicious appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The Drug Enforcement Administration had to get involved in the first successful cardiac xenotransplantation.

By Sandra Gutierrez G.

Because of tricky logistics, scarcity of viable organs, and various cultural apprehensions, doctors have been looking into xenotransplantation, where animal tissue is implanted into a human body. 

Researchers had been experimenting on baboons for years, and in 2021 a team at NYU successfully transplanted two genetically engineered porcine kidneys into human patients. But in January 2022, Muhammad Mohiuddin and a medical team at the University of Maryland School of Medicine upped the ante by successfully transplanting a pig’s heart for the first time. The patient, 57-year-old David Bennet Senior, unfortunately died two months after the procedure, but the cause of death was unrelated to the porcine heart beating in his chest, which is why the operation was a true medical breakthrough. 

Before the surgery, the pig’s heart soaked in a particular concoction containing a mix of hormones and a very special ingredient—one gram per liter of dissolved cocaine. The solution was developed by Swedish doctor Stig Steen, who gave it the cute name of “brain death cocktail.” In a 2016 paper, Steen showed that the liquid helped stabilize the pig’s heart for up to 24 hours after harvesting, which would theoretically increase the chances of a successful transplant. 

But the recipe behind the brew is proprietary, which means the team at the University of Maryland had to import it from Sweeden, creating a bureaucratic nightmare that forced the Drug Enforcement Administration to get involved.

It’s unclear exactly how this works and what’s the specific role of cocaine in this brew, but working with tissue that stays healthy for longer could be key not only for future xenotransplantations but also to address organ shortages and making it possible to fly in organs from across state lines. 

FACT: Scientists once taught goldfish to drive.

By Rachel Feltman 

About a year ago, researchers in Israel published evidence that goldfish can learn to drive tanks. Fish tanks, that is. 

They started by crafting what they called FOVs—fish operated vehicles, of course—which basically amounted to aquariums secured to motorized wheels. The rig included a little camera hooked up to a Raspberry Pi computer, which pointed down into the water, tracked the movements of the fish inside, and translated them into wheel movements based on a simple algorithm. 

The researchers placed a pink board somewhere in the room, and the fish were given a food pellet the moment their tank-mobile successfully tapped the target. After a few days, the six goldfish—who it feels important to note were named after Pride and Prejudice characters—all learned how to steer their FOVs to the snack zone. They were able to navigate the vehicle from different starting points, and managed to ignore false targets and even recover and redirect when they bumped into walls. Apparently Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley were the best drivers. 

The point was to see whether goldfish have some innate sense of logic when it comes to navigating a space. The purpose of the FOV is just to make it possible for a fish to navigate a non-aquatic space. It doesn’t matter what the fish thinks is happening when it makes the tank move; what matters is that the fish is figuring out the best way to get to an arbitrary target, using extremely non-fish-native wayfinding points, because it knows there will be food there. 

They were even able to approach their targets from a variety of different angles, which suggests that they have some internal representation of the strange world around them. And they got faster over time. 

All of this helps support the idea that the way we navigate space, which we know has to do with parts of our hippocampus that are pretty similar in all vertebrates, has more to do with some innate inner mind mapping that goes on than it does species-specific ways of figuring out an environment. 

A study published in 2019 did genuinely teach rats to drive little cars. The point of that study really was to teach rats to drive, not just propel themselves around in a strange space. The idea was to show whether growing up in so-called enriched environments—cages with multiple levels to climb on and interesting stuff to play with—made rats better able to learn stuff and less likely to be stressed about the novelty. 

FACT: Rodent DNA revealed a black market seal trade.

By Sara Kiley Watson

150 years ago, sealers in New Zealand nearly brought fur seals, also known as Kekeno, to extinction. Nowadays, they are doing much better—the last recorded count shows in 2001 there were 200,000 of the fuzzy cuties bouncing around the rocky shores throughout mainland New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, and the sub-Antarctic islands, as well as parts of Australia. 

The hunting of Kekono began with the Maori people who lived in New Zealand and the Cook Islands pre-colonialism, but things got especially troubling with the arrival of Europeans. By the 1700s, seals were confined to the far south of New Zealand, and by the early 1800s the seal populations were already in dangerous decline and the legality of sealing became more of a legal gray area. 

But, a discovery that lays open some secrets about an illegal seal trade between Asia and New Zealand has only recently unfolded, with the help of tiny detectives—rodents that have stowed away on ships and created populations of two distinct species on the two islands of New Zealand. As it turns out, while one population can be traced back to trade with Europe, another population comes solely from Asia—a region where this seal trade was largely kept off the books. 

The post Goldfish learned to drive tanks on wheels—and that’s not even the best part appeared first on Popular Science.

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Using microscopes to observe living things has been one of the most powerful ways to understand how biology works, at least since Dutch naturalist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first zoomed in on bacteria in the 1600s. Today, high-magnification images can help design new medical tools, enrich our understanding of diseases, and explain how embryos develop. And, as shown by the 2023 winners from the MIT Koch Institute Image Awards, they can be works of art, too.

The above image shows Arabidopsis thaliana pollen with proteins removed from their nuclear lamina, a membrane of dense filaments that provides structure to cells. Humans who lack lamina (a mutation seen in some skeletal and muscular conditions) generally cannot survive for more than 20 years, according to the biologists at MIT’s Whitehead Institute and the Koch Institute who took this image. They stuck the grains to carbon tape and imaged them with a Zeiss Crossbeam microscope. Without these proteins, pollen also appear misshapen—underscoring the importance of this meshwork for plants as well.

The post Under a microscope, mouse colons and mutant pollen become art appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Lubrication is why chocolate feels so good on your tongue

By Chelsey B. Coombs

Most of us aren’t thinking about physics and materials science when we eat chocolate, but there’s a reason chocolate’s melt-in-your-mouth sensation feels so good, and it’s all about lubrication.

In a paper published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces in January 2023, researchers from the University of Leeds created a 3D artificial tongue surface and used techniques from a field of engineering called tribology to better understand the reason for chocolate’s specific mouthfeel. Tribology is basically the study of how surfaces interact with each other while they’re in motion and how friction and lubrication affect them.

What they found is that chocolate releases a fatty film – the lubrication – that mixes with your spit to coat your tongue and mouth. But the really interesting thing is that it’s the fat layer on the outside layer of the chocolate that contributes to chocolate’s mouthfeel and *not* the fat located on the inside of the bar. The researchers hope the research could help food scientists develop multilayered chocolate that’s better for you by reducing the fat on the inside of the chocolate, but keeping it in the outside layer that actually comes into contact with your tongue.

FACT: There’s a German word for a bird with an arrow stuck through its neck 

By Rachel Feltman

In 1822, a white stork flew by a northern German estate with a shocking passenger in tow: it had a two-and-a-half-foot spear sticking through its neck. The wound didn’t seem to have bothered it much, since it had carried the weapon all the way from Africa. 

The bird, which after all that was shot out of the sky and stuffed, was dubbed a pfeilstorch—an arrow stork. Examination of the weapon that impaled it revealed it was made of African wood, and similar in design to weapons used in Central Africa. 

But that wasn’t just shocking because it meant the bird had flown thousands of miles with an arrow through its neck. The very idea that a stork might spend time on another continent was really big news. At that time, at least among Europeans, the fact that birds disappeared for part of the year was considered a total mystery. They didn’t know that the birds were migrating. The appearance of a local bird that carried proof of having recently been on a different continent also provided the best evidence to date that birds migrated.

Not everyone was totally clueless about migration. There are Indigenous folk tales that involve references to migrating geese flying off for the winter, and some Polynesian myths involve birds traveling long distances as well. That makes sense, because many Polynesian explorers were island-hopping themselves. They would have had a better chance of spotting a bird making a seasonal pilgrimage than, say, Aristotle would. 

Aristotle, for what it’s worth, described some short-range migrations around the mediterranean as he observed them, and hypothesized that cranes might go to the edges of the earth to do annual battle with humans who lived there, for some reason. But he also thought that some birds, like swallows, simply hibernated in muddy lake beds, while others turned into entirely different kinds of birds, like caterpillars turning into butterflies. 

These beliefs were still circulating in the late 1600s, which is when a scholar named Charles Morton argued that storks disappeared because they flew to the moon.

One especially fun thing about the pfeilstorch is that folks say some 25 of them have been recorded. I tried to trace that number back to its source, and the furthest I got was a 2003 newsletter, in German, from the University of Rostock, which is the institution that studied and taxidermied that infamous bird in 1822. I als found an english-language review of a German book published in 2005 called “Das Buch von Pfeilstorch,” or the book of the arrow stork, which apparently recounts and summarizes 24 known instances from the last few hundred years. 

We do know that this strange phenomenon has happened more than once, because at least two have been reported at different times in recent history in Israel. 

We now know that the stork’s 4,000 mile or so round-trip migration is actually pretty chill as far as bird migrations go. The Arctic tern flies from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle and back every year, which is nearly 19,000 miles. In 2022, researchers reported what could be the longest non-stop journey for a migratory bird, which was a five-month-old bar-tailed godwit that made it from Alaska to Tasmania—about 8,500 miles—in just 11 days. According to the little solar-powered GPS it was carrying, it did not stop. 

FACT: Ovaries are more regenerative than we thought

By Rachel E. Gross

There’s one fact everyone seems to remember from high school biology: If you have XX chromosomes, you’re born with all the eggs you’ll ever have. Starting around puberty, your ovaries begin pumping those eggs out monthly, and the count starts falling. By the time you hit menopause, you’re down to zero. So I remember being shocked to learn while reporting my book Vagina Obscura that this simple countdown isn’t the whole story. Not even close. We now know that ovaries, like most tissues in the body, harbor stem cells. And those stem cells seem to be able to grow into new eggs.

As you might expect, this change holds serious consequences for how we think of female health and fertility. It also suggests that the ovaries may be less like trickling-away hourglasses, and more like rechargeable batteries.

One surprising reason we’ve started re-examining human ovaries in the first place is thanks to scientists who study sex shifting chickens and their mind-blowing gonads. Chickens have just one ovary—the other one withers away soon after birth—that supplies them with hormones and grows massive eggs on a near-daily basis. That single ovary also has remarkable powers of regeneration. In past experiments where scientists removed it, they learned that it often grew back completely, eggs and all. Sometimes, the bird even grew a new testes!

Often it takes fresh blood and a new lens to move science forward. For half a century, ovarian biologists of the human variety stuck to the truism that women were born with all their eggs, and ovaries degenerated over time. It’s no coincidence that chicken scientists were some of the first to point out that actually, human ovaries, too, might be using their stem cells to regenerate and replenish themselves throughout your lifetime—potentially even past menopause.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: You can (sort of) blame pirates for your inability to understand temperatures in Celsius 

By Rachel Feltman

As someone who married into a European family, I deal with the persistent absurdity of America’s stubborn use of English measurement more than most. I often wonder how we got to be pretty much the only country that eschews the metric system—the only other nations that haven’t officially adopted it are Liberia and Myanmar—and it turns out that pirates can take at least part of the blame.  

When the US was new and it was time to decide what its official way of doing business was, the idea of standardized measurements, even within a single country, was relatively novel. This is not to say people didn’t measure things before then; the concept of units of measurement has existed since ancient Mesopotamia, if not longer. But for most of human history, those measurements were relatively relative. You needed something to reference when weighing or measuring, and those had to be common objects, like seeds or parts of the human body, which all have variations in size. 

Fast forward to the 1790s, when the founding fathers are trying to figure out how the US will measure things. Luckily for us, France—which had amassed hundreds of confusing and inexact regional units of measurement over the years—was on the cusp of something huge in the wake of its own revolution. 

Tasked with developing a more enlightened system by the National Assembly, the French Academy of Sciences decided to base the system on a natural physical unit: the length of 1/10,000,000 of a quadrant of a great circle of Earth, measured around the poles of the meridian passing through Paris. Figuring that out took a six-year survey led by some of the greatest minds of the day, but they were finally able to ascertain the length of the arc of the meridian from Barcelona to Dunkirk. The new unit was dubbed the metre, from Greek metron, meaning “measure.”

You might think that after all that hard work, the US would have jumped at using such a sensible system—especially given that it came from the French, our revolutionary allies, and was created as a sort of symbol of reason and democracy. But of course we know that didn’t happen.

That’s where pirates came in. Thomas Jefferson did indeed express interest in the new metric system, and France sent a scientist named Joseph Dombey to the US with a standardized copper kilogram weight for reference. Unfortunately, the ship blew off course to the Caribbean, where a bunch of British privateers tasked with causing trouble for enemy merchant ships took him prisoner and tried to ransom him, after he failed to convince them he was actually just a Spanish sailor. He died in captivity, and they auctioned off the contents of his ship. 

The weight didn’t turn up until the 1950s, when someone donated it to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. 

The US ended up sticking with British units, which had evolved out of Anglo-Saxon and Roman systems. Britain would implement the British Imperial system a few decades later, while the US formalized its own version. It’s quite a stretch to say the pirate misadventure was the reason we went with British imperial measurements instead of the flashy new French system, but it certainly didn’t help. 

Loads of countries had adopted the metric system for themselves by the mid-19th century, and international governments were starting to talk about how absurd it was not to have standardized measurements for science and industry. In 1875, 17 different countries, including the US, signed the “treaty of the meter” in Paris and agreed to define all units based on the standard metric bases. In 1893, the US officially adopted metric standards as our own fundamental definitions for measurement units. 

The reason we didn’t switch entirely is that our machines and factories and official documents all revolved around English units, and business entities lobbied against having to make the overhaul. But these days, a lot of companies voluntarily use metric measurements in creating their products to make them easier to sell and use internationally. 

FACT: Your earwax says a lot about you

By Lauren Young

In many Asian cultures, ear cleaning is an act of care and affection that’s been around for centuries. The gentle practice of removing the sticky or flaky stuff in your ear holes is seen as a soothing, loving household ritual depicted in Japan Edo-era woodcut prints and manga of wives who would clean their husbands ears or of mothers who would clean their children’s ears with these thin ear rakes. And these very special soothing moments call for special bamboo ear picks or rakes, called mimikaki in Japanese. There are many different types of ear picks in Asian culture: some had a little down puff or decorative Daruma doll on the opposite end of the curved scoop; others were made of precious metals like gold and silver. Today, a number of Asian countries have ear cleaning salons. But the obsession with removing earwax spans across time and cultures—from the ancient Romans, Europeans in the 16th and early 17th century, and the Vikings. Now we’ve got a variety of modern-day earwax removal kits made of plastic and stainless steel, and sport  little lights and even cameras.

Even though we’re super obsessed with getting rid of it, many ear, nose, and throat doctors say that earwax is best left alone. In fact, your earwax can tell quite a bit about you. For instance, most of us fall into two main groups of earwax types: wet or dry. What type you have links back to your genetics. In 2006 a Nature Genetics study identified a specific gene that was responsible for earwax type, and found that wet earwax was the more dominant trait than dry. The study also explained that wet earwax is more commonly found in populations of European and African descent, while dry earwax is typically prevalent in East Asians (of course, there are exceptions). The scent of your earwax can occasionally tell you about the health of your ear. A change in odor can tip off a otolaryngologist of a potential fungal or bacterial infection, like swimmer’s ear. While earwax generally doesn’t change, an infection can cause the ear to leak a liquidy, smelly discharge. 

Earwax is a defensive lubricant, filled with antibacterial and antifungal proteins that helps keep the ear healthy. As a rule of thumb, ear, nose, and throat doctors recommend not trying to clear out your earwax if it’s bothering you (please, put down those cotton swabs). But too much earwax can be a bad thing. There are instances where earwax should be checked and removed by medical professionals. If you’re experiencing any pain in the inner ear, doctors sometimes need to clear out earwax to take a look at your eardrums to ensure there isn’t any damage. It’s particularly important for people who wear hearing aids or hearing assistive devices to get their ears regularly cleaned to prevent severe impactions. Earwax pushes out of the ear canal on its own. However, the ear molds of hearing devices block this natural movement and can also increase earwax production. As the substance builds up, it can worsen hearing loss or cause conditions like tinnitus. People with hearing aids need to vigilant about cleaning their devices and going in for regular cleaning appointments with their doctors. 

If your ears aren’t already full of earwax facts, you can learn more in an article on PopSci.

FACT: Gender norms in STEM aren’t universal

By Angela Saini

During the 1980s and 1990s, the proportion of women studying computer science in the computer science department of Yerevan State University in the former Soviet republic of Armenia never fell below 75%. When they were writing a paper about this is 2006, the authors even felt they had to point out that “this is not a typo”. Because the Soviet Union encouraged women to work and go to technical colleges, gender norms in STEM are still different in former socialist states.

The post Your earwax contains multitudes—of secrets about your health appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Dinosaur sex might’ve been simpler than we thought

By Dustin Growick

Listen. We’re not quite sure how dinosaurs literally came together to make more dinosaurs…but there are some pretty wild theories out there. Did male T. rexes use their tiny arms to tickle the backs of the females while mating? Probably not. Did giant long-neck sauropods—the largest animals to ever walk the face of the Earth—have to go to “sex lakes” in order to breed? Come on now. One thing we’re pretty sure about—based on modern reptile and bird corollaries—is that dinosaurs had cloacas. What’s a cloaca? Well, it’s kind of like one hole to rule them all, out which comes pee, poop, and the sexytime juices. So, yes, like most modern birds, dinosaurs probably practiced a “cloacal kiss” in order to reproduce. How romantic!

FACT: The Monty Python “silly walk” can be great exercise

By Rachel Feltman

The 2022 holiday issue of the British Medical Journal had a real Christmas cracker of a study: An investigation into the biomechanical implications of the Monty Python “silly walk.”

This actually isn’t the first time the silly walk has shown up in peer-reviewed literature. In 2020, Dartmouth researchers published an analysis of the gaits of the two silly walkers—dubbed Putey and Teabag in the sketch—for the journal Gait and Posture. They basically measured how much variation between steps there was, and unsurprisingly found that both were way more variable than a normal gait, but that Teabag’s was much more so than Putey’s. 

Researchers from the University of Virginia, Arizona State University, and Kansas State University took things a silly step further in this new BMJ paper. They gathered 13 healthy adults and had each of them put on a rig to measure how much oxygen they were taking in, how much energy they were expending, and how intensely they were exerting themselves. Each of them first walked around in a normal gait, then tried to mimic Teabag and Putey. 

The scientists found that while the Putey walk didn’t expend much more energy than a normal stroll, the Teabag walk basically amounted to intense exercise. 

Based on their findings, the researchers say that doing the Teabag silly walk for 11 minutes a day could provide adults with their recommended amount of physical activity. 
Even if someone can’t or doesn’t wish to kick their legs into the air and shuffle strangely for a dozen minutes or so a day, the researchers point out that the key is that the movement is inefficient, from an energy expenditure standpoint. Anything that makes movements less efficient—like traveling in a zigzag—can accomplish the same goal. And since the best physical activity is whatever activity gives you joy to do, a silly walk could sometimes be better than the gym!

FACT: Two ground-shaking discoveries were recently found in old museum cabinets

By Sara Kiley Watson

As someone who doesn’t clean their desk out often enough—do it more often. Especially if you happen to work at a museum. For two museums, the finds in the back of their cupboards were game changing. Researchers found both a hidden lizard relative that holds the key to when squamates originated and the remains of the last Tasmanian tiger on the planet.

When it comes to the lizard, scientists at the Natural History Museum in London originally thought a unique fossil belonged to the Clevosaurus family, a part of the Rhynchocephalia group. These guys only have one living relative, the tuatara of New Zealand, and the oldest fossils go back to the Middle Jurassic, some 238 to 240 million years ago. These guys split from squamates, which includes most of today’s lizards and snakes, way back then. Scientists decided to take a closer look at the fossil, doing x-ray scans and reconstructing the skeleton in 3D, and discovered that this wee lizard has more in common with the ones scampering around your backyard than the unique Tuatara—pushing back lizard evolution as we know it quite a bit before we thought.
The next reason to clean out your old drawers comes from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) in Hobart, Tasmania. And while these remains aren’t millions of years old, they are still a big deal. For 85 years, the remains of the last known Tasmanian tiger or thylacine were missing—until they were found recently in a museum cupboard. This means the well-photographed “last Tasmanian tiger” wasn’t the last one at all.

The post The Monty Python ‘silly walk’ could replace your gym workout appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Dr. Robert White did a primate head transplant—but did he transplant a soul?

By: Brandy Schillace

We tend to give precedence to the brain, and so long as our consciousness remains intact, we are we. But should we have that brain removed from the body that houses it—well, that’s another story. In fact, it’s this story. I tell the incredible story of a “Frankenstein” event, the world’s first successful primate head transplant, but also how this bizarre encounter shaped, and in fact inaugurated, life-saving technologies that still save lives today. The book will also explore a mystery that still begs to be solved: if you make a brain to live outside a body, what becomes of the self? Or as one doctor puts it, “Can you transplant the human SOUL?” And finally, this story will follow a contest every bit as determined as the space race: the Cold War contest between Russia and America to perform the first head transplant in a bid to overcome mortality and to bestow life.

Fact: Koalas have shockingly human fingerprints—but the forensic implications have been greatly exaggerated 

By Rachel Feltman

Let’s start with a supposed ‘fact’ that just isn’t true. Supposedly, back in the 90s, a spate of robberies turned out to have been committed not by a human, but by a koala—because these animals have fingerprints so similar to our own as to confuse police. 

There haven’t actually been any koala capers, as far as the record shows. This seems to have been inspired by the statement of a scientist back in the ‘90s, who pointed out that koala prints could, in theory, confuse police at crime scenes, and he figured someone should probably look into that. And in terms of purely theoretical happenings, he wasn’t wrong: You could absolutely confuse a koala’s fingerprint with a human’s, which is wild when you consider how mysterious fingerprints are to begin with.

Let’s zoom out from koalas for a minute. What exactly is a fingerprint, and why do we have them? 

Our fingerprints are made out of ridged skin that can be found on our hands and the soles of our feet, as well as on several other body parts in different mammals. They come in three major pattern categories called loops, whorls, and arches. But the idea that no two fingerprints are alike comes down to tiny shapes and changes in the characteristics of the lines within those figures, which are known as minutiae. That’s why the forensic reliability of fingerprints is more hotly debated than you might think, given that they’ve been a ubiquitous part of crime scene investigation since the early 1900s. Because the differences in fingerprints come down to loads of tiny little features, it’s very possible for an unscrupulous or biased analyzer to call something a match when it’s actually not. 

But while we can’t actually say with certainty that no two people have ever had the same fingerprints, because that’s more of a statistical question than a biological one, we do know that the amount of tiny variations that are possible in the formation of a fingerprint make it nearly, if not literally, impossible for two individuals to end up with the same set. Identical twins have more similarities between their fingerprints than fraternal twins do, and the similarities increase out from there as relations get more distant, so it’s clear there’s a genetic component. Basically, the general vibe of your fingerprint is quite heritable, but the many minutiae aren’t.

That comes down to how fingerprints form. When a fetus is about seven weeks along, its hands and feet start to form little humps called volar pads. A few weeks later, the fetus starts to grow quickly enough that those bumps just sort of fade back into the palms of its hands and feet. The shifting pressures of growing tissue seem to cause folds to form in the skin, which is how we get our whirls, arches, or loops. And which one you get depends on when, in your fetal development, your volar pads got overtaken by your growing hands and feet. That timing definitely has a genetic component, so families tend to have the same general type of fingerprint. But the formation of minutiae is way more arbitrary, and can be impacted by everything from the viscosity of your amniotic fluid to how much you punched your mom’s kidneys in utero. 

Scientists have yet to land on one concrete explanation for why fingerprints evolved, but their best guesses come down to improving our grip strength by creating friction or making us more sensitive to tactile information—there’s some evidence that the ridges of our fingerprints increase the vibrations we feel when we touch something. One 2009 study suggested that fingerprints might amplify useful vibrations while dampening others to help specialized nerve cells interpret surface texture. When that paper came out, a lot of news outlets crowd about how the “urban legend” that fingerprints existed to improve grip strength had been “debunked,” but that’s far from true. As recently as a couple of years ago, researchers were continuing to explore how these friction ridges might affect our ability to grab things, particularly when our skin is moist due to sweat. Some experts have even pointed out that an improved sense of touch could contribute to better gripping abilities, since it would help you realize when something was slipping out of your grasp, so both benefits could have been involved in fingerprint evolution. 

Let’s get back to our cuddly buddies down under. Back in the 1990s, a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist named Maciej Henneberg who’d recently come to work at the University of Adelaide was working with some koalas at a wildlife refuge when he got to looking at their digits. He was surprised he’d never read or heard anything about their fingerprints, because they looked to him to be quite human-like. He and his colleagues found some recently deceased specimens to scan with an electron microscope, and their study showed that they did indeed have a lot of similarities. 

Fingerprints show up in other primates, but koalas aren’t nearly as closely related to us as chimps and gorillas are. Marsupials branched off from primates more than 70 million years ago. So this seems to be a case of convergent evolution, meaning that what worked for primate fingers also happened to work for koala fingers. Koalas, after all, do a lot of climbing. They’re also very particular about what plants they eat, so tactile sensitivity must be useful. We see this a lot in nature—bat wings and bird wings are super similar, but didn’t actually come from a common ancestor. 

Henneberg never actually set out to catch a koala on the lam, nor did he suggest the police should actually do so. But he did point out that a crime scene could potentially be contaminated by koala prints, and the rest is history. 

I think part of the reason this sometimes gets shared as an anecdote about actual crime scenes is some rather cheeky reporting on Henneberg’s 1996 study by UK newspaper The Independent, which ran the headline “Koalas make a monkey out of the police.” The story included a local anecdote from 1975, when Hertfordshire police raided several zoos to take prints from a handful of chimps and orangutans. The guy who ordered the exercise said it was because cops used to refer to ambiguous prints as “monkey prints,” so, sure, an idiom is a great reason to go dust chimps for prints, I guess. On the bright side, zookeepers recall the chimps being happy to get the attention. This very strange side quest showed the police force that the prints were very similar, but not actually close enough to human prints to trick a trained eye—which is likely the case with koalas, too. 

I do have to dunk on The Independent circa 1996 for this one line in particular: “The chimp file is likely to be re-examined in the light of new evidence yesterday that criminal investigations in Australia may have been hampered by the presence of koala fingerprints at the scenes of crimes.” That’s based on quite literally nothing said by any of the sources quoted or referenced, and I’m pretty sure it’s what gave people the idea that primates and marsupials were under active investigation.

Fact: Sea sponges sneeze!

By: Sara Kiley Watson

It is sneeze season. And there’s plenty to make you sneeze out there–colds, the flu, allergies, you name it. 

Humans aren’t the only animals that sneeze–elephants, pandas, seals, puppies, and more all get that tickle in their nose sometimes. But not all animals sneeze—sharks for instance have nostrils and everything, but those nostrils don’t link to the back of the throat like humans do, so if they get something stuck up in their smellers they have to just try to shake it out, apparently. Aquatic animals in general don’t have the advantage of using a ton of air to push out every single annoying particle they suck up while swimming about.

However, a new study shows how one aquatic animal, in its own little way, sneezes to get rid of junk that clogs up their internal filter system—sea sponges. 

Sea sponges are some of the oldest creatures out there, with a fossil record dating back approximately 600 million years to the earliest (Precambrian) period of Earth’s history. Sponges don’t have noses, obviously. They instead have all of these tiny pores that suck in stuff from the water around them, which they use as food and nutrients. But just like when you get a whiff of stinky perfume instead of fresh air, sometimes sponges just need to sneeze something out. And sponges can’t move, so if their home all of the sudden becomes really gross, they especially need one hearty achoo. 

How their sneezes work is their little water inlets release mucus slowly over time, which builds up on their little sponge-y surfaces. When that mucus becomes too much, the sponge tissues contract and push the waste-filled snot globs into the water. Visually, it’s like pimples popping themselves, so if that’s your thing then you’ll be a big fan of the sponge sneeze.

The post A sea sponge’s sneeze lasts a very, very long time appeared first on Popular Science.

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Earthlings, get ready for your closeups.

Close-up Photographer of the Year has revealed its fourth annual contest winners, and the results are a doozy. With 11 different categories, the Top 100 features everything from octopuses and Atlas moths, to trails of pheromones and the delicate cross sections of leaves.

The story behind the overall winner (seen above):

“Northern pitcher plants (Sarracenia purpurea) are carnivorous, allowing them to survive in nutrient-poor bog environments. Here there is no rich soil, but rather a floating mat of Sphagnum moss. Instead of drawing nutrients up through their roots, this plant relies on trapping prey in its specialised bell-shaped leaves, called pitchers. Typically, these plants feast on invertebrates—such as moths and flies—but recently, researchers at the Algonquin Wildlife Research Station discovered a surprising new item on the plant’s menu: juvenile spotted salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum).

This population of Northern Pitcher Plants in Algonquin Provincial Park is the first to be found regularly consuming a vertebrate prey. For a plant that’s used to capturing tiny invertebrate, a juvenile spotted salamander is a hefty feast!

On the day I made this image, I was following researchers on their daily surveys of the plants. Pitchers typically contain just one salamander prey at a time, although occasionally they catch multiple salamanders simultaneously. When I saw a pitcher that had two salamanders, both at the same stage of decay floating at the surface of the pitcher’s fluid, I knew it was a special and fleeting moment. The next day, both salamanders had sunk to the bottom of the pitcher.”

– Photographer Samantha Stephens

The next entry period for the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards will open in March. But before you start prepping your cameras, get a little inspiration by scrolling through more of the recent winners below.

The post 13 otherworldly photos that were actually taken on Earth appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Scientists are feeding poisoned toad butts to predators to save their lives.

By Bethany Brookshire

Cane toads hopped across Australia beginning in the 1930s. Scientists brought them in originally to try to combat the cane grub attacking sugar cane farms. Unfortunately, cane toads weren’t much for cane grub control. Instead, they bred really well and started hopping west. (For the best possible content on this, I recommend this iconic cane toad documentary on YouTube.) In the process, they came to the attention of the local predators. But cane toads are toxic! They have poisonous pads on their shoulders. Predators who ate them quickly found out they had eaten their last meal. Up to 90% of predators would end up dead as cane toads spread west. To save the predators, scientists have started giving naive predators bits of toad before the real ones arrive, hoping to teach the predators that toads are a never food. Some predators get sausages made of toad, others get non-poisonous toad butts. Both are laced with lithium chloride, a substance that doesn’t kill, but does make the animals feel very, very nauseated. The animals that rely on live prey get exposed to baby cane toads, ones too small to kill them outright, but with enough poison to make the predators learn their lessons. So far the toad butts appear to work! Predators exposed to cane toads only decline by about 50% when the big toads arrive. It’s still bad, but not as bad as it could be.

For more on cane toads, and on the other amazing animals that we hate, and why we hate them, check out Bethany Brookshire’s book, Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, wherever fine books are sold. 

FACT: No one actually thought riding a train would make your uterus fly out of your body—but the moral panic was very real.

By Rachel Feltman

A couple years back on Weirdest Thing, I talked about how the invention of the modern bicycle led to all kinds of moral and medical uproar about why women shouldn’t ride them.  And in my recent book, I talk about the history of the term hysteria—which was once a fully serious medical belief that the uterus wandered around the body following exciting smells like some kind of feral rodent, thereby impacting health. 

Both of these stories prompted friends and readers and listeners alike to say “you’ve got to talk about how when trains were first invented, men thought that moving at such speeds would make a woman’s uterus go flying right out of her!!!”

I’ve attempted to do this episode multiple times, but my cursory research efforts have always come up short. I found loads of blog posts and listicles and Reddit comments discussing this historical anecdote, but kept striking out on an actual historical source. As it turns out, there probably isn’t one! 

This specific supposed factoid seems to come from a 2011 interview with a technologist from Intel. And in her defense, the way she paraphrased the historical attitudes around trains was pretty clearly, at least in my reading, meant to be off-the-cuff and a bit hyperbolic. But people really latched onto the idea that Victorian men literally thought organs were getting ripped out of bodies, and it’s gotten repeated as fact over and over. 

The closest thing we actually find to this in the historical literature, though, is an article in the New England Medical Gazette from 1870, where a doctor fussed over the strong vibrations of the bench a woman might sit on while riding a train, and how that might delay a menstrual cycle and/or cause “uterine flexion or dislocation.”

Important context here is that people still believed in the whole hysteria thing, whereby the uterus shifted around the body and caused trouble. A lot of physicians by this point had come up with more modest and reasonable amounts of motion a uterus could undertake, in contrast to their forefathers who had literally thought that thing could go anywhere, but they still thought it was an organ prone to ending up in the wrong spot. So, someone saying this is very different from someone saying they thought trains would send your uterus flying out your vagina. 

That’s not to say that Victorians were chill and reasonable about railway trains (or uteruses). According to papers from the 1860s, which was a few decades after passenger steam trains first became a thing, consumers had been worried about everything from suffocating in tunnels to fainting in the exhaust fumes. When The Lancet solicited research on rail travel in the early 1860s, doctors blamed it for everything from miscarriage to brain congestion. 

In hindsight, we can see the clear rise of a moral panic around railway travel. In the 1860s and 1870s, as train travel became more ubiquitous—even as doctors wrote confidently that fears of asphyxiation and such had been unfounded—there started to be accounts of totally healthy people boarding trains and being driven to violent madness. There was loads of media coverage, which may have made people who were on-edge more prone to having the sort of breakdown they were supposed to have on a train. People also started to write stories about how patients from mental asylums could just pop onto a train and you’d never know, and you’d be stuck with them, which really puts the concept of Uber Pool into sharp perspective. 

There was also a lot of debate over something called Railway Spine, which referred to the long term physical distress reported by survivors of the first passenger train crashes. Railway owners saw this as an obvious sign that folks were faking distress for money, but doctors worried that something about the high speeds of rail—and the resulting force of its collisions—could be creating an illness they’d never seen before. Now it’s easy to characterize these symptoms as traumatic brain injuries, PTSD, or both. But the belief that there was something special about trains that made them particularly dangerous may have 

led to the general sense of panic around them.

Trains were obviously not our first moral panic over technology. Ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates groused about how writing and reading were a slippery slope into laziness and anti-intellectualism, since obviously the natural way to learn new information was to hear it in person and then just remember it perfectly. People thought telephones would electrocute them and keep everyone from leaving their homes. Zippers may have been associated with laziness and moral decay. The printing press would allow for false prophets to print satanic bibles. Reading popular novels would rot young peoples’ brains.

In her 2020 paper “The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics,” Cambridge University experimental psychologist Amy Orben points out that adolescents are often at the center of moral panics around new tech. Orben also points out that we’ve looped scientists into these questions, looking for data-driven answers on how something might impact our youth. But she notes that these studies are almost always flawed—they make generalizations about who uses the tech and how, and assume all people using it will be affected the same way, and generally have a specific negative outcome they’re looking to connect it to. 

FACT: Aye-ayes pick their noses with XXL fingers.

By Lauren Young

The beauty of the aye-aye is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. This species of lemur from Madagascar, Daubentonia madagascariensis, is often known for its visually striking looks—a coat of shaggy, wispy black and gray fur, large bat-like ears used for echolocation, and a pair of bright yellow-orange eyes that seem to piece into your soul. Averaging about 15 inches long and five pounds, they’re one of, if not the largest known nocturnal primate in the world. But perhaps the aye-aye’s most notable feature is its long, spindly fingers. 

Aye-ayes, in general, have very strange hands. For one, biologists discovered in 2020 that they actually have a sixth finger, tiny pseudo-thumb, on each wrist that might have evolved to help the aye-ayes grip branches and climb. The rest of their fingers are noticeably long—the fourth and longest finger accounts for more than two-thirds the length of its hand. If you consider the human hand, a finger with the same proportions would be nearly a foot long. Instead of being cumbersome, these solitary tree dwellers have developed a variety of specialized functions that take full advantage of the long appendages. For instance, they’ll tap their digits along branches and trees and listen in for insect grub with those echolocating ears. When they hear a delectable snack scuttling inside, they’ll use their fingers to scoop out the food. Researchers at the Duke Lemur Center, a leading lemur research and education hub, have also found that the third middle finger—which can be around three inches long—can be used to drink water and eat fruit.  

In November, a study in the Journal of Zoology reported observations of an aye-aye inserting the entire length of its skinny middle finger into its nose, before proceeding to lick it clean of snot. Yum. Study author from the University of Bern, who worked with the Duke Lemur Center, noted that the nose-picking and eating behavior—known scientifically as mucophagy—didn’t seem to be a one-off instance. The researchers also obtained museum specimens of the head and hand of an aye-aye and took CT scans of the nasal cavity, which revealed that the finger could reach all the way down to the throat. 

[Related: There’s no proof picking your nose causes Alzheimer’s]

Only 12 primate species have been observed to pick their nose, whether with fingers or sticks or other tools, the study authors report. This includes humans, gorillas, chimps, and now aye-ayes. It’s still a mystery why exactly the aye-ayes, or any nose-picking animal, eats their boogers. The study authors pointed to past studies that suggest humans may have evolved ingesting boogers to boost the immune system, or that the slimy materials coats our teeth and prevents bacteria from sticking, which might improve oral health. Others have proposed snot could have some sort of nutritional value for animals. But these findings aren’t concrete, and other studies contradict that booger eating is good for you. For instance, other experts suggest that picking your nose in general can spread or introduce harmful bacteria to your nasal cavity.

While the answer might be up in the air, the study does shed light on another trait primates seem to share. Unfortunately, aye-ayes get a bad rap because of their appearance—including that long booger-picking finger. Folklore has said if the aye-aye’s finger points at someone, it’s thought they are marked for death. This has caused aye-ayes to have been killed in the past, and they are an endangered species due to habitat loss. Scientists in Madagascar have found that not all villages and locals have this negative perception of aye-ayes. Some locals have actually found that they could be a beneficial form of pest control because they like to eat bugs that infest sugar cane crops.

The post These long-fingered lemurs pick and eat their boogers, just like humans appeared first on Popular Science.

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Often when the PopSci editors put together a photo gallery, we like to talk about perspective. That can mean anything from zooming in with a microscope or camera lens, or actually manipulating natural forms into art. But the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards take a simpler approach: find the humor in animal antics and freeze it in a shot or a series. Here, we get to look at wildlife behavior from an anthropomorphic perspective, while learning a little about common and exotic species. That’s what makes it one of PopSci‘s favorite contests each year.

Now in its seventh year, the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards recognizes six winners and 10 commendations from a pool of 5,000 entries. The competition is free to enter, and 10 percent of all publicity profits are donated to the UK’s Whitley Fund for Nature. Check out our favorites from the entertaining 2022 champions.

The post These might be the funniest animal photos you’ve seen this year appeared first on Popular Science.

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Humans continue to alter Earth in ways both mundane and extreme, as diverse as rocket ships punching through the sky to scooping up rocks from a volcano’s mouth. This crop of images, pulled from National Geographic’s Pictures of the Year 2022, shows that influence as: new scientific developments, like ribbon-y curls of ultra-thin ceramic; natural appreciation, including hikers who march like ants atop the Bears Ears monument in southeast Utah; and altered animal behavior, such as the gathering of wild elephants and domesticated cattle munching on a trash heap in Sri Lanka.

Throughout 2022, 132 photographers took 2.2 million images for the magazine from 60 countries, according to National Geographic. Check out 10 of the very best in the gallery below.

[Related: 9 stunning pictures of the microscopic realm]

For more on this story, visit natgeo.com/photos.

The post Trash-eating elephants, a lava landscaper, and 8 more of this year’s best NatGeo photos appeared first on Popular Science.

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On a cloudy Christmas morning last year, a rocket carrying the most powerful space telescope ever built blasted off from a launchpad in French Guiana. After reaching its destination in space about a month later, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending back sparkling presents to humanity—jaw-dropping images that are revealing our universe in stunning new ways.

Every year since 1988, Popular Science has highlighted the innovations that make living on Earth even a tiny bit better. And this year—our 35th—has been remarkable, thanks to the successful deployment of the JWST, which earned our highest honor as the Innovation of the Year. But it’s just one item out of the 100 stellar technological accomplishments our editors have selected to recognize. 

The list below represents months of research, testing, discussion, and debate. It celebrates exciting inventions that are improving our lives in ways both big and small. These technologies and discoveries are teaching us about the nature of the universe and treating diseases, but they’re also giving us better ways of entertaining and expressing ourselves. 

With 10 categories spanning from aerospace to sports and outdoors, the list is a doozy. We’ve got Naval fighter jets on the big screen and TikTok filters on your phone. There’s gear to help you explore the great outdoors, and devices to help you improve your health and home. We’ve got gadgets galore, a very long suspension bridge, and an EV with a range of 747 miles. So buckle up, and explore the winners below. 

• Aerospace
• Engineering
• Gadgets
• Health
• Entertainment
• Personal Care
• Emergency Services and Defense
• Automotive
• Sports and Outdoors
• Home

Aerospace

In space, no one can hear a probe smash into an asteroid—but that’s just what happened in September, when NASA’s successful DART experiment proved that it’s possible to reroute a space rock by crashing into it on purpose. And that wasn’t even the most important event to materialize in space this year—more on the JWST in a moment. Back on Earth, innovation also reached new heights in the aviation industry, as a unique electric airplane took off, as did a Black Hawk helicopter that can fly itself. 

Innovation of the Year

The James Webb Space Telescope by NASA: A game-changing new instrument to see the cosmos 

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Once a generation, an astronomical tool arrives that surpasses everything that came before it. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is just such a creation. After more than two decades and $9.7 billion in the making, JWST launched on December 25, 2021. Since February of this year, when it first started imaging—employing a mirror and aperture nearly three times larger in radius than its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope—JWST’s vibrant images have captured the attention of the world.

The JWST can see deep into fields of forming stars. It can peer 13 billion years back in time at ancient galaxies, still in their nursery. It can peek at exoplanets, seeing them directly where astronomers would have once had to reconstruct meager traces of their existence. It can teach us about how those stars and galaxies came together from primordial matter, something Hubble could only glimpse.

While Hubble circles in low Earth orbit, JWST instead sits hundreds of thousands of miles farther away, in Earth’s shadow. It will never see sunlight. There, protected even further by a multi-layer sunshield thinner than a human fingernail, the telescope chills at -370 degrees F, where JWST’s infrared sight works best. Its home is a fascinating location called L2, one of several points where the sun and Earth’s gravities balance each other out. 

All this might just be JWST’s prologue. Since the telescope used less fuel than initially anticipated when reaching its perch, the instrument might have enough to last well past its anticipated 10-year-long window. We can’t wait to see what else it dazzles us with.

Parallel Reality by Delta: A screen customized for you

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You’ve probably found yourself running through an airport at some point, squinting up at a screen filled with rows of flight information. A futuristic new offering from Delta and a startup called Misapplied Sciences aims to change that. At Detroit Metro Airport, an installation can show travelers customized information for their flight. A scan of your boarding pass in McNamara Terminal is one way to tell the system who you are. Then, when you look at the overhead screen, you see that it displays only personalized data about your journey, like which gate you need to find. The tech behind the system works because the pixels in the display itself can shine in one of 18,000 directions, meaning many different people can see distinct information while looking at the same screen at the same time. 

Electronic bag tags by Alaska Airlines: The last tag you’ll need (for one airline)

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Believe it or not, some travelers do still check bags, and a new offering from this Seattle-based airline aims to make that process easier. Flyers who can get an electronic bag tag from Alaska Airlines (at first, 2,500 members of their frequent flier plan will get them, and in 2023 they’ll be available to buy) can use their mobile phone to create the appropriate luggage tag on this device’s e-ink display while at home, up to 24 hours before a flight. The 5-inch-long tag itself gets the power it needs to generate the information on the screen from your phone, thanks to an NFC connection. After the traveler has done this step at home, they just need to drop the tagged bag off in the right place at the airport, avoiding the line to get a tag. 

Alice by Eviation: A totally electric commuter airplane 

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The aviation industry is a major producer of carbon emissions. One way to try to solve that problem is to run aircraft on electric power, utilizing them just for short hops. That’s what Eviation aims to do with a plane called Alice: 8,000 pounds of batteries in the belly of this commuter aircraft give its two motors the power it needs to fly. In fact, it made its first flight in September, a scant but successful eight minutes in the air. Someday, as battery tech improves, the company hopes that it can carry nine passengers for distances of 200 miles or so. 

OPV Black Hawk by Sikorsky: A military helicopter that flies itself 

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Two pilots sit up front at the controls of the Army’s Black Hawk helicopters, but what if that number could be zero for missions that are especially hazardous? That’s exactly what a modified UH-60 helicopter can do, a product of a DARPA program called ALIAS, which stands for Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System. The self-flying whirlybird made its first flights with zero occupants on board in February, and in October, it took flight again, even carrying a 2,600-pound load beneath it. The technology comes from helicopter-maker Sikorsky, and allows the modified UH-60 to be flown by two pilots, one pilot, or zero. The idea is that this type of autonomy can help in several ways: to assist the one or two humans at the controls, or as a way for an uninhabited helicopter to execute tasks like flying somewhere dangerous to deliver supplies without putting any people on board at risk. 

Detect and Avoid by Zipline: Drones that can listen for in-flight obstacles

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As drones and other small aircraft continue to fill the skies, all parties involved have an interest in avoiding collisions. But figuring out the best way for a drone to detect potential obstacles isn’t an easy problem to solve, especially since there are no pilots on board to keep their eyes out and weight is at a premium. Drone delivery company Zipline has turned to using sound, not sight, to solve this conundrum. Eight microphones on the drone’s wing listen for traffic like an approaching small plane, and can preemptively change the UAV’s route to get out of the way before it arrives. An onboard GPU and AI help with the task, too. While the company is still waiting for regulatory approval to totally switch the system on, the technique represents a solid approach to an important issue.

DART by NASA and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory: Smashing into an asteroid, for good 

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Earthlings who look at the sky in fear that a space rock might tumble down and devastate our world can now breathe a sigh of relief. On September 26, a 1,100-pound spacecraft streaked into a roughly 525-foot-diameter asteroid, Dimorphos, intentionally crashing into it at over 14,000 mph. NASA confirmed on October 11 that the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART)’s impact altered Dimorphos’s orbit around its companion asteroid, Didymos, even more than anticipated. Thanks to DART, humans have redirected an asteroid for the first time. The dramatic experiment gives astronomers hope that perhaps we could do it again to avert an apocalypse.

CAPSTONE by Advanced Space: A small vessel on a big journey

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Some lunar craft fill up whole rooms. On the other hand, there’s CAPSTONE, a satellite that can fit on a desk. Despite control issues, CAPSTONE—which launched on June 28—triumphantly entered lunar orbit on November 13. This small traveler is a CubeSat, an affordable design of mini-satellite that’s helped make space accessible to universities, small companies, and countries without major space programs. Hundreds of CubeSats now populate the Earth’s orbit, and although some have hitched rides to Mars, none have made the trip to the moon under their own power—until CAPSTONE. More low-cost lunar flights, its creators hope, may follow.

The LSST Camera by SLAC/Vera C. Rubin Observatory: A 3,200-megapixel camera

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Very soon, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the high desert of Northern Chile will provide astronomers with what will be nearly a live-feed view of the southern hemisphere’s sky. To do that, it will rely on the world’s largest camera—with a lens 5 feet across and matching shutters, it will be capable of taking images that are an astounding 3,200 megapixels. The camera’s crafters are currently placing the finishing touches on it, but their impressive engineering feats aren’t done yet: In May 2023, the camera will fly down to Chile in a Boeing 747, before traveling by truck to its final destination.

The Event Horizon Telescope by the EHT Collaboration: Seeing the black hole in the Milky Way’s center

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Just a few decades ago, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s heart, was a hazy concept. Now, thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), we have a blurry image of it—or, since a black hole doesn’t let out light, of its surrounding accretion disc. The EHT is actually a global network of radio telescopes stretching from Germany to Hawaii, and from Chile to the South Pole. EHT released the image in May, following years of painstaking reconstruction by over 300 scientists, who learned much about the black hole’s inner workings in the process. This is EHT’s second black hole image, following its 2019 portrait of a behemoth in the galaxy M87.

Starliner by Boeing: A new way of getting to the ISS 

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After years of budget issues, technical delays, and testing failures, Boeing’s much-awaited Starliner crew capsule finally took to the skies and made it to its destination. An uncrewed test launch in May successfully departed Florida, docked at the International Space Station (ISS), and landed back on Earth. Now, Boeing and NASA are preparing for Starliner’s first crewed test, set to launch sometime in 2023. When that happens, Starliner will take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, and NASA will have more than one option to get astronauts into orbit. There are a few differences between the two: Where Crew Dragon splashes down in the sea, Starliner touches down on land, making it easier to recover. And, where Crew Dragon was designed to launch on SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 rockets, Starliner is more flexible. 

Engineering

Zero-emissions vehicles, artificial intelligence, and self-charging gadgets are helping remake and update some of the most important technologies of the last few centuries. Personal devices like headphones and remote controls may be headed for a wireless, grid-less future, thanks to a smaller and more flexible solar panel. Boats can now sail human-free from the UK to the US, using a suite of sensors and AI. Chemical factories, energy facilities, trucks and ships are getting green makeovers as engineers figure out clever new ways to make them run on hydrogen, batteries, or other alternative, non-fossil fuel power sources.

Grand Award Winner

1915 Çanakkale by the Republic of Turkey: The world’s longest suspension bridge

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An international team of engineers had to solve several difficult challenges to build the world’s largest suspension bridge, which stretches 15,118 feet across the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey. To construct it, engineers used tugboats to float out 66,000-ton concrete foundations known as caissons to serve as pillars. They then flooded chambers in the caissons to sink them 40 meters (131 feet) deep into the seabed. Prefabricated sections of the bridge deck were carried out with barges and cranes, then assembled. Completed in March 2022, the bridge boasts a span between the two towers that measures an incredible 6,637 feet. Ultimately the massive structure shortens the commuting time across the congested strait, which is a win for everyone.

NuGen by Anglo American: World’s largest hydrogen fuel cell EV

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When carrying a full load of rock, the standard issue Komatsu 930E-5 mining truck weighs over 1 million pounds and burns 800 gallons of diesel per work day. Collectively, mining trucks emit 68 million tons of carbon dioxide each year (about as much as the entire nation of New Zealand). This company’s solution was to turn to hydrogen power, and so Anglo American hired American contractor First Mode to hack together a hydrogen fuel cell version of their mining truck. It’s called NuGen. Since the original Komatsu truck already had electric traction motors, powered by diesel, the engineers replaced the fossil-fuel-burning engine with eight separate 800-kw fuel cells that feed into a giant 1.1 Mwh battery. (The battery further recaptures power through regenerative braking.)  Deployed at a South African platinum mine in May, the truck refuels with green hydrogen produced using energy from a nearby solar farm.

Hydeal España by ArcelorMittal, Enagás, Grupo Fertiberia and DH2 Energy: The biggest green hydrogen hub

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Hydrogen can be a valuable fuel source for decarbonizing industrial processes. But obtaining the gas at scale requires using energy from natural gas to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with electrical currents. To be sustainable, this process needs to be powered with renewables. That’s the goal of an industrial consortium in Spain, comprised of the four companies listed above. It’s beginning work on HyDeal España, set to be the world’s largest green hydrogen hub. Solar panels with a capacity of 9.5 GW will power electrolysers that will separate hydrogen from water at an unprecedented scale. The project will help create fossil-free ammonia (for fertilizer and other purposes), and hydrogen for use in the production of green steel. The hub is scheduled to be completed in 2030, and according to its estimates, the project will reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of Spain by 4 percent. 

DALL-E 2 by Open AI: A groundbreaking text-to-image generator

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Art students will often mimic the style of a master as part of their training. DALL-E 2 by Open AI takes this technique to a scale only artificial intelligence can achieve, by studying hundreds of millions of captioned images scraped from the internet. It allows users to write text prompts that the algorithm then renders into pictures in less than a minute. Compared to previous image generators, the quality of the output is getting rave reviews, and there are “happy accidents” that feel like real creativity. And it’s not just artists—urban planning advocates and even a reconstructive surgeon have used the tool to visualize rough concepts.

The P12 shuttle by Candela: A speedy electric hydrofoil ferry

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When the first Candela P12 electric hydrofoil goes into service next year in Stockholm, Sweden, it will take commuters from the suburbs to downtown in about 25 minutes. That’s a big  improvement from the 55 minutes it takes on diesel ferries. Because the P12 produces almost no wake, it is allowed to exceed the speed restrictions placed on other watercraft; it travels at roughly 30 miles per hour, which according to the company makes it the world’s fastest aquatic electric vessel. Computer-guided stabilization technology aims to make the ride feel smooth. And as a zero-emissions way to avoid traffic congestion on bridge or tunnel chokepoints without needing to build expensive infrastructure, the boats are a win for transportation.

Bioforge by Solugen: Zero-emission chemical factory

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Petrochemical plants typically require acres of towering columns and snaking pipes to turn fossil fuels into useful products. In addition to producing toxic emissions like benzene, these facilities put out 925 million metric tons of greenhouse gas every year, according to an IEA estimate. But outside Houston, Solugen built a “Bioforge” plant that produces 10,000 tons of chemicals like fertilizer and cleaning solutions annually through a process that yields zero air emissions or wastewater. The secret sauce consists of enzymes: instead of using fossil fuels as a feedstock, these proteins turn corn syrup into useful chemicals for products much more efficiently than conventional fossil fuel processes– and at a competitive price. These enzymes even like to eat pieces of old cardboard that can’t be recycled anymore, turning trash into feedstock treasure. Solugen signed a deal this fall with a large company to turn cardboard landfill waste into usable plastics.

HydroSKIN by ILEK/U of Stuttgart: Zero-Emissions Cooling

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Air conditioners and fans already consume 10 percent of the world’s electricity, and AC use is projected to triple by the year 2050. But there are other ways to cool a structure. Installed in an experimental building in Stuttgart, Germany, an external facade add-on called HydroSKIN employs layers of modern textiles to update the ancient technique of using wet cloth to cool the air through evaporation. The top layer is a mesh that serves to keep out bugs and debris. The second layer is a thick spacer fabric designed to absorb water—from rain or water vapor when it’s humid out—and then facilitate evaporation in hot weather. The third layer is an optional film that provides additional absorption. The fourth (closest to the wall of the building) is a foil that collects any moisture that soaks through, allowing it to either be stored or drained.  A preliminary estimate found that a single square meter of HydroSKIN can cool an 8x8x8 meter (26x26x26 feet) cube by 10 degrees Kelvin (18 degrees F).

Powerfoyle by Exeger: Self-charging gadgets

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Consumer electronics in the U.S. used about 176 terawatt hours of electricity in 2020, more than the entire nation of Sweden. Researchers at the Swedish company Exeger have devised a new architecture for solar cells that’s compact, flexible, and can be integrated into a variety of self-charging gadgets. Silicon solar panels generate power cheaply at massive scale, but are fragile and require unsightly silver lines to conduct electricity.  Exeger’s Powerfoyle updates a 1980s innovation called dye-sensitized solar cells with titanium dioxide, an abundant material found in white paint and donut glaze, and a new electrode that’s 1,000 times more conductive than silicon. Powerfoyle can be printed to look like brushed steel, carbon fiber or plastic, and can now be found in self-charging headphones by Urbanista and Adidas, a bike helmet, and even a GPS-enabled dog collar.

The Mayflower by IBM: Uncrewed trans-Atlantic voyage

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Collecting data in the corrosive salt waves and high winds of the Atlantic can be dull, dirty, and dangerous. Enter the Mayflower, an AI-captained, electrically-powered ship. It has 30 sensors and 16 computing devices that can process data onboard in lieu of a galley, toilets, or sleeping quarters. After the Mayflower successfully piloted itself from Plymouth in the UK to Plymouth, MA earlier this year—with pit stops in the Azores and Canada due to mechanical failures—the team is prepping a vessel more than twice the size for a longer journey. The boat is designed to collect data on everything from whales to the behavior of eddies or gyres at a hundredth the cost of a crewed voyage and without risking human life. The next milestone will be a 12,000 mile trip from the UK to Antarctica, with a return trip via the Falkland Islands.

The Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities by NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric: A triple threat of renewable energy

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In Oregon, the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facilities, co-owned by NextEra Energy Resources and Portland General Electric (PGE), is combining solar, wind, and battery storage to bring renewable energy to the grid at utility scale. Key to the equation are those batteries, which stabilize the intermittency of wind and solar power. All told, it touts 300 megawatts of wind, 50 megawatts of solar, and 30 megawatts of battery storage capable of serving around 100,000 homes, and it’s already started producing power. The facility is all part of the Pacific Northwestern state’s plan to achieve 100-percent carbon-free electricity by 2040. 

Gadgets

Over the past 15 years or so, smartphones have consumed many familiar gizmos. Calculators, TV remotes, cameras, and other standalone devices have converged into the smartphone that lives in our pockets. Recently, however, that trend has slowed. Phones have been iteratively improving with increasingly granular updates. The gadget and computer market has felt more diverse as more and more devices find their niche outside the confines of a smartphone. That includes hardcore computer hardware, VR and AR devices, and even smart-home tech. Our winner this year addresses the ever-present disparity in the ways we use electronic devices, because gadgets should ultimately give us as many options as possible for how we interact with them.

Grand Award Winner

Adaptive Accessories by Microsoft: Making computers accessible to all

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Microsoft’s Adaptive Mouse might not look very advanced. It’s a simple, squircle-shaped device with two buttons, a scroll wheel, and several slots around its edges. You’re not meant to use it as it ships, however. This mouse is one of Microsoft’s Accessible Accessories that easily connect to custom, 3D-printed attachments to accommodate a wide variety of users with different physical needs. The Microsoft Adaptive Hub allows people to connect up to three of the Accessible Accessories to any computer. Compatible devices include an Adaptive D-pad button, an Adaptive Dual Button, and an Adaptive Joystick button, all of which can accommodate people with limited mobility through the Shapeways 3D printing platform. The hub connects via USB-C or Bluetooth wireless, so it can integrate third-party accessibility devices along with Microsoft’s own accessories. The company plans to continue expanding the platform to help ensure the most people can interact with their computers in ways not previously possible with common mice and keyboards.

C1 Webcam by Opal: A webcam that goes beyond its hardware

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Computational photography relies on software and processing power in order to make camera hardware perform well above its technical capabilities, which is what makes your smartphone camera so good at what it does. The Opal C1 draws heavily on computational photography to apply those same improvements to a webcam. It relies on a smartphone imaging chip previously found in older Google Pixel phones, which stands to reason since the Opal was developed by a former Google designer, Kenny Sweet. Right out of the box, the camera corrects for common issues like heavy backlighting, mixed lighting (which can make you look sickly), and overly contrasty ambient illumination. People can also customize the look they want based on their environment or personal tastes.

Arc GPUs by Intel: A new chip to shake up the graphics processor market

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The market for graphics processing units (or GPUs) isn’t very crowded. Two companies, AMD and Nvidia, have dominated for decades. Chipmaker Intel abandoned its GPU ambitions more than 10 years ago—until this year’s release of its Arc hardware. These graphics cards deliver surprisingly powerful performance for even more surprisingly affordable prices. The Arcs’ strength comes from their efficiency. The top-end A770 card isn’t meant to take on the most powerful models from other brands. Instead, at just $329, it provides 1440p gaming for players who might otherwise have to rely on wimpy integrated graphics or an older and outdated card. That should rally gamers who want solid graphics performance without having to shell out the money and power required to run the increasingly ridiculous flagship graphics cards on the market right now.

Ultra Reality Monitor by Brelyon: AR and VR without the headset

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Typical virtual reality headsets create shallow stereoscopic depth by showing each eye a slightly different perspective of the same scene. Brelyon’s new Ultra Reality monitor relies on a more complex phenomenon called monocular depth modulation, which allows the eye to focus deeper into a scene just as it could in the real world. Brelyon’s combination of optics and display tech fill a viewer’s field of vision with 3D images that simulate a 120-inch display—with a device the size of a typical gaming monitor. The eye can focus at various depths in the scene, which makes the display feel as though it extends far beyond the physical bounds of the hardware. Eventually, tech like this could, on a much larger scale, essentially create a Star Trek-like Holodeck that creates room-scale VR without the need for a headset.

Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs by AMD: A big leap in processing performance

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CPUs (or central processing units) get faster all the time. AMD’s latest Ryzen 7000 Series chips, however, represent more than an iterative jump of pure processing power. These powerful little chips rely on a brand new architecture that AMD calls Zen 4. It’s built on a 5nm process, which doesn’t indicate the actual physical size of the transistors, but rather their density on the chip. By moving to this architecture, AMD has created the fastest CPUs to date for creative and gaming purposes. AMD’s plans for these chips go beyond personal computers and extend out into its commercial data center hardware. But for now, they’ll render those Adobe Premiere edits with the quickness.

OLED Flex LX3 TV by LG: A screen that goes from flat to curved and back again

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Curved displays can immerse you in a viewing or video game experience. Try watching content with a group, however, and that curve becomes a hindrance as the picture loses contrast and color accuracy for everyone sitting off-center. LG’s new 42-inch OLED, however, can rest completely flat for group viewing, then mechanically adjust its curvature with built-in motors. It curves all the way to 900R, which is just shy of the human eye’s natural shape. Because it’s an OLED, this TV offers superior contrast and color reproduction no matter what orientation you choose. Plus, it offers a full suite of advanced features, including HDMI 2.1 and an anti-reflective coating to keep the picture glare-free.

Quest Pro VR by Meta: A VR headset that ropes in reality

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Until a company convinces us to collectively install Matrix-style data jacks in the backs of our skulls, headsets will be our way into the metaverse. Meta’s new flagship headset offers capabilities well beyond its Quest 2 VR headset that earned a Best of What’s New award in 2020. The Quest Pro features front-facing cameras, which add a mixed-reality element to the overall experience. It can pump a real-time feed of the outside world into high-res displays while integrating digital elements as if they really exist. Replace your desk with a virtual workspace. Get real-time directions on how to fix a piece of machinery. Play fantastical games in a hyper-realistic setting. We’ve seen devices that have promised this kind of AR/VR synergy before, but Meta has brought it a very real step closer to actual reality.

Z9 Mirrorless Camera by Nikon: A professional camera with almost no moving parts

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Take the lens off a high-end mirrorless camera and you’ll still find a mechanical shutter that moves up and down when you take a shot. That’s not the case with Nikon’s Z9. This pro-grade mirrorless camera relies entirely on a super-fast, stacked imaging sensor that’s capable of shooting up to 30 fps at its full 45.7-megapixel resolution or up to 120 fps if you only need 11 megapixels. In making this switch, Nikon increased the camera’s overall speed and removed its biggest moving part, which tends to be the first piece that needs repair after heavy use. The Z9 can shoot detailed, high-res raw files for the studio, super-fast bursts of small jpegs for sports, and even 8K video for cinema shooters. And yes, it will shoot the fanciest selfies you’ve ever seen.

Archer Omni Router by TP-Link: A router that transforms to augment wireless connectivity

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Single-point routers have fallen out of fashion thanks to the popularity of mesh Wi-Fi systems, but TP-Link’s AXE200 Omni could change all that. At the push of a button, each of its four antennas move automatically to optimize its signal based on where you need the internet most in your home. Positioning router antennas has been annoying for nearly 20 years, so it’s refreshing to see a major networking company take the hassle out of it. The various arrangements can throw signals evenly around an area or divert the antennas in order to focus coverage in one specific direction. Under the hood, the AXE200 is a monster of a router. By adopting Wi-Fi 6e, the router can reach speeds of up to 11 Gbps, and its eight-core processor manages antenna movement and enables HomeShield, a built-in security system.

Matter Smart Home Platform by the Connectivity Standards Alliance: Sync your whole smart home

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Smart home gadgets are stubborn and territorial. Their refusal to play together nicely can throw a wrench in anyone’s plans to build an automated electronic utopia around the house. The Connectivity Standards Alliance aims to change that with Matter. It’s a set of standards that ensure smart devices—even those designed to work with specific smart assistants—can talk to each other during the setup process and forever after in regular use. The first iteration includes smart plugs, thermostats, lights, and just about anything else you control with Siri, Alexa, or whatever other assistant you’ve chosen. As devices evolve, so will the standards, so hopefully you’ll never have to struggle through a long setup or an unresponsive device again.

12S Ultra Smartphone by Xiaomi: A smartphone camera with evolved hardware

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Smartphone cameras rely heavily on processing and AI to make their videos and images perform outside the bounds of the built-in hardware. Xiaomi has taken a different approach with its 12S Ultra Android phone, however. It has a truly impressive and relatively huge array of 1-inch and ½-inch sensors behind lenses designed by iconic German manufacturer Leica. It still provides the AI and computational capabilities you’d expect from a modern flagship phone camera, but it backs up the processing with hardware well beyond what you’ll find in a typical device. The 50-megapixel main camera takes full advantage of a 1-inch Sony sensor—similar to what you’d find in a dedicated camera. The ultra-wide and telephoto cameras both sport ½-inch chips that are also much bigger than most of their smartphone competition. That extra real estate allows for better light gathering and overall image capture before the computing hardware crunches a single pixel.

Phone (1) by Nothing: Light-based notifications help kick the screen habit

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From the front, Nothing’s debut phone looks a lot like a typical flagship Android device. Flip the phone over, however, and you’ll find Nothing’s extremely clever light-based notification system, designed to let users know what’s happening on their device without having to look at the screen. Users can customize the lights (Nothing calls them glyphs) in a surprising number of ways. For instance, individual contacts can have their own light pattern that flashes whenever they call. A strip of LEDs at the bottom of the device can act as a battery charge indicator or give feedback from the built-in Google Assistant. The circular ring of lights around the center surround the Qi wireless charging pad, which can top up a pair of earbuds. Beyond the built-in functions, the lights are deeply customizable and will only gain more functionality in future updates. After all, anything that helps look at our phone screens less is OK with us.

Car Crash Detection by Apple: Smart sensors that can save a life in an accident

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One of the most advanced features of this year’s iPhone and Apple Watch models is one the company hopes you’ll never have to use. Car Crash detection uses an iPhone 14 Pro’s or Apple Watch 8’s upgraded gyroscope, which can measure up to 256 G of force, and checks for changes 3,000 times per second. This data, along with information collected by an accelerometer and the built-in barometer, can sense the change in a car’s cabin pressure caused by a deployed airbag. Once it detects a crash, the watch will automatically send emergency services to your location if you don’t respond to an alert within a few seconds. Your device will also give you the option to manually call emergency services if you’re conscious but need help. The feature is enabled by default, and the information your phone collects is never shared with Apple or a third party.

Health

Almost three years into the pandemic, the spotlight isn’t just on COVID medicine anymore. While booster shots and take-home antiviral pills gave us new tools to fight the infectious disease, health researchers and drug makers regained momentum in other crucial areas, like organ transplants, STI prevention, and white-whale therapies for alopecia and HIV. At the same time, AI deepened its role as a diagnostic aid, while mental health services got an accessibility boost across the US. We know the pandemic isn’t over—and other pathogens and illnesses are likely lurking undetected—but the progress we make in medical labs, factories, and care centers can help nurse societies back to health before the next storm hits.

Grand Award Winner

AuriNova by 3DBio Therapeutics: A replacement ear that’s made from ear cells

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About 1,500 people in the US are born each year with absent or underdeveloped external ears. Traditional reconstruction techniques might fix the cosmetic issue, but a new 3D-printed ear transplant, called AuriNovo, offers a living substitute. The implant is made with proteins, hydrogel, and a patient’s own cells, giving it far more flexibility than any constructed with synthetic materials; plus, the procedure is less invasive than, say, transplanting tissue from a patient’s ribs. To build the replacement, a surgeon first takes a sample of an individual’s ear tissue to separate and culture the cartilage-making cells. Then, based on a 3D scan of the fully formed ear on the patient, the part is printed with collagen-based “bio ink” and surgically inserted above the jaw. A 20-year-old woman from Mexico was the first to get the implant this June. 3DBio Therapeutics, the New York-based regenerative medicine company behind AuriNovo, hopes to use the technology to one day create other replacement body parts, like noses, spinal discs, and larger organs. 

Paxlovid by Pfizer: The first take-home treatment for COVID-19

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COVID therapies have come a long way since the start of the pandemic, and now include several antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies. But Pfizer’s Paxlovid was the first oral treatment for the disease to receive emergency authorization from the FDA, meaning it can be obtained with a prescription. It’s also highly effective: Clinical trials show it reduces hospitalization and death from the virus up to 90 percent more than a placebo. The remedy is a combination of two pills: nirmatrelvir, which prevents the novel coronavirus from replicating, and ritonavir, which causes the body to metabolize nirmatrelvir more slowly. The drug does have downsides—it can interact with other medications and sometimes causes a foul aftertaste. Plus, rare cases of rebound COVID symptoms and positive tests have occurred in people following Paxlovid treatment, although research indicates that the latter might be related to the immune system responding to residual viral RNA. Still, it represents a crucial new safeguard for healthcare providers and the public.

EVO Visian Implantable Collamer Lenses by STAAR Surgical: Combining the perks of contacts and laser surgery

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Most cases of nearsightedness and astigmatism, which is blurred vision caused by an irregularly shaped cornea, can be fixed with laser eye surgery. But the procedure requires some corneal tissue to be removed and often leaves recipients with lingering dry eyes. EVO ICL provides an alternative with a minimally invasive new way to correct or reduce both conditions. During the approximately hour-long procedure, a flexible collagen-containing lens is implanted between the iris and natural lens. The implant is meant to sit in the eye permanently, but can also be plucked out by an ophthalmologist if needed. In published clinical trial results, close to 88 percent of patients reported 20/20 or better and nearly all achieved 20/32 or better distance vision after six months. The lenses also block some UV rays for added protection.

Olumiant by Eli Lilly and Incyte: Long-term relief for severe alopecia

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More than 300,000 people of all ages in the US live with severe alopecia areata, a condition that causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, leading to patchy baldness on the scalp and elsewhere. Hair loss in the nose and ears can affect patients’ hearing and allergies, and a lack of eyelashes can leave people vulnerable to eye irritation from dust. Olumiant, the first medication to secure the FDA’s approval for severe alopecia, can help hair grow back over the entire body. It belongs to a group of drugs called JAK inhibitors, which block certain inflammation-promoting enzymes. It was originally greenlit by the agency in 2018 to treat some forms of rheumatoid arthritis, but in clinical trials for alopecia, it helped roughly a third of participants to regrow up to 80 percent of their hair by 36 weeks, and nearly half after a year. Other JAK inhibitors in development could provide alternatives for patients who don’t fully respond to Olumiant.

AIR Recon DL by GE Healthcare: Sharper MRIs in half the time

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Laying motionless for an hour or longer in a magnetic scanner can be a claustrophobic and sometimes nauseating experience. A next-level neural network by GE Healthcare reduces the stress on patients, while filtering out visual noise from movement or faulty processing. The software combs through raw radio-wave data from MRI machines and turns the most accurate bits into high-resolution 3D images. Originally, the AI-reconstructed images had to be stitched together—but the updated tech, which received FDA approval this September, delivers in one go. The speedy precision can cut exam times in half, help hospitals and clinics serve more patients, and possibly improve the rate of diagnosis by giving radiologists a much cleaner view of tissues, bones, masses, and more.

ONE Male Condom by ONE: Latex that works for anal sex

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At first glance this condom isn’t all that different from those by other brands. It’s made from natural latex, comes in three thicknesses, and has a wide range of sizes for best fit. But the contraceptive is the first to also be clinically tested for STI protection during anal sex—and has proven to be extremely effective. In studies involving 252 male-male couples and 252 male-female couples, the condoms had a less than 2-percent chance of breakage, slippage, discomfort, and adverse events (which included urinary tract infections and bacteria and viruses spread during sex). With such a healthy showing, the company earned the FDA nod to label the product as “safe for anal sex.” With widespread availability, there’s hope that the condom can help beat back a record rise in chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, and other STIs.

Bivalent COVID-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech: A one-shot-fits-all approach

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One of the niftiest features of mRNA vaccines such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID shots is that they can be tweaked and scaled up quickly to keep up with an ever-changing virus. This August, the FDA authorized the first bivalent COVID boosters, modified with new genetic data to target both the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and the Omicron sub-variants BA.4 and BA.5. Just how much added protection the bivalent shots offer against the latest versions of COVID remains to be seen, although in early results, the Pfizer-BioNTech booster increased antibodies against the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants by up to 11 times, while the Moderna booster did so by up to 15 times. Experts anticipate that the bivalent COVID vaccines, which are available to all adults and children ages 5 and older in the US, could save thousands of lives if the virus surges again this winter. 

Umbilical cord blood transplant for HIV by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and Weill Cornell Medicine: The right cells for viral resistance

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There are now three official cases of patients in long-term HIV remission—but this one might be the most promising for the millions around the world living with the virus. In 2017, an unidentified American received a blood transplant packed with genes that were resistant to the pathogen behind AIDS. More than four years later, her doctors at Weill Cornell Medicine confirmed that the procedure at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center had indeed made her free of the disease. The miraculous sample was specifically taken from a relative’s umbilical cord blood cells, which were still in the process of maturing and specializing, making it easier for the transplant to take. Previous attempts to cure the disease depended on bone marrow donations that carry a mutated gene only known in Northern Europeans. This alternative treatment makes transplants more accessible for patients from other ethnic backgrounds, so their bodies can fight HIV in the long run as well.

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by SAMSHA: Streamlining the call for help 

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When you have a general emergency, you might call 911. But for people experiencing a mental crisis, the number has been a lot less intuitive. This July, however, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, run by the US Department of Health and Human Services since 2005, fully switched over to a three-digit code that’s easy to punch in: 988. The shortcut was years in the making, but required major collaboration with the Federal Communication Commission to connect every phone service provider to the alternative number. Since it went live, officials have reported shorter hold times and a 45-percent increase in use compared to August 2021, including on a specialized veteran hotline. The service shakeup also came with $177 million for states and tribes to support the transition in different ways, like alleviating surcharges, setting up call centers, and integrating crisis relief with existing or new emergency responses.

eCoin Peripheral Neurostimulator by Valencia Technologies: A discreet implant for bladder control 

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Pads, vaginal seals, and skin patches can be a burden for anyone who has to deal with urinary incontinence on a daily basis. A new electrode device, about as small as a nickel and implanted above the ankle, nips the issue in the bud in a more private and convenient way. Incontinence typically occurs when the muscles in and around the bladder contract too often or too much. To prevent leaks and constant trips to the toilet, the eCoin sends low-key shocks through the tibial nerve, targeting the pelvic organs and relaxing the bladder wall. A doctor can control the intensity of the pulses with a remote, making the device more customizable for a broad range of patients. Neurostimulators have become a vanguard treatment for different nervous system conditions, including chronic back pain and even paralysis—but few are so adaptable as this.

Entertainment

The entertainment category for Best of What’s New used to primarily contain devices meant for consuming content. But that’s changed. While our Grand Award Winner goes to a big-budget movie this year, you’ll find an increasing number of devices meant for actually making content. Self-flying drones, all-encompassing camera rigs, and even high-end monitors give people the opportunity to make their own content rather than simply consuming it. Other items on this list—primarily the earbuds—provide a reminder that content is a constant part of our lives. We’ve changed the content we consume for entertainment, but more than that, we’ve changed the way we interact with it. And these gadgets help shape that relationship.

Grand Award Winner

Top Gun: Maverick by Skydance Media/Paramount: A high-speed upgrade to practical filmmaking

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We’re all too used to watching computer-generated action sequences in movies. When Hulk smashes up the scene or aliens attack a city, we know it’s fake. The sequel to Top Gun, which arrived in May—36 years after the original—did it differently. Actors trained in real aircraft to prepare to climb into Navy F/A-18F Super Hornets, and when they did, they experienced crushing G forces as the jets maneuvered at speeds that ranged from about 250 mph to more than 400. To film it, the studio turned to custom cameras carefully mounted within the cockpits, and other aircraft like the L-39 CineJet shot while airborne, too. That approach, plus scenes shot on both the USS Theodore Roosevelt and USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carriers, all add up to give the film a degree of excitement and verisimilitude that’s rare. While the film is still a product of Hollywood that made some use of CGI, and doubles as a recruiting vehicle for the Navy, we still salute its commitment to capturing the thrill and speed of Naval aviation.

Freestyle Projector by Samsung: An advanced projector that handles its own setup process

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Samsung’s Freestyle fixes one of our biggest complaints with projectors: that moving them to find the perfect angle is a pain. The floating, tube-shaped all-in-one projector is attached to its frame on a pair of hinges, which lets it be tilted up or down with very little force. The Freestyle can be twisted a full 180 degrees, allowing it to be pointed forward for a traditional viewing experience, or vertically to play games on your ceiling. You can use your phone to enable “smart calibration,” which adjusts its brightness and color settings based on the color of your walls and the room’s lighting conditions. The Freestyle’s fun form factor and smart settings are complemented by impressive hardware features, like native 1080p resolution, stereo speakers, and an HDMI port for connecting external devices. There’s also a USB-C port in case you’d like to connect the Freestyle to a high-capacity power bank to take it on the go.

Frame TV Anti-Glare Matte Display by Samsung: A 4K TV that isn’t afraid of a bright room

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A couple of years ago, Samsung imagined a creative way to make use of a large, borderless, high-resolution screen when you’re not using it to watch videos or play games: displaying famous artwork on your wall. The problem was the TV’s LCD panel, which reflected light and made older paintings look like they were displayed on a screen rather than a canvas. That changes with the second-generation Frame, which has an anti-reflective matte display. Despite the change in technologies, Samsung says you’ll still be able to see a billion colors on the screen, and that it’ll continue to automatically adjust its color balance based on your brightness preferences. If you can’t justify the cost of an original Rembrandt, Samsung’s new Frame will be the next best thing.

Linkbuds by Sony: Earbuds that mix your audio with the real world

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Sony created its LinkBuds to be the antithesis of noise-canceling headphones. They let outside sound in so you never need to take them out. The buds have a hard-shelled body, which means they won’t create a tight seal around your ear, and boast a circular cutout, which Sony calls an open ring. The ring gives LinkBuds their unique look, and is also where the earbuds’ driver is located. Sound is fed from the ring through the bud into your ear, along with some noise from the outside world. You’ll hear cars honking, airplane engines, and people on the street. But if you’re a runner who wants to hear a vehicle approach, this is a feature, not a bug.

QC II earbuds by Bose: Active noise cancellation that works across every frequency

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Typical noise-canceling headphones have trouble blocking out sound in the middle frequencies between roughly 120Hz and 400Hz. That allows sounds like voices to occasionally get through. Bose has totally reconfigured its noise-canceling algorithm and hardware setup in order to fill in that ANC gap without creating uncomfortable ear pressure or compromising audio quality. The company adjusted its noise cancellation and tuning to a user’s body by measuring the way a chime reflects off the inside of your ears back to the earbuds’ microphones. The attention to detail paid off, as outside noises are greatly reduced even if you’re not listening to music. Bose offers three listening modes by default, but you can create custom ones using the company’s app if you’d like to crank active noise cancellation all the way up, or mellow it out.

Ronin 4D by DJI: An all-encompassing cinema rig and steadicam for creators on a budget

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DJI’s Ronin 4D rig looks like a futuristic weapon pulled from a Star Wars flick. In reality, it’s a full-featured cinema rig that combines a number of essential movie-making tools into one compact and extremely stable camera rig. The modular system includes DJI’s flagship Zenmuse camera, which can capture 6K raw video at up to 60 fps or 4K video at up to 120 fps. It also boasts a full-frame sensor and interchangeable camera mounts. The whole imaging rig sits on a 4-axis gimbal that stabilizes footage so convincingly that it sometimes looks like it was shot on a dolly or a crane. Because the whole system is modular, you can swap parts like monitors, storage devices, batteries, and audio gear on the fly and customize it for your shooting needs.

Alienware AW3423DW QD-OLED Gaming Monitor by Dell: The first gaming monitor with a new brighter version of OLED tech

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OLED monitors typically provide unmatched contrast, image quality, and color reproduction, but they lack brightness. Quantum dot (or QLED) displays crank up the illumination, but lose some of the overall image impact found on an OLED. Enter QD-OLED. Like a typical OLED display, each pixel provides its own backlight. But the addition of quantum dots adds even more illumination, giving it a total peak brightness of 1,000 lumens while maintaining the certified HDR black levels to create ridiculous levels of contrast. And with its 175Hz native refresh rate, and super-fast 0.1-second response time, you can’t blame this pro-grade gaming monitor if you’re always getting eliminated mid-game.

Arctis Nova Pro Headset for Xbox by SteelSeries: A gaming headset that works across all of your machines

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Gaming headsets typically require players to pick a platform for compatibility when you buy them. Some work with a console as well as a PC, but SteelSeries has given its Arctis Nova Pro headset the hardware it needs to work with Xbox, PS5, PC, and even the Nintendo Switch—all at the press of a button. Its secret lies in the GameDAC (short for digital audio converter), which connects to multiple systems and pumps out high-res certified sound with 360-degree spatial audio from whatever source you choose. Plush ear cups and a flexible suspension band ensure comfort, even during long, multi-platform gaming sessions.

Skydio 2+ drone by Skydio: A drone that follows commands or flies itself

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Crashing a drone is bad for your footage—and your budget. But this high-end flying machine avoids obstacles with an advanced system that adjusts more than 500 times per second to prevent disaster. A fish-eye lens allows the drone to see 360 degrees around the craft. A dual-core Nvidia chipset generates a 3D-world model with more than 1 million data points per second to identify and avoid anything that might get in its way. With all those smarts, creatives can simply tell the drone to track them or program complex flight paths and the Skydio2+ will capture 4K video at 60 fps on its own. The drone also comes with more than 18 predetermined paths and programs that can make even basic action look worthy of a Mountain Dew commercial.

Dione soundbar by Devialet: True surround sound on a stick

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Most soundbars allow buyers a chance to expand their audio system and add satellite speakers or at least a subwoofer. The Dione is different. It’s a totally stand-alone system that relies on nine 41mm drivers and eight built-in subwoofers in order to fulfill the entire sonic range you need to enjoy everything from high-pitched tire squeals to rumbling explosions. Thanks to its Dolby Atmos integration, it mimics a true 5.1.2 surround sound system. The sphere in the center of the bar contains one of the 41mm drivers; it rotates to allow the soundbar to achieve its spatial audio ambitions, whether it’s sitting on a TV stand or mounted somewhere around the television. Devialet’s Speaker Active Matching technology watches over the entire array to make sure none of the individual drivers surpass their optimal operating frequencies, and it even has a dynamic EQ mode that brings up dialog—so you can finally turn off the closed captioning and still understand what the actors are saying.

Personal Care

Our new pandemic normal made soothing stress and monitoring our health the main goals of most personal care products in 2021. But this year saw a flood of launches geared at leaving home and showing off: vibrant cosmetics, anti-aging formulas and gizmos, and skincare products designed to protect from outdoor pollutants. From a multi-dimensional hair dye that draws upon the iridescence of butterfly wings to an end-of-life solution that nourishes the Earth instead of polluting it, these 10 wellness and beauty products stood out above the rest, offering true innovations in a world too often flooded with trendy buzzwords and empty promises.

Grand Award Winner

AR Beauty Tutorials on TikTok by Grace Choi: Filters that aim to educate, not manipulate

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Most TikTok filters let you play pretend and “try on” makeup—or, more insidiously, warp the shape of your face to fit an unattainable standard—but a new generation of augmented reality overlays aim to teach you something instead. Grace Choi, a Harvard MBA known for creating 2020 BOWN winner Mink’s makeup palette printer, changed the conversation this year with a digital brow stencil and contouring filter. While tutorials often assume the viewer shares the same face shape as the demonstrator, Choi notes that her filter can map out the slopes and dips of each user’s unique features and guide their makeup placement accordingly. The technique—which involves using contrasting light and dark pigment to subtly highlight some parts of your facial structure and minimize others—is notoriously tough to master using videos, as ideal pigment placement varies depending on bone structure. Choi’s filter instantly creates an easy-to-follow diagram, showing you exactly where to apply your makeup to make your cheekbones pop and your jaw look more defined.

YSL Beauté Rouge Sur Mesure by L’Oreal: Personalized lipstick, made on-demand

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Whether you want your lipstick to match the sunset or your blouse, the Yves Saint Laurent Beauté Rouge Sur Mesure can produce any hue with the touch of a few buttons. The handheld system uses color cartridges in swappable palettes of red, nude, orange, and pink to create thousands of personalized shades. The accompanying app lets you scan any object for reference, or peruse a color wheel for inspiration. You can even try the color on virtually before the gadget mixes it up for you. A hydrating lipstick packed with pigment emerges at the top of the device into a chic, removable YSL palette—perfect for on-the-go touch-ups.

Gro Ageless by Vegamour: A duo that keeps you from going gray

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Less than 30 percent of hair graying is dictated by your genes, according to a 2016 study in Nature. Instead, it’s predominantly driven by stress, excess UV exposure, diet, and smoking. Increased inflammation damages melanocytes, the pigment-producing cells in the hair, and saps them of their hue. Research suggests that maintaining healthy levels of B vitamins, copper, zinc, and selenium can safeguard melanocytes from damage. Vegamour’s Gro Ageless system includes oral supplements to combat those deficits from within, along with a serum that penetrates the hair follicle to stimulate melanocyte stem cells. The plant-based products add shine to strands, improve the texture of aging tresses, and can even help restore color as new hair grows in.

Smoke Alarm Drops by Pour Moi: A serum that shields your skin from wildfire smoke

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It’s no secret that our planet is in trouble—and that means your skin is, too. Pour Moi Smoke Alarm Drops mark the first serum formulated specifically to protect skin when it’s exposed to smoke. Some skincare products that lock moisture in can also trap in pollutants. The resulting oxidative stress (an imbalance in a body’s ability to remove toxins or repair damage) can lead to sagging due to collagen loss, fine lines and wrinkles, and rough texture. Pour Moi’s drops address this by creating a shield within the skin’s surface layer, using hyaluronic acid, emollients, and soothing and repairing botanicals.

Dr. Harris Anti-Wrinkle Sleep Mask by CurrentBody: An eye mask that melts stress as you sleep

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This mask aims to help you get your beauty sleep—literally and figuratively. The inside of the Dr. Harris Anti-Wrinkle Sleep Mask is lined with slightly raised silicone dots. Each presses imperceptibly against some of the 17,000-plus touch receptors in the skin of your face. Those receptors convert mechanical pressure into electrical signals for your autonomic nervous system, telling your brain to unfurrow your brow. Wearing the eye covering for just 15 minutes can help relax your muscles and make it easier to drift off to slumber. And since it smooths out your forehead, it also reduces the appearance of wrinkles between your eyebrows for up to five hours.

The Loop Cocoon by Loop Biotech: The world’s first living coffin

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It’s time to close the loop on the circle of life. Modern burial practices pump heaps of toxic chemicals into the ground and cremation pollutes the air with greenhouse gasses. Over the last several years, several solutions for greener burials have emerged—California has even given human composting the green light—but for most people, such alternatives have remained out of reach or even illegal. This year, Dutch company Loop Biotech became the first to offer a “living coffin” for sale to the general public. The Cocoon is made of dried mycelium, which is the cobweb-like filament that forms mushrooms and other fungi. This substance creates a sturdy coffin that breaks down once exposed to moist soil. In less than two months, it degrades entirely and seeds the burial site with mushrooms. The fungi then helps the corpse biodegrade more quickly, breaking down heavy metals and pollutants in its tissues so it can nourish surrounding plants instead of poisoning them.

TheraFace PRO by Therabody: The utility player of facial gadgets

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There are nearly endless beauty gadgets you can buy to scrub, massage, and even electrify your face into submission. Some of them even work: Microcurrents can temporarily soften wrinkles, lymphatic drainage can briefly depuff swollen sinuses, and LED lights can kill acne-causing bacteria and stimulate skin-plumping collagen. But implementing an arsenal of such tools takes deep pockets (and a big medicine cabinet). Enter the TheraFace Pro. In addition to offering the percussive massage the brand is known for—appropriately toned down for the delicate bones of the face—the device’s suite of magnetic attachments also provide hot and cold compresses, microcurrent treatments, deep facial cleaning, and multi-hued LED light therapy. Whether you need to soothe a sore jaw muscle or induce a dewy glow for a special event, the TheraFace makes it downright sensible to own an absurd array of skincare gizmos.

Colour Alchemy by The Unseen and Schwarzkopf Professional: The world’s first holographic hair dye

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Most people who color their hair are looking for multi-faceted, prismatic hues—ones with slight variations that catch the light for a more interesting (and often more natural-looking) visual effect. That usually means lightening some pieces of hair, darkening others, and using multiple shades of toners and dyes. Colour Alchemy by The Unseen harnesses the power of physics to create a totally new kind of hair color: a temporary dye that turns hair strands into light-scattering prisms. The products rely on structural color—the same principle that gives beetle shells and butterfly wings iridescent hues using cellular shape instead of actual pigment. The result is hair that shifts across a spectrum of vibrant color when exposed to changes in temperature (like a blast of cool air) or light (like a camera flash). Unlike most temporary dyes, Colour Alchemy shows up on dark tresses without any bleaching. In fact, dark hair provides the best base for its sun-scattering holographic crystals.

Venom Go by Hyperice: A pocket-sized recovery tool that melts sore muscles in a flash 

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Recovery brand Hyperice has designed a super-portable gadget that melts muscle tension fast. The company’s Venom line, which combines vibration and targeted heat to create not-your-grandpa’s-heating-pad wearables, first launched a few years ago. But this update gave the fitness community something to buzz about. The electronic portion of the Venom Go is small enough to fit in a pocket, and you can use the simple button interface anywhere. Just slap one of the reusable adhesive patches onto the place you want to treat, snap the magnetic device into place, and turn it on for instant heat and soothing vibration.

Super Stay Vinyl Ink Longwear Liquid Lipcolor by Maybelline: A lipstick that truly lasts for hours

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Many lipsticks claim to be transfer-proof, but tell-tale signs prove otherwise—ruby stains on a coffee cup, pink smudges inside a face mask, berry splotches after a smooch. Products that truly offer longevity usually manage the feat by drying with a plaster-like finish, leaving your lips feeling like drywall (and sometimes flaking as badly, too). Maybelline Vinyl Ink promises 16 hours of wear without any of those pitfalls. Seven years of research involving some 100 scientists are behind its dual-phase formula, which combines a long-wear pigment with an emollient silicone resin for moisture and shine. The two components purposefully stay separated until application, when the user shakes the tube to combine them—a process that borrows the trick protein shaker bottles use to blend powder and water on the go.

Emergency Services and Defense

The past year has been marked by serious challenges, from the ongoing climate emergency, a subsequent increase in extreme forest fire frequency, and the devastating war in Ukraine following Russia’s invasion. But we’ve also seen true innovation in the field of crisis response. More exact location systems will help emergency services find people in trouble quicker. Better respirator technology is rolling out, designed to help wildland firefighters breathe a little easier. And fire trucks are finally starting to go electric. This year’s best emergency services and defense innovations offer paths out of tight spots, aiming to create a safer future—or at least a better way to handle its myriad disasters.

Grand Award Winner 

Wildland Firefighter Respirator by TDA Research: A lightweight, field-rechargeable respirator for forest firefighters

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Forest fire fighters need a lightweight wearable respirator to protect them from inhaling smoke. The Wildland Firefighter Respirator, by TDA Research, uses a hip-mounted pump to pull air through a HEPA filter, channeling it to a secure but loose-fitting half-mask (a helpful feature for people who haven’t had the chance to shave while in the field). A sensor in the system detects air flow direction, letting the pump only blow at full strength when the user inhales. Importantly, the device weighs just 2.3 pounds, which is only about 10 percent the weight of a typical urban firefighting Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. About the size of a 1-liter water bottle, the respirator is powered by a lithium-ion battery pack. To recharge in the field or away from a generator, that pack can also draw power from 6 AA batteries. Bonus: Even though it was designed for safety professionals, the device could also become civilian protective gear in fire season.

Connect AED by Avive: Connecting defibrillators to those in need, faster

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Avive’s Connect AED (Automated External Defibrillator) is designed to be a life-saving device that’s also smart. The devices can automatically do daily maintenance checks to ensure they can perform as needed, thanks to WiFi, cellular, bluetooth, and GPS. Plus, with that connectivity, 911 operators could alert nearby Connect AED holders to respond to a called-in cardiac arrest, saving time and possibly someone’s life. Once a person has been defibrillated, Connect’s connectivity also lets emergency room doctors see data the device collected, such as the patient’s heart rhythm, as well as the device’s shock history, complete with timestamps. The Connect AED also has a backpack-like form factor and touch screen for intuitive use.

Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations by Ames Research Center: Letting drone pilots clear skies for aerial emergency vehicles 

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The sky above a forest fire can be a dangerous, crowded place, and that was before forest fire fighters added drones joined the mix. Developed by NASA, the Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations project (STEReO) is developing tools for managing the complicated airspace above an emergency. In the spring of 2023, a NASA team field-tested a STEReO’s suitcase-sized prototype device, called the UASP-Kit, to monitor drones safely in the open airspace around prescribed burns. By tracking transponders on crewed aircraft, the UASP-Kit can play a sound through tablet speakers, alerting drone operators when helicopters and planes fly close to where they are operating. That hopefully lets drone pilots get their equipment to safety without risking aerial collision.

Locate Before Route by AT&T: Pinpointing the emergency 

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When a person in an emergency calls 911 for help, that call is routed, based on its location, to the closest 911 operator. For cell phones, that meant matching the call to the nearest tower and hoping it sent the call to dispatch in the right county. But in May 2022, AT&T announced the nationwide rollout of a better system. Leaning on the improved location services on iOS and Android phones, AT&T’s Locate Before Route feature can pinpoint the location of the emergency call within 50 meters, sometimes even as precisely as 15 meters. This better location information should allow the call to be routed to the best dispatch center, ideally helping responders arrive faster. That data can only be used for 911 purposes, and helps first responders get where they’re needed quickly, nationwide.

GridStar Flow by Lockheed Martin: Helping to power defense with renewable energy

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The US military is a massive consumer of fossil fuels, but if it wants to use more renewable energy, it needs a way to store that electricity to power vital functions. GridStar Flow, developed by Lockheed Martin for the US Army, is a massive battery complex that takes advantage of the space of Colorado’s Fort Carson to go big. It will store up to 10 megawatt-hours of juice, thanks to tanks of charged electrolytes and other equipment. Construction at Fort Carson broke ground on November 3, but the company has already tested out a smaller flow battery in Andover, Massachusetts. Using electrolytes that can be derived from commodity chemicals, GridStar Flow offers a power storage and release system that can help smooth the energy flow from renewable sources.

Volterra Electric Firetruck by Pierce: A more sustainable, quieter fire truck

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Fire trucks are big, powerful vehicles, but they run on diesel, a polluting fossil fuel. The Pierce Volterra truck can deliver all that power on an electric charge, and it can also run on diesel fuel if need be. Already in use with the Madison, Wisconsin fire department, but with contracts to expand to Portland, Oregon and Gilbert, Arizona underway this year, the Volterra has enough battery power for a full day as an electric vehicle. The electric power helps complement a transition to renewable energy, but it also comes with immediate benefit to the firefighters: the vehicle doesn’t spew exhaust into the station. The quiet of the electric engine also lets firefighters coordinate better on the drive, and can help cries for help be heard when the responders arrive on site.

Vampire Drone by L3Harris: Taking down drones from kilometers away

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Drones are increasingly a part of modern battles, seen in wars across the globe but especially with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with both countries using a range of uncrewed aircraft to scout and fight. In August 2022, the Department of Defense announced it would send a new tool to aid Ukrainian forces as a way to counter Russian drones. Made by L3Harris, the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) system is a rocket launcher and sensor kit that can be mounted to a range of vehicles, providing a means to damage and destroy drones at a range of at least three miles. The laser-guided rockets, directed by a human operator, explode with a proximity fuse, making near misses into effective takedowns. 

Emergency SOS via satellite by Apple: Locating lost hikers with satellites

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For hikers lost in remote parts of the United States and Canada, calling for help means hoping for cell phone coverage, or waiting for a serendipitous rescue. But Apple’s Emergency SOS via Satellite, announced September 2022, will let people with an iPhone 14 transmit emergency messages via satellite, provided they can’t first establish a cellular connection. Texters will have a tap-through menu to create an information-dense but data-light report, and provided trees or mountains don’t block the signal, they can transmit crucial information, like what kind of injuries someone has sustained. With a clear view of the sky and fifteen seconds, a cry for help can reach space and then, even better, rescuers on Earth.

Automotive

We may be decades away from replacing fossil-fuel-powered vehicles with a fully electric fleet, but at the same time, EVs have continued their impressive gains on US roadways. But the most innovative companies in the automotive industry are looking beyond just batteries and charging infrastructure. They’re making the most of what we’ve got while doing the heavy lifting that goes unnoticed: Making vehicles lighter, more aerodynamic, more useful, and less wasteful. They’re also giving us faster and extremely entertaining cars—and we’re here to honor their technical brilliance.

Grand Award Winner

Vision EQXX by Mercedes-Benz: The slipperiest EV

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This year, Mercedes-Benz introduced a one-off, world-beating car with an altruistic purpose: To make the most out of the heavy batteries at the core of the growing EV fleet. The numbers for the Vision EQXX are otherworldly for an EV: 3,900 pounds of car and 747 miles on a single charge. It’s slow by EV and gasoline standards, yet modesty was the mission. So how did they do it? Here’s one trick: Its body can extend its sweptback tail at speed another eight inches, helping cut drag by half that of a normal sedan or crossover. To further augment efficiency, Mercedes-Benz opted for a Formula 1 subframe, magnesium wheels, tiny side-view mirrors, and a 100-kWh battery that the company claims is half the size and almost a third lighter than the powerpack in their production EQS sedan. Reducing mass and improving efficiency are old mechanical concepts that all manufacturers need to revisit if EVs are to succeed in the gasoline era. For that to happen, however, the breakthroughs must be this dramatic. Though it’s only a concept, the Vision EQXX may be the spark that ignites that reality.

Uconnect 5 by Jeep: Putting the passenger in command

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Large SUVs typically allow the people in the back to zone out and watch whatever’s on the screens in front of them. But in the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, all the fun is in the shotgun seat—and won’t distract the driver. The Uconnect 5 infotainment system can run up to eight independent displays, including a 10.3-inch touchscreen built into the passenger-side dash. To reduce distraction, Jeep tints the display so it’s a faint glow to the driver while still looking bright to the passenger. You can connect an Xbox to the HDMI port, stream a ton of titles with the built-in Amazon Fire TV, control the 360 cameras, and set the navigation system by sending a chosen route to three of the driver displays. Best of all, there’s no ugly screen-mounting hardware to clutter the polished black dash.

Pilot Sport EV by Michelin: When tires go electric

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Electric vehicles—performance models especially—put the strain of extra mass and torque onto their tires. The Pilot Sport EV is the first of a growing segment of EV-specific treads designed to improve both range and grip. Typically, a manufacturer can increase range by reducing the rolling resistance—the slowing effects of friction—at the expense of grip. These Michelins find balance by putting different parts of the tire in charge of handling torque and mass: The center of the tire has a grippier compound to take the brunt of an EV’s torque, while the shoulders are optimized for lower rolling resistance. It’s a mix they honed over the last eight years on Formula E racers. Compared to the company’s gold standard, the Pilot Sport 4S, the Pilot Sport EV increases range by as much as 20 percent with nearly the same level of traction. 

Android Automotive OS by Google: A car OS from an OS company

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Google’s suite of car-specific software has been mediocre for the past several years. Android Auto projects a limited array of Android apps onto a car’s infotainment display; then there’s regular old Android, which is tablet software that many automakers modify for their vehicles. In either instance, their interfaces feel half-baked. Enter Android Automotive OS, which is Google’s first operating system developed specifically and only for cars. Through it, the voice assistant, maps, keyboards, and the Play store run faster and function more intuitively than a smartphone connected to Android Auto or Apple CarPlay ever could. Thanks to it, the experience on the latest Volvo, Polestar, and Chevrolet vehicles is dramatically better than anything those automakers had ever coded themselves.

GR Corolla by Toyota: A three-cylinder powerhouse

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In 2022, it’s rare to see automakers develop all-new gasoline engines. To see Toyota craft an engine with as much output per liter as a Bugatti Chiron? That’s a cosmic event. The G16E-GTS spews 300 turbocharged ponies from three tiny cylinders displacing only 1.6 liters. This is the ferocious heart of the 2023 GR Corolla, an ordinary-looking hatchback. On the Morizo Edition, the turbocharger pumps 26.3 PSI of air through the intake—a monstrous amount that the fortified engine block can handle. First offered overseas in the smaller GR Yaris, this engine transforms the humdrum Corolla—the world’s best-selling car of all time—into an everyday sports car. It’s comfortable, practical, gets 28 mpg on the highway, and will absolutely embarrass a Porsche on a twisty road. 

FC1-X by Nitro: Rally racing at its most extreme

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The FC1-X is what happens when motorcycle stuntman and record-breaking rally driver Travis Pastrana and a Swedish race team agree that Red Bull’s Rallycross is too slow. The FC1-X is a custom, 1000-horsepower electric car that zaps to 60 mph in 1.5 seconds and can land a 100-foot jump. A major reason: The car’s silicon carbide inverter is a fraction of the size and weight of a typical EV’s inverter—the device that converts the battery’s DC output to AC for the motors—and the battery can handle major power draws without overheating. It’s unique to Pastrana’s Nitro Rallycross series. As it evolves, FC1-X stands to influence the next generation of EVs—for both the track and the road.

Super Cruise by General Motors: Best hands-free system

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General Motors’ Super Cruise strikes an ideal balance between hands-free driving assistance—giving the human operator a break—and safety. Using a network of laser-scanned highways at 10 times the accuracy of a GPS map with a full suite of ultrasonic, radar, and infrared cameras, Super Cruise can operate on more than 400,000 miles of marked US highways, including executing automatic lane changes. Most important, however, is when it won’t operate: Super Cruise will disable the system for the entire drive if the driver looks away for too long, a road is unmapped, the vehicle’s data connection goes dark, or any number of failure points to keep the person behind the wheel engaged. Next up is Ultra Cruise, which promises “door-to-door” hands-free driving, but that may be years away.

Hummer EV by GMC: A maneuverable behemoth

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Let’s get this out of the way. From the standpoint of energy consumption, the GMC Hummer EV is wasteful—and, at nearly 10,000 pounds, it’s a behemoth. Its battery pack is twice the capacity of the best Tesla Model S but delivers 80 percent of the EPA-estimated range compared to that vehicle. But underneath this super truck’s extravagance is a mind-blowing method of four-wheel steering. CrabWalk sounds too ridiculous and motion sickness-inducing to be true, but it is: All four wheels can steer the truck diagonally. The rear rims steer in tandem with the front at up to 10 degrees, enough to let this massive vehicle dance sideways like a crustacean that needs to parallel park, moving up to 25 mph. 

Nevera by Rimac: The most powerful production car

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A Croatian scientist who converted his broken BMW to run on electricity is now, at age 34, the CEO of a hypercar company that’s fresh off a merger with Bugatti. Mate Rimac’s dream machine, the 1877-horsepower Nevera, has four electric motors and the stiffest carbon fiber monocoque—that’s a combination of the car’s frame and body—around. It’s the world’s fastest EV: 258 mph. Car enthusiasts with $2.4 million to blow will soon show us the evidence. But more importantly, Rimac’s other partners, which include Hyundai and Porsche, will benefit from the company’s EV expertise in future cars costing a fraction of that price.

MotoE by Ducati: The hottest electric racing bike

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The heavy batteries that can be packaged easily in a car are harder to incorporate into a motorcycle that needs to balance. Instead of allowing a bulky, off-the-shelf battery pack to dictate the bike’s design, Ducati designed the battery on its MotoE—which the entire field of the 2023 FIM MotoE World Cup will ride—so that it functions as an integral part of the bike’s central frame instead of a bulky add-on. Two separate cooling systems (one for the 18-kWh battery, the other for the 150-hp motor and inverter) ensure the MotoE can sustain 171 mph and then pit for a recharge without needing to cool down. It might not be the first electric racing bike, but it is the first such bike that customers will ultimately want to ride on the road. 

Sports and Outdoors

This year’s sports and outdoor innovations make our adrenaline-filled adventures smarter, while going easier on the Earth. On land, a bike helmet can be broken down and recycled at the end of its life. In the snow, a ski that helps you tear down the mountain can also be similarly repurposed. But the best sports and outdoor tech this year helps us communicate better—whether that be a new system for catchers to relay plays to pitchers, or a satellite safety beacon that keeps you connected to family and friends. One winner represents both: an electric joy ride that makes careening through the water easy, fun, and carbon-neutral.

Grand Award Winner

Orca Carbon by Taiga: A silent, safer emission-free joy ride

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Personal watercraft like Jet Skis are fun to ride, but this year’s winner makes them greener. Historically, personal watercrafts—or PWCs—operate on fossil fuel, emit noise up to 115 decibels, and leak unburned gasoline into the water. Enter the Taiga Orca Carbon, which takes electric vehicles aquatic. (The company built upon what it learned from its line of electric snowmobiles.) This PWC replaces the gas tank with lithium-ion batteries, which power the jet-drive impeller, creating an electric vessel that is silent and emission-free. The powertrain is located in the bottom of the hull for better handling and performance, which creates a safer ride. The Taiga Orca Carbon broadens the accessibility of on-water exploration, and shows that ditching the engine doesn’t have to decrease the fun.

Canyon Packs by Slot: Gear designed for desert rappelling

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Adventurers who go canyoneering squeeze through narrow sandstone passages, sometimes while walking in or swimming through a river, and nearly always must also manage technical gear like ropes and belay devices. Slot’s Guide 50L and Rapide 38L canyoneering packs are specifically designed with these desert conditions in mind, with an innovative rope management system. A divider separates rope from gear and allows users to feed out only the amount of line they need—from 15 to 200 feet—for each rappel. The bag keeps the rest of the rope organized inside, along with the rest of your equipment. The result is a more efficient and safer system that eliminates the need to uncoil and recoil rope for each rappel.

Stealth driver by TaylorMade: A club that’s one tough cookie

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Drivers suffer the most damage compared to other golf clubs, experiencing 30,000 Gs of force in one swing. Carbon fiber—a lightweight, strong material—usually cracks under that amount of power, which led clubmakers to use flexible titanium faces for their drivers. But TaylorMade changes the golf club game with its new StealthDriver, finding a way to use carbon after all. Its light face can handle plenty of strokes, higher ball speeds, and longer drives, thanks to its 60 layers of carbon, reduced weight, and aerodynamic shape. Despite the changes, it still gives off the satisfying thwack golfers love from a club with an all-metal head.  

Piston Pro X by Kuat: An easy-loading and safe bike rack

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Bike racks are notoriously difficult and annoying to load. Most require two hands, which makes securing a bicycle while holding the rack open almost impossible if you’re flying solo. But Kuat’s Piston Pro features smooth-opening, hydro-pneumatic arms that you can operate with just one hand and let you fasten a bike by the tires without touching the frame. The company also incorporates brake lights into the bike rack. The sleek, eye-catching piece of gear holds ebikes too; a separate ramp for electric bikes assists with loading. And a 12mm lock keeps everything secure.

Myelin Helmet by POC Sports: A lid that’s recyclable

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Bike helmets are typically in service for five to 10 years, then they head for the landfill. But the POC Myelin helmet gets a new life when its time protecting a rider’s head is over. The headpiece may look like a regular cycling helmet at first, but inside its clean design hides a host of advanced technical details, such as adhesive-free assembly, a recycled fabric outer shell, and cutaway fasteners. These allow the helmet to be separated into individual pieces at the end of its life for easy recycling in your home’s blue bin, or at your local recycling center.

Fuel EXe by Trek Bikes: An electric mountain bike with a no-engine feel

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Typical ebikes deliver a whiny hum and noticeable surge when you pedal with the assist they offer. Other riders can find the noise obnoxious, too. But the Trek Fuel EXe is the best new “SL,” or superlight ebike, blurring the line between purely human-powered and pedal-assist bikes. Trek partnered with German robotics manufacturer TQ to develop the new HPR50 motor, which forgoes noisy belts and gears in favor of a refined system; it’s smaller, quieter, and more durable than traditional ebike motors. The result is a sleek, powerful ride with a smooth boost that’s hard to distinguish from your own pedaling power.

The ePE membrane by Gore: A new type of waterproof tech from an old-school company

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Gore, the company that invented the waterproof but breathable GORE-TEX membrane in 1968, is back with a new material that aims to take planet-polluting chemicals out of outerwear. After more than seven years of development and rigorous testing, Gore built upon its experience with expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE), polymer processing, and materials science to create an expanded polyethylene (ePE) membrane that’s thin, light, and strong. The new material is also free of environmentally damaging perfluorochemicals (PFCs) and made with recycled nylon and polyester, resulting in a reduced carbon footprint. You can find the new ePE membrane—which has set a new standard in waterproofing—in GORE-TEX products like the Patagonia Storm Shift jacket and pants.

PitchCom by PitchCom Sports: A 150-year baseball problem, solved

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Signs in baseball vary from team to team and player to player: Catchers flash two fingers so the pitcher knows to hurl a fastball; coaches use signs to tell a baserunner if they should bat or bunt. However, the opposing team can read these signs and use them to their own advantage, making sign-stealing a 150-year-old problem. Now PitchCom Sports—which created a wrist transmitter for catchers and a receiver for inside the pitcher’s hat—has relieved professional players of the threat of intercepted signals. Phrases like “fastball” and “good job!” are pre-loaded as .mp3 files onto the PitchCom device and played when the catcher or coach presses the button. Only the people wearing the PitchCom receiver can hear the play. And, the commands can be played in any language, so all players on the team know the play.

Salem Dyneema Down Parka by Foehn: A puffy jacket that doesn’t wear down

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Down jackets are known for their warmth—and their short life span. Sportswear company Foehn solves inevitable wear and tear by incorporating Dyneema, an incredibly strong synthetic fiber previously used in backpacks and other outdoor gear. The tough new garment combines high-performance insulation with the practically indestructible Dyneema to create a jacket that won’t rip while out on tundra escapades or be slashed by a dog’s untrimmed nails. It’s a lifetime investment for outdoor enthusiasts and those just looking for a tough, stylish, warm piece of kit.

The inReach Messenger by Garmin: A gadget for staying always connected

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Satellite communicators can be expensive, tricky to connect to a signal when you need it, and are typically used for extreme outdoor adventures or emergencies only. (Or they require the newest iPhone, as we highlight in our Emergency Services and Defense category.) The Garmin inReach Messenger is designed for more everyday pursuits: when entering a deadzone during a road trip or staying connected while hiking far from cell towers. This 4-ounce  personal safety device lets you text anyone from anywhere over satellite, through pairing it to your phone and with the Garmin Messenger app, by using its virtual keyboard, or utilizing preset messages on the device itself. In case of emergency, the inReach Messenger connects the user to the Garmin Response Center. And should your phone die, the inReach Messenger’s Safety Charging gives your phone a partial charge for continued use.

Essential Ski by Rossignol: Reducing waste, one set of skis at a time

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The Essential Ski is a first—and a feat—for Rossignol: It’s made from 62 percent recycled, certified natural, and bio-sourced materials, including aluminum, steel, and wood. The design process uses no solvents or water. Plus, the ski can be recycled through a partnership with MTB Recycling that will repurpose the ski’s materials to the automotive, garden, or construction industries. And it’s produced using renewable energy. But don’t let its Earth-friendliness fool you: It’s a real-deal ski that lives up to Rossignol’s performance and durability standards. Plus, they’re not even guarding the secret of how they made it, so that others can make greener skis, too.

Home

Renters, homeowners, and DIY-ers don’t always have the time, money, or skills to accomplish the home improvement tasks on their lists. We get it. Fortunately, one of the benefits of living in a time of rapid innovation is that technology can easily step in where our brains, brawn, and bank accounts fall short. This year, you can upgrade your living space with an easy-install smart showerhead, use spray paint that doesn’t drip, or even consider the most compact in-home water recycling system we’ve ever seen—and that’s just the tip of the screw.

Grand Award Winner

Smart water recycling by Hydraloop: A compact, easy-to-use gray water recycling system

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Gray water is the stuff that spirals down your shower and sink drains, and it’s mostly clean, usable H2O that goes to immediate waste. Recycling this wastewater is doable, but the required systems are frequently large, maintenance-intensive, and involve a complicated jumble of pipes and valves. Hydraloop founder Arthur Valkieser changed that by redesigning existing water treatment technology to eliminate filters, and shrinking his device into something that looks a lot more like a modern household appliance. As water fills the Hydraloop’s tank, sediment sinks to the bottom and lighter grime like soap and hair floats to the top, where it foams up and over as waste. Then, a torrent of air bubbles grabs any free-floating solids and removes them, too. The gray water then enters an aerobic bioreactor where live bacteria feast on any remaining organic material and soap. Every four hours after that, UV-C light disinfects the stored water to kill any remaining bacteria, and the non-potable (but sanitized) water is ready to go back into your washing machine, toilet tank, or garden.

Timberline Solar shingles by GAF Energy: Roofing and renewable energy in one

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Installing traditional rack-mounted solar panels requires drilling through your existing roof, creating holes that can lead to leaks and water damage if they’re improperly sealed. GAF Energy’s Timberline Solar shingles, however, nail down just like regular asphalt roofing, thanks to a flexible thermoplastic polymer backing. With that supporting a durable photovoltaic surface, they’ll hang tight in the rain, hail, and winds up to 130 mph. Even brighter: These shingles have serious curb appeal and you won’t have to choose between spending on a roof replacement or investing in solar—you can do both at the same time.

3-in-1 Digital Laser Measurer by Dremel: Precise measurements of uneven surfaces

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Anyone who’s tried to measure an odd-shaped object knows the struggle of fumbling with a flexible tape, laboring through numerous calculations, or painstakingly determining the length of a string that once followed the contours of the piece in question. Dremel’s 3-in-1 digital laser measurer makes this job easier with a snap-on wheel you can roll for up to 65 feet along any surface. On top of that, it’s got a laser measurer that’s accurate within an eighth of an inch, and a 5-foot tape for all your in-home measuring needs.

757 PowerHouse by Anker: A longer-lasting portable power station

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Whether you need portable outdoor power or are trying to sustain your home through a blackout, the lithium iron phosphate cells inside the Anker 757 PowerHouse will keep your devices juiced for more than 3,000 cycles. That means if you dispense and refill its full 1,500-watt output once a day, this picnic-cooler-sized hub will last for more than eight years. It’s got one car outlet, two USB-C ports, four USB-A connections, and six standard household AC plugs. Bonus: Its flat top allows it to double as a sturdy off-grid table.

Glidden Max-Flex Spray Paint by PPG: Drip-proof spray paint

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Few things are more disheartening to a DIY-er than completing a project, shaking up a can of spray paint, and then seeing your first coat start dripping all over your masterpiece. Applying a smooth sheen of color takes practice, and PPG seems to understand that not everyone has the time to learn the fine points of pigment application. The company’s Glidden Max-Flex all-surface paint eschews the traditional conical spray for a unique wide-fan pattern that not only refuses to drip, but dries in minutes. The lacquer-based formulation works on wood, glass, and metal and is available in 16 matte shades ranging from “In the Buff” to “Black Elegance.”

M18 18V Cordless Tire Inflator by Milwaukee: Faster, cooler roadside assistance

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It goes without saying that cordless inflators produce lots of air, but they also generate a bunch of heat. That’s a problem when your pump conks out after 5 minutes and you have to wait for it to cool down before you can keep filling your tires. Not only will Milwaukee’s M18 cordless tire inflator push out 1.41 standard cubic feet of air per minute—making it the fastest 18-volt cordless tire inflator around—but its internal fan will keep it chugging along for up to 20 minutes. You might not even need to use it that long, either: It’ll top off a 33-inch light duty truck tire in less than a minute.

Smart Showerhead by hai: No plumber necessary

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Smart showerheads frequently require skilled experts to install, and some even feature components that are built into the wall of your bathroom. That’s not accessible for the everyday homeowner. You don’t need tools or special skills to hook up hai’s smart Bluetooth showerhead, though. Just unscrew the old head, twist on the new one, connect the app, and you’ve got immediate control over both temperature and flow. Use the adjustable spray slider on the head to go from a high-pressure stream to a light mist, and choose your preferred heat level from the app. Plus, customizable LED lights will let you know when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, saving water.

Credits:

Package Editor: Rob Verger

Judging Panel: Corinne Iozzio, Stan Horaczek, Rob Verger

Category Editors: Rachel Feltman, Stan Horaczek, Charlotte Hu, Corinne Iozzio, John Kennedy, Jen McCaffery, Amanda Reed, Purbita Saha, Rob Verger

Researchers: Kelsey Atherton, Clifford Atiyeh, Kate Baggaley, Berne Broudy, Rahul Rao, Andrew Rosenblum, Celia Shatzman, Terri Williams

Design Director: Russ Smith

The post The 100 greatest innovations of 2022 appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Piss was once a precious commodity 

By Rachel Feltman

For most people, urine is a fluid best flushed away as quickly as possible. But for much of human history, our pee was a powerful tool and an important resource. If you let the substance sit around to ferment and evaporate for a spell, its high ammonia content turns it into an effective cleansing and bleaching agent. It can also be used to produce potassium nitrate, otherwise known as saltpeter, which is a component of gunpowder. 

Known as lant, this fermented pee was clearly important to everyone from laundresses to military leaders. There were even times when governments demanded that people turn their liquid waste over to serve the needs of the many. But for the most part, we don’t know much about how people peddled in lant. We have quite a few more records on folks hired to deal with poop—specifically, the poopsmiths hired to get it away from everyone else. 

Because the use of lant offends our modern sensibilities, there are loads of probably-not-very-true stories about its historical applications. There’s been plenty of internet chatter, for example, about references to “lanted” ale—beer laced with fermented pee. But it seems unlikely this was a real trend, and it’s definitely not one that homebrewers should try to replicate. (Side note: Here’s that Yorkshire dictionary entry I mentioned during the episode.) 

FACT: Snakes have no legs, but they do have two penises

By Sara Kiley Watson

Male snakes have two penises. Actually, it sounds like a decent amount of lizards and things have two penises—squamates, the largest order of reptiles, are actually known for the fact that they have two penises. But the story of the snake’s “hemipenis” is an interesting evolutionary one for certain.

About 150 million years ago, the ancestors of the slithery snakes we now know and love were waddling and walking around on legs. Apparently, snakes still have that leg development ability in their DNA, but the “make legs happen” switch is just turned off. This is because of a gene that researchers call the “Sonic hedgehog” gene, which is responsible for growing limbs. The researchers found that the Sonic hedgehog gene “flickers” briefly in python embryos that are around 24 hours old, and the gene previously hasn’t been spotted in actual slytherin pythons. Essentially, for the first 24 hours of embryonic development, snakes have legs—then a light bulb goes off. 

So what do these legs have to do with snake penises? Well, another study found that in lizards, snakes, birds and mammals alike the development of the genitals is run by the embryonic structure the cloaca—which is pretty much the butt hole. The location of the cloaca, however, is key—in lizards and snakes, it’s right up close to those hind legs (or the hind legs that could’ve been for snakes). Enter the double penis right where those legs could’ve been.

At the end of the day, instead of legs, the male snake got penises in their place. 

FACT: Timothy Dexter was perhaps the luckiest businessman who ever lived

By Annie Rauwerda

Timothy Dexter was a goofy, 18th-century guy who was a wildly successful businessman, seemingly by accident. First he made money off his investment into Continental currency (almost worthless at the time), then by selling bed warmers to the West Indies (which is already warm!) where they were sold very profitably as ladles for the molasses industry. Then, Dexter sent wool mittens there, which Asian merchants bought for export to Siberia. Then he sold coal to Newcastle (where there was a coal mine!!) and happened to profit because the miners went on strike.

All in all, Dexter’s business trajectory is an epic tale. From whale bone hoarding, to faking his own death, and an autobiography without any punctuation, you’ll want to hear all the details in this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

The post Snakes may not have legs, but they do have two penises appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Birds are real

By Purbita Saha

This fact might be blatantly obvious to listeners of a famous science podcast, but it’s important to clear the air with all the misinformation flying around the internet. In 2017, a student from Tennessee launched a national campaign called Birds Aren’t Real. He claimed that the CIA replaced every feathered creature, starting with rock pigeons, with drones during the Cold War. Apparently, these well-disguised machines are still used to surveil Americans today.

In recent interviews, the founder of Birds Aren’t Real says his movement calls attention to the harms and pervasiveness of real conspiracy theories, like QAnon. But whether it’s counterprogramming, clever marketing, or a big, fat joke, it’s raised the hackles of people who love and study birds. Avian evolution dates back hundreds of millions of years to a prominent group of dinosaurs that included T. rex, velociraptors, and the possibly flighted Archaeopteryx. Over time, the survivors have taken on diverse forms, shown stunning intelligence, and illuminated many natural phenomena. 

But the best part about birds is that they’re accessible to everyone, everywhere. You don’t have to hike up mountains or paddle out to islands to experience their uniqueness—they will come to you. Giant flocks of passerines, raptors, and more migrate through the US and Eurasia in fall and spring. A tiny ruby-crowned kinglet might stop by on your windowsill (as one did while I was recording this podcast), reminding you that not only are birds real: They’re basically perfect.

FACT: There’s way too much poop on Mount Everest

By Rachel Feltman

Let’s start with some basic stats to put things in perspective. Mount Everest, which sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet, is the highest point on Earth—its summit is 29,031 feet above sea level. That doesn’t actually make it the world’s tallest mountain, to be clear: Mauna Kea on Hawai’i is about three quarters of a mile taller than Everest from tail to snout, as it were, but a big portion of that sits below the surface of the pacific ocean. To make things even more confusing, there’s another mountain that, by certain definitions, could be considered the world’s tallest. Because Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, Ecuador’s Chimborazo mountain happens to sit at just the right bulgy spot below the equator to be particularly far from the planet’s core. The summit measures more than 3,900 miles from the center of the Earth, which is 6,798 feet farther than Everest. But Chimborazo isn’t even the tallest mountain in the Andes by more traditional measurements! But I digress. 

As of July of 2022, around 6,100 people had summited Everest some 11,000 times since the first known success in 1953. It’s also one of just 14 peaks in the world that stretches into what’s known as the “death zone.” At around 26,000 feet, it’s no longer possible for the human body to acclimatize. 

In a 2019 article by Weirdest Thing alum Eleanor Cummins, Pulmonary expert Peter Hackett put it this way: “You’re slowly dying at 18,000 feet, but when you get above 26,000 feet, you start dying much more quickly.” Over the last three decades, the researchers found, success rates among climbers have actually doubled, while the death rate has stayed pretty level. But it’s still super dangerous to climb, and at least 310 people have died trying to make it to the top. Their bodies are still there. 

In addition to the bodies we’ve left on Everest, we’ve left a lot of trash—and poop. Like, a really problematic amount. Every year the Nepali government and an NGO run by the Sherpa people of Tibet work on clearing up the worst of the trash left by 700 or so climbers and the people that support them. It’s difficult to know exactly how much garbage there is, because some of it is basically impossible to get to due to hazardous conditions. One 2015 estimate suggested there’s more than 26,000 pounds of poop left behind each year in total, which says nothing of the ripped-up tents and empty oxygen tanks and all the rest of it. And in January of 2022, groups estimated that at Base Camp 2, there had been more than 17,000 pounds of human poop left behind in just the previous climbing season. 

Rising temperatures mean that there are fewer deep ice crevasses to dump excrement into, by the way, which means it’s more and more likely for feces to contaminate the melting snow that people who live around base camp rely on for drinking water. 

Consider this your friendly reminder that you really shouldn’t leave your poop behind on any mountain, even a chill one. Yes, you can dig a deep hole if you’re not close to a water source, but if you’re on a rocky trail or one that’s really populated, you need to admit to yourself that there simply isn’t room for everyone’s poop. Pack that crap out! 

Fact: In the 1970s, inventors tried to make a Ford Pinto fly

By Corinne Iozzio

In the 150 years Popular Science has been around, few concepts have gotten as much airtime as the flying car. Almost immediately after terrestrial autos hit the roadways, inventors began dreaming of them taking flight—and they never quite stopped. Some ideas seemed better grounded than others. Take, for example, the Mizar: Invented in the early 1970s by a pair of career aerospace engineers, it screamed practicality. At least on the surface. The car, which debuted to much press fanfare, married together a compact model of Ford and a Cessna plane. The driver, the concept went, would simply need to back his car into the tail-end of the craft, lock the two parts together, and get ready to take off. 

Of course, there was a catch—actually several. Not least of which was their car of choice: a Ford Pinto. Now infamous for bursting into flames at even a light tapping of its rear end, the Pinto had yet to make fiery headlines when the Mizar’s inventors tried to launch it into the skies. The Mizar’s true failings, however, laid in its construction. Bolting the car onto a Cessna overtaxed the airframe. And, later reports revealed, the connections between car and plane left a lot to be desired. 
Test flights were rocky, and eventually turned deadly for the Mizar’s intrepid inventors. But the public was captivated by the idea. And, to some degree, we still are. Visions of flying cars today, though, embrace a different kind of practicality—one that doesn’t put everyday drivers in the cockpit.

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Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition celebrates the beauty of what we cannot see—unless we have the help of extreme magnification. The contest, which has been running for nearly 50 years, is open to anyone with an eye for the minuscule and a microscope. This year’s winning images include moth eggs stacked in a column, a hump of slime mold, and a slice of crystallized dinosaur bone.

The first-place photo (above) is the foot of an embryonic lizard—Phelsuma grandi, a Madagascar giant day gecko—created by Grigorii Timin at the University of Geneva under the supervision of biologist Michel Milinkovitch. Hundreds of images, representing 200 gigabytes of data, were stitched together to show nerves (in cyan), bones, blood cells, and other tissues. Even though the foot is only about 3 millimeters long, acquiring all those images took more than two days, Timin said in a news release.

And if movement in miniature tickles your fancy, be sure to check out the top videos from the 2022 Small World in Motion Competition, too.

[Related: This may be the highest resolution microscope we’ll ever get]

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: Vampire epidemics are real

By Rachel Feltman

Back in September, there were a lot of headlines and tweets and TikToks about a new archeological finding in Poland. It was the 300-year-old grave of a seemingly wealthy woman in the village of Pien. She was wearing a silk cap and she was buried in a cemetery—signs that she was someone of status—but she was also shackled to the grave by her big toe. And she had a sickle placed over her neck in such a way that, should she try to rise, she would have been decapitated. These sorts of physical booby traps, along with more symbolic bits of protective magic, are generally accepted as signs that the living feared the dead would rise. In other words: They thought this lady was a vampire.

It’s not surprising that people were spooked and intrigued by this story, but it’s worth noting that it’s unlikely this woman did anything truly menacing, let alone anything seemingly supernatural, to inspire those fears. The archeologists who found her noted that she had a very prominently protruding front tooth, which may have been enough to make her a suspicious figure to her neighbors—especially if she was wealthy and independent.

I really appreciated that tooth detail, because it gets at something important about vampire burials—yes, plural, because these happened with some frequency all over the world. According to Stanley Stepanic, an expert on Slavic languages and literature from the University of Virginia, these beliefs and practices were common enough to prompt an official ban on vampire burials in 14th-century Serbian legal codes. And they show up outside of Eastern Europe, too. The thing that tends to unite them is that people saw vampires when they looked at people who were different—especially when they had reason to worry about disease. Other graves found with such signs of superstition have largely been associated with deaths from various plagues.

The so-called Vampire Epidemic of the 18th century, which is when the idea of vampires really entered the zeitgeist and became a downright common explanation for the spread of disease, may have been tied to pellagra, a condition caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, which would have arisen as more of Europe started to live primarily on corn. (Fun fact, in mesoamerica, where corn originated, people prepared maize in an alkaline solution like ashy water, which made its B3 bioavailable and made it healthy to live on! Europeans apparently did not get the memo.) Before the arrival of corn, diseases like rabies could have helped shape the myths. As for why people became so convinced that the dead were rising, some historians point to the fact that urbanization meant that, for the first time in human history, hundreds or even thousands of corpses were being crammed into cemeteries that sat right next to bustling human settlements, often in simple shrouds due to poverty. That meant people being inadvertently disinterred by scavenging animals or flash flooding was suddenly much more common. Plus, several physicians of the era started spreading the idea that some of the corpses in question weren’t decomposing as quickly as they should, but that probably just had to do with the huge uptick in corpses they had the ability to observe.

The US had its own vampire panic in the 1800s, when an epidemic of tuberculosis in New England got blamed on dead people draining the life out of the relatives they’d left behind. TB tends to spread within households, and it takes a while to cause symptoms and kill you, so people started to figure that the first one to die must be slowly leeching the rest. One of the best documented cases of this was the exhumation of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island in 1892. Mercy was actually the third member of her family to die of consumption, but when the local doctor dug all their corpses up, she was the one who seemed suspiciously intact—because she had literally just died, and she’d been stored in a freezing crypt for two months. To save her brother Edwin, the village burned her heart and liver and mixed them into a tonic for him to drink. It didn’t work. 

While ostentatious vampire burials and rituals are the ones that are most fun to talk about, some people were indeed killed because their neighbors thought they were, quite literally, parasitic monsters. The origin of vampiric panic is closely tied to the origin of blood libel, which is the pervasive belief that Jews ritually murder Christian children and drink their blood. In Medieval Europe, it wasn’t uncommon for Crusaders—or peasants caught up in the fervor of holy war—to target Jewish populations in retaliation for assorted local deaths. You don’t have to look too closely at the 18th, 19th, and early 20th-century vampire stories we know and love to see plenty of antisemetic tropes, either. 

Fact: Even if Bigfoot doesn’t exist now, there’s a legit possibility that it might have once upon a time

By Laura Krantz

Let’s start by saying that there is no scientifically accepted evidence that Bigfoot is out there, roaming around the woods of the Pacific Northwest (or anywhere else for that matter). But there are some scientists who think that there is a very real possibility of Bigfoot.

To be clear, this is conjecture. But there are lots of eyewitness accounts, stories, myths and legends about a big, hairy, ape-like creature that have been handed down over generations – from indigenous peoples in the Pacific Northwest, and other parts of the US, as well as in other countries—Russia, China, parts of Europe. As anthropologists have pointed out, when stories appear in disparate places, they can be grounded in some fact.

For example, there are all these tales about giant floods from all over the world – in the Bible, the Quran, from ancient Mesopotamia, South America, Australia, India. In recent years, geologists have found evidence that around 10,000 years ago, when Earth was much cooler, enormous dams made of ice broke and caused huge floods. They also found evidence that when large meteors from space hit Earth’s oceans, they caused giant waves and floods. Events like those might have been the reason there are so many stories about floods that have been passed down through generations.

The thought is that this could be true for a Bigfoot as well. It likely isn’t around any longer, but there might have been some sort of creature like this that existed in the distant past and the stories were handed down. After all, humans coexisted with at least 7 other hominid species at one point in time—and those are the ones we know about. Given that the fossil record is incomplete, the possibility of a giant, bipedal ape-like creature isn’t hard to imagine.

Fact: Parasites actually turn animals into zombies

By Lauren Young

If you ever read or watched the late 1990s young adult series Animorphs, you might remember the particularly unsettling alien villain species: the Yeerks. In a ploy to take over the world, the parasitic slug-like creatures would wriggle through the ear canal and meld themselves to the brain of human hosts to control them. While the Yeerks are a work of fiction, there are real-life parasites that exhibit “mind control” abilities. 

These creatures are popularly called “zombie parasites,” as many species often turn their hosts into walking brain-dead organisms. But many parasitologists often refer to this as host manipulation, where a parasite essentially alters the host’s behavior in typically self-destructive ways that ultimately benefits the parasite. There are numerous parasites that use this method for a variety of reasons, such as traveling to a more favorable environment, finding or reaching food, reproducing, or completing part of its life cycle. 

This Halloween episode rounds up some of the most fascinating zombie parasites—including a four foot long worm that forces crickets to drown themselves, bacteria that alters the behavior of rodents to make them less scared of cats, and fungi that take over insects to burst and spread spores. While we might be grossed out (and freaked out by these parasites), you really don’t have to be afraid. For the most part, many of these species won’t ever affect you and they are often host specific. 

Parasitologists, like University of New England’s Tommy Leung, emphasize the importance of parasitic relationships in ecosystems: “There are parasites that are causing a great deal of suffering for people,” Leung told me when I interviewed him for Science Friday. “But they are extremely interesting in their own place.” These field experts learn a lot about evolution and ecological relationships from these very interesting, and really clever, means of survival. While the thought of losing your freewill might seem terrifying, it’s a fascinating trait that parasites have evolved in order to survive and thrive. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: This skeleton was found with a knife in place of his hand

By Sara Kiley Watson

Inside Longobard cemeteries, really weird stuff can be found—people sharing tombs, jewelry, dogs, headless horses. But the strangest of all is likely the knife-armed man. Researchers who excavated the site in the 1980s and 1990s disccovered a corpse dated back to around the 6th to 8th century AD who had his right forearm amputated, healed, and replaced with a knife. The knife was likely once bound to the remaining stump with leather. 

And this knife wasn’t just for show—studying the arm bones and the knife placement suggests the knife acted as his prosthetic arm, but his teeth and shoulders showed some serious wear and tear from what likely was the act of tightening up his knife stump with his teeth. When it comes to his shoulders, he developed a C-shaped ridge of bone from holding the shoulder in an unnaturally extended position to tighten the prosthesis in his mouth, which only could’ve happened if he was up to this tightening trick pretty often.

The stump healed really well, apparently. Well enough that the man, dubbed T US 380, not only survived but lived for quite some time afterwards—he made it to around his 40s or 50s, which was middle-aged at the time. So not only is the knife armed man a badass, but also a sign that communities have been caring for their disabled members for a really long time.

Fact: The government wanted to create a gay bomb

By Rachel Feltman 

So in 2007, the Ig Nobel Awards—which is a satirical take on the Nobel Prize that highlights research that “makes you laugh, then makes you think—honored a few real heavy hitters. The prize for Medicine went to research we actually talked about on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, where scientists used sword swallowing to better understand gastrointestinal stuff. Physics honored several studies on how sheets become wrinkled. A Japanese chemist won for her work on extracting vanilla flavoring from cow dung, which isn’t too gross if you remember, from a previous Weirdest Thing episode, that the best natural source of the stuff is beaver anal glands. 

But today we’re talking about the 2007 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, which went to The Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio for their efforts to develop a chemical weapon capable of making enemy soldiers suddenly irresistible to one another. In short, they tried to make a gay bomb. According to reports of the award ceremony, no one showed up to accept the honor—probably because their research was meant to be a secret. 

Unfortunately, the group responsible for uncovering the existence of the so-called gay bomb is now defunct. The Sunshine Project was an NGO based in the US and Germany that formed in 2000 to expose research on biological and chemical warfare using the Freedom of Information Act. According to the website, which you can still access using the Wayback Machine, the group suspended its operations in February 2008 due to a lack of funding. 

Now, many so-called non-lethal weapons are absolutely horrifying, which is why the folks behind the Sunshine Project found their development so concerning. Weapons that maim and disfigure people are often classified as non-lethal or less-lethal. But that doesn’t mean that some of the military’s ideas, especially the ones that never actually took off, can’t inspire at least a bit of a chuckle. And people chuckled quite a bit in 2005, when the Sunshine Project released a 1994 memo from The Air Force Wright Laboratory called “Harassing, Annoying, and ‘bad guy’ Identifying Chemicals.” 

This paper was basically just a list of spitball ideas—an attempt to create broad categories of chemical weapons that might be worth investigating further. Just to make this abundantly clear: They didn’t have chemicals in hand that could definitely do this stuff. They were focused on listing what kind of outcome you might want a hypothetical weapon to produce, with the idea that finding the right compounds to make it happen would take funding and time. The chemists suggested, for example, that compounds designed to attract biting insects could weaken enemy defenses or even disrupt the food supply, or that certain chemicals could be used to tag so-called “bad guys” for later identification, like those exploding ink packs on clothing tags at the mall. 

Most insidiously, they talked about influencing the behavior of their targets in a way that might cause confusion or damaged morale. You might make your enemy super sensitive to sunlight, for example. The chemists went on to note that a “distasteful but completely non-lethal” option would be to use “strong aphrodaisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

When the Sunshine Project dropped these papers in 2005, the US military came out saying that none of the proposals contained therein had ever been taken seriously. The Sunshine Project responded by producing evidence that the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate included it on a promotional CD-ROM about its work that got distributed to other US military and government agencies in the year 2000. So, just to be clear, six years after the lab wrote the memo, it was still getting passed around in official channels. 
When this story went mainstream in 2007 thanks to the Ig Nobel Awards, The Guardian reported that researchers had actually asked for $7.5 million to develop the gay bomb. But that doesn’t mean it actually exists. For starters, sexual attraction is deeply complicated, and no cocktail of chemicals can simply flip a switch on someone’s orientation—let alone make them suddenly horny enough to want to get down in a war zone. As someone who just wrote a book about the history of sex, I feel completely confident that if scientists ever found a true aphrodaisiac, gay-making or otherwise, the pharmaceutical industry would slap a patent on it and market it six ways to Sunday. Until that day comes, we’ll just have to settle for viagra.

FACT: Honey bees become robbers when times are rough.

By Chelsey B. Coombs

During early spring before plants have begun blossoming and in the fall when plants are wilting away, some honey bee colonies will actually turn to robbing other, weaker colonies of their hard-earned honey stores–and even kill them in the process. 

Just like a heist movie, the enemy robber bees “case the joint” to scope out their victims’ hive. They fly side to side in what’s called a “casting” pattern to look for back entrances or weak spots in the hive itself so they can sneak in and get the goods. 

They’re also surveilling for the defensive bees of the hive: guards. Those specialized guard bees hang out at the hive entrance to determine whether returning bees are friends or foes based on their smell. They use their antennae to touch the returning bees, bite them and even threaten to sting by grabbing the bee with their legs or mouth and making a sting motion with their abdomens. And sometimes they even sting, killing the potential intruder and themselves. It looks like a fight in The Octagon. Bee researchers have long noted that after a robbery, the poor victims, as one would expect,  increase their defensive behaviors. 

And the perps change their behaviors, too, according to a March 2021 Animal Behaviour study led by Clare Rittschof, an assistant professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. Rittschof’s team found that after a robbing, the bully colony increases both their foraging and defense behaviors, even against their own nestmates returning from foraging. 

But their increased defensiveness isn’t due to weird smells that the robbers are bringing back with them from victim hives like it was previously thought. The study looked at the brain gene expression patterns of robbing bees and found they are unusually aggressive. The returning robbers actually provoke aggression from their nestmate guards when they come back to their home hive.

And while the increased defensiveness of the guards seems like it would be bad because it increases the number of colonymates who die, it’s actually advantageous. Because the nectar conditions are so bad, which led the colony to start robbing in the first place, they’re increasing their defensiveness in case a colony comes to rob them, next. 

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Rats can’t vomit and rat poison (probably) can’t kill you—unless it’s old as heck 

By Rachel Feltman

Here’s the thing: Rats can’t vomit. Rodents as a general rule, don’t puke. That’s why most available rat poisons contain chemicals that induce vomiting; the urge to let out a technicolor yawn will save most humans and pets from getting an accidental dose of pesticides, but it doesn’t do diddly squat for a rat. 

Vomiting is a super common evolutionary tactic, and it’s one that makes a lot of sense. When toxins get into our bodies, our bodies try to push them out. It’s simple! It’s elegant! It’s gross! It works! And rodents just… don’t do it. Instead, they have a super intense gag reflex. When rodents taste something unfamiliar or otherwise suspicious, they reflexively and definitively spit it right out. Blech! 

Now that humans have come to understand this strange biological quirk, we’ve come to use it to our advantage in the lab. Scientists are always trying to get better at studying nausea—just look at the puking robots they’ve designed to hurl chunks on command—because our species’ tendency to vomit can have dire consequences. During chemotherapy, for example, the common inability to keep food down can seriously impact a patient’s chance of recovery. The mechanisms that make us more or less likely to throw up are still pretty mysterious, too: some cannabis users, for example, suffer extreme nausea after smoking, even though cannabinoids are frequently used to make other people less queasy. The fact that rats reliably gag—but never actually vomit—makes them a perfect model organism for studying nausea. Scientists can test different ways of mitigating the urge to purge without having piles of puke all over their labs. 

Let’s circle back to the fact that rat poison is designed to use rodents’ evolutionary trick against them. If you’re wondering why rodenticide still shows up in fiction as a tool for doing murder, that’s because we used to make pesticides out of obscenely toxic substances. A century ago, ingesting household pesticide—or even touching it without gloves on, in some cases—could absolutely kill you. While it’s still a good idea to avoid direct contact with pesticides, and it’s very important to keep them away from small children and pets, we’ve fortunately found pest-control compounds that are much less likely to cause us harm in the small doses that kill mice and rats. Plus, now that we know that rats can’t puke, the addition of emetic agents has become a common tactic to make rodenticides safer. 

Fact: The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever created

By Swapna Krishna

JWST​is a groundbreaking space observatory that launched on Christmas day last year and is currently orbiting a spot a million miles away from Earth. It’s designed to see deeper into the universe than we’ve ever seen before. Looking out into the cosmos is also a chance to see back in time because light takes so long to reach us — so if we see something a million light-years away, that’s what it looked like a million years ago. JWST, an infrared optimized telescope, is so sensitive it can detect the heat of a bumblebee as far away as the moon. We’re hoping it will be able to see far enough away to detect the first light of the universe after the Big Bang.

Fact: Octopus mothers can self-destruct

By Sara Kiley Watson

Giving birth when you are an octopus is a fate worse than death. After laying her eggs, octopus moms die slowly and dramatically, self-harming until they meet their bitter end. After laying eggs, a female octopus goes from living a normal life and gently caring for the embryos to no longer eating, dropping muscle tone, changing color, and even engaging in acts of self harm (like eating her own body parts). 

Generally the timeline after death looks something like starvation or reduced food intake over time, and in an extreme case, deep-sea octopus Graneledone boreopacifica, brooding can take up to four years and basically the octopus mom guards her eggs as her body slowly withers away. Octopus hummelincki, which have been studied before for this mechanism, typically don’t live longer than 9 months in total and don’t have more than 2 months post-eggs. 

There have been a lot of questions about why this happens. Is it triggered by the lack of food? Or is some kind of ‘self destruct’ built into female octopuses? Back in the 1970’s, psychologist Jerome Wodinsky started to take a deeper look at what kind of signals in the octopus body could be linked to the whole self-destruct idea. And after a somewhat accidental expiriment of getting female octopuses drunk and removing their sex glands, he discovered that minus sex-glands, octopus moms thrive after birth.

Research from this year broke down the chemicals that the optic gland was producing around the time of the octopus mother’s behavioral break. Researchers found three specific pathways light up: The first produces pregnancy steroids pregnenolone and progesterone; the second produces components for bile acids; and the third produces increased levels of cholesterol-precursor 7-dehydrocholesterol (7-DHC).

Elevated 7-DHC levels are linked directly to a human disorder called Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome, which can affect mental development and behavior in children. Kind of like octopus moms, people with this disease often struggle with self-injury and aggression. Research on the dramatic end of life of many octopus moms may actually help us better understand other species, like humans.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: The tech that powers E-ZPass comes from Soviet-era spy gadgets.

By Purbita Saha

I live in a New Jersey suburb right next to the Garden State Parkway. I flash my E-ZPass way more than I pump my own gas. So to me, and probably the millions of other drivers in the Eastern US who use this electronic toll system, E-ZPass is a daily essential. And while the technology itself isn’t cool enough for a Weirdest Thing yarn, the story behind it is surprisingly juicy.

According to a 2016 episode of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the origin of E-ZPass and electronic tollbooths goes back to the invention of RFID transponders. The credit goes to two inventors: a Soviet spy and a NASA rocket scientist. In the 1920s, Russian cellist Leon Theremin was experimenting with microwaves and gases when he realized he could create sounds with different volumes and pitches by simply moving two antennas around. (His instrument was mass produced by RCA, and still has a cult following today.) This caught the attention of Vladimir Lenin, who promoted Theremin to be a representative for Soviet science in Europe and the US. 

When Theremin returned to the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s reign, he was imprisoned for his overseas forays and forced to work for the state. In his new role, he designed a wireless bug powered by the same electromagnetic waves from his instrument to eavedrop on the US ambassador in Moscow. Legend has it that it was hidden in the embassy’s seal throughout World War I.

Fast forward to the 1960s, when Mario Cardullo, a NASA space flight engineer in New York, began fiddling around with primitive versions of RFID shoplifting tags. Cardullo sampled Theremin’s approach by triggering a small transponder with microwaves, but added a memory chip that could hold a bundle of information and share it with a matching receiver. The prototype measured out to about the size of a Galaxy Z Fold4, which was too big for a window or car window. It took a few decades before Cardullo landed his invention in an actual tollbooth (in Scandinavia). It took off in Europe and Asia, and finally started transforming bridges and highways in the US in the 1990s. Today, Cardullo’s dream of decking out the George Washington Bridge with Soviet-spy technology has been realized.

Fact: A bisexual goose raising a family with two black swans isn’t as strange as it sounds.

By Rachel Feltman 

Here’s a fact from my recent book “Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex,” which you can buy as an audiobook narrated by yours truly! So, in the early 90s, a black swan flew into New Zealand’s Waimanu lagoon. Locals dubbed her Henrietta after a wing injury kept her from leaving with the rest of her flock and she took up with a white goose named Thomas. For nearly two decades they were generally seen together, with Thomas protecting Henrietta from dogs and other disturbances. 

Then another black swan showed up, and things got… complicated. Henrietta started spending more of her time with her new gal pal, and Thomas got aggressive toward the swans. Then the newly arrived black swan laid eggs, and Henrietta started caring for them the way you’d expect a papa swan to care for his young. Plot twist: Henrietta had been a boy the whole time! 

Very confusingly, the tour guides who worked at the lagoon where this all went down decided to name the newly-arrived, actually female bird Henrietta, while the artist formerly known as Henrietta got rechristened as Henry. 

The good news is that Thomas didn’t hold a grudge for long, and took on a tertiary parental role once the chicks hatched—and continued to care for all of Henry and Henrietta’s 68 babies over the next six years. Thomas became an icon to tourists from around the world, who were just absolutely charmed by his devotion to the little black swans. He even helped teach them to fly. 

Here’s the coolest part: For Henry and Henrietta, these family arrangements wouldn’t have seemed unusual at all. Research on the species shows that male black swans frequently pair up together, both in captivity and in the wild. They sometimes have chicks by briefly associating with a female black swan before kicking her out, but they’ve also been known to simply overtake an existing nest full of eggs to raise as their own. Henry may have spent the better part of the 90s wondering why his beloved Thomas wasn’t off robbing nests to get their family started! 

Black swans can also set up long-term throuples, where all three birds—two males and one female—participate in mating displays, and the males take turns between mounting the female and parading around protectively. In this setup, where the female isn’t kicked out as soon as her laying is done, the males actually take over caring for the nest so she can immediately go lay some more. 

The New Zealand triad stayed solid until Henry died of old age in 2009, which prompted Henrietta to go looking for more of her kind. Geese and swans can reproduce and create mottled hybrids known as swooses (sweese?), but it seems Thomas just wasn’t Henrietta’s type. 

Ironically, a few years before that, when Thomas finally met a female goose he fancied enough to settle down with, another goose stole the chicks for their own. No word on whether that goose was gay, but I’m pretty sure the BBC would have mentioned that, so we have to assume their motives were less heartwarming. Apparently geese sometimes kidnap goslings from less powerful birds around them to “pad” their broods—literally adding extra babies to the outer edge of the nest, so predators will grab the adoptees instead of the better-protected natural young. Nature isn’t always cute! But while we don’t know the fates of Thomas’s biological chicks, I think we can all agree that he got to experience the joys of fatherhood at least 68 times over. 

When Thomas died in 2018, he was beloved by tourists from all over the world—and, at the age of 40, extremely old in goose-years. Long may he live in our hearts! 

Fact: Louse feeder was a job during WWII, and it was also a part of the resistance against the Nazis.

By Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke 

So, it all starts with typhus. Typhus, specifically epidemic typhus, is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium known as Rickettsia prowazekii. Spread by body lice, it’s understandably a disease that often would rear its head whenever times were tough and lice would flourish. Things like famine, displacement, war—these were generally conditions under which body lice are easily transmitted person to person carrying this little rickettsia and thus spreading typhus.

But just knowing those two things, what causes the disease and how it’s transmitted, simply wasn’t enough to stop the spread of disease. Because even if you have effective treatment for the disease, you won’t be able to get rid of typhus if you can’t clean your clothes in hot water and then not wear them for five days. If you’re on the move during a war or you’re displaced, how are you gonna do that? Prevention was key. And how do you prevent a disease? Vaccines.

Enter: Dr. Rudolf Weigel. Dr. Weigl came up with the brilliant idea to use the lice themselves as the maintenance animal to create a lot of typhus pathogen for vaccine research. But how do you get enough lice to make enough vaccine material? Well, you need a louse colony and a way to feed them. And because lice are so species specific to humans… humans had to supply the food. In the form of blood. Yep, humans were the louse feeders. 

With WWII on the horizon and Nazis being terrified of typhus, they used this fear as an excuse to enact horrific policies. Because typhus wasn’t seen as this universal threat that could impact anyone – the Nazis blamed its spread on Jewish people. 

Under German occupation, Weigl’s institute grew rapidly, where it served as the only means of survival for many Polish people who faced death, starvation, or deportation. Weigl went out of his way to hire hundreds of people as louse-feeders, often Polish intellectuals or Jewish people, people who were under incredible threat from the Nazi occupation. While feeding the lice, people often sat around and chatted, exchanging ideas about philosophy, mathematics, and even actively working in the resistance against German forces.

To find out more, listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing—and check out This Podcast Will Kill You wherever you get podcasts. Plus, you can find out more information about Dr. Weigl in the book The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl by Arthur Allen.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: There’s a right and wrong time to eat wild oysters

By Sara Kiley Watson

According to some, oyster season only truly happens when the months of the year have an “R” in them. While the validity of that is contested, it apparently has some deeply seeded roots in the native populations of the southeastern US.

The first part of this myth is based on pretty simple science—oysters in the summer tend to be in their youth phase. They can be fatty, watery, soft, and lack flavor versus a more mature, tasty oyster in chilly months with the firm texture and brine many have come to love. Bacteria like Vibrio parahaemolyticus have caused illnesses in harvesting areas throughout the summer. They can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and the like when someone eats a raw oyster. 

But, humans have been eating oysters for thousands of years before we knew about bacteria. Oyster shells have been found in “shell rings” littered across the coasts of places like South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. These shell rings are circular or semi-circular “middens” of shells, pottery, bones, soil, and other artifacts. Researchers from the Florida Museum found that the islanders living on St Catherine’s were primarily foraging or capturing oysters in the chillier times of year—aka the R months. Why they did this is a bit of a mystery—maybe trial by error of sickness, perhaps merely a tastiness issue. But one of the authors suggests it could also be one of the earliest records of “sustainable harvesting,” because leaving the oysters to spawn in the summer helps guarantee a replenished stock for the next season’s big chow down. 

So, the R month legend has thousands of years of history. But a lot of stuff has happened, technologically, climate-wise, science-knowledge-wise, since the days of the shell ring. Namely, refrigeration. Nowadays, you can get your oysters farmed any time of the year with exposure to hot summer air and water, the big issue when it comes to icky bacteria, under control. But if you’re fishing oysters out of the sound on your own, it is probably best to eat them in cold seasons—for your health and taste.

Fact: Project Plowshare was an ambitious, nuclear fail

By Laura Krantz

In the wake of WWII, the US government was looking for peaceful ways to use atomic power. One of their most ambitious (and insane) programs was called Project Plowshare, which would use nuclear explosives for big public works projects, like building harbors and canals, and extracting natural gas. Here’s a brief and incomplete list of some proposals that were put forth: Widening the Panama Canal, blasting underground aquifers in Arizona to connect them, cutting a road through the California mountains to help build the interstate, and using hydrogen bombs to create a new harbor in Alaska. Not all of these were pipe dreams. In Rulison, Colorado, scientists detonated a nuclear bomb underground in the hopes of freeing natural gas trapped in the rock. It worked but the gas was so contaminated with radioactivity that it couldn’t actually be used. Officials eventually mothballed these public works projects in 1978, although similar ideas still crop up every now and then like the time a former American president—I’ll let you guess which one—repeatedly floated the idea of nuking a hurricane to prevent it from making landfall.

FACT: Erectile dysfunction treatments have a shocking, somewhat contentious origin story 

By Rachel Feltman

This week’s Weirdest Thing fact is one pulled from my recently published book, “Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex.” Here’s a little snippet:

“Giles Brindley is undeniably a man of many and varied talents. In the 1960s, the UK native developed a neuroprosthesis capable of restoring some sight to the blind and casually invented an instrument he dubbed the “logical bassoon.” According to a 2014 profile published in the British Journal of Neurosurgery, he spent his sixties taking up marathons and relay racing; as this book went to print, he was in his nineties and studying the origins of falsetto. Brindley is a polymath if ever there was one. But if he wanted to be most remembered for his life-altering work in prosthetics, his sexagenarian sportsmanship, or his endeavor to create a more perfect bassoon—well, he shouldn’t have flashed a room full of people in Vegas.”

Check out this week’s episode—or grab a physical, digital, or audio copy of “Been There, Done That” (narrated by yours truly)—to hear more about Brindley’s surprisingly scientific flashing incident. 

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Some people adopt photography as a profession; others do it as a hobby. But for researchers in the field or the lab, it’s often a hazard of the job.

The BMC Ecology and Evolution image competition makes space to celebrate those ultra-close, ultra-detailed, or ultra-rare candids every year. Chosen by the editors of the journal BioMed Central Ecology and Evolution, the winners and runner-ups consist of scientists from all around the world. The 2022 submissions fell into four categories: research in action, life closeup, biodiversity under threat, and relationships in nature.

[Related: 8 award-winning photos of nature’s stranger things]

The overall winner (seen above) was taken in the Tambopata National Reserve in Peru by evolutionary biologist and expert photographer Roberto García-Roa. It depicts ”spores of the so-called ‘Zombie’ fungus (e.g. genera Ophiocordyceps) that infect arthropods by infiltrating their exoskeleton and minds,” says García-Roa in a description for the contest. ”As a result, parasitized hosts are compelled to migrate to a more favorable location for the fungus’s growth. Here, they await death, at which point the fungus feeds on its host to produce fruiting bodies full of spores that will be jettisoned to infect more victims—a conquest shaped by thousands of years of evolution.”

See PopSci‘s picks from the final lineup below, and check the journal’s website for information on the 2023 competition soon.

The post These thoughtful nature images were captured by scientists in action appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Echolocation might be a much more common human ‘superpower’ than you think

By Rachel Feltman

In 2015 the NPR podcast Invisibilia did an episode called “How To Become Batman.” That was my first real introduction to Daniel Kish, who’s arguably the most famous human echolocator on the planet. 

Even if you missed that NPR segment, you’ve probably seen viral videos of Kish. He lost his eyes to retinal cancer during infancy, but his ability to navigate the world rivals that of any sighted person. He uses his tongue to make clicking noises, then interprets the sounds and their echoes to give him feedback on the space and objects around him. 

Kish is now famous for teaching other people with visual impairments how to use what he calls “Flash Sonar,” and his prominence has inspired loads of research. And as it turns out, echolocation might be a pretty common superpower. 

According to an analysis by Cambridge psychologists in 2014, the earliest known example of this practice was reported in 1954, when researchers described a child who produced clicking sounds to navigate his neighborhood by bicycle. And it’s actually quite likely that the French philosopher Diderot described something similar in 1749, when he recounted a blind acquaintance who could locate and estimate the positions of objects that didn’t give off their own sound. 

Diderot thought that his friend was taking note of tiny changes in air pressure to his skin. As late as the 1940s, folks were still trying to suss out how that might work, and a lot of the proposed explanations were very woo woo. It was around this time that researchers started to figure out that this was actually an auditory thing; the objects weren’t producing sound, but the people perceiving those objects were. 

In hindsight, it’s obvious that any visually impaired person who has full use of their hearing does this to some extent. When someone uses a mobility tool like a cane, for instance, they’re getting auditory input as well as tactile.

But while many popular portrayals of flash sonar suggest that it relies on an enhanced sense of hearing, the truth is even more fantastic: it’s possible that any human who can hear can also learn to echolocate.  

In 2021, a small study led by researchers at Durham University showed that blind and sighted people alike could learn to effectively use flash sonar in just 10 weeks, amounting to something like 40 to 60 hours of total training. By the end of it, some of them were even better at specific tests of their spatial perception than long-time experts of the technique.

When the average person off the street hears clicks like the ones Kish uses, their brains just hear noise. They react the way they react to the sound of a man clicking his tongue. But something different happens in your brain if you’ve learned to use flash sonar like Kish has. And it’s different between sighted people and blind people. If you can see, parts of your brain associated with auditory processing light up: you’re recognizing that there is information encoded into these clicks, and you’re looking for it with the part of your brain that interprets audio. 

In blind participants, researchers saw those same areas light up. But they also saw parts of the brain associated with visual processing light up. 

The journal Frontiers for Young Minds, which writes up scientific findings for young kids to read about, had a great way of explaining this. Imagine your brain is full of train lines. You’ve got your NYC subway and your metro north regional rail and Amtrak and you need the right ticket to get on each one. Sight and hearing are similar in that they take input from the world—light waves and sound waves—and convert them into electrical signals that your brain then interprets. But they run on different rail lines. So, research on so-called human echolocation shows us that if you’re not using your visual processing centers, your brain can reroute different traffic there. Imagine if suddenly your weekly subway ticket was good for Amtrak, too.

Why do we care? Because anything that involves getting your brain to do things differently than it’s always done them is easier when you’re a kid: you’ve done less. The brain is still actively forming and building those transit lines. So there’s reason to believe that giving blind children the freedom to explore the world around them will set them up to be able to navigate that world without limitations as they get older. 

That’s an important lesson for all parents, because research shows that having the ability to undertake risky, dangerous play in the safest possible settings is key to developing confidence and critical thinking skills and self preservation. Even letting kids experiment with being kind of mean is an important way to let them develop a moral code, as opposed to just being afraid of everything.

As Daniel Kish puts it: Running into a pole is a drag, but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster.

FACT: A madcap crew is trying to make pogo into an extreme sport

By Corinne Iozzio

The concept of a souped-up pogo stick goes almost as far back as the first pogos in the US. Inventors adapted the spring-loaded toys with propellers, even gas engines. But it wasn’t until the last couple decades that any such over-engineered stick—the latest use air pressurized two times the level of a car tire to send jumpers skyward—caught on. The reason? A generation of pogo jumpers hellbent on turning bouncing ten-plus feet aloft into the next BMX, skateboarding, or snowboarding.

Welcome to the world of extreme pogo, where athletes push the limits of physics to bust out midair tricks so wild they may just succeed in bouncing right into the spotlight. The road to every year’s Pogopalooza—their championship event, which has been going on since 2004—has been paved with cracked kneecaps, broken bones, split muscles, and even reconstructive surgery. But it’s also marked by incredible feats like 12-foot leaps, backlips, and combo stunts that sling pogoers upside-down, sideways, and pretty much everywhere in between.

FACT: Female African elephants are dropping their tusks to get the upper hand on poachers.

By Purbita Saha

In the past decade, biologists and rangers in several African countries, including Mozambique, Zambia, and Kenya, have noticed more tuskless elephants being born in national and wildlife parks. Oddly, all of the animals have been female. Last year, researchers finally put it together. 

In the late 1900s, poaching was rampant in several parts of Africa. Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, for example, saw near-extermination in all its big mammal populations during a harrowing civil war. Today, herds of African bush elephants roam the park again, thanks in part to constant security and a crackdown on ivory sales. But hunters have still left an imprint on the genetic makeup of the animals. DNA analysis of several tuskless elephants shows that the individuals have a mutation on the same marker that helps grow incisor teeth in humans. The mutation kills male offspring, but is passed down among females, leading to a pattern of tusklessness. In Gorongosa, experts think the trait could affect up to 60 percent of the population if it continues across generations.

It’s still not clear if losing tusks to avoid poachers hurts the affected elephants’ survival in the long term. The mammals use the lengthy ivory accessories to dig up food, defend territory, and fight off predators. Elephants born without them might have low-nutrition diets or issues finding a mate. Either way, the rapid rate of adaptation in the African bush elephant is truly stunning—and shows that wildlife are fighting tooth and nail to make it with all the changes humans have made to the world. Read more examples, reported by Jason Bittle, in the fall “Daredevil” issue of Popular Science.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

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Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

Fact: An intentional detonation of some 6,000 pounds of gunpowder was showcased on PopSci‘s 1915 cover.

By Rachel Feltman

One of PopSci’s most popular vintage covers is for our November 1931 issue. It features a painting by Edgar F. Wittmack that appears to show a man watching a volcanic eruption in progress. He’s wearing a headset and talking into a microphone, and he’s tinkering with a contraption that looks like a xylophone. Is it some kind of old-timey soundboard he’s using to broadcast the news of this spectacular natural disaster? No. It’s actually a detonator that he’s using to cause the eruption.

In fact, the event this cover commemorates wasn’t a true eruption at all. It shows the intentional detonation of some 6,000 pounds of gunpowder inside the crater at the summit of Lassen Peak in California.

Why? More like why not, which was kind of the spirit of PopSci back in those days. I found this story while helping to set up our new Popular Science merch shop, which features museum-quality prints of our favorite vintage covers (along with a few throwback logo t-shirts) to celebrate our 150th anniversary. Digging through the articles that served to explain the beautiful, often fantastical images that graced our magazines throughout the 20th century yielded quite a few quaintly outlandish and misguided historical experiments.

Here’s what we know about this particular “scientific” scene: Lassen Peak’s last real eruption started on May 30, 1914 with a small phreatic eruption, which according to the US Geological Society is a steam-driven explosion that occurs when water beneath the ground or on the surface is heated by magma, lava, hot rocks, or new volcanic deposits. Those materials can reach temperatures higher than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, causing water to boil away so quickly it makes a burst of steam.

That little flurry of activity near the peak’s summit kicked off a year of more than 150 additional explosions, which around May of 1915 shifted into lava flows, avalanches, and mudflows full of volcanic debris known as lahars. That kerfuffle culminated in a pyroclastic flow—which is the kind of chaotic, fast-moving spew of lava people think of when they hear “eruption”—on May 22. The eruption column reached around 5.5 miles into the air above the summit and devastated the land for several miles around, and fine ash reportedly fell as far as 300 miles away. There continued to be intermittent small eruptions for around two more years, but Lassen’s been quiet ever since.

Except for this one time.

I actually had a pretty hard time finding info on the 1931 spectacle outside of the pages of PopSci itself, presumably because the National Park Service would rather forget it. But according to a blog on Lassen County’s history run by local Tim Purdy, the explosion was devised as a celebration by one L.W. Collins, who became Lassen Volcanic National Park’s first superintendent in 1922. According to Purdy, Collins’ plans for a giant park dedication in 1931 were “widely criticized,” but that didn’t stop him from arranging for a big pyrotechnics show.

Edgar F. Wittmack’s iconic oil painting for Popular Science recalls the event in much more splendor than it probably deserves. According to Purdy’s blog, the wind actually blew the smoke away so quickly that there was basically no danger of mistaking the boom for a real eruption—though folks did say it looked pretty.

Fact: We kept using asbestos in everything after we knew it was deadly.

By Purbita Saha

Asbestos might have a dark and dangerous legacy, but for centuries, people thought it was miraculous–including several Popular Science writers through the ages. Archaeologists have detected traces of it in Macedonian funeral shrouds, classic Byzantine wall paintings, ancient Greek clothing, and early Inuit lantern wicks.

But what’s so great about asbestos? It all comes down to its chemical composition. The mineral comes from six different silicate compounds found in serpentine and igneous rocks. After it’s mined and broken up, it forms the kind of white fibrous material that you might imagine in a crumbling classroom ceiling. And of course, they’re also fireproof. Asbestos has a melting point of 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, and is easy to manipulate into various structures, too, which made it such a darling in manufacturing. Once industrialization exploded across the world, asbestos was being added to everything from house shingles to baby blankets to firefighter uniforms.

As asbestos’s popularity grew, so did concerns over its effects on people’s health. Some of the earliest medical studies on factory workers showed that the fibers could embed in organ tissues, causing lung scarring, inflammation, and worse. Today, we know that asbestos exposure is a major cause of mesothelioma, especially in firefighters. As a result, most manufacturers and contractors have stopped using the material—though it still isn’t fully banned in the US. (The Environmental Protection Agency is working on that, again.)

Fact: What if we’re all ‘moon crab guys’?

By Corinne Iozzio

“Do beavers rule on Mars?” has long been regarded among the PopSci staff as the most laughably absurd of our archival bylines. For certain, its author, Thomas Elway, didn’t think the buck-toothed dam builders were supreme regents of the Red Planet. What he did think, however, was it was a thought exercise worth having. Given what planetary scientists knew about the fourth planet from the Sun in May 1830—that its temperatures were extreme, its sunlight faint, its gravity minimal, and its oxygen supply nearly nonexistent—Elway’s aim was to help readers understand what life there might look like. Of course he didn’t mean a literal Earth beaver, but instead a monstrous creature with massive eyes, a burly chest, and a lankier form.

It’s all very…logical? Until it’s not. There are obviously many holes to poke in the idea, but there is at least one major sticking point: Elway asserts that life on Mars never evolved past this point because the planet had never experienced the mass extinction of an ice age. We now know that to be very incorrect; in fact, researchers at Colgate University in 2021 showed evidence that Mars had been through a dozen such swings. As if the bubble-chested beaver idea hadn’t already been sufficiently popped.

This wasn’t Elway’s only such flight of fancy. In December 1929, he posed mutant grabs as a possible explanation for some shifty activity observed on the surface of the moon. Absurd though they may seem to modern eyes, it’s hard to judge his ideas too harshly. Elway’s fantastic beasts can be seen as a type of hard science fiction: visions whose ideas, technology, and landscapes are consistent with our own known reality.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Scientists and high-society ladies once used radiation to grow mutant flowers and veggies 

By Rachel Feltman

Most folks know that during World War II, the Manhattan Project figured out how to harness nuclear chain reactions to commit unspeakably horrifying acts of mass-murder and war. But in the early 1900s, when we were just starting to understand radioactivity, nuclear science had a much more fantastical and optimistic following. This led to plenty of dangerous and misguided nonsense, like irradiated slippers designed to glow in the dark, but also a general sense that understanding physics would give us unlimited energy and unlimited food—that it could make resources so abundant that utopia simply had to follow. Part of that research involved using x-rays to try to induce helpful mutations in plants like peanuts. Radiation can break down the bonds that keep DNA together, causing cancers when cells start reproducing out of control or radiation burns when they start dying. But DNA damage in sex cells can also get passed on to offspring, and result in literally any kind of physiological change. 

All those rosy utopian avenues for using nuclear physics were put on hold so the US could make a terrible bomb, which we did. But the Manhattan Project did keep at least half an eye on radioactive plants. They understood that radioactive fallout was going to fundamentally alter the ecosystem of any place where bombs were tested or dropped. 

Enter gamma ray gardens, where scientists would essentially plunk a tube of radioactive material (usually the isotope cobalt-60) into the center of a field. They’d plant various crops in a kind of pizza pie configuration of concentric circles. Eventually the isotope rod would get dropped into a bunker that shielded the surface from its gamma rays, and scientists could safely go check on their spoils. 

Gamma rays have an even smaller wavelength than x-rays—they’re something you can only get after you split into an atom—and they can shoot through basically anything like a bullet. So, surprise surprise, the plants right next to the radiation center would die. Some of the closest ones to survive would grow tumors. But somewhere farther out in the circle, you’d start to see plants that were just…a little different than what you’d planted. Maybe they’d grow especially tall, or have especially high fruit yields, or produce an unusual variety of colors in each flower.

That became very interesting to the US government during the cold war; politicians wanted to prove to the world that there was a bright side to the whole nuclear weapon thing. There were a bunch of initiatives designed to get nuclear physics into our everyday lives in a helpful and morally palatable fashion, and one of them was using those gamma gardens to create exciting and useful new plant varietals. 

Researchers would start by trying to spot any potentially useful adaptations that cropped up thanks to irradiation. Then they’d take the mutant plant and try to improve on it; they might cross-breed with something else, or irradiate a second or third or fourth generation of it, for example. At each stage they would store some seeds, so that when they found something really neat—either for aesthetic or agricultural purposes—they could get those nuclear plants out to the public. 

Even folks without any interest in nuclear science interacted with some of these plants, and we still do today. The Rio Star grapefruit, which is now very common, is just one example, which was bred in an atomic garden to have very dark flesh and sweet juice. Most of the world’s mint oil comes from a peppermint cultivar called “Todd’s Mitcham,” which is resistant to certain fungi, and was bred at Brookhaven National Lab’s gamma garden. There are more than 3,000 registered plants that got to be the way they are because of radiation. 

But some civilians wanted to get an even closer look at this exciting new science. One of the most famous was an oral surgeon named CJ Speas, who shot seeds up with radiation in a backyard bunker and sold them across the world. This provided a hint of the same mystery of a gamma garden without having to bury cobalt-60 in your own backyard; you never knew what kind of mutation the seed might have taken on until you planted it. 

One of Speas’ most prolific overseas distributors was a British woman named Muriel Howorth. She also started the Atomic Gardening Society, which did things like put on interpretive dance performances to explain how nuclear physics worked. 

Some countries still use gamma gardens to find new and better plant varietals, but more targeted genetic engineering has made the practice pretty obsolete. While post-war proponents talked about irradiation as if it jump-started the process of evolution, it actually only jump starts the process of mutation. For more info on this strange era of botany, listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing! 

FACT: Pain is subjective—but that doesn’t make it any less painful

By Leigh Cowart

Every time you experience pain, the brain cooks it up fresh, which sometimes means mistaking a snake bite for a pointy stick. Pain is, simply and maddeningly, always subjective. There’s no machine in existence today that could peer inside your head and quantify the exact amount of pain you’re in. There’s just no standard experience of pain! When you have pain, the brain takes into account your surroundings, emotional state, expectation, arousal, and a slew of other factors to calibrate and deliver the aversive sensation we know so well. But this doesn’t mean pain isn’t real, quite the contrary: the experience of pain is as real as the brains that provide the suffering itself. And I would know. Even my scientific understanding of the trickster capsaicin could not save me from sobbing through the exquisite burn of Dante’s gazpacho when I ate the world’s hottest pepper. For more agony in the name of science, tune into this edition of The Weirdest Thing and check out my book, “Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose.“

FACT: Puppies get emo, too

By Sara Kiley Watson

Ever wonder why your seemingly perfect pup turned into a total menace over night right before their first birthdays? It might just be teen angst.

Until fairly recently, there’s not been a whole lot of proof that animals that aren’t human undergo the same kind of parental-mind-boggling teen drama during puberty. Especially when it comes to the animals that we really see as our own babies. That is, until a study came out in 2020 about teenage puppies going through shockingly similar dramatic changes in attitude—especially towards their parents. A team of British researchers worked with the charity Guide Dogs to see if around doggy puberty, around six to nine months, and substantial behavioral differences were spotted. 

The team of researchers took two different groups of pups, all German shepherds, golden retrievers, labrador retrievers or crosses of these breeds. The first group was around five months old, still in their bouncy baby phase where their human parents are the light of their lives, much like kids before hormones start running amok. The second group was at eight months—peak of potentially grouchy teen angst era. They took these two teams of dogs and did the classic “sit” command. At five months, pups responded pretty well to their parents telling them to sit, and not so much a stranger. But by eight months, this reverses—a teenage pup will more gladly sit when some random person asks them to, but when it comes to mom or dad, they’ll be more angsty about it.

Considering, however, that we can’t really give up our teens for adoption when they are driving us up the wall, folks do have the ability to rehome their dogs if they start acting out of control—even if it is just their hormones making them a little grumpier than usual. So if your pup is acting out a little more than usual, remember how you were when you were going through puberty, because growing up can certainly be ruff for man’s best friend. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things messy—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: A kitchen scrubber changed marine biology

By: Corinne Iozzio

True story: About a decade ago, the Clorox company discontinued a kitchen scrubber and sent the world of marine science into a tailspin. The scrubber in question was a poofy orange-red-yellow ball called the Tuffy, and for years marine biologist had been using this cleaning-aisle product as a collection medium for plankton—specifically mussel larvae. Counting these populations gives scientists a means to glimpse the health of the ocean. They’d been doing this since the 1980s, when an Oregon State marine biology professor named Bruce Menge happened up the wonder-collection-medium while wandering grocery aisles. As feature contributor Ryan Bradley writes in the Messy issue, without the Tuffy to rely on, marine scientists worldwide were left to scramble, buying Tuffys in bulk, second-hand, or even developing ways to reuse the scrubbers. But, as it turns out, even when the Tuffy supply runs dry, this special li’l scrubber is still making its mark.

Fact: Chocolate rivers make for terrible cleanup 

By Purbita Saha

A chocolate spill might sound like the stuff of dreams, but for one tiny hamlet in Germany, it created an infrastructure nightmare. In December of 2018, the DreiMeister Chocolate Factory in Westönnen dumped nearly 2,000 pounds of liquid cocoa on public streets after a malfunction on one of its storage tanks. The confection quickly hardened in the chilly weather (chocolate has a higher freezing point than water), forming a bumpy shell on top of the pavement. Firefighters from nearby towns had to chip away at the chocolate with shovels, and even resorted to burning it off with blowtorches. 

A month later, a tanker truck spilled 3,500 gallons of melted chocolate across an interstate in Flagstaff, Arizona. This time the chocolate retained its sludge-like consistency, allowing public safety workers to suck it up with hoses. It all goes to show how tricky the substance is to handle. In the kitchen chocolate requires a slow-heating and -cooling process called tempering. This is mainly because of its molecular structure: Cocoa butter can form six different crystals based on how it’s manipulated. The shiny, snappy kind that bakers aspire to is called Beta V. Of course, cooking methods will differ based on if you’re using dark, milk, or white chocolate and what other goodies you’re folding in. And as host Rachel Feltman shares in the podcast, chocolate fountains present a whole different chemistry challenge (and mess).

FACT: Pooping in space used to be so messy and difficult that free-floating turds were not uncommon 

By Rachel Feltman

While recently researching the conundrum of dealing with Irritable Bowel Syndrome while traveling through space, I was reminded of one of my favorite pieces of NASA lore: The free-flying turd incident. 

In May of 1969, with humanity just on the cusp of our first lunar landing, three NASA astronauts set off on Apollon 10 to orbit the moon. And then someone pooped. 

Pooping in space is complicated, even with modern technology and know-how. In 1969, the process of emptying one’s bowels in orbit was even trickier. See, astronauts had to adhere plastic baggies to their rear-ends using a bit of adhesive, then use their own hands to make sure poops actually made a safe landing in the intended receptacle. Without gravity, after all, there was no natural force acting to separate their BMs from their butts. 

But this process left plenty of room for user error. And on Apollo 10, the result was a free-floating turd—several, in fact. Don’t believe me? You can see for yourself: Each awkward incident got recorded on the official mission transcript (as did the many inevitable arguments about who’d created the floater in question). 

For more on the saga of the Apollo 10 turds, listen to this week’s episode. To learn more about how modern astronauts handle poop problems, check out our article about how NASA handles space diarrhea. And for dozens of other tales of messes both historical and recent, check out the latest digital issue of Popular Science.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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This post has been updated. It was originally published in March 2021.

If there’s one thing we can count on in life, it’s change, and viruses are no exception. Variants of the original SARS-CoV-2 virus have popped up in different corners of the world. That might sound scary, but it’s actually perfectly normal, or even “humdrum” as one Nature study puts it.

While virologists predicted all along that the virus that causes COVID-19 would mutate, it’s impossible to predict exactly how deadly or transmissible the next one will be. Some variants, like Delta and Omicron, are more infectious than previous strains. Omicron is currently the dominant form of COVID in the US, largely because it can infect people who have recovered from earlier waves of the disease. Globally, a small but rising proportion of cases are stemming from a sub-lineage of Omicron, BA.2, which preliminary research has found to be more transmissible and possibly more deadly. In the US, however, so many people have been infected by Omicron that BA.2 is unlikely to lead to a new COVID surge.

Here’s what you need to know about COVID mutations.

BA.2: A sub-lineage of Omicron

As Omicron spread in Europe, a particular strain of the variant, called BA.2, began to take off much faster than other versions. In January, it spread widely in Denmark, and drove waves of infection in the Philippines and India. On January 23, the UK officially designated BA.2 a “variant under investigation. The World Health Organization (WHO) states that the sub-lineage is more contagious than prior variants, and one Danish study estimated a 30 percent transmission advantage over other Omicron strains.

In addition to its possible increased transmissibility, BA.2 has lost a key mutation that characterized the original Omicron variant. That feature allowed certain PCR tests to distinguish Omicron from other strains, and means that BA.2 will be slightly harder to identify, hence the nickname “stealth Omicron.”

More concerningly, early research published in mid-February found that in hamsters, BA.2 was more likely than other Omicron lineages to cause weight loss and low blood oxygen—signals that it could make humans dangerously sick. But virologists who study disease severity cautioned against putting too much weight on the findings, both because animals are an imperfect predictor of virus behavior in humans, and because most people who are infected will have immunity from vaccines or prior infection. “You should probably redouble whatever efforts you now take to protect your pet hamster,” one expert wrote on Twitter. “BA.2 Omicron is tough on them. Whether it’s tough on humans, [we] don’t know yet.”

That same study found that BA.2 was less susceptible to the one monoclonal antibody treatment still approved in the US, though not entirely resistant. People with three doses of mRNA vaccines should still be able to neutralize the virus, however.

BA.2 also doesn’t seem to reinfect people who’ve already had another form of Omicron, meaning that it probably won’t trigger a COVID wave in the US. Preliminary findings out of Denmark found that of the 187 Danes who were reinfected by the coronavirus in a two-month span this winter, just 47 cases involved Omicron followed by BA.2, “mostly in young unvaccinated individuals with mild disease.” Even if BA.2 has a transmission advantage, it won’t have room to spread if most people have recently been sick with another lineage. Real world data backs that up: As of February 19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) attributes under 10 percent of COVID cases in the US to BA.2.

Omicron: The world’s dominant variant (B.1.1.529)

On November 26, 2021, WHO declared a variant first identified in South Africa and Botswana to be “a variant of concern.” By early January, the variant caused more than 90 percent of COVID-19 cases in the United States.

The variant has a large number of variations, including about 30 mutations in the spike protein and 50 mutations throughout the rest of the virus. The spike mutations in particular allow it to dodge the immune system’s first line of defense. 

“There is now consistent evidence that Omicron is spreading significantly faster than the Delta variant,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a briefing in December of 2021. “And it is more likely people vaccinated or recovered from COVID-19 could be infected or re-infected.”

While it’s absolutely normal for viruses to mutate, researchers are concerned because they haven’t seen this combination of changes in the SARS-CoV-2 virus yet. Further, mutations in the spike protein are always cause for concern, as that’s the area of the virus that current vaccines target. Pharmaceutical companies that make the vaccines—Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson, among others—have found that a booster dose confers strong protection against illness, and some are testing variant-specific updates for future boosters.

Omicron cases appear to have a lower risk of hospitalization and death, although record-setting infection rates mean hospitals were crushed by a wave of new admissions at the start of the new year. However, it’s still not clear if the variant is intrinsically milder, or if prior immunity from infection or vaccination is simply keeping it from sickening and killing people. New research from the Imperial College London showed that Omicron is more than five times likelier to cause reinfection, isn’t necessarily milder than the Delta variant, and that two-dose vaccines are not very effective against infection, though they do offer strong protection against serious illness. Vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic illness, according to the study, is 0-20 percent after two doses, and 55-80 percent after a booster dose.

“This study provides further evidence of the very substantial extent to which Omicron can evade prior immunity given by both infection or vaccination,” author Neil Ferguson and Imperial College London medicine professor said in a statement. “This level of immune evasion means that Omicron poses a major, imminent threat to public health.”

While vaccines may not completely halt Omicron’s spread, it’s crucial that Americans who aren’t already vaccinated and boosted get their shots immediately, as this could make the difference between a quick recovery at home and death. To stay safe, continue with tried and true methods to prevent transmission—even if you’re vaccinated—like wearing masks, frequently washing your hands, and social distancing. 

Delta: The variant that originated in India (B.1.617)

The Delta variant, a spin-off of the B.1.617 lineage which also includes Kappa, was first identified in India in October 2020, and has since spread around the world. Delta was the most common variant in the US until Omicron came along, and has been shown to be incredibly transmissible—even more so than the common cold. Scientists have estimated that the original strain of the novel coronavirus had a reproductive number (R0) of about 1.5 to 3.5, meaning each sick person infects, on average, another one to four people. The delta variant, though, seems to be even more infectious than that. Researchers estimate that each sick person will infect about seven people. That makes it twice as infectious as the original strain and almost as contagious as the chickenpox.

Experts are still determining whether or not Delta makes people sicker than other variants, but almost all hospitalizations and deaths due to the variant are in unvaccinated populations.

“As older age groups get vaccinated, those who are younger and unvaccinated will be at higher risk of getting COVID-19 with any variant,” Inci Yildirim, a Yale Medicine pediatric infectious diseases specialist and vaccinologist, said in a press release. “But Delta seems to be impacting younger age groups more than previous variants.”

The lineage that includes Delta and Kappa is known for two major mutations—E484Q and L452R, the first of which may help the virus evade antibodies, according to The New York Times. 

COVID patients in India, where the variant has been especially prevalent, experienced rarer symptoms like stomach pain, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, hearing loss, and joint pain. Ganesh Manudhane, a Mumbai cardiologist, told Bloomberg in June that he has seen increasing cases of microthrombi, which are clots in small blood vessels, so severe that gangrene develops, which can be life-threatening. 

“I saw three to four cases the whole of last year, and now it’s one patient a week,” Manudhane told Bloomberg.

There were also concerns about vaccine efficacy against the Delta. One study showed that two Pfizer doses were 88 percent effective against Delta, compared to 93 percent effective against the UK-originated Alpha strain. One study found that the J&J vaccine may be less effective at fighting off Delta, too.

Delta-plus: A sub-lineage of the Delta variant (AY.4.2)

Another variant that’s been of recent concern among virologists is what’s known as the Delta-plus variant. Scientists are describing this version as a sub-lineage of Delta, according to The New York Times, which essentially means it is most closely related to that variant and likely evolved from it. Delta-plus has a spike protein mutation that researchers have also identified in the Beta variant (described below).

The variant likely originated in India but has now spread to other countries, including the United States.

Some experts believe this variant is even more transmissible than the highly transmissible Delta variant, though more research is needed to confirm this. “It is most likely capable of dodging immunities,” Shahid Jameel, a virologist and director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences at Ashoka University in Sonipat, India, told The New York Times in late June. “That is because it carries all symptoms of the original Delta variant and also from its partner Beta variant.”

Alpha: The variant that originated in the UK (B.1.1.7)

The COVID-19 variant first detected in the UK—also known as B.1.1.7—was identified on December 14, 2020, causing tightened lockdown rules and border control inside the UK and between other countries. The virus has been found more frequently in southern England, and what has stood out to researchers most is a large number of mutations it’s taken on—a whopping 23 shifts from the original COVID-19 virus that emerged from Wuhan, China, in late December 2019.

This variant spread to the United States earlier this year, and was doubling around every 10 days back in January 2021, according to one preprint study. Delta accounted for more than 90 percent of US cases by August 2021, however, and Omicron overtook Delta in December 2021.

While scientists believe that the COVID-19 vaccines currently being distributed are still effective against this version of the virus and there’s no change in disease severity compared to the original, the B.1.1.7 version is thought to be more contagious. According to the BBC, this variant has the ability to spread between 50 and 70 percent faster than previous forms of the virus.

Beta: The variant that originated in South Africa (B.1.351)

A few days after the discovery of the Alpha variant, another—known as B.1.351—popped up in South Africa that displayed similar mutations. It quickly became more dominant than earlier variants throughout the country, nearly replacing the other versions in the Eastern Cape, Western Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal provinces. 

Similar to Alpha, the Beta variant doesn’t necessarily make people get more sick, but it certainly appears to be more transmissible.

Research over the past several months has been done to test out the efficacy of the vaccine against this variant. Back in January, according to Reuters, scientists at BioNTech, the German biotech company that partnered with Pfizer to develop one of the vaccines currently in use, said they were testing the vaccines against the new variants and, if needed, could make tweaks in as little as six weeks.

Gamma: The variant that originated in Brazil (P.1 lineage)

The Gamma lineage was spotted in four people in Japan after they took a trip to Brazil. It developed late in 2020 in Brazil’s Amazon region, becoming dominant there, and in surrounding South American cities. By January 2021, the variant had also been found in parts of Europe, as well as in Oklahoma and Minnesota.

A close cousin to the Beta variant, Gamma has similar mutations, including what virologists have dubbed the E484K mutation, which affects the spike protein and may make it trickier for certain vaccines to provide maximum effectiveness. Another major worry, reports NPR, is that of reinfection rates. The number of mutations on P.1 variants can theoretically help the virus evade antibody response, which may be why Manaus, Brazil, saw a resurgence of this particular strain.

“If you were to ask me right now, what’s most concerning of all the things that I’ve heard so far, it’s the fact that they are reporting a sudden increase in cases in Manaus, Brazil,” University of Massachusetts virus expert Jeremy Luban told NPR. “Manaus already had 75 percent of people infected [in the spring of last year].”

The post ‘Stealth Omicron’ is spreading slowly in the US appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The first international vaccine campaign in history used young orphans as human refrigerators 

By Rachel Feltman

There are stories you expect to be uncontroversially positive and stories you expect to be irredeemably negative. The Balmis Expedition defies such binary categorization. On the one hand, it’s the tale of the first international effort to get vaccines into arms all over the world—an instance of a monarch choosing to put resources toward improving public health and eradicating a horrific disease. On the other hand, it involves young orphans—toddlers, in some cases—being crowded onto ships and sent around the world to serve as human incubators. But even those two polarities risk oversimplifying this moment in history.

By the 1700s, smallpox was a horrific fact of life, killing an estimated 400,000 people throughout Europe each year. But things were even worse in the Americas, which had been exposed to smallpox by Spanish invaders starting in the 1500s. It’s thought to have contributed to the downfall of the Incas and Aztecs, as the disease was almost always fatal to indigenous populations. 

King Charles IV of Spain had lost several family members to smallpox and seen several of the survivors scarred significantly by virolation, which as I talked about on a past episode of Weirdest Thing, was the practice of purposefully infecting people with smallpox scabs or pus that had been weakened with steam or some other method. Because virolation actually infected you with smallpox, albeit often a weaker case than you’d catch naturally, you still got sick and had pus-filled lesions. 

That changed in the 1790s, when Edward Jenner tested pus from cowpox blisters as a less dangerous form of inoculation, thereby inventing vaccines as we know them. He tested it in 1796 on his gardener’s son, which is a bit of a foreshadowing. 

In 1803, King Charles announced his intention to provide free vaccination to the masses in the Spanish colonies—and to leave each region with the resources and knowledge necessary to continue their own vaccination programs in the future. Royal physician Francisco Javier de Balmis, who had spent time in Mexico researching botany and folk medicine, led the charge. 

The hitch: Pus could stay usable on a piece of cloth or pressed between glass and sealed with wax for a journey of a few days, but what then? Some suggested bringing cows on board and slowly giving them cowpox one by one. But cows are loud, messy, and large—so Balmis went with 22 Spanish orphans between the age of 3 and 9 instead. Two boys would be infected with cowpox, and just before their pustules healed over, their pus would be used to inoculate another pair, and so on. The group made it to the Americas just in time to use one final remaining pustule—and to replenish their chain of children by renting some from local families. 

By the time the expedition finished, some 300,000 people in the Canaries, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines and China had received the vaccine for free. 

FACT: Legends are strange things. But the legend of the poop knife is especially so.

By Sara Kiley Watson

Wade Davis, a Canadian anthropologist sometimes called the “real-life Indiana Jones,” is passionate about telling stories about the Inuit and their relationship with their icy homeland. But one of his stories is especially iconic. He wrote of a mysterious Inuit tale in one of his books, called Shadows in the Sun, back in 1998. This tale of survival goes as such, and I quote:w

“There is a well known account of an old Inuit man who refused to move into a settlement. Over the objections of his family, he made plans to stay on the ice. To stop him, they took away all of his tools. So in the midst of a winter gale, he stepped out of their igloo, defecated, and honed the feces into a frozen blade, which he sharpened with a spray of saliva. With the knife he killed a dog. Using its rib cage as a sled and its hide to harness another dog, he disappeared into the darkness.”

On its own, the story is bizarre enough, but in the past few years it’s taken on a new, more scientific life. Enter a group of scientists who said “hmmm let’s actually test this whole poop knife theory.” So they did—and really, really committed. The Kent State researchers created their own replica of the Inuit diet to create authentic poop, then molded said poop into knife shapes to see if Davis’s story would hold up in real life.

Using the poop knives that were frozen at brutally cold temperatures, they attempted to slice and dice a pig hide—but the knives left melty skid marks instead of serious dashes, meaning murdering a dog with ice cold poop is likely more myth than miracle.

And if testing the legend wasn’t enough, it spurred a discussion of whether or not we should take these kinds of tales at their face value. But whatever way you spin it, making a knife out of your own feces is definitely a tale to be told, even if the resulting weapon is pretty crappy.

But what about the boys? While historical records do suggest that Balmis intended for them to have wonderful lives in Mexico City—better lives than they could have had in Spain—but what information we have about them suggests that didn’t pan out. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more. 

FACT: Bird tongues are way stranger than you think

By Lauren Young

There’s a lot of reasons why I am enamored with birds—I’ve waxed poetic about their stunning plumage and unique vision, silly mating dances, and food hoarding tendencies. So, the story for my Weirdest Thing debut fittingly ties around a peculiar, perhaps overlooked, feature of our avian friends: Their tongues. 

Birders and scientists can glean a lot from the tongue of a bird, from feeding tactics to the anatomy of ancient extinct birds. Tongues can be so distinct that they can help identify different species, if you so happen to catch a lucky peek. Bird tongues come in a diversity of shapes, sizes, and structures, which each supply birds with an array of fascinating (and weird) behaviors. Some tongues are short and thick, some are frayed and barbed, some are pronged at the tip, while others are long and narrow—like certain woodpecker species. 

Woodpeckers are well-known high-speed drillers, but many species have a remarkably long tongue within that chisel-like beak. These rope-like, fleshy extensions can grow to a third the length of its body, while others even have tongues that reach up to 5 inches past the tip of the bill.  

You might be wondering, like I was, where does all that tongue… go? It turns out that woodpeckers tuck their tongues all nice and snug around the top of their skulls, and poke it through the nasal cavities.

If you think this floppy, long tongue would be cumbersome, think again: its length serves a number of functional advantages. In some species, like the Northern Flicker woodpecker, a sticky mucus coats around the tongue to help collect grub, like ants down in an anthill. Other woodpecker species use their tongues to get to hard-to-reach prey in their freshly burrowed trees. 

Additionally, the long tongue is actually one way a woodpecker doesn’t get bad whiplash. By wrapping around the skull, the tongue actually acts a bit like a cushion for the brain and helps support the woodpecker as it pecks into trees, as writer Rebecca Heisman explains for the American Bird Conservancy. (Read the full paper published in PLOS ONE.) Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about how the woodpecker keeps on being its best headbanger self.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Why young orphans were once used as human refrigerators appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Madame CJ Walker’s “Wonderful Hair Grower” was a better, smarter version of dandruff shampoo

By Purbita Saha

There’s no denying that Madame CJ Walker was a genius. The self-taught chemist and self-made entrepreneur was born to two formerly enslaved Louisianans in 1867. At a young age, she took on a job as a laundress, which exposed her to harsh cleansers that made her hair fall out.

Hair loss was a common issue among Black women in America in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pharmaceuticals like Johnson & Johnson tried to hawk relaxers and shampoos to them, but Walker knew that their formulas wouldn’t work. Instead, she found inspiration in the budding industry of Black hair care products, and became a door-to-door salesperson for one such company. After just a few months on the job, she came up with her own line of products.

Walker’s inventiveness didn’t apply so much to her mixtures (the main ingredients were petrolatum and sulfur, which are a staple in dandruff treatments), but rather her emphasis on the haircare process. Black families didn’t have reliable access to clean water, so the business maven made sure to incorporate washing and scalp massaging into her regrowth solution. Of course, she was also a savvy marketer: She and her family set up shipping hubs at US rail hubs and took their sales overseas to Caribbean countries. By the time of her death in 1919, she was the first female millionaire in America who hadn’t inherited her wealth. 

Black women still disproportionately struggle with conditions like alopecia today. But Walker’s legacy has helped us learn about the importance of personalizing hair care and the science around it.

Fact: A lightbulb that hangs in a fire station in Livermore, California has been glowing for more than a century.

By Claire Maldarelli  

If you’ve ever had to replace a lightbulb in the middle of the night, you know the frustration that comes along with the fact that lightbulbs don’t last forever. Except for maybe one. In a fire station in Livermore, California, a lightbulb has been glowing for more than one hundred years. A few decades ago, after an investigation by a local journalist, a team of scientists dated the bulb to the early twentieth century. And to this day, scientists who’ve studied the bulb have yet to understand why it’s still working. 

Here’s what they do know. The bulb was made by a company called the Shelby Electric Company, which, a century ago, was known for creating some of the best products around. A part of the company’s success in making such incredible lightbulbs was the way they created the filament. It was constructed of a plastic cellulose material, which would become pure carbon when baked at the right temperature. In this process it would become nearly as hard as a diamond. 

There are many Shelby lightbulbs that have remained glowing for decades. However, most eventually stopped working. So what has kept this lightbulb in Livermore, California? Listen to this week’s episode to find out. And, if you want to see the bulb shining you can check out its live webcam here. 

FACT: Giant spiders and tiny frogs sometimes become roommates 

By Rachel Feltman

I recently saw one of those not-necessarily-reputable screenshots that tout supposed science facts claiming that there are spiders and frogs that link up as best friends—paired, of course, with an absolutely adorable picture. I simply had to investigate. 

Thankfully, this delightful fact is true, though whether it’s fair to call these arachnid-and-amphibian pairs “best friends” is an open question. It’s probably more accurate to call them business partners, because it seems likely it’s a relationship they both benefit from, or what we call “mutualism” in the world of biology. 

This has been seen most often in microhylids, a family of nearly 700, generally tiny frog species. Just to give you an idea, a real whopper of a microhylid species might grow to be about 3.5 inches long. Many of them are smaller than an inch. 

Since the late 20th century, scientists have found several species of microhylids that seem to commune with giant spiders. In 1989, for example, researchers found a dotted humming frog in Peru sharing a burrow with a local tarantula, despite the fact that the spider was large enough to eat the tiny amphibian, and was in fact known to munch on similar frogs. 

Young spiders were occasionally seen picking up the dotted humming frogs and tasting them before putting them back down, which could hint at how the two species came to coexist in such a strange way: It’s now thought that many microchylids have toxins in their skin that make them unpalatable to certain species of spiders. Because the spiders have learned not to eat these species, those lucky frogs have learned that hanging out around tarantulas is safe. 

But why would they do it? Well, because if you share a room with a giant spider, that spider is going to attack anything that tries to attack you—after all, it can’t be sure the predator isn’t going to attempt to run off with some arachnid eggs.  

Some researchers have proposed that while the frog benefits from the spider’s presence, the spider only tolerates the frog or ignores it. But others have suggested that there could be something in it for the spider, too. Frogs eat parasites and tiny creatures like ants that are too small for a tarantula to get their mouthparts around, but that can attack and eat a spider’s eggs. So while the tarantula is basically a bodyguard, the frog is basically a babysitter. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Why some tiny frogs have tarantulas as bodyguards appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Brussels sprouts tasted very different decades ago

By: Sara Kiley Watson

It seems like everyone these days has a new favorite side dish—brussel sprouts. Whether they’re fried up and dusted with parmesan or roasted with crumbles of bacon, these little cabbages seem hotter than ever. But, just a few years ago, these little leafy greens were hardly the apple of America’s eye. They tended to be more of a staple in Europe, and even then they tended to be served boiled.

That’s because, up until recently, the breeding of brussel sprouts allowed for the bitter taste, provided by a chemical called glucosinolates, that have an important role in plant self-defense, to really shine through. On top of the cooking method of boiling them up, this chemical made them more of an ick than a yum for lots of folks (in fact, a 2008 poll showed that brussel sprouts were America’s most hated vegetable). 

But in the 90’s, a Dutch scientist figured out that there was a way to make sprouts less bitter, and therefore much more appealing to the masses. By breeding a hybrid of the sturdy (yet bitter) modern stock with older and milder varieties, the company now known as Syngenta put a sprout out into the world that was delicious, healthy, and didn’t reek so much of sulfur when cooked. And people, especially young people, responded—the tiny cabbages they detested as children suddenly, and mysteriously, became a new delicacy. 
Only a few years ago, there were only about 2,500 acres of brussels sprouts planted across the country—nowadays folks can’t get enough. As of 2019, there are 10,000 acres of sprouts in the US with more fields being planted in Mexico. This comeback is best served crispy with a side of garlic aioli, if you ask me.

FACT: There’s an island so full of snakes that humans can’t go there

By Rachel Feltman

Ilha da Queimada Grande, a stretch of land some 106 acres-big off the coast of São Paulo, Brazil is technically called “island of the big burn.” Sounds cheery, no? But its unofficial name is even more ominous: Snake Island. 

Estimates used to suggest there were as many as 5 snakes per square meter on Queimada Grande, but an actual survey by ecologists a few years back turned up a more reasonable 1 snake per square meter.

And those snakes? They’re not very chill. Queimada’s primary full time residents are extremely venomous pit vipers called Bothrops insularis, or golden lanceheads. Snake Island is infamous for being off-limits to humans, save for occasional trips by the Brazilian navy—to check in on the local lighthouse—and a small number of approved scientific expeditions. 

There are some really gruesome legends from folks over on the mainland, including that the last people who lived on Ilha da Queimada Grande—the family of the person who ran the lighthouse right before the government decided to automate in 1920—were literally stalked and killed by a gang of vipers, like something out of a Syfy channel original movie. That’s probably just a macabre rumor, but the snakes are definitely capable of taking you out. We know that their closest relatives on the mainland can absolutely kill humans, and chemical analysis suggests the golden lancehead’s venom is more potent and faster-acting. 

But while those urban legends are impossible to confirm, these freaky snakes do have a really intriguing backstory. Around 11,000 years ago, when sea levels were rising due to melting ice sheets after the last glacial maximum, the ocean cut off a strip of land from the rest of Brazil—Queimada Grande. 

That shift trapped some number of snakes in the genus Bothrops, which is a type of venomous pit viper found in the South and Central Americas, in a new home—one with, as far as scientists can tell, no natural predators, at least against adults. It’s just some frogs, some bugs, some lizards, some birds, and a whole bunch of vipers. 

So, on the one hand, there was nothing keeping these slithering predators from reproducing like crazy, which is how you end up with a snake per square meter. On the other hand, they didn’t have a lot of great food sources—juveniles could live on millipedes and such, but the biggest prey available to adults would be birds. That poses a bit of a problem. Birds are not easy prey for a snake like the golden lancehead, which lacks a prehensile tail for skillfully navigating trees. Most snakes in this Bothrops genus hunt by biting their prey once, letting it go, and then stalking it to attack again as it weakens. A bird doesn’t have to be able to get very far to get out of a snake’s easy reach, and certainly isn’t easy to track with chemical trails like terrestrial prey. 

Instead, it seems the snakes that thrived on this island were the ones able to keep prey in their mouths after that first bite. If that’s how you’re trying to hunt, extremely potent venom certainly doesn’t hurt your chances. 

Despite their scary countenance, golden lanceheads are actually critically endangered. Snake Island is their only native habitat, and deforestation on the mainland has decreased the number of migratory birds, threatening their main food source. There’s also, naturally, a lot of inbreeding that could start to cause problems as the gene pool shrinks. And, of course, because humans are awful, there’s quite a lucrative poaching market for these vipers, simply because they’re rare. 

There are several golden lanceheads in captivity throughout the state of São Paulo, if you want to visit without breaking the law and, let’s be real, probably dying. 

FACT: The ape language studies of the 1970s imploded — and changed the way we study animal communication

By: Arielle Duhaime-Ross

In the 1960s and 1970s, a handful of psychologists attempted to teach American sign language to Great Apes — most notably to chimps and one very well-known gorilla named Koko. The experiments made many of these animals and their trainers famous, but ultimately the work was engulfed in controversy. One scientist in particular, Herbert Terrace, claimed that none of these apes had learned this human language — even the ape he’d trained himself, Nim Chimpsky. Years later, these experiments were also critiqued for not having involved many animal trainers who were actually fluent in American Sign Language.

Today, the story of Koko the gorilla and Nim Chimpsky is a cautionary tale for scientists hoping to study animal communication. And the field has moved beyond the idea of teaching non-human animals a human language — focusing instead on animal cognition and how animals communicate in their own ways.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post This noxious island is so full of snakes, people can’t even visit appeared first on Popular Science.

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Over the course of each trip we take around the sun, the Popular Science staff produces thousands of stories, from breaking news to meaty features. Some of those tales stick in our heads for the long haul, and this year was no exception: These yarns, which include a decades-long quest to uncover a missing spyplane and a search for the fountain of youth, all dig deep into little-known truths about our world. Below are some of our favorite stories, including a few from our network of sibling publications, from the last year.

[Related: The most compelling military tech stories from the land, air, and sea this year]

The post Our favorite science long reads of 2021 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Bees can make a special kind of honey using spotted lanternfly poop 

By Rachel Feltman

Even if you love slurping down a cup of hot tea just full of the stuff, you might not really know what honey is. Bees often make this sweet goop out of nectar from flowers, but any super-sugary liquid will do in a pinch. In 2012, for example, some French bees got into a candy factory’s waste vats and produced blue and green honey from the sticky syrup. 

And sometimes, if we’re very lucky, bees will make honey using the waste emissions of other insects—including the invasive spotted lanternfly. 

The spotted lanternfly, which is a heartbreakingly beautiful and absolutely ecologically devastating little leaf-hopper native to China, was first seen in Pennsylvania in September of 2014. They feed on dozens of species of plants, including food crops, and can cause a lot of damage. In addition to all the nibbling, they also secrete a sticky waste—basically poop or pee—called honeydew, which tends to attract molds that kill the affected plants. Far from being picky eaters, bees have been known to sup on this sweet stuff and produce honey from it (the resulting product is also, confusingly, called honeydew). 

FACT: Super-heated falcon poop can help explain the origins of rocks and life on Earth.

By Lauren Leffer

In 2016 on Mt. Rasvumchorr in Russia, researchers discovered naturally occurring deposits of a substance known as Tinnunculite. The compound is a pale, carbon-based mineral that comes in a variety of colors. It’s also the byproduct of birds pooping near burning coal. When falcon feces reacts with hot gasses, it turns from biodegradable to solid-as-a-rock. And this relatively recent entry to the official list of minerals is also a wild example of how minerals and life co-evolved on Earth.

When you think of evolution, maybe you think of natural selection, Galapagos finches, Darwin, or DNA. But according to mineralogist Robert Hazen, rocks evolve too. Hazen’s hypothesis of “mineral evolution” posits that we have as many living things on earth as we do, in part, because of the presence of minerals. And, that we have so many different minerals because of living things.

For an example that goes beyond guano, there’s “The Great Oxygenation Event.” Before there was life, our atmosphere had no oxygen in it. Oxygen molecules are key to a whole suite of chemical reactions, and without it, not much was happening in the mineral record. But suddenly, microscopic organisms called cyanobacteria emerged, multiplied, photosynthesized, and produced enough oxygen gas to create thousands of new minerals. There are lots and lots of ways (big and small) that living things and rocks are altering each other’s environments and determining each other’s future. In Hazen’s own words, “we need to understand minerals to give us the story of our planet.”

FACT: A doctor tried to cure gluten intolerance with ONLY bananas

By Sara Chodosh

Avid listeners of the show might remember that I have celiac disease, which depending on who you’re talking to is either a legit reason not to eat gluten or “just a fad.” I know a lot about the disease both through having it and through writing about it for PopSci, but even I didn’t know about this week’s fact until really recently.
Banana babies are not, despite what Google says, tiny frozen bananas covered in chocolate (though they look delicious). They’re babies and small children who were fed a diet chock full of bananas in an effort to cure them of celiac. Did it work? No. You don’t have to listen to the episode to figure that out. But is it a wild tale anyway? Absolutely.

In August, Atlas Obscura reported that Philadelphia beekeepers had harvested the sticky results of this bee-and-lanternfly collab. Check out their story for more on the accidental discovery of an intriguing new type of honey, and listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to learn more about how bees can go on misadventures that lead to toxic, spicy, and even hallucinogenic honey. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Spotted lanternfly goo is surprisingly tasty appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things tasty—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: A study ‘proved’ White Castle is good for you

By Corinne Iozzio

The hamburger business was having a hard time in the 1930s. Sales were way down after a wave of public attention around unsavory, unappetizing, and downright unhygienic practices are meat processing facilities came to light in the decades following the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Among the hardest hit was White Castle founder Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram. Despite PR campaigns designed to tout the cleanliness of the production of his famous sliders, Ingram was struggling to tempt the public. So, he decided to get science on his side. He recruited a physiological chemist named Jesse McClendon to design a study to prove the healthfulness of a burger-based diet. The study McClendon completed had a single person eat an entire Crave Case a day (that’s 10 sliders per meal, three meals a day), totaling approximately 4,500 calories. When the single participant survived the month-long burger binge with no immediately apparent ill effects, Ingram was emboldened to launch a campaign touting his menu as not only not bad for you, but were an essential part of building a healthy body. This run of ads was, of course, not unique in an era when scant oversight gave advertisers leeway to trumpet the bodily benefits of everything from junk food to cigarettes. Today, a vast catalog of research into the impacts of fast food on health soundly refutes Ingram’s claims, but chains continue to market “healthy” menu items like plant-based burgers just the same. 

FACT: We might all be cooking up invasive bloodsuckers by 2030

By Purbita Saha

Okay, that year is slightly arbitrary. But the fact remains: Americans should start eating sea lampreys before they decimate all the wildlife in the Great Lakes. The hellish-looking species is native to the Atlantic Ocean (though there is some debate over their origins), and has been making its way inland in the Midwest since the 1800s with the help of canal systems. Today, their population in the region totals in the tens of millions, which is bad news for Great Lakes fish and anglers. Sea lampreys, you see, are voracious predators that latch onto larger prey with sharp, circular suckers. They bore through the scales of their catch, then drain all the blood and bodily fluids out for a nourishing meal. Note: They don’t attack humans.

Wildlife agencies in Michigan and other Great Lakes states have launched lamprey task forces to control the invasive species. But nothing has worked well enough to slow the invasion. So, biologists and chefs are getting creative by encouraging people to eat the fish as many Europeans do. (It’s even rumored that King Henry I died from glutting on boiled lamprey.) The barrier to entry, of course, is the creature’s hideous exterior. If Americans can learn that taste is more than skin-deep, lamprey—and other destructive exotics, like periwinkles, Japanese knotweed, and wild boar—could serve as a reliable and sustainable food source.

FACT: Competitive meat judging is a real sport—and it’s even stranger than it sounds

By Rachel Feltman

First things first: There are people—loads of people—who consider competitive meat judging to be a sport. But while you might reasonably assume that a meat judging competition would be about who raises and slaughters the best livestock, it’s actually about who does the best job of judging random meat. Dating back to at least 1926, when it was introduced at the International Livestock Exposition in Chicago, the noble pursuit of competitive meat judging is all about knowing everything there is to know about beef, lamb, and pork carcasses. 

Competitive meat judging’s highest stakes are in the intercollegiate circuit, where a number of schools send students on a whirlwind tour of the nation’s most hallowed meat lockers to prove their stuff. It’s not easy: Competitors spend hours on their feet in frigid rooms, trying their best to evaluate qualities like the size of a cut of meat, its degree of fat marbling, and the age of the animal it came from using nothing but visual cues. 
Fans and alums argue that those strange and tense conditions help breed top-notch critical thinking skills in competitors—some of whom, unsurprisingly, go on to do the same kind of meat analysis in a professional capacity. For more info on the strange world of competitive meat judging, check out this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Inside the cutthroat world of competitive meat judging appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: You used to be able to die “by planet”

By Sara Chodosh

I’ve spent more time than most looking at death statistics. It’s kind of an occupational hazard of being both a health/science person and a data person. I am generally used to them being both quite depressing and pretty mundane—in the modern era in the US the vast majority of deaths are from cancer and heart disease, followed by accidents and respiratory issues. Elsewhere in the world it’s less mundane but much more depressing (read: lots of deaths due to preventable diseases that we largely don’t suffer from in high-income countries). 

So it was something of a pleasant surprise to come across “The Diseases, and Casualties this year being 1632” (strange comma included). I think because the causes of death listed here—Affrighted, Made away themselves, Suddenly—are so removed from how we quantify death today this whole list kind of comes across as funny, or at least amusing. And really what’s ultimately most amusing is the total lack of understanding of disease. “Suddenly” is not an acceptable item on a death certificate in the 21st century because even if someone did drop dead suddenly we could do an autopsy to figure out what actually happened. A stroke, perhaps, or a heart attack. But in the 17th and 18th centuries you just…died. You often did so at home or maybe at work, and the person who came to pick up your body for burial probably knew about as much about why you died as did the person who saw you die in the first place, which is to say: not a lot. 

Of course the more I dug into this list the less funny it became. Death is death, and the more you think about what life was actually like for these people the sadder the whole thing gets. I highly recommend reading the paper I found explaining all the terms—it’s a fascinating look at birth and death, and at how much has changed in just a few hundred years. And we could all probably use a reminder right now of how much better life is today than it used to be.

FACT: This ferret named Felicia is a scientific hero

By Rachel Feltman

Some listeners may recall that in 2016, the Large Hadron Collider, which is a big ol’ particle collider in Switzerland, shut down because of a weasel. There was a massive power outage that turned out to be the result of a small mammal now thought to be a marten weasel, which chewed through some power lines and sadly died, but not before taking the LHC with it, albeit temporarily. 

Animals are not infrequent sources of trouble in these facilities. In 2009, a soggy baguette caused an electrical short at the LHC, and the prevailing theory is that a passing bird dropped it down into the equipment. In 2006, a Fermilab newsletter even recounted an only somewhat facetious report of a “coordinated attack” on the facility by a family of raccoons. 

But speaking of Fermilab, and back to ferrets, I want to talk about a more positive animal interaction at a particle collider.

So, in the early 70s, back when Fermilab was still called the National Accelerator Laboratory, engineers couldn’t get the particles up to the necessary speed without the magnets inside shorting out. Eventually, they figured out that tiny metal shavings left behind by the construction of the tube were interfering. 

But how do you clean out a ring-shaped tube that stretches for something like four miles? 

They found their solution in Felicia, the smallest available ferret from a fur farm in Minnesota, and purchased her for $35. For more on how she helped change the particle physics game, listen to this week’s episode.

FACT: Swedish scientists once crafted a crash test dummy shaped like a moose

By Mary Roach

When to swerve, and when to hit? Most drivers now know that when it comes to deer, the safest thing to do is to simply collide with the unfortunate animal. But when large animals like moose and camels come into play, the potential consequences of a run-in become much more dire—and the choice to swerve becomes the smarter option. For more on the scientific investigation into moose jaywalkers, check out the latest episode of Weirdest Thing—and my latest book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Death ‘by planet’ was surprisingly common in the 1600s appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Dallas Taylor—he’s a sound engineer and the host of Twenty Thousand Hertz. Make sure to check it out!

FACT: At least one very unlucky astronaut claims he had an allergic reaction to lunar dust

By Sara Chodosh

Lunar dust is, at least according to some NASA experts, the number one challenge facing missions to the moon. That may be hard to believe, but only if you know nothing about moon dust. Here’s the 411: it’s both wildly sharp and incredibly powdery, which turns out to be a terrible combination. 

Even worse is that you can—maybe, possibly—be allergic to it. There’s not exactly a large sample size of people who have ever breathed in moon dust, but at least two people have had what appears to be an allergic reaction to it. Cruelly, the first was a geologist who flew on Apollo 17, only to arrive on the moon and realize he was allergic to the very thing he studied. There’s a beautiful kind of poetry to that, I think. 

You’ll have to listen to the episode to find out some of the wilder facts about lunar dust, but I’ll leave you with this tease: astronauts and miners have a lot more in common than you’d think.

FACT: An Ancient Egyptian statue supposedly sung at dawn

By Rachel Feltman

The Colossi of Memnon were built near what’s now Luxor around 1350 BCE, and they originally stood guard over the palatial memorial grounds of the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Depicting Amenhotep in the style of Osiris, the statues stood 26 feet high and were carved from a single block of quartzite sandstone that came from hundreds of miles away.

The temple and other structures around the complex didn’t last very long: around 1200 BC, an earthquake did away with everything but the Colossi. In 27 BC, another earthquake hit and shattered the northern Colossus, collapsing it from the waist up and cracking the lower half.

But the legacy of the Colossi was actually just getting started. Around the time of the BCE to AD switch, the Greek historian Strabo reported that one of the Colossi was known to sing.

This phenomenon—which occurred only at the break of dawn—sparked a tourist craze, and visitors left ancient Yelp reviews in the form of graffiti on the statue’s base. Julia Balbilla, a Roman noble who visited in 130 A.D., wrote a poem on the statue’s leg comparing the sound to “ringing bronze.” Others described it as sounding like a broken harp or lyre string.

Many of the visitors to the site suspected some kind of supernatural significance to the sound, especially since it always happened at the same time of day—as dawn broke—but wasn’t otherwise consistent. People put a lot of stock in whether the statue sang on the day they visited.

But the best guess for how this “singing” occurred comes from what we know about when the Colossus stopped singing.

In either 196 or 199, the Roman emperor Septimus Severus visited the site and heard nothing. In an attempt to curry favor with whatever power controlled the singing statue, he supposedly paid for a repair job on it. We know that the sound stopped for good around this time. The best theory: cracks in the stone had previously collected dew, creating sonic vibrations as morning temperatures rose and warmed the liquid. Ironically, when Severus had those cracks repaired, he shut the singing up for good.

We’ll never know for certain whether the Colossus really sang, how it managed to carry a tune, or why it stopped. You can find out more about mysterious sounds that science has yet to solve here.

FACT: Animal sounds make surprising cameos in movies and TV shows

By Dallas Taylor

When you think of the roar of a T. rex, what sound comes to mind? A tiny puppy squeal? No? Well, you may be surprised to learn that the sound designers of Jurassic Park mixed that very noise into a slew of other animal yips and yaps to create the iconic dinosaur’s bellow. On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, we get into the use of real-world animal sounds for creating everything from the purr of an engine to the sci-fi whoosh of a TIE fighter. Stick around for one particularly surprising fact about Netflix’s signature sound (spoiler alert: it involves a goat).

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Imagine traveling to the moon only to realize you’re allergic to it. One astronaut did. appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: NYC’s boiling hot radiators were designed to help fight a pandemic 

By Rachel Feltman

Anyone who lives in a city is probably familiar with the radiator problem. They hiss, they rattle, they smell kinda weird when they turn on for the season, and, most importantly, they’re really hot. In a lot of cases the only options are to physically turn the radiator off at the valve, which means having no heat, or to open your window, which feels like such a waste of the gas they’re using to keep the building warm. 

But thanks to a late-2020 tweet from director and producer Ana Breton, I have a newfound appreciation for all those dang radiators that kept me up at night and made what I can only describe as “wet marble slot machine noises” when I lived in pre-war buildings in harlem. Here’s the headline: The radiators get too hot on purpose. They were designed that way to help lower disease transmission during the 1918 influenza pandemic. 

Our understanding of viruses was new and, shall we say, incomplete in 1918. But health officials had caught wind of the fact that better ventilation and more fresh air seemed to fight off airborne diseases like the flu, and in fact had started beating this drum even back in the 1800s. That was before anyone knew what a virus was, but people who studied tuberculosis saw that it spread more in stuffy homes. So, when the 1918 influenza pandemic persisted into winter, New York City health officials asked residents to keep their windows open to help curb the spread. 

Over-powered steam radiators were considered a great way to keep homes toasty even in the open air. That’s why they’re generally placed under a window—so they can heat the fresh air as it blows in. Because a huge chunk of the available living space in NYC was built from 1900 to 1930, we still have this public health hack at our disposal. 

Meanwhile, the power source for those steam radiators switched from coal to oil to natural gas over the years, which means they’ve gotten more powerful. New windows also provide much better insulation than the panes of glass used in 1918. So, not only are our heaters designed to be used with open windows, but they’re even hotter than they were designed to be, and our apartments are now even toastier with windows shut than those 20th century engineers ever intended. 

In the years following the pandemic, engineers figured out you could cut the heat output of a radiator by around 20 percent by covering in some kind of metallic paint, and you could further reduce the output by covering with a cozy, but any new yorker will tell you that the problem is far from solved. 

FACT: Crows are probably smarter than your kid—at least in some ways

By Michael Judson Berry

I’m SO excited to present the weirdest thing I learned this week! To all of my fellow Schitt’s Creek fans out there, you know that the “crows have eyes”, but do you also know that their knowledge of basic math, water displacement, and tool making know-how rival that of a 7 year old? I first became interested in crows’ problem solving abilities when I had my tonsils out and my Mom would read me selections of The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. I always knew the old adage “bird brain” was a total misnomer, but I didn’t realize just to what extent. Honestly, aside from a rather churlish crow named Mango, you’d be surprised at just how crafty birds can be!  

FACT: Incans were really good at brain surgery

By Sara Kiley Watson

As long as human beings have been walking around the planet, we’ve been getting into situations and fights where a head can get seriously bonked. And as anyone who has taken a tumble and hurt their noggin, the consequences can be pretty dire if the head injury is serious—and treatment has to happen pretty quickly. Before the era of modern medicine, there was a way to relieve pressure after a head injury, called trepanation. Trepanning, is, in its simplest form, drilling a hole into a live person’s head to relieve that trauma.

There has been evidence of folks scraping off layers of a live person’s literal skull for thousands of years—sometimes dating back as far as the neolithic era in Europe. And this kept going until relatively recently—as recent at least as the American Civil War. But on the battlefield in the US, people were dying left and right from issues associated with trepanning, namely infection, even though the tools to do the drilling had, in theory, improved.

In fact, trepanation’s golden age was reached years before America existed as we know it today. Skulls discovered in Peru from the Incan era and prior showed remarkable rates of recovery, up to around 80 percent compared to the Civil War’s 50 percent,  even when some patients received as many as seven holes in their heads for various ailments. The researchers who made this discovery also found that trepanation was largely used as emergency medicine, not necessarily as a spiritual practice as some had assumed. Nowadays, a neurosurgeon is probably the best person to call if you hit your head, but the practice is still used in absolute emergencies where medical care is hard to come by. But whatever you do, don’t try trepanning yourself at home, despite what some modern-day pseudoscientists have to say. 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post Even more proof that crows are terrifyingly smart appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Doctors used to bind books in human skin 

By Rachel Feltman

For most of us, the idea of everyday objects being made out of human skin is something we associate with horror movies, or maybe with historical monsters like the Nazis. But recent research shows that there was a time when doing so was considered pretty normal.

The Anthropodermic Book Project started up a few years ago to investigate supposed instances of anthropodermic bibliopegy, or books bound in human skin. So far the team has identified 50 supposed skin books, and have tested 31 of them using peptide mass fingerprinting, which is a technique that analyzes the amino acids in the collagen of a skin sample. Of those 31 books, 13 have turned out to be made of some non-human animal leather, but 18 of them have been confirmed as human. And these weren’t found in the homes of serial killers and war criminals. They were mostly medical texts bound by physicians during the 19th century.

For more information on these historical monstrosities, listen to this week’s episode. And be sure to check out “Dark Archives” by Megan Rosenbloom, which is a fascinating new book that goes into the subject in depth. 

If you learn nothing else, know this: You almost certainly wouldn’t be able to tell a human-bound book apart from one wrapped in cow or pig skin by sight, feel, or smell. So if you ever find yourself in the possession of a medical textbook from the 1800s, well… you get the idea. 

FACT: Ectoplasm is real, but it’s not what you think it is

By Sara Chodosh

Ectoplasm is something I associate, perhaps strangely, with Ghostbusters. I don’t think they even use the word “ectoplasm” in the movie, but my mental image of it is still the green slime from Slimer. So during this episode I want you to know one thing: “real” “ectoplasm” (both words really do need to be in quotation marks) is nothing like Slimer’s slime. Instead, it’s something much more ordinary and surprising, though you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out why. 

There is actually real ectoplasm, no quotation marks required, which is the outer layer of foraminifera, a class of single-celled organisms that live in the ocean and use their ectoplasm to catch food. That type is not nearly spooky or weird enough for a podcast episode, though, so the stuff I’m talking about this week is of the type that spiritualist mediums claimed to produce from various orifices in the early to mid 20th centuries. And yes, I do mean “various.” 

FACT: Cotton candy was invented by a dentist

By Claire Maldarelli

I’m pretty confident that if you ask any modern dentist today, they’d tell you that cotton candy isn’t all that great for your teeth. So it might come as a surprise then, that what Americans know today as cotton candy was indeed created by a dentist. William James Morrison, born in 1860, was a prominent dentist from Nashville, Tennessee, who along with a fellow Nashville-based friend, John C. Wharton created a device called the “fairy floss.” While it hardly resembles what any dentist would deem flossing (perhaps the opposite, even), the device became wildly popular and was exhibited at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, otherwise known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. To learn more about how the machine and product evolved—and for four more just as fun facts about candy—listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing! 

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

Season 5 of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week was recorded using the Shure MV7 podcast kit. The kit includes a Manfrotto PIXI mini tripod, so everything you need to get recording straight away is included—that’s super-helpful if you’re a creator who’s buying their first mic set up. Check it out at www.shure.com/popsci.

The post How sexy Victorian mediums tricked scientists into believing in ectoplasm appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on January 7, 2021.

Click here to see all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage.

More than a year and a half into the global pandemic, COVID vaccines have become the crucial stepping stone to recovering our normal lives. But even as multiple options have rolled out across the country, some folks are still confused about which COVID vaccine is best or even what they each do. So which should you get?

The answer is straightforward: All three vaccines that are currently available have been shown to be safe and effective. Any option is far better than no shot at all.

Currently, there are two vaccines that require two shots. Both vaccines, created by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, are mRNA-based. In clinical trials, both were shown to be around 95 percent effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 illness. The Johnson & Johnson single-shot vaccine , despite a brief pause, is also available across the country. The shot now carries a warning about a very small risk of developing a particular kind of blood clot, but reviews of the data by the CDC and FDA showed that the vaccine was safe.

Since they were granted emergency use authorization in late December of 2020 and early 2021, the three vaccines have continued to show their effectiveness. Most recently, a study published earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine studied how effective the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were at preventing symptomatic illness in a total of 5,000 healthcare workers across 25 states. The study found Moderna’s vaccine was 96.3 percent effective and Pfizer’s was 88.8 percent effective. Additionally, data released by the CDC which looked at how effective the two vaccines were at preventing hospitalization found that Pfizer’s effectiveness had fallen from 91 percent following the second shot to 77 percent about four months after that. Interestingly, the Moderna vaccine showed no decline in effectiveness over that period of time.

As for Johnson & Johnson, the company’s latest data on its one-shot vaccine showed an overall effectiveness of 79 percent at preventing COVID-19 altogether and an 81 percent effectiveness at preventing hospitalization. Further, a recent study found that a second dose of the Johnson & Johnson shot (given two months after the first) gave 94 percent effectiveness against infection, which is on par with the original effectiveness of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. And another recent study done by the company found that a booster shot given at six months increased the number of circulating antibodies by 12-fold.

While Pfizer’s and Moderna’s vaccines have been considered more or less twin vaccines, scientists are now trying to tease apart why the Moderna vaccine seems to be holding up better over the long term compared to the Pfizer vaccine. It’s important to note, however, that the change in effectiveness over time between the two vaccines is quite small and both are still incredibly effective. “Yes, [it’s] likely a real difference, probably reflecting what’s in the two vials,” said John Moore, a virologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, to The New York Times. “But truly, how much does this difference matter in the real world?”

Though it is possible, to some degree, to choose which vaccine you get, there are many situations where you simply can’t. Making a reservation at a local pharmacy will often mean you know in advance which shot you’ll get, but generally large vaccination centers will be giving out whatever is available. And since all of the options provide solid protection against COVID—especially protection against severe disease—it doesn’t much matter which one you get. The main differences are in how the shots work.

[Read more: If you’re fully vaccinated, you (mostly) don’t need to wear a mask outdoors]

Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines both rely on mRNA (messenger RNA) to provide our cells with a blueprint to make copies of an important coronavirus protein. Our immune system recognizes the protein as foreign, learns how to destroy it, and remembers it in case it sees the real coronavirus in the future. The ingredients in the two vaccines differ slightly, as well as the microscopic packaging in which the mRNA sequences comes. Because of this, the two vaccines must be stored at very low temperatures (Pfizer at -94 degrees Fahrenheit and Moderna at -4 degrees Fahrenheit), which limits who can get that vaccine.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine differs by using a weakened version of a common virus that causes the common cold to get the instructions for coronavirus proteins into humans. This vaccine relies on double-stranded DNA instead of mRNA, and doesn’t require the same level of intense cooling systems as Moderna’s and Pfizer’s. Instead, it can be stuck in a fridge for months at 36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit.

“We have three highly efficacious vaccines that also have a very good safety profile,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a White House press conference in January.

“If you did have a choice, I think I would probably still go with the ones that are showing 95 percent efficacy, but I would certainly be happy to have the other adenoviral-based [J&J] vaccine if that was what was available to me,” says Susan Kaech, professor and director of the NOMIS Center for Immunobiology and Microbial Pathogenesis. Importantly, Kaech says, “I wouldn’t skip getting a vaccine because the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccines weren’t available.”

Getting vaccinated presents two benefits, Kaech says: Any of the authorized vaccines will protect against severe cases of coronavirus disease. Most vaccines also prevent the illness from being transmitted. Though they don’t prevent transmission entirely, they do make transmission highly unlikely. A more mild case of the disease may lower the risk for long-term symptoms or COVID long-haulers, she adds, so even if you get sick after receiving a vaccine, you’ll be better off than if you hadn’t gotten vaccinated.

Barring specific allergies, people in the US don’t generally get to choose the specific vaccine they receive for a given disease. When you take your child to the pediatrician to get a vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough, for example, you may not know that there are six different pediatric vaccines licensed for that purpose. Individual doctor’s offices (or groups of them) pick which vaccine to order ahead of time. Some places allow you to choose which flu shot you get, especially if you’re allergic to eggs, but many only offer one type.

We’re not used to having a choice of vaccine, which is why multiple options of a coronavirus vaccine may be confusing to some, Kaech says. Still, she notes, it’s a good thing that there are more vaccine candidates being developed and tested. A greater diversity of vaccines will reduce the pressure on manufacturers and vaccine distributors, with the result of increased availability.

“If at the end of a year from now, we have 10 vaccines that are protective, I think it would be just as important as having two highly protective vaccines today,” says Kaech, “because it’ll make the global distribution a lot easier.”

The post Which COVID-19 vaccine is the best? appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on July 10, 2003.

Reader Robert Hayes of Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, asks: “Is there some way a small, nondeadly atomic bomb could somehow blow apart a tornado as it forms, averting any damage the storm might bring?”

While some might assume this idea to be an absurd one, we were willing to check it out (even the “nondeadly atomic bomb” part). And lo, it turns out that researchers are currently hard at work devising ways to control the weather—particularly disastrous weather systems like tornados and hurricanes—and hope to put their ideas to the test in the coming decades. Any storm depends on a host of complex, interrelated drivers, like heat flows and wind movements. The basic anti-storm strategy is to take the smallest of these factors, the one most amenable to change, and change it—in the manner, say, of throwing a wrench into the smallest cog at a factory in hopes that disrupting one part of the system will cause the entire assembly line to shut down.

[Related: 8 otherworldly photos of tornadoes and other Midwest storms]

Yet disrupting even one little part of a storm system, especially a system as massive as a hurricane, which can produce as much energy as the total global power output, will be mighty difficult. Here are three ideas in the works:

1. Research indicates that in order to form, a tornado needs both a cold, rainy downdraft and a warm updraft. To stop a tornado from forming, just heat this cold downdraft until it’s cold no longer. And how would one do this, you ask? Simple: Blast it with beams of microwaves from a fleet of satellites. The satellites would collect solar energy, transform it into microwaves, and send a beam down to Earth. The beams would be focused on cold downdrafts, heating them like last night’s leftovers. The European Space Agency has funded initial studies on building this type of satellite, though it hopes to use the satellites as high-altitude solar-power stations, not as weather modifiers.

2. Hurricanes get most of their energy from evaporating seawater, which is why they quickly die out over land. To prevent this evaporation, spray a thin layer of oil over the water. This should stop, or at least weaken, a Caribbean hurricane before it devastates Miami.

3. Divert the path of a hurricane by heating the atmosphere in front of it, presumably with the aforementioned microwave satellites, or with a giant orbiting mirror that reflects the sun’s energy.

All this, as should be expected, is still at the extreme hypothetical stage. Not only will we need to develop the ability to monitor storms on a much finer scale than is currently possible, we’ll also have to create and coordinate the intervening energy sources. Yet localized weather control is not pure fantasy: A study published in Nature showed that high-altitude jet contrails create lower day-to-night temperature swings—without even blowing anything up.

The post 3 wild ideas for how to stop a tornado appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Trading blood could actually make you “young” again

By Corinne Iozzio

Scientists have long thought that blood has the power to reshape us—to make an old person feel young, an ill person well again, and an agitated person find calm. Some of the earliest experiments to test this notion, though, did not have stellar results. When Robert Lower developed a crude transfusion technique that he tested on dogs, the donating puppers didn’t survive. But he and other physicians in the mid-1600s felt they were onto something; more specifically, they wanted to know if “calm” blood could help quiet mental illness. To avoid a dead donor they instead transfused their patients with lamb’s blood. In 1667, a pair of public experiments—one in London and one in Paris—were relatively successful, according to the scientists’ own accounts, at least. But the first Parisian infusion, scientific historian Holly Tucker recounts in her book Blood Work, raised some, uh, red flags; the subject had what we now know was a normal immune response to such an incursion. The patient’s eventual death, though suspicious, spurred the government and eventually the pope to put the kibosh on the whole bloody business.

Here’s the thing, though: As Kat McGowan reports in the new issue of PopSci, these experiments were, in fact, onto something. Over the last couple decades, a growing body of research has found that a sustained commingling of blood supplies—so-called parabiosis—can reverse the signs of aging in lab mice. What remains is to figure out precisely what in the blood is spurring those changes and put that into a manageable form like a shot or a pill—no blood trading, necessary.

FACT: Candyland wouldn’t exist without polio

By Rachel Feltman

Polio is one of those diseases that most of us are lucky enough to not have to worry about. Jonas Salk created an extremely effective vaccine for it that was released in 1955, and cases dropped by 85 to 90 percent within just two years of that initial rollout. We haven’t had a case of polio with US origins since 1979, and the last time the virus was brought into the country to spread here was 1993. That’s not because polio has disappeared; it’s because our vaccination rates are so high.

Because of that, it’s easy for us to forget that in the 1950s, polio was a devastating and terrifying disease in the US. In around 1 percent of infections, polio attacks the central nervous system and can lead to permanent paralysis of different parts of the body. Young children are at especially high risk of contracting the virus. 

The height of the US polio epidemic was in the 1950s, just before Salk’s vaccine came out, and there was no cure and no understanding of how to prevent it. Something like 15,000 people were being paralyzed each year in the US alone. With no sense of what would actually help their kids avoid polio, a lot of parents spent the early 50s making kids stay indoors all summer, when transmission rates would peak. It was a really scary time—and a boring one.
Enter Eleanor Abbott, a school teacher from San Diego. We don’t know much about her, but we know she contracted polio herself in 1948. And sometime during or after her recovery, she designed Candyland. It’s colorful, it’s simple, and the game mechanic is literally about taking a stroll—which is pretty poignant when you realize she designed it primarily for bedridden kids recovering from illness. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about Abbott’s story—and other surprising origins of beloved American board games.

FACT: You can’t raise a baby chimpanzee like a tiny human

By Purbita Saha

Brave psychology couple Winthrop and Luella Kellogg gave this experiment a go in the 1930s—and though it led to some fascinating results, it didn’t pan out too well overall. Winthrop, who ran an animal-stimuli lab at Indiana State University and then Florida State University, was intrigued by the case of two “wolf children” in India whose feral instincts stuck with them for life. He wanted to dig into the question: How much can an infant’s environment change its behavior and development?

Winthrop couldn’t quite test his hypothesis on a young human, so he and his wife took in a 7-month-old captive chimpanzee from Cuba to raise alongside their 10-month-old son, Donald. Gua, as the ape was called, received the same care and attention as her “sibling” and was tested daily for a long list of metrics. While she never learned to speak or babble like a person, her physical growth and motor skills progressed quickly—on par with other chimps in captivity. Donald, on the other hand, began imitating Gua’s barks and onomatopoeia, which may have been one reason the experiment ended in just six months.

The Kellogg’s documented their whole endeavor in their book, The Ape and the Child. There’s also a silent documentary that’s mostly available online.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post What scientists learned when they tried to raise a chimp with a human baby appeared first on Popular Science.

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Here at Popular Science, we love miniaturism—so much that we devoted a whole magazine issue to it (see Fall 2018, “Tiny”). Which is why we live for photos that show the wonders of the world not-at-scale.

Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition is the perfect opportunity for that. The awards uniquely feature images taken through light microscopes, from a range of scientific fields, including cancer research, plant evolution, and crystallography. The specimens themselves are often stained, fluoresced, and treated with other methods to tease out their visual features. Which leaves us with an eyeful of sharp contrasts and tiny details that we otherwise would be oblivious to with our zoomed-out human vantages.

The overall winner of this year’s contest (above) was composed of 200 separate photos, taken with a custom microscope made by optical imaging expert Jason Kirk. The technique was used by many of the other finalists, but with varying subjects, light sources, and color edits. The resulting lineup is diverse and stunning, and we’re excited to share some of the most memorable selects.

If you’re in the mood for a little motion, check out Nikon’s Small World video winners, which were also shot through light microscopes.

The post 11 views of the microscopic world in brilliant detail appeared first on Popular Science.

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Click here to see all of PopSci’s COVID-19 coverage.

This post is updated weekly.

We are well into year two of the COVID-19 pandemic, which officially began on March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization declared the viral outbreak a global event. That came just two months after WHO announced on January 5, 2020, that there was a mysterious virus emerging in Wuhan, China. Since then, more than 647,000 Americans have died from the virus—over 6,000 in the last week alone.

Today, the state of the pandemic looks far different than it did even a few months ago. We now have a handful of vaccines to prevent the infection, and more than 64 percent of US adults have completed their vaccination regimens. But it’s still crucial that we maintain our awareness of the severity of this crisis. Here’s a quick overview of the most recent essential stats and figures.

Current US vaccination numbers

The number of daily vaccines administered had plateaued at around half a million doses toward the end of July, but is slowly on the rise again. As of Sept. 7, the 7-day average of vaccines administered was around 826,000 doses per day nationwide, a slight decrease from last week. That’s 76 percent lower than when vaccinations peaked on April 13, at 3.38 million doses per day.

Some 64 percent of US adults are now fully vaccinated, and 62.5 percent of the entire population has received at least one dose.

On May 4, President Biden set a goal of having 70 percent of American adults with at least one vaccine by July 4. The US reached the benchmark about one month late. And that number has barely crept up, just 1 percent, in the last week: Currently 75 percent of all adults nationally have gotten at least one dose of a vaccine, though vaccination rates still vary widely by state and region.

These are the top five states for percentage of total population with at least one dose:

1. Vermont at 77 percent
2. Massachusetts at 76 percent
3. Hawaii at 75 percent
4. Connecticut at 74 percent
5. Rhode Island at 73 percent

Every state has reached a rate of at least 39 percent complete vaccination, with Vermont leading the way at 68 percent and Alabama and Wyoming tied in last place.

[Related: Questions about booster vaccines, answered]

Latest US COVID-19 case counts

The United States has now reported more than 40 million cases in total, and there were 152,393 new daily cases on average as of August 30, which is up 1 percent over the last two weeks. Since early July, the average number of new cases per day has increased more than ten-fold. Case numbers had drastically declined from our third—and by far largest—peak so far, reaching a pandemic low for much of June. Although cases are still below January’s peak, they have been rising steeply since early July and are now on par with numbers from last November.

COVID-19 testing has continued to increase since mid-July, although the testing rates remain slightly lower than they were over the winter when reported case counts were similar. This means that case numbers may not be directly comparable to the winter counts. National positivity rates had fallen along with case counts in the spring and early summer, and are now slowly coming down from another peak, as the delta variant remains dominant.

The CDC reports that an average of 9.8 percent of tests nationally have been positive this week.

In order to get this new wave under control and avoid another spike in the magnitude of January’s, it’s crucial that we use all of the tools at our disposal. Get tested if you have symptoms or a known exposure, even if you’ve been vaccinated. Wear a mask in indoor or crowded outdoor public spaces. Most importantly, it’s critical that everyone get vaccinated as quickly as possible. Everyone age 12 and older in the US is currently eligible—this is how we can all contribute to ending the pandemic.

Coronavirus stats around the world

Going by total case counts, the current top 10 countries for COVID-19 are:

1. United States
2. India
3. Brazil
4. United Kingdom
5. Russia
6. France
7. Turkey
8. Argentina
9. Iran
10. Colombia

But what these countries generally have in common is large populations. The list of total cases per 100,000 people tells a very different story (not counting countries with fewer than 100,000 people):

1. Montenegro
2. Czech Republic
3. Maldives
4. Georgia
5. Slovenia
6. Israel
7. Luxembourg
8. United States
9. Argentina
10. Serbia

America is also currently the biggest single-nation driver of the new global cases by a factor of more than three.

Many parts of the world have recently or are currently experiencing a resurgence in COVID cases, driven by the especially infectious delta variant. The global daily average case count has leveled off on its recent peak, actually decreasing by 9 percent over the two weeks. In spring and early summer, this global spike was mostly linked with high case counts across Latin America, but is now largely related to resurgences in the US, the Middle East, and Western Europe. A dozen countries are currently averaging 60 or more cases per 100,000 residents over the past two weeks.

More than half of all South American nations experienced case spikes in June, and had among the highest rates of new infections and deaths in the world. Peru has reported more than 198,000 COVID-19 deaths, making it the country with the highest death toll per capita in the world by a factor of nearly two. Brazil has reported more than 584,000 deaths, a number second only to the United States.

A study from July, however, estimated the actual death toll in India at the time was well over three million, nearly seven times the official count of 432,000. The study, conducted by the Center for Global Development, a D.C.-based research group, examined data from the state, international estimates, testing samples, and surveys of people living in India. “True deaths are likely to be in the several millions, not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India’s worst human tragedy,” its authors noted.

India is reporting about 41,000 new daily cases and an average of 342 daily deaths. Just 12 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.

Worldwide, the vaccination disparity between low and high-income nations is increasingly evident. In developing nations, vaccination rates remain well below 10 percent, while in wealthier countries, more than 60 percent of residents have completed their jab regimens, according to The New York Times.

[Related: J&J vaccine may be less effective against delta COVID variant]

The most recent COVID-19 hotspots in the US

Case numbers are falling, thankfully, in 17 US states. States with the highest current infection rates per capita include Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming, Alaska, and Alabama, which all have an average of more than 80 new daily cases per 100,000 people. Currently none of those states have vaccinated a majority of their populations, though Kentucky and Alaska are close, at 49 and 48 percent fully vaccinated, respectively.

The coronavirus death toll and hospitalization rates

At least 647,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19. An average of 1,499 people are dying on average every day, up by 34 percent over the last two weeks—and almost all of those who died were unvaccinated.

The average number of people hospitalized with COVID has been hovering around 100,000 for the past two weeks, levels not seen since February. Medical systems are becoming regionally overloaded once again, particularly in the Southeast. With the highly contagious delta variant dominating, and the threat of new variants on the horizon, getting back to the gains made earlier in the summer will be a challenge.

However, it is possible to once again achieve declining infection rates and hospitalizations. All of the US vaccines have demonstrated some level of protection against the delta variant—crucially, they continue to protect against serious disease. Vaccination, testing, and following appropriate masking and distancing precautions all remain critical.

The post The US has had more than 40 million COVID cases since the pandemic began appeared first on Popular Science.

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This post was originally published on July 20, 2021, and has been updated.

As of September 7, 78 large fires have been spreading across 10 states in the US—burning across 1.9 million acres of land thus far, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Over the course of this year, 5,104,228 acres have burned due to 43,555 separate wildfires. These fires have followed record drought and heatwave conditions across the western US, and have so far crushed towns and communities in their wake. There were more than a dozen new fires in California over Labor Day Weekend alone, according to local officials; all national forests in the state continue to be closed through September 17.

[Related: Wildfires could hit your hometown. Here’s how to prepare.]

Blazes have become more and more hazardous in today’s climate—largely due to climate change, the lack of controlled natural burns over the past century, and an increasingly dry and extended fire season throughout the western US and Canada. Fire containment is a key management practice and consists of creating a manmade or natural barrier around the perimeter of a fire. However, within this perimeter, flames may continue burning for months, so even 100 percent containment doesn’t mean the fire has vanished.

Important wildfires to keep an eye on right now

Dixie fire in California

The Dixie fire, which is now the largest burning in the US and may soon be the biggest in Golden State history, was discovered on July 13. California’s giant utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, has admitted to potentially sparking it, due to equipment failure. As of September 7, it’s burned 917,579 acres (larger than the entire state of Rhode Island). The fire, which has burned across Northern California, engulfing entire homes in its wake, has caused evacuations in multiple counties. Currently, 59 percent of the fire has been contained.

Caldor fire in California

The Caldor fire started on August 14 and has since burned through 216,646 acres. A large chunk of that has been in Eldorado National Forest, about an hour outside of Sacramento. The fire continues to burn through the Sierra Nevada mountain range, causing mandatory evacuations around Lake Tahoe last week. Currently, 49 percent of the fire has been contained—a major difference from the 16 percent reported last week.

Monument fire in California

The Monument fire near Junction City, California, has reached 184,142 acres in Trinity National Forest and surrounding localities. The fire started due to lightning on July 30 and grew nearly 4,000 acres last week. Still, evacuation orders and warnings have been lifted as it shifts away from high-population regions, and repair work is already underway. Currently, 41 percent of the fire has been contained.

McFarland fire in California

The McFarland fire has burned through 122,653 acres. Located just below the Monument Fire, it started burning on July 29 and mowed through 40,000 acres from August 16 through the 17. Towns such as Weaverville and Hayfork were heavily affected by smoky air conditions due to McFarland and other local fires for the next handful of days. It destroyed 20 homes, even as dozens of personnel rushed to control it. Currently, 98 percent of the fire has been contained, and it may be 100 percent contained as soon as September 9.

River Complex in California

The River Complex started off with 31 lightning-induced fires in the Klamath National Forest on July 30. It’s now shrunk down to two major fires: Cronan and Haypress. The full complex has reached 135,689 acres and is still causing evacuation orders in California. Currently, 19 percent of the fire has been contained.

Schneider Springs fire in Washington

Another lightning-induced blaze, the Schneider Springs fire began August 3 and has burned through 94,206 acres. Hot weather and low humidity helped it to grow last month, and a temporary closure was put in place for the entire Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest (now downgraded to Stage 2 restrictions). Currently, 14 percent of the fire has been contained.

Cub Creek 2 fire in Washington

The Cub Creek 2 fire, located on Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest lands, has burned through 70,186 acres since July 16. The latest reports show it’s reached private property in the surrounding county as well. Currently, 70 percent of the fire has been contained.

Woods Creek fire in Montana

The Woods Creek fire has been burning since July 10 in central Montana and has now affected 55,424 acres. It was also caused by a lightning strike. While most of it is under control, a few flames continue burning in hard-to-access wilderness around the Big Belt Mountains. Currently, 90 percent of the fire has been contained.

The post The Dixie fire is on track to be California’s biggest ever appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Josh Gondelman, writer and co-Executive Producer for Desus & Mero on Showtime. Be sure to check out his podcast Make My Day if you don’t already listen!

FACT: This dog went ‘extinct’ once we stopped needing it to help us cook our meat

By Rachel Feltman

Yes, a dog was once genetically engineered to serve as a kitchen appliance.

Back when open fires were our best way of cooking things, the spit was invaluable. As early as the 1st century BC, people were sticking meat onto spits so they could turn and cook them evenly instead of like literally setting one half of a carcass on fire while the other stayed raw. But for hundreds of years, that meant someone had to physically turn the spit. In Medieval kitchens, this was a job for the lowest of lowly servant boys, who would be called the “spit boy” or “spit jack.” 

The first mention of the turnspit dog, also called the vernepator cur or canis vertigus (dizzy dog), was in 1576, where it was referred to as the turnespete. But most of what we know about them was written down in the 1800s, near the end of what was apparently centuries of regular use. The long story short here is that people bred terrier-like dogs to have relatively long bodies and short, crooked legs, and to be very strong and high-energy. Their bodies were designed to fit easily into these treadmills that powered various kitchen aids, but primarily the roasting spit. They would run and run and run all day to keep the meat turning.

[Related: Why corgi mixes look like adorable munchkin versions of other dogs]

Unfortunately, this job totally sucked for the dogs for all the reasons it had sucked for humans. According to at least one historian, it was an encounter with a New York hotel’s turnspit dogs in the 1850s that inspired Henry Berg to found the ASPCA.

Turnspit dogs weren’t completely relegated to the kitchen—the lords and ladies of the house would use them as living foot-warmers at church on Sundays, and Queen Victoria is said to have kept several of them as pets. But they were generally considered ugly and mean, probably because people kept making them run on hot treadmills that smelled like meat, so once they became obsolete as kitchen utensils—which happened over the course of the 19th century and as we entered the 20th, when various automated roasting spits became more accessible—they quickly disappeared. 

They’re considered “extinct” now, but dog breeds can’t really go extinct—they’re not distinct species. It’s kind of like how cabbage, kale, broccoli, kohlrabi, Brussel sprouts, and a whole bunch of other plants are all one species: if we stopped eating cabbage, it wouldn’t really be “extinct,” and the makings of cabbage would still exist in the DNA of the other varietals. Similarly, any “extinct” dog breed is just one where we don’t have proof that a pure descendant of that exact lineage is still around. All we have left of the turnspit dog are its many cousins in the canine world—and one seemingly beloved pet vernepator forever preserved with questionable taxidermy skills. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more!

FACT: An unsolved art heist is still memorialized with empty frames on the museum walls

By Josh Gondelman

In 1990, hundreds of millions of dollars of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (on St. Patrick’s Day, obviously). Because of stipulations made when the museum was founded, several frames remain hanging on the wall where paintings were cut out of them. This robbery, and the subsequent attempts to crack the case, are detailed in the Boston Globe/WBUR podcast Last Seen. The heist remains unsolved to this day, much to the disappointment of people who watched This Is A Robbery on Netflix thinking that the documentary’s producers would reveal a conclusion.

FACT: Chickens deserve our respect and praise

By Sara Chodosh

It doesn’t seem possible that chickens should be able to produce so many eggs. Modern domestic chickens (there are wild varieties called junglefowl) are egg-laying machines—some average more than 300 eggs per year, which is nearly one a day.

Just from a sheer physics standpoint, that is a gnarly amount of matter to convert from food to egg each day, not to mention passing through a hole in your body. Yikes!

So it’s only natural that sometimes they get it wrong.

In this week’s episode I talk all about the ways in which egg-laying can go awry, and boy are there a lot of them. A few highlights: wrinkly eggs, tiny eggs, and sandpaper-y ones, too.

My main egg fact for the episode, though, is about the absolute worst way things can go wrong: when chickens “lay” an egg inside their body. Somehow this also relates to a hormonal implant given to ferrets, but you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out how.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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If you live with a pet of any kind, you’ve probably noticed that animals are flipping hilarious. The same goes for wild creatures spanning the planet. Their antics can dazzle, raise questions, and add some comedy to the pursuit of science.

A lot of the fun, however, rests on interpretation. A photographer might snap a creature in its habitat a certain way or capture an interaction with other members of its species because the scenario struck them as amusing. The viewers then get a second-hand look at the artist’s perspective. But they’ll never know what was running through the subject’s mind at that moment—not until biologists tap into animals’ self-awareness.

While you wait for that Dr. Doolittle breakthrough, check out the finalists of the 2021 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards. These reptiles, mammals, fish, and birdies are completely meme-worthy and will add some sunshine to your day. Maybe even literally, if you choose to head outdoors and see what silly sights you can spot in your own backyard.

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This post has been updated. It was originally published on January 15, 2020.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The chainsaw was originally developed to aid in difficult childbirths

By Claire Maldarelli

When you picture a chainsaw, the typical uses that come to mind usually have to do with wood (and, you know, chopping it). But why were chainsaws invented, really? It might surprise you that the device’s origin lands about as far away from a lumber yard as you can get: The creators of the chainsaw were two Scottish surgeons named John Aitken and James Jeffray. And they developed their gnarly and dangerous device to help them do their jobs—cutting human bone and flesh.

Even under the best possible circumstances, giving birth is not what most would call a pleasant experience. But in the 18th century, prior to the development of anesthesia and other modern surgical tools, delivery could turn incredibly dangerous with little warning. When babies came out feet-first or their bodies were otherwise trapped in the birth canal, doctors would have to widen the pelvic area by cutting into the cartilage and bone. Aitken and Jeffray found that a sharp knife just didn’t do the trick in a timely fashion, so, somewhat shockingly, they created a chainsaw as a more precise and humane option.

The resulting procedure was known as a symphysiotomy, and thankfully it is no longer in use today. What’s left is the chainsaw, which is now kept well away from surgical wards. Thank goodness.

FACT: You owe your favorite fitness tracker to a man who diligently weighed his own poop

By Rachel Feltman

The next time you finish a workout and glance down at your Apple Watch for instant gratification, thank 16th-century Italian physician Santorio Santorio. He may not have pioneered the practice of counting steps, but he did something even more important to our understanding of self-quantification: He sat down. A lot. For a long time. For the better part of 30 years, in fact.

Santorio dedicated his career to improving our ability to measure important data points, especially as they pertained to health. In a world of physicians who thought you only needed to balance your humors in order to be well, Santorio wanted to know exactly how much phlegm was going into the equation. To that end, he built himself a special balancing chair designed to keep tabs on his weight at all hours.

By weighing himself at multiple points throughout the day—just after waking up; while sitting around doing nothing; before, during, and after eating; after having sex; before and after urinating or defecating—Santorio developed medicine’s first knowledge of the basal metabolic rate. Today we know that most of the calories we need to eat to survive go straight to fueling our organs. Barring seriously strenuous exercise, the calories we burn by moving around are relatively few.

Santorio didn’t have a perfect understanding of this, but his endless weigh-ins did help him land on the basic concept. Why? Because he needed an explanation for his missing poop. Listen to this week’s episode to find out more.

FACT: Some animals seem to have complete control over when they get pregnant

By Sara Chodosh

Pregnancy in general is a whirlwind of experiences in which your body starts doing things it’s never done before—and it can feel a little out of control. But it turns out a lot of animals have a surprising amount of control over their pregnancy. And that starts with choosing when to get preggers in the first place.

I talk a lot in the podcast about why an animal would want to plan when to give birth, but one thing that didn’t make it into the episode is the fact that a number of species can get inseminated while still suckling their babies, then get pregnant after those babies are weaned. A lot of human mothers think that they experience the same thing—that as long as they’re breastfeeding, they can’t conceive again. But that’s a total myth. It’s true that breastfeeding can affect your fertility, and so some women can have unprotected sex without much risk of pregnancy. But it’s also true that plenty of women are absolutely able to get pregnant even while regularly nursing—and that every year, tons of people end up having their second kid earlier than planned because they didn’t realize that fact. So, consider this your fair warning, and check out this week’s episode to hear about the animals who have a way better handle on the whole conception thing than humans do. For more stories about weird animal baby-making, listen to our previous episode about virgin births (yes, they’re a thing).

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise from our Threadless shop.

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What can we learn from a zebrafish’s regenerating tail? Or a termite army’s march into uncharted terrain? Welcome to the fields of ecology and evolution, where researchers observe the natural world to better understand how species are shaped by each other and their environments. 

In practice, it takes years of notetaking and analysis to break down adaptations and other evolutionary forces. Charles Darwin noticed the uniquely shaped beaks of the Galapagos finches during a five-week foray to the islands, and then spent the next decade and a half trying to make sense of them. 

But even a single moment can shed light on an organism’s grind for survival, especially when it’s captured on camera. The BioMed Central Ecology and Evolution image competition highlights photos that show adaptations in action. Experts submit works from lab benches and field sites across the world to vy for the crowning spot in their area of study.

[Related: 14 hypnotizing photos that captured the world during the pandemic] 

Here are the judges’ 2021 selections for each category, along with the grand prize winner.

Best in Human Evolution and Ecology

Overall winner and best in Conservation Biology

Editor’s pick

Best in Ecological Developmental Biology

Best in Behavioral Ecology

Best in Evolutionary Developmental Biology and Biodiversity

The post These photos are proof that evolution is wild and wondrous appeared first on Popular Science.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is about all things hot—providing just a quick taste of the sorts of stories you’ll find in the latest issue of Popular Science. We’re now a digital-only magazine, which means you can access it right here and now.

FACT: Some skyscrapers are so shiny they turn into death rays

By Corinne Iozzio

In 2013, a London skyscraper known as the “Walkie Talkie” building made its mark on its neighborhood in an unusual way: Sunlight bouncing off the topmost floors of the bulbous facade melted cars on the street below. At the peak of its shine, the ray emitted 15 times as much solar radiation as would usually be found on the ground—enough to hurt any humans unlucky enough to cross its path.

Strangely, though, this was not the first time the so-called Fryscraper’s architect had set a town alight; the Vdara hotel in Las Vegas had, only a few years earlier, reflected rays so powerful they singed guests’ hair on the pool deck below. This was such a persistent problem that the hotel installed an army of giant umbrellas to shield swimmers and sunbathers. The Walkie Talkie now has a shield in place to provide a similar fix.

Many other buildings dotted around the globe have spurred similarly scorching scenes. Computer-assisted models have since revealed just how dangerous these rays can be, spurring physicists to sound alarms about the reflectivity of our modern structures—and implore architects to design buildings that sweat the exterior temperature as much as the interior one.

FACT: The sun will not explode in the year 2057

By Purbita Saha

Here’s some good news: We still have another five billion years before the sun runs out of hydrogen and sets us and our planetary neighbors on fire. That gives us a little more time than the sci-fi movie Sunshine predicted, and a couple of millennia to understand how stars truly meet their ends.

Astronomers have a pretty good guess at how the sun will burn out, based on the trajectories of yellow dwarves in other solar systems. But not all stars follow the same destiny. An energy analysis of distant galaxy NGC 6946 reveals that the red supergiant at its heart barely exploded as it completed its death spiral. Instead, it sort of just vanished and formed a gaping black hole, leaving its celestial neighbors intact. 

Experts are wondering if the red supergiant Betelguese will go out the same way. The grizzled star was looking dim in the night sky last year, but recent findings hint that it may have been due to a dust cloud, not impending nuclear doom. Tracking its fate and modeling more stellar scenarios could give us more insight on how our—and existence as we know it—will end.

FACT: If you love hot tubs, thank the Jacuzzis

By Rachel Feltman

When I set out to learn the history of the hot tub, the first, like, five pages of google search results were all from companies that sell them, which is absolutely my least favorite genre of history article. But then I found this amazing Atlas Obscura article from 2015 by Rich Paulas. You’ll have to listen to this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing to get the full scoop on my deep dive into the history of hydrotherapy—from the Ancient Romans, to bougie old resorts, to literal torture devices, to a bygone vestige of swinger culture, and finally to the fancy wellness aids we know and love today. But if you don’t learn anything else, know this: Jacuzzi isn’t just a product name. It’s also a surname. And the Jacuzzi family had a pretty prolific run as inventors during the first half of the 20th century. The next time you find yourself luxuriating in a whirlpool, take a moment to say salute to the Italian brothers who made your soak possible.

Plus: Click here for tips and tricks on how to take the absolute best and most relaxing bath ever.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post Some skyscrapers are so shiny they turn into death rays appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: The winner of the 1960 Olympic marathon did the whole race barefoot

By Claire Maldarelli 

Running shoe technology has come a long way in the last 100 years. Companies have added arch support, ridged soles designed to minimize shin splints, and, most recently, literal carbon-fiber plates sandwiched between an energy-returning ultra-lightweight midsole. All of this research and investment is meant to help athletes run their best races, and while world record times, particularly in the marathon, have come down with the advent of higher-tech shoes, sneakers aren’t everything. Case-in-point: Abebe Bikila and his barefoot Olympic triumph. 

Bikila was a last minute addition to the Ethiopian marathon squad at the 1960 Summer Olympic games in Rome. According to a documentary on the Olympics YouTube channel, a few days before he was set to leave for the big games, his shoes fell apart. Despite a long search, he couldn’t find a pair comfortable enough for him to race 26.2 miles in.

[Related: Science helped me run my first marathon in 3 hours and 21 minutes]

Instead of settling for a mediocre pair of kicks, he ran arguably the most important run of his life barefoot—and won. In doing so, he became the first Black African to win an Olympic Gold medal. This all goes to show that while technology can help an athlete succeed, it doesn’t always make or break a race. That’s one of the things about sports—you can’t predict everything that will happen on the day of the event. Listen to this week’s episode to hear how Bikila pulled off such an incredible fee(a)t.

FACT: The early-modern Olympics were a mess of bizarre sports and inconsistent rules

By Rachel Feltman

Before we get into the madness that used to count as an Olympic event, let’s start with a bit of historical context. The Olympics are at least around 3,000 years old—that’s when we know the Ancient Greeks held several major sporting festivals, one of which took place every four years at Olympia—but they didn’t exist from the year 400 to the year 1859. The ancient games tapered off during the Roman empire, and it was only in 1859 that Greece started holding modern Olympiads in Athens. The first international games took place in Athens in 1896, not long after the International Olympic Committee first formed.

The winter games weren’t a thing until 1924, and in general, it took a few decades for the Olympics to look anything like the events we hold today. Olympians had to provide their own lodging until 1932, for instance, so at those first games, most international competitors were people who happened to be in the host country for some other reason—like diplomats. Also, only amateurs were allowed to compete, and rules were kind of all over the place. 

For those first few Olympic games, and especially the second iteration—Paris 1900—countries just inserted events that they expected locals to do well in, which led to some very weird competitions. Motor boating, pigeon shooting, pistol dueling, and croquet were all featured in the 1900 games, to name just a few of the wildest examples. Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about when and how the Olympics became the tightly-run ship they are today.

FACT: The Olympics used to give out medals for art and poetry

By Sara Chodosh

When I found out that there used to be Olympic medals for art, I honestly thought I must have misheard or misunderstood the podcast I was listening to. Or maybe that there was some technicality that I was missing—surely they couldn’t have done this. 

But it’s true: there used to be Olympic medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. 

There’s still kind of an artistic component to the Olympics today, in that there’s always a new logo design and some kind of overall aesthetic that ties the event together. There’s usually a public installation of the Olympic rings or some such event, and often the host city keeps that structure in place for years afterward. But the Olympics have changed so much in the past century that it now boggles the mind to consider holding a painting contest as part of the festivities.

There’s lots to admire about Olympic athletes—their commitment, their ambition, their skill—but in the end, the Olympics are an athletic endeavor. And the modern Olympics, in particular, are an event largely designed to make the organizers very wealthy, despite rules against paying the athletes who actually participate. Sorry to be a downer! Listen to the episode for far more fun facts and to learn how all of this somehow relates to Michael Jordan.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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Looking for this year’s list? 2019’s Best of What’s New winners, this way. >>

It’s an elegant way to avoid urban flooding: Lay down paving tiles that soak up rain and divert it from sewers to greenery. But that innovation, the Climate Tile, is just one of the problem-solving projects we’ve named the best engineering breakthroughs of 2018. There’s also a 3D printer slated to build affordable homes in impoverished areas, and a sea life sampler that lets biologists gather marine specimens without damaging their squishy bodies. Other “bests” are a bit more whimsical: a banana that grows in the cold, vegan scrambled eggs, and robots that turn backflips 60 feet in the air.

Climate Tile by Tredje Natur (Third Nature)

Rotary Actuated Dodecahedron (RAD) by Harvard University

Mongee banana by D&T Farm

The Loupe on the Space Needle

Guardian GT robot by Sarcos

Vulcan printed housing by ICON & New Story

Stuntronics by Disney Imagineering

Morpheus Hotel by Zaha Hadid Architects

Amazon Go by Amazon

Steel Vengeance by Rocky Mountain Corporation

Just Egg by Just

See the entire list: The 100 greatest innovations of 2018

Spot by Boston Dynamics

The post The most impressive engineering feats of 2018 appeared first on Popular Science.

Articles may contain affiliate links which enable us to share in the revenue of any purchases made.

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: Viagra might be a secret weapon against period cramps

By Purbita Saha

Sildenafil has only been on the market since the late ‘90s. In its brief history it’s helped tens of millions of people and made billions for Pfizer and other pharmaceutical companies.

But Viagra (the brand-specific name for the drug) wasn’t always meant to treat erectile dysfunction. It works all over the body, relaxing the muscles and dilating blood vessels, which could either lead to a boner or help with a slew of other conditions. The first clinical trials involving sildenafil were actually for angina and hypertension. Throughout the course of those studies, the attending nurses discovered that the pill had some… conspicuous side effects on people with penises.

[Related: How a Victorian heart medicine became a gay sex drug]

The drugmakers saw a major money making opportunity and changed the drug’s focus. That’s a story plenty of folks have heard before. But what’s less known is that the medication also had soothing effects on study subjects experiencing pain from uterine cramping. A more recent clinical trial, run by Penn State University and the National Institute of Health from 2007 to 2011, followed up on this neglected result. It only included 25 participants, with a few receiving Viagra and a few receiving a placebo, so we have to take them with a grain of salt. But those patients did indeed experience massive relief from primary dysmenorrhea, a.k.a. period cramps, within just four hours. (It’s important to note they got the dose vaginally, not orally, which may have maximized the effectiveness and minimized other side effects.)

Those findings were reported almost eight years ago now, and for some reason there hasn’t been much research or buzz around Viagra and period cramps since. Which might point to a larger pattern in medicine—that there just isn’t a big appetite when it comes to understanding and treating reproductive issues that don’t have to do with penises.

FACT: Cats once dropped out of planes to help fight an army of rats

By Sara Kiley Watson

Weird stories tend to keep getting weirder over time—and the true-story turned urban-legend tale of public health officials who parachuted cats to a remote island to prevent a resurgence of the plague has certainly acquired some mythical add-ons over the years. 

Basically, back in the 1950s, Borneo was having a bit of a mosquito problem. What was customary in the day (and still is in some places), was to knock out those nasty biting bugs with DDT. This thorough spritzing had some unexpected consequences, including that enough predatory creatures died off to cause a massive upswing in thatch-eating caterpillars. But the real problem was that cats kept keeling over.

To regain control over a now precariously poised situation for potentially disease-carrying and predator-free rats, the British Royal Air Force allegedly dropped 20 cats over the island in parachuted baskets to “wage war on rats which were threatening crops.”

Over time, the story has picked up multiple spins. Some sources claim that thousands of yowling cats were involved, while others say that the plague had already broken out amongst the people living there. The most popular fabrication is that this is a story of biomagnification. Listen to this week’s episode to separate feline fact from fiction.

[Related: You’re probably petting your cat wrong]

FACT: In the future we might be able to breathe through our butts

By Rachel Feltman

On one of the very first episodes of Weirdest Thing, I did a whole exhaustive history of something called a smoke enema. You’ll have to go back and listen if you want all the grim details, but the gist is that throughout history and until the early 1800s, people sometimes tried to resuscitate, revive, or otherwise treat ailing humans by blowing smoke up their anuses. 

Now, I’m not quite issuing a correction here. I’m not retracting my fantastic smoke enema expose. But I’m here to say that, while I wish it weren’t so, there may have been more to the idea than I thought back when that old episode aired. In May, researchers released a study that showed at least some mammals—mice and pigs, to be precise—can be saved from suffocation with the help of oxygen-rich enemas. 

Lead researcher Takanori Takebe, of the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, was inspired by non-mammalian animals that we already know can absorb oxygen through their intestines. Sea cucumbers, for example, suck water through these branching tubes just inside their anuses, expelling the liquid and absorbing the oxygen. There are also fish called loaches that, in addition to breathing through gills like most fish, can pop their heads out of the water to get gulps of air through their mouth, which are then absorbed by their intestines since they have no lungs.

So, it wasn’t totally far-fetched to think mammals might be able to get oxygen from their rear ends, but we obviously don’t just breathe through our butts every time we go swimming or anything as simple as that. Listen to this week’s episode to hear how Takebe and his team managed to turn a bunch of hypoxic mice and pigs into happy and healthy butt-breathers.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode features special guest Jonathan Sims. Best known around these parts for writing and starring in Rachel’s favorite audio drama series, he’s also the author of “Thirteen Storeys” and a tabletop game designer.

FACT: Bees can get jet lag (and probably know everything)

By Sara Chodosh

If you’ve seen the viral TikTok video about how bees perceive time, my apologies in advance—you’ll already know a lot of the information I dive into on this episode. If you haven’t, boy oh boy do I have a story for you. 

You might think that it’s obvious that any animal, not just bees, experiences the passage of time. But that’s mainly because, well, we can’t really imagine what it would be like to not perceive time. Scientists don’t care, though. Just because we have trouble imagining it doesn’t mean it’s not true, and by default we assume that less complex animals—like bees—don’t perceive time. Which is how some biologists ended up flying a nest of bees across the Atlantic Ocean, and then again across the US. 

You’ll have to tune in to the episode to hear the full story, as well as to find out what bees and humans have in common, time perception-wise. And as a special bonus, you’ll also get to hear about the UK’s truly bizarre beekeeping laws.

[Related: Bee theft is almost a perfect crime—but there’s a new sheriff in town]

FACT: Steam trains were once cutting-edge getaway vehicles for criminals—but the telegraph stopped them in their tracks

By Rachel Feltman

Around six or seven in the evening on January 1, 1845, Sarah Hart’s neighbor heard sounds of groaning and distress from her Salt Hill cottage—and saw a man known to be a frequent visitor leave the house. When the neighbor went in to check on her, she found Sarah almost unconscious and foaming at the mouth, and Hart soon died. It seemed clear she’d been murdered. But when locals rushed off to catch the man who’d last seen her alive, they just managed to see him boarding the train back to London. None of them knew his real name, and could only vaguely describe him—so unless they somehow beat the train to the city to alert the constable there, all hope of catching the culprit was lost. 

Luckily the Slough station was equipped with the absolute cutting edge of technology: a brand new telegraph machine. 

Listen to this week’s episode to hear about how John Tawell—a man “in the garb of a kwaker with a great coat—became the first criminal caught thanks to electronic communication.

This is generally considered one of the first murders involving hydrogen cyanide, which had only been discovered in 1782 by Carl Wilhelm Scheele; it’s also sometimes said to be the first known instance of a murderer using a steam train as a getaway vehicle. But it is definitely, absolutely the first case of a criminal being caught thanks to a telegraph—and electronic communications in general—and the media sensation no doubt contributed to the technology’s adoption around the world. Tune in to hear the whole sordid tale.

FACT: Sir Isaac Newton was a keen alchemist

By Jonathan Sims

Widely remembered as one of the fathers of modern science and credited with foundational discoveries in gravity, calculous, motion, light (and even the invention of a new type of telescope), Isaac Newton is considered one of the greatest minds in history with good reason. He also tried to use the power of God and Magic to turn base metal into gold.

Alchemy remains one of most fascinating fields of study ever devised, a mixture of actual chemical experimentation and religious mysticism tied up in so much secrecy and possible charlatanism that it’s impossible to truly say exactly what any of it meant. It remains a compelling example of how the modern division between scientific enquiry and religious or spiritual exploration was not always the case.

If you like The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts. You can also join in the weirdness in our Facebook group and bedeck yourself in Weirdo merchandise (including face masks!) from our Threadless shop.

The post What’s stranger than bees telling time? How we learned that they can. appeared first on Popular Science.

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What makes a disease deadly in the twenty-first century? Medicine has never been more advanced; our understanding of spread and infection, never more sophisticated. And yet, we may be poised for the largest and most devastating pandemic the human race has ever encountered.

Diseases that could have been effectively eradicated decades ago continue to ravage developing nations. In the wake of natural and manmade disasters, cholera, tuberculosis and the like spread even more easily, aided by tenuous medical infrastructures and close living quarters for refugees. Meanwhile, wealthy nations are no less imperiled, their citizens endangered by a massively consolidated food supply and by antibiotics prescribed so indiscriminately as to potentially destroy their efficacy altogether.

But, if medical advancements may be our undoing, they also pose our only salvation. Launch the gallery here to see 10 of the world’s deadliest diseases—the contagious monsters that threaten our very way of life—and to learn how science is holding them at bay.

Salmonella and_ E. coli_

Yellow Fever Virus

Shanghai SARS Alert

Liver Infected With Ebola

Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus

Dengue Fever

Enterovirus 71

Influenza A (Avian Flu)

Vibrio Cholerae

Extensively Drug Resistant Tuberculosis

The post Pandemic! 10 of the Deadliest Diseases appeared first on Popular Science.

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What are the dirtiest industries? Sometimes the most innocuous-seeming are the worst culprits. PopSci takes a look inside five of the sectors most responsible for unleashing destruction upon the planet.

And check out PopSci‘s complete coverage of the future of the environment at popsci.com/futurecity.

Construction

Local Government

Fishing

Hollywood

Gold Mining

The post The Five Dirtiest Industries appeared first on Popular Science.

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You may already know about the pollution plight of Linfen, China. But how about the heavy metals Pittsburghers breathe in on a daily basis? Or the incomparable smog Milanesi put up with? PopSci has culled an eye-opening selection of some of the world’s most problematic cities. From the painfully high cancer rates in Sumgayit, Azerbaijan to the acid rain destroying La Oroya, Peru, writer Jason Daley will walk you through the lowest of the low; and explain why, despite it all, there’s still hope for these places.

And check out PopSci‘s complete coverage of the future of the environment at popsci.com/futurecity.

Milan, Italy

Norilsk, Russia

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Mexico City, Mexico

Dakar, Senegal

Sumgayit, Azerbaijan

Linfen, China

La Oroya, Peru

Cubatao Valley, Brazil

Kabwe, Zambia

The post The World’s 10 Worst Cities appeared first on Popular Science.

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In our annual Future of the Environment issue, we take a look at the monumental problems facing our world as we continue into the 21st century, as well as solutions ranging from the audacious to the everyday to, quite literally, save the planet.

This year we turn much of our focus toward a bold blueprint for the city of the future. Check out our interactive tour of a future green megalopolis, the 10 most audacious engineering solutions for saving the planet, as well as the most problematic cities, industries, and projects looming on the horizon.

The Good News

A Green Megalopolis: The Plan

10 Audacious Ideas to Save the Planet

Green DIY Guide

Charging Ahead

Riding Clean

Google Earth Environment Guide

And the Bad News

Ten Problem Cities

Five Ways You’re Killing the Planet

The Five Dirtiest Industries

Five Looming Eco-Disasters

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Heavenly Power

Making a dent in the climate crisis is going to take more than solar panels and recycled toilet paper. Scientists are finding ever more creative ways (pig pee! DIY tornadoes! mini nuclear reactors!) to clean up the Earth

Beaming Electricity from Space

The Vision Launch giant solar panels into orbit and send limitless clean energy back to Earth

The Plan By 2030, Japan hopes to pull its power from the heavens instead of from polluting coal plants. The idea is to send satellites into geostationary orbit above the equator, where they will unfurl 1.5-mile-long solar arrays and soak up the sun 24 hours a day. Transmitters mounted on the satellites would convert the solar energy into microwave energy and beam it down to terrestrial receiving stations. Equipped with massive antennas measuring two miles across, each station would produce one gigawatt of electricity—enough to power 500,000 homes. That’s twice as much as a typical coal-fired plant, and without any of the greenhouse emissions.

Putting solar panels in space has one obvious advantage: It’s never cloudy 22,000 miles up. On average, there’s 8 to 10 times as much sunlight available in space as there is on Earth, where atmosphere and weather get in the way. Now, with satellite launch costs dropping (about five thousand dollars per pound today, versus $12,000 per pound a decade ago) and energy bills rising (already double what they were in 2005), researchers are finally warming to the idea.

Later this year, in fact, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) plans to test the idea on the ground, blasting a microwave beam some 170 feet to a 6.5-foot-wide rectenna, a type of receiver that converts microwaves into DC electricity. Not as glamorous as beaming rays from space, but it’s a vital first step.

Potential Uh-Ohs One frightful but improbable scenario is that the microwave beam misses the receiving antenna and fries something on Earth’s surface. Like a village. To mitigate that risk, JAXA scientists are developing an automated detection system that turns off the microwave beam if the satellite drifts out of line.

ETA JAXA aims to launch its first energy-beaming satellite into orbit by 2013, with a network of powersats that feed energy directly into the grid to follow by 2030.
—Rena Marie Pacella

Fur Farms

Hair Club for Plants

The Vision Thousands of acres of super-hairy plants around the world reflect extra sunlight and cool down the globe

The Plan While searching for ways to fortify crops against tomorrow’s stifling temperatures, earth scientist Christopher Doughty of the University of California at Irvine noticed that plants that thrive in hot, arid conditions are often covered in hair-like fibers. The tiny hairs, it turns out, reflect almost all near-infrared light from the sun, while allowing the light in the visible spectrum to hit the leaf and drive photosynthesis. By absorbing less heat energy and evaporating less water to stay cool, the plants are more efficient—and better suited to warmer weather. That got Doughty thinking: If hairy plants covered a substantial area of the Earth and were all reflecting near-infrared energy back into space, exactly how much might that cool the planet? So he fired up a global circulation model that takes into account hundreds of variables and estimates their effect on climate around the world. When he increased crop reflectivity by 10 percent, Doughty found that distribution of the hairy plants between 30 degrees latitude and the poles produced optimal results, yielding a reduction in regional temperatures of two to three degrees Fahrenheit.

Unfortunately, most crops aren’t nearly hairy enough to create this cooling effect, but some clever selective breeding could remedy that. “No one has really ever purposely grown hairier plants,” Doughty says. “But then again, there’s never been a good reason to try until now.”

Potential Uh-Ohs Super-reflective plants could evaporate less water into the atmosphere, causing a decrease in protective cloud cover, which in turn would drive an increase in surface temperature.

ETA Breeding crops hairy enough to gain a 10 percent increase in reflectivity could take decades.
—Bjorn Carey

In ‘n’ Out

Pulling Gas from Thin Air

The Vision A modified nuclear reactor that produces 17,000 barrels of gasoline a day—enough to fuel 54,000 Honda Civics.

The Plan Air contains hydrogen and carbon, the building blocks of gasoline. So why not turn it into fuel? That’s the thinking behind a plan from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory to transform carbon dioxide into a renewable resource using nuclear plants. As air enters a reactor’s cooling tower, it filters through a potassium carbonate solution, which captures 95 percent of the carbon dioxide and forms a bicarbonate solution: baking soda, more or less.

From there, an electrolytic cell turns the bicarbonate into 100 percent CO2. As for the hydrogen, the nuclear reactor is already generating electricity, and some of it can power electrolyzers that strip hydrogen from water. Finally, catalytic processes combine the hydrogen and carbon into methane, gasoline or jet fuel, all without toxic emissions. The researchers estimate that to produce 8,600 tons of CO2 per day, enough for those 17,000 barrels of gas, it would take six cooling towers and as many as 90 cells.

Potential Uh-Ohs The plan needs gas prices to continue to rise, since the new gas would cost $4 a gallon at the pump. If oil prices fall, the plan dies.

ETA The Los Alamos scientists plan to debut a prototype of the electrolytic cells next year, with a commercial version ready by 2013.
—Cliff Kuang

Big Catch

Sinking Carbon in the Sea

The Vision Sequester carbon dioxide in six-mile-long sausage-shaped plastic bags on the seafloor

The Plan It’s a hard sell. Cover thousands of square miles of ocean bottom with polymer-skinned sausage links 650 feet in diameter, fill them with carbon dioxide sucked from power plants, and leave them there for all eternity. “I thought the project was silly until I started to talk to marine engineers and do the math,” says physicist David Keith, a director at the University of Calgary’s Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy. But by the time he finished a concept study on the project with engineers at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Singapore, he was convinced that it was not only possible; it was downright practical.

“The basic physics is simple,” Keith explains. At ocean depths below two miles, liquid carbon dioxide is denser than seawater, so it sinks. In fact, for decades, scientists have suggested injecting liquid CO2 into depressions in the deep ocean so that they form lakes, an option that environmentalists have resisted because some of this CO2 would eventually dissolve and acidify the water. But contain that liquid in a corrosion-resistant material, like an organic polymer or titanium, and it could sit, safely, on the seafloor for several thousand years.

As for installation, the sausage skin is flexible, so engineers can roll each bag around a floating reel and then use a tugboat to tow it about 60 miles offshore. As the reel unwinds, the membrane sinks nearly two miles to the seafloor, where deep-sea rovers connect one end of each bag to valves along a main pipeline. After power plants capture CO2 emissions and compress the gas into liquid, a pipeline pumps two tons per second into the bags, which slowly inflate from their deepest end first. Since real estate is not a factor—the ocean covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface, and the necessary depths are reachable within 60 miles of most continental coasts—the pipeline can be continuously extended to accommodate new bags.

Potential Uh-Ohs Did we mention the vast quantities of CO2 that humankind currently dumps? It’s about 800 tons a second, enough to fill an oil tanker with CO2 every minute. To reduce current global emissions by even 20 percent, we would need to fill one bag every 11 days. Then there’s the problem of durability. What if a shark sinks its teeth into a bag, for instance, or the material falls apart? There’s no way to be certain that the bags won’t disintegrate after hundreds of years instead of thousands, as predicted.

ETA Keith says CO2 bags could be in place by 2020, pending regulatory hurdles.
—Rena Marie Pacella

Tastes Great! Less Global Warming!

The Vision Save six billion kilowatt-hours of energy annually (enough to power 20 million lightbulbs for a year) by blasting brew with supersonic streams of steam

The Plan Earlier this year, Shepherd Neame, Britain’s oldest brewery, began making its popular Spitfire lagers and ales with a powerful new “wort boiling” technology that cuts the brewery’s energy usage by 10 percent.

Better Brew

The primary ingredient in beer, aside from water, is a starch such as malted barley. Soaking the starch in water and enzymes breaks it down into a sugar solution called wort. The next step, boiling the wort to eliminate impurities from the malt, hogs 20 percent of the brewery’s total energy consumption. Enter the PDX Wort Heater, a network of nozzles made by the English company Pursuit Dynamics that fires steam at the wort at 3,000 feet per second. The impact breaks the liquid into mist droplets, which heat up faster than liquid wort and cut the brewing time from one hour to 30 minutes while using half the energy. If the world’s 8,000 major breweries adopted the technology, it could save the electricity equivalent of three million tons of coal a year.

Potential Uh-Ohs Leaky nozzles can contaminate the steam and spoil a batch. Beyond that, convincing breweries to pay for new technology that shoots steam into their time-honored recipes won’t be easy.

ETA Rising energy costs could make steam-heated beers the industry standard within three years.

Hot Bodies

The Vision Harness the warmth given off by millions of commuters and reduce global energy demand by 15 percent

The Plan Your average human generates about 60 watts just lying on the sofa, and about 100 watts hustling for the train during rush hour. Swedish civil engineer Karl Sundholm aims to capture some of that excess energy, starting in Stockholm’s Central Station, where he’ll use a car-size heat exchanger to absorb air made warm by more than 250,000 daily commuters and use it to provide up to 15 percent of the heating needs of a building next door. The exchanger heats water pipes, which funnel the warm water to another heat exchanger in the new building, where the process is reversed: The hot water warms the air, helping to keep shop owners and cubicle dwellers toasty. In the summer, when body heat is less welcome, the same exchangers will transport cold water from a nearby lake to cool the building and the train station.

Central Station

Potential Uh-Ohs Logistics may make the heat-funneling system a challenge to replicate in other cities. The proximity of the Stockholm station and the adjacent construction site is unusual, as is the fact that Sweden owns both the station and the future building site. “[The system is] more expensive and takes more space,” Sundholm says. But it should pay for itself in less than a year.

ETA Central Station could be capturing heat from hot Swedes by 2010.
—Corey Binns

Wild Idea

Harnessing Energy from Tornadoes

The Vision Draw power from man-made twisters and light up entire cities

The Plan Your average 100mph tornado can generate up to 10 megawatt-hours of power, about the same as a large utility plant. Now Canadian engineer Louis Michaud says he has figured out a way to trap a twister and make it spin indefinitely, generating a cheap, virtually limitless source of energy. His creation is a 13-foot-wide tornado-making machine that produces a powerful spinning column of air to drive electrical turbines. Last year, Michaud showed off a smaller prototype that produced a 6.5-foot-tall cyclone [see “Twister Power,” Headlines, November 2007], but this new one—due to have been tested in Sarnia, Ontario, in May—should produce the biggest artificial tornado yet
.
If the testing goes as planned, Michaud hopes to begin constructing a full-scale commercial version that’s nearly twice as wide as a football field and capable of producing a 150-foot-wide, miles-high vortex. Its outer wall will contain 20 fans that suck in air, blow it over hot-water pipes to heat it, and blast it through ducts to an inner chamber. Because the ducts are angled, the hot air will begin to rotate like a tornado. It will require about 2,000 megawatts of electricity to get the machine started, but Michaud’s plan is to recover the waste heat from power plants and use it to heat the water pipes. Once the twister is twisting, it needs no extra energy input to keep it going—the turbines keep working as long as there is low pressure at the bottom of the storm to suck in more air, which in turn feeds the tornado. The air flowing past the turbines will ultimately drive generators and convert the twister’s mechanical energy into 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 200,000 homes.

Potential Uh-Ohs What if the engine spins out of control? What if it breaks from its base or grows too large? Michaud says he could simply close the ducts to the inner chamber, blocking the air supply, or reverse the direction of the incoming air.

ETA Expect the commercial machine within five years.
—Rena Marie Pacella

Biogas Buses Powered by Sewage

The Vision Turn civilization’s lowliest by-products—including human waste and animal carcasses—into clean-burning fuels for commuter transport

The Plan In a pilot project conceived by Warren Weisman, a consultant who heads the Oregon Biogas Cooperative, the nation’s first biogas bus would get its fuel from a wastewater-treatment plant in Eugene, Oregon. Weisman believes that sewage, supplemented with crop stubble and restaurant leftovers, could eventually power all of the city’s buses.

Biogas is created by anaerobic digestion, a process in which bacteria break down organic waste in the absence of oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide are removed from the biogas, and the remaining natural gas (mostly methane) is compressed.

There isn’t enough biogas to power every car on the road, but it could replace nonrenewable, polluting fuels such as diesel for mass transportation. And unlike natural gas extracted from deep wells, biogas does not make a net contribution to greenhouse-gas emissions because it doesn’t release carbon trapped in fossil deposits.

Cities in Switzerland, France, Spain and Iceland are already tapping their sewers for bus fuel. And in Sweden, the city of Linköping’s entire fleet runs on biogas generated from organic materials like manure and slaughterhouse leftovers. Linköping is also home to the world’s first and possibly only biogas commuter train.

Potential Uh-Ohs Getting a high yield requires a perfect recipe of waste ingredients. Municipal wastewater alone produces low yields, so it must be co-digested with other waste materials. Plus, transportation to digester sites cuts into the efficiency of the process.

ETA The Oregon Department of Energy’s Clean Cities Program is prepared to provide $1 million in funding, but local officials say they’re shelving the bus project for a few years in order to focus on other upgrades to the treatment plant.
—Dawn Stover

The New Gold: Turning Pig Pee into Plastic

The Vision Capture 90,000 tons of urine every day from the world’s billion pigs and recycle it into plastic plates

The Plan To Agroplast chairman Jes Thomsen, pig pee is just as valuable as oil, coal and gas. A chemical produced in a pig’s liver, urea, can be recycled in a variety of ways, from de-icing roads and airplanes to manufacturing so-called bioplastics, in which urea can replace petroleum as a bulking agent. Later this summer, the Danish company will begin collecting 3,000 liters of pig pee a day at a processing plant near Copenhagen in an effort to reduce costs and conserve resources.
Typically, pig urine and manure is dumped en masse into smelly pools and storage tanks vulnerable to overflowing and leaks. This can lead to dangerous levels of air and groundwater pollution. The Agroplast filtering system, on the other hand, collects the urine as quickly as a pig can eliminate it, which keeps pigpens clean and disease-free. Unlike conventional septic systems, the waste flows through filters that clean the liquid while removing particles, color and odor. By the end of the process, the urea is ready to be recycled into plastic, soap or moisturizer.

Potential Uh-Ohs Scientists disagree about whether bioplastics are environmentally superior to petroleum-based plastics. If you toss a plastic plate made from pig urine into a landfill, it will end up releasing the greenhouse gas methane. Recycling bioplastics poses trouble too, because most companies aren’t yet equipped to sort regular plastic from bioplastics.

ETA Thomsen expects the company’s second plant to be in Iowa or North Carolina, home to some of the largest pig farms in the U.S. With farmland and gas prices at a premium, he envisions building “pig cities”—efficient, land-conserving skyscrapers that would house the pigs while processing their waste into plastic and fertilizer.
—Corey Binns

Powering Remote Towns with Little Nukes

The Vision Generate heat and electricity for small-town America using pint-size nuclear reactors that will run for 30 years with no refueling, maintenance or noxious diesel fumes

The Plan From Toshiba, a company best known in the U.S. for its consumer electronics, comes a proposal for the world’s smallest commercial nuclear power plant. At 10 megawatts, the 4S reactor (short for Super Safe, Small and Simple) is less than seven feet tall and is sealed in a concrete vault about 100 feet underground. Some have dubbed it a “nuclear battery” since it will run without refueling for its entire 30-year lifetime.
The key to the hands-off maintenance plan for the proposed reactor is its coolant system. Most nuclear reactors in the U.S. use pressurized water as their coolant, but the 4S relies on molten sodium. Because sodium is a metal, it can be cycled through the reactor using electromagnetic pumps with no moving parts to repair.

Potential Uh-Ohs Of the 400-plus full-size nuclear reactors operating worldwide, only two are sodium-cooled. One concern is that sodium might come in contact with water, which could cause an explosion. Another question is whether the reactor can be safely operated for 30 years without any inspections or repairs. If maintenance is required, the reactor will have to be dug up and sent back to the factory in Japan.

ETA Toshiba hopes to install the first 4S in Galena, Alaska (pop. 700), by 2012. Far from the main power grid, residents now pay about 45 cents per kilowatt for diesel power, but the 4S could cut that cost in half.
—Dawn Stover

Check out PopSci‘s complete coverage of the future of the environment at popsci.com/futurecity.

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In each issue, PopSci rounds up the must-have products for the month. This June, check out dozens of the hottest new products: from the smallest pro camera to a eco-friendly mower to a frame that prints out its shots.

Launch the gallery here. And be sure to check out our entire gear and gadget coverage.

RAISE THE DEAD

SCOPE SHOTS

SCREEN PRINTING

SAND BOX

MORPHING MOUSE

AN EAR FOR MUSIC

LITTLE BIG SHOT

CARD PLAYER

CLEAR THE AIR

MEASURED RESPONSE

MEASURED RESPONSE

A GREENER LAWN

CLEAN AND SHINY

TOAST, NO JAM

CADDY HACK

A RANGE WITH RANGE

BUZZ KILL

INVISIBLE INK

AS THE WORM TURNS

AS THE WORM TURNS

BLACK LIGHT

ROBO REF

TRAFFIC TRENDS

The post The Goods: June 2008 appeared first on Popular Science.

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Here at Popular Science, we’re pretty optimistic about the potential for large-scale technological projects. But sometimes the cutting edge can cut in destructive ways. Join us as we look at five upcoming projects that have the potential to wreak destruction on the environment.

The Giant Coal Plant

The Risky Ocean Drill

The Floating Nuclear Plant

The Habitat-Destroying Fence

The (Not So) Savior Fuel Source

The post Calamities on the Horizon appeared first on Popular Science.

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Thinking of revamping your place? Do it in style with the newest technology for the home.

Nest Learning Thermostat

Switch Lighting Switch75

Black & Decker Matrix Quick Connect System

Wilton Bad Ass Sledge Hammer (B.A.S.H.)

Big Ass Fans Haiku

Ryobi Cordless 40-Volt Blower

DeWalt 10-Amp Compact Reciprocating Saw

Bodum Bistro B.Over

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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

This week’s episode is all about the surprisingly weird world of play: Bog snorkeling, cheese rolling, baseball bat boning, and so much more. We’re celebrating our latest magazine issue, which is available as a digital-only edition for anyone who wants to read it. It’s all about the ways humans (and animals) have fun, and you can check it out for yourself right now. Here’s some more info on the weird facts we highlighted on this week’s episode:

FACT: Baseball players have a surprisingly scientific reason for their superstitious “bat boning”

By Corinne Iozzio

All professional sports are packed with storied superstitions, but baseball really knocks it out of the park when it comes to strange traditions. As Jess Boddy explained on a previous episode of Weirdest Thing, this sport just seems particularly prone to superstitious tricks and bizarre myths. In the latest issue of Popular Science, which you can access right now from your phone, tablet, or computer, we examined some of the science and tech that goes into crafting a high-quality baseball bat. And somewhat to our surprise, that led us to what seemed like an extremely unscientific practice: Boning. No, not that kind of boning.

As we soon learned, baseball players historically used big bones (often cow femurs) to rub down their wooden bats. It might sound like some sort of attempt at dark magic, but at the time, giving your bat a good bone did have some effect on its performance. The force and friction helped compress the soft wood of the bat, and hitting with a harder surface means a ball will go farther. Compressing a bat also keeps it from wearing out and splintering.

However, as we explain on this week’s episode, modern-day boning practices aren’t quite as logical. Listen to Weirdest Thing to learn more.

FACT: Your favorite childhood toy (and sometimes snack) started out as a wallpaper cleaner

By Sara Chodosh

I was never a Play-Doh eater, but the fact that it’s basically just salt, water, and flour always made me think it must have vaguely culinary origins. Maybe some parents had given their kids a ball of poorly-made pie dough to play with, only to find it served as an excellent distraction. Or maybe a child “helping” with some baking figured out that a thick, floury paste made for a super-pliable toy superior to tough modeling clay.

But it turns out Play-Doh’s origins are far more utilitarian, and far less obviously child-safe: It began as a wallpaper cleaner. This is a product we don’t have a lot of use for today, but when you heated your house with a coal stove and your walls were covered in actual paper (unlike modern wallpaper, which is made with types of plastic), you really needed something to help lift all the black dust off your walls that wouldn’t turn paper soggy. That substance was Play-Doh—or, more accurately, a mixture of flour, salt, water, and boric acid that would later become Play-Doh. You’ll have to listen to the episode for all the details, but suffice to say we have one forward-thinking woman in particular to thank for this member of the Toy Hall of Fame.

FACT: Cheese rolling, bog snorkeling, and underwater ice hockey are all real sports

By Rachel Feltman

If working on the latest issue of PopSci taught me anything, it’s that people have come up with some seriously weird ways of goofing off. You can peruse the digital edition of the magazine for stories about folks who enjoy doing ultra-marathons in dark, freezing conditions and grown men who obsessively craft and race tiny pinewood derby cars. We also explore the concept of “Dark Play,” which finally explains, once and for all, why you loved to drown your sims in their swimming pools.

With that inspiration in mind, I decided to spend this week’s episode taking a closer look at one of my favorite bizarre recreational pastimes: Competitive cheese rolling.