Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Cannibal Caribou, Charming Worms, Strawberry-Flavored Neutrinos About this episode Rachel's officially back! Chanda Prescod-Weinstein also joins as a guest host. This week, they talk about self-made caribou snacks, how to charm a worm, and why neutrinos can be classified as nontrinary.
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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 This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.
0:30 Speaker 01 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.
1:08 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.
1:28 Speaker 03 I'm Lauren Lefer. And I'm Chonda Prescod Weinstein.
1:31 Rachel Feltman? Chonda, welcome to the show. And also, yes, listeners, I'm back. I think at one point I said I'd be back in May, and it is, in fact, April. But you have to forgive me, because I've been busy, and I got that wrong, and that's fine. Also, thank you so much, Jess, for helming the show in my absence. It's been great listening to all your eps. It was really fun. I'm glad you're back, though. Oh, thank you, thank you. Glad to be back. Chonda, you have a new book. I would love to hear a little bit about it, so our listeners can get excited about it and go check it out.
2:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, my new book is The Edge of Spacetime: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie. And the book is very broadly about all the cool ways that we can think about our universe from the context of edges. So whether you're talking about the event horizon of a black hole, or thinking about other cosmic horizons. And I'm also super interested in how poetry helps us think through the universe, and how poets use the universe to help us understand our world and our lives.
2:35 Rachel Feltman? That's so cool. I have a copy waiting for me to read. But due to baby, I have not read it yet. But I know it's gonna be great, just like your last one was.
2:47 Speaker 03 I can't believe you're prioritizing your baby over my book. Rude.
2:50 Rachel Feltman? I know, I know. Just for now, he really like can't do anything yet. Soon my TBR pile will shove him out of the way. Well, let's jump right into the show. So on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, we start by each offering up a tease about some kind of fact or story that we found in the course of reading, writing, reporting, 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. Lauren, great to have you back on. What's your tease?
3:28 Speaker 04 Thanks, Rachel. Great to be back on. Also, I'm gonna say, welcome back to you, because you're always saying, welcome back to everyone else. But welcome back to you, Rachel.
3:34 Rachel Feltman? Thank you, thank you.
3:36 Speaker 04 My tease is, what do timberdoodles, Florida's recreational fishing industry, and the quaint English village of Williston have in common?
3:44 Rachel Feltman? Probably so much, but I don't know. So I can't wait.
3:47 Speaker 04 You're gonna learn. You're all gonna learn.
3:51 Rachel Feltman? Chanda, what's your tease?
3:53 Speaker 03 Man, I feel like that's a tough act to follow, Lauren. My tease is that neutrinos are non-trinary. And I'm not even gonna explain what non-trinary means.
4:05 Rachel Feltman? Great. I can't wait.
4:06 Speaker 04 I'm thrilled to learn.
4:08 Rachel Feltman? All right, my tease is that I am a new parent who's always hungry and I'm gonna talk about some other new parents that are always hungry, except these ones are reindeer. Yay, seasonally appropriate for spring, absolutely. I'm really on top of things. Lauren, you really did kill it with that tease, so I would love for you to go first.
4:35 Speaker 04 Oh wow, thank you. Great, okay, so I'm gonna start by sending a video link in the chat. It's quick, but it's very important, I promise. And we're gonna hope that this doesn't like somehow tank the feed. Everyone, everyone gets this, even you Jess.
4:52 Rachel Feltman? Yay.
4:53 Speaker 04 If everyone could just like click that, take a look.
4:57 Rachel Feltman? Oh my, yeah, this is, this is important, this is a rich text.
5:02 Speaker 04 Chanda, are you able to open it?
5:04 Speaker 03 I was just typing in the chat, it's not coming through to me, I'm just getting that bar that's like cycling.
5:10 Speaker 04 Oh no.
5:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:12 Speaker 04 Cycling bar, okay, I'm gonna rely on the fact that Rachel was able to watch it and ask you Rachel to describe what's happening in the video.
5:20 Rachel Feltman? I'm seeing, well first of all, some really funky tunes, great, great beats, and some birds, I believe based on the title of the video, some woodcocks are kinda, they're really getting down, they're, they're dancing like, like a millennial at a wedding, I don't know.
5:42 Speaker 04 Lots of head movement, lots of foot movement, no hips at all.
5:46 Speaker 03 I'm taking this personally.
5:48 Rachel Feltman? As a millennial, as a millennial who's been to weddings, that I say that neutrally and with love, but yeah, there's a lot of, you know, sort of head, head, just like basic move into the rhythm, impressive, impressive stuff.
6:03 Speaker 04 If these birds had arms, they'd be doing like the little wiggle shuffle thing with them, just like fists up near the chest. Anyway, for the folks listening at home and for Chanda, this is a video of an adult American woodcock, AKA a timberdoodle, AKA a hokum poke, AKA a bog sucker, AKA a brush snape, AKA a Labrador twister.
6:23 Rachel Feltman? A hoki poke.
6:24 Speaker 04 They have so many names. They have so many names because they're such weird little birds. But this is a video of an adult woodcock and it's two little chicks doing this groovy little stomp step dance walk. There is that funky synth beat in the background of the YouTube clip. But given that the birds in real life are not actually hearing that music, you might wonder, why are they walking this way? And no, it's not like an AI-generated animal video like woodcocks do in fact, walk around on this earth doing that little dance. Not all the time, but they can. Yes.
6:58 Rachel Feltman? Is the hokey pokey named after them? Or did they get that name from doing the hokey pokey?
7:04 Speaker 04 So the alternate name is the hokum poke? And I actually don't know. That's a great question. That's like a whole other episode's worth of questions.
7:12 Rachel Feltman? Wow, okay.
7:13 Speaker 04 Are they related?
7:14 Speaker 03 I've been stuck on it's timber doodles.
7:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:18 Speaker 03 Like is it, it just, I just think dog now, especially because I can't see the video. I'm just like envisioning a labradoodle, like, I don't like with a bird head or something.
7:26 Speaker 04 And you know what? Why not? Big aside, the guy who like bred the labradoodle, have you heard that he's like gone on record saying it was like the biggest mistake and he created a monster? He's like been doing like a decades-long apology tour, trying to get people to stop, to stop.
7:43 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
7:44 Speaker 04 Because they're so anxious and they're so smart and they're so high energy. Anyway, woodcocks. Yeah, the timber doodle name, no one knows exactly where it first originated, but the idea is that they live in the woods, hence timber, and they are super fun looking, hence doodle. And that's like as, as much as we know about the etymology of that. But why are they walking this way? So I guess, do either of you want to make a guess?
8:10 Rachel Feltman? I mean, I feel like usually when birds do funky stuff, it's for like mating reasons. But I feel like that, that's too obvious. So I don't know.
8:20 Speaker 04 I guess because I'm a physicist, my immediate thought was mechanics. Like this has something to do with the way in which they are ambulatory, or it has something to do with body temperature. Like somehow this helps them regulate. It's a physicist answer.
8:35 Rachel Feltman? Is it like dune, are they trying not to disturb the worm?
8:38 Speaker 04 Oh, okay, wait, that's gonna be so prescient in just a minute. But those are both really good guesses. One, because timberdoodles do have a super intricate mating ritual called a skydance. They do like these insane courtship displays across the eastern US and parts of Canada in the springtime. Those are cool, but not this. And then also because like lots of birds have kind of a weird way of walking, right? Like Chanda, you're totally right. Like chickens and pigeons are ambulatory in this way that seems to necessitate them moving their heads. But woodcocks aren't. They can, they can walk normally if they choose to. They can walk like little sandpipers because they're actually related to shorebirds, even though they live in the woods. Anyway, great guesses. Not it.
9:21 Speaker 04 You were on to something with the dune reference and we will get to that. But there are like two main ideas about why woodcocks do this walk. The first theory is that it's an aposomatic display. So like a way to warn would be predators that the bird, the woodcock has spotted them and then discourage the predator for going in for the kill. The idea is that like if a prey animal has seen a predator, they're more likely to successfully escape. And so it's probably not worth the predator's time to try. You might be familiar, like whitetail deer do this. If, if you startle them in the woods, they start jumping up and they flash their whitetails. It's called stopping. Lots of animals do this too. Behavioral aposomatic, aposomaticism, behavioral aposomaticism.
10:06 Speaker 04 That's so hard to say. So that's one idea. But then there's this second theory that's a little bit more unique and based on some scientific studies is like probably closer to the truth.
10:20 Speaker 04 Timberdoodles, like I said before, they're funny little birds. They're taxonomically shorebirds, but they live in scrubby inland forest and meadow habitats, not at the beach. And they use the majority of their time in that forest habitat probing for earthworms. Worms make up like 60 to 70% of their diet. Their beaks are super weird in and of themselves. They have tons of nerve endings, especially at the tip. The tip of the beak is like uniquely flexible. Also, they have this muscular and tendon structure that allows them to actually open their beaks underground, which if you think about it, kind of crazy because like soil's heavy and dense and like this bird beak looks so thin and delicate.
11:02 Speaker 04 Really cool beaks, very specially adapted for worms. And then there's this kind of like woodcock waltz or the timberdoodle two-step, whatever you want to call it.
11:11 Rachel Feltman? Oh my god, stop.
11:13 Speaker 04 I can keep going, Rachel.
11:17 Speaker 04 Whatever you want to call it, the second theory about why they're doing this little dance is that it actually compels worms to emerge from the ground via vibration. So by like rock stepping to this instinctively ingrained beat, they might just be like summoning worms to the surface. So, yeah, kind of, I guess, like opposite dune worm. They want the worms. They're not, yeah, they're not avoiding the worms.
11:41 Speaker 03 That's, I just need to point out, that's a physics answer.
11:44 Speaker 04 It is a physics answer. It totally is. Vibration, sound waves, all physics, 100%.
11:51 Rachel Feltman? I just keep thinking about how, sorry, what was the name of the dance that had timberdoodle in it?
11:58 Speaker 04 I just said timberdoodle two-step.
11:59 Rachel Feltman? Oh yeah, that's great. Well, that does, I keep thinking of like, it sounds like a song in the music man. It would be somewhere after shapoopy.
12:10 Speaker 04 All the kids are doing the timber noodle two-step. Yeah. I love it. We could, we can collab on the musical. Perfect. Um, yeah. And so this idea that, um, that vibrations applied to the surface of the earth, um, that that could make earthworms appear, um, is actually like a really kind of an old idea. Um, it's been around for hundreds of years. Even Darwin was writing about it, uh, and kind of in terms that suggested it's, it's old news. In one of his published texts on earthworms, he wrote, quote, "It's often been said that if the ground is beaten or otherwise made to tremble, worms leave their burrows." So at that point in like the mid 1800s, people were like, yeah,
12:52 Speaker 04 you like shake the earth, worms come up, no big deal. Um, and people have been using this knowledge for a really long time. So enter the little known endangered human art of worm charming, uh, AKA worm grunting, worm fiddling, or rooping. Lots of stuff with lots of names in this, in this spiel.
13:14 Speaker 04 So worm charming is like a clearly effective and proven means of harvesting earthworms. Um, there are lots of ways to do it. You can use a metal saw, power tools, you can dance, you can use a musical instrument, you can rev a car, or like literally just wiggle a dining fork in the ground. Um, but in the place it's been most professionalized, which is the Florida Panhandle, uh, the primary method involves a wooden stake and a metal iron. Um, so you hammer a wooden stake into the ground and then you rub the iron against it, kind of like a violin bow. Um, it makes a really distinctive sound, sort of like moving your finger across a comb. And the resulting vibrations, like obviously do something because people can collect hundreds of worms in a single grunt,
13:59 Speaker 04 um, and like thousands over hours. Um, you can see videos of this happening, like on the Wikipedia page for worm charming. There's this video of this like very old grizzled Florida Panhandle man, like mumbling some incomprehensible words and like doing his little worm grunt thing. And then you just see the bucket and it's just like, like absolutely chock full wriggling with worms.
14:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, so people in the Panhandle and elsewhere have been using worm grunting to charm worms and like straight up earn a living for decades. So people collect the worms, they sell them as fishing bait. And in the 1960s and 70s, the bait industry exploded so much in Florida's Apalachicolacola National Forest. Thousands of worm charmers were working the soil like every day and the US Forest Service got worried about over harvesting. So they actually started a permitting system and also they banned power vibration methods. So you could no longer use a car or power tools. Yeah, so it works. You can charm worms. You can try it at home
15:06 Speaker 04 in your backyard or in the park if you have a fork. And in the present day, despite the fact that you can also just like farm worms, which is where probably most of the bait night crawlers come from that you might encounter in like a fishing supply shop, people do still grunt for bait sold in shops. But the practice is kind of a dying art. The number of practitioners is in really steep decline. Just a handful of folks have really like dedicated themselves to passing on their techniques to the next generation. And one major way worm charming lives on is through like these niche local competitions. So Sopchopy, Florida, a town of fewer than 500 people, is home to the American Worm Grunting Festival, which happens
15:51 Speaker 04 annually. There are also events in East Texas, Alabama, Ontario, Canada, elsewhere in North America. But the most well-known and longest-running contest is the World Worm Charming Championship in the village of Williston, Cheshire, in the northwest of England, which goes back all the way to the teaser question, what do these three things have in common? The answer is worms. Yeah, in Williston, the event started in 1980. It was like part of a primary school festival. So initially, it was just kids. Now it's an all-ages competition. And currently, the official world record holder for quote, "most worms charmed."
16:33 Speaker 04 Uh, is, is Sophie Smith, who won the Williston contest in 2009 at 10 years old, in 30 minutes from a three by three meter square plot, she charmed 567 worms out of the ground.
16:46 Rachel Feltman? Most worms charmed was actually my high school yearbook superlative. So that's crazy.
16:51 Speaker 04 Yeah. Paper plate awards all across the country given out to, to those worm charmers. Yeah. I'm not going to try and pull up another video, but the footage from the Williston Festival is like a hundred percent worth watching. Um, you've got people like tap dancing, playing the upright bass, like smashing paddles into the ground, uh, like trying to use pitchforks. It's very like New York's hottest club coded in that it's just like a list of seemingly unrelated absurd things. Um, but at this point, you might be wondering like, why, why the worms respond to vibration this way, right? Cause it seems like super counterproductive to survival, to, um, to just like come out of the ground, expose yourself to predators.
17:36 Speaker 04 Like you could get snapped up by a bird if, you know, if not a worm charmer. Um, doesn't seem super advantageous, but, uh, they do it anyway. So any guesses about why? What's going on here?
17:49 Speaker 03 I'm going to be honest and say the question that's really on my mind right now is how all of this affects hobbits.
17:55 Speaker 04 Like with the bare feet or?
17:57 Speaker 03 No, I'm, I honestly, I'm stuck on like the worm charming and the shaking of the ground. And, and if this has been known for a really long time, like in Darwin's time, like, why didn't Tolkien integrate this into the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings?
18:10 Speaker 04 Big oversight. That's true.
18:12 Speaker 03 I just like huge, huge.
18:15 Speaker 04 So, uh, if you're a worm, it turns out that your number one most feared predator is a mole. Um, and so if you want to escape like a mole on the move, the best way out is up. Um, so moles are, are really shy and secretive. They don't surface unless they absolutely have to, um, even if their prey is escaping from them. So, uh, when moles are digging on the hunt for worms, worms sense those vibrations and it's adaptive and strategic for them to then surface to avoid the underground predator. So I guess in this like analogy, the moles are actually the sand worms. Like if we're sticking with the dune comparison and the worms are not worms.
18:54 Speaker 04 But anyway, that's the prevailing idea is that worm grunting and also timberdoodle dancing, it all mimics mole vibration. And this was actually tested by a Vanderbilt University scientist in 2008. And this is like, like a noted biologist with like a MacArthur Genius Grant, but he took time out of his busy schedule to be like, why worms do this? So he recorded the underground vibrations of both moles digging and worm grunters working their, you know, plying their little trade, found that the vibration patterns were really similar, and then did kind of all of these tests, both in plots
19:35 Speaker 04 and in big bins of soil, to see how worms responded to moles digging and also different strategies of worm grunting. There was also this other idea, and both of you have probably heard of it, that worms come up when it rains because they don't want to drown underground. So that was like this other theory that vibrations from grunting and timberdoodles may be mimicked like rain falling. But in 2008, the Vanderbilt University scientists tested this idea with a sprinkler and simply didn't find support for it. Apparently worms do fine underground if the soil is saturated for a period of time. Yeah. So, you know, woodcocks and their little stomps may very well be an evolved strategy for mimicking
20:20 Speaker 04 moles, worm charming, and they're not the only ones. Herringgalls, a few other species of birds, and wood turtles are also thought to do a similar behavior where they stomp the ground and then eat the worms that come up. Wow. Yeah, that's so cool.
20:35 Speaker 03 Wait, I have a question. Although this is more about the worms underground. So in the experiment where they tested with the sprinkler, how did they force the worms to stay underground? Like, did they saran wrap them down? Or like, to see if they survived? Because I'm assuming that they were, how did they test that?
20:53 Speaker 04 So they, in that experiment, they had basically like bins or enclosures that were pretty deep, full of soil, full of worms, and they Um, used the sprinkler that they thought was a pretty good approximation of like a regular rainstorm. Um, and they ran it long enough for the water in that bin to be totally saturated and just like observed if worms came up. And in five trials, only three worms emerged of like hundreds. Um, and then they like dug through when they were all done and like assessed the health of the remaining worms and they found that all of them were still alive and totally fine, even after like a couple hours in saturated soil.
21:31 Rachel Feltman? So for every worm we see squirming up in the rain, there are probably a bunch more being like, whatever, man.
21:38 Speaker 04 Yeah. And maybe, maybe they're not squirming up because of the rain. Maybe there's something else going on. Maybe moles get more active when it's raining, you know?
21:44 Rachel Feltman? Hmm. Yeah. Who knows?
21:46 Speaker 04 Who knows? We need more science.
21:48 Rachel Feltman? I keep thinking of, there's this visual from a movie that I think dates back to my childhood. And it's like, early in the film, somebody is harvesting worms and it's not related to the rest of the film at all. It's just like a crazy visual. And now it's really bothering me. If anyone thinks they know what movie I'm talking about, it's presumably from the nineties. Let me know.
22:16 Speaker 04 Do you know what else happens in the movie?
22:19 Rachel Feltman? I want to say it's a sci-fi movie because most of the adult movies I watched as a small child were science fiction that my parents put on. So we'll see, maybe it'll come to me later, but for now, I'm posing it to the chat. Get in the comments.
22:37 Speaker 03 All of my visuals for this right now are Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Like Rick Moranis running around in like blades of grass that are just like giants. My associations are clearly like very weird. It's like Lord of the Rings and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
22:51 Speaker 04 You know, great, classic, classic works of literature and film. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and then we'll be right back with some more facts.
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24:08 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And, Tonda, tell me what non-trinary means in your own time, but I would like to know.
24:16 Speaker 03 So I think to really appreciate what non-trinary means, I have to back up a little bit and tell you about one of my favorite particles. So this type of particle is called the neutrino. And I actually talked about the neutrino the last time I was on with you in the context of radioactive bananas. So yes, for people who haven't heard that episode yet, you should go back and find it. And bananas have a lot of potassium in them, and some of that potassium decays. And as the potassium decays, it produces neutrinos. And so it emits neutrinos. Bananas are totally safe. You should continue to eat them. They're delicious. They're also emitting neutrinos. And this type of subatomic particle...
24:59 Speaker 03 Is kind of wily because it is very low mass. It's so low mass that actually for a while, people thought maybe it didn't have any mass at all. And so it behaved like photons, like light, and it would just travel at the speed of light. We're fairly certain now that that's not the case. But neutrinos are very interesting because they're produced in a lot of different environments. So as one example, neutrinos are made in the sun as part of a process called beta decay. And beta decay is usually neutrons turning into protons or protons turning into neutrons. And so these make either neutrinos or anti neutrinos, which are the antimatter version of neutrino.
25:42 Speaker 03 And the thing about neutrino production in the sun is that the sun only makes one kind of neutrino, only one flavor. So there are three flavors, and one of them is the electron neutrino. And the sun only makes electron neutrinos. So you'd think if we point our, a little neutrino detector at the sun, that we should see a certain number of electron neutrinos coming from the sun. This is what you might expect from theory, and you can calculate how many electron neutrinos you might expect based on like stellar nuclear astrophysics. So at one point decades ago, there was this huge crisis because of what's called the solar neutrino problem.
26:26 Speaker 03 We were not seeing as many electron neutrinos coming from the sun as we might expect. And we're fairly certain now that this is related to the fact that neutrinos come in three different flavors. So one is the electron neutrino. There's also the muon neutrino and the tau or tauon neutrino. And it turns out that neutrinos just will randomly change from one flavor into another while they're flying along through space. So when I say that neutrinos are non-trinary, I mean that they are literally non-trinary because their identities are not stabilized into one particular category. They change as they fly through space.
27:09 Speaker 03 And so the way that the solar neutrino problem gets resolved is that some of the neutrinos that start as electron neutrinos at the sun, by the time they arrive at the earth are a different flavor. So that's what I mean by non-trinary. They're literally just mixing identities in their own way. And we don't fully understand why, but we do think this has something to do with their mass.
27:34 Speaker 04 So non-trinary is like non-binary if there were three categories and the particle existed outside and within all of them?
27:42 Speaker 03 Exactly. I, so I personally, as an age-under person, I love the non-trinary neutrino because I think it's such a great example of how people love to tell us that, for example, binaries are just, quote, "natural," big air quotes on this, right? And here's an example that comes straight from nature, from what many people consider to be the most fundamental level of nature, where actually that's not at all how the identity is stabilized. I was actually talking about this on social media the other day, and some physicist who apparently has like no sense of humor was like, "I didn't know that neutrinos were people."
28:25 Speaker 03 And I was kind of like, or actually he specifically said, "I didn't know that particles were people." And I was like, I hate to tell him that people are made of particles. So I don't know if he missed that in one of his physics classes or whatever.
28:41 Speaker 03 But I think this is a great example from nature where we see that our sensibilities about what is normal, what is natural, actually have to go away. And then, in fact, having the sense that things will always come in clean-cut categories can make it difficult for us to become aware of how nature is actually working. Hell, yeah. No, that's true so often.
29:04 Speaker 04 So, okay, question. Is this, is it kind of like, like a quantum state thing? Like where particles can inhabit like multiple states at the same time? And that's kind of like a fundamental feature of, of quantum stuff? I'm not a physicist.
29:22 Speaker 03 No, I love this. And I think one of the ways to think about this is, for example, You're probably familiar with the electron as a concept, right? And so we have some sense that the electron has what we call electrical charge. Right? And usually the way that we orient ourselves is we say electrons have negative charge and say it's antimatter counterpart, the positron has a positive charge. And this, this value of the charge is known as one of its characteristics, say, quantum numbers.
29:55 Speaker 03 And so you can think of the flavor of a neutrino as being one of its quantum properties. And so this is an example of a quantum property where there is some kind of mixing that's happening. And it's actually quite difficult to characterize it. And in the context of what is known about particle physics, we have the structure called the standard model of particle physics that people like to triumphantly roll out and say, you know, we know lots about particle physics, everything fits together really nicely. There are some giant gaping holes in that, like it doesn't account for dark matter, which is the thing that I actually research. And so the standard model at best describes only about 4% of the matter energy in the universe.
30:40 Speaker 03 So I will say it's very incomplete in some very fundamental way. But even if we accept that it's complete for what we might call visible matter, like matter that we can see.
30:51 Speaker 03 The neutrino is still difficult because it's the only particle in the standard model that doesn't get its mass in the way that other particles in the standard model do. So this is like a huge open question in particle physics, which is like, how do neutrinos get their mass? And we feel fairly certain that this has something to do with these flavor transformations or oscillations. They're called neutrino oscillations formally. But that's definitely, it's somewhere in the picture that I am. Now, I will say, because I brought up dark matter, I will just say that I think that there's an argument for why neutrinos should actually be categorized as the one form of dark matter that we have formally identified and seen.
31:35 Speaker 03 Probably going to get myself into trouble for that, but that's a tiny hill I would die on for like five seconds.
31:40 Rachel Feltman? I really, listen, as someone who knows almost nothing, I like the sound of it. I like the vibe. I'm on board.
31:50 Speaker 03 Um, I have one additional question, which is, um, what does each of the three flavors taste like?
31:58 Speaker 03 Oh, man. I should have thought of this. I'm just gonna go with this because I always root for the underdog and I feel like no one ever talks about Taon's or they don't get enough love. So I'm just gonna say that Taon neutrinos and Taos taste like Haagen Dazs strawberry ice cream because that's the best one on the planet.
32:23 Rachel Feltman? I love it. Okay, we're gonna take another quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.
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33:07 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And I, a hungry parent, I'm gonna talk about some other hungry parents. I have to say, obviously, having a child takes a lot of literal energy, but then, you know, also producing food for a child is pretty crazy. I have this strange experience as a fat person. Please don't email me saying, no, Rachel, you're beautiful. I know, I know. Fat is a neutral term. And indeed, I am beautiful. But anyway, I had this really interesting experience where after having my child, I suddenly wasn't
33:49 Rachel Feltman? swollen everywhere. And then also, I had no appetite because I had had a pretty horrible C-section. And then I was also breastfeeding. And I was like, I feel dainty. I feel like a breeze would blow me away. This is strange. Thankfully, I got my appetite back because that was not sustainable. But Anyway, I've been thinking a lot about the energy it takes to turn your blood into food, and that's wild. And thankfully, this study came out recently about caribou moms, and how they too are pretty snacky for a lot of the time. So reindeer, aka caribou,
34:31 Rachel Feltman? they're the only deer where females have antlers. And this new study offers one possible explanation for why, which is that new moms need snacks, which again is very relevant to my current interests. Me and Shonda just turned our heads the same way at the same time.
34:50 Speaker 03 I mean, I think I was like, are they eating their antlers? Like, I don't know if that was like the first place.
34:56 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, they are. Yeah, grow your own snacks. They are.
35:00 Speaker 03 No.
35:01 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And I will, I'll get into it. I will. But first, I want to talk about just antlers in general a little bit, because they're really cool. I've been fascinated by antlers ever since I learned about antler shedding. So I'm going to give folks just a little bit of a background. So they're unique to the deer family, cervids. And they're not horns. Horns are bone covered in keratin, keratin like you'd find in a toenail or a horse hoof. And with the exception of this one pretty weird mammal called the pronghorn, horns grow very slowly over a lifetime. You don't shed them and regrow them. So weak sauce, boring, anybody can do it. It's basically just a bony toenail that comes out of your
35:42 Rachel Feltman? face. But antlers are shed and regrown every year out of these little nubs called pedicles. And they're also true bone, some of the fastest growing bone in the world, apparently up to an inch per day in some species, which is just wild. And that super fast growth is facilitated by the so-called velvet that covers immature antlers as they're growing in, which is actually this very spongy skin that's just packed with blood vessels. And so this soft, spongy tissue grows cartilage like a sort of scaffolding. So there's actually a period where deer that are currently growing their new set of antlers are walking around with actually sort of like squishy, squishy antlers. Do they flop?
36:27 Rachel Feltman? I don't think they flop. I think they hold themselves up, but the impression I get is if you squeezed one, it would squish. I don't recommend trying to squish a soft antler because while their antlers might not be ready for a fight yet, their hooves are always ready for a fight. So don't squish the antlers. But then bone fills in that matrix. The blood vessels dry up. For male deer at least, who are, you know, most of the deer who are doing this, that seems to happen when testosterone is rising and the velvet sloughs off. It looks like a horror movie. I particularly recommend checking out images of moose shedding their
37:10 Rachel Feltman? velvet because there's just so much that they look like they are covered in gore because they are, but it's their own gore that they need to get rid of. So it's fine. And sometimes that you're eat it, which looks even more like a horror movie, we will be talking about some light auto cannibalism. It's true. So for most deer, this process starts in early spring, antlers harden up around September, and then they shed in late fall or early winter, when shorter days seem to trigger drops in testosterone and the bone like erodes and just sort of crumbles and dies. As you might imagine, this is incredibly costly from an energy perspective. Bull moose, for example, eat 35 pounds of vegetation a day
37:55 Rachel Feltman? and a quarter of that goes toward antler growth. So it's just, it's such an indulgence. So you might ask, why all the effort? They do use them to fight one another, as you might expect, but it's really pretty much all about sexual competition as opposed to like life for limb fights. As the Fish and Wildlife Service puts it, antlers are used for saber rattling more than as a saber. And they also serve as like an actually very honest display of a male's ability to get and use resources because they're so costly. So this is one of those situations where You know, sexual selection has selected for something that genuinely is, you can't fake
38:40 Rachel Feltman? it. You gotta, you gotta grow the big antlers by eating a lot of food, being big. But while they're not like incredible weapons, they do seem to dissuade predators from attacking deer. So that's probably part of why they've stuck around, which is an important point we'll, we'll come back to later. I should also add that in many deer species, there are deer who are somewhere on the, the intersex spectrum who have antlers, but you know, are otherwise seem to be female. But we're talking about female mama deer who also have antlers, which only happens in the caribou, which are the same thing as reindeer. There are different subspecies, but all caribou and reindeer are the same species.
39:24 Speaker 03 Okay, I didn't know that.
39:25 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, I always forget it. I think it's something I've re-learned like five times.
39:31 Speaker 03 I thought reindeer, because like you hear about reindeer like in Christmas, whatever stuff. And then like whenever you watch stuff on TV, they're like caribou.
39:39 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah. Caribou seem like very, like hardy pedestrian deer. Reindeer are, seem fanciful, but it's just branding, just branding. They're the only species where females routinely also have antlers. And this new study has one explanation for why they've stuck around, because we can imagine that probably all deer had some kind of antler at some point, though if it goes far enough back, it is thought that antlers replaced tusks in deer. And there are still some deer that have both tusks and antlers.
40:17 Speaker 03 Oh, like the musk deer. Yeah. Those weird little teeth things.
40:21 Rachel Feltman? They have weird little teeth. And it is thought that tusks used to be more the thing. But anyway, at some point, we can imagine many deer. All had antlers. And so why did they get bigger and more ostentatious in male deer and disappear in almost all species females? One interesting thing is that the timeline is slightly different for these female caribou. They start growing their antlers in May, which is also when they shed their sets from the year before. So they're basically constantly growing them. You know, they might have like a couple of weeks off in between. Whereas in males, like I said, they start their new growth in early spring, but they'll shed them in the fall or the early winter.
41:05 Rachel Feltman? So they'll basically have the winter off. And caribou ladies do not. They just kind of keep them around from May to May. But that alone doesn't tell us what they're for. And there are a few different theories. One is that maybe it's mostly so they can clear away snow, so they can eat the vegetation underneath, which would, you know, explain why they keep them in the winter. It's also possible that they use them for defense or just kind of like social dominance signaling. They keep them in the winter while the males lose them. Antlers are a hierarchical thing while the male deer have them.
41:45 Rachel Feltman? So it's like maybe once winter comes and it's like really important for the female deer to be getting these resources, that they keep their antlers to kind of like lean in, be a boss, whatever. CEO of your way to Yeah. They CEO their way. Nice winter vegetation patches. Yeah. And it does, there is some research showing that females with antlers and with bigger antlers get access to more food once the males are antlerless. But if this was the only reason, you might expect them to keep their antlers when they have new calves and they're lactating, because that's when they need more energy and protection from predators than ever.
42:26 Rachel Feltman? And instead, they all drop them like in pretty close sync within days of calving. Plus, apparently female caribou are really good at kicking their enemies, so they don't really actually need them for defense. So researchers have an idea about what might be going on here. They collected a bunch of antlers and other bones from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of Alaska, which is home to the Porcupine caribou herd. Adorable name. It's a group of around 200,000 caribou, and they make a 1,500-mile round-trip migration between their winter range and their calving grounds, which is the longest land migration of any mammal. Fun fact. So they picked up more than 1,500 antlers, some of which had been there for decades
43:10 Rachel Feltman? or maybe even centuries. Apparently, this place is just, like, rife with antlers. And then they also found 224 skeletal bones from caribou, but also from some moose and musk ox. And basically, they were looking at the bite marks on these antlers along with the other bones. It seems like they started out primarily interested in seeing whether rodents in the area were chewing on the antlers a lot. But instead, they found that 86% of the antlers they examined showed signs of gnawing, yes, but 99% of those gnaw marks were left by caribou. And actually, the rodent they seemed to expect to find gnaw marks from, they only found evidence on 4% of the antlers.
43:55 Rachel Feltman? And they didn't see any evidence of carnivore gnaw marks on the antlers. And the skeletal bones, it was a very different story. So most of those bones had gnaw marks from wolves and bears and other predators, and very few of them had gnaw marks from caribou. So there are all these bones around, many of them antlers. And it seems like the caribou are preferentially chewing on the antler bones. It's not news to us that deer might chew on bones and antlers. I actually, years ago on Weirdest Thing, I talked about one of my favorite weird studies ever, which was at a body farm that studies human decomposition.
44:38 Rachel Feltman? And they had caught a deer on camera eating a human bone. And they were like, is this the first known case of a deer eating? Human remains. And one thing that really sticks in my mind is that in the paper and in the photos, it was very clear, they described the deer gnawing on it like a cigar. That's how they gnaw on bones. They're just like, "She, she here? I got, I got my antlers for calcium and phosphorus." And that's adorable. I like to think about that. But basically, it seems possible that one of the reasons that antlers continue to emerge
45:20 Rachel Feltman? every year in these female caribou and reindeer and not in other species of deer is that they're kind of like a convenient place to store energy so that then you can drop them in the calving grounds for a snack. And it's not just that they're eating their own antlers, though I would be surprised if they don't occasionally take a gnaw of the antler that falls right in front of them. But basically, there's now this landscape littered with shed antlers that have all been left by female deer because the male deer have already lost their antlers by the time they get anywhere near here. And those minerals are, they're returning to the soil. They're a really important part of the ecosystem.
46:05 Rachel Feltman? But they're also providing really necessary nutrients to these new moms. So it's sort of this like multi-generational, like ecosystem shaping, you know, geoengineering happening where they are creating this environment where there's plenty of phosphorus and calcium for new moms to get just by, you know, chewing on the antlers that are all over the place.
46:31 Speaker 04 It's ladies looking out for each other.
46:33 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah. I do really like the intergenerational aspect of it. It's really cool. I think, you know, sometimes when folks talk about evolution, they forget that things can stick around, not just because they're like great for that individual in that moment, but that it's, it's good for everybody. It helps generally more calves survive in that herd. And that's fun to think about. And of course, you know, this study didn't definitively prove that this is the reason they have antlers. And it's probably multifaceted. You know, there are probably social aspects, but... I think it's really cool. As, as somebody who frequently needs a snack and wishes I could
47:16 Rachel Feltman? just carry one around on my head that's always there. Also, this is not actually related, but Google the muntjac or the barking deer listeners, because that's the guy I talked to you about before that has, still has tusks in addition to antlers. And boy, what a, what a weird looking guy. Good for him. But yeah, that's, that's my fact for today. My first one back. I didn't intend to do a mom fact, but then I saw this study and I thought, wow, we're all out here snacking together.
47:50 Speaker 03 I have to say that when you made clear that this was going in the direction of self-consumption, this made me think about dermatilomania, which is like when people like pick at their skin and sometimes like they eat
48:07 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
48:07 Speaker 03 the skin that they picked out and how that along with like obsessive compulsive disorder is pathologized as like a mental health issue, which, you know, we could have a long conversation about pathologizing, but it's considered kind of a negative, like there's something wrong with you. And it makes you wonder if like, this is a matter of perspective that we aren't thinking about like what the evolutionary value might be of some percentage of the population having some of these features as like the way that they operate or whatever. So that's what I was just thinking about because it's basically like reindeer, caribou, dermatilomania, except it turns out to be really, really useful for the survival of the species.
48:52 Rachel Feltman? Totally. No, I love that point. Well, and even, you know, in humans, something that you hear a lot about in talking about pregnancy is pico, which is, you know, hunger for non-food items. And of course, in the US, we hear about it as a negative thing, you know, you're chewing on ice all the time and it's bad for your teeth. Get a nugget ice machine. I didn't do that because I only had my normal amount of ice hunger, but I kind of wish I had. It would have been a really good excuse to finally get that good ice machine.
49:25 Rachel Feltman? And or, you know, people that people will talk in horror about eating genuinely things that they should not eat. But then there are other parts of the world where like eating clay while you're pregnant is considered neutral at worst and like a thing that it's normal to want to do. And I think there's often the understanding that there are some minerals you're craving from that good, good soil. I don't know that I trust our, our soil just out and about these days. I wouldn't recommend chowing down on that, no matter what your gestational status is. But yeah, point being, there are definitely things that we pathologize, including in terms of eating quote unquote, non-food, or perhaps
50:07 Rachel Feltman? parts of ourselves, that probably have really interesting evolutionary stories behind them.
50:14 Speaker 04 I love the specific idea of like, you're eating, you're storing up energy, you're like literally saving it for later on your, like on your body, on your caribou person.
50:23 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
50:24 Speaker 04 Yeah. It's like, okay, if caribes don't have pockets, so if they want to save a snack for later, it has to be growing as bone out of their head.
50:31 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
50:32 Speaker 03 I mean, it's like birds storing meals and basically in their throats, right? I can't remember what the part is called, but birds can actually like basically store.
50:42 Rachel Feltman? Yes.
50:43 Speaker 03 Or some types of birds can.
50:44 Speaker 04 Like in their crop?
50:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:47 Speaker 04 I didn't know that. That's cool.
50:48 Speaker 03 I'm pretty, I mean, I'm a physicist. So like, take what I say with a grain of salt.
50:54 Speaker 04 No, I believe it. That was authoritative.
50:55 Speaker 03 But I'm pretty sure that's true.
50:56 Speaker 04 And I'm not going to fact check it at all. So.
50:58 Speaker 03 I mean, the thing that I can tell you is that bluebird wings aren't actually like, they're not actually, not bluebirds, blue jays, they're not actually blue. That's a whole, for physics reasons.
51:08 Speaker 04 Structural color.
51:09 Speaker 03 Yeah. It's a scattering effect. I can tell you bird physics facts.
51:18 Rachel Feltman? I, we could, listen, I would love to do a Bird Physics Fact episode. So maybe next time you're on, we'll make that happen.
51:25 Speaker 03 I will come back. There was like another thing, I came up with the non, I, I realize I didn't say this, but I'm the one who came up with the idea of calling neutrinos non-trinary. This was like another one of my, like, I write a column for New Scientist. And I was like, wait a minute, they're non-trinary. I also, when I figured out that blue jay, I'm not the person who did the research, but when I figured out that blue jays were not actually blue, I was like, I have to tell the whole world about this immediately.
51:51 Rachel Feltman? Blow it wide open. Blue jays, not real, not really.
51:54 Speaker 03 I think my editor was like, usually you write about spacetime, but okay, blue jays.
52:00 Speaker 03 You gotta mix it up.
52:01 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Tana, thanks so much for joining us. Would you remind our listeners what your new book is called so they can go check it out?
52:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, The Edge of Spacetime: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie is out from Pantheon on April 7th in North America and in the UK and Europe on the 7th of May from Canongate.
52:18 Rachel Feltman? The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week is produced by all of our hosts, including me, Rachel Feltman, along with Jess Bodie, who also serves as our audio engineer and editor extraordinaire. Our theme music is by Billy Cadden. Our logo is by Katie Belloff. If you have questions, suggestions, or weird stories to share, tweet us at weirdest underscore thing. Thanks for listening, weirdos.
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