Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Rat Sommeliers, Pneumatic Tube Flirting, Why Periods Hurt About this episode Kate Downey joins the show to explain how little we actually know about why periods hurt so dang bad. Plus, Rachel divulges how to flirt using tubes, and Laura talks about the cutest, sweetest little rat sommeliers.
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 20% off your first order of Liquid I. V. when you go to https://www.liquid-iv.com/ and use code WEIRDEST at checkout.
Give yourself the luxury you deserve with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/weirdest for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns.
Stop putting off those doctors appointments and go to https://www. Zocdoc.com/WEIRDEST to find and instantly book a top-rated doctor today.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
0:26 Speaker 01 I used to wonder what I missed any time I stepped out of the shop. But with AT&T Business Wireless, my signal stays strong no matter where the day takes me. Like right now, I'm meeting a photography client
0:39 Speaker 01 out here. But I still have a reliable connection, even though I have no idea where I am right now.
0:46 Speaker 02 Keep your business connected with AT&T Business Wireless. Visit att.com/5gnetwork. When the connection matters, it has to be AT&T.
0:56 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, "I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York." Or, "Why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse?" We also solve non-car-related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
1:34 Rachel 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 Feltman. I'm Laura Bisus. And I'm Kate Downey. Kate, welcome to the show.
1:59 Speaker 05 Hi, thank you for having me.
2:00 Rachel Feltman? It's so great to have you, and I'm really excited to share your new show with our listeners. Would you tell them a little bit about it?
2:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, absolutely. The show is called Cramped. It is a 10-episode limited series about my experience with severe period cramps, why it took me 22 years to get a diagnosis and treatment. And it really digs into the systemic and structural issues when it comes to treating women's bodies.
2:29 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, it's an awesome show. Really excited to have you on to share some weird facts, perhaps related to it. And I hope our listeners will check it out.
2:38 Speaker 06 When you said cramped at first, I thought maybe it was on claustrophobia. But that went, so that went like a bit of a different direction than I initially expected. But, you know, so if you need a sequel, there you go.
2:50 Speaker 05 Yeah. One of the other podcast, like you check to see if there are other podcasts with that name. And there is another podcast that is, the whole concept of the podcast is it's four people on one couch, having a conversation.
3:03 Speaker 06 That is fun. That is also cramped.
3:06 Rachel Feltman? Yep.
3:08 Rachel Feltman? All right, let's get into the show. So on the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, sitting on the couch, 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. Laura, what's your tease?
3:34 Speaker 06 Rats can kind of be smeliees.
3:38 Rachel Feltman? I mean, I've seen Ratatouille. You don't have to tell me.
3:43 Speaker 06 No, no. And anybody who has seen that can tell you, not only can they be smeliees, but they can also wash their hands with some pretty impressive dexterity. So, but yes, actual rats, not wonderful animated rats.
3:57 Rachel Feltman? Kate, what's your tease?
3:59 Speaker 05 So, we don't know why period cramps hurt. We thought we did, but we don't.
4:06 Speaker 06 Great, awesome.
4:11 Rachel Feltman? I love a wild what from Jess. It's always. I had to unmute for that one because seriously.
4:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
4:18 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Yep. My tease is that back in the day, you might flirt with someone via pneumatic tube. I think we should bring it back.
4:33 Speaker 06 That sounds, that sounds pleasant.
4:35 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, I can, I can get us started with that if we would like.
4:39 Speaker 06 Yeah.
4:40 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
4:40 Speaker 06 Start with tubes. Always start with tubes.
4:42 Rachel Feltman? Always start with tubes. So one of the points I make in the dating and courtship chapter of my book, Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex, available wherever books are sold.
4:52 Speaker 06 And you should read it.
4:55 Rachel Feltman? Or you can listen to me read it if you get the audiobook. So one of the points I make is that whatever the hot new technology is, people will probably find a way to use it for dating and also for making porn. But that's another chapter of the book that we're not talking about today. So for instance, in the eighties, people would go into little studios and record their bios on VHS tapes that could be sent around to prospective partners. And you can actually find examples of this on like found footage sites. And it's pretty delightful and awful, you know?
5:29 Speaker 06 And I believe in episode of Full House.
5:32 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
5:32 Speaker 06 Like the New Year's Eve one or something.
5:34 Rachel Feltman? It definitely showed up on, on some sitcoms.
5:36 Speaker 06 Time capsule. Yeah.
5:37 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And in the 1700s, a woman named Helen Morrison put out what might be the first personal ad in her local paper, looking for a husband. According to some sources, the mayor of her town then had her committed for a month in response. But by the 19th and 20th century. That's true. What didn't they commit women for?
5:58 Speaker 06 I was gonna say, that's, that seems pretty light on the, you know.
6:01 Rachel Feltman? Exactly. Only a month.
6:03 Speaker 06 Yeah. Only one month? Oh, come on. Slap on the wrist.
6:06 Rachel Feltman? But by the 19th and 20th century, that was a very common practice. If you look back at newspapers from that time, people are just single and ready to mingle, lot of lonely hearts. So like I said, if, if a technology exists, people are probably gonna find out how to use it for stuff related to sex. But what about dating with pneumatic tubes?
6:30 Speaker 05 Yes.
6:32 Rachel Feltman? So first, a little bit about the tubes in question. If you've never gone through a bank or a pharmacy drive through, which it occurs to me that some people may simply not have done, a pneumatic tube is a system that propels cylindrical containers around using compressed air or vacuums or a combination thereof.
6:54 Speaker 05 It's very steampunk.
6:55 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
6:56 Speaker 05 Yes.
6:57 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, and they were invented in 1799 and really took off in the Victorian era, first for the purpose of sending telegrams from dispatch stations to nearby buildings. So sort of expanding the range of where a telegraph station could insta-deliver a message to without sending somebody out on foot. They were also really big at the stock exchange, starting in the 1800s, again, for just like quick communication. Anything you could put on a piece of paper, you could get to someone really fast with a pneumatic tube. And one fun use in London in the late 1800s was that there was a tube between the Aberdeen Fish Market office and the main post office because fish go bad really quickly.
7:42 Rachel Feltman? So being able to rapidly communicate about the stock and who wanted to buy them was huge for Aberdeen Fish Market. That's like, sometimes at the bank, they would put a little lollipop in there. Yeah. This is a little bit smellier, but you know, more nutritious, that's for sure. Yeah, well, I don't think they would actually put the fish themselves in. No, just, just correspondence reefish. Got it. My, my brain went a little crazy there.
8:08 Speaker 05 Me too, no. I did the same, I was like, yeah, the fish would go bad really fast. So they put the fish in the pneumatic tubes to get them there really quickly.
8:16 Rachel Feltman? Actually, since you mention it, like, one of the things that comes up a lot when you research pneumatic tubes is that it's essentially the same technology that they use in fish cannons, where they like propel the fish over dams. So we do kind of put fish in pneumatic tubes all the time. The fish put themselves in there. I'm sorry I brought us on that journey. Apologies. No, never, never apologize for sending us on a journey. Retail stores would, would also have them so salespeople could like leave tasks like making change and referencing customers' credit records to other employees in a centralized location. And it also just like meant that there wasn't a ton of money in the cash register
8:57 Rachel Feltman? upfront, which was especially good when department stores used to kind of literally be people standing at like individual tables and sort of, you know, doing that very old timey one on one salesmanship. It's, it's good that they didn't also have to carry around a bunch of money. They were doing enough stuff. And one, one place where pneumatic tubes really took off was in sending, at one point, a bunch of postal systems, including the USPS, were using a lot of pneumatic tubes. According to a 1930 issue of Popular Science, once the USPS even shipped a sick cat through the tubes to a veterinarian. Oh, God. And apparently, though, actually, I'm not sure it was the USPS. It may have been
9:40 Rachel Feltman? a different postal service. But anyway, definitely a postal service. And apparently he arrived just fine and he jumped out of the canister. And the quote is something like, "with a speed approaching the tubes themselves."
9:53 Rachel Feltman? I can imagine that cat was a little peeved. Yes. If I knew anything about cats. He wasn't, he wasn't thrilled, but he did get to the vet. So that's good. That's good. And yeah, pneumatic tubes might seem kind of silly, but they were way faster than other methods of delivering mail and they were faster than telegrams. And the, but the rise of the telephone basically made the point of instant mail kind of moot. Though one thing I think it's important to note is that pneumatic tubes would still be faster today than all the ways we have of getting and sending packages. And it would probably be a way less chaotic and exploitative way for us to feed our desire for instant delivery. And definitely it has a lower carbon footprint than everything being, you know, brought
10:36 Rachel Feltman? around by Amazon trucks that make that horrible screeching noise when they drive by. But the issue is the high cost of putting in the system. So, you know, for a while pneumatic tubes. Were like the hot thing because there was simply no other way to pretty much instantly send a message or small package across town. Then, once we got over that, because we were like, you can just pick up the phone, then we abandoned the idea of pneumatic tubes. And now, it truly would probably be good for us to get back into them, but the sort of cost of entry is too high. That being said, there are several places where pneumatic tubes are used, which I will get to in a second.
11:16 Rachel Feltman? There were a lot of proposals and even rails put down for blowing human passengers through pneumatic tubes. Of course, protected in little capsules, but some, while some of those capsules were like train car style, others showed people like laying down like they were in a coffin and just getting, just getting shot through.
11:33 Speaker 05 At a world's fair at some point?
11:35 Rachel Feltman? I think so, yeah. Yeah, there were definitely.
11:37 Speaker 05 I do remember reading about this.
11:39 Rachel Feltman? There were demonstrations. And it seems like basically what happened is like similar to the telephone thing. It just didn't get far enough along before like the much simpler idea of mass rail travel took off. Though, don't tell Elon that because Hyperloop is basically a pneumatic tube. But again, putting in the systems is just like a huge cost and we have trains, trains exist.
12:04 Speaker 05 I remember when I was researching the New York City subway system and like how they made decisions about like, hey, is it going to be steam trains? Is it going to be electric? Like, how are we going to do this? They considered pneumatic tubes and a pneumatic train. And I think there was actually, I think there actually was a pneumatic like people mover in between a couple of blocks in like downtown New York.
12:28 Rachel Feltman? Like as a prototype or something early on?
12:31 Speaker 05 Yeah.
12:31 Rachel Feltman? Oh.
12:32 Speaker 05 Yeah. And it, they couldn't keep the seal. Like it was not reasonable.
12:38 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, pneumatic tubes definitely way more practical for non-living, smaller objects. Though apparently up to and including cat.
12:45 Speaker 05 Cats, yeah. It's like lollipop up to cat. That's like your solid, you know, that's your scale.
12:52 Rachel Feltman? There are also systems that collect trash using pneumatic tubes. That started in Sweden in the 1960s, but they're still used in several places, including in the Magic Kingdom in Disney World, plus on Roosevelt Island, where they manage the trash of more than 10,000 people. And in Stockholm, there's like 120,000 households that have these vacuum tubes for taking their trash, and it means there are no trash trucks. And according to the Swedish company that takes care of them in Sweden, they can curb emissions by as much as 90% just by getting rid of sort of the above-ground moving of waste. And pneumatic tubes are still really common in hospitals.
13:34 Rachel Feltman? That's, that's one place where a technology for, you know, getting specimens and X-rays and notes across the building really fast didn't emerge in time to supplant the pneumatic tube. So instead, the pneumatic tube technology has just gotten better and better. So they still are there, you know, vacuuming and blowing away. But my favorite use of pneumatic tubes from history is that people used to use them to flirt at their club.
14:04 Speaker 06 Where we're all at.
14:05 Rachel Feltman? Adam Driver. Right. Or, yeah, or Broad City. But I was thinking of Adam Driver in Megalopolis.
14:11 Speaker 06 That makes more sense. That makes more steampunk sense.
14:16 Rachel Feltman? So in a 2017 Atlas Obscura article, Michael Waters shared how nightclub patrons in Berlin, starting in the 1920s, used pneumatic tubes to send messages to other tables. The Rezzi and the Femina were two clubs that were said to have spearheaded this trend. The Rezzi had live-
14:33 Speaker 05 Wait, other, so other tables at the same club?
14:36 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
14:37 Speaker 06 Or between, okay.
14:38 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
14:38 Speaker 05 So this is just like, instead of getting up and walking over to a table-
14:42 Rachel Feltman? Or sending a drink. So here's the idea. Like, let me set the scene. You're at a club. If you're at the Rezzi, they have live music, space for 1,000 people. You're sitting at your table. It's very Cabaret style. You know, you're, you're there for a show. They apparently had this very popular show starting in 1928 with like, they called it a water- Jet ballet or something and it had like flashing lights. It was like the Bellagio, but inside in 1928 in Berlin. Why isn't that a musical? Right? Well. Anyway, another, another journey, but whoa. Yeah. So yeah, picture this. You're, you're truly seated for a show. It's not like a get up and mosh club and everyone's table has a glowing light above it with a number and you have phones
15:26 Rachel Feltman? and pneumatic tubes. So if you see a cutie from across the way, I don't think the idea is that instead of talking to them in person, you send a message, but you might get things going while you're sitting at your respective tables, just like send a cheeky little hello. And then, you know, you can also, that can also be the whole activity. You can just sort of be flirting with each other in a very low stakes way from across the club all night, if that's what you want. But then of course, the evening can go wherever you want it to. So it's texting? Yes, it is texting. It's tube texting. It's tube texting. I like that. And it's, it's also sort of like airdropping because you can tube text with a stranger just because you see them across the way. But the tubes were stylized to look like golden snakes.
16:08 Rachel Feltman? So you like put your message in a snake mouth. It's like very sexy stuff, honestly. And yeah, the, the phones at tables were a big thing. You actually, I didn't realize this, but in Cabaret, there's the telephone song that like has people communicating over telephone. And I'm very familiar with Cabaret. Like I, I did tech for a production my dad was in when I was a kid and it never occurred to me like, oh, why are there phones at their tables? Why is this? I, you know, it didn't occur to me that that they were referencing a real popular thing that happened in these, in these Weimar clubs. To be fair, there's a, a lot in that musical.
16:48 Rachel Feltman? That you should ask questions about. Yeah. And then you go, okay, fine. Yeah, yeah. You could even apparently ask the switchboard, you could, you know, write, write something down and put it in the tube and the switchboard could send another patron a gift from a list of available options. So you could really. That's like on Twitch. Yeah, yeah, totally. It's like streaming gifts. Yeah. What is that called? But I, I know what you mean.
17:14 Speaker 06 That's so much nicer than where my brain went. My brain went right to the Hunger Games and like airdropping.
17:21 Speaker 06 Really?
17:21 Rachel Feltman? No.
17:22 Speaker 06 But yeah, that sounds worse. That sounds a lot nicer. Never mind.
17:25 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Well, Feminina was twice as big and had more than 225 table telephones with instructions in German and English. So it was very, very tourist and expat friendly. Though apparently one note that I found really funny, Rezzi at least, did have women working in the switchboard room who would censor anything too obscene. I wasn't able to find a, like, primary source to say sort of what their guidelines were. I would truly love to know that, but I imagine, like, if you sent, like, an unsolicited sketch of your penis, they'd be like, "No, keep it." But, but the thing is that, like, the Weimar Republic was really, it was a very sexy
18:06 Rachel Feltman? time. People were very cool. So I can't imagine that the censors were, were total drips about it. I think it was truly, like, getting rid of trolls, which sounds so nice. Like, I would love it.
18:19 Speaker 06 Yeah.
18:20 Rachel Feltman? I would be so much more on board for strangers feeling empowered to flirt with me if there was some woman, like, checking it to be like, "I think, I think she'll be into this. I think this is worth sending through." So, bring it back, honestly.
18:35 Speaker 06 Almost like a chaperone on a date, but not, not as creepy or not as, you know, it's like a chaperone that has your real best interests in mind, not just like your, your virtue or something.
18:46 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, no, it's a, a wingwoman content moderator.
18:49 Speaker 06 There you go. Yeah, yeah.
18:50 Rachel Feltman? Yes. Hopefully who is highly paid. I would take that job. That honestly sounds like a great job. Yeah. You'd be in every- Great gossip.
18:57 Speaker 06 Oh, God. You'd be in everybody's business.
18:59 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah. You could be so, it would satisfy the nosiness so much. Absolutely.
19:03 Speaker 06 It would be like hearing confession without having to be a priest, kind of.
19:07 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. I do know that there's, there is at least one restaurant, there's a fondue place in the West Village that has nights where they do, like,
19:19 Rachel Feltman? Like past messages where it's like you can send a message to any table on a scrap of paper, which I didn't realize is probably trying to evoke this because I think it was also a thing in Paris for a while. But again, bring if, if there are pneumatic tubes, I'm not interested.
19:37 Speaker 06 So that's why we're not recording this there because it's phones. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense.
19:43 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And I will just end by saying this is not the only romantic tube usage I found on record. On Valentine's Day 2020, the Government Communications Headquarters, which is an intelligence agency in the UK, revealed that back in the 1950s, a linguist who worked there used the communication tubes to send a proposal to his girlfriend. Apparently, he was shy and kind of afraid to ask her in person. And she worked as an analyst on the Soviet Air Force. So like, it does sound like she was probably like, you know, kind of a boss. So I get it. He was intimidated. He should be so lucky. Apparently, she walked over to accept in person after receiving her pneumatic proposal.
20:25 Rachel Feltman? And according to historians that work for, you know, this intelligence agency, agents also like to send each other eclairs because they fit perfectly in the pneumatic tube containers.
20:36 Speaker 06 I was gonna say it's tube shaped.
20:40 Rachel Feltman? And I really love that, especially it just makes it better that they were intelligence agents. Like, it's really, uh, where's that movie?
20:50 Speaker 06 The movie ideas we come up with on this podcast alone.
20:53 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, goldmine.
20:55 Speaker 06 Goldmine.
20:56 Rachel Feltman? So yeah, that's, that's a history of pneumatic tubes and using them to get laid. And again, I really think like we should bring back this model at the club. And we should also definitely like reconsider putting in some pneumatic tube systems for all of our like DoorDash deliveries because we just got the little robo delivery guys in Jersey City and they are, they're not doing well. We had a rainstorm the other day, the, the flooded street.
21:32 Rachel Feltman? And it was, I'm not going to say it was sad because honestly, there was something kind of satisfying about it, but it did. I was like, wow, that person's food is going to be cold. This is not the solution we've been told. So anyway, pneumatic tubes. Have we considered a series of tubes? That's my pitch.
21:52 Speaker 06 That's your pitch to make society better?
21:54 Speaker 05 I buy it. Honestly, more tube-based everything, I think, is the answer.
22:00 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
22:00 Speaker 05 It also would, having a tube-based infrastructure would lead to more walkable cities and towns. Oh, yeah. Yep. It would reduce smog.
22:09 Rachel Feltman? Get cars off the road, get tubes in the ground.
22:14 Speaker 05 Yeah. Order your thing on, on Amazon and go walk to the tube office to collect it.
22:22 Rachel Feltman? All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.
22:31 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
22:55 Speaker 01 I used to wonder what I missed anytime I stepped out of the shop, but with AT&T Business Wireless, my signal stays strong no matter where the day takes me. Like right now, I'm meeting a photography client out here, but I still have a reliable connection, even though I have no idea where I am right now.
23:16 Speaker 02 Keep your business connected with AT&T Business Wireless. Visit att.com/5gnetwork. When the connection matters, it has to be AT&T.
23:26 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, host of the Hyperfixed Podcast. Each week, we take listeners' problems and try to solve them for them. Problems like, I'm 30 and I'm scared to drive in New York, or, why can't I adjust the volume of my car stereo when I'm in reverse? We also solve non-car related problems. If you have a problem, not only will we fix it, we'll expose the hidden systems that caused that problem in the first place. That's the Hyperfixed Podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you find podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
24:05 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back and Flora is gonna tell us about some rat sommeliers.
24:14 Speaker 06 Kind of like we said at the top, obviously, the movie Ratatouille is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this study. My youngest niece actually calls that movie Mouse Cook, which, for a toddler, that's a pretty solid description.
24:30 Rachel Feltman? All I can think of is Everything Everywhere All at Once and Ratatouille.
24:33 Speaker 06 Yes.
24:35 Rachel Feltman? Ratatouille?
24:36 Speaker 06 Yes, Ratatouille. Yeah, I think that was probably my favorite part of that movie.
24:42 Rachel Feltman? Many great parts, but that was like-
24:44 Speaker 06 That was, because it was just like, what? It was so perfect. But yeah, so Ratatouille came out 2007. For those, if you don't know, a mouse can cook amazing food and ends up with a nice little restaurant in Paris. Now, these rats aren't exactly cooking yet, but they might be able to help tell wines apart. This research was published earlier this year in the journal Animal Cognition, and it found that the rats could actually successfully tell the difference between two varieties of white wine. Would either of you like to venture a guess as to which varieties of white wine? There's a lot, so.
25:26 Rachel Feltman? Maybe one is Chardonnay, because I feel like that's the oakiness could, I believe, that a rat could distinguish that. And then, truly, I have no idea what the other one would be. Something basic, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio.
25:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, I was gonna say Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, because those just feel like the two most opposite tasting white wines.
25:48 Speaker 06 You got one. They were Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc. I know, I first thought that it was gonna be Chardonnay as well, because of like that, you know, like that's, I mean, I'm not a wino, but if I'm gonna drink white wine, like that's kind of the, Chardonnay is kind of the one that like, I find has like, the best taste of the white, of white wines. Anyway, Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc. Um, rats have about 1,200 genes that function as smell receptors compared to 400 for humans. So quite a bit more, but we kind of have, you know, much higher levels of cognitive processing. So we kind of.
26:25 Rachel Feltman? It's not the smell genes, it's what you do with them.
26:28 Speaker 06 Do it. Exactly, Rachel. Um, yeah, basically, we have words that we can use to talk about why, you know, wine, you know, bouquet, mouth feel, flavor profile, all of that, that kind of makes up for our lack of smeller genes when it comes compared to rats. This team from the University of Trento, University of Lincoln, University of London, and the University of Vienna, so a nice little international group of researchers, used a type of test called a go no-go scenario in the lab. Go no-go scenarios basically mean that the subject in the lab experiment has to make a decision in order to move on to the next stage. And this one was designed to see if the rats could learn and detect various odor categories
27:12 Speaker 06 in a more complex setup. They took nine adult male domesticated rats who had been previously trained on another odor categorization task. So they kind of already knew that their smellers worked. They weren't just picking rats that maybe were very good at mazes. They wanted to go with ones who had at least some experience in doing smell-based tests. For this new task, they were trained to discriminate between the wines with the two distinct grape varieties, riesling or Sauvignon Blanc. So they were each assigned a variety. So if the rat was training on riesling, it would receive a reward if it selected the riesling. But if it selected the incorrect one, it would not get the reward. So it wouldn't be shocked or anything. It wasn't like that. It was just rewarded on if they got something.
27:56 Rachel Feltman? Also, they weren't drinking the wine. That, for some reason, I was expecting that, but now that I'm thinking it through, I'm like, that would have been really bad.
28:05 Speaker 06 That would have been horrible.
28:06 Rachel Feltman? You can't, you can't give lab mice a bunch of wine, so.
28:10 Speaker 06 No, only, only in Pixar, only in Pixar and Disney movies can you know. They were just going by smell.
28:16 Rachel Feltman? A little bit as a treat.
28:17 Speaker 05 The rats can have a little wine as a treat.
28:19 Speaker 06 Like, right. At the, at the end of the test, you could have, have the wine as a treat on Friday afternoon.
28:25 Speaker 05 But also, also rodents actually eat a lot, end up consuming a lot of fermented fruit, which typically alcohol.
28:34 Speaker 06 Right, right.
28:35 Rachel Feltman? They can party.
28:36 Speaker 06 They can, rodents can party.
28:39 Speaker 06 So they were exposed to multiple different types of these wines from distinct vintages and places of origin. So it was, you know, Rieslings from all sorts of, all sorts of different countries and fields. Now, the Riesling group included rats named Badger, Hero, Edison, and Sean. They were also numbered. The important data we need. The important data we need. I mean, I was gonna, I was gonna put the numbers in there too, but I'm just going with the names. You're gonna remember that. You're not gonna remember Rat Number Three. And the Sauvignon Blanc group included Darren, Lionel, Peanuts, Thomas, and Schrodinger. Solid rat names. Real mix of, real mix of acceptable rat. Yeah, acceptable rat names, like Peanuts and Thomas?
29:25 Speaker 06 Why not? No Remy's, or Emile, or, you know, none of the rats from the movie, which I think they were probably like, ah, cliche at this point. We can't do that. Everyone's expecting this rat to be named Remy. So during the training stage of the experiment, each of the nine rats was put into a box that had a little nose poke hole and two levers. There was also a little carousel of eight paper cups, which is adorable. I will include a, a graphic description of the experiment in the show notes. This little carousel with the eight cups was right at the nose poke hole. There were four Sauvignon Blancs and four Rieslings. The rats were then conditioned to expect a treat when one
30:06 Speaker 06 type, the type in their group, was present. This was to teach them the aromas to associate with each type of wine. This training step continued until the rats could get 80% correct responses for at least three consecutive training sessions. So quite a while. They did that, you know, this was the kind of test that they did multiple times to see, you know, to kind of weed out that they could do it. And obviously, after training, comes the test. The testing stage was basically the same setup, except after about five seconds, they were timed, which I don't know if you're like me, but timed tests, just, so hats off to these rats for doing that. After five seconds, the rats were rewarded with a sugar pellet
30:47 Speaker 06 if they correct, if they pressed the correct lever, so their specific wine group. If they, and they would get a reward if they got that right. If they pressed the wrong lever, the lever itself would be retracted and there would be kind of a light that shined, and then they did not get their reward. I know. I always, I mean, even though they're not getting it right, that's why I couldn't do this kind of work. I would, I would still feel bad and be like, here you go. Take the wine anyway, or take the sugar pellet anyway. Not the wine. Again, don't give rats wine.
31:16 Speaker 05 I, I have a question. Why?
31:20 Speaker 06 We're getting to that.
31:23 Speaker 06 We're getting to that. First, more, most importantly, the results. Everyone always wants to know, well, how did they do? They were generally able to distinguish between the two types of wine that they were trained on. They most frequently chose the lever for the wines that matched the variety that they were rewarded with. And then, once they kind of got that sense that they could do this, they took that testing stage one step further to see if they could detect them among new wines. So they introduced, you know, another novel confounding variable to see, to see how well they did. While the rat Sommeliers correctly distinguished 94% of the trained wines and only 65% of the new wines, they did get better at testing
32:07 Speaker 06 these new wines, the more they were exposed to it. So yes, the, yes, it did decrease when they were exposed to wines that they weren't trained on, but they did, they did show some signs of improvement when, you know, some other confounding variables were thrown into the mix. In total, and we're gonna, we're gonna single out a rat here. So, you know, get ready. Eight out of the nine rats were more likely to recognize the novel wines, and six actually showed some significant levels of discernment. So six out of nine, not, not bad. That's, that's, that's, that's a pretty good, that's a pretty good success ratio. The one who stood out here a little bit was Peanuts. Peanuts was the only one
32:50 Speaker 06 out of the nine that fully completed the training phase, but then had a little bit of a strange response during the testing.
32:59 Speaker 06 Unlike the others, he did not successfully identify the new wines. Instead, he showed a higher rate of incorrect responses and pressed the lever for one of, for the more non, non rewarded wines than in the rewarded category. So he pressed more for Riesling, despite being on Team Sauvignon Blanc.
33:21 Speaker 06 The authors believe that Peanuts' results actually indicates that he has some natural differences in his olfactory processing system or differences in memory. He might just have a more discerning sense of smell and appreciate the different elements of each variety of reward of each variety of the reward in and of itself. So while he's not named Remy, because that would have definitely been, you know, a little, you know, a little bit on the nose, Peanuts might be a little bit more like the fictional Remy in that he has a little bit more of an appreciation of different smells and different aromas within the wine grapes.
34:01 Speaker 06 Yes. So in general, this just kind of, this gets back to Kate's question, which is always the question when you read a fun study like this of like, all right, why? Why, why did we devote some lab time to this?
34:13 Speaker 05 Unless it is a very complicated way to cheat on wine tasting.
34:19 Speaker 06 Right, right. To have like a little, you know, kind of like Ratatouille style, you know, the rat could be telling you, "The bouquet is very earthy," you know, so you could sound wise at a, at a, at a wine tasting.
34:30 Speaker 05 You could just, you can be blindfolded and sip a glass of mystery white wine, put it under the table to your rat, and the rat can tug on your shirt.
34:39 Speaker 06 And be like-
34:39 Speaker 05 You could be like, "Sauvignon Blanc, Sauvignon Blanc," but not peanuts. Don't bring peanuts to the wine tasting.
34:45 Speaker 06 Well, you could bring peanuts, but he would just probably get overwhelmed and all excited because he would like everything.
34:51 Speaker 05 I love peanuts.
34:53 Speaker 06 Anyway, so this just shows that there is a complex olfactory categorization, or the ability to categorize and ID something by smell doesn't necessarily need language. And it could be more widespread in non-human animals, like how we said rats have 1,200 smell receptor genes, humans have 400, we make up for it in our language. This shows that while yes, that is still true, it might not be quite as strong, and they, they might actually have just as, pretty complicated olfactory categorization. In future experiments, because we need to know more, always, the team hopes to test to see if rats could maybe tell wines apart by region or origin, kind of like we were just- fantasizing about in, you know, a perfect world, we'd have our little rat sommelier,
35:38 Speaker 06 let it help us sound cool at wine tastings. And while, again, a rat sommelier is not exactly going to be selecting wine the next time you go out to eat, this kind of research shows to the, you know, the wide variety of skills and how a rat's wide variety of skills and how there is so much more to these rodents than their bad reputation. So justice for rats, justice for peanuts, rats as somms, rats as sommeliers.
36:09 Rachel Feltman? Wow.
36:09 Speaker 05 I love it. Let's do Rat Tattooie 2.
36:11 Speaker 06 Yeah. There we go.
36:12 Speaker 05 Oh, wait, they have one already.
36:14 Speaker 06 Do they?
36:15 Speaker 05 Probably. Why wouldn't they?
36:17 Speaker 06 You're right.
36:19 Rachel Feltman? All right, we're going to take one more break and then we'll be back with one more fact.
36:27 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.
36:51 Speaker 01 I used to wonder what I missed anytime I stepped out of the shop, but with AT&T Business Wireless, my signal stays strong no matter where the day takes me. Like right now, I'm meeting a photography client out here. But I still have a reliable connection, even though I have no idea where I am right now.
37:12 Speaker 02 Keep your business connected with AT&T Business Wireless. Visit att.com/5gnetwork. When the connection matters, it has to be AT&T.
37:28 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And Kate, upset me, please.
37:33 Speaker 06 Yeah, please.
37:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, get ready to live where I've been living for the last year, which is extreme rage. So for context, I get severe period cramps. I have since I was 14. And for the last year, I've been making the podcast Cramped, where I try to find answers to what I think are very basic questions about my body and my cramps. Turns out, when you try to look into these basic questions and get them answered, There may not be answers out there because of how female bodies are treated in the medical system. So obviously, if we're talking about severe period pain, my question was, what's causing it? And I've had this question for 22 years. What, I'm in pain, what is
38:18 Speaker 05 causing this pain? Like, truly, what is happening inside my body? So I went ahead, I went and did the research, I looked up the medical papers, I, you know, found the best information that the internet could give me. And I'm curious, do you two know what causes period pain?
38:38 Rachel Feltman? I mean, the thing that I assume is what turned out to be wrong is what I've always told is that it's contractions of
38:45 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:45 Rachel Feltman? the uterus. Though I did, there's, there's so much that is just like, I got to adulthood and then realized that what I was told in middle school, I'm like, wait, let me, should I double check that? That it's like, completely wrong? So anyway, I assume that's wrong.
39:07 Speaker 05 Well, yeah, it's not completely right, at least. So based on what I could find on the internet and in medical papers, I learned about something called prostaglandins, which are released when your progesterone dips, right before you get your period. So prost, these little, they're not exactly hormones, but they're like hormones in that they are messengers. They get released when you have that progesterone dip. The prostaglandins bind with receptors in your uterine muscle, and they basically just tell the uterine muscle to constrict or cramp. And that muscle constriction, that squeezing, is what starts your period. It squeezes the blood out of your uterus. And what all the medical papers
39:50 Speaker 05 say is that severe period pain is what happens when there are too many prostaglandins, and they are telling your uterus, because the normal way for a muscle to contract, right, is it contracts, and then releases, and then contracts, and then releases. That's how all our muscles work. And that's so that blood, oxygenated blood can get back to that muscle fiber and, you know, deliver it oxygen. If a muscle squeezes and keeps squeezing, it doesn't relax and then squeeze again. Uh, this actually keeps it. It basically is squeezing so tight that oxygenated blood can't get to that muscle.
40:28 Speaker 06 Hmm.
40:29 Speaker 05 And then what happens is something called ischemia, which is a big medical word, but it basically is the word for a charlie horse.
40:38 Speaker 06 Right.
40:38 Speaker 05 If your muscle is squeezed so tight that fresh oxygen can't get to it, your body reads that as pain because the muscle will die if it doesn't get oxygen. And so it wants to bring your attention to it. And so if that's like in your arm, you can kind of shake your arm out. Uh, but you can't really do that with your uterus. Um, and so that's, uh, the medical community has since the 1970s, which is when prostaglandins were discovered. Since the 1970s, that has been like, that's what is causing period pain. So also that is why ibuprofen and other NSAIDs work often on period pain. Because NSAIDs like ibuprofen are prostaglandin blockers.
41:22 Speaker 06 Hmm. Okay.
41:24 Speaker 05 So they actually like block the, they lower production of prostaglandin and they also block the prostaglandin from connecting to the receptors in the muscles. Something I learned researching for this podcast though, is that the most effective way to take ibuprofen or any NSAIDs is actually before you're cramping. So up to 48 hours before you expect to get your period. If you get severe period pain, you can start taking ibuprofen and/or any other NSAID and it will actually like reduce the level of prostaglandin that gets produced in the first place.
42:02 Speaker 06 That's really cool.
42:03 Speaker 05 For some of us, yeah, for some of us like me, oh, sorry, go ahead.
42:06 Speaker 06 It makes a lot. Well, so I'd get pretty bad migraines. And when I would get headaches as a kid, my mom would always say, take it before, take your medicine before it gets to you. So it doesn't get ahead of you. Like, that was like my little kind of way of remembering it because like once it's like, it's kind of like extreme thirst or extreme hunger. Once it gets to a certain point, it's too far gone and it can't, it can't work.
42:29 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so for a lot of people like me who get severe period pain, once it gets to a certain point, you start throwing up and you can't keep meds down. And so it's too late. I have a friend who calls this her pill window between when cramps start and when throwing up starts. It's like, you gotta get something in there. But yeah, the most effective way to take ibuprofen or any other NSAID is before the pain starts, which is counterintuitive, but that's the best way. So hopefully that can help somebody out there. But it turns out, this may not be as true. The ibuprofen thing is true, but
43:09 Speaker 05 the prostaglandins and ischemia being the cause of all period pain, not true. And I learned this by taking a field trip to a lab in Evanston, Illinois called the G Y R L lab, the gynecology research lab, which spells girl. And it is a lab that it is a lab that gets NIH funding to study period pain. And they are doing what I thought was really basic research. But it's just happening now.
43:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
43:43 Speaker 05 What so one of the
43:44 Speaker 06 How now? Like, how many? I mean, not to put you on the spot with like, an exact number of years, but like, how now are we talking?
43:53 Speaker 05 The the the study where they are looking into the mechanism of period pain, which is like, medical speak for what's causing this period pain, has been going on for a couple of years. But it started very recently.
44:07 Speaker 06 Wow. Okay, okay.
44:09 Speaker 05 Yeah. And so when I, oh, yeah, get ready. When I explain to you how this study works, you're gonna be like, really? We don't know that? Um, so what they are doing is they are having people who are cramping, people who are actively having dysmenorrhea come into the lab, go into an MRI.
44:30 Rachel Feltman? To be like, what's literally just what's happening?
44:33 Speaker 05 Well, and that part has been done before. The part that hasn't been done before is they are giving the person who is cramping a little bulb to squeeze when they are feeling pain.
44:46 Rachel Feltman? Hmm.
44:47 Speaker 05 So they can take the MRI image of what the uterus is doing and what is happening inside the body and match it up to when the person says they are experiencing pain. Because nobody ever looked at that before.
45:02 Rachel Feltman? That's wild. Once you're getting somebody in the MRI to not be like,
45:08 Speaker 05 And also, does it hurt?
45:10 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah.
45:12 Speaker 05 Exactly. And so what would you expect to see?
45:16 Rachel Feltman? I guess I would expect that after
45:22 Rachel Feltman? a prolonged, you know, squeezing of the muscle, people start to have the pain. Or when the muscle is squeezing, sometimes maybe, but yeah.
45:34 Speaker 05 Yeah. And that's not what they find.
45:37 Rachel Feltman? What?
45:38 Speaker 05 So what they find is that the uterine, the, the contractile event, they call it, where the uterus is actually squeezing is actually pretty long, like 90 seconds. But the amount of time that someone is squeezing the bulb and saying they are in pain, they squeeze it, they hold it until they are not in as much pain and then they release it. And those squeezes are, first of all, different for everyone. That's the thing that they are finding across the board is everyone is experiencing period pain very differently. And for some people, they are only experiencing pain for maybe like 30 seconds. While the uterus is squeezing that whole time. Some people are experiencing pain before the uterine contraction starts.
46:24 Speaker 05 Some people are experiencing pain in the middle and some people are experiencing pain after it ends. So clearly, something is going on beyond just the uterus contracting and they have theories, but they're not totally sure yet. So one theory is that your is that the body and the other muscles near the uterus can like feel a cramp coming and kind of like brace themselves and tighten. Yeah. Exactly. And that may be what contributes to the pain before the uterine cramp. It could be that the that after the uterine cramp, blood rushing in, so what's called reperfusion, actually creates pain. Right.
47:08 Speaker 05 And it could be something totally different. It could have something to do with how our brains interpret the signals from our organs. Because while we know a lot about the kind of pain where you touch a stove and it hurts, we know a lot about those pain signals. We don't know a lot about what's called visceral pain, which is like organ sensation, like how we feel what's happening in our organs. And so it could be something crazy happening with the the pain pathways and the signals and how our brain is interpreting what's happening in our organs. Wow. The other, like a sort of add, a sort of bonus is they've done additional research
47:49 Speaker 05 at this lab into what's called NSAID resistant dysmenorrhea. Dysmenorrhea is just the medical term for period pain. So when you take ibuprofen and it doesn't work and nothing happens, which some people experience that all the time. Some people, it'll work sometimes, it won't work other times. But about 25% of people who have severe cramping have NSAID resistant dysmenorrhea. So this is a huge problem because we don't really have alternative treatments, right? We kind of just throw NSAIDs at period cramps. And if that doesn't work, you're kind of up a creek. And they found something really crazy, which is they gave some people NSAIDs.
48:32 Speaker 05 They watched them take the pills, did a blood draw 90 minutes later, tested the blood. No sign of the NSAIDs.
48:41 Speaker 06 No sign after 90 minutes.
48:44 Speaker 05 Mm hmm.
48:44 Speaker 06 Wow.
48:45 Speaker 05 And they confirmed it. They like had it tested by an independent lab and yeah, no, no sign of the NSAIDs in the bloodstream, which so then it's like, where did they go? What happened?
48:58 Speaker 06 Did they fall out?
48:59 Speaker 05 Yeah. Exactly. And so
49:01 Speaker 06 Wow.
49:02 Speaker 05 there's something happening here that we don't understand, that we don't know yet. And because we are decades and decades behind in our research into female bodies, this will probably remain a mystery for a little while longer. But the good news is the folks at the G I R L lab, as well as countless teams across the country, not countless, there's not that many of them. There are other teams across the country also looking into the mechanisms of period pain, whether they are caused by vaginal microbiome changes. Likely there are lots and lots of different factors. And every person feeling period pain is feeling it for slightly different reasons. Just like the way we feel a cold or the way we get a stomach bug. It's different in every single person.
49:46 Speaker 05 So hopefully they have told me that realistically in the next 10 to 15 years, there will be new treatments and more targeted treatments for severe period pain, which is very cool.
49:57 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, that's, that's really cool.
49:59 Speaker 06 Maybe around the same time that we can give more than just a more than just an ibuprofen for an IUD insertion, because that also doesn't really work.
50:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, nope. That's a, that is a whole it's connected. Obviously it's connected.
50:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
50:19 Speaker 05 But yeah, it's not taken seriously. It's not considered an invasive procedure. And that is when I got an IUD put in, I was like, oh, is it going to hurt? And they were like, oh, it'll just be some cramping pain. And I was like, who's cramping?
50:34 Speaker 05 Cause if it's mine, absolutely not.
50:36 Speaker 06 It's mine, bye, I'm out.
50:38 Speaker 05 Yeah.
50:40 Rachel Feltman? Wow. Well, Kate, thanks so much for for sharing some of what you've learned while making crammed. And I'm sure our listeners are gonna rush to check out the rest of it. And thanks so much for coming on today.
50:54 Speaker 05 Thank you. Thank you for sharing your your tube and rat thoughts.
51:00 Speaker 05 It's what we do. It's what we do.
51:03 Rachel Feltman? The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Saltman, 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.
51:35 Speaker 07 What if you could run your Oracle databases everywhere you run your business? Good news, you can. Oracle AI Database runs in every major cloud, so you can use your live data for all your AI and analytics needs. Learn more at oracle.com/migrate.
51:50 Speaker 08 If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to your Nana. But she'd probably just tell you how she insured her couch from stains by covering it with plastic. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They'll give you a different kind of warm and fuzzy with personalized assistance for all your insurance needs, like how you could be saving on your policies. So let your Nana cover her couch in plastic and let a local GEICO agent help cover you, but not in plastic. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit geico.com/local.
Previous The Poison King, the Seismic DONK, Contagious Peeing Next Time Balls, Bug Culture, Traffic Mimes Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated