transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Now that the weather's warming up, I've been doing one of my favorite activities ever, kicking back in the sun with an alcoholic beverage or two at a baseball game. But sometimes, even if I chug water at the seventh inning stretch and get a good night's sleep, I still wake up the next day feeling sluggish and foggy. So I recently tried the Cheers Health Restore after alcohol aid, after the most recent Cubs victory, and I was actually shocked how normal I felt waking up the next morning. Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50 percent better or your money back. For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20 percent off their entire order by using code Weirdest at cheershealth.com. Just head to cheershealth.com and use code Weirdest for 20 percent off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 3:
[00:54] Bro, Skycoin, way better than points.

Speaker 4:
[00:58] Never fly during a Scorpio full moon.

Speaker 5:
[01:01] Just tell the manager you'll sue. Instant room upgrade.

Speaker 2:
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Speaker 5:
[01:10] Bad advice? You talking to me?

Speaker 2:
[01:13] Kayak got that right.

Speaker 1:
[01:17] I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also seem to like keeping my money too. After years of overpaying for wireless, I finally got fed up with crazy high wireless bills, bogus fees, and quote unquote free perks that actually cost more in the long run. And I switched to Mint Mobile. If you like your money, Mint Mobile is for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com/weirdest. That's mintmobile.com/weirdest. Upfront payment of $45 for three month, five gigabyte plan required equivalent to $15 per month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details.

Speaker 6:
[02:01] At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. While most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman.

Speaker 7:
[02:22] I'm Lauren Leffer, and I'm Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

Speaker 6:
[02:25] Chanda, welcome to the show, and also yes, listeners, I'm back. I think at one point I said I'd be back in May, and it is in fact April, but you have to forgive me because I've been busy, and I got that wrong and that's fine. Also, thank you so much Jess for helming the show in my absence. It's been great listening to all your apps.

Speaker 1:
[02:45] It was really fun. I'm glad you're back though.

Speaker 6:
[02:48] Oh, thank you. Glad to be back. Chanda, you have a new book. I would love to hear a little bit about it so our listeners can get excited about it and go check it out.

Speaker 8:
[02:56] Yeah, my new book is The Edge of Spacetime, Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. And the book is very broadly about all the cool ways that we can think about our universe from the context of edges. So whether you're talking about the event horizon of a black hole or thinking about other cosmic horizons. And I'm also super interested in how poetry helps us think through the universe and how poets use the universe to help us understand our world and our lives.

Speaker 6:
[03:29] That's so cool. I have a copy waiting for me to read. But due to baby, I have not read it yet. But I know it's going to be great, just like your last one was.

Speaker 8:
[03:40] I can't believe you're prioritizing your baby over my book. Rude.

Speaker 5:
[03:44] I know, I know.

Speaker 6:
[03:46] Just for now, he really like can't do anything yet. Soon, my TBR pile will shove him out of the way. Well, let's jump right into the show. So on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, etc. And decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Lauren, great to have you back on. What's your tease?

Speaker 7:
[04:21] Thanks, Rachel. Great to be back on. Also, I'm going to say welcome back to you, because you're always saying welcome back to everyone else. But welcome back to you, Rachel.

Speaker 6:
[04:28] Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 7:
[04:29] My tease is, what do Timberdoodles, Florida's recreational fishing industry, and the quaint English village of Williston have in common?

Speaker 6:
[04:38] Probably so much, but I don't know. So I can't wait.

Speaker 7:
[04:41] You're going to learn.

Speaker 6:
[04:41] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[04:42] You're all going to learn.

Speaker 6:
[04:45] Chanda, what's your tease?

Speaker 8:
[04:46] Man, I feel like that's a tough act to follow, Lauren. My tease is that neutrinos are non-trienary, and I'm not even going to explain what non-trienary means.

Speaker 6:
[04:58] Great. I can't wait.

Speaker 7:
[05:00] I'm thrilled to learn.

Speaker 6:
[05:03] All right. My tease is that I am a new parent who's always hungry, and I'm going to talk about some other new parents that are always hungry, except these ones are reindeer. Yay. Seasonally appropriate for spring. Absolutely. I'm really on top of things. Lauren, you really did kill it with that to you, so I would love for you to go first.

Speaker 7:
[05:28] Oh, wow. Thank you. Great. I'm going to start by sending a video link in the chat. It's quick, but it's very important, I promise. And we're going to hope that this doesn't somehow tank the feed. Everyone gets this, even you, Jess. Yay. If everyone could just click that, take a look.

Speaker 6:
[05:50] Oh, my. Yeah, this is important. This is a rich text.

Speaker 7:
[05:55] Chanda, are you able to open it?

Speaker 8:
[05:57] I was just typing in the chat. It's not coming through to me. I'm just getting that bar that's cycling.

Speaker 7:
[06:03] Oh, no. Cycling bar. Okay, I'm going to rely on the fact that Rachel was able to watch it and ask you, Rachel, to describe what's happening in the video.

Speaker 6:
[06:14] I'm seeing, well, first of all, some really funky tunes, great beats, and some birds, I believe, based on the title of the video, some woodcocks, they're really getting down. They're dancing like a millennial at a wedding.

Speaker 8:
[06:34] I don't know.

Speaker 7:
[06:36] Lots of head movement, lots of foot movement, no hips at all.

Speaker 8:
[06:39] I'm taking this personally.

Speaker 6:
[06:41] I'm a millennial. As a millennial who has been to weddings, I say that neutrally and with love. But yeah, there's a lot of head, just basic move into the rhythm, impressive stuff.

Speaker 7:
[06:56] If these birds had arms, they'd be doing the little wiggle shuffle thing with them, just like fists up near the chest. Anyway, for the folks listening at home and for Chanda, this is a video of an adult American Woodcock, aka a Timberdoodle, aka a Hokum Poke, aka a Bog Sucker, aka a Brush Snape, aka a Labrador Twister.

Speaker 6:
[07:16] A Hokie Poke.

Speaker 7:
[07:18] They have so many names. They have so many names because they're such weird little birds. But this is a video of an adult Woodcock and it's two little chicks doing this groovy little stomp step dance walk. There is that funky synth beat in the background of the YouTube clip. But given that the birds in real life are not actually hearing that music, you might wonder why are they walking this way? And no, it's not like an AI generated animal video like Woodcocks do, in fact, walk around on this earth doing that little dance. Lauren, I have a question. Not all the time, but they can. Yes, question.

Speaker 6:
[07:52] Is the Hokie Poke named after them or did they get that name from doing the Hokie Poke?

Speaker 7:
[07:58] So the alternate name is the Hokie Poke, and I actually don't know. That's a great question. That's like a whole other episodes worth of question. Wow.

Speaker 6:
[08:06] Okay.

Speaker 7:
[08:07] Are they related?

Speaker 8:
[08:08] I've been stuck on, it's Timberdoodles?

Speaker 6:
[08:11] Yeah.

Speaker 8:
[08:13] I just think dog now, especially because I can't see the video. I'm just envisioning a Labradoodle, like with a bird head or something.

Speaker 7:
[08:20] And you know what, why not? Big aside, the guy who bred the Labradoodle, you heard that he's gone on record saying it was the biggest mistake and he created a monster.

Speaker 6:
[08:30] It's like a whole thing.

Speaker 7:
[08:31] He's been doing a decades-long apology tour trying to get people to stop.

Speaker 6:
[08:36] Oh, no.

Speaker 7:
[08:37] Because they're so anxious and they're so smart and they're so high energy. Anyway, Woodcocks. Yeah, the Timberdoodle name, no one knows exactly where it first originated, but the idea is that they live in the woods, hence timber, and they are super fun looking, hence doodle. And that's like as much as we know about the etymology of that. But why are they walking this way? So I guess, do either of you want to make a guess?

Speaker 6:
[09:04] I mean, I feel like usually when birds do funky stuff, it's for like mating reasons. But I feel like that that's too obvious. So I don't know.

Speaker 8:
[09:14] I guess because I'm a physicist, my immediate thought was mechanics. Like this has something to do with the way in which they are ambulatory, or it has something to do with body temperature. Like somehow this helps them regulate. It's a physicist's answer.

Speaker 6:
[09:29] Is it like dune? Are they trying not to disturb the worm?

Speaker 7:
[09:32] Oh, okay, wait, that's going to be so prescient in just a minute. But those are both really good guesses. One, because timber doodles do have a super intricate mating ritual called a sky dance. They do like these insane courtship displays across the Eastern US and parts of Canada in the springtime. Those are cool, but not this. And then also, because lots of birds have a weird way of walking, right? Chanda, you're totally right. Chickens and pigeons are ambulatory in this way that seems to necessitate them moving their heads, but woodcocks aren't. They can walk normally. If they choose to, they can walk like little sandpipers because they're actually related to shorebirds even though they live in the woods. Anyway, great guesses, not it. You were on to something with the dune reference and we will get to that. But there are two main ideas about why woodcocks do this walk. The first theory is that it's an aposematic display, so a way to warn would be predators, that the bird, the woodcock has spotted them, and then discourage the predator for going in for the kill. The idea is that if a prey animal has seen a predator, they're more likely to successfully escape, and so it's probably not worth the predator's time to try. You might be familiar, white-tailed deer do this. If you startle them in the woods, they start jumping up and they flash their white tails. It's called stopping. Lots of animals do this too. Behavioral aposematism. Behavioral aposematism, that's so hard to say. So that's one idea, but then there's the second theory that's a little bit more unique, and based on some scientific studies is probably closer to the truth. Timberdoodles, like I said before, they're funny little birds. They're taxonomically shorebirds, but they live in scrubby inland forest and meadow habitats, not at the beach, and they use the majority of their time in that forest habitat probing for earthworms. Worms make up like 60 to 70% of their diet. Their beaks are super weird in and of themselves. They have tons of nerve endings, especially at the tip. The tip of the beak is like uniquely flexible. Also they have this muscular and tendon structure that allows them to actually open their beaks underground, which if you think about it, kind of crazy because like soil is heavy and dense and like this bird beak looks so thin and delicate. Really cool beaks, very specially adapted for worms. And then there's this kind of like woodcock waltz or the timber doodle two step, whatever you want to call it.

Speaker 6:
[12:04] Oh my god, stop. I can keep going, Rachel.

Speaker 7:
[12:10] Whatever you want to call it, the second theory about why they're doing this little dance is that it actually compels worms to emerge from the ground via vibration. So by like rock stepping to this instinctively ingrained beat, they might just be like summoning worms to the surface. So yeah, kind of I guess like opposite dune worm, they want the worms, they're not, yeah, they're not avoiding the worms.

Speaker 8:
[12:35] That's, I just need to point out, that's a physics answer.

Speaker 7:
[12:38] It is a physics answer. It totally is. Vibration, sound waves, all physics, 100%.

Speaker 6:
[12:44] I just keep thinking about how, sorry, what was the name of the dance that had Timberdoodle in it?

Speaker 7:
[12:51] I just said Timberdoodle two step. Oh yeah, that's great.

Speaker 6:
[12:54] Well, that does, I keep thinking of like, it sounds like a song in The Music Man. It would be somewhere after Shapoopy. All the kids are doing the Timberdoodle two step. I love it.

Speaker 7:
[13:09] We can collab on the musical.

Speaker 6:
[13:10] Perfect.

Speaker 7:
[13:13] Yeah, and so this idea that vibrations applied to the surface of the earth, that that could make earthworms appear, is actually like a really kind of an old idea. It's been around for hundreds of years, even Darwin was writing about it, and kind of in terms that suggested it's old news. In one of his published texts on earthworms, he wrote, quote, it's often been said that if the ground is beaten or otherwise made to tremble, worms leave their burrows. So at that point in the mid 1800s, people were like, yeah, you shake the earth, worms come up, no big deal. And people have been using this knowledge for a really long time. So enter the little known endangered human art of worm charming, aka worm grunting, worm fiddling, or rooping. Lots of stuff with lots of names in this spiel. So worm charming is a clearly effective and proven means of harvesting earthworms. There are lots of ways to do it. You can use a metal saw, power tools, you can dance, you can use a musical instrument, you can rev a car or literally just wiggle a dining fork in the ground. But in the place it's been most professionalized, which is the Florida Panhandle, the primary method involves a wooden stake and a metal iron. So you hammer a wooden stake into the ground and then you rub the iron against it, kind of like a violin bow. It makes a really distinctive sound, sort of like moving your finger across a comb. And the resulting vibrations obviously do something because people can collect hundreds of worms in a single grunt and thousands over hours. You can see videos of this happening on the Wikipedia page for worm charming. There's this video of this very old grizzled Florida Panhandle man mumbling some incomprehensible words and doing his little worm grunt thing. And then you just see the bucket and it's just absolutely chock full wriggling with worms. Yeah, so people in the Panhandle and elsewhere have been using worm grunting to charm worms and like straight up earn a living for decades. So people collect the worms. They sell them as fishing bait. And in the 1960s and 70s, the bait industry exploded so much in Florida's Apalachicola National Forest, thousands of worm charmers were working the soil like every day. And the US. Forest Service got worried about over-harvesting. So they actually started a permitting system. And also they banned power vibration methods. So you could no longer use a car or power tools. Yeah, so it works. You can charm worms. You can try it at home in your backyard or in the park if you have a fork. And in the present day, despite the fact that you can also just like farm worms, which is where probably most of the bait night crawlers come from, that you might encounter in like a fishing supply shop, people do still grunt for bait sold in shops. But the practice is kind of a dying art. The number of practitioners is in really steep decline. Just a handful of folks have really like dedicated themselves to passing on their techniques to the next generation. And one major way Worm Charming lives on is through like these niche local competitions. So, Sopchoppy, Florida, a town of fewer than 500 people, is home to the American Worm Gruntin Festival, which happens annually. There are also events in East Texas, Alabama, Ontario, Canada, elsewhere in North America. But the most well-known and longest running contest is the World Worm Charming Championship in the village of Williston, Cheshire, in the northwest of England, which goes back all the way to the teaser question, what do these three things have in common? The answer is worms. Yeah, in Williston, the event started in 1980. It was like part of a primary school festival. So initially, it was just kids. Now it's an all-ages competition. And currently, the official world record holder for quote, most worms charmed is Sophie Smith, who won the Williston contest in 2009 at 10 years old. In 30 minutes from a three by three meter square plot, she charmed 567 worms out of the ground.

Speaker 6:
[17:40] Most worms charmed was actually my high school yearbook, Superlative, so that's crazy.

Speaker 7:
[17:45] Yeah, paper plate awards all across the country given out to those worm charmers. Yeah, I'm not going to try and pull up another video, but the footage from the Williston festival is like 100% worth watching. You've got people like tap dancing, playing the upright bass, like smashing paddles into the ground, like trying to use pitchforks. It's very like New York's hottest club coded, in that it's just like a list of seemingly unrelated absurd things. But at this point, you might be wondering like why, why the worms respond to vibration this way, right? Because it seems like super counterproductive to survival, to just like come out of the ground, expose yourself to predators, like you could get snapped up by a bird if, a lot of worm charmer doesn't seem super advantageous, but they do it anyway. So any guesses about why, what's going on here?

Speaker 8:
[18:43] I'm going to be honest and say the question that's really on my mind right now is how all of this affects hobbits.

Speaker 7:
[18:48] Like with the bare feet or?

Speaker 8:
[18:51] No, honestly, I'm stuck on the worm charming and the shaking of the ground. If this has been known for a really long time, like in Darwin's time, like why didn't Tolkien integrate this into The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings?

Speaker 7:
[19:04] Big oversight. That's true.

Speaker 8:
[19:06] I'm just like, huge, huge.

Speaker 7:
[19:09] So if you're a worm, it turns out that your number one most feared predator is a mole. And so if you want to escape like a mole on the move, the best way out is up. So moles are really shy and secretive. They don't surface unless they absolutely have to, even if their prey is escaping from them. So when moles are digging on the hunt for worms, worms sense those vibrations and it's adaptive and strategic for them to then surface to avoid the underground predator. So I guess in this like analogy, the moles are actually the sand worms, like if we're sticking with the dune comparison and the worms are not worms. But anyway, that's the prevailing idea, is that worm grunting and also timberdoodle dancing, it all mimics mole vibration. And this was actually tested by a Vanderbilt University Scientist in 2008. And this is like a noted biologist with like a MacArthur Genius Grant, but he took time out of his busy schedule to be like, why worms do this? So he recorded the underground vibrations of both moles digging and worm grunters working, they're, you know, plying their little trade, found that the vibration patterns were really similar, and then did kind of all of these tests, both in plots and in big bins of soil, to see how worms responded to moles digging and also different strategies of worm grunting. There was also this other idea, and both of you have probably heard of it, that worms come up when it rains because they don't want to drown underground. So that was like this other theory, that vibrations from grunting and timber doodles may be mimicked like rain falling. But in 2008, the Vanderbilt University scientists tested this idea with a sprinkler and simply didn't find support for it. Apparently, worms do find underground if the soil is saturated for a period of time. Yeah. So, you know, woodcocks and their little stumps may very well be an evolved strategy for mimicking moles, worm charming. And they're not the only ones. Haringles, a few other species of birds, and wood turtles are also thought to do a similar behavior where they stomp the ground and then eat the worms that come up.

Speaker 6:
[21:26] Well, yeah, that's so cool.

Speaker 8:
[21:29] Wait, I have a question. Although this is more about the worms underground. So in the experiment where they tested with the sprinkler, how did they force the worms to stay underground? Like, did they saran wrap them down or like to see if they survived? Because I'm assuming that they were, how did they test that?

Speaker 7:
[21:46] So in that experiment, they had basically like bins or enclosures that were pretty deep, full of soil, full of worms. And they used the sprinkler that they thought was a pretty good approximation of like a regular rainstorm. And they ran it long enough for the water in that bin to be totally saturated and just like observed if worms came up. And in five trials, only three worms emerged of like hundreds. And then they like dug through when they were all done and like assessed the health of the remaining worms. And they found that all of them were still alive and totally fine, even after like a couple hours in saturated soil.

Speaker 6:
[22:24] So for every worm we see squirming up in the rain, there are probably a bunch more being like, whatever, man.

Speaker 7:
[22:31] Yeah. And maybe they're not squirming up because of the rain. Maybe there's something else going on. Maybe moles get more active when it's raining, you know?

Speaker 6:
[22:39] Yeah. Who knows?

Speaker 7:
[22:40] Who knows? We need more science.

Speaker 6:
[22:42] I keep thinking of there's this visual from a movie that I think dates back to my childhood and it's like early in the film, somebody is harvesting worms and it's not related to the rest of the film at all. It's just like a crazy visual. And now it's really bothering me. If anyone thinks they know what movie I'm talking about, it's presumably from the 90s. Let me know.

Speaker 7:
[23:10] Do you know what else happens in the movie?

Speaker 6:
[23:12] I want to say it's a sci-fi movie because most of the adult movies I watched as a small child were science fiction that my parents put on. So maybe it'll come to me later. But for now, I'm posing it to the chat. Get in the comments.

Speaker 8:
[23:31] All of my visuals for this right now are Hennie I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis running around in blades of grass that are just giant. My associations are clearly very weird. It's like Lord of the Rings and Hennie I Shrunk the Kids.

Speaker 6:
[23:45] You know, great classic works of literature and film. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be right back with some more facts.

Speaker 1:
[23:56] Now that the weather is warming up, I've been doing one of my favorite activities ever. Kicking back in the sun with an alcoholic beverage or two at a baseball game. But sometimes, even if I chug water at the seventh inning stretch and get a good night's sleep, I still wake up the next day feeling sluggish and foggy. So I recently tried the Cheers Health Restore after alcohol aid, after the most recent Cubs victory, and I was actually shocked how normal I felt waking up the next morning. You just take it right before you go to bed, and it helps you metabolize alcohol more efficiently, and also supports better overall liver health. Their claim to fame is that you feel 50% better or your money back, which makes sense, because I woke up feeling like I had drank two beers, not four. Cheers is backed by over 1,000 verified clinicians, and it's available at CVS, Walgreens, and 7-Eleven, so you can go see for yourself. Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed, and wake up feeling at least 50% better or your money back. For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order by using code weirdest at cheershealth.com. Just head to cheershealth.com and use code weirdest for 20% off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you.

Speaker 5:
[25:05] So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night's stay anywhere?

Speaker 7:
[25:09] Anywhere.

Speaker 5:
[25:10] What about fancy places like the Canopy in Paris?

Speaker 7:
[25:13] Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 5:
[25:15] Or relaxing sanctuaries like the Conrad in Touloume?

Speaker 2:
[25:18] Hilton Honors, baby.

Speaker 5:
[25:20] What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you gonna do this for all 9,000 properties?

Speaker 3:
[25:27] When you want points that can take you anywhere, anytime, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day, book your spring break now.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 6:
[26:41] Okay, we're back, and Chanda, tell me what non-trienary means in your own time, but I would like to know.

Speaker 8:
[26:49] So I think to really appreciate what non-trienary means, I have to back up a little bit and tell you about one of my favorite particles. So this type of particle is called the neutrino. And I actually talked about the neutrino the last time I was on with you in the context of radioactive bananas. So yes, for people who haven't heard that episode yet, you should go back and find it. And bananas have a lot of potassium in them, and some of that potassium decays. And as the potassium decays, it produces neutrinos and so it emits neutrinos. Bananas are totally safe. You should continue to eat them. They're delicious. They're also emitting neutrinos. And this type of subatomic particle is kind of wily because it is very low mass. It's so low mass that actually for a while, people thought maybe it didn't have any mass at all. And so it behaved like photons, like light, and it would just travel at the speed of light. We're fairly certain now that that's not the case. But neutrinos are very interesting because they're produced in a lot of different environments. So as one example, neutrinos are made in the sun as part of a process called beta decay. And beta decay is usually in neutrons turning into protons or protons turning into neutrons. And so these make either neutrinos or anti-neutrinos, which are the anti-matter version of a neutrino. And the thing about neutrino production in the sun is that the sun only makes one kind of neutrino, only one flavor. So there are three flavors, and one of them is the electron neutrino, and the sun only makes electron neutrinos. So you think if we point a little neutrino detector at the sun, that we should see a certain number of electron neutrinos coming from the sun. This is what you might expect from theory, and you can calculate how many electron neutrinos you might expect based on stellar nuclear astrophysics. So at one point decades ago, there was this huge crisis because of what's called the solar neutrino problem. We were not seeing as many electron neutrinos coming from the sun as we might expect. And we're fairly certain now that this is related to the fact that neutrinos come in three different flavors. So one is the electron neutrino. There's also the muon neutrino and the tau or tauon neutrino. And it turns out that neutrinos just will randomly change from one flavor into another while they're flying along through space. So when I say that neutrinos are non-trinary, I mean that they are literally non-trinary because their identities are not stabilized into one particular category. They change as they fly through space. And so the way that the solar neutrino problem gets resolved is that some of the neutrinos that start as electron neutrinos at the sun by the time they arrive at the earth are a different flavor. So that's what I mean by non-trinary. They're literally just mixing identities in their own way. And we don't fully understand why, but we do think this has something to do with their mass.

Speaker 7:
[30:06] So non-trinary is like non-binary if there were three categories and the particle existed outside and within all of them.

Speaker 8:
[30:15] Exactly. So I personally, as an agender person, I love the non-trinary neutrino because I think it's such a great example of how people love to tell us that, for example, binaries are just, quote, natural, big air quotes on this, right? And here's an example that comes straight from nature, from what many people consider to be the most fundamental level of nature, where actually that's not at all how the identity is stabilized. I was actually talking about this on social media the other day, and some physicist who apparently has like no sense of humor was like, I didn't know that neutrinos were people, and I was kind of like, or actually specifically said I didn't know that particles were people, and I was like, I hate to tell him that people are made of particles. So I don't know if he missed that, and what if his physics classes or whatever. But I think this is a great example from nature where we see that our sensibilities about what is normal, what is natural actually have to go away, and then in fact, having the sense that things will always come in clean-cut categories can make it difficult for us to become aware of how nature is actually working.

Speaker 6:
[31:32] Hell yeah. No, that's true so often.

Speaker 7:
[31:37] So, okay, question. Is it kind of like a quantum state thing, like where particles can inhabit multiple states at the same time, and that's kind of like a fundamental feature of quantum stuff. I'm not a physicist.

Speaker 8:
[31:55] No, I love this. And I think one of the ways to think about this is, for example, you're probably familiar with the electron as a concept, right? And so we have some sense that the electron has what we call electrical charge, right? And usually the way that we orient ourselves is we say electrons have negative charge and say it's anti-matter counterpart, the positron has a positive charge. And this value of the charge is known as one of its characteristics, say, quantum numbers. And so you can think of the flavor of a neutrino as being one of its quantum properties. And so this is an example of quantum property where there is some kind of mixing that's happening. And it's actually quite difficult to characterize it. And in the context of what is known about particle physics, we have the structure called the standard model of particle physics that people like to triumphantly roll out and say, you know, we know lots about particle physics, everything fits together really nicely. There's some giant gaping holes in that, like it doesn't account for dark matter, which is the thing that I actually research. And so the standard model at best describes only about 4% of the matter energy in the universe. So I will say it's very incomplete in some very fundamental way. But even if we accept that it's complete for what we might call visible matter, like matter that we can see, the neutrino is still difficult because it's the only particle in the standard model that doesn't get its mass in the way that other particles in the standard model do. So this is like a huge open question in particle physics, which is like how do neutrinos get their mass? And we feel fairly certain that this has something to do with these flavor transformations or oscillations. They're called neutrino oscillations formally. But that's definitely, it's somewhere in the picture that I am. Now, I will say, because I brought up dark matter, I will just say that I think that there's an argument for why neutrinos should actually be categorized as the one form of dark matter that we have formally identified and seen. Probably would get myself into trouble for that. But that's a tiny hill I would die on for like five seconds.

Speaker 6:
[34:13] I really, listen, as someone who knows almost nothing, I like the sound of it. I like the vibe. I'm on board.

Speaker 7:
[34:23] I have one additional question, which is, what does each of the three flavors taste like?

Speaker 8:
[34:32] Oh, man, I should have thought of this. I'm just going to go with this because I always root for the underdog, and I feel like no one ever talks about Tauans or they don't get enough love. I'm just going to say that Tau neutrinos and Tau's taste like Hagendaz strawberry ice cream, because that's the best one on the planet.

Speaker 6:
[34:55] I love it. We're going to take another quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

Speaker 4:
[35:05] K-Pop Demon Hunter's Saja Boys Breakfast Meal and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi?

Speaker 2:
[35:14] It's not a battle.

Speaker 3:
[35:15] So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

Speaker 9:
[35:19] It is an honor to share.

Speaker 4:
[35:21] No, it's our honor.

Speaker 10:
[35:23] It is our larger honor.

Speaker 2:
[35:24] No, really, stop.

Speaker 4:
[35:26] You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side.

Speaker 11:
[35:32] Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

Speaker 9:
[35:33] And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

Speaker 11:
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Speaker 6:
[36:08] Okay, we're back, and I, a hungry parent, I'm gonna talk about some other hungry parents, I have to say, obviously, having a child takes a lot of literal energy, but then also producing food for a child is pretty crazy. I have this strange experience as a fat person. Please don't email me saying, no, Rachel, you're beautiful. I know, I know. Fat is a neutral term. And indeed, I am beautiful. But anyway, I have this really interesting experience where after having my child, I suddenly wasn't swollen everywhere. And then also I had no appetite because I had had a pretty horrible C-section. And then I was also breastfeeding. And I was like, I feel dainty. I feel like a breeze would blow me away. This is strange. Thankfully, I got my appetite back because that was not sustainable. But anyway, I've been thinking a lot about the energy it takes to turn your blood into food and that's wild. And thankfully, this study came out recently about caribou moms and how they too are pretty snacky for a lot of the time. So reindeer, aka caribou, they're the only deer where females have antlers. And this new study offers one possible explanation for why, which is that new moms need snacks, which again is very relevant to my current interests.

Speaker 7:
[37:48] And Chanda just turned our heads the same way at the same time.

Speaker 8:
[37:52] I mean, I think I was like, are they eating their antlers? Like, I don't know if that was like the first place.

Speaker 6:
[37:57] Yeah, they are.

Speaker 7:
[37:58] Yeah, grow your own snacks.

Speaker 6:
[38:00] They are. Yeah. And I will get into it. I will. But first, I want to talk about just antlers in general a little bit because they're really cool. I've been fascinated by antlers ever since I learned about antler shedding. So I'm going to give folks just a little bit of a background. So they're unique to the Deer family servants, and they're not horns. Horns are bone covered in keratin, keratin like you'd find in a toenail or a horse hoof. And with the exception of this one pretty weird mammal called the pronghorn, horns grow very slowly over a lifetime. You don't shed them and regrow them. So weak sauce, boring, anybody can do it. It's basically just a bony toenail that comes out of your face. But antlers are shed and regrown every year out of these little nubs called pedicles. And they're also true bone, some of the fastest growing bone in the world, apparently up to an inch per day in some species, which is just wild. And that super fast growth is facilitated by the so-called velvet that covers immature antlers as they're growing in, which is actually this very spongy skin that's just packed with blood vessels. And so this soft spongy tissue grows cartilage like a sort of scaffolding. So there's actually a period where deer that are currently growing their new set of antlers are walking around with actually sort of like squishy, squishy antlers.

Speaker 7:
[39:27] Do they flop?

Speaker 6:
[39:29] I don't think they flop. I think they hold themselves up, but the impression I get is if you squeezed one, it would squish. I don't recommend trying to squish a soft antler because while their antlers might not be ready for a fight yet, their hooves are always ready for a fight. So don't squish the antlers. But then bone fills in that matrix. The blood vessels dry up for male deer, at least, who are, most of the deer who are doing this. That seems to happen when testosterone is rising and the velvet sloughs off. It looks like a horror movie. I particularly recommend checking out images of moose shedding their velvet because there's just so much. They look like they are covered in gore because they are, but it's their own gore that they need to get rid of, so it's fine. Sometimes, the deer eat it, which looks even more like a horror movie. We will be talking about some light auto-cannibalism. It's true. For most deer, this process starts in early spring, antlers harden up around September, and then they shed in late fall or early winter when shorter days seem to trigger drops in testosterone and the bone erodes and just crumbles and dies. As you might imagine, this is incredibly costly from an energy perspective. Bull moose, for example, eat 35 pounds of vegetation a day, and a quarter of that goes toward antler growth. So it's such an indulgence. So you might ask, why all the effort? They do use them to fight one another, as you might expect. But it's really pretty much all about sexual competition, as opposed to life for limb fights. As the Fish and Wildlife Service puts it, antlers are used for saber rattling more than as a saber. And they also serve as like an actually very honest display of a male's ability to get and use resources because they're so costly. So this is one of those situations where sexual selection has selected for something that genuinely is, you can't fake it, you got to grow the big antlers by eating a lot of food being big. But while they're not like incredible weapons, they do seem to dissuade predators from attacking deer. So that's probably part of why they've stuck around, which is an important point we'll come back to later. I should also add that in many deer species, there are deer who are somewhere on the intersex spectrum who have antlers, but are otherwise seem to be female. But we're talking about female mama deer who also have antlers, which only happens in the caribou, which are the same thing as reindeer. There are different subspecies, but all caribou and reindeer are the same species.

Speaker 8:
[42:25] Okay, I didn't know that.

Speaker 6:
[42:26] Yeah, I always forget it. I think it's something I've re-learned five times.

Speaker 8:
[42:32] I thought reindeer because you hear about reindeer in Christmas whatever stuff, and then whenever you watch stuff on TV, they're like caribou.

Speaker 6:
[42:41] Yeah, caribou seem like very hardy pedestrian deer. Reindeer seem fanciful, but it's just branding. They're the only species where females routinely also have antlers. And this new study has one explanation for why they've stuck around, because we can imagine that probably all deer had some kind of antler at some point. Though if it goes far enough back, it is thought that antlers replaced tusks in deer, and there are still some deer that have both tusks and antlers.

Speaker 7:
[43:19] Oh, like the musk deer.

Speaker 6:
[43:20] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[43:20] Those weird little teeth thing.

Speaker 6:
[43:22] They have weird little teeth. And it is thought that tusks used to be more the thing. But anyway, at some point, we can imagine many deer all had antlers. And so why did they get bigger and more ostentatious in male deer and disappear in almost all species females? One interesting thing is that the timeline is slightly different for these female caribou. They start growing their antlers in May, which is also when they shed their sets from the year before. So they're basically constantly growing them. They might have a couple of weeks off in between. Whereas in males, like I said, they start their new growth in early spring, but they'll shed them in the fall or the early winter. So they'll basically have the winter off. And caribou ladies do not. They just kind of keep them around from May to May. But that alone doesn't tell us what they're for. And there are a few different theories. One is that maybe it's mostly so they can clear away snow, so they can eat the vegetation underneath, which would explain why they keep them in the winter. It's also possible that they use them for defense or just kind of like social dominance signaling. They keep them in the winter while the males lose them. Antlers are a hierarchical thing while the male deer have them, so it's like maybe once winter comes and it's like really important for the female deer to be getting these resources, that they keep their antlers to kind of like lean in, be a boss, whatever.

Speaker 7:
[44:59] Shee-yo their way to all the nice winter.

Speaker 6:
[45:01] They shee-yo their way.

Speaker 7:
[45:02] Nice winter vegetation patches.

Speaker 6:
[45:03] Yeah. And there is some research showing that females with antlers and with bigger antlers get access to more food once the males are antlerless. But if this was the only reason you might expect them to keep their antlers when they have new calves and they're lactating, because that's when they need more energy and protection from predators than ever. And instead, they all drop them in pretty close sync within days of calving. Plus, apparently female caribou are really good at kicking their enemies, so they don't really actually need them for defense. So researchers have an idea about what might be going on here. They collected a bunch of antlers and other bones from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of Alaska, which is home to the porcupine caribou herd, adorable name. It's a group of around 200,000 caribou, and they make a 1,500 mile round trip migration between their winter range and their calving grounds, which is the longest land migration of any mammal. Fun fact. So they picked up more than 1,500 antlers, some of which had been there for decades or maybe even centuries. Apparently this place is just like rife with antlers. And then they also found 224 skeletal bones from caribou, but also from some moose and muskox. And basically they were looking at the bite marks on these antlers along with the other bones. It seems like they started out primarily interested in seeing whether rodents in the area were chewing on the antlers a lot. But instead they found that 86% of the antlers they examined showed signs of gnawing, yes, but 99% of those gnaw marks were left by caribou. And actually the rodent they seemed to expect to find gnaw marks from, they only found evidence on 4% of the antlers. And they didn't see any evidence of carnivore gnaw marks on the antlers. And the skeletal bones, it was a very different story. So most of those bones had gnaw marks from wolves and bears and other predators. And very few of them had gnaw marks from caribou. So there are all these bones around, many of them antlers. And it seems like the caribou are preferentially chew in on the antler bones. It's not news to us that deer might chew on bones and antlers. I actually years ago on Weirdest Thing, I talked about one of my favorite weird studies ever, which was at a body farm that studies human decomposition. And they had caught a deer on camera eating a human bone. And they were like, is this the first known case of a deer eating human remains? And one thing that really sticks in my mind is that in the paper and in the photos, it was very clear, they described the deer gnawing on it like a cigar. That's how they gnaw on bones. They just, they're like, is she here? I got my antlers full of calcium and phosphorus. And that's adorable. I like to think about that. But basically, it seems possible that one of the reasons that antlers continue to emerge every year in these female caribou and reindeer and gnaw in other species of deer is that they're kind of like a convenient place to store energy so that then you can drop them in the calving grounds for a snack. And it's not just that they're eating their own antlers, though I would be surprised if they don't occasionally take a gnaw of the antler that falls right in front of them. But basically, there's now this landscape littered with shed antlers that have all been left by female deer because the male deer have already lost their antlers by the time they get anywhere near here. And those minerals are, they're returning to the soil, they're a really important part of the ecosystem, but they're also providing really necessary nutrients to these new moms. So it's sort of this multi-generational ecosystem shaping, geo-engineering happening where they are creating this environment where there's plenty of phosphorus and calcium for new moms to get just by chewing on the antlers that are all over the place.

Speaker 7:
[49:32] It's ladies looking out for each other.

Speaker 6:
[49:34] Yeah. I do really like the intergenerational aspect of it. It's really cool. I think sometimes when folks talk about evolution, they forget that things can stick around, not just because they're like great for that individual in that moment, but that it's good for everybody. It helps generally more calves survive in that herd, and that's fun to think about. Of course, this study didn't definitively prove that this is the reason they have antlers, and it's probably multifaceted. They're probably social aspects, but I think it's really cool. As somebody who frequently needs a snack and wishes, I could just carry one around on my head. That's always there. Also, this is not actually related, but Google the Muntjac or the Barking Deer listeners, because that's the guy I talked to you about before that still has tusks in addition to antlers, and boy, what a weird-looking guy. Good for him. But yeah, that's my fact for today. My first one back, I didn't intend to do a mom fact, but then I saw this study and I thought, wow, we're all out here snacking together.

Speaker 8:
[50:51] I have to say that when you made clear that this was going in the direction of self-consumption, this made me think about dermatillomania, which is when people pick at their skin, and sometimes they eat the skin that they picked up, and how that along with obsessive-compulsive disorder is pathologized as a mental health issue, which we could have a long conversation about pathologizing, but it's considered a negative, like there's something wrong with you, and it makes you wonder if this is a matter of perspective that we aren't thinking about what the evolutionary value might be of some percentage of the population having some of these features as the way that they operate or whatever. So that's what I was just thinking about, because it's basically like reindeer, caribou, dermatillomania, except it turns out to be really, really useful for the survival of the species.

Speaker 6:
[51:53] Totally. No, I love that point. Well, and even in humans, something that you hear a lot about in talking about pregnancy is pica, which is hunger for non-food items. And of course, in the US, we hear about it as a negative thing. You're chewing on ice all the time and it's bad for your teeth. Get a nugget ice machine. I didn't do that because I only had my normal amount of ice hunger, but I wish I had. It would have been a really good excuse to finally get that good ice machine. People will talk in horror about eating genuinely things that they should not eat. But then there are other parts of the world where eating clay while you're pregnant is considered neutral at worst and a thing that it's normal to want to do. And I think there's often the understanding that there are some minerals you're craving from that good soil. I don't know that I trust our soil just out and about these days. I wouldn't recommend chowing down on that no matter what your gestational status is. But yeah, point being, there are definitely things that we pathologize, including in terms of eating quote unquote non-food or perhaps parts of ourselves, that probably have really interesting evolutionary stories behind them.

Speaker 7:
[53:15] I love the specific idea of like, you're eating, you're storing up energy, you're like literally saving it for later on your body, on your caribou person. Yeah, it's like caribou's don't have pockets, so if they want to save a snack for later, it has to be growing as bone out of their head.

Speaker 8:
[53:32] Yeah. I mean, it's like birds storing meals basically in their throats, right? I can't remember what the part is called, but birds can actually basically store, or some types of birds can.

Speaker 7:
[53:46] Like in their crop?

Speaker 8:
[53:47] Yeah.

Speaker 7:
[53:48] I didn't know that. That's cool.

Speaker 8:
[53:49] I'm pretty, I mean, I'm a physicist. So like, take what I say with a grain of salt, I guess.

Speaker 7:
[53:55] I believe it. That was authoritative, and I'm not going to fact check it at all.

Speaker 8:
[54:00] I mean, the thing that I can tell you is that blue bird wings aren't actually, like they're not actually, not blue birds, blue jays, they're not actually blue. That's a whole, for physics reasons.

Speaker 7:
[54:09] Structural color.

Speaker 8:
[54:11] Yeah. It's a scattering effect. I can tell you bird physics facts.

Speaker 6:
[54:20] Listen, I would love to do a bird physics fact episode, so maybe next time you're on, we'll make that happen.

Speaker 8:
[54:26] I will come back. There was like another thing, I came up with the non, I realize I didn't say this, but I'm the one who came up with the idea of calling neutrinos non-trinary. And this was like another one of my leg, I write a column for new scientists. And it was like, wait a minute, they're non-trinary. I also, when I figured out that blue jay, I'm not the person who did the research, but when I figured out that blue jays were not actually blue, I was like, I have to tell the whole world about this immediately.

Speaker 6:
[54:52] Blow it wide open. Blue jays, not real, not really.

Speaker 8:
[54:55] I think my editor was like, usually you write about space time, but okay, blue jays, you got to mix it up.

Speaker 6:
[55:02] Yeah. Chanda, thanks so much for joining us. Would you remind our listeners what your new book is called so they can go check it out? Yeah.

Speaker 8:
[55:08] The Edge of Space-Time, Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie is out from Pantheon on April 7th in North America and in the UK and Europe on the 7th of May from Cannon Gate.

Speaker 6:
[55:19] The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Boddy, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Caden. Our logo is by Katie Beloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at Weirdest Underscore Thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.

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