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 Spotify, YouTube, Apple, 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: There’s cocaine in the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress has more than 170 million items, and they’re definitely not all books. And no, I’m not just talking about old-timey letters and other historical documents. There’s also a lot of…stuff. What kind of stuff? A topographical map of the Grand Canyon made of chocolate, for one. The LoC also plays host to Carl Sagan’s old whiteboard, a 160-year-old wedding cake, and at least one packet of cocaine. Contrary to popular belief, the cocaine in question didn’t belong to Sigmund Freud—but it’s still his fault that it’s there.
This story starts in the 1880s, when a young Freud was getting super into cocaine. He wasn’t the only one: The medical journal The Lancet basically couldn’t keep up with all the new research being published on cocaine (probably because researchers were also on cocaine). Freud sent a vial to his fiancée and wrote a monograph called “Über Coca” (On Coca, which, again, he very much was) hyping cocaine’s “promise.” Among many potential uses for cocaine, Freud briefly noted that it might make a good local anesthetic.
That’s where his friend Carl Koller, an ophthalmologist at Vienna General Hospital, came in. Koller noticed cocaine made his tongue numb and realized it could revolutionize eye surgery. He tested it on a frog’s eye (success), then on himself (also success), and published the first work on cocaine as a local anesthetic in 1884. Freud was not pleased.
Koller kept a tiny packet of cocaine from his experiments. Over a century later, his daughter donated his papers to the Library of Congress, and library staff found it. The FBI verified it was inert, and now it sits in a vault. Meanwhile, Freud went on to become the father of psychology (much of it conceived while on cocaine).
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more, including the story of how a Civil War vet and morphine addict accidentally invented the world’s most famous soda.
FACT: Fallout shelters were never quite as popular as TV might make you think
Featuring Ben Bradford
When you hear “fallout shelter,” what do you picture? Maybe a ladder in a backyard, cylindric vault door, and canned food on green metal shelves.
In this week’s episode, Ben Bradford—host of the podcast Are We Doomed?—joined to discuss the strange reality of bunkering down for nuclear war.
The classic idea of the family fallout shelter largely comes from a craze in the early 1960s—one that lasted only a few months, sparked an industry bubble, and then quickly collapsed. But the image stuck, shaping generations of movies, TV, and nuclear anxiety ever since.
While as many as a couple hundred thousand fallout shelters may have existed, most were probably improvised spaces like storm cellars and basements, not a purpose-built backyard hole for a family to ride out nuclear Armageddon.
So what was (and is?) the plan for you and other Americans in the event of nuclear war? Instead of funding private shelters or digging decked-out public ones, as some other countries do, the U.S. looked for makeshift sites. If you live in New York, Boston, or other major cities, you may still see the signs pointing you toward them.
Do they work? What would they be like? How long would someone be expected to stay down there? Listen to this week’s episode to get the radioactive scoop from Ben.
FACT: My great-grandfather discovered 2 percent of all known mosquito species
By Laura Baisas
While making conversation during our first date, my now-husband Francis told me that his great-grandfather was a mosquito entomologist who had several species named after him. Turns out, he was not just making up fun mosquito facts to impress me.
Francisco Edelgan Baisas was an accomplished entomologist. He lived in the Philippines for most of his life, where he had a prolific career studying mosquitoes and malaria. He was born on a farm in Luzon in 1896 and became the first Filipino trained as a malaria technician while attending University of the Philippines in the 1920s.
According to entomologist Dr. Yvonne Linton from the Smithsonian, Francisco had a real knack for understanding how all of the many organisms in the Philippines related and fit together. He used a keen eye for detail to kind of prune and weed out a lot of them. That eye for detail was very clear in one of the textbooks he wrote, Notes on Philippine Mosquitoes. He was literally splitting hairs and worked closely with scientific illustrators to capture the subtle differences between species. Entomologists actually still use his textbook and it’s considered a bible of Filipino mosquitoes. Understanding these differences can help scientists know which disease-carrying mosquitoes are present so that they can help the public take precautions.
Over the course of his career, Francisco discovered 71 out of 3,800 known mosquito species (roughly 2 percent of all known mosquitoes) and has seven species named after him. In 1955, he was named among the country’s Ten Outstanding Scientists by the Philippine government, and was awarded him a gold medal and a Diploma of Honor for his contributions to the study of malaria and mosquitoes.
