The Weird Science Hiding in Plain Sight: Strange Facts About Earth, Space, Animals, and the Human Body

0:00 Speaker 1: Dear listener, Tonight, I want to begin with a warning.

0:03 Speaker 1: This episode may permanently damage your ability to experience ordinary

0:07 Speaker 1: life in peace. After this. You may never look at

0:10 Speaker 1: a cloud the same way again. You may never boil

0:13 Speaker 1: pasta without feeling smugly scientific. You may never pet a

0:17 Speaker 1: cat without wondering if you are being silently reviewed and

0:20 Speaker 1: found unacceptable. You may lie awake at night thinking about

0:23 Speaker 1: feathered dinosaurs, upside down moons, floating million tons sky puddles,

0:29 Speaker 1: and the fact that your own body is basically a

0:31 Speaker 1: gated community for bacteria. Because tonight we are not exploring

0:36 Speaker 1: a haunted inn, a curse stretch of road, or a

0:40 Speaker 1: half forgotten historical tragedy wrapped in fog and bad decisions. No, tonight,

0:46 Speaker 1: we are doing something much stranger. We are looking at

0:49 Speaker 1: reality itself, and as it turns out, reality is absurd.

0:55 Speaker 1: It is magnificent, ridiculous, unsettling, gross, elegant, and deeply committed

1:01 Speaker 1: to never being as simple as we want it to be.

1:05 Speaker 1: The facts are not just fun little science tidbits. They

1:08 Speaker 1: are evidence that the universe, the planet, the animal kingdom,

1:12 Speaker 1: and even your own face are all doing bizarre things

1:15 Speaker 1: behind your back. Let us start with the sky, because

1:19 Speaker 1: that is where the betrayal begins. A cloud, that harmless

1:23 Speaker 1: looking fluff drifting over your head like divine cotton candy,

1:27 Speaker 1: can weigh around a million tons. A million tons. That

1:32 Speaker 1: does not sound like something that should float. That sounds

1:35 Speaker 1: like something that should crash through your roof and flatten

1:39 Speaker 1: your neighborhood, while the weather person stands on television saying, well,

1:44 Speaker 1: that was unexpected. But clouds float because they are spread

1:48 Speaker 1: out over an enormous volume, and because their density is

1:51 Speaker 1: slightly lower than the air surrounding them. That is the

1:55 Speaker 1: maddening elegance of nature. A thing can be unimaginably heavy

2:00 Speaker 1: in total, yet still hang above you with all the

2:02 Speaker 1: drama of a lazy afternoon. We grow up drawing clouds

2:06 Speaker 1: as puffy little loops and crayons, as if they are

2:10 Speaker 1: soft decorations clipped onto the sky. But in truth, they

2:14 Speaker 1: are towering water systems, moving cathedrals of vapor and pressure

2:18 Speaker 1: and suspended droplets. They are giant, shifting physics problems with

2:24 Speaker 1: excellent public relations. And even as those clouds drift overhead,

2:28 Speaker 1: the world beneath them is not nearly as steady as

2:31 Speaker 1: it feels Earth's rotation is slowing down, not in a dramatic,

2:36 Speaker 1: panic by canned beans kind of way, but enough that

2:39 Speaker 1: over vast stretches of time, the length of a day changes.

2:44 Speaker 1: The average day grows by around one point eight seconds

2:47 Speaker 1: per century. That sounds trivial until you widen your view

2:51 Speaker 1: and realize that six hundred million years ago a day

2:54 Speaker 1: lasted only about twenty one hours. Imagine that entire ecosystems,

3:00 Speaker 1: rising and falling, tides, shifting, ancient life, crawling and flopping about,

3:05 Speaker 1: all on a shorter daily schedule. The planet itself has

3:09 Speaker 1: never been fixed. Our sense of time feels so natural,

3:13 Speaker 1: so permanent, so built into the bones of existence. But

3:17 Speaker 1: even the turning of the Earth is a thing in motion,

3:20 Speaker 1: a thing subject to drag, to gravity, to the tug

3:23 Speaker 1: of the moon, and the deep, slow mechanics of a

3:25 Speaker 1: living planet. Time, which already feels rude on a personal level,

3:30 Speaker 1: turns out to be negotiable on a geological one. That

3:33 Speaker 1: same Earth, by the way, is also four point five

3:36 Speaker 1: to four billion years old. That number is so large

3:40 Speaker 1: it almost stops being meaningful, like trying to emotionally process

3:44 Speaker 1: a spreadsheet four and a half billion years, Mountains have

3:48 Speaker 1: risen and been eaten down to stumps. Seas have opened

3:51 Speaker 1: and closed, Whole branches of life have emerged, flourished, and

3:55 Speaker 1: vanished into stone. The world you walk across is not

3:59 Speaker 1: just old. It is so ancient that all of human history,

4:03 Speaker 1: every king and empire and invention and heartbreak and dumb

4:07 Speaker 1: little internet argument, is less than a scratch on the

4:10 Speaker 1: skin of it. And yet here we are, tiny, hairless

4:14 Speaker 1: apes and shoes, confidently acting like we understand everything because

4:18 Speaker 1: we have weather apps and folding chairs. Of course, even

4:22 Speaker 1: space does not behave itself. The average color of the

4:25 Speaker 1: universe is called cosmic latte. I will never be over

4:29 Speaker 1: the fact that the sum total of galactic light across

4:31 Speaker 1: the observable universe has the same energy as a paint

4:35 Speaker 1: swatch in the waiting area of an upscale dentist's office.

4:39 Speaker 1: Humanity looked into the endless abyss, into the great sprawling

4:43 Speaker 1: fields of stars and galaxies and cosmic dust, and discovered that,

4:47 Speaker 1: on average, the whole thing is beige, not terrifying black,

4:52 Speaker 1: not glowing silver beige. The universe has the color palette

4:57 Speaker 1: of a tasteful throw blanket. There is something deeply funny

5:00 Speaker 1: about that. It is like the Cosmos got dressed for

5:03 Speaker 1: a gallery opening and chose neutrals. Mars, meanwhile, is not

5:07 Speaker 1: perfectly round. It is shaped more like a lopsided ball

5:11 Speaker 1: stretched unevenly along its axes. This feels fitting. Honestly, Mars

5:17 Speaker 1: has always had the energy of a planet trying its

5:20 Speaker 1: best while holding centuries of war, god branding, and human

5:23 Speaker 1: projection on its dusty shoulders. It gave us canals that

5:27 Speaker 1: weren't canals, fantasies of Martians, dreams of colonization, and now

5:32 Speaker 1: apparently cannot even commit to being a proper sphere. Mercury,

5:37 Speaker 1: not Venus, is on average the closest planet to Earth,

5:40 Speaker 1: which sounds fake until you realize orbital mechanics enjoy embarrassing Us.

5:45 Speaker 1: Venus still gets physically closer at certain times, but averaged

5:48 Speaker 1: over time, Mercury wins the prize. So if you ever

5:53 Speaker 1: needed a reminder that the universe is under no obligation

5:57 Speaker 1: to match your elementary school poster, there it is. The Moon, too,

6:02 Speaker 1: is playing its own long game. It is drifting away

6:05 Speaker 1: from Earth by around three centimeters every year, not enough

6:09 Speaker 1: to cause immediate heartbreak, but enough that over vast ages,

6:13 Speaker 1: the dance between Earth and Moon changes. The Moon is

6:16 Speaker 1: also shrinking slightly, perhaps because of internal cooling and moonquakes.

6:21 Speaker 1: It looks so serene from here, so poetic, so reliable,

6:27 Speaker 1: But even our oldest companion in the sky is quietly cracking,

6:30 Speaker 1: shifting and backing away. In the southern hemisphere it appears

6:34 Speaker 1: upside down compared with the northern hemisphere, turning the familiar

6:38 Speaker 1: face people imagine into something stranger, more rabbit than man,

6:43 Speaker 1: and somebody because humans are incurable sentimentalists, left a family

6:47 Speaker 1: photo on the Moon during Apollo sixteen. So among the dust,

6:52 Speaker 1: the silence, the radiation, and the old footprints of one

6:56 Speaker 1: of our greatest achievements, there is also basically an InterPlaNet

7:00 Speaker 1: terry wallet photo.

7:01 Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by Skyweight, the only

7:04 Speaker 2: self help program designed to make your problems feel smaller

7:08 Speaker 2: by reminding you that a million ton cloud is floating

7:10 Speaker 2: over your head right now and somehow not falling. Feeling overwhelmed,

7:16 Speaker 2: just whisper to yourself the atmosphere is performing invisible miracles

7:21 Speaker 2: every second, and continue loading the dishwasher with renewed humility. Skyweight,

7:27 Speaker 2: because perspective is cheaper than therapy.

7:30 Speaker 1: Now, let us come down from the heavens and talk

7:32 Speaker 1: about your body, which I regret to inform you is

7:35 Speaker 1: also weird enough to be its own separate universe. About

7:39 Speaker 1: sixty percent of your body is water. That means your

7:42 Speaker 1: dramatic size, your office resentment, your unspoken judgments in the

7:47 Speaker 1: grocery store, your irrational attachment to one very specific mug.

7:52 Speaker 1: All of it is happening inside a mostly liquid structure.

7:56 Speaker 1: We like to imagine ourselves as solid beings because it

7:59 Speaker 1: feels reassuring, but biologically speaking, we are moist chemistry with opinions.

8:05 Speaker 1: Your weight can fluctuate noticeably from day to day due

8:09 Speaker 1: to fluid retention, hormones, salt intake, and other ordinary processes.

8:14 Speaker 1: So if you have ever stepped on a scale and

8:16 Speaker 1: thought how is that possible? The answer may be that

8:20 Speaker 1: you are in some small way weather and you are

8:23 Speaker 1: not even the only thing living in you. There are

8:26 Speaker 1: more bacterial cells in your body than human cells. The

8:30 Speaker 1: modern estimate is not the old exaggerated ninety percent bacteria

8:35 Speaker 1: line people used to repeat, but it is still enough

8:38 Speaker 1: to be profoundly humbling. You are a walking ecosystem, a

8:43 Speaker 1: crowded metropolis, a tiny civilization of microbes inhabiting your skin,

8:48 Speaker 1: your gut, your mouth, all busily helping digest food, train

8:53 Speaker 1: your immune system, crowd out harmful organisms, and occasionally cause

8:57 Speaker 1: chaos by mass. You are still overwhelmingly human by cell count,

9:03 Speaker 1: though you are hosting a convention. Every breath you take

9:07 Speaker 1: may bring in around fifty potentially harmful bacteria, and your

9:11 Speaker 1: immune system is constantly identifying friend from foe, destroying some,

9:16 Speaker 1: cooperating with others, all without notifying you or asking for applause.

9:21 Speaker 1: It is one of the great underappreciated performances of your life,

9:25 Speaker 1: the fact that most of the terrible microscopic things trying

9:29 Speaker 1: to get in are dealt with before you even know

9:32 Speaker 1: there was a conflict, And your body recycles in ways

9:35 Speaker 1: that sound horrifying until you realize they are efficient. When

9:40 Speaker 1: cells die, other cells called phagocytes eat them. That is

9:44 Speaker 1: not metaphor. Your body has cleanup crews that consume the

9:48 Speaker 1: dead to keep the whole place functional. Imagine if cities

9:52 Speaker 1: worked like that. Imagine if after a building was demolished,

9:55 Speaker 1: tiny municipal goblins simply arrived and politely ate the rubble.

10:00 Speaker 1: It is gruesome only because we hear it in plain language.

10:04 Speaker 1: In biological terms, it is elegant. In human terms, it

10:09 Speaker 1: means you are being quietly cannibalized for maintenance by your

10:12 Speaker 1: own immune system All the time. When you read, even silently,

10:18 Speaker 1: the muscles of your mouth, tongue, and larynx activate. That

10:21 Speaker 1: means there is no such thing as purely silent reading

10:25 Speaker 1: in the way most of us imagine it. Somewhere in

10:28 Speaker 1: your head and throat, the machinery of speech is waking up,

10:32 Speaker 1: sounding things out in miniature as your brain decodes language.

10:36 Speaker 1: So every time you sit there reading in dignified silence,

10:40 Speaker 1: your body is actually doing a very restrained little rehearsal.

10:45 Speaker 1: Around eight to ten percent of people grind their teeth

10:48 Speaker 1: in their sleep, too, sleep, which should be the one

10:51 Speaker 1: time your body politely leaves you alone, is apparently an

10:55 Speaker 1: opportunity for your jaw to become a stressed out lumber mill.

10:59 Speaker 1: Then there is the vol voice issue. You dislike the

11:02 Speaker 1: sound of your recorded voice because the bones in your

11:04 Speaker 1: head make your voice sound different to you internally, So

11:08 Speaker 1: the horrifying creature you hear in a voicemail is, unfortunately

11:13 Speaker 1: what everyone else has been listening to all along. You

11:16 Speaker 1: are not haunted, You are acoustically betrayed. Even your skin

11:21 Speaker 1: and nerves are participating in nonsense. The bacteria on your

11:26 Speaker 1: skin can contribute to itching by triggering nerves that report

11:29 Speaker 1: discomfort to your brain. Anxiety sweat may contain cues that

11:34 Speaker 1: alert the brains of other people around you. Goosebumps, those

11:38 Speaker 1: tiny raised bumps that show up when you are cold

11:41 Speaker 1: or emotionally ambushed by a song, are the leftovers of

11:44 Speaker 1: a furrier past shared by all mammals. And then there

11:48 Speaker 1: is boredom, which sounds passive but is actually a high

11:52 Speaker 1: arousal physiological state. So that restless, irritated, squirmy feeling when

11:57 Speaker 1: your brain is understimulated is not laziness, It is your

12:02 Speaker 1: nervous system. Basically pacing in circles. Human development is just

12:07 Speaker 1: as strange. Identical twins do not share fingerprints because tiny

12:12 Speaker 1: environmental differences in the womb alter how those patterns form

12:16 Speaker 1: the angle of a hand, blood flow pressure in the womb,

12:20 Speaker 1: growth rate of the fingers. All these tiny details leave

12:24 Speaker 1: permanent signatures, so even people who begin with nearly the

12:28 Speaker 1: same blueprint become distinct before they are born. Newborn babies

12:33 Speaker 1: are not seeing in crisp black and white either. Their

12:36 Speaker 1: color vision is immature, but they can detect certain strong colors,

12:41 Speaker 1: especially reds. They enter the world not blind to color,

12:45 Speaker 1: but not yet fluent in it, and cryptic pregnancies can

12:49 Speaker 1: go unnoticed far longer than most people realize. In rare cases,

12:53 Speaker 1: even until labor, the human body does not always read

12:56 Speaker 1: the manual we wrote for it. Ear lobes may have

12:59 Speaker 1: no real biological purpose, which is deeply funny. Your body

13:03 Speaker 1: is such an exquisitely tuned result of millions of years

13:07 Speaker 1: of selection, and yet hanging off the side of your

13:10 Speaker 1: head are two fleshy little tabs that might just be

13:13 Speaker 1: there because evolution shrugged and moved on. Even the raw

13:17 Speaker 1: ingredients of a human body can be priced in wildly

13:20 Speaker 1: different ways, depending on whether you mean the refined medical,

13:24 Speaker 1: chemically separated version or the blunt elemental value, which means

13:29 Speaker 1: that in one framing humans sound extraordinarily costly and in

13:33 Speaker 1: another suspiciously discount. Never has dignity depended so much on packaging.

13:39 Speaker 2: This episode is also brought to you by ear lobes,

13:43 Speaker 2: still here, still unexplained, still holding ear rings like absolute champions.

13:49 Speaker 2: Scientists may not know why they are there, but they

13:51 Speaker 2: are doing their best. Ear lobes proof that not everything

13:56 Speaker 2: in life needs a purpose to be fabulous.

13:59 Speaker 1: Now let us step into domestic life, where science continues

14:02 Speaker 1: to sneak up on people who thought they were just

14:04 Speaker 1: trying to make lunch. Leftover pasta contains more resistant starch

14:10 Speaker 1: than freshly made pasta because cooling changes the structure of

14:14 Speaker 1: the starch. Resistant starch is linked to better blood sugar

14:17 Speaker 1: control and gut health, which means the sad little bowl

14:21 Speaker 1: of cold noodles in your refrigerator may have some nutritional

14:24 Speaker 1: advantages over the glamorous fresh version. I love this fact

14:29 Speaker 1: because it feels like science briefly took the side of

14:32 Speaker 1: exhausted people everywhere. We live in a culture that worships freshness, optimization,

14:39 Speaker 1: artisanal nonsense, and yet here comes biology saying, actually, the

14:44 Speaker 1: lazy leftovers may have something going for them. It is

14:48 Speaker 1: one of the rare moments in life when procrastination accidentally

14:51 Speaker 1: gets a gold star. There is no such thing as

14:54 Speaker 1: a magical zero calorie food in the mythic sense people

14:58 Speaker 1: love to repeat. Celery and watercress still contain energy, they

15:03 Speaker 1: do not somehow cost more calories to digest than they provide.

15:08 Speaker 1: That fantasy survives because people adore the idea that somewhere

15:12 Speaker 1: there is a loophole snack, a crunchy cheat code that

15:15 Speaker 1: lets you eat your way into negative numbers. Sadly, the

15:19 Speaker 1: human body continues to insist on accounting. Yet fresh fruit,

15:23 Speaker 1: despite all the panic people sometimes attached to sugar, is

15:27 Speaker 1: difficult to overdo in the way processed sweets are because

15:31 Speaker 1: it comes bundled with water and fiber that slow digestion

15:35 Speaker 1: and increase fullness. Nature once again is doing nuance while

15:40 Speaker 1: humans try to turn nutrition into slogans. Water itself might

15:45 Speaker 1: not technically be wet, depending on how one defines wetness.

15:49 Speaker 1: This is one of those facts that sounds less like

15:52 Speaker 1: science and more like the beginning of a family argument

15:55 Speaker 1: that lasts through dessert. But if wetness is defined as

15:59 Speaker 1: a liquid's ability to maintain contact with a solid surface,

16:04 Speaker 1: then water can make other things wet without itself being

16:07 Speaker 1: wet in the same way. This is why science is

16:10 Speaker 1: both glorious and insufferable. It takes an everyday word, turns

16:15 Speaker 1: its sideways, and suddenly everyone is standing in a kitchen saying, well,

16:20 Speaker 1: what do you mean by wet while a child starts

16:23 Speaker 1: crying and a dog eats a napkin, and then there

16:26 Speaker 1: is new car smell. That luxurious artificial scent people love

16:31 Speaker 1: is actually a stew of chemicals, including compounds like benzene

16:35 Speaker 1: and tallween. So what we romanticize as freshness is in

16:39 Speaker 1: part the aroma of synthetic materials slowly off gasing into

16:43 Speaker 1: the air around us, which is so perfectly human. We

16:47 Speaker 1: took a mild chemical warning and turned it into a

16:50 Speaker 1: premium sensory experience. Somewhere an ad executive decided that if

16:54 Speaker 1: it smells expensive enough, people will call toxins sophistication. Let

16:59 Speaker 1: us talk about human happiness, or at least the sociological

17:03 Speaker 1: weirdness around it. Parents in the United States often report

17:07 Speaker 1: lower happiness than non parents, while in some other cultures

17:11 Speaker 1: parents report similar or slightly better well being. This does

17:16 Speaker 1: not mean parenthood itself is inherently miserable. It means context matters,

17:21 Speaker 1: paid leave, childcare, social support, work expectations, community structures. All

17:28 Speaker 1: of it changes whether raising children feels like shared human

17:31 Speaker 1: life or a sleep deprived endurance sport run by a

17:34 Speaker 1: nation that forgot families exist. It is one of those

17:38 Speaker 1: facts that sounds like a joke until you realize it

17:41 Speaker 1: is also a quiet indictment a society can make one

17:44 Speaker 1: of the most basic human experiences feel unnecessarily punishing. Now

17:50 Speaker 1: on to weather, because the atmosphere is not content with

17:53 Speaker 1: clouds alone. Hector the convector, a thunderstorm system over Australia's

17:58 Speaker 1: Tiwi Islands, arrives with such regularity that it is practically

18:03 Speaker 1: a salaried employee thanks to a local microclimate. It tends

18:08 Speaker 1: to form daily around three pm during certain months and

18:12 Speaker 1: grows to astonishing heights. Imagine living somewhere that the sky

18:17 Speaker 1: has a recurring appointment, not chance of storms, not watch

18:22 Speaker 1: for changing conditions. No, the weather just clocks in after lunch.

18:28 Speaker 1: I love this because most of weather is chaos. Forecasting

18:31 Speaker 1: remains part science, part pleading. And then along comes Hector

18:36 Speaker 1: punctual As a librarian. There is something almost mythic about that,

18:41 Speaker 1: as if an old storm god signed a lease and

18:44 Speaker 1: agreed to office hours. Lightning itself is hotter than the

18:47 Speaker 1: surface of the Sun, reaching temperatures around thirty thousand degrees celsius.

18:53 Speaker 1: Think about that the next time you hear a storm

18:55 Speaker 1: rolling in and casually decide to stand by a window

18:58 Speaker 1: feeling dramatic. A lightning bolt is one of those reminders

19:02 Speaker 1: that nature contains sudden, concentrated violence on a scale we

19:07 Speaker 1: barely know how to process. It is bright enough to

19:10 Speaker 1: turn night into an X ray of the world, hot

19:13 Speaker 1: enough to outclass the Sun's surface, and fast enough to

19:17 Speaker 1: remind you that the atmosphere is not decorative. It is

19:21 Speaker 1: a giant electrical machine wrapped around the planet, and while

19:25 Speaker 1: we are in the air, sound can be minus decibels.

19:29 Speaker 1: The quietest place on Earth is so quiet that it

19:32 Speaker 1: measures below the threshold usually defined for human hearing. Anacoic

19:38 Speaker 1: chambers designed to absorb sound and block vibration, can create

19:43 Speaker 1: an environment so acoustically empty that people begin hearing the

19:47 Speaker 1: machinery of their own bodies more intensely, their heart beat,

19:52 Speaker 1: their breathing, their joints, their blood. Human beings claim to

19:57 Speaker 1: want peace and quiet, but apparently there is a limit.

20:02 Speaker 1: Beyond that threshold, silence stops being soothing and starts feeling

20:06 Speaker 1: like an existential prank.

20:09 Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by Hector's Time Management Academy.

20:12 Speaker 2: Want to become more reliable, more disciplined, more feared learn

20:17 Speaker 2: from the only thunderstorm with better attendance than most middle

20:20 Speaker 2: managers Hector's Time Management Academy, Because even chaos can benefit

20:25 Speaker 2: from a schedule.

20:27 Speaker 1: Nature, of course, saves some of its finest weirdness. For animals,

20:32 Speaker 1: most people pet cats the wrong way. This is not

20:35 Speaker 1: just bad technique, It is a failure of diplomacy. Cats

20:40 Speaker 1: often tolerate petting that is not actually enjoyable because they

20:44 Speaker 1: are in a transactional relationship with humanity. The best spots

20:49 Speaker 1: are around the cheeks, chin, and ears. The worst include

20:55 Speaker 1: the belly and base of the tail. So if your

20:58 Speaker 1: cat has ever suddenly transformed from loaf to murder in

21:02 Speaker 1: half a second, it may be because you were not bonding.

21:05 Speaker 1: You were trespassing. Cats also prefer sleeping on their left side,

21:10 Speaker 1: perhaps because it gives the right hemisphere of the brain

21:12 Speaker 1: a better setup to scan for danger when they wake,

21:16 Speaker 1: which means your pet is not just napping, it is

21:19 Speaker 1: napping tactically. Most ginger cats are male because the orange

21:23 Speaker 1: coloration is carried on the X chromosome. This is one

21:27 Speaker 1: of those delightful intersections of genetics in daily life. The

21:30 Speaker 1: reason your orange neighborhood menace is usually some unbothered male

21:34 Speaker 1: with one brain cell, and all the confidence in the

21:36 Speaker 1: world is written into sex linked inheritance. Dogs tilt their

21:40 Speaker 1: heads to better localized sounds and recognize familiar words, so

21:44 Speaker 1: that adorable little head tilt is not just manipulation, though

21:48 Speaker 1: let us be honest, they know it works. It is

21:51 Speaker 1: information gathering. They are literally triangulating your nonsense. Hippos cannot

21:58 Speaker 1: really swim in the buoyant paddling sense. We imagine they

22:02 Speaker 1: move by pushing and galloping along the bottom. A hippo

22:05 Speaker 1: is so dense, so profoundly overbuilt, that water is less

22:09 Speaker 1: something it floats in and more something it stomps through

22:12 Speaker 1: with aquatic resentment. Polar bears are not white, but have

22:17 Speaker 1: black skin under translucent fur. Flamingos are born gray and

22:21 Speaker 1: only become pink through diet. Animals can be allergic to humans.

22:26 Speaker 1: You can smell ants. Some release odors like citronella or

22:30 Speaker 1: even chocolate when threatened. I do not know what disturbs

22:34 Speaker 1: me more that ants have distinct scents, or that one

22:37 Speaker 1: of them went with confectionery panic. Orcas wear dead fish

22:41 Speaker 1: as hats. No one knows why, which may be my

22:45 Speaker 1: favorite part. Not every behavior in nature has a neat explanation,

22:49 Speaker 1: Yet somewhere in the ocean, a killer whale tried on

22:54 Speaker 1: a salmon fascinator, and science had to write, in essence,

22:58 Speaker 1: we are still looking into this. Giraffes may hum to communicate,

23:03 Speaker 1: especially at night. Fish can cue politely during emergencies. Platypuses

23:08 Speaker 1: secrete milk through the skin because they do not have teats,

23:13 Speaker 1: and male anglerfish fuse into females after biting them, surrendering

23:17 Speaker 1: almost their entire bodies to reproductive biology. There are horror

23:22 Speaker 1: novelists who could not invent something this upsetting with a

23:25 Speaker 1: month and a corkboard. Some animals show autistic like traits.

23:29 Speaker 1: Some insects can fly at astonishing altitudes. The biggest butterfly

23:34 Speaker 1: in the world has a thirty one centimeter wingspan. Emperor

23:38 Speaker 1: penguins can dive to more than five hundred and fifty meters.

23:41 Speaker 1: Pine trees can indicate incoming rain because their cones close

23:45 Speaker 1: in humid conditions. Beavers do not live in the dams themselves,

23:49 Speaker 1: but in lodges built in the water the dams help create.

23:53 Speaker 1: The more you study the natural world, the more it

23:56 Speaker 1: stops resembling a hierarchy of sensible designs and still arts

24:00 Speaker 1: resembling a vast cabinet of mutually tolerated odd balls.

24:04 Speaker 2: This episode is also brought to you by Tactical cat consulting.

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24:12 Speaker 2: important meetings without first locating the best escape route and

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24:26 Speaker 1: Now to the prehistoric and the paleontological, where things become

24:30 Speaker 1: gloriously undignified. The largest piece of fossilized dinosaur dung ever

24:35 Speaker 1: found was more than thirty centimeters long and over two

24:39 Speaker 1: liters in volume. This is not just a fun gross

24:42 Speaker 1: out fact. Fossilized feces, known as coprolites, can tell scientists

24:48 Speaker 1: what ancient animals hate. So somewhere in the grand noble

24:52 Speaker 1: project of understanding Earth's distant past, a palaeontologist was gently

24:57 Speaker 1: brushing dirt off an enormous prehistoric term and whispering this matters,

25:03 Speaker 1: and it does. That is what I love about science.

25:07 Speaker 1: No piece of evidence is too humble if it reveals

25:10 Speaker 1: a lost world. The t rex may have had feathers,

25:14 Speaker 1: or at least descended from feathered tyrannosaurs, which means the

25:17 Speaker 1: old image of a purely scaly monster may be incomplete.

25:22 Speaker 1: This is one of the great insults science has handed

25:25 Speaker 1: popular culture. We spent decades building the perfect cinematic giant reptile,

25:30 Speaker 1: and then fossils kept showing up to say, actually, he

25:33 Speaker 1: may have been somewhat fluffy, not cute, mind you, Let

25:37 Speaker 1: us not overcorrect. A feathered tyrannosaur is still a nightmare.

25:42 Speaker 1: It is just a nightmare that suggests evolution enjoys mixing

25:46 Speaker 1: terror with texture. Even more surprising, many dinosaurs may not

25:51 Speaker 1: have lived as long as people imagine. Some huge animals

25:55 Speaker 1: were not ancient lumbering elders, but fast growing, relatively short

25:59 Speaker 1: lived engines of appetite and violence. The sharpest teeth ever

26:04 Speaker 1: measured did not belong to sharks or dinosaurs, but to

26:07 Speaker 1: tiny extinct creatures called connodants, tiny eel like animals producing

26:13 Speaker 1: teeth with edges so fine they outperformed the icons of

26:17 Speaker 1: bite force fantasy. That is science again swerving away from

26:22 Speaker 1: our expectations. We want grandeur, we want giant jaws. Nature says,

26:29 Speaker 1: actually the microscopic little weirdos win this round. And now,

26:35 Speaker 1: because history has no respect for emotional comfort, we must

26:39 Speaker 1: discuss chainsaws. They were first invented for childbirth related surgery

26:45 Speaker 1: in late eighteenth century Scotland. Every single word in that

26:49 Speaker 1: sentence feels like it should be illegal. It sounds invented

26:53 Speaker 1: by someone trying to lose a trivia night on purpose.

26:56 Speaker 1: But before chainsaws became associated with trees and masked maniacs

27:01 Speaker 1: in films, early versions were surgical instruments meant to assist

27:05 Speaker 1: in procedures involving pelvic bone and difficult berths. It is

27:10 Speaker 1: one of those facts that makes you grateful to be

27:12 Speaker 1: alive now, while simultaneously making you want to sit very

27:16 Speaker 1: still and stare at the middle distance. Human history is

27:20 Speaker 1: not just brave and brilliant. It is frequently alarmingly improvised.

27:25 Speaker 1: In nineteen twelve, Franz Reichelt climbed the Eiffel Tower in

27:29 Speaker 1: a flying suit he designed himself and jumped. He believed

27:33 Speaker 1: he had invented a wearable parachute. He had tested it

27:36 Speaker 1: on dummies. He was certain, and then he stepped off

27:40 Speaker 1: the tower and discovered in the most public and tragic

27:43 Speaker 1: way possible that confidence is not the same thing as aerodynamics.

27:48 Speaker 1: There is something painfully human in this story, the dream

27:51 Speaker 1: of flight, the belief in invention, the willingness to risk

27:56 Speaker 1: everything in pursuit of being first, and then the brutal

27:59 Speaker 1: reminder that gravity is not sentimental. History remembers him because

28:04 Speaker 1: he was bold, because the attempt was filmed, and because

28:07 Speaker 1: the line between visionary and cautionary tale is sometimes one

28:12 Speaker 1: bad design away.

28:14 Speaker 2: This episode is brought to you by gravity, the ancient

28:16 Speaker 2: force that has humbled kings, birds, inventors, gymnasts, and that

28:21 Speaker 2: one guy on a ladder who said, no, I don't

28:24 Speaker 2: need help. Gravity undefeated since the dawn of.

28:28 Speaker 1: Time, space continues to outdo all of us. Our solar

28:32 Speaker 1: system has a boundary region, the heliopause, often thought of

28:37 Speaker 1: as a sort of edge between the Sun's influence and

28:40 Speaker 1: interstellar space. It is not a wall you can knock on,

28:44 Speaker 1: but the phrase our solar system has a wall satisfies

28:48 Speaker 1: the same emotional need as the ocean has something down there.

28:52 Speaker 1: It gives the universe just enough architecture to feel eerie

28:56 Speaker 1: comets smell like rotten eggs, urine burning matches and almonds

29:00 Speaker 1: because of the compounds found in them. We actually sent

29:03 Speaker 1: missions out to study these ancient icy bodies and one

29:07 Speaker 1: of the results was essentially they smell absolutely terrible. That

29:12 Speaker 1: is a triumph of science. We crossed the void, approached

29:16 Speaker 1: a relic from the early Solar system and discovered it reeks,

29:20 Speaker 1: It rains methane on Titan, rivers, lakes, rainfall, weather systems

29:27 Speaker 1: all built not on water but on hydrocarbons. Titan is

29:31 Speaker 1: one of those places that sounds fictional even when you

29:34 Speaker 1: describe it correctly. It has the familiar architecture of Earth

29:38 Speaker 1: like weather and landscapes, but with chemistry turned sideways into

29:42 Speaker 1: something alien. A rainbow like effect on Venus is called

29:47 Speaker 1: a glory. Protons may appear in wildly different shapes depending

29:51 Speaker 1: on their internal dynamics. Electrons might live for spans so

29:56 Speaker 1: vast that forever stops sounding metaphorical. Can yo yo in

30:01 Speaker 1: space if the string stays taut enough. These are the

30:04 Speaker 1: sorts of facts that make the universe feel less like

30:07 Speaker 1: a machine and more like a vast, elegant improv performance,

30:10 Speaker 1: where the laws of physics are set but the style

30:13 Speaker 1: choices are outrageous. Back on Earth, we have barely explored

30:18 Speaker 1: the deep ocean floor. The seafloor is one of the biggest.

30:22 Speaker 1: We should probably know more about that areas in human knowledge.

30:26 Speaker 1: We have mapped the Moon in greater detail, we have

30:29 Speaker 1: sent machines to Mars, but beneath our own oceans lie

30:33 Speaker 1: enormous regions still largely unvisited, under pressures and darkness that

30:38 Speaker 1: seem designed to discourage curiosity. It is both thrilling and embarrassing.

30:44 Speaker 1: The unknown is not only far away, a great deal

30:47 Speaker 1: of it is wet and directly under us. Most maps

30:51 Speaker 1: of the world are wrong in familiar ways because the

30:53 Speaker 1: Mercador projection distorts areas dramatically. Greenland swells into giantism, Alaska

31:00 Speaker 1: bulks up, Equatorial regions get visually cheated. It is the

31:05 Speaker 1: cartographic version of an unfair camera angle. To flattenous sphere

31:10 Speaker 1: is to lie somehow, and the lies we got used

31:13 Speaker 1: to have shaped how millions of people imagine the planet.

31:17 Speaker 1: Even sea level is not truly level thanks to Earth's

31:21 Speaker 1: spin and gravity variations. The poles move mountains are not

31:25 Speaker 1: always what we say they are, with Maunakia and Mauna Loa,

31:30 Speaker 1: overtaking everest. When measured from base to summit, including what

31:33 Speaker 1: lies under the sea, the Bermuda triangle is not statistically

31:38 Speaker 1: more dangerous than other busy roots. Reality so often turns

31:42 Speaker 1: out not to be less interesting than the myth, but

31:45 Speaker 1: differently interesting, less cursed, perhaps more complicated. Now let us

31:50 Speaker 1: drift into the gloriously miscellaneous category, because some facts do

31:54 Speaker 1: not need to fit together neatly to be wonderful. The

31:57 Speaker 1: fear of long words is called hippop pot of monstros squipidaiiaphobia.

32:02 Speaker 1: Whoever finalized that term either possessed an extraordinary sense of

32:06 Speaker 1: irony or woke up one day and chose violence. The

32:10 Speaker 1: oldest dog on record lived to twenty nine point five years,

32:13 Speaker 1: and the oldest cat to thirty eight years and three days.

32:17 Speaker 1: Some horse can produce about twenty four horse power. You

32:20 Speaker 1: can die laughing. Murder rates rise in summer. Laughing came

32:24 Speaker 1: before language. If evidence from tickled baby apes and shared

32:28 Speaker 1: structures holds, the fastest jet ever built approached ten times

32:32 Speaker 1: the speed of sound. The world contains enough absurdity that

32:36 Speaker 1: any one of these could carry an evening by itself.

32:39 Speaker 1: There is apparently a condition in which the body can

32:42 Speaker 1: brew alcohol internally. Some people remember more dreams when they

32:46 Speaker 1: sleep badly. Deaf people have been observed using sign language

32:50 Speaker 1: in their sleep. It may even be possible for lucid

32:54 Speaker 1: dreamers to communicate in strange neural ways while dreaming. There

32:58 Speaker 1: are people who have been constipated for shockingly long periods.

33:03 Speaker 1: Quicksand is easier to survive than film suggest. Martial artists

33:07 Speaker 1: who smile may lose more. Football players spit because their

33:12 Speaker 1: saliva changes during exertion. New car smell is chemicals. Mirrors

33:17 Speaker 1: facing each other do not reflect infinitely. Board games might

33:21 Speaker 1: help your brain age better. Wind turbines can kill birds,

33:25 Speaker 1: though simple design changes like painting a blade can reduce that.

33:30 Speaker 1: All of it together creates a portrait of reality that

33:33 Speaker 1: is not orderly, but alive, with exceptions and sideways truths.

33:38 Speaker 1: One of my favorite facts is that somebody deliberately let

33:41 Speaker 1: insects sting him to find out which hurt the most.

33:45 Speaker 1: Justin Schmidt turned his own body into a ranking system

33:48 Speaker 1: and concluded that the bullet ant delivers agony like being shot.

33:53 Speaker 1: That is science at its most gloriously deranged. It reminds

33:58 Speaker 1: us that knowledge is not always one in sterile rooms

34:01 Speaker 1: full of gentle beeping machines. Sometimes it is one by

34:05 Speaker 1: a deeply committed person looking at a dangerous insect and

34:08 Speaker 1: deciding I need to know, and apparently I need to

34:10 Speaker 1: know with my skin. And then there are the facts

34:13 Speaker 1: that seem small but quietly alter your sense of existence.

34:18 Speaker 1: You can see stars as they were thousands of years ago.

34:22 Speaker 1: Plants existed before seeds. Not only plants photosynthesize. Bats can

34:27 Speaker 1: see hibernating animals usually do not dream. Smells can pass

34:32 Speaker 1: through liquid. A penguin can dive to staggering depths. A

34:37 Speaker 1: human can hold their breath under water for more than

34:40 Speaker 1: twenty four minutes under record conditions. There is a planet

34:44 Speaker 1: that may be rich in diamond. All the world's bacteria

34:48 Speaker 1: stacked up could stretch for distances that mock comprehension. Each

34:53 Speaker 1: fact alone is a curiosity. Together they amount to an

34:58 Speaker 1: argument that ordinary the reality is more surreal than we

35:02 Speaker 1: give it credit for. So what do we do with

35:05 Speaker 1: all this, dear listener? I think we do the only

35:08 Speaker 1: sensible thing. We let it crack open our sense of

35:11 Speaker 1: the every day. We stop using the word ordinary so casually,

35:16 Speaker 1: because there is nothing ordinary about standing on a four

35:19 Speaker 1: point five to four billion year old planet that is

35:22 Speaker 1: spinning more slowly than it once did under million ton

35:25 Speaker 1: clouds beside an ocean floor we barely know, while the

35:29 Speaker 1: moon edges away and the sun lights up a beige universe.

35:34 Speaker 1: There is nothing ordinary about being a body made mostly

35:37 Speaker 1: of water and full of bacteria, reading silently with your

35:41 Speaker 1: throat muscles twitching, scratching at signals partially caused by skin microbes,

35:47 Speaker 1: and wondering why your cat looks disappointed in you. There

35:50 Speaker 1: is nothing ordinary about a world where thunderstorms arrive on schedule,

35:55 Speaker 1: platypuses sweat milk, dinosaurs may have worn feathers, and somewhere

36:00 Speaker 1: the archives of human invention sits the sentence chainsaws were

36:04 Speaker 1: first invented for childbirth. Science is not dry, It is

36:08 Speaker 1: not cold. It is not a pile of facts in

36:11 Speaker 1: a textbook waiting to be memorized and forgotten. Science is

36:16 Speaker 1: the running revelation that existence is stranger than superstition, more

36:20 Speaker 1: intricate than folklore, and often funnier than comedy. It does

36:25 Speaker 1: not remove wonder, It upgrades it. It takes what seemed

36:29 Speaker 1: familiar and turns it uncanny. In the best possible way,

36:33 Speaker 1: and maybe that is the real gift hidden in all

36:36 Speaker 1: of this, not just knowledge, but perspective. The world is

36:40 Speaker 1: not dead matter, It is not bland. It is not exhausted,

36:44 Speaker 1: it is not used up. It is still full of

36:47 Speaker 1: things we barely understand, and things we understand just enough

36:50 Speaker 1: to be amazed by. The weird is not elsewhere. It

36:53 Speaker 1: is here. It is in the fridge, in the clouds,

36:56 Speaker 1: in your bloodstream, under your feet in the nights, guy

37:00 Speaker 1: in your pets, sleeping posture, in your own jaw while

37:03 Speaker 1: you sleep. The strange has been here all along. We

37:08 Speaker 1: just kept calling it normal. Until next time, dear listener,

37:12 Speaker 1: stay curious, stay skeptical, and stay open to the possibility

37:17 Speaker 1: that the most unsettling discoveries are not hidden in abandoned

37:21 Speaker 1: places at all. They are hiding in broad daylight, right

37:25 Speaker 1: in the middle of everyday life had

38:12 Speaker 2: Had, had