Favorite Superstitions Explained & Weird Science Quirks – SYSK Choice

Apologizing seems like the obvious thing to do when you’ve done something wrong. It’s supposed to make things right—and make you feel better. But interestingly, there’s something else that can feel even better than saying “I’m sorry”… and many people do it without even realizing why. https://www.npr.org/2013/04/01/175714511/why-not-apologizing-makes-you-feel-better Every culture has superstitions—lucky charms, rituals, taboos, and beliefs that don’t seem to make logical sense. By definition, they’re irrational. So why do they persist? Why do otherwise rational people still avoid walking under ladders, knock on wood, or carry lucky objects? Heather Alexander, author of The Good Luck Book: A Celebration of Global Traditions, Superstitions, and Folklore (https://amzn.to/3TUWIAe), explains where superstitions come from, why they endure across cultures, and what they reveal about how humans think, cope with uncertainty, and try to influence the uncontrollable. Science isn’t just about big breakthroughs—it’s also full of strange, unexpected discoveries that challenge what we think we know. Some of them sound almost unbelievable: creatures used to heal wounds, simple remedies that actually work, and small moments in history that quietly changed the course of science. Chris Balakrishnan, co-founder of Nerd Nite and author of How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Nite (https://amzn.to/3TXVrIK), shares some of the most fascinating and unusual insights from the world of science—many of which are far more useful than they first appear. If you come across an egg on the ground that appears to have fallen from a nest, your instinct might be to help. But should you? There are a lot of opinions—and some common advice you’ve probably heard. What bird experts actually recommend may surprise you and could change what you do in that moment. https://www.torontowildlifecentre.com/wildlife-emergency-rescue-hotline/how-to-help-orphaned-baby-wild-animals/what-should-i-do-with-eggs PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS DUTCH: If your pet is still scratching and you’ve tried everything at the pet store –it’s time to stop guessing and go prescription. Support us and use code SYSK for $40 off your membership at ⁠⁠⁠https://Dutch.com⁠⁠⁠ RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your wardrobe with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: See less carts go abandoned with Shopify and their Shop Pay button! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:31Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know: Why is it sometimes so hard to say "I'm sorry"? Then superstitions. Why do we have them? And we have a lot of them. About Lucky Charms, broken mirrors, black cats.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  Europeans started associating black cats with witches. So that's why black cats crossing your path was thought to be a sign of bad things to come. As a result, black cats are not adopted as much from shelters.

• 1:00Mike Carruthers?

  Also, what should you do if you see an egg on the ground that fell out of a nest? And fascinating science, like the only way to cure a hangover, and why we use maggots to heal wounds.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, the grossness is really what prevents people from using this treatment. Maggots are not used nearly as much as they should, given their effectiveness, just because of the gross-out factor.

• 1:26Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

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• 2:14Mike Carruthers?

  find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing, but with a thousand chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:09Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, here we go with another episode of Something You Should Know. And we start today with the topic of apologies. You ever find it difficult to say, "I'm sorry"? It's hard for a lot of people. And there is some research that sheds light on why apologizing is so difficult. And it really comes down to the fact that not apologizing just feels better. Two groups of volunteers agreed to write letters addressing something they had done wrong. While the group who apologized had a better sense of integrity after the fact, the group who refused to apologize felt more empowered and had a greater sense of self-worth.

• 3:54Mike Carruthers?

  The author of the study says that apologies make apologizers feel a little better, but refusing to apologize makes a lot of people feel a lot better and in more control of the situation. It also turns out that a voluntary apology feels a lot better than an apology given because somebody told you to say you're sorry. And that is something you should know.

• 4:24Mike Carruthers?

  There's a pretty good chance that you engage in some superstitions some of the time. Maybe you have a good luck charm, or you walk around a ladder because you don't want to walk under it, or you avoid black cats, or you have a lucky number. I mean, there are a lot of superstitions. So where do they come from? And why do they persist? Do all cultures have superstitions? Well, here to take a look at the history of superstitions and why we have them is Heather Alexander, who has gone back and researched some of our favorite superstitions, as well as some strange ones as well. Heather is author of "The Good Luck Book: A Celebration of Global Traditions, Superstitions, and Folklore." Hi Heather, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 5:11Mike Carruthers?

  So what is a superstition if you had to define it?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  So the actual definition of the word is it's an irrational belief. So it's a belief that's not based in knowledge or fact. Doesn't mean we still don't have them, but it is not a scientific fact-based belief.

• 5:29Mike Carruthers?

  And do you know, are superstitions pretty much everywhere, all around the world?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  There are superstitions everywhere. Sometimes they vary from place to place, but there are superstitions everywhere.

• 5:43Mike Carruthers?

  And why is that? Why do human beings cling to what we know are irrational beliefs? And it is universal all over the planet?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  I think in the beginning, way back when, our ancestors, when we didn't have a lot of knowledge that we do have now about science and how things, and the world, and how animals, and how people work, humans naturally look for explanations. And so if there wasn't a ready scientific explanation for something that was happening around you, we tend to fill in the gaps with stories, and we connect things that sometimes are not meant to be connected. And that gives us a sense of relief and a sense of comfort to know that there is an explanation.

• 6:31Mike Carruthers?

  But what's so interesting is that now that we have some explanations, we still have the superstitions.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Exactly, and some of it is passed down. We're taught it at a very young age from our family. Some things we don't even realize are a superstition. For example, blowing up candles on a birthday cake or covering our mouth when we yawn. All come from superstitious beliefs. They're just so ingrained in us that we never take a moment to stop and think, why not? And then a lot of other times, people say they're not superstitious, but they actually do a few little things just to be sure, because you sometimes don't want to tempt the fate.

• 7:13Mike Carruthers?

  So what's the difference between a superstition and a ritual? Because I would think of blowing out birthday candles. I've always thought it's just a ritual that people do. I didn't know it was a superstition. And maybe, or maybe I don't understand the difference between those two words.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Right, I mean, so there are many, many rituals that are based or born from superstitions. So they've become rituals for us now. For example, blowing out the birthday cake candles. German kids back in the 1700s were giving cakes with candles on it for the first time. And the candles were lit throughout the day of your birthday. And when it was cake time, you blew out the candles. And there's a big candle in the middle. And if you blew it out, the superstition was that you would then live to see your next birthday. Granted, these were times where children died young or adults also died young.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  So it was a big deal to wish for your next birthday. Now we blow out candles and we say we make a wish. We don't necessarily all wish for health and to see our next birthday. We might wish for something else. But that's where the superstition came from. If you blew out the candle and you were able to have enough breath to blow out the candle, you would then get to see your next birthday.

• 8:37Mike Carruthers?

  So from your research, tell me a strange kind of bizarre superstition that you uncovered that I would find fascinating.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  So one of the ones actually that I found an amazing story behind was the idea, I was always told that eating carrots would give me great nighttime vision.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  And actually, this superstition is traced back to the United Kingdom during World War II. In 1940, a Royal Air Force pilot was the first to shoot down a German plane in the nighttime using what was then secret radar technology. But the British at that time, or the British media, the British military, didn't want the Germans to know that they had this technology. So they fed to the media that this pilot's super night vision was the result of eating lots and lots of carrots. And actually, I'm not sure that the German military believed this, but parents believed it.

• 9:39Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, my grandmother believed that.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so they decided, well, I'm gonna tell my children that. And they started packing carrots for lunch and carrots for here. And it was actually something that was just put out in the press, but it became a belief. And that's actually how a lot of superstitions get their start. Two different things that have nothing to do with each other. You put together, this one was put together for you, but a lot of times you put them together in your mind. So if I wear my lucky red underwear and I get an A on the test, I then start to believe, and it happens a second time, that red underwear equals an A on the test, sort of forgetting

• 10:26Speaker 02

  that I did study for this test or I did listen in class.

• 10:30Mike Carruthers?

  There's a lot of superstition, I don't know if there's a lot of it. There are several superstitions that come to mind that come from like Halloween, Darkside, you know, black cats, broken mirrors, that kind of stuff. Where do they come from?

• 10:44Speaker 02

  The black cat superstition. Black, I mean, cats go back to ancient Egypt, ancient China. They were honored as goddesses. Cats were a very good thing. But back in the Middle Ages, Europeans started associating black cats with witches. And they feared that the witches kept the cats as companions, or that the witches could then turn into cats. So that's why. A black cat crossing your path was thought to be a sign of bad things to come because witches would either be in your life or be coming into your life. The Puritans, when they traveled to America, brought this superstition with them.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Black cats actually are not unlucky in other countries. Actually, in Japan, the United Kingdom, a black cat crossing your path is considered lucky. The problem with the black cat one is, as a result, black cats are not adopted as much from shelters. So it actually is a problem for the black cat community, as it were.

• 11:56Mike Carruthers?

  That's really interesting that the superstition actually has consequences, well, as you say, to the black cat community, which...

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Right. There's actually a lot of them. For example, the giant anteater is seen as an animal that brings bad luck in South and Central America. And as a result, it's been hunted, or it's hit by cars. And now the giant anteaters are endangered. And it's a direct relationship between the feeling that this animal in particular is bad luck. So it actually does have, for animals, it does have consequences.

• 12:36Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that weird?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:38Mike Carruthers?

  And what about the broken mirror, seven years bad luck thing? Do we know where that's, what that's about?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  The superstition is, if you break a mirror, you get seven years of bad luck. It's believed that it goes back to ancient cultures. Back then, the idea of a person's reflection was not only to show their physical appearance, but it was also a doorway into their soul. So shattering a mirror was like shattering or damaging your soul. As far as the seven years, seven is a number that comes up a lot in superstition, both for good luck and bad luck. But as I understand, in ancient Romans believed that a person's body renewed itself every seven years. So the idea that the luck would come back if you waited, you had to wait now seven years

• 13:29Speaker 02

  for your body to renew itself, for your soul to become whole again. Another part of that, though, is that years ago, mirrors were very expensive and fragile, and you didn't want to break a mirror because it costs a lot of money and was hard to replace. So a lot of superstitions also are a not-so-subtle way for parents and others to say, "Don't mess with the expensive stuff."

• 13:59Mike Carruthers?

  Heather Alexander is my guest. We're talking about superstitions, why we have them and what they do for us. Heather is author of The Good Luck Book.

• 14:11Speaker 05

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• 14:40Speaker 06

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• 15:10Mike Carruthers?

  So Heather, if you had to like divide the world of superstitions between superstitions for good and bad, are there more superstitions about bad things happening or good things happening, or is it 50/50?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  I don't know that it can give you a percentage, but there actually are quite a lot of good luck superstitions, especially good luck charms, things that people either do or physically hold on to to bring good luck, as well as different ways that we make wishes, whether it's wishing upon a star, wishing on, you know, finding a four-leaf clover, horseshoes hung up in a barn to gather luck. So actually, I probably think there is a little bit more good luck than there is bad luck.

• 15:57Mike Carruthers?

  Oh, that's interesting. Well, what's the deal with, you know, like, I used to have like rabbit's foot, rabbit's feet when I was a kid, and I have no idea why that's supposed to be good luck, and it's not good luck for the rabbit.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  No, it's definitely not, and it's another one, though, that has had not good consequences for rabbits.

• 16:19Mike Carruthers?

  What about just the idea of a good luck charm, that having this thing in your hand or in this, in your possession, will bring you good luck?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  It comes back to confidence, and you'll see it, especially in athletes, as well as going on, people going on stage, when there is a chance of something going wrong, or a situation where you're not exactly sure, if you're up at bat at the baseball, at a baseball game, how it's going to actually play out, as it were. Certain behaviors, or lucky uniforms, or the way you wind up before you hit, or the way you start, for example, certain tennis players bounce the tennis ball five times.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  If they bounce it six times, they have to start again and bounce it five times. It's more, this superstition is more a way to calm nerves. As a result, sometimes people can't get beyond that superstition. There's actually a story of Pele, the soccer player, who had a lucky jersey that he wore. And he once gave the jersey away to a fan.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Then after the jersey was given away, he went into a scoring slump.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  So he decided that he needed to have this jersey back immediately. Actually, but didn't, he had given it away to a fan, had no idea where the fan was. Actually hired a private detective to track down this fan. Weeks or months later, the private detective comes back, tells Pele, I found the jersey. Here it is. Pele puts the jersey back on. Lo and behold, he scores in the next game and the game after. What Pele didn't find out till much later was the private detective could not find the fan that the original jersey was given away to. Pulled another jersey out of his kit that Pele had owned. Dirtied it up a little bit, gave it to Pele.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  And the belief that he was wearing the lucky jersey was enough to give him, whether it's the confidence or the oomph to, to score. So that's a lot of these.

• 18:41Mike Carruthers?

  Isn't that interesting? Well, see, like the example that you gave of the, the bouncing the ball five times. To me, I would, if you asked me, I would say that's a ritual. That's not really a superstition, but I, I guess the line is kind of blurred.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  There's a blur, look, there is a blurry line between when rituals and superstitions and where you cross that line. But it's, it's an irrational belief that if I,

• 19:08Speaker 02

  you know, do something a certain way, something else will happen. And I mean, there's NAS, for example, NASA, there is a lot of rituals and beliefs before space travel that happen. And this is a group of scientists who are doing, for example,

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Astronauts, before any launch, no matter what time of day the launch is, they will eat a meal of steak and eggs before the launch. And this happened because Alan Shepard, that was his meal before he made that first mission launch in 1961.

• 19:48Mike Carruthers?

  So let me ask you about a couple of, I guess they're superstitions. And one is, you know, at Thanksgiving, the wishbone, the turkey wishbone, and you pull it apart, and whoever gets the biggest piece gets their wish to come true. Where did that come from?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  This is actually a story. It goes back to the Etruscans, which were an ancient civilization who lived in what's now Italy. And they believed that chickens had the power to tell the future. I don't know why. So they would actually draw a circle on the ground and divide it into wedges, sort of the way you would cut a pie, and write a letter of the alphabet inside each wedge. And then grain was sprinkled in each wedge, and a rooster was placed in the middle. And the local priest would ask the rooster an important question about the city's future, and then watch to see which wedge the rooster would eat from. And that's how they got their letters from those, their answer from those letters.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  So then, after this fortune-telling rooster died, its bones were left out to dry in the sun, and the V-shaped wishbone was used as a lucky charm. And so anybody who would walk by would stroke it while making a wish. So then the Romans came about, and they liked this lucky wishbone idea. But there weren't really enough chickens to go around, so they began breaking the bone in two. And so this way, there are more bones, more wishes for everyone. And then the Romans introduced the wishbone to Europe. And Germany actually used geese for the wishbone. And in Britain, some people, actually, there was a thing way back when where you would

• 21:34Speaker 02

  try to balance the wishbone on your nose before making a wish. And that leads us again to the pilgrims who left Britain and sailed over to what's now the United States. And there weren't many chickens to be used for wishbones then, but there were turkeys. And so they said, okay, we'll move it over to the turkey. And they started making the wishes on the wishbone of the turkey. But the word wishbone didn't come into being actually until about the mid 1800s. And that's when, after Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, that the wishbone became associated

• 22:19Speaker 02

  with Thanksgiving.

• 22:21Mike Carruthers?

  So one of the, one really good example of this is the, you know, don't walk under a ladder, that it's bad luck to walk under a ladder. And everybody, any rational person will tell you that that just can't possibly be true. And yet, people will go out of their way not to walk under a ladder, even though they know, because I guess you don't want to tempt fate. But we all know that walking under a ladder doesn't do anything.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  It's not 100% sure where it comes from, but ancient Egyptians would place a ladder inside the tombs, so that in the afterlife, the dead could climb up to the heavens. And they believed that the triangular space under a ladder was filled with spirits. And essentially, the spirits kind of get cranky when they're disturbed by humans. So the fear of walking under the ladder. Others have said that the ladder's triangular shape represents the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity. And so that walking through, or essentially breaking the Trinity. Is showing disrespect.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  So those are two options as to where it comes from. But then again, a lot of superstitions really are warnings of what not to do. So no, don't walk under a ladder because it could fall on you or a can of paint could fall on you. So that's how it happens.

• 23:52Mike Carruthers?

  I just find it interesting what you said at the beginning that, you know, superstitions were a way to explain things we didn't know. And now today, we do know the truth about science and whatnot. But we still cling to these superstitions. Superstition has really good PR. It seems that they just keep going in the face of, of the truth. And I guess it's because we see like famous people with their, their superstitions or their rituals that kind of help perpetuate it all.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  A lot, a lot of famous people or celebrities have superstitions that they do. For example, Taylor Swift finds the number 13 lucky and does a lot of things on the days, sorry, a lot of things on the number 13. Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti insisted that he could only perform with a bent nail in his pocket because that was his good luck charm. But he had to find the bent nail on his way to the stage. So he had to find it backstage. As a result, in opera houses all over the world, they would have assistants drop a few bent nails on the pathway from the dressing room to the stage.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  So he would be sure to find one in order for him to be able to go on and perform. So that's a fun one there.

• 25:18Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah. And there's got to be more to that story, like why a nail? But so many of these superstitions seem so kind of random and weird, but kind of fun to talk about. I've been speaking with Heather Alexander and she's author of The Good Luck Book, A Celebration of Global Tradition, Superstitions, and Folklore. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for coming on and talking about this, Heather. This was fun.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike, for having me. It's been wonderful talking to you.

• 25:46Speaker 05

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• 26:14Speaker 07

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• 26:43Mike Carruthers?

  One thing that often happens to people such as you who listen to this show is you learn lots of new and interesting things. And in this next segment, you're going to learn several new things you probably didn't know from the world of science. And I think you'll find it quite fascinating. My guest is Chris Balakrishnan. He is co-founder of something called Nerd Night, where for over 20 years, Nerd Night has delivered to live audiences around the world some interesting, fun, and informative presentations about science, history, the arts, pop culture, and more.

• 27:23Mike Carruthers?

  He's also author of a book called How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Night. Hey, Chris, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me and good to be here.

• 27:39Mike Carruthers?

  So let's start with the hangover. Because anybody who's had a hangover knows that feeling of wishing there was a cure for it. And over the years, people have come up with various ways, various ideas of how to prevent a hangover, how to cure a hangover. I don't know how successful those are. So what is a hangover? And what's the science about this whole thing?

• 28:01Speaker 03

  A hangover is generally is a combination of symptoms that you feel after drinking too much. This can include things like headache, nausea, and even worse. It's a really uncomfortable set of symptoms. And these symptoms actually, believe it or not, cause a significant economic cost.

• 28:29Mike Carruthers?

  Well, sure, because you think about all the people who are hung over the next day and don't go to work and add all that up. And the lost productivity itself is is pretty substantial. But is there any progress towards a cure for a hangover? And maybe it's hard to do because it's it's not a thing. It's a group of symptoms. But where are we with that?

• 28:51Speaker 03

  The simplest answer, of course, and the one nobody wants to hear, is that the only sure way to not have a hangover is to not drink. But for many of us, that's not a tenable solution. What other kinds of options are there? Well, unfortunately, the only proven treatment that reduces the effects of the hangover is one that we've all heard about, and that is drinking more alcohol. So why does drinking more alcohol help? To understand that, you have to understand how alcohol is metabolized in the body.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  And basically, when you get a hangover, the reason you have a hangover is because of the toxic metabolites of methanol. And so there are two kinds of alcohol that you might run into in your drinks, ethanol and methanol. And the majority will be ethanol. But if you drink a lot, the toxic byproducts of methanol build up in the bloodstream. And and and methanol and ethanol both compete for the same enzymes that process alcohol. And your body preferentially processes the ethanol. And so by drinking more alcohol, you're giving your body the ethanol that prevents

• 30:18Speaker 03

  these toxic byproducts of methanol from forming. These are things like formaldehyde. And so by giving your body ethanol, these toxic byproducts of methanol just don't form. And those, again, those byproducts like formaldehyde are the things that contribute to the hangover.

• 30:36Mike Carruthers?

  It does seem like a weird solution to the problem because, you know, we've heard that alcohol is poison, basically, to the body if you drink too much of it. And so if you take poison to then take more poison to combat the poison, doesn't seem like it would make much sense.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  This is the context where this really comes up. That is, you're in a hospital. Things have gotten so bad that this is a really a good idea to... And doctors will prescribe, for example, IV alcohol to help with the extreme symptoms that you're suffering.

• 31:12Mike Carruthers?

  Really? So when you have alcohol poisoning in the hospital, they treat you with alcohol?

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Yes, in extreme circumstances, yes.

• 31:21Mike Carruthers?

  Wow.

• 31:22Speaker 03

  When methanol poisoning specifically, yeah.

• 31:25Mike Carruthers?

  So is there any other treatment, any other cure, any other wife's tale about curing a hangover that doesn't involve drinking more alcohol that has any value at all?

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the other possible treatment is a supplement called glutathione. And this, it turns out, is a supplement that you can buy over the counter and has now been even branded as an alcohol, as a hangover cure. Glutathione, what it does is, well, first of all, the amount of glutathione in your body is reduced while you're drinking. And so you're depleting your glutathione supply as you drink. And it turns out glutathione is a cofactor that helps these enzymes that process alcohol in your body to function. And so you've depleted your glutathione by drinking. And so bringing those levels back

• 32:23Speaker 03

  up can help these alcohol processing enzymes work more effectively. There are here as well, a couple of caveats.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  One is that glutathione itself also has side effects. And these are, these are not enjoyable side effects. They're gastrointestinal side effects. And so you can imagine, so it's a, it's really sort of a trade off as to whether the, the benefits outweigh the cost of the hangover.

• 32:56Mike Carruthers?

  Well, and as you said at the very beginning, you know, the best cure for a hangover is to not drink. And then, then you can't get a hangover. Let's talk about maggots because there's some science here. And, you know, people are pretty grossed out when they see maggots, but there is some scientific use for them.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this was a really interesting thing that I just learned. And that is how maggots are used in hospitals and in the context of, of wound healing. And so it turns out that maggots are actually an approved therapy for treating poorly healing wounds. And there are, there are old anecdotes going back to Napoleon's army and the civil war that suggested that people who have maggot infested wounds actually heal better than people who, who don't have maggot infested wounds. And this was actually tested by a medical intern at the time named Ron Sherman,

• 33:59Speaker 03

  who, who, who set up an experiment with 103 people with poorly healing wounds. And it turns out that about 80% of the people who were treated with maggots achieved complete debridement, whereas only about 48% of those without maggots had, had complete debridement. And so in 2004, Ron Sherman applied for FDA approval for maggot therapy. And in 2007 maggots became the first FDA approved animal treatment.

• 34:35Mike Carruthers?

  And the maggots that are used are not like the ones in your garbage. I mean, there's medical maggots, right?

• 34:42Speaker 03

  There are medical maggots and Ron Sherman has been the key entrepreneur in developing this business. So he basically started a company where maggots can be grown in sterile conditions. They're sent to hospitals on like a circular gauze type thing as eggs and they can be placed on the wounds and grown in sterile conditions.

• 35:09Mike Carruthers?

  It sounds so gross and yet it's apparently it's very effective.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  It's so effective and unfortunately, the grossness is really what prevents people from using this treatment or even offering this treatment in some cases. So maggots are not used nearly as much as they should be, given their effectiveness, just because of the gross-out factor.

• 35:32Mike Carruthers?

  So I'm almost afraid to ask, but what is it that the maggots do that makes it so successful?

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Basically maggots have evolved prickly spines that they use to basically loosen the dead flesh. And this turns out to be a much gentler way of removing dead tissue than a surgeon's scalpel. They also, like many babies, they can't chew food. And so what maggots do is they basically release their digestive enzymes onto the tissue itself. And that again helps soften and digest the dead tissue, but it spares the living tissue. And the enzymes involved also have antibiotic properties. And then that's where the infection

• 36:22Speaker 03

  management comes in. And so that's also a contribution of maggots. Finally, there's a part that no one understands, but also appears to be true, is that having treatment with maggot actually improves blood flow to the wound and stimulates blood vessel growth.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  And this also improves the healing in these poorly healing wounds.

• 36:46Mike Carruthers?

  Misophonia you talk about and it's, we touched on it before in a previous episode, but I think it's so interesting because people don't know it's a thing. And well, you talk about it.

• 37:00Speaker 03

  Misophonia is a condition that's really only recently come to attention where the sufferer is extremely sensitive to particular repetitive noises. And by sensitivity, what I mean is that someone with misophonia feels a real emotional threat when they hear these repetitive sounds. These repetitive sounds include things like the sound of chewing, the sound of snoring, the sound of someone blowing their nose. So these are sounds that we hear every day in normal life. And many of us are able to filter these sounds out and not even notice them from, and they're just sort of part of the background

• 37:44Speaker 03

  noise. But someone with misophonia really feels anxious and stressed when they hear such sounds. And it turns out that estimates say that roughly 20% of people suffer from some form of misophonia, but only really 10% of people or so have actually ever heard of misophonia. And when people hear about misophonia, lots of people are like, oh, I have that. I've always, I've always wondered what was wrong with me. And it turns out that there's lots of other people that have this condition.

• 38:28Mike Carruthers?

  Talk about the tea test, because this is something I'd never heard before. And it has to, it has to do with the beverage, tea, and how you prepare it. And so I'll let you tell the story.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  So a famous statistician named Ronald Fisher was making tea for his colleague Muriel Bristol, another scientist, and she was unhappy with the tea that was made. And she said it was because of the order that the tea was made. That is, was milk added first to the tea, or was the tea added to the milk? And Fisher thought this didn't make any sense. You should be able to add things in either direction and have the same outcome. But Fisher played an important role in the origins of statistics and experiments. At this time, there were

• 39:19Speaker 03

  not standardized methods for experiments. And in the context of this tea experiment, he devised an experiment to really test Muriel as to whether she could distinguish the two types of tea. And so what he did was, he made eight cups of tea, four of which were presented milk first, four of which were made tea first, and he randomized the order of presentation. And he just simply asked Muriel to identify whether the milk or the tea had been added first. And it turns out that Muriel was able to correctly guess

• 39:58Speaker 03

  the order of milk adding 100% of the time. And why that was is simply because of the thermodynamics. When a small amount of milk hits hot tea, that milk becomes a little bit burned and develops a caramelly taste, and she could detect that. But what's really important here is that this little experiment was the foundation of modern statistics and modern experimental design that we use now today. This led to the Fisher's Exact Test, which is a longstanding statistical test used in experiments all around the world.

• 40:36Mike Carruthers?

  So I know your specialty is birds. So tell me something fascinating, interesting that I probably don't know about birds.

• 40:46Speaker 03

  Have you ever heard of parasitic birds?

• 40:49Mike Carruthers?

  No, but do I want to hear about parasitic birds? It sounds a little gross.

• 40:57Speaker 03

  So it turns out there are birds that are parasites. And these are not blood sucking parasites or anything like that, but they are brood parasites. And so what that means is that these are birds that lay their eggs in the nest of a different species. And then that species raises these young as their own. And it turns out this, this behavior in birds has evolved independently in seven different groups of birds. That is, these birds don't build their own nests and they don't raise their own young. These are all very birdy things that you assume all birds do.

• 41:35Speaker 03

  But instead of that, they lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and pawn off that entire effort of parental care onto a different species.

• 41:50Mike Carruthers?

  And would I know of some of these birds? I mean, are they commonly known birds or are these very weird birds that nobody's ever heard of?

• 41:58Speaker 03

  You might know about them. If you, if you follow birds even a little bit in North America, you've probably heard of one, one species that is the brown headed cowbird or the cowbird. This is a bird that's known to lay its eggs in over 200 other different species nests and has been implicated in the declines of a subset of those species. So people tend to hate the cowbird because of this brood parasitic behavior and because of this assumption that it's causing problems for other bird species. So that is one famous one. The, the other famous one is one that I think it's maybe less known that they're parasitic, but they're cuckoos. So like the cuckoo clock.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  So European cuckoos, which are the, the species that are, that the cuckoo clock is, is designed to reflect is also a brood parasite. Unlike the cowbirds, they are very picky in where they lay their eggs. They lay their eggs in just a typically a single host species. And in fact, in cuckoos, the eggs of the parasite actually match the eggs of the host. So that the host can't tell which eggs are are are their own versus the parasites. And this is to avoid things like having the host eject those egg, those parasitic eggs from the nest.

• 43:17Mike Carruthers?

  Do all birds in that species do it? Or just some birds decide, you know, we're not going to raise our own here. We're just going to have the birds in the other tree do it.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  That that's a that's a great question. So the the birds that I was talking about are species where they do it all the time. 100% of all the birds are parasitic. So they are always, they do it 100% of the time. On top of that, there are other species of birds that only sometimes lay their eggs parasitically. So there are some ducks that do this, where they'll just occasionally drop an egg into a different into a different bird's nest. All different versions of this behavior have evolved. And in fact, it isn't just birds that do this. There are fish that are parasitic. There are insects that are parasitic. Basically, anything that lays an egg, any group of organisms that lays eggs. There are examples of this type of parasitism evolving.

• 44:11Mike Carruthers?

  Lastly, because I think this is interesting, is the songs that songbirds sing, how they come to sing them. Talk, talk about that.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  The songs that they sing, which we all hear all around us, are learned. They learn these songs from their parents. They're not born with them. And so the way that songbirds learn their song is very similar to the way that humans learn to speak. And very few other animals in the animal kingdom have this type of learned communication. So even chimpanzees, their vocalizations are innate and not and not learned. But songbirds, parrots and humans.

• 44:53Mike Carruthers?

  Are examples of learned vocal communication. And so, as I promised at the very beginning of this segment, at least I know I've learned several new things I didn't know before, and I imagine most people did too, thanks to you, Chris Balakrishnan. He is co-founder of Nerd Night that delivers live presentations about science and history and pop culture and things around the world. And he is author of a book called How to Win Friends and Influence Fungi: Collected Quirks of Science, Tech, Engineering, and Math from Nerd Night. If you'd like to check that book out, there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate you being here. Thank you very much.

• 45:37Mike Carruthers?

  In springtime, it's not that uncommon to come across an egg on the ground that has fallen from a nest in the tree above. So the question is, if you come across one of these eggs, should you put it back in the nest? And the answer is probably not. If an egg has fallen out of the nest, it's fallen pretty far and is probably damaged, and a damaged egg will not hatch. Also, many bird eggs found on the ground have actually been kicked out of the nest by the mother. Some other birds can determine whether an egg is viable or not and gets rid of the ones that aren't. And in other cases, the egg has been stolen by another critter and dropped.

• 46:21Mike Carruthers?

  The other problem is, if that egg that you find isn't from the nest that you think it is, many mama birds will actually abandon an entire nest if there is an unfamiliar egg placed in there. So it's really best to let fallen eggs be. And that is something you should know. If you enjoy what we do here on this podcast, you should become a follower. That way, you get the episodes delivered right to your phone or whatever device you want it sent to, and you never miss a single one. Just hit the follow button on the app you're listening on, and that should take care of it. I'm Micah Rathers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 47:03Speaker 07

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