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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
A 13th-century schoolboy's doodles show that kids have always been like that
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. By Rachel Feltman Dating back to at least the 1st century in various parts of the world, people have used birch bark as a writing surface. It's soft and easy to scratch into with a stylus, and of course it's easy to peel off the tree. In parts of Russia, there are so many old manuscripts preserved on birch bark that there's basically a field of study devoted to them. As of 2018, archaeologists had found 1,222 specimens in Russia, and 1,113 of them were from a Medieval town called Novgorod. There's very heavy, waterlogged clay soil there that probably protected the birch bark from oxygen and decay, but it also seems like it was an especially literate place for the time period. While some of these notes use Church Slavonic, most of them are written in a vernacular dialect and many recount personal matters and everyday happenings Less than 3 percent of the Medieval settlement has actually been excavated systematically. Some estimates suggest that more than 20,000 additional notes are waiting to be discovered. But the most famous of these birch bark writings come from a single prolific artist who lived there in the 13th century. He drew epic battle scenes and mythical creatures and even rather abstract works. His name was Onfim, and he was a 7-year-old boy. Onfim's birch bark scraps show signs of schoolwork, with psalms and cyrillic alphabet exercises written out on many of them. But they also show doodles that are charmingly recognizable as the work of a bored kid at school. To learn more about Onfim's adventures (and doodles), listen to this week's episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. And if you're interested in more charming historical scribbles, check out this repository of ancient graffiti. By Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian I didn't actually learn about eels for the first time this week—I've been obsessed with them for years. Back when I was teaching in the Hudson Valley, I used to take my students to help catch and count baby eels as they migrated upriver from the Sargasso Sea. These tiny, translucent fish are glassy and delicate, with eyes and spines you can see straight through—and yet they've already traveled thousands of miles. Eels are mysterious in almost every way: we still don't fully understand how they navigate, how they reproduce, or why they live for decades in freshwater before transforming into long, lean, sex-obsessed creatures that return to the sea to die. On this week's episode I talk about eels' intersex biology, their magnetic sense of direction, and even the strange detour that eel anatomy took through the hands of Sigmund Freud. This story, for me, is not just about eels—it's also about what their biology tells us about queerness, evolution, and the history of science itself. For more of this kind of natural history, check out my new book 'Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.' By Sara Kiley Watson Lightning strikes millions of trees every year, and for most of them, the outcome is grim: exploded trunks, scorched roots, or a slow, quiet death from internal damage. So when I heard about a tropical tree that not only survives lightning but actually benefits from it, I had to dig in. This story takes us into the dense forests of Panama, where the towering tonka bean tree—Dipteryx oleifera—has evolved to attract lightning strikes and come out stronger after being zapped. These trees are unusually tall, with wide crowns that seem designed to draw bolts from the sky. When lightning hits, they shed pests. They also outlive their similarly-stricken neighbors, which allows them to claim more sunlight for themselves. This discovery challenges long-held assumptions about lightning and forest ecology…and hints at how climate change could shift that balance even more.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The foul-mouthed cockatoo that lived to 120
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. By Divya Anantharaman In this week's episode I tell the story of Cocky Bennett, a sulphur-crested cockatoo who lived for more than 120 years. He was once the companion of a sea captain, later became a bar mascot, and developed a reputation for being loud, foul-mouthed, and maybe even a little bit tipsy. But what really caught my attention was what happened after he died. Cocky was preserved by a mother-daughter taxidermy team at a time when that work was almost exclusively done by men. In this episode, I follow Cocky's remarkable journey across generations of human lives, and explore what it means to keep a body—and a personality—around long after death. By Rachel Feltman You've heard of whale falls—the huge nutrient boost whales give to the ocean when they die and sink down to the seafloor—but have you heard of a hot little commodity called whale urine? A study came out recently that looked at another nutrient-boosting phenomenon known as the Great Whale Conveyor Belt. We already knew that whales helped move nutrients through the ocean. Back in 2010, a study described something called the 'whale pump' phenomenon. This describes the way that whales feed deep below the ocean and then go up to the surface to poop, pee and give birth. When they do that, their waste products bring a bunch of the nutrients of the deep up topside. Researchers wanted to see how much nutrient movement happens when whales move horizontally, too—because they move a lot. Many great whales spend their summers feeding in high-latitude areas, then migrate to tropical and subtropical coastal areas to breed in the winter. Southern Hemisphere humpback whales travel more than 5,000 miles to breeding grounds off Costa Rica from the Southern Ocean. And gray whales can travel 14,000 miles round trip between Russian feeding grounds and breeding grounds in Baja California. In the Arctic and North Atlantic, many species move from high latitudes, off North America, Iceland, and Europe, to breeding areas in the Caribbean and off the West coast of Africa. The whales put on weight during the Spring, Summer and Fall, but they generally don't eat at all during the Winter. So all of the biomass they shed in their winter homes—placentas, poop, carcasses and pee—contains nutrients they consumed elsewhere. The new study looked at humpbacks, gray whales, and north atlantic and southern right whales. They estimate that these animals drop more than 100 million pounds of biomass and 8.3 million pounds of nitrogen each year. Nitrogen feeds phytoplankton, which support the whole food chain. In Hawaii's Humpback Whale Sanctuary, whales contribute twice the nutrients that are introduced by natural ocean processes. This conveyer belt is also kind of a pee funnel: they're way more spread out when they feed than they are when they breed. One of the researchers compared it to gathering leaves from all over your yard and putting them all in the compost pile. So the next time you take a trip to the beach—or enjoy some fresh seafood—take a second to thank whale pee for the ocean's bounty! By Lauren Leffer Astronauts aboard the ISS experience all sorts of minor ailments, including rashes, sudden allergies, inflammation, and the resurgence of latent viral infections like chicken pox and mononucleosis. It's all part of the well-known phenomenon of astronaut immune dysfunction. If we want to get better at sticking around in space long-term it's a problem we'll have to address. Part of the issue is probably microgravity, but another aspect may be the much smaller microbial space travelers that leave Earth with humans (and the ones that don't). Scientists recently published the most comprehensive ever survey and analysis of microorganisms on the space station, and they discovered some unsettling stuff. For one, compared with all surveyed Earth environments, the ISS microbiome most closely resembles that of a hospital isolation room. It's a super deprived microbial environment, lacking in diversity. Plus antimicrobial resistance genes scientists have a few potential solutions in mind. Some unexpectedly tasty options, and then some others that you probably wouldn't want to eat. Listen to learn about how we could make space infrastructure healthier, and/or read all about it on the Popular Science website. Bonus: While researching this episode, I found out that NASA has all sorts of incredible images on its Flickr page, including these photos documenting the making of some frankly, appalling-looking, space pizza. But at least the astronauts seem to be having fun.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Literal time ladies used to sell people a look at their watches
Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience. Generate Key Takeaways 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: People used to pay to learn the time By Rachel Feltman I recently came across the story of Ruth Belville, known as the 'Greenwich Time Lady,' because she literally sold people time. Or at least she sold people the time. Back in 1675, King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory 'in order to the finding out of the longitude of places for perfecting navigation and astronomy.' He asked for a small observatory to be built at the highest point in Greenwich Park. Almost a century later, the royal astronomer published the first Nautical Almanac, which shared the observatory's findings with seafarers all over the world and allowed them to pinpoint their longitude. That meant people all over were using Greenwich as the starting point from which they measured their longitude. Up until the Industrial Revolution, every town had kept its own local time based on the position of the sun, so there was, for example, a 16 minute difference between London and Plymouth. Railways meant it suddenly made a difference if you were 16 minutes off all the time. And telegraphs meant there was an actual way to share what time it was. Greenwich Mean Time wouldn't become legally mandated until 1880, apparently because folks kept showing up late to court and blaming their local time zone for the discrepancy. But accurate clocks weren't yet common for most people to own. So how did everyone keep up with the newly standardized time? If they lived within sight of the Royal Observatory, they could watch for the 'time balls' they dropped to mark the hour (and later the clock kept up to date at the observatory's gates). But others turned to a more… hands-on service. Starting in 1836, a former Royal Observatory employee named John Belville charged people an annual fee to use his pocket watch. Once a week, he'd come by and visit them and share the time on his watch—which he kept accurate thanks to his access to the observatory's chronometers—so they could adjust their own watches accordingly. John died in 1856, by which time the gate clock showed the public the time and anyone could get the time via telegraph if they really needed to. But John's 200 subscribers knew and trusted the pocket watch system, so they asked his widow Maria if she'd take up his mantle. She did so for 36 years before retiring. By the time she left the business, people definitely had other ways of accessing the time. But folks couldn't give up their trusty time lady, so John and Maria's daughter Ruth took over. Despite the continued advancement of time-keeping tech—and the naysaying of at least one ruthless hater—she kept up the business until 1940. She was 86 when she retired, and apparently only did so because World War II made it too dangerous for a woman of her age to walk the streets. FACT: Bugs have culture, too By SciAnts I love thinking about what bugs think about. New research shows that fruit flies are capable of social learning in ways that resemble what we call culture. In one study, flies developed mating preferences simply by watching other flies make choices—preferring mates with specific colors of dust that had been used to mark them. In another experiment, observer flies that watched others react to predators developed lasting behavioral and physiological changes, including changes to their reproductive systems—despite never encountering the predator themselves. This visually transmitted fear response was strong enough to persist for days. Even exposure to dead members of their own species shortened their lifespan, while exposure to dead relatives from different species had no effect. These findings suggest that fruit flies not only learn by observation but may also pass on preferences and fears in ways that go beyond simple instinct, hinting at a primitive form of culture. FACT: Traffic mimes make jams more peaceful in South America By Jess Boddy Road rage can be truly terrifying, and sometimes it feels inescapable in big cities. But what if the answer to the violence and danger that comes with angry drivers was a nonverbal fellow in stripes and white face paint? Yes… MIMES. Back in Colombia in the 1990s, then-mayor Antanas Mockus replaced 1,800 traffic cops with just 20 mimes, who used silent performance to mock reckless drivers and praise good behavior. They helped cut traffic deaths by 50% within a few years. The program ended in the late '90s but was so beloved it still lives on today, having inspired similar efforts in other South American countries, including Bolivia's 'traffic zebras.' Listen to this week's episode to hear all about how mimes mocked angry drivers successfully, and how it might (or might not) be the answer to road rage here in the United States.
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
The Earth once vibrated for 9 days straight
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. By Sara Kiley Watson On September 16, 2023, vibrations shook the entire world—and didn't stop for nine days. The phenomenon started in East Greenland, but in the space of an hour, the strange hums had spread via the Earth's crust and reached all the way to the other end of the world in Antarctica. Across the entire world, seismic monitoring stations, the ones we typically use to keep an eye on earthquakes and the like, started lighting up in response. But the noise that came through to the seismologists was nothing like the quick, car-crash-like noise that typically occurs with earthquakes. Instead, every 90 seconds, you'd hear this one 'donk'—and it looked far from normal on a graph. The cause? A domino-fall that started with climate change. A melting glacier could no longer support a mountaintop in a fjord in East Greenland, and when that mountain top came crashing down it created a mega-tsunami about 650 feet tall. That tsunami then created a rocking seiche, or a standing wave, which was stuck going back and forth inside the narrow fjord. This back and forth motion made the whole planet shake. Luckily, there were no casualties in this remote corner of the world, but it's another spooky reminder of how climate change can make for strangeness that sends the whole world buzzing. By Trace Dominguez One of my favorite questions we ever got on That's Absurd, Please Elaborate came from a listener named Tessa on Spotify. She asked: How long would it have taken Wesley to build up his immunity to iocane powder? You know, that iconic scene in The Princess Bride—poisoned wine, a battle of wits, one man drops dead, the other smugly reveals he's been microdosing poison this whole time? I went way too hard on this one. Like, 40-minutes-of-absurd-scientific-deep-dive hard. Because I had to know: could you actually do that? Could you really build up immunity to a poison? This week on Weirdest Thing, I dig into the wild history of Mithridates VI—aka the Poison King—who allegedly drank small amounts of poison daily to become immune (and yeah, probably was not a great dude). I break down the science of what poisons and venoms actually are, how they affect the body differently, and whether you can train your immune system to fight them off. Spoiler: poisons like arsenic or cyanide mess with your body in ways you can't just 'get used to.' But venoms—like the kind from the insanely venomous inland taipan snake (which is, of course, Australian)—now, that's a different story. Venoms trigger immune responses, meaning there's some basis for building tolerance…if you're very careful. To get the full deep dive on poison (and venom) immunity, check out my show That's Absurd Please Elaborate. By Rachel Feltman Pee comes up pretty often on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. We've talked about folks selling it. We've talked about doctors drinking it. We've talked about why you can't help but let it loose the second you get home from running errands. We've even talked about how some bugs can use 'super propulsion' to launch their urine out like little missiles. On this week's episode, we're exploring that phenomenon where people get up to use the bathroom together—except in chimps. A new study out of Japan has uncovered previously undocumented behavior in one of our closest animal relatives: contagious urination. Researchers at the Kumamoto Sanctuary observed 20 captive chimpanzees for more than 600 hours, recording over 1,300 individual urination events. They found a statistically significant phenomenon of chimps being more likely to pee right after seeing other chimps go. This clustering of urination events wasn't random. Chimps were more likely to pee if they were within visual range of a peer who'd just done the same, and higher-ranking individuals were more likely to set off a chain reaction. Surprisingly, though, the likelihood of simultaneous peeing didn't seem to depend on how socially close the chimps were, which sets this behavior apart from better-known contagious behaviors like yawning. Contagious yawning, common in humans and other social animals, is thought to be linked to social bonding, empathy, and group coordination—but the evolutionary driver behind contagious peeing remains unclear. The researchers offered a few ideas: it might be a way of preparing for a group activity ('everyone go before we get back on the road!'), or it could help keep scent markers concentrated in one place, reducing the chances of predators catching a whiff. But we can't know for sure!
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Squirrels could be the key to getting us into deep space
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. By Lauren Leffer Certain species of ground squirrels hibernate underground without any food or water for up to eight months of the year. It's a super-extreme survival strategy, enabled by a complicated cascade of physiological processes, some of which we understand and many of which scientists are still trying to figure out. Helping them along is funding and interest from heavy hitters in the research world like NASA, the European Space agency, and private aerospace companies, because–since the 1960's–those with their eyes on the stars have wondered if human hibernation could enable us to travel farther and more safely in isn't just a long nap. It's closer to death than sleep. While in hibernation torpor, ground squirrels' endure up to a 95 percent reduction in their metabolic rate. Their heart and respiration rates drop to a few beats and breaths per minute. Their brain waves go flat. Their body temperatures plummet to near freezing for some species (or even below freezing for Arctic ground squirrels). Yet amid all of this, the squirrels stay pretty healthy: maintaining muscle mass, reversing pre-hibernation diabetes, experiencing organ regeneration, stalling aging, and undergoing physiological shifts that can ward off things like radiation damage. For these reasons and more, scientists have been studying if we can harness the power of squirrel hibernation for ourselves. It could help propel us to outer reaches of the galaxy. Even if it doesn't, it's poised to fuel some big Earth-bound biomedical advances. Listen to learn more about squirrel-sicles, the challenges of long-distance space travel, and the ultimate in restorative rest. Or read all about it in this Popular Science feature article. By John Green Tuberculosis has been curable since the 1950s, yet it remains the deadliest infectious disease in the world, killing 1.5 million people each year. That's largely due to our failure to get treatment to those who need it. I talk all about how tuberculosis shaped the world—and how humanity has allowed it to thrive thanks to injustice and inequity—in my new book 'Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection.' On this week's episode of Weirdest Thing, I share the story of a man who became consumed with finding a cure for consumption. In the 18th and 19th centuries, TB thrived in the crowded living and working conditions of industrializing cities, yet people believed it was an inherited disease, even romanticizing it as a mark of beauty and artistic sensitivity. James Watt, famed for his contributions to the steam engine, dedicated years to trying to cure TB after his children became ill with the disease. His failed contraption, which treated TB by pushing carbon dioxide into the lungs to reduce the amount of air there, was closer to viable than you might think: the bacteria that causes TB is highly aerobic, meaning it needs lots of oxygen to survive. Sometimes doctors actually collapse one lung to help patients recover from TB. That was much more common in the early 20th century, but it's a technique still employed for some treatment-resistant cases of TB today. Today, despite being curable, TB still kills millions. And recent funding cuts threaten to worsen the spread of drug-resistant TB, raising the specter of a world where the disease regains its early 20th-century deadliness. If you want to learn more, you can find 'Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of our Deadliest Infection' anywhere books are sold. By Rachel Feltman When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it buried thousands of people in ash, preserving eerie casts of their final moments. But one unfortunate resident may have been preserved in an even more extreme way—by having his brain turn to glass. Researchers recently confirmed that glassy black fragments found in a skull from the eruption are vitrified brain tissue, marking the only known case of an animal's tissue undergoing this process. It took a perfect storm of extreme heat and rapid cooling to make this happen, and it's unlikely to have ever happened before—or to ever happen again. Tune into this week's episode to learn how it all went down!
