Pod Insights The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week Medical Butt Chugging, Ancient Ice Cream Pyramids, "The Thing" but Midwestern About this episode Mary Roach RETURNS to Weirdest Thing to share her new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy! From this phenomenal new read, she discusses a section on breathing through your butt, a thing not only turtles can do, but also apparently humans. Plus, Rachel talks about the ancient (and DEADLY) origins of ice cream, and Lauren explains a strange, dark goop found on a research boat propeller in one of the great lakes. (Yes, we know it sounds like the premise of a new John Carpenter flick.)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:34 Rachel Feltman? At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of science and tech stories every week. And while most of the stuff we stumble across makes it into our articles, we also find plenty of weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to the weirdest thing I learned this week from the editors of Popular Science. I'm Rachel Feltman. I'm Lauren Lefter.
1:56 Speaker 04 I'm Mary Roach.
1:57 Rachel Feltman? Mary, welcome back to the show. It's so great to have you.
2:01 Speaker 04 I'm so excited to be back!
2:02 Rachel Feltman? Thank you. Would you tell us a little bit about your latest book?
2:08 Speaker 04 Sure. It's called Replaceable You. It looks like that. Oh, you can't see it! Ha ha ha! You guys saw it and no one else will. It's a lovely cover. I could describe it, but I won't. The subtitle is Adventures in Human Anatomy, which is admittedly kind of vague, but it's all about replacing the challenges and successes and failures and weirdness of trying to replace bits and pieces of the human body. So, everything from hair to feet.
2:41 Rachel Feltman? I love that. And like, I can't wait to read it.
2:43 Speaker 05 Like those ears that they grow on the backs of mice? Are those in there?
2:46 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, they're not. That, that, that actually, people think it grew an ear. It was actually just sort of a, they sort of stuck an ear form under the skin and the skin grew in. It didn't actually grow, sadly.
2:58 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, that's disappointing. Yeah.
2:59 Speaker 04 I know. Yeah, yeah. And it, everybody thought that was the case. And at the time, it was like, whoa, they're growing ears on mice. They're not.
3:08 Speaker 05 That's actually way more gruesome than I thought, though. They just like stuck a
3:11 Speaker 04 I know. Yeah, to grow an ear would be sort of a gentle, oh, you know, the, the rat would get used to it. Oh, well, there's this little thing. And now, you know, day by day, it'd be like, this is me now.
3:25 Rachel Feltman? Well, I can't wait to read it. But for now, we've got some weird facts to share. So, we'll, we'll get 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've learned in the course of reading, writing, reporting, et cetera, and decide which one we just absolutely have to hear more about first. Then, once we've all had time to spin our little science yarns, we reconvene and decide what the weirdest thing we learned this week actually was. Except, we don't have winners anymore. We just, we kept having three-way ties, and you just can only do that so many times. Lauren, what's your tease?
4:02 Speaker 05 Okay, so my, my teaser this week is a busted ship propeller led to the discovery of entirely new life forms.
4:11 Rachel Feltman? I love that. I love a new life form. Mary, what's your tease?
4:19 Speaker 04 Mine is that it is possible to breathe through your ass.
4:26 Rachel Feltman? Amazing. We love, we love a butt breathing story here on Weirdest Thing. I can't wait to hear more. My fact is that I'm going to talk about the surprisingly dark history of ice cream.
4:44 Rachel Feltman? Feels seasonally appropriate.
4:46 Speaker 05 I've had questions about that for a long time. I went through like a Wikipedia deep dive on like pyramids that maybe could freeze ice in ancient times. Anyway, excited.
4:56 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, we're going to talk about this. They were real.
4:59 Speaker 05 Nice.
5:01 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, well, I can, I can go first. I can jump right in. So I learned a few interesting things about ice cream this week and I decided I, what a great time to talk about ice cream because it's a billion degrees here in New York today.
5:20 Rachel Feltman? So I'll start with the early history of ice cream because once I found these couple of weird facts about ice cream, I was like, from whence did ice cream really come? You know? I really take it for granted. And the early history of ice cream is kind of murky. It's one of those things where you'll see a lot of, you know, supposed facts thrown around. And then you trace those facts back to like a book from the 90s called like A History of Sweet Treats. And nobody knows where that book came up with it. And so, yeah, the, the scholarship on ice cream history honestly leaves something to be desired. I think it's a niche that some people should really dive into.
6:05 Rachel Feltman? But, you know, when you think about the history of frozen desserts, when you think about them emerging, you need access to ice, which of course some people have had since almost the dawn of humanity, you know, the first time humans lived in cold places. But you also need warm weather during which it's appealing to eat that ice.
6:28 Speaker 05 I disagree with that. I think you can, I want to eat the ice all the time, especially if it's cold sweet.
6:35 Rachel Feltman? That, that makes sense now when your likelihood of dying of hypothermia on just like a random day is significantly lower than like proto-human in Siberia. So. I feel that probably it is unlikely that people at that time would have been like, "Mmm, a delicious cold treat." But hey, there's always someone who wants something, so maybe.
7:00 Speaker 05 If your inside temperature matches the outside temperature, nothing can hurt you.
7:05 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, okay, yeah, fair. So yeah, you need ice, you need warm weather, and then you need both the means and the foresight to keep ice from the cold time until it's warm. So that is kind of complicated. So it's not surprising that for kind of most of human history, it seems frozen desserts were not really a thing. Like I said, there's a lot of poorly cited facts about the origin of ice cream that get thrown around, but ancient Persia comes up a lot, and that does make a lot of sense
7:44 Rachel Feltman? because we do know that Persian engineers were building yakhls, which are these domed structures with subterranean storage space beneath them that kept ice frozen as far back as 400 BCE, which is wild to me. Good going, Persians. And they also would make ice, because I was like, where did it come from? Where were they schlepping this ice from? They didn't schlepp at all. They would channel water into these shallow pools near their little ice domes. And then because it was so arid, it would get cold at night. It would get cold enough theoretically for water to freeze sometimes.
8:28 Rachel Feltman? And also, there was very little wind. So the conditions were right, that if you made a shallow enough pool, it would freeze at night. And then they would be like, okay, we scrape up that ice, we put it in our really well-engineered ice hut, and they were able to create and store ice in the desert, which is pretty wild. And so I didn't see anyone talking directly about evidence that they were eating frozen desserts at that time, but they definitely talked about making beverages cold, which was pretty innovative. So I feel like, once you're putting ice into beverages, the idea of a cold, sweet treat isn't far behind. But we do know that by the year 1002...
9:15 Rachel Feltman? The frozen dessert kakigori showed up in a book written by a Japanese court lady. And that was that really delicious, like, hand shaved ice that gets flavored with, like, these days, often condensed milk and syrup. At the time, I think it was just like botanical syrups. So, we know that by the 11th century, someone, people in Japan, were eating frozen dessert, which of course is the precursor to ice cream. That was really just for the elite into the late 1800s. There was not a lot of ice around. In the late 1800s, merchants started bringing ice from Hokkaido, and it became much more accessible. Apparently, the first kind of like pedestrian shop for frozen desserts in Japan opened around that
9:58 Rachel Feltman? time. Meanwhile, frozen dessert as a general concept didn't make it to Europe until the 17th century. This is something I didn't do a deep dive on, but I saw a couple allusions to the idea that in a lot of Europe, the idea of kind of freezing things or keeping things cold was just not, not really a thing. Like, they salted stuff, they fermented stuff, they sometimes put stuff in cold bogs. But like, they're just, there were other preservation methods, and so if there wasn't ice at hand, it seems like maybe in a lot of Europe, they weren't really concerned about getting or making ice, which, you know, it's fair enough,
10:42 Rachel Feltman? means that there were probably a lot of lukewarm beverages throughout a lot of European history. But by the 17th century, they were turned on to the idea of frozen desserts. And ice cream, and you know, ices, became really popular in Europe and America by the 1800s. Which brings us to the dark stuff. Because, basically, in the Victorian era, in both England and in the US, people kept getting poisoned by ice cream. This was happening Frequently enough that people would refer to like mass ice cream poisonings.
11:24 Rachel Feltman? This one historian Edward Geist has written about this. He said, you know, there were semi regular reports of whole groups of picnickers or people going to fairs, becoming terribly sick with gastrointestinal illness. Sometimes people died, especially young children. There was an incident in 1854 where people at a festival in Massachusetts got sick after eating pineapple flavored ice cream. Which brings us to one of the common explanations at the time for what was going on, which was flavorings and other additives.
12:00 Rachel Feltman? Because in this case, it contained butyrach ether flavorings, which are made using rancid butter. Basically, the precursor to this compound is a short chain fatty acid that's naturally present in butter. And when butter goes bad, it releases this apparently kind of fruity tasting compound through hydrolysis. So they were like, yeah, it's definitely that rancid butter juice that you put in the ice cream.
12:35 Speaker 05 Was there any actual pineapple in the ice cream? Or was the flavoring entirely rancid butter?
12:40 Rachel Feltman? You know, I haven't seen explicitly whether there was any pineapple, but it does seem like this flavoring was meant to be the fruity flavoring. And I don't think they had the pineapple. I don't think they had a lot of pineapple at that time in Massachusetts. Not for a casual fair goer. So, yeah, first of all, did the ice cream taste like pineapple? Doubtful. Second of all, it made a lot of people really sick. But yeah, in general, a lot of times people would bring up dyes, which were frequently contaminated with arsenic. And of course, we've talked about the Victorian era dyes that were so popular that often had really nasty, dangerous stuff in them.
13:23 Rachel Feltman? And people were just like, wow, I've never seen a green this green. I wonder why also I'm so sick.
13:31 Rachel Feltman? And so, yeah, additives and dyes and flavorings were often considered the culprit. But even when additives kind of fell out of favor, the ice cream poisonings kept happening.
13:46 Speaker 05 Is this, is this why vanilla ice cream is like so popular, though, in the US?
13:50 Rachel Feltman? Perhaps, yeah.
13:51 Speaker 05 Because it was just like as close to plain as possible. They were like, we gotta get these additives out.
13:56 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
13:56 Speaker 05 The ice cream is unflavored, undyed.
13:59 Rachel Feltman? Though there were some scientists who blamed, and doctors who blamed, artificial vanilla flavor. Though there, it was like, why aren't other people, why aren't people who use artificial vanilla for other things getting sick? And they were like, hmm. But, yeah, really, people were just like, really throwing out ideas, not really landing on anything. And one thing that came up, which I find really interesting, is the idea that, that tomaines, it's with a silent P at the beginning, but I'm pretty sure it's pronounced tomaines, were the problem. And these were compounds that they thought were created by bacteria during decomposition of tissue.
14:44 Rachel Feltman? So it was too wild to be like, bacteria might be making people sick. They had to come up with a secondary thing created by the bacteria to explain any illness.
14:58 Rachel Feltman? That, this was not a thing. But it did sort of lead to some thoughts about hygiene that were accidentally correct. And it's true that probably, you know, lack of pasteurization and, you know, sort of lack of regulation around food safety in general was probably a huge part of this. Meanwhile, often people just blamed overeating. They were like, people are so into this ice cream stuff. It's no wonder that they're all getting messed up.
15:28 Speaker 05 They're eating too much ice cream so they died.
15:31 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, exactly.
15:32 Speaker 05 It's like a Monty Python sketch.
15:35 Rachel Feltman? You know, just a case of the old ice cream death. And meanwhile, in England during the same period, they were also having issues with ice cream death, though the culprit is a little more obvious. So in England, you know, once ice and sugar became available enough that this wasn't just like something for really rich people. The way that ice cream sort of percolated down to the masses was this thing called the penny lick, which was, you know, basically a proto ice cream cone, except they were sold in these glass containers.
16:20 Rachel Feltman? And I saw one source referring to them as a deceptive glass container. And I looked it up and it's even even more deceptive than I was assuming. So it sort of looks like it looks like it's a small cup with a with a handle. But just the very, very top of the cup has a divot in it. There it's not a hollow cup. It's a it is just a slightly concave surface on top of like an inverted pyramid. And so you are getting literally a lick of ice cream with your penny lick. It is like one one tongue motion and the ice cream's gone.
17:04 Rachel Feltman? This is a smear of ice cream. And I guess the the glass vessel is really just there as a farce. But you obviously didn't keep the glass vessel. You gave them back immediately. It's like you waited in line, you bought your penny lick, you licked it and you handed it back and.
17:27 Speaker 04 Wait, why didn't they just use a little spoon?
17:31 Rachel Feltman? That would be so.
17:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, why wouldn't they do a little sample?
17:35 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
17:35 Speaker 04 The wooden, the little wooden thing, yeah.
17:37 Rachel Feltman? Exactly. What they really needed were those those little little wooden spoons.
17:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:43 Rachel Feltman? But no, they did it in these very, very deceptive glass cups, even though like no one could have been fooled because you would see the person in front of you like take. Half a second to eat their ice cream and be done.
17:58 Speaker 05 Maybe it was part of the experience.
18:00 Rachel Feltman? And then, yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it was all part of it. It was part of the theater of ice cream.
18:06 Speaker 04 The inverted pyramid was just so you could hold it easily?
18:10 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
18:11 Speaker 04 Or it was?
18:11 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
18:12 Speaker 04 And I guess that was, you know, the cones were sort of echoing that. That's interesting.
18:17 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. And so you would hand it back and depending on your, your penny lick vendor, it might not be washed at all, or it might just be kind of dunked in a bucket of water that maybe came from the Thames. Like, it was, it was not good. And so it was actually so clear that this was leading to outbreaks of all sorts, that the sale of penny licks was banned in London around 1899. So, good for them. They, they, they came to a conclusion much faster than the people in America tried to figure out why the ice cream was killing people.
18:57 Rachel Feltman? But apparently some vendors continued to use the dishes until more, more widespread bans went into effect in like the 1920s and 30s, because people loved the penny lick. And then around that time, I think the reason those bans were able to stick is because the, the concept of like an edible ice cream cup and then the cone that is now so iconic were, were coming about. So the people were, were ready to, ready to have more ice cream.
19:30 Speaker 05 You're saying that just like thin tasty waffles saved like the entire population of Great Britain from ice cream death?
19:38 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, probably. And also what this reminded me of is that something absolutely wild to me that I feel like more people should know about is how
19:52 Rachel Feltman? The Soviet Union had these soda vending machines where everyone used one cup. It was a, it was sort of like a Coca-Cola freestyle machine. Like it would, it would dispense soda and syrup. But it was, you know, you would, you would put your money in to get it. It was basically an uncrewed soda fountain, which was very exciting. But instead of it coming out in a bottle, you know, it got dispensed into a cup that would be like, you know, maybe attached with a wire. And so you would like wait in line, you would put in your money, you would get your soda, and then you would just drink it in front of everyone and then put the cup back. And there was like a little, one of those little things like, like an old soda fountain
20:34 Rachel Feltman? store would have where you like press the cup down, or like they have at bars and like the water sprays up into it to clean it. But, you know, you'd have to rely on people having done that and like, what's the water? You know, there's no soap. And so it was just sort of whenever somebody came around to service the machines, they would actually clean the cups. And I was reading this one article about it where it was like, you know, no disease outbreaks have ever been tied to the vending machine. But then again, the Soviet Union didn't have a great track record for admitting that something that they had everyone do might have caused disease.
21:14 Rachel Feltman? So it seems pretty likely that probably a lot of people shared a lot of communicable diseases at the communal soda fountain cup. And yeah, I, I'm really, I'm really fascinated by all the points in history when capitalism has innovated enough to like bring this product to the masses, but not enough to like serve it to people in a, in a clean vessel, you know?
21:46 Speaker 05 And, and so just to clarify, the, the ice cream deaths in, across the pond in the US, were they, they were just like a raw milk issue?
21:55 Rachel Feltman? Like a? So, yeah, we still don't have a definitive answer. It was probably a little bit of this, a little bit of that. I mean, the people were not wrong that a lot of these additives were really dangerous, but. Like I said, the deaths kind of continued once those fell out of favor. But yeah, to me, my assumption is that lack of pasteurization and, you know, lack of food safety prep courses and certifications were probably a big issue. It was probably a lot of, you know, bacterial growth happening. But yeah, truly, who knows?
22:35 Speaker 04 So I have a question. So there's a sense that if you freeze something, you kill a lot of the, you kill the bacteria. But you don't, you don't kill all types of bacteria. So it's possible that if there were, if it were contaminated, if the milk were contaminated, it would still continue to grow, albeit slowly, in the ice cream. Is that right? Because people think, ah, it's frozen. You don't have to worry.
23:00 Rachel Feltman? Yeah, yeah. I think that's exactly right. Where it's like, some bacteria, probably even a lot of bacteria, will, will not, you know, survive in a frozen thing. But like, I know there have been Listeria outbreaks tied to, to ice creams. And then also, like, bearing in mind how new refrigeration was, like, how cold was the ice cream? How frozen was the ice cream? Very much up in the air.
23:28 Speaker 04 Yeah. And how often did it thaw and then get refrozen?
23:30 Rachel Feltman? Exactly.
23:31 Speaker 05 Well, and I mean, at the time, did people know that these outbreaks were happening? And everyone still got in line at the ice cream shop? They were like, it might kill me, but I just have to try it.
23:42 Speaker 04 It's worth it.
23:43 Rachel Feltman? Apparently so. And I mean, you know, I think, you know, to be fair, probably the percentage of people who got sick versus the many people eating ice cream was probably relatively low. But yeah, you know, also though, like, anything could kill you. It was, it was a wild time. Many things you ate could kill you and many things you put on your face could kill you. And I guess, you know, they were there for a good time, not a long time. And
24:14 Speaker 05 Might as well lick the scoop.
24:15 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
24:16 Speaker 04 And this is all pre FDA and pre, it's just, it's a free for all in terms of food safety.
24:23 Rachel Feltman? Absolutely.
24:25 Rachel Feltman? But yeah, those are my, my big ice cream facts. I learned a few more things about ice cream that maybe I'll save for another day. But I'm glad that we've gotten a little bit better about food safety. You know, things are, things are feeling a little dicey right now, but on the whole, we're in, we're in better shape than, than Penny Licks. So that's something.
24:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah. I remember reading a book by Deb Bloom about the early days of food safety and before there was any regular, before these kind of heroes came in and like, we will be testing and we will be exposing the people who are like putting lead and sawdust in the bread and, and it was horrifying what, what people, how people were adulterating and just stretching the supplies with just random shit around the garage, basically.
25:19 Rachel Feltman? Yeah. Well, and milk itself was often adulterated, which is another potential avenue for some of these ice, ice cream related illnesses is like, people would put like, I forget exactly what it was, but I want to say like chalk. People would put like random white stuff in diluted milk to make it look more robust. So, you know, if you take that and you make ice cream, that's, that's not so good.
25:44 Speaker 05 Yeah. I actually, I interviewed Deborah Bloom about the origins of the FDA a few months ago and wrote about it in an AUA for POPS I, so you should read it there. But yeah, it was like often, often like drywall dust and borax was like a really common adulterant also because they thought it had antibacterial properties and it like tasted kind of sweet. Yeah. Coffee was like 90% brick dust and like cadmium or whatever.
26:11 Speaker 04 Unreal, just unreal. I mean, we think it's going in a bad direction now, but it was really bad.
26:18 Rachel Feltman? We could make it worse. The percentage of non-food allowed is, is still low, much lower. So.
26:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:25 Rachel Feltman? Okay. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back with some more facts.
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27:35 Speaker 02 Hey, listen! Power up your play with Nintendo Switch 2 and experience Link's legendary adventure, now reborn in vibrant detail on our fastest and most powerful system yet.
27:48 Speaker 02 And harness the power of the Ocarina with the built-in microphone.
27:57 Speaker 02 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive. Game and system sold separately. Game rated everyone 10 and up.
28:09 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And, Lauren, what's going on with the ships, the propellers?
28:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, I sure do have a science yarn to spin.
28:24 Speaker 05 Yeah, so uh, so just enter the story zone. Buckle up. Last year, at the, at the end of August, something was amiss aboard the RV Blue Heron. The ship was making some strange sounds, think like a loud, low grinding noise or a deep hum during its journey around the Great Lakes. And, and specifically, the noises were emanating from the propeller and propeller shaft and, and things weren't working exactly the way that they should. And it was all towards the end of the Blue Heron's planned route anyway. So instead of heading back to its usual dock in Duluth, Minnesota, the crew diverted to a shipyard in Cleveland. Once the vessel was dry docked there, they started disassembling the propeller
29:09 Speaker 05 and they, they, they fixed the problem almost immediately. It was really anticlimactic. They figured out what was wrong. It was easy to address. It was a real red heron. Red heron? Red herring. It's the Blue Heron, but it was a red herring. But, but then there was, there was something else. So during this maintenance process and all of the repairs, the ship's captain, Ruol Li, he noticed something he'd like never seen before in all of his years as a ship captain. You know, all of his time on the high seas and, and by high seas, I mean the Great Lakes, because they're, they're on the Great Lakes. There was this mysterious black goo oozing out, not from the propeller shaft, but from the, the rudder
29:51 Speaker 05 shaft. And, and this is where the horror turn would be if this was a John Carpenter movie. You know, it's, it's like giving the thing. It's giving the cursed cylinder of like Antichrist antimatter in The Prince of Darkness. Yeah, she doesn't give up her dead until now. Undead goo. Yeah. So the, the synth soundtrack, it's all dissonant. You like have a slow zoom on this like weird black gunk. And it is weird enough to the captain that he opts to disassemble the rudder, which is a pretty labor intensive process. It's not a small boat. It's a big ship. So they have the whole maintenance crew take out this post and disassemble the shaft. And it's something that had never been done in the entire 28 years that the Blue Heron
30:36 Speaker 05 had been owned by the University of Minnesota. When the maintenance crew did that, they found that the rudder post was completely covered in this gunk that had been oozing out, like tip to tail. The whole length of it was just like thick with goo. And importantly, the rudder is not a ship part that gets greased. It's supposed to be lubricated just via the routine intrusion of fresh lake water into the shaft, so there's no oil added. But this like gloop or glap or slop, whatever you want to call it, it uh, it looked like the, the wrong end of a petroleum refinery, not that I like 100% know what the right end is. Um, it was, it was a completely strange substance in a place where there was supposed to be no substance at all.
31:19 Speaker 05 Um, at first, the captain was like, well, this, this must be some sort of oil or grease because that's what it looked like.
31:25 Rachel Feltman? Seems reasonable, yeah.
31:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, like what, what else is like a thick, black gunk supposed to be? Um, so he, he took it upon himself to do like all of these initial tests to verify his, his hunch. Um, and I guess like for either of you, what, what might you do to test if something was made of petroleum product?
31:44 Rachel Feltman? What a good question. Um, maybe like, I don't know, see if it floats. Try it as a lube. Try to set it on fire.
31:55 Speaker 05 Honestly, you're like absolutely correct, except for Mary, the, the lube suggestion, not, not there. But, but, um, he did, the captain, he like took some of it, he dropped it in a container of water to see if it was less dense, to see if it floated, to see if it made like a sheen on the surface. It, um, it like didn't really, there, no dice, no sheen. Um, then he, he took a blowtorch to it to see if it would catch fire.
32:19 Rachel Feltman? I, I know that he was, he was experimenting with it, but it also does seem like kind of a reasonable thing to do once you realize it's not an oil-based product. You're like, kill it.
32:30 Speaker 05 Yeah, gotta kill it with fire. There's, um, there's citizen science where you count birds and then there's ship-ism science where you kill it with fire. But, uh, the, the goo, it did not ignite. Um, and then, you know, he sniffed it, it didn't smell like oil or chemically, it smelled like almost a little bit metallic, but it really didn't smell like much. Um, and despite the metal smell, the like metal rudder shaft didn't have any apparent damage. It wasn't visibly eroding away, it wasn't rusting. And so all of this was kind of bizarre and unsettling enough that Lee called his boss. He got the Marines Superintendent Doug Ricketts involved. He got Ricketts over to the shipyard. He showed it to him. He walked him through all of the little tests that he'd done.
33:16 Speaker 05 And Ricketts also really wanted to know what the goop was. And they were kind of out of easy ideas they could do on their own at the shipyard in way of experiments. So Ricketts thought, why not just ask some experts?
33:31 Speaker 05 Like I mentioned earlier, the RV Blue Heron, it's owned by the University of Minnesota. And one of the beautiful ironies of this story is that the RV in RV Blue Heron stands for research vessel. It's a ship dedicated to intentional and purposeful discovery. Scientists and the crew use the ship to monitor algal blooms, collect sediment, water samples, deploy meteorological buoys and devices, all sorts of things like that. And then there's this like completely unplanned accidental finding that was not a scientist's idea, but was just like the ship captain noticing something weird. So the point of that is that the crew and Ricketts, they're all part of this Great Lakes Research Institute. They interface with scientists all the time and they have the connections to really try to solve the mystery of the goo.
34:16 Speaker 05 So Ricketts, the superintendent, he decides to just bring it to the next lab meeting that's on the schedule and see if anyone wants to deal with it, to see if anyone can tell him what's up with the gunk.
34:28 Speaker 05 And at this juncture, I just want to say that every day I'm frustrated. I can't beam pictures into people's heads over the internet because I really want you to be able to see how the goo was brought to the lab meeting. They have, they have a cup and the cup is like objectively funny. I mean, it's, it's like the most underwhelming of objects. It's like pure Americana office culture. It's like a beat up paper cup from a desk job coffee machine. It's, it's bent at the rim. There's like some smudges on the outside. Someone clearly meant to throw it in the trash, but they just like missed the bin. And and on the outside of the cup is a piece of yellow tape that just says ship goo in in questionably legible Sharpie.
35:14 Speaker 05 If you're looking at it from the side, you can just see into the inner room that there's like these cartoonish dribs of something black. It looks like if Nickelonian slime was was not green, but instead like the color of the night. It's it's a if you look inside, it's about a quarter full of like more of this completely nasty looking substance. It's really, really dark. It's kind of like unnaturally flat and gray. It's like if you mixed charcoal and chalk dust into molasses, maybe like something that might have been served at like ye olde ice cream shop.
35:49 Speaker 05 And and because it's in a cup, my brain like immediately imagines drinking it. And so every time I look at this picture of the cup that one of the scientists sent me, I I kind of involuntarily gag a little bit. So anyway, this is like where the majesty of discovery begins is with this like completely gross innocuous looking coffee cup.
36:11 Speaker 05 And and so
36:14 Speaker 05 the superintendent Ricketts, he busts into the lab meeting. He's got this cup. He just like is like, can anybody tell me what this is? And and incredibly kind of confronted with this yucky cup of goo. One scientist is like, yeah, sure, I'll I'll analyze it. And so enter our next character, Cody Sheik, who is a microbial ecologist. He takes the cup back to his lab and he immediately just passes it off to a grad student because he is so unconvinced that there's anything worth finding in there that it's like not worth his time initially. He just tells the student to chuck it in with their next batch of routine DNA screening that they do on all of their samples, soil samples, sediment samples, everything that comes to the lab.
36:59 Speaker 05 Um, so the, the first step in that routine screening is to try to extract genetic material so they can compare it to things and figure out what it might be. Again, Sheik really didn't think that that would be possible, but uh, lo and behold, the grad student came back with lots of DNA successfully isolated from the sample. So then Sheik, our scientist, he uh, thought, well, probably whatever DNA they found, it was probably just routine sample contamination. The kind of stuff that's, that's unavoidable when working in the lab, you might, you know, maybe it's on the petri dish, maybe it's on like the DNA extractor machine, which I completely know the name of and I'm forgetting.
37:44 Speaker 05 But uh, they had this DNA and so uh, the lab took the next step and sent it off for preliminary sequencing. Uh, they just looked at this one gene to get a sense of what type of organism it might be. Uh, and if all the DNA were just from routine contamination, they'd be able to see pretty quickly that it matched the usual profile and then they could move on with their lives and forget all about ship goo. But surprise, surprise, uh, the gene sequences were like not at all what would be expected from standard sample contamination. And in fact, many of them didn't readily match anything at all in like the massive comparison databases of microbial genetic data that the lab uses to identify samples. So it wasn't just that they weren't contamination, but they like
38:29 Speaker 05 weren't even documented or recorded in like the entire compendium of human microbial knowledge. Um, a lot of the sequences just looked totally new. So this, this prompted Sheik to like finally like sit up and be like, grad student, we have to look at this more closely.
38:48 Speaker 05 Not, not to portray him in a, he, he was perfectly nice when I talked to him. Go Cody Sheik. But, but you know, it prompted him and his lab to send the ship goo off for another round of sampling where they assessed the whole genomes, not just a single gene of some of these mystery microbes. And they confirmed that, that several of the organisms inside the goo were, were previously undiscovered. And they weren't just like new species, which are pretty common in microbial research because, uh, you know, microbial life are really poorly surveyed. They're, they're tiny, they're everywhere, but we don't pay much attention to them. Uh, but these, these were new categories of microbes altogether. So, um, there's at
39:29 Speaker 05 least one new order of archaea, which is a type of single-celled prokaryotic life that's distinguished from bacteria because of the makeup of the cell membrane. Um, archaea are often associated with extreme environments like undersea geothermal vents and super polluted places. Um, so they've confirmed this whole new order of archaea, which is a family and genus away from just a species. Um, and, uh, anyone want to guess what they named the, the new microbe that they found representative of a whole new order? Larry.
40:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, Larry would have been great. Um, Goop, I do think they would have gotten into a copyright battle with Gwyneth Paltrow about that one. But they, they went with Shipgoo One, um, which I think is a beautiful name for a microbe. I agree.
40:21 Speaker 06 Yeah.
40:22 Speaker 05 And then aside from Shipgoo One, uh, there's potentially even a new bacterial phylum. So even higher up in the kingdom domain, blah, da, da, da, than order. Um, and if confirmed, Sheik says that they would officially call that new bacterial order Shipgoo Two. Um, and then several other microbes in the sample might also represent previously undiscovered genera or families. Um, there's just like so much that they could not identify in the sample. Uh, and there's still a lot of work needed to pin down everything living inside the gunk. But there are a couple of things that we do know or that were able to be revealed through
41:04 Speaker 05 sampling. Some of the early comparisons and findings they have, they indicate that the closest known organisms to the things living inside the gunk are associated with tar pits and oil wells. Many have international origins from places like Germany, which is again, really odd because like, why are the relatives of those microbes inside an ungreased rudder system in the Midwest? Unfortunately, I am sorry to say, there's a lot of question marks that are still unresolved here. For one, where did the goo come from? They, they still don't know. The best prevailing guess is that the ship's
41:43 Speaker 05 previous owner more than 28 years ago did at one point, maybe grease the rudder shaft, introducing some sort of petroleum substance. But then, what have those oil-associated microbes been living on for decades? Like 30-year-old DNA from, from long-dead microbes in an open environment, constantly exposed to lake water, it's not going to stick around and be like readily isolated in quantities big enough to sample and analyze. So, so these organisms, if they were introduced on grease, they somehow found a way to subsist off of something else for almost 30 years. And, and not just to, to like, subsist, but
42:24 Speaker 05 they like survived and reproduced and proliferated. And so then the question is like, well, what, what are they eating? What are they living off of? Is it the metal? Is it some sort of organic material from the lake water, the algae, some, some sort of dead muck? And then what are the microbes floating around in? Like, what is the goo itself? Because it's not 100% living microbes. And that's still also a big unknown. They just don't know what like the matrix containing the microbes is. Sheik is hoping to do some chemical isotope analysis to find out. But currently, he describes himself as quote, "kind of clueless here." He, he said it's like trying to assemble a thousand-piece
43:08 Speaker 05 puzzle without any picture of what the final product is supposed to be. And unfortunately, or I guess like fortunately, if you believe the gunk might be some sort of like vengeful harbinger of madness and destruction. Watch, watch a John Carpenter movie. It's fun. Um, there are, there are a couple of big challenges standing in the way of solving the puzzle. Um, so first off, um, they cleaned the rudder. They, they scrubbed it down and the only goo they saved was that little sample in the cruddy coffee cup. Um, and the, the rest is like a, a memory on the asphalt at a shipyard in Cleveland. Um, and so Sheik and Ricketts, they're, they're both pretty
43:49 Speaker 05 sure that this rudder post can't be that unique, that maybe somewhere else out there, other ships are also carrying this whole community of never before seen life. You know, microbes are everywhere after all. But if that's the case, each ship might have its own microbiome. Um, and the specific weird organisms on the blue heron might be like functionally exist, it functionally extinct in the wild. Um, and then there's this other, um, actually terrifying challenge, uh, which is that Sheik's lab and, um, many other labs at the University of Minnesota and beyond that rely on federal funding, um, they're really struggling just to stay afloat. Uh, and you know, the, the work that they do,
44:32 Speaker 05 it helps us understand the fundamentals of aquatic ecosystems. It reveals and resolves the causes of toxic algae blooms. Um, and they, they might not be able to keep going amid all the federal funding cuts. Uh, ship goo sounds really silly and it was just kind of a fun opportunistic side project. Um, but microbial discoveries akin to ship goo, they've, uh, they've led to things like lifesaving drug development. They've helped us better manage waste and conduct pollution remediation. We, we really, really need primary curiosity-driven research, uh, in order to keep innovating and, and right now we're at risk of losing a ton of it. So, um, so that's the end. I'm a, I'm cutting off the ship goo saga. Uh, please care about science funding.
45:14 Rachel Feltman? You're here. Excellent. Well, we're going to take one more quick break and then we'll be back with one more fact.
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46:33 Rachel Feltman? Okay, we're back. And Mary, tell us about some butt breathing. What's new in the world of breathing butts?
46:40 Speaker 04 I was just gonna say, the ship goo, you know that's gonna find its way to the Ben and Jerry's warehouse and we're gonna have another mass death, death by ice cream one of these days.
46:50 Rachel Feltman? Yeah.
46:51 Speaker 04 Ship goo. Yeah, okay, so the technical term for breathing through your ass is enteral ventilation via anus, which is pretty much what it sounds like. You are breathing, you're sort of using the rectum as a third lung. And this, this is, I mean, I came across, the rectum is a, it's a pretty, the gut in general, pretty versatile organ. You know, it's possible, I don't even remember which book, it probably Gault, there was the story of one of the presidents who was shot, it was an assassination attempt, and now I'm forgetting his name.
47:32 Speaker 04 But anyway, he developed a blockage and he was kept alive by rectal alimentation. In other words, eating through his butt, eating through his rectum. And there were, even, there was even a... A cookbook that there was a number of recipes that his physician put together. You know, they tended to be, you know, kind of like beef extract, a little whiskey thrown in. I'm not sure what the whiskey was for, other than just to cheer him up and make life a little less horrible while he was, while he was dying, basically. So, yeah, you can absorb. Yeah, go ahead.
48:10 Speaker 05 Oh, I just, I mean, like the whiskey, that's like, um, that's like some frat house butt chugging stuff to like, just be putting the alcohol reverse.
48:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, you can, you can absorb a lot of, a lot of things through the butt. The, I think it's about 20% of what you could absorb compared with breathing. I mean, the lungs are better. The lungs are like, we got this. This is what we do. We do this. You butt, you're not very good at.
48:39 Speaker 05 It's not the butt's primary objective or function.
48:43 Speaker 04 But it's great that you tried, you know? Yeah. So, um, anyway, I was spending some time at the University of Michigan Extracorporeal Life Support Laboratory, which is run by the director of it, he's retired now, but he still comes in just about every day, Bob Bartlett, he's in his 80s, he's a lovely man. And we got to talking about ways that you can, you know, breathe outside the body. We were, you know, there, he's the, the father of ECMO, which is essentially a machine that oxygenates blood outside the body. It's used mainly in operating rooms, but you can now
49:25 Speaker 04 sort of bring it into the home sometimes and, and use it also as an emergency, you know, ECPR. In other words, you could, if you have a truck, an ECMobile, you can kind of bring in, you can, you can do that and keep someone alive more effectively than with regular CPR. Anyway, on the topic of machines doing breathing for you, I mentioned breathing through the rectum. And he said, well, you know, we tried that actually just blowing oxygen through the digestive system, like through, from the stomach all the way through. And he said, that way you can, you just blowing the oxygen through and that removes the carbon dioxide.
50:07 Speaker 04 And he said, it doesn't work very well. And I'm like, wait a minute. So that's essentially. Air constantly coming out the butt. It's like one long, continuous fart. And I finally got him to smile and he said, yes, doesn't sound very attractive. Anyway, so, but it works better with a liquid, something called perfluorocarbon, which holds, can hold a lot of soluble oxygen, a lot of oxygen. So you can, it's essentially called a perfluorocarbon enema. So that can, you know, and that works better. And that's something that's been known since 1966. There was a paper in Science in which rodents, I don't remember if it was rats or mice,
50:51 Speaker 04 were able to breathe underwater. They were able to breathe this substance. They were able to survive that way for about four hours. And there was some initial excitement, and this is taking it in through the lungs. There was some excitement that this might be a way to facilitate escape from a submarine. But as it turned out, there was damage to the lungs. There were all these sort of white polka dots.
51:18 Speaker 04 That was actually a technical term that they use, polka dots. It didn't work, it didn't work. Anyway. So, but perfluorocarbon, you know, you hear a lot about that in terms of blood substitutes.
51:31 Speaker 04 But it is, and it's kind of amazing that you, you know, that it's effective enough that it could be used in neonatal ICUs. Because if you had got, you know, the baby's born too early and the lungs haven't completely developed. And to use a ventilator could, would damage the lungs. It's, that's a big problem with keeping premature neonates alive. The lungs aren't working yet and then, but the pressure, you know, it's a very delicate tissue, the lining of the lungs. So to blast air in through the, with, using a positive pressure ventilator is, is damaging typically.
52:14 Speaker 04 So this, to use perfluorocarbon and use the rectal enema way of breathing would, would be great. Also, could be kind of a combat medics or emergency medics. Could use that as kind of a supplement to, if there, if you don't have a ventilator. For an adult I'm talking about, you just, you know. Stick that perfluorocarbon enema up there and have the person breathe through their butt.
52:45 Speaker 05 Could it be like, like an alternate scuba diving method or something? Or like, could it help someone like Summit Everest?
52:53 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think there are, there are a lot of options here, a lot of possible applications that haven't really, the, the, yeah, the researchers is great. Tukabe is his name. He's at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, I think it is. I'm, I'm forgetting one word of that title. But anyway, he's very enthusiastic about it. And they've been doing a bunch of work over the past couple of years on, on rectal breathing.
53:23 Speaker 05 What happens if you just drink it? Does it have to go in the rectal end? Or could you just drink it to get it into your digestive tract?
53:31 Speaker 04 Interesting. Um, I don't know if you could drink perfluorocarbon. Good question. Yeah. I mean, you, you, you could just, you know, hook up the IV, do it that way. Could you, could you drink it? Don't know.
53:48 Speaker 05 Hmm. Only one way to find out.
53:50 Speaker 04 Only one, one way to find out. Probably somebody has tried it.
53:56 Speaker 05 That's kind of wild though. I wonder if you still feel like the impulse to breathe. If you're getting your oxygen needs met through your rectal end, or if you just like happily don't.
54:06 Speaker 04 You know, it, you know, just, uh, just with ECMO, there's, there's, um, Dr. Bartlett was talking about how, he called it sport ECMO, like you could hook up somebody in their home and have the blood oxygenated outside their body. So they don't need to be breathing. So they could literally like, watch Netflix with their head underwater. You know, I mean, it was, it's like, what a weird. I, yeah, it must psychologically be strange to.
54:37 Speaker 04 Just stop breathing, to not need to breathe. But yeah, I don't know the answer to that, whether you, whether that's just freak, a freaky thing that they have to get used to, or if it's just very relaxing.
54:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, you could probably play some fun pranks with that on your friends and family.
54:59 Rachel Feltman? Wow. Well, that's incredible. Makes me very, even more excited to read the new book. Would you remind our listeners what it's called, so they can go find it?
55:10 Speaker 04 Sure. It's called Replaceable You. Adventures in Human Anatomy is the subtitle.
55:15 Rachel Feltman? Amazing. Well, thanks again for, for coming on. It's always a pleasure to have you. And Lauren, thank you for another amazing weird fact, as always.
55:25 Speaker 05 Happy to be here, as always. And Mary Roach, it's so exciting to meet you.
55:30 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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