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: During the Victorian era, both the US and England had an issue with mass ice cream poisonings
The next time you’re enjoying a scoop of ice cream this summer, consider this: Throughout the 1800s, people regularly died from eating the frozen treat, with whole groups at picnics and fairs falling violently ill after indulging.
The potential culprits were everywhere—additives made from rancid butter that supposedly produced a “pineapple” flavor, arsenic-contaminated dyes, and the general lack of dairy pasteurization. Scientists at the time never landed on one cause they could prove, but it’s likely that some combination of these factors made eating ice cream such a gamble. And it’s worth remembering that, without any food safety regulations to speak of, even milk itself could be adulterated with ingredients like plaster and cleaning products.
In England, the problem was even more obvious: “penny licks” were served in deceptively small glass cups that customers licked clean and immediately returned, often without any real washing to speak of. It took until 1899 for London to ban this communal disease-spreading system. Listen to this week’s episode to learn how ancient Persians built ice-making domes in the desert and why thin, tasty waffles may have saved Britain from ice cream extinction.
FACT: Breathing through your butt could save your life
By Mary Roach
This week’s episode features returning guest and best-selling author Mary Roach. Her latest book, “Replaceable You,” is “a rollicking exploration of the quest to re-create the impossible complexities of human anatomy.”
For her appearance on the podcast, Mary shared some facts about “enteral ventilation via anus”—AKA breathing through your rectum. Yes, this is very real science, and it also involves what one researcher delicately described as “one long continuous fart.”
The technique works best with a special liquid called perfluorocarbon. This “perfluorocarbon enema” method has been known since 1966, when scientists kept rodents alive underwater for four hours. The rectum can absorb about 20% of what your lungs can handle—not great, but better than nothing.
Researchers are exploring this bizarre backup breathing system for premature babies whose lungs aren’t ready for traditional ventilators, combat medics without access to proper equipment, and emergency situations where conventional breathing fails.
FACT: A busted boat covered in goo revealed an entirely new form of life
When the research vessel Blue Heron started making weird grinding noises on Lake Superior, the crew expected a routine propeller repair. What they didn’t expect was to discover multiple new orders of life that science had never seen before.
It all started with mysterious black goo oozing from the ship’s rudder shaft—a part that’s supposed to be lubricated only by lake water. The captain initially figured it was petroleum based. To test that hypothesis, he tried setting it on fire (it wouldn’t burn), tested if it floated (it didn’t), and even sniffed it (slightly metallic, mostly odorless). Baffled, he brought a coffee cup full of the gunk to a university lab meeting.
What happened next reads like science fiction: the goo contained not just new species, but entirely new categories of microbes, including at least one new order of archaea now officially named “Ship Goo One.” The closest relatives of these mystery organisms are typically found in German tar pits and oil wells. How they ended up thriving in a Minnesota ship’s rudder for possibly 30 years—and what they’ve been eating all this time—remains a complete mystery. Learn more in the story I wrote about this eerie goo for PopSci.
