What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.
FACT: Chickens could hold the key to eliminating cat allergies
By Kelley Heyer (creator of the Apple Dance!)
Most people who are allergic to cats aren’t reacting to the fur—they’re reacting to a protein in cat saliva called Fel d 1. And now, researchers might have found a way to reduce that allergen at the source with the help of a surprising ally: chickens. It turns out that when chickens are exposed to cats, they produce antibodies against Fel d 1 and pass them into their eggs.
Feed those antibody-rich eggs to a cat, and—at least according to one 26-week study partially funded by Purina—the cat’s levels of the allergen go down. Essentially, the cat becomes less allergenic to humans. It’s not a permanent fix (yet), and no, you shouldn’t start feeding your cat raw eggs, especially with bird flu in the picture. But the idea that food could make cats safer for allergic animal lovers is a big shift from the usual focus on treating humans themselves. If it pans out, this research could make life a lot easier—and less congested—for cat lovers with allergies.
FACT: Scientists showed people a completely new color
Researchers just showed humans a color we were never supposed to see. It’s called Olo, and it was revealed using a new system called Oz that stimulates individual photoreceptor cells in the eye with lasers. Normally, we perceive color through a combination of input from three types of cone cells—each tuned to short, medium, or long wavelengths of light. But because of how these sensitivities overlap, there’s no natural wavelength that activates just the “medium” cones—so there’s a whole theoretical range of color that’s invisible to us.
With the Oz system, researchers mapped individual participants’ retinas down to the cellular level and precisely targeted only their medium cones, essentially creating a new, artificial color input. The result was an unnaturally vivid green-blue shade that all five test subjects described in strikingly similar ways. They called it Olo, after the numerical coordinates of the stimulation pattern: 0 on short-wave cones, 1 on medium, 0 on long.
Beyond the novelty of a new color, this method could help scientists study colorblindness and perception. It could even help them simulate entirely new forms of color vision. For now, the tech is bulky and experimental, but it offers an exciting glimpse into how our sense of reality might be expanded—one cone cell at a time.
FACT: Xenon may have helped humans speedrun Mount Everest
Four British climbers recently managed to speedrun Mount Everest—in just five days—thanks in part, they say, to a noble gas. They trained in hypoxic tents for months to simulate high-altitude conditions and took helicopters to skip parts of the usual two-month climb, which is all par for the course for folks trying to climb the summit on a tight schedule. But 10 days before their summit push, they did something extra: they were sedated and dosed with xenon gas. This noble gas, once used as anesthesia, is now rumored to increase red blood cell production and protect the brain at extreme altitudes.
The climbers pulled off their quick trip, which was part of an effort to raise money for charity. But experts say there’s no solid evidence that xenon actually improves performance, and mountaineering purists are crying foul. The World Anti-Doping Agency has banned xenon in sports, and although mountaineering isn’t formally regulated, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation recently put out a statement poo-pooing its use. Meanwhile, Everest continues to be a magnet for controversy—from elitist tourism and ecological damage to increasingly extreme summit strategies.
Maybe the real question isn’t whether we can keep finding new ways to climb Everest, but whether we should.
