Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Time Balls, Bug Culture, Traffic Mimes About this episode Balint Kacsoh of SciAnts_Streams joins the show today to talk about how flies have their own sort of culture. Plus, Jess hops behind the mic to discuss mimes mocking traffic offenders, and Rachel divulges the story of London's legendary timekeepers.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time.
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0:16 Speaker 02 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.
0:43 Speaker 03 Born from the intensity of a night in the Eternal City. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin, and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex Womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver, and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.
1:15 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.
1:35 Speaker 05 I'm Jess Boddy. And I'm Blood Kacho. Woo!
1:39 Rachel Feltman? Welcome to the show.
1:40 Speaker 05 Welcome!
1:41 Rachel Feltman? Jess, would you introduce our guest?
1:43 Speaker 05 Yes. So this is one of my pals from Twitch. We met just by happenstance because I think you raided me once. I was playing a really fun indie game called Super Liminal, which is a real... I love that game. It's like a cool puzzle game.
1:57 Speaker 05 And I saw your username and I was like, oh my god, are you a science gamer Twitch person? Because I make a, you know, me and my pal Rachel make this awesome science show.
2:08 Rachel Feltman? Well, and you have to, you have to share what, what the username is.
2:11 Speaker 05 Oh, Science Streams?
2:15 Speaker 05 Also Twitch Ambassador, they're wonderful. You and your wife run your guys' channel. Tell us a little bit about it.
2:23 Speaker 06 Yeah, so my wife and I, we both run the channel together. Like Jess said, we have our PhDs in molecular biology from Dartmouth. We have our masters in biology from Emory, and we did our postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. And we believe that science should be accessible to everyone. And so we started a Twitch channel under that premise, and we're here today as Twitch ambassadors.
2:45 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's so sick y'all got Ambassador. That's so amazing.
2:49 Speaker 06 It's still shocking. I can't believe that actually happened.
2:51 Speaker 05 You guys deserve it. You deserve it.
2:54 Rachel Feltman? To be honest, I don't know what that means, but it sounds really impressive, and I'm very happy for you.
2:59 Speaker 05 It's a very prestigious thing. Instead of your Twitch Partner badge, which is already a huge deal, you get like a multi-colored Twitch Partner badge, and it's like you're kind of like a liaison between Twitch staff and Twitch, the rest of us.
3:12 Rachel Feltman? Very cool.
3:13 Speaker 06 So it's set up, I believe since 2017 when they started, there's 180 ambassadors total, and we're the first and only so far that do educational content.
3:23 Rachel Feltman? Hell, yeah. You're like a prefect or head boy.
3:26 Speaker 05 Exactly.
3:30 Rachel Feltman? I've been reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction lately.
3:32 Speaker 06 Well, I mean, what's science if not magic, but real, right?
3:35 Rachel Feltman? That is so true. Also, I should clarify for listeners, all the Harry Potter fanfiction I read is super gay and would make J.K. Rowling very mad.
3:45 Speaker 05 Yes, hell, yeah.
3:47 Rachel Feltman? And it's written better than her, yeah. Well, let's get into the weirdest thing I learned this week. On the weirdest thing I learned this week, we start by each offering up a little tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was, in a chill way where we often don't actually decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Jess, what's your tease?
4:18 Speaker 05 My tease is traffic mimes.
4:23 Rachel Feltman? No, you don't need to say anything more.
4:26 Speaker 05 That's it.
4:26 Rachel Feltman? Two words, iconic. My tease is that I'm gonna talk about the real time lords and ladies of the olden days.
4:36 Speaker 05 Uh huh.
4:39 Rachel Feltman? And what's your tease?
4:40 Speaker 06 Fruit flies screaming in fear.
4:44 Rachel Feltman? Oh.
4:47 Rachel Feltman? Well, just traffic mimes is just so powerful. I think you need to kick us off.
4:54 Speaker 05 I would love to. Okay, so this was a fact that I found while scrolling good old Atlas Obscura, you know.
5:00 Rachel Feltman? The best.
5:00 Speaker 05 Old faithful. Yes. And I found a piece written by Abby Cole about mimes directing traffic. And so yesterday I sent my fact into Rachel and I was like, oh, this fact is like cool and funny and relevant. And it's like a cool scientific finding, you know, it's, you know, it was like a great fact. So I was like, Rachel, this is what I want to talk about. And she was like, perfection. So I was like, great. And all that is still true. But a mere hours after choosing my fact, I had a traffic related incident where I really could have used a mime. Everything is fine. I will explain.
5:36 Rachel Feltman? Well, I'm glad you're fine, but where are the mimes when you need them?
5:39 Speaker 05 That's what I'm saying. They really would have come in handy. So, okay, first, picture this, Bogota, which I believe how you pronounce the capital of Colombia in South America. It's rush hour, 5pm, cars at a standstill, trucks honking, mopeds are weaving in and out of traffic, trying to scare where they need to go. All of this under the blistering Colombian sun. Everyone's just roasting. People are getting pissed.
6:07 Speaker 05 But then I brought the fresh air. Not literally, and not like, you know, my favorite refreshing beverage when I'm really sweaty, an ice cold, cool blue Gatorade, non-spawn.
6:19 Speaker 05 I love blue Gatorade. My grandma recently, because my grandpa had the flu or something, and he's fine, but my grandma was taking care of him and she, she was like, I've been giving him that alligator juice. And I was like, the what? That alligator juice? And I was like, they live in Florida. So I was like, the what? Something in some bootleg beverage? It was just Gatorade. It was merely just Gatorade. Oh, I love it. And I think we should all call, we should all call it alligator juice. That alligator juice. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, so anyway.
6:49 Speaker 06 Next time you go down to see your grandparents, you need to visit Gatorland.
6:52 Speaker 05 What's Gatorland?
6:54 Speaker 06 Gatorland is like a bootleg theme park with just alligators everywhere. They just celebrated their 50 year anniversary last year.
7:03 Speaker 05 Okay, I need to investigate that. Oh, my God.
7:07 Speaker 05 So, yeah, this was, this was not ice cool, cool, cool blue, ice cold, cool blue Gatorade or alligator juice or whatever. Uh, this breath of fresh air is a fellow in white face paint and black eyeliner and a striped shirt. Yes, a mime. So here in the city, if you honk a bit too aggressively, this mime is going to hold up their little gloves at you in horror. Or, you know, let's say you're doing a little jaywalking, this mime will do like an exaggerated version of what you're doing to mock you, which I love. Um, but also if you do things right, like, you know, a nice little family waits for the walk signal and they go, like, the mimes will do like a little cartwheel or like applause or some other non-verbal
7:52 Speaker 05 praise. Um, and you know, why?
7:58 Speaker 05 Why not? Yeah, true. Uh, but there is a reason for this. So let's go back to the beginning. Back in like 1994, 1995, this is pre-mime, uh, Bogota had 1,500 traffic-related deaths annually, which is a lot. And, um, they had just elected a new mayor named Antonas Mokas, who fired 1,800 traffic cops in exchange for 20 mimes.
8:28 Rachel Feltman? Hell yeah, honestly.
8:29 Speaker 05 I, yes, I agree. I agree. Uh, and this dude, okay, so he, this, this new mayor, he isn't just like some guy who likes mimes. Which maybe he's also that, but who's to say? He had this whole plan. So he was a former professor of math and psychology. So he wanted to like, use that knowledge to completely transform the city and its traffic problem with mimes. And really, so he was kind of just bummed that like, when the government had tried to meet traffic, like violent traffic incidents with force, like when they tried to solve stuff with violence and force.
9:04 Speaker 05 That didn't work, which like, you know, imagine that. But he, he was like, you know, I'm really sad about this. Let's find a different way. And he said mimes. Uh, so in the beginning, his mimes had to follow like very strict rules. So they held up, the only thing they really did was hold up signs that said correcto and incorrecto.
9:23 Speaker 05 And they would just hold them up.
9:23 Rachel Feltman? What a mime tells you incorrecto devastating.
9:26 Speaker 05 I mean, I would, I would be devastated.
9:29 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
9:30 Speaker 05 And though simple, or perhaps maybe like because it was simple, uh, it started to work. So by 1998, traffic violence decreased by 50%.
9:41 Rachel Feltman? Wow.
9:42 Speaker 05 Which is crazy to think about. Uh, so they added more mimes. Their ranks climbed to over 400 around the city. So still a small percentage because Bogota has seven million people total. But still, the mimes were like such a success and they were so drama, uh, they had become like kind of famous around the city.
10:03 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, it's very camp.
10:04 Speaker 05 It's so camp. I love it. Uh, so that official mime program did end in the late nineties. So it went on for like five to seven years ish officially. But the people love it so much that they still carry out this tradition 30 years later. And it's spread to other Latin American countries. So, uh, some governments in South America even hand out thumbs up or thumbs down cards to people to encourage folks to like, get out there and mime.
10:33 Speaker 05 Which I love. And like, why does this work? Uh, so there was a recent behavioral science study looking at this. Researchers think that when people are willing to engage with the mimes and like play along, that they're forced to rethink these everyday interactions with their larger community. Like, they're taking a more active part in their communities, they care more about them, that kind of thing, and basically makes folks less passive and encourage them to engage and like care about their community, um, which makes complete sense. And something I think that a lot of Americans could benefit from too, frankly.
11:12 Speaker 05 Um, and this is what one, uh, behavioral science researcher said about this whole thing is that, quote, "Instead of thinking that only politicians can solve the problem, or that the problem will never be resolved because that's just the way we are here, uh, the mime scheme shows that it's a collective responsibility to change," end quote, which I like a lot. Yeah, that's great. I love that. And I think that that could be a notion brought to all culture, not just mime or traffic culture, but you know, I guess. And so, yeah, like I said, you can see traffic mimes in other countries now like Peru and Venezuela. And apparently Bolivia has traffic zebras.
11:56 Speaker 05 Like people in like zebra suits, like you would get on Halloween or something. Uh, which I guess is also kind of a take on mime culture. Sure, yeah. And, okay, so back to the US. Do I think this could work in the US? Maybe. Somebody would shoot the mime. That was my fear. That was my fear. And you know, like, I think it's important to think about too, because like when they introduced this in Colombia, it was still like an issue. It was still an issue where like violence was a lot of the problem. And so they were still able to implement this, but I think it's probably because, you know, back in the 90s, people elected this mayor because he wanted to fix things with nonviolence. They were all already kind of like on board with that.
12:39 Speaker 05 Uh, and the mimes were rolled out slowly and it was a gradual influx of traffic mimes and people were kind of primed for it. Uh, and yeah, I would fear for mime safety in America. I do think maybe there could be a nice way to implement something like this.
12:53 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah.
12:54 Speaker 05 Um, but, but yeah, like I mentioned at the top of the, at the top of my fact, this is top of mind for me because a complete and total dickhead locked eyes with me out on the road and sideswept my car. Cause he wanted to like merge in front of me despite me being already halfway in front of him and having the right of way and following the traffic laws and signs. Uh, so it's, it's, you know, it's all fine. My, my mirror, my side mirror is a little bit screwed up. Uh, and then he didn't stop. He kept driving even though I know, I know he knows. I know he knows. Uh, however, I did, you know, I got really mad, but I stayed super calm.
13:37 Speaker 05 And I called my mom on my, I didn't even call, I like, you know, I'm not even doing a classic hand motion. Like I'm calling my mom on my phone. I'm using my car's Bluetooth. And I'm like, mom, you'll never believe what just happened. You know, when in doubt, call your mom. And, um, I got a picture of its license plate and it's like a commercial truck vehicle.
13:55 Rachel Feltman? Oh, yeah.
13:56 Speaker 05 So I'm like, oh, you're going down loser. I am going to contact this truck company and be like, hello. Your driver of license plate.
14:03 Rachel Feltman? Bad.
14:04 Speaker 05 It sucks and you need to pay for a new side mirror for me. So anyway, also, I would have liked as a mime would have been like, what? You know, I can't, audio listeners are not going to benefit from this, but like, you know, a crazy exaggerated movement.
14:21 Speaker 06 Or they, they could have put the car in a box.
14:28 Rachel Feltman? I do think, you know.
14:29 Speaker 05 Any of those options.
14:31 Rachel Feltman? It's useful for the mime to be like, what you're doing is clown behavior.
14:36 Speaker 05 Yes, yes.
14:37 Rachel Feltman? I'm here to remind you of that.
14:38 Speaker 05 Exactly. Uh, so anyway, mime, mimery would have been like, I would have loved that. But at the very least, hopefully I can get him in trouble at his job. So that's, that's my traffic mime story.
14:53 Rachel Feltman? Justice for deaths.
14:56 Rachel Feltman? Wow, I'm really like the mimes in particular. It's such a such a wild image. And I love that.
15:09 Speaker 06 It's interesting, too, like the difference between the imagery of what a mime looks like versus what a traffic cop could look like and seeing like how in Bogota like that's the image that calmed people, right, to let lead to that decrease in the violence. So is it like, is it the nonverbal stuff? Is it the appearance? Is it a little bit of both? And what was it that really drove people to be like, you know what? I will take that extra moment.
15:32 Speaker 05 Right. And it was just like so endearing, you know? Yeah, I don't know what it is, but yeah, made people engage with their communities. So.
15:40 Rachel Feltman? Nice. All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.
15:49 Speaker 00 Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change. Your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5 only at McDonald's for a limited time.
16:01 Speaker 01 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
16:05 Speaker 02 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.
16:32 Speaker 03 Born from the intensity of a night in the eternal city. Introducing Born in Roma Fragrances by Valentino. Feminine perfume Donna Born in Roma features juicy black currant, central jasmine, soft cashmerin and warm vanilla. Masculine leaning but unisex womo has notes of fresh violet leaf, aromatic sage, green vetiver and mineral salt. Shop holiday gifts at Macy's.com.
17:05 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back and I'm going to share my fact, which, as I said, is about the real-life time lords and especially time ladies of way back when. So I recently came across the story of Ruth Belleville, who is known as the Greenwich Time Lady because she literally sold people time, or at least she sold people the time, which at the time was very novel. So we need to rewind a little bit to sort of set the scene for Ruth's business. So back in 1675, King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory. He wanted to like get better at navigating the seas.
17:48 Rachel Feltman? He asked for a small observatory to be built at the highest point in Greenwich Park. And then almost a century later, the Royal Astronomer published the first nautical almanac, which shared the observatory's findings with seafarers all over the world and allowed them to pinpoint their longitude. So basically, people were using marine chronometers, which were kind of the first precision timepieces. Timepieces go back thousands of years. It's pretty wild how long back into history people were able to keep time pretty precisely. But precision timepieces, as we would now consider them, really started because of marine navigation. So you would have this super-precise timepiece on a ship
18:33 Rachel Feltman? that would be set to Greenwich Mean Time, so the time over at the Royal Observatory. And then you would use the sky and celestial navigation to figure out how different the time was where you were. And that would help you calculate your longitude relative to Greenwich, which was huge. That was groundbreaking. People had simply not really done that before. Of course, people did incredible navigation. Polynesian wayfarers did amazing celestial navigation thousands of years ago. But for Europeans, this was groundbreaking. And all of this sets the scene for the very idea of having like one time
19:17 Rachel Feltman? that everyone agrees that it is.
19:21 Rachel Feltman? Up until a certain point in the 1800s, every town in the London area kept its own local time based on the position of the sun. So, for example, there was a 16-minute difference between London and Plymouth. Fast forward to 1833, and the Royal Observatory started getting into time balls, which are exactly what they sound like. The first one was like five feet across, it was made of a wooden frame covered in leather, and it was raised to the top of a 16-foot mast. And then, basically, every day at exactly 1 o'clock, the observatory would drop the ball so that men who were working out on
20:02 Rachel Feltman? the Thames, and people who were making timekeeping devices in Clerkenwell, could know the time. And, yes, this is what the ball drop is referencing. Balls dropping because of a certain time happening used to be a thing.
20:17 Speaker 05 No way! Oh my god!
20:19 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. People went absolutely nuts for the time ball. They loved it. They wanted more time balls. So the observatory built more so that they were visible from more places, because, again, up until this time, people told what time it was by the position of the sun. And in a pre-industrial society, that's really all you need. Why get more precise than that? Sun goes up, sun goes down, sometimes the sun's high in the sky. You know, that really tells you everything you need to know. But now, the Industrial Revolution has happened, is happening, and suddenly, people want to agree on stuff happening at certain times. In particular, railways made this a big problem. Suddenly, if you
21:01 Rachel Feltman? had a 16-minute difference in what time you agreed it was, huge issue. And like, passenger rail wasn't so much a thing yet, but for like, shipping and business, it just started to actually matter. So, telegraphs meant there was an actual way to share what time it was, so they'd be like, wow, there's not just an unsolvable existential problem, like, there is actually something we can do about this. And eventually, telegraph signals would control the time balls, which implies it was once just dudes watching really carefully for 1 o'clock to happen. And, wow, respect.
21:36 Rachel Feltman? So thus began Greenwich Mean Time, first known as railway time for this reason, which is just, I think is really interesting because we now all kind of take for granted that we have this unified time system, but it used to be a very new idea. And just to fast forward a little bit before I rewind again, in 1880, this became official law and not just sort of a thing most people did. That happened because people kept showing up to court at the wrong time and being like, "Well, sorry, to me it was 9:00 a.m. I don't know what to tell you. Over in Plymouth, it was 9:00 a.m. What's your issue?" So they were like, "Okay, now we are all agreeing that we use Greenwich Mean Time. That is the time.
22:20 Rachel Feltman? So if you have a court date, you get there based on Greenwich Mean Time." And yeah, then that was that. But in those decades between time starting to matter because of factories and trains and whatnot and clocks becoming common, what did people do? Well, the answer is kind of goofy. So in the early 19th century, any business that wanted an accurate time in the London area, so clockmakers, for example, banks, they would basically send an employee to
22:59 Rachel Feltman? the Royal Observatory to bang on the door and be like, "Let me see your clock." Because the Royal Observatory was the keeper of Greenwich Mean Time. They had the high-precision chronometer that was referenced by all these ships at sea, and that was what Greenwich Mean Time was. And so if you wanted to be sure you were matching Greenwich Mean Time, you had to go see it. And then keep in mind, most people weren't carrying around accurate timepieces yet. They had less advanced clocks that would very quickly lose their time. So you had to reset them over and over again. So yeah, people would just show up, they would, I assume, send, they're like unpaid interns.
23:43 Rachel Feltman? And be like, what time is it? And eventually, somebody got really fed up about this. They were like, you can't, we can't have all these bank interns and clock making apprentices showing up demanding to know what time it is. So they limited their access to once a week on a Monday. Like, everyone had to show up and get their time for the week and just be satisfied with that. And a man named John Belleville, who worked at the Royal Observatory, or had worked, I've seen some sort of conflicting notes on what actually his title was at this time, but at least for a while, he had been an apprentice at the Royal Observatory. And he saw a market for telling people what time it was.
24:26 Rachel Feltman? And by the way, in 1852, they would come up with a better solution for this than just saying, you can't bang on our door more than once a week. They put a giant clock on the outside of their gate that they kept up to date. Basically, they had gotten their first electric clock, so that made having multiple clocks that were set to Greenwich Mean Time and all referenced the one really good clock that made that viable. So eventually, it would be just like, look at the big clock on the gate, point to the sign, that's what time it is. But, you know, there were like, almost 20 years when people were demanding to know what time it was, and that giant gate clock didn't exist yet. So that's where John Belleville comes in.
25:09 Rachel Feltman? He might have worked at the Royal Observatory at the time. At the very least, he had been an apprentice at the Royal Observatory at some point. But he saw a market for telling people what time it was. So in 1836, he started charging people an annual fee to use his pocket watch. He had a very good pocket watch, and once a week, he'd come by and visit them and share the time on his watch, which he kept accurate, thanks to his access to the observatory's chronometers. So then everybody else could... What an entrepreneur. Yeah, seriously. Business mastermind. So, yeah, they could adjust their own watches accordingly. And as a side note, I just really love this.
25:52 Rachel Feltman? The guy who, like, oversaw him at the observatory for some time when he was younger, said that he was, quote, "steady though not clever." And I'm like, first of all, I disagree. I think this man sounds very clever. But I love that he was described as steady, and then he became literally a professional timekeeper. So this business thrived until John died in 1856. And by that time, the gate clock was up. It was showing people the time. Anyone could get the time via telegraph if they really wanted to. But John's 200 subscribers knew and trusted the pocket watch system. So they asked his widow Maria if she would take up the mantle of selling them the time.
26:34 Rachel Feltman? And she did that for another 36 years before retiring. Now, by this point, we're in the 1890s. Again, it seems very reasonable for this service to just die out with Maria. Telegraph time was a very established technology. There were commercial firms, one called the Standard Time Company, competing with the post office telegraph time to get customers. But it wasn't actually as accurate or reliable as a pocket watch set regularly to the Greenwich Mean Time clock. And apparently, according to historians, the post office had a reputation for like not always doing a good job, sort of keeping people updated.
27:18 Rachel Feltman? And Maria Belleville would always show up every week. So people were like, we need the time lady. And they asked her daughter Ruth to step in. And she did, with the same pocket watch that had belonged to her father, which she called Arnold, after the guy who had made it. She carried it around London every week for another 48 years. She did have haters, at least one hater. This guy named Saint John Wynn, who was a director of the Standard Time Company, tried to bring her down. And this is a great story. In 1908, he gave a speech at the United Awards Club, which was then published in The Times, and he criticized Belleville's business methods. He was like, this is so amusingly out of date.
28:02 Rachel Feltman? It's, you know, he basically kind of crapped all over London and being like, it's wild that we don't have a better system for this. Do you know how bad it is? It's so bad that here's how people get their time. And this is a quote. A woman possessed of a chronometer obtained permission from the Astronomer Royal at the time, perhaps no mere man could have been successful. So first of all, calling Ruth's mother a slut, how dare, to call at the observatory and have it correct it as often as she pleased. The business is carried on to this day by her successor, still a female, I think. So hugely offensive, terrible man, hate him. He really wanted- Screw that guy. Yeah, absolutely. He really wanted to promote the Standard Time Company.
28:47 Rachel Feltman? He simply wanted her business. And this was printed in The Times, then a bunch of angry dudes wrote letters to the editor about how it was really egregious that London didn't have a good public system for access to accurate time, which some other major cities did by then. But, twist, all of those angry men writing into the newspapers actually seemed to boost Ruth Belleville's business because people read it and were like, oh, I didn't know there was a lady I could pay to tell me the time. Or people were like, yeah, that's a great point. Our city is really bad at telling us what time it is, and thank goodness they've given
29:30 Rachel Feltman? me the name of this reliable woman who will fix that problem for me. Apparently it became very fashionable to have this like personal service instead of using the telegraph. And if you could afford like thrice weekly updates, you were very, you know, that was very elite. So Ruth had like a great system. She would arrive at the Royal Observatory before nine at least once a week. She would always refer to her watch as Arnold, and she would say, good morning, Arnold's four seconds fast today. And somebody would check the watch, she would set it, she would get a certificate of accuracy, and then she would go and see her clients.
30:13 Rachel Feltman? Now, in 1924, the BBC started broadcasting the Pips and the Sound of Big Ben, which meant anyone with a radio could tell what time it was. And then in 1936, there was the speaking clock, also called TIM, which meant you could like dial the letters TIM and get the time. So by the time Ruth retired in 1940, this was very much of a bygone era. And even though it seems she had clients until the end, there wasn't really anyone scrambling for a replacement for her, though she only retired because she was 86 and World War II made it unsafe for her to walk the streets. And then she passed away a couple of years later, reportedly with Arnold by her side.
30:57 Rachel Feltman? But yeah, one other thing that I'm not getting into because Ruth's story ended up being so great that I just spent the whole time reading about it. There was another like pre-clock saturation job called a knocker-upper, which is of course just a very funny sounding thing. And these were people who would go around knocking on your windows to wake you up for work at the factory. Because again, there was this very awkward time when people were used to relying on the sun for getting up. But now they're moving into cities, they have factory jobs where your boss doesn't care about what time your body thinks it is. And there were actually a lot of times when people talk about knocker-uppers, they'll be like, and alarm clocks were just impossible to get. And that's actually probably not true.
31:43 Rachel Feltman? There, alarm clocks have existed for thousands of years. There's some wild stuff about like water-based alarm clocks that people had in ancient Greece and ancient China. That being said, the sort of like modern mechanical idea of an alarm clock, those were probably available and not wildly expensive. But they also weren't very reliable. And then people weren't used to using alarm clocks. So apparently, a lot of people would have an alarm clock, but then often sleep through it. So the knocker-upper would be like, no, wake up.
32:15 Rachel Feltman? And again, this is, this is a job that sort of went away as alarm clocks got better. People got more used to the industrial schedule. But I love the idea of people just like hoofing it to, to deal with the concept of time. I think, and like honestly, I, I wish there were still more services that involved like a, a trusted lady coming to your door once a week to update you on something or other.
32:41 Speaker 05 Well, it kind of reminds me of like, like, I don't know, like the, the time being kind of decentralized like that reminds me of like pre-internet stuff. And like, I don't know, I think there's something kind of nice and special about having like less access to stuff like that. Obviously there's a lot of good reasons to have that stuff, but I don't know. Maybe this is just me being nostalgic for time before the internet, but yeah, I don't know.
33:02 Speaker 06 The old days when you got that hotel wake up call instead of setting a phone alarm.
33:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, I forgot about that. Well, I'm nostalgic for it.
33:11 Rachel Feltman? You can still do that at most hotels, I think.
33:13 Speaker 05 Maybe we should, maybe we should start doing that again. Let's bring that back.
33:16 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Honestly, I think somebody could probably really make a killing, like rebranding the wake up call as like a boutique service.
33:27 Speaker 05 Oh, somebody make that. It could be a gold mine and also really cool and fun.
33:33 Rachel Feltman? I think I read a romance novel once where the plot was that she was supposed to find a wake up call service for her boss, but none of them would take him because he was so mean.
33:46 Speaker 05 Oh, my God.
33:47 Rachel Feltman? And then like one morning she did it out of desperation and like, you know, told him what a jerk he was. It was, you know, it's a good, good plot device. I don't remember if the book was good, but yeah. Anyway, bring it back.
34:01 Speaker 05 Agree.
34:02 Rachel Feltman? In the billionaire romance novel world, apparently wake up calls are still a thing. So maybe they do still exist. All right, we're going to take one more break and then be back with one more fact.
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35:33 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And we have one more fact. Belinda, what's your fact?
35:39 Speaker 06 So something that I'm always interested in is how do organisms communicate and what are they talking about? Especially if you get to something simple, like a bug, right? It's a bug. There's always the question of do they even have a brain? And how smart they are? Can they talk about things that are important? So I came across a paper that claims that they have culture. And the researchers are defining culture as preferences that are passed on in between generations of information and not genetically. And so what they did- Oh, cool. Bug culture? Bug culture. I love bug culture. So they did mating preferences because that's an easy thing to study.
36:18 Speaker 06 So what they did was they put females and males into different colored dust and made them look a little bit different. So there was like a blue fly and a pink fly and a yellow fly. And they made them really, you know, like they took a female fly that was unmated. So the males preferred that female fly right away. They didn't know that it was something about the yellow dust or the blue, but you had a group of naive observer flies, or these are the students that are watching this interaction happen. And they're seeing the males pick the yellow fruit fly or the blue flute fry every time. Whoever was the more attractive actually to them. And it turns out that those individuals that were watching these flies, without any other experience beyond just watching them, then formed this preference.
37:03 Speaker 05 No way.
37:04 Speaker 06 And so they, without any actual stimulus, then preferred the color fly that they watched that was successfully mated with.
37:11 Speaker 05 Unrealistic beauty standards.
37:16 Speaker 06 Yeah, watching in TV, right? Like you're, that's what's told to you is beautiful, and now that's what you go after.
37:21 Speaker 05 Now I have to be blue?
37:25 Speaker 06 I mean, you know, Smurf costumes, we're good.
37:27 Speaker 05 We're good, you're so right, you're so right.
37:30 Speaker 06 But so I was really curious to see if this can transmit to something that's more biologically relevant, right? And one thing that I always think is interesting is a fear response, right? To me, if I see a behavior, I'm like, all right, that's either sexual selection. So some reason to be more attracted to a mate, or it's some kind of predation risk. How could it have evolved? So it turns out, you can give fruit flies a variety of different predators. You can put them in the same container with them. You can put them in with spiders that'll actually end up eating them. And you could watch them bounce around like a piece of popcorn kernel in their container, trying to escape from the spider. You know, they never actually do, but they are like visibly changing their behavior. And same with something that doesn't hurt them, but only infects their babies.
38:15 Speaker 06 So if there's a parasitic wasp that infects the offspring of the fruit fly, so the larval state, but is no threat to the adult, the adult still has fundamental behavioral changes. So the question is, right? Can this be transmitted in that cultural sense the same way as that color preference? And so researchers did a variety of genetic experiments, as well as physical separations and showed that, yeah, this fear of spiders and being afraid of them can be transmitted visually. And it is a maintained behavior in those observer flies. So it's not just a transient where the observer fly watches there a fear happening of a spider, and they're afraid as long as they see the spider. But rather for days after the experience,
38:59 Speaker 06 those flies that never caught the whiff of the predator, but just have seen it, or have seen an individual that had been exposed to a predator. In the absence of the original predator itself, they show physiological changes. So they are able to communicate that, yes, there has been a predator threat. And that not only results in a behavioral change, but changes in the germ lines. The ovaries of fruit flies have fundamentally changed as a result of this exposure.
39:27 Speaker 05 Wow.
39:28 Speaker 06 And so that that has, it makes sense that it's transient, right? Because then you can see, like, you can adapt quickly to the environment, depending on what predatory needs or available. If there's no predators, right, you don't have to change anything. Presumably, if you're laying at an egg site, you're closely related to the individuals laying there. So from a genetic fitness standpoint, it makes sense. But it's just something really cool that it happens in a fruit fly. It happens across multiple different phenomena, so predation, the color preference, right? And it's this through visual cues, which insects are usually thought of as like not really good visual animals. Minus like the praying mantis. But even for them, they have this built in search image in their brains that's innate that they look for.
40:11 Speaker 06 And it has this really, really potent level of information.
40:15 Speaker 05 Wow, that's wild. I love bug culture.
40:20 Speaker 06 And it goes to show like what else in terms of bug culture exists that we don't account for. So I think that's what I find really exciting about these facts as well as not to just, it's not just an end game, right? It's like, well, that's in one instance of one organism, right? What happens with everything else on a day to day basis? That's maybe more relevant to what goes on their lives. And researchers have tested multiple species as well. One really interesting study was if you place two species, the same species side by side. And one of, one group is dead. The one that's watching has a shortened lifespan. So if they see dead individuals of cons specifics of their same species, those that have seen death live a shorter lifespan.
41:04 Speaker 05 Spooky. I see dead fruit flies.
41:08 Speaker 06 But it, but if you put in a different species of fruit fly, so a close relative, right? Not like a totally, not like a housefly even, just a close relative of fruit fly. You put a close relative and that's dead, doesn't affect them.
41:21 Speaker 05 I think that's not my problem.
41:23 Speaker 06 And it makes sense, right? Like, well, I'm resistant to whatever he died from. I don't need to worry about that.
41:28 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah, okay.
41:29 Speaker 06 But it's just really cool to be able to have this visual information conferred in this like spread of fear. And in the information of it and see how it can be contained, how translated is how it's remembered by these animals. And I think it's kind of relevant to today's culture as well because there's a lot of fears that we may have and hopefully it's not permanent. Right? And so that's, that was my, uh, interesting fact for the day.
41:51 Rachel Feltman? Wow. I love it. Bug culture.
41:53 Speaker 05 Bug culture. It is wild that they can learn that stuff and pass it down just by like watching.
41:59 Speaker 06 Right. And so, because a lot of the researchers thought maybe it's olfaction, right? A lot of insects can smell really well. And it turns out again, just like building containers, they're side by side. So they can't actually smell each other.
42:09 Speaker 05 But they can see.
42:11 Speaker 06 Exactly. Or the alternative is that they did, they removed the ability for the insect to smell. And so it's really, it's really easy to do because all the receptors are what are called heterodimers. So it's a pair of receptors. One is always this gene called orco one. And then you have orco number two through whatever you get to. And it's that pair that allows them to smell something. So if you get rid of orco one, they can't smell a thing. And so you can genetically ablate it, put them together and you get the exact same result.
42:40 Speaker 05 Well, and it does make me wonder too, like you were saying, like, like what else are they learning by watching? Like if, you know, if we're able to just see this one thing, like what else do they know?
42:51 Speaker 06 And it's something right, you're looking for, and even like that is, why were you even looking for something like that? Whose idea was it to put dust on them to see it? It, it's really, the reason I liked it so much because I find it was so clever of an idea. And then it actually panned out. So it just goes to show, I think, how little we still know about the natural world where it's like, you know, in these papers were ranging from 2018 to 2022 that I was seeing. And there's still like this visual transfer of information that is so fundamental to the behavior of the animal, but it's just now being published on.
43:25 Rachel Feltman? Right. Yeah. And fruit flies are like, we, we've looked at fruit flies so much. They're such a classic model organism. So, uh, if there's so much we don't know about them, wow.
43:37 Speaker 06 Right. It's like a hu- a hundred plus years of research and just now it's like, oh, they're, they're talking to each other about, about being scared. Uh oh.
43:44 Speaker 05 Yeah.
43:46 Rachel Feltman? But are they scared of us?
43:50 Rachel Feltman? I want to know. I want to make sure they're fine with it.
43:54 Rachel Feltman? Um, no, that was really cool. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been a great app. Um, and Jess, thanks again for, for coming on the side of the mic. Always great to have you.
44:04 Speaker 05 Glad to be here, even when my dog is causing a ruckus.
44:09 Rachel Feltman? Would you actually both, uh, remind our listeners where they can find your Twitch streams? Cause Jess, I feel like it's been a while since we plugged.
44:18 Speaker 05 Yes, I would love, I would love to. So I stream, I'm Jess Capricorn on Twitch, all one word. And I stream mostly Monday, Wednesday, Thursday nights. Uh, and I also publish YouTube videos and I do a lot of like JRPG style stuff, some Elden Ring stuff, some Bloodborne stuff. Uh, when is this coming out? I think it will have already passed by that time. Yes, I'm doing a big charity stream, but that will have already happened. Uh, for reproductive rights, but yeah, so that's what, that's what I get up to. Uh, we get into some science stuff occasionally, but not as much as Balint does. So please tell us about science streams.
44:52 Speaker 06 Well, first of all, thank you all very much for having me on today. This is an absolute blast.
44:56 Speaker 05 This was so fun. We loved having you.
44:59 Speaker 06 I love the show and it was, it's been a blast catching up on some of the older episodes as well. So again, thank you all for having me. Um, we are, so my wife and I run our Twitch stream. It is science streams. So S C I A N T S underscore streams.
45:14 Speaker 05 And we'll put those in the description and everything too.
45:18 Speaker 06 Awesome. Uh, and we, yeah, like Jess said, we do science content every day. So we, Mondays we'll get stuff under the microscope, including 30 million year old amber with insects. Tuesdays we build models. Wednesdays we do art. Thursdays we play games, talk about the science behind them. Science news on Friday. You might get a grab bag of anything on Saturday. And then we usually do IRL content on Sunday, going out into the world, doing fossil hunts, museum tours, aquariums and more.
45:43 Rachel Feltman? Awesome. Definitely. Uh, I think listeners should check that out. The weirdest thing I learned this week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.
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46:32 Speaker 01 Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing.
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Previous Rat Sommeliers, Pneumatic Tube Flirting, Why Periods Hurt Next The Piss Current, Mucking Up Space, a Cocky Legend Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated