Elephant Pranks, Ghost Armies, Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Silkworm

Sophie Bushwick and Claire Maldarelli join the show to talk about silkworms in tea and ghost armies (though not the kind from Lord of the Rings). Plus, Rachel talks about a prankster elephant. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is a podcast by Popular Science. Share your weirdest facts and stories with us in our Facebook group or tweet at us! Click here to learn more about all of our stories! Links to Rachel's TikTok, Newsletter, Merch Store and More: https://linktr.ee/RachelFeltman Rachel now has a Patreon, too! Follow her for exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/RachelFeltman Link to Jess' Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/jesscapricorn -- Follow our team on Twitter Rachel Feltman: www.twitter.com/RachelFeltman Produced by Jess Boddy: www.twitter.com/JessicaBoddy Popular Science: www.twitter.com/PopSci Theme music by Billy Cadden: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LqT4DCuAXlBzX8XlNy4Wq?si=5VF2r2XiQoGepRsMTBsDAQ Thanks to our Sponsors! Get an additional 20% OFF the @honeylove Holiday sale by going to https://honeylove.com/WEIRDEST! #honeylovepod This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Get 10% off your first month at: https://BetterHelp.com/WEIRDEST Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month at https://MINTMOBILE.com/weirdest Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Rachel Feltman?

  At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And 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 Veltman.

• 1:55Speaker 04

  I'm Claire Maldarelli. I'm Sophie Bush.

• 1:57Rachel Feltman?

  Ah, it's so great to have you both back. Longtime listeners know that, I mean Claire, you have been on fairly recently, but of course, longtime listeners know you are a weirdest thing OG. And Sophie, it's been years since we had you on, so it's so great to have you back.

• 2:14Speaker 05

  I'm so pumped to be here.

• 2:15Rachel Feltman?

  Yay.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Reunion.

• 2:18Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, it's an absolutely a reunion episode. So let's get right into it. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, 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, except there's not a winner anymore. Now, everybody wins. It's fine.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  Everyone gets a trophy.

• 2:52Speaker 05

  It's been so long since I was on that last time I was here, there were winners, and I was very passionate about it.

• 3:00Rachel Feltman?

  We just had too many three-way ties. I, you know, it's, yeah.

• 3:04Speaker 05

  Honestly, it'll still be delightful without a trophy.

• 3:08Rachel Feltman?

  Claire, what's your tease?

• 3:10Speaker 04

  Uh, yes, I would like to talk about the connection between paper mache and World War II.

• 3:16Rachel Feltman?

  Ooh, arts and crafts.

• 3:19Speaker 05

  Love it.

• 3:19Rachel Feltman?

  Love it. Sophie, what's your tease?

• 3:23Speaker 05

  My tease is about how a worm falling out of a tree changed the course of human history.

• 3:30Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  Wow, that's big. And small at the same time.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 3:36Rachel Feltman?

  Would you still love me if I was a worm that fell out of a tree?

• 3:40Rachel Feltman?

  Um, my tease is that I want to talk about elephants using tools and possibly playing pranks? Maybe?

• 3:50Speaker 05

  I love that.

• 3:52Rachel Feltman?

  Um, I'm happy to start. I'll dive right in with elephants. So this story is about three elephants at the Berlin Zoo. Mary, Pengfa, and Anchali. Mary is this handsome respectable woman of 54, and Pengfa is also an adult. I want to say she's in her 30s. Don't quote me on that, though. And then Anchali is Pengfa's child, 12 years old, little rapsgallion. We'll get into that more later. So. This all started because as part of their morning routine at the Berlin Zoo, these elephants were showered by keepers with a water hose.

• 4:33Rachel Feltman?

  And then they had access to water, you know, all day to drink and to spray themselves. But the hose would only be turned on, you know, while the zookeepers were using it. And researchers who were hanging out, watching these elephants for interesting reasons I will get to later. Turns out they are a very special, interesting group. But they noticed that Mary wasn't just spraying herself with water using her trunk, which is something elephants do when they have access to water. They do lots of grooming, they do lots of stuff with their trunks. They'll like give themselves like little dust and mud baths. So that's not unusual at all. But they found that she was also taking the hose and holding it in her trunk to give herself showers,

• 5:16Rachel Feltman?

  which is not something they had ever seen an elephant do before. Basically, when the hose was turned on, she would pick it up on average within five seconds. And then she would shower for an average of seven minutes. Yeah, she was like, it's shower time. Yeah, and seven minutes, which like I feel like for an animal that doesn't shower, seven minutes is like, that's a luxurious shower, girl. I understand.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  A morning rush for me, seven minutes is a luxurious shower.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  And I let the water run a little before I get in, so it'll warm up.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:49Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, no, good point. This water is almost certainly bracing. And then when the water was turned off, she would like drop the hose. She would be like, okay, shower done. And she had never been trained to do this and nobody knew how she had learned. And what's cool is that once they started looking at her, they found it wasn't even as straightforward as like she has learned to pick up the hose and put water on herself. She would actually change her grip depending on what part of her body she was targeting. Like when she was like going on her side and she would be like lifting her legs to like reach all the, all the crevices, but she would be holding the hose in her trunk again. There's a video, it's really adorable. I'll reference the video multiple times. I really recommend everybody go watch it.

• 6:34Rachel Feltman?

  I'll link to it on popsite.com/Weird. But she would like, you know, wrap her trunk around the hose very close to the head of it. So she would be using it like similar to how you might use like a handheld shower head, where you're really directing the spray. But then when she wanted to shower her back, she would move her trunk to further down the hose. And she would flip it up like a lasso so that it would flop down her back and shower her there. And the researchers were like, this is a non-trivial difference in tool use. You know, one is a very straightforward pickup, use the, apply directly to burn, you know?

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:12Rachel Feltman?

  And the other is entirely different movements. It's like high velocity. She's using the flexibility and the ballistics of the hose. And then she would frequently, after flipping down her back, she would like drop it. She would just be like, huh? Yeah, she was done. And hoses in particular, the researchers of this study were saying, are considered pretty tricky tools. Like they're long and flexible. So, you know, they're, they're more noodley than say, picking up a branch, which elephants have been seen to do to like sort of swat bugs off of their backs. Also very cool, but like a much more sort of straightforward tool than a giant noodle. Also, the water flow adds a bunch of physics and like dynamic movement

• 7:54Rachel Feltman?

  that an animal has to take into account if they're gonna use that as a tool. And yeah, the researchers were quoted as saying elephants are amazing with hoses, but the way they'll be willing to use hoses like varies a lot from animal to animal. And he said, quote, "Elephant Mary is the queen of showering," which I love.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Incredible, incredible. I want that title as well.

• 8:18Rachel Feltman?

  Right, yeah. And they think, like, you know, there's no way of knowing. But what they think is happening here is that even though they've never seen an elephant do this, there is something intuitive about using a hose to shower for an elephant, because that's how they use their trunks. So they're saying, you know, It's, so they're saying it's super plausible to imagine an elephant like looking at the hose as their zookeepers using it and being like, oh, it's a thing that does the thing my trunk does. I should use that. Seems chill. Seems like a nice way to save energy and not constantly be spraying water on myself using my own air. And yeah, we also know that like elephants are really big on skincare.

• 9:01Rachel Feltman?

  They do a lot of stuff to take care of their skin and to regulate their body temperature. You know, those like mud and dust and water baths. Yeah, I love it too. Um, in fact, they cited a study that said that 80% of tool use that's been observed in elephants has been body care related.

• 9:17Speaker 05

  I love this for elephants.

• 9:19Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  Good for them.

• 9:22Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, good for them. And another thing that they noticed that they said, you know, was evidence that this was tool use and should be considered tool use. To me, there's no ambiguity. This is clearly an elephant using a tool, but you know, whenever you read an animal behavior paper and they're saying this is tool use, they're like, and how must we define a tool? And what is use? You know, they're, they're being very careful to show their work because I think, uh, you know, nobody wants to have appeared to anthropomorphize and put meaning into something that was like random, but the girl is showering.

• 9:57Speaker 05

  I think if you've named your elephant the queen of showers, then I think that's...

• 10:02Rachel Feltman?

  But they also pointed out that she exhibited what they call tool use specific lateralization, uh, which is this thing where research shows that tool use promotes the development of like what we consider handedness. Like, most animals, when they're going about their day to day lives, when they're like climbing stuff, they don't have a real dominant hand. But once they start using tools, you see it's more and more likely that they like, they favor one hand over the other to use those tools as opposed to like... Just ambulating.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 10:38Rachel Feltman?

  Now, elephants have been shown to have trunkedness when they're using tools. They can be left trunked or right trunked. And it often like seems to have to do with sort of the, the direction in which they are most dexterous in twisting their trunk because they make these little twists to like, you know, handle small objects. And so sure enough, Mary showed a preference for her left body side when she was using the hose. Yes, lefties. Lefties, yeah. Which was actually the opposite of how she would hose herself down when she was using her trunk. So they were like, see, she's like, you know, she's doing, she's making choices about handedness

• 11:21Rachel Feltman?

  to be more dexterous with her shower hose. Which it gets a little in the weeds, but I thought was, you know, an interesting point. And also I just love thinking about, you know, a left trunk elephant. They also found, because they were like, what tests can we do to explore what's going on here? And one of the ones they landed on was like, let's see what she does with different sized hoses. So the standard zoo hose had a diameter of 24 millimeters. And then they also started sometimes presenting her with a thicker one. It had a diameter of 32 millimeters and then a, a narrow one that was only 13 millimeters.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  Did they all have like the same, did they, they fuss with the water pressure to make sure they were all like, because like, I think if you broaden the diameter, right, the water's going to come out at a different pace.

• 12:04Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, that's such a good point. And I think the, the point, part of the point was that the water pressure was going to be different. They were like, it was less about the size specifically and more like, we want to alter the function of the tool and see

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 12:18Rachel Feltman?

  how she reacts. It's not a perfectly controlled study, more like what can we throw at this elephant to see what she does? And they found that she did prefer the one that the zookeepers used and When they gave her the wider hose, she was like more often to just use her trunk. And she was most likely to entirely abstain from showering when they gave her the 13mm water hose, which, again, this is complete anthropomorphizing, but I can just imagine her being like, "What the heck is this useless thing? Like, I'm done for the day. I don't want to shower anymore at all." So, yeah, really interesting stuff about, like, this elephant who has taught herself this really innovative thing, hashtag self-care, we love that for Mary.

• 13:03Rachel Feltman?

  But I also promised pranks. And this study also features some shenanigans. So, they noticed that, you know, Mary was the only of the three using the hose to shower. But Anchali, the 12-year-old, showed what they called "complex hose manipulation behavior", at times resulting in brief disruptions of water flow to Mary. In other words, Anchali was messing with the hose to stop Mary showers. And they have all these videos. You can see her, she's standing there watching Mary and picking up the hose in her trunk and like twirling and twisting her trunk to kink the hose. There's a slow-motion video with arrows, like pointing to the kink in the hose and then to Mary showering

• 13:48Rachel Feltman?

  to show that the kinked hose is, you know, acting like a kinked hose in the water.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  Does Mary make that connection between the change in the water and like this prank?

• 13:58Rachel Feltman?

  So, I don't know that they... I think they were very careful not to try to infer the moods of these elephants. Because they already were like, there were several moments in both the paper and in press releases where they were like, "We'll admit, to us, it looks like they're having a prank war." But like, we understand. We can't know for sure that's what's happening. So, for this round, I don't think they focused on Mary's reactions. And it was always very like, brief interruptions, you know, the water would like spurt. But they did say that they noticed, like...

• 14:42Rachel Feltman?

  Antagonistic behavior between the two of them, leading up to and after this. Like, Mary would kind of slap at Anchali with her trunk, which to them sort of added to the evidence that this was part of, you know, that they were trying to annoy each other. But again, we can't know. We do know that Anchali was definitely up to something with this hose, because in addition to the, like, kinking, which they pointed out required, like, quite a lot of force. It was really unlikely that she was just sort of enjoying twirling this hose and accidentally kinking it sometimes. They also saw her do something that they're calling a trunk stand, where she put her trunk down on the hose and then pressed, like, some of her body weight into it.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  Like stepping on it, but with her trunk?

• 15:24Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and there's an interesting thing about that. I'll talk about it in a minute. Why was she not stepping on it? So this, like, trunk press, not typical elephant behavior. They were like, what is she doing? And then they realized that she was actually applying force to the hose. And they were like, oh, so, like, she for sure is trying to mess with Mary's shower then. So again, they were also quick to add the caveat, we can't know that. But you can, like, feel the researchers giggling throughout this whole thing. And I, watching the videos, I was like, so delighted. I was surprised by how delightful I found it. It's really hard not to project, like, this little scam is interrupting this woman's shower,

• 16:08Rachel Feltman?

  and she is pissed off. And the interesting thing about the trunk stand, which again, really got to me, they pointed out that these elephants have been trained not to step on the hoses, because it interrupts when the zookeepers are doing their work. And they're, so the only training-related hoses they have received is don't step on them. And so they were saying, maybe Anchali is like, okay, I'm not allowed to step on the hose, so like, what can I do instead? And that's why she invented the trunk press, to be like, no feet here, I'm not breaking the rules.

• 16:43Speaker 05

  Not against the rules.

• 16:44Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, which I, again... I love that. And we know that elephants have really complex social bonds and like very complex emotional lives. So while of course, we like can't be sure that our projection of what this looks like to us is real, it's also, it's totally reasonable to suggest that that might be what's happening. Like elephants get up to nonsense for sure. And they hold grudges, like they for sure hold grudges. So the idea of an elephant prank war is like not far fetched. They did perform some controlled experiments to see, like, is Aunt Chali really trying to disrupt Mary's showers? And what they did is they offered her two water hoses.

• 17:28Rachel Feltman?

  Like, one was closer to her, but the other one was the one that Mary was actually using. And they were like, she didn't show any preference. In fact, she tended to go for the one closer to her. But they also pointed out, they were like, we don't know that she could see that that hose wasn't the one Mary was using. Like, they, they were like, this is not, we don't think this is conclusive evidence that this was not a prank. And yeah, in fact, they pointed out, like, she got better at disrupting the water flow over time, which makes them think that was her end goal. She did this repeatedly. It was like very complex maneuvers, requiring a lot of pressure and force. So they're like, yeah, listen, we suspect this was her being a little

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Kind of sounds like it.

• 18:15Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, it really does. Oh, yeah. And so one other thing, just to wrap this up, I don't know for sure that this is why the researchers were looking at these elephants, but I did find that Pang Fa, who's Aunt Chali's mother, was previously the subject of a different study because her caretakers at the zoo noticed that she had learned to peel bananas, which is not a standard elephant thing. And they were like, you gotta come look at this elephant. She keeps peeling bananas.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness.

• 18:48Rachel Feltman?

  When the researchers came, they kept giving her bananas and she was eating all of them whole, which is what they normally do. They were like, is this fake? Were the zookeepers trying to like? Start an international sensation around their elephant peeling bananas. Then they realized that all of the bananas they've been offering her had been perfectly ripe. And they were like, interesting, what if, what about different ripeness? And they found that it was specifically when a banana had a very spotted peel. She would not always, but almost always remove it. And this also has video that I'll link to. It's adorable. She's so efficient.

• 19:28Speaker 05

  I love this.

• 19:29Rachel Feltman?

  Maybe efficient isn't the right word because I think she probably leaves a lot of banana on the peel, but she very quickly like, you know, kind of crushes it out of the peel and then eats the banana that's left. And so they're like, maybe she just doesn't like the taste of the, the like more overripe banana peels, or maybe it's just that it's easier and like it's a

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Cause it's overripe.

• 19:51Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, exactly. So it like slips out more easily. But yeah, they almost missed confirming this, you know, describing this wild behavior in a study because they hadn't, hadn't considered an overripe banana.

• 20:04Speaker 05

  I mean, I wonder if it's at all similar to like, you know, you find some cheese and you're like, oh no, there's mold on it, but only on one part. I could just

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Skin sure is spotty. I'll just take it off.

• 20:16Rachel Feltman?

  Exactly, exactly. So relatable, so understandable versus like a, a kind of green banana. You're not going to waste your time trying to unpeel that if you're an animal that can eat a peel.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:27Rachel Feltman?

  That's silly. And you don't even have fingers. So like, why, why are you going to spend time doing that? And similarly with that one, they were like, how did this elephant learn this? No one trained her to do this. But they did note that as, um, when she was young, she had had like very one-on-one care. I think she might've been at some kind of nature reserve. And her like main caretaker had often peeled bananas in front of her and handed them to her. And so it's similar to the hose thing. They're like elephants watch stuff. They see humans do stuff and, um, you know, they don't necessarily Go like that humans got those weird pair of stubby trunks and I don't so I can't do

• 21:11Rachel Feltman?

  that they they just figure out a way to do it on their own and I love that this study again very delightful video that I will link to and I just love the idea of these three apparently very talented elephants using their amazing cognitive abilities to very different ends one for self-care one to eat bananas and one to cause trouble which is just wonderful.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, these elephants sound like like the opposite of a pleasure to have in class like a disruption to have in class.

• 21:47Rachel Feltman?

  Absolutely.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  I don't know, I would want a class full of these elephants, they sound delightful.

• 21:53Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, I agree. Yeah, yeah, would we get much done, probably not.

• 21:57Speaker 05

  No, but you'd eat a lot of bananas.

• 21:59Rachel Feltman?

  So true, so true. Yeah, there was a one of the researchers behind the banana paper, the day it came out, they like posted a video on Twitter that was like, you know, having many celebratory bananas with Pung Pha and you know, it was a video showing like three bananas in a row that she like very quickly peeled and then the last one she just ate whole and you could hear the researcher like cackle. She's just a contrarian. Anyway, yeah, we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.

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• 24:05Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Claire, tell me about paper mache and the Great War.

• 24:10Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. Okay, so I feel like I made a bigger deal about paper mache than than

• 24:17Rachel Feltman?

  I think I mean, paper mache being involved in this story is a big deal to me.

• 24:20Speaker 04

  But it's it's still a good fact. I just wrote I wrote the teaser last minute, so I just threw paper mache in there, even though it's not the focus. But anyways, don't hate me later for that. So I was doing research earlier this week on anechoic chambers, which are those like silent rooms that you go into and you can like feel your heart rate. And it's

• 24:42Rachel Feltman?

  I want to go into one of those so much.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  I have never been in one either. Like, a lot of journalists have and like people have written about it before. I think the one that's in Minnesota, you can pay like $75 an hour or something to see how long you last.

• 24:57Rachel Feltman?

  Wow, the blood running in your veins, right? That's what I've heard.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, like your heartbeat, like the blood swishing through your ears.

• 25:05Rachel Feltman?

  Wow.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it it sounds lovely. So yeah, that that sounds great as well. And I was doing a little bit of research on like the history of them. And I came across an article in the New York Times Magazine. It's a recent article. And it talked about like where these anechoic chambers came from, like how they came about. And it turns out that during World War II, the United States Army was trying to, you know, pull out all the tactics they could to win the war, as you do. You know, you have your army and you have all the things that usually go along with war. But they're pulling out all the stops. So they come up with this idea that they call the quote unquote ghost army.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  And it is, it is spooky, Rachel. And it consists of essentially this idea that we are going to create like a almost fake military base and fake soldiers and fake weapons and artillery and set it up and make it seem like instead of there being one thousand soldiers or ten, like a hundred soldiers, there's like thirty thousand soldiers. We're gonna trick the other side and disillusion them to think that there's like a bigger army and weapons than there are.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  Like large scale toy soldiers.

• 26:34Speaker 04

  Quite literally, and they use all these like enormous speakers that would make it sound like there was a cacophony of man and machines.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  This must have been so much fun to set up.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Right, truly. I mean, like you're in the middle of war and you're like, this all sucks, but at least I get to try this like cool stuff. So they had, but the problem is that they're trying to create this like massive, massive amount of sound. And they were like, where in America can I do this without disturbing people? And they were like, nowhere. So let's create a room that tests the loudness of these of sound. And that's how, partially how anechoic chambers came to be. That is a cool fact in and of itself. But then I was like, wow, ghost army, so weird. So I went down a rabbit hole and this is everything that I know and that you will now know

• 27:31Speaker 04

  about the ghost army of World War Two. As I said, it was this brainchild of a group of army, not soldiers, but higher up than soldiers. And they were like, we need to create this illusion that there is a bigger amount of soldiers and a bit like, we want it to seem like that the other side should go towards this direction and. Instead, they're gonna go, we're gonna, you know, bring them, we're gonna disillusion them essentially. So Ghost Army arrived in England in May nineteen forty-four as D-Day preparations were being finalized.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  And the Ghost Army engaged in its first large-scale deceptions in the summer of nineteen forty-four as it deployed fifty dummy tanks and position sound trucks within a few hundred yards of the front line during the siege of the front, of the French port of Brest. And as part of Operation Brittany, the Ghost Army deceived the Germans about the location of General George Patton's Third Army, which eluded the enemy and raced eastward across France. So, yeah, this was just like an entire fake army of dummy troops that were able to act like they were way larger than they were. And they helped to save a lot of American lives because they tricked the enemy side.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  And for a while after the war, this was all like a big secret because they were sworn to secrecy both during and after the war ended. And it wasn't until a couple of decades later that these members of the Ghost Army were able to talk about their experiences. And

• 29:17Speaker 05

  It would be so hard to keep that secret. I would want to tell everyone about it.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, like they weren't even allowed to tell their families. Like their families knew that they were soldiers in the war, but they didn't know what they were doing. And I did a little bit of research on like how they got people to join this special force. And it seems like it were like all the, all the people that were just like, maybe like kind of similar to these elephants that were just like not able to follow directions. And they were just like, no, I like, it's just not the pleasure to have in class. And so they're like, okay, we're exactly, exactly.

• 29:55Speaker 05

  Go make a bunch of noise.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  And so they were like, okay, we're gonna put you in this like quote unquote special army. And you can use paper mache and all these various things to create.

• 30:08Rachel Feltman?

  That's the only army I want to be in.

• 30:10Speaker 05

  The paper mache crafty army.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  Truly same.

• 30:14Rachel Feltman?

  A bunch of theater kids in class.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  But literally, yeah, so it comprised of like artists, architects, set designers, painters, and other engineers and skilled creatives to create this ghost army.

• 30:27Rachel Feltman?

  We'd all live in the ghost army.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Like truly, yes. And now to this day, we have the anechoic chambers, which test out all of our sound that we use from like hair dryers to dishwashers and everything to thank for. We have the ghost army to thank for this. So, yeah, it it changed my, both my idea of war. I was like, okay, people were way more creative than I thought and way more weird as well.

• 31:01Rachel Feltman?

  Really great video game that I played and never finished called We Happy Few that takes place in an alternate history where the UK surrendered to Germany in World War II. And there's, I won't go into details because it is part of a major plot point, but ghost armies are involved in that. I didn't realize that that was a thing that America did too.

• 31:28Speaker 04

  And then let me find, I finally have found the spot where the paper mache comes in. So this was from when they were finally able to talk about having been in this special ghost army.

• 31:42Speaker 04

  This is from an article in the New York Times. Quote, "We were told to make the Germans believe an American attack was coming through the Ardennes to hit them. Accordingly, we put on a demonstration of strength by bringing up a quote, 'pretend division' made of paper mache. It reminded me of a production by Cecil B. DeMille, only we had fewer extras to carry spears."

• 32:04Rachel Feltman?

  I love that.

• 32:05Speaker 05

  Incredible.

• 32:06Rachel Feltman?

  Again, I really feel like this would be such a good movie.

• 32:10Speaker 05

  I would absolutely watch this movie.

• 32:12Rachel Feltman?

  Slapstick. Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Yes. And if you just like Google Ghost Army and maybe I can share some of these pictures too for this story, but you can kind of see they like they just create these big giant trucks that are all made of papier mache or they're like blown up using like balloons.

• 32:30Rachel Feltman?

  Oh my god.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Because they don't want to use actual trucks that they need for other areas. That is a great question.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  Right?

• 32:37Speaker 04

  I wonder if they had to check, yeah, like the air quality, what's the weather today? Can we pull off this?

• 32:44Speaker 05

  Can we have our balloon tanks?

• 32:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, do we need the balloons to stand down today?

• 32:49Rachel Feltman?

  We need more flour and water when the war is lost.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Quick, more strips of torn up newspaper.

• 32:58Rachel Feltman?

  Wow, I love that. Absolutely incredible. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.

• 33:08Speaker 00

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• 34:15Rachel Feltman?

  Okay, we're back. And Sophie, tell us about some worms.

• 34:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, so like, let's start, just imagine that you are a worm, okay? And I mean, people call you that, but really what you are is a larva. And you live in this tree, and it is your life's goal to turn into a moth. So you take these thin filaments and you start pulling them from your head. You're producing them from these glands. And they bond together into this one long thread that you wrap around yourself and it gets glued together into this cocoon. So, okay, so far, so good. You're all wrapped up in your cocoon. You're waiting, you're going through the process of becoming a moth. And then tragedy strikes. You fall out of the tree. You fall and you land in literal hot water. So you are about to die. So you're never gonna realize this.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry, I'm sorry. I made you the worm and then I killed the worm. But, but the good news is you have just crashed into history. And more specifically, you've crashed into the teacup of the legendary Chinese Empress Lei Zhu. So, yeah, while you're dying, your cocoon is also falling apart around you. Sorry, you put in all that work. Whatever, your part in the story is done now because Lei Zhu notices like this.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  Wait, that's it? You're dead, that's it?

• 35:35Speaker 05

  You're dead, I'm sorry. You're dead, but you're gonna live forever. And I'm gonna tell you how. So Lei Zhu notices that there's that this cocoon has become like these threads. And she's like, I wonder how long this thread is. So one of her ladies in waiting picks up the end of the thread and sort of like steps back and then steps back again. And then she keeps going and going and going. And it's this one long thread. And she has a very long way to go because a silkworm cocoon can form a fiber that's a mile long. And this little larva was a silkworm.

• 36:13Speaker 05

  And, okay, so

• 36:14Rachel Feltman?

  Dying for fashion.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  Dying for fashion, but also like a whole lot else. So I, I read this story or this either history or legend, depending on how you think about it, in the book, The Insect Epiphany by Barrett Klein, and it just captured my imagination because silk is such a cool material. In science journalism, we've covered a lot of stories about researchers like, oh, I'm gonna do a cool thing with silk. Like, let's make this silk fluorescent. Let's make a, a patch out of this silk. Let's use three droplets of silk hydrogel to make a battery, which is a story I edited recently. And it's just, silk is just a super cool material. It is very strong, it's very lightweight, but it's still very durable.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  Like, our oldest, the oldest samples of silk that we have are from almost 5,000 years ago, and it still exists. It makes really good clothing because it insulates well, it's easy to dye, it's smooth, and it's got that beautiful shine. And it also has military applications. So it used to be a component of early body armor, like bulletproof vests. Yeah, and it can also, it, when you, when it burns, it sort of burns completely up without leaving a trace. So that made it really useful for weapons like guns. You know, you'd put gunpowder charges in these little bags made of silk. Yeah, and even before that, you know, silk was this very desirable material. And China, for a while, kept it as this state secret.

• 37:43Speaker 05

  You know, you couldn't explain or share these, these silkworm eggs or larvae under pain of death. And then eventually, I mean, this couldn't last forever. It did eventually get smuggled out, but the smugglers had to get really creative. So there's one story about a Chinese princess who was being married off into a different kingdom, and she had this elaborate headdress, and she hid moth eggs in it. And then there was another case of monks hiding either silkworm eggs or silkworm larvae in these hollow bamboo walking canes. And they brought them to the Byzantine Empire. But even with all the smuggling going on, silk was still primarily produced in China.

• 38:26Speaker 05

  And the final product made its way to the rest of the world by a little trade route that came to be known as the Silk Road. So

• 38:36Rachel Feltman?

  Also the source of most of my favorite quizies.

• 38:40Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. And so this is this big network of roads in Europe and Asia, mostly in Asia. And it it connected the ancient world. So it allowed for the transfer of silk. But also, yes, all of these different foods, spices, perfume, tea, paper, gunpowder. And then, of course, there's, there's like culture and religion and scientific ideas. And it's all possible because of this trade route, which is being used really heavily for silk.

• 39:10Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah, my favorite, one of my favorite restaurants in Manhattan is called Farida Sponsor Me. And there it's Isbeku Food. And on their menu, they have like a giant page that's like, why is it like this? The Silk Road. Because it's true, they really have the best of everything. They got like, you know, they got dumplings, they got borscht, they got

• 39:31Speaker 05

  Dumplings and

• 39:32Rachel Feltman?

  Meat on skewers.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Nice. Yeah. Amazing. And, you know, so like the Silk Road was enormously influential on human, the course of human history. But, I mean, even after it was no longer playing as much of a role, it still affected world events. So in particular, for Japan, silk was this like destiny changing technology. Because in the late 1800s, Japan was modernizing and its main export was silk, raw silk. And because of that industry, the country was able to sort of transform itself from a farming society to this military world power. And it played a huge role in, in Japan's role in 20th century politics.

• 40:15Speaker 05

  So the Sino Japanese War, World War I, World War II. And silk was actually also used in those wars. So, yeah, like the bulletproof vests with silk components, that was from the era of World War I. In World War II, there was this one case where there were these British prisoners of war. And they wanted to escape. And so they had these various Tools to help them escape were smuggled into them. And among the tools were these maps made of silk because it was lightweight and it was super durable and you could like fold it up and hide it in something else. And so this was smuggled into the prisoners of war to help them escape captivity.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, and so we have all this amazing impact from silk. And if you believe the story, it's all due to this like one little larva of the moth species is called Bombix Mori and it's bad luck, but our good luck when it fell into that cup of hot tea.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it just kind of stinks for that one larvae larva because died and then didn't know its legacy.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  I mean, it also kind of stinks. It kind of stinks for the rest of the silk worms too, though, because first of all, we've been cultivating them for so long that they can't really live independently anymore. And the other thing is just like making silk, the process kills a lot of silk worms. Yeah. So unfortunately, it's, it's maybe not so happy for them. But I mean, the fact is that this species is still existing because in part of this are our human domestication of it.

• 41:48Rachel Feltman?

  In, in a, in a different timeline, I would have been born a silk era. I actually, I, my family was on both sides of these historic, basically some of the first like labor protests that led to unionization were in Patterson, New Jersey around the silk factories.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:10Rachel Feltman?

  And the vast majority of my ancestors were people working in sweatshops. And in fact, some of them did work in the silk industry in Patterson. But my great grandmother, yeah, my great grandmother, her father owned one of said silk factories and then they lost everything, which is like probably fair, you know, if you're on the wrong side of the first union riots. But yeah, what I've always been told is that during, I think, World War One. Maybe World War II. He was told to switch over their looms to nylon to make parachutes. And he was like, no, it'll ruin the looms. Like, well, why should I do that?

• 42:54Rachel Feltman?

  And then he was like, blacklisted. Though also maybe because they were Jewish, because like, you know, who knows?

• 43:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:01Rachel Feltman?

  But anyway, yeah, that is my connection to

• 43:05Speaker 04

  To the world of silk.

• 43:06Rachel Feltman?

  Both sides of the Patterson, New Jersey silk industry. And, ooh, and a fat lot of good it did us.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  Okay, it's, it's so weird driving through Patterson now because all of that is like, pretty much, you know, gone, except for there's like a really, really fancy Burger King that is clearly like built within one of those like silk factories or one of the factories. And it's, it's just like legitimately the fanciest Burger King I have ever been in.

• 43:37Rachel Feltman?

  I'll have to go. I'll be like connecting with my, uh, my family, like a saint in the Burger King. Um, yeah, I, silk is so interesting. I feel like there are also so many studies about like scientists trying to replicate how good of a material silk is. And like spider silk in particular. Remember those goats? They like engineered some goats?

• 44:00Speaker 04

  That's right, to produce spider silk in their milk.

• 44:03Rachel Feltman?

  Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard about those goats in years. I wonder how they do it.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  I wonder how sticky they've gotten in the interim.

• 44:11Rachel Feltman?

  Thank you both so much for coming on. This was a great app. Learned so much about World War II and otherwise. Always a pleasure to have you both. I hope we can do it again soon.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  Me too. Yes.

• 44:23Rachel Feltman?

  The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.

• 44:55Speaker 00

  Shop Black Friday appliance savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant. Or upgrade your laundry room with the UltraFresh Vent System Plus Front Load Washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday appliance savings with fast, free delivery at The Home Depot. Offer valid November 4th through December 2nd at participating stores and at HomeDepot.com. U.S. only. See store online for details.

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