Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick. And today we're going to
Speaker 3: be kicking off a yearly tradition, our coverage of some
Speaker 3: of the winners of this year's Ignobel Prizes.
Speaker 2: That's right, We've been doing the Ignobel Prizes on the
Speaker 2: show for many, many years now. We almost never cover
Speaker 2: them right away. The awards usually drop and I think
Speaker 2: this has been the case for like at least a
Speaker 2: decade now. They tend to come out during September or
Speaker 2: rarely earlier on I think they would come out in October.
Speaker 2: But any event, we're often already wrapped up in Halloween
Speaker 2: stuff by that point, and we end up coming back
Speaker 2: to the Ignobel Prizes early November. It's kind of like
Speaker 2: a post Halloween detox to get away from a lot
Speaker 2: of the spooky stuff and into some other topic areas.
Speaker 2: But this year is a little different. I mean, last
Speaker 2: year was a little different because Joe, you're on parental leave,
Speaker 2: so our former producer Seth had to pop in and
Speaker 2: sort through these with me. So this year, we're back,
Speaker 2: and we welcome me back. But also this year we're
Speaker 2: actually ahead of schedule and hitting the egg Nobels before October.
Speaker 3: Feels good to be prompt.
Speaker 2: If you're not familiar with the ig Nobels, these are
Speaker 2: a series of awards given out once a year by
Speaker 2: the scientific humor journal the Annals of Improbable Research, edited
Speaker 2: for many years now by Mark Abrahams. This this, of course,
Speaker 2: is a play on the the the on the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2: You know the Nobel Prize in various areas physics, chemistry,
Speaker 2: et cetera, And there's a similar organizational structure in place
Speaker 2: for the ig Nobel Prizes. Their stated purpose is, quote,
Speaker 2: do honor achievements that first make people laugh and then
Speaker 2: make them think. If you want to learn more about them,
Speaker 2: go to Improbable dot com. You can find out more
Speaker 2: about the magazine. You can see they have a wonderful
Speaker 2: list of all the winners going back to the very
Speaker 2: beginning of the whole project.
Speaker 3: Yes, now, usually the prizes are given out in honor
Speaker 3: of studies that are published in regular scientific journals but
Speaker 3: just might have to do with some intentionally or unintentionally
Speaker 3: funny subject matter. But occasionally it also focuses on papers
Speaker 3: that are themselves like intended to be funny or satirical.
Speaker 3: One example that comes to mind is a study, a
Speaker 3: quote study from several years back that was about the
Speaker 3: raiology of cats. Raology being the study of how materials flow,
Speaker 3: and so the idea is like, you know, our cat's
Speaker 3: a liquid or a solid, So you know, that is
Speaker 3: a joke, but also there was some interesting stuff to
Speaker 3: ponder in that paper, and the the pattern continues. Most
Speaker 3: of this year's winners are regular scientific studies published in
Speaker 3: academic journals, but the for example, my selection for today
Speaker 3: is more of a historical interest paper that leans on
Speaker 3: a subject that was I think intended to be selected
Speaker 3: because it was funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, And I think the important thing to keep
Speaker 2: in mind is that, yeah, at the heart of all
Speaker 2: of these there is some genuine science or a quest
Speaker 2: for knowledge, some some seriousness. It's not all just complete tomfoolery.
Speaker 2: And I think that's ultimately what they're celebrating here. That's
Speaker 2: one of the reasons we keep covering it is that
Speaker 2: with each entry, you know, we often ask the question, well,
Speaker 2: what makes this funny? Any kind of point to the obvious,
Speaker 2: you know, it maybe say a study that has to
Speaker 2: do with, say, you know, flatulence or something, and it's
Speaker 2: pretty obvious why that's funny. But then there is also
Speaker 2: the follow up question why is it important? And in
Speaker 2: all cases there's something there, there's some way to answer that,
Speaker 2: like it's the study involved. You know, it may seem like,
Speaker 2: you know, it's the pure shrimp on a treadmill territory,
Speaker 2: where like this is how does this possibly benefit anything?
Speaker 2: But it is benefiting our scientific understanding of ourselves or
Speaker 2: the world to some extent. And I always say, the
Speaker 2: other cool thing about it is that, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: it inevitably draws attention to some of these smaller studies
Speaker 2: and the work of professional researchers and scientists. So it's
Speaker 2: all good.
Speaker 3: Now, Rob, If you're ready to get into the actual
Speaker 3: winners we're going to talk about today, I think maybe
Speaker 3: a good place to start would be on the maybe
Speaker 3: the halloweenist of all the Ignobel Prize winners I can recall.
Speaker 2: That's right, we're talking about the Mechanical Engineering Prize that
Speaker 2: goes to a paper that deals with necrobotics, which, if
Speaker 2: you're not already familiar with the term, yes, it does
Speaker 2: sound like it could be made up by some sort
Speaker 2: of a nineteen eighties science fiction film or earlier that
Speaker 2: we were watching on weird house cinema, But no, this
Speaker 2: is an actual term. Will explain what it means here.
Speaker 3: Shortly, it sounds like like a Stuart Gordon movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the paper in question is Necrobotics Biotic Materials
Speaker 2: as Ready to Use Actuators by yap at All, published
Speaker 2: in Advanced Science volume nine, number twenty nine from twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two. So the entire premise of this study is
Speaker 2: at once completely sensible and also morbidly sensational, and I
Speaker 2: think that's one of the reasons it really zings. So
Speaker 2: the author's touch on biomemicry, which as you probably know,
Speaker 2: refers to the idea of turning to nature to help
Speaker 2: solve engineering problems, because why spend a few years trying
Speaker 2: to solve a problem that nature already solved over the
Speaker 2: course of evolutionary time.
Speaker 3: Now, of course, some solutions that are engineered by evolution
Speaker 3: are easier to reproduce or reverse engineer and reproduce in
Speaker 3: inanimate technology than others are. For example, we still can't
Speaker 3: really like recreate what's happening in a human brain. That
Speaker 3: is a very complex bioengineering problem that we have not
Speaker 3: fully reverse engineered yet. But there are lots of other
Speaker 3: sort of simpler biological mechanisms that we have been able
Speaker 3: to look at and say, ah, okay, yeah, here's how
Speaker 3: that works, and we could actually we could make technology
Speaker 3: that does the same thing.
Speaker 2: But the authors here point out, yeah, you know, this
Speaker 2: is all well and good, but why don't you You
Speaker 2: don't have to just stop at merely copying the design.
Speaker 2: We can actually reuse parts and materials, and this is
Speaker 2: where we get specifically into the idea of a biohybrid robot,
Speaker 2: something that quote goes a step further by incorporating living
Speaker 2: materials directly into engineered systems, so a kind of cybernetic approach. Really. Now,
Speaker 2: it's my understanding that biohybrids in general covers a lot
Speaker 2: of things that are maybe less necro in flavor, such
Speaker 2: as biohybrid materials that contain both a biopolymer and a
Speaker 2: synthetic polymer. But that's just one route. As for biohybrid robots,
Speaker 2: you can, yeah, you can think of him in general
Speaker 2: as somewhere on the same slider with the concept of
Speaker 2: a cyborg, except more of a robot that's made with
Speaker 2: some organic materials or parts.
Speaker 3: Tired donating your body to scientific research, wired donating your
Speaker 3: body to a robot's body.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a way, I think one of our classic
Speaker 2: cinematic examples of a cyborg can be very can throw
Speaker 2: off our understanding of what these things can consist of,
Speaker 2: because you think of the Terminator, right, he's essentially a robot.
Speaker 2: He's just a robot, but he has this living tissue
Speaker 2: on top of all of that as a disguise. But
Speaker 2: he can completely lose that and he's still very functional.
Speaker 2: As we've discussed on the show before, the topic of
Speaker 2: cybernetics is a little more complicated than that and involves
Speaker 2: a lot more. But in this particular case, this idea
Speaker 2: of the biohybrid robot, it's you know, imagine that it's
Speaker 2: not so much the robot is covered in the skin,
Speaker 2: but the robot then actually uses human skin in various places,
Speaker 2: is to help move better, to perform its functionality better,
Speaker 2: et cetera.
Speaker 3: So they say in the movie Terminator that the living
Speaker 3: tissue on the outside of the T eight hundred is
Speaker 3: grown for the cyborgs in labs they have. But imagine
Speaker 3: instead that maybe, say, when the Terminator gets injured, it
Speaker 3: can like harvest the flesh of its enemies in order
Speaker 3: to graft onto its own skin and become part of
Speaker 3: its living encasement.
Speaker 2: There you go, it's the Terminator remake right there. You
Speaker 2: can thank Joe McCormick for that.
Speaker 3: But repurposing the dead flesh of living organisms for itself.
Speaker 2: I like it. I think it could work. But a
Speaker 2: couple of real world examples of this, at least in
Speaker 2: you know, you know, ideas that have been explored in
Speaker 2: various studies and projects. There is a twenty eighteen University
Speaker 2: of Tokyo project that created a robotic finger using rat
Speaker 2: muscle cells. There was also a twenty twelve Harvard Caltech
Speaker 2: project that produced a silicone jellyfish, so kind of like
Speaker 2: a jellyfish robot using rat heart muscle cells. And then
Speaker 2: they later worked in a kind of like swimming ray
Speaker 2: using some of the same technology.
Speaker 3: Now, less people start getting weirded out at the idea
Speaker 3: of using animal body parts as technology, it might be
Speaker 3: worth pointing out that I think really the only novel
Speaker 3: part here is that it is using independently moving body parts.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I mean they stress here in a way
Speaker 2: that I found kind of comedic. I laughed a little
Speaker 2: bit at this, but also it's a totally valid point.
Speaker 2: They point out that, like, look, humans have long used
Speaker 2: bioderved materials in their tool use. I mean that's the
Speaker 2: basic two thousand and one A Space Odyssey model, right,
Speaker 2: you know, you pick up the bone and you use it.
Speaker 2: We've talked about this numerous times in the show in
Speaker 2: the past, using bits and pieces of animals, using all
Speaker 2: of the buffalo in some cases, to create various bits
Speaker 2: of human ingenuity, various tools, materials, clothing, etc.
Speaker 3: Animal hides, Yeah, are a huge part of human technology.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there's nothing particularly weird about this. I guess
Speaker 2: it just kind of runs counter to what some people
Speaker 2: might think about as the trajectory of human materials and
Speaker 2: human inventions, that as they get more futuristic, they move
Speaker 2: further and further away from this idea of something that
Speaker 2: we've made from the natural world and it becomes just
Speaker 2: completely synthetic, you know, matching up with these various sci
Speaker 2: fi visions. Where As on that SpongeBob app episode, everything
Speaker 2: is chrome, you know, everything is metallic, et cetera. This
Speaker 2: seems to run counter to that, and in some ways
Speaker 2: because they're asking you to imagine a robot that reaches
Speaker 2: out to you, not with a metal hand or even
Speaker 2: a metal hand that is covered with like some sort
Speaker 2: of plastic substance that is like a that is kind
Speaker 2: of like human skin. No, it is reaching out to
Speaker 2: touch you with a hand that is a dead tarantula.
Speaker 3: It's funny that you mentioned the plastic hand though, because
Speaker 3: if it were a metal hand, you could say, Okay,
Speaker 3: that's never been alive. That was always just you know,
Speaker 3: mineral content in the ground that was mined. But if
Speaker 3: it's a plastic hand that's derived from petroleum products, which
Speaker 3: are derived from at some point life.
Speaker 2: That's true and that it's interesting how we have kind
Speaker 2: of a mental disconnect on that a lot of the time.
Speaker 2: Maybe part of it is, you know, being in denial
Speaker 2: of our fossil fuel dependency to some extent, But the
Speaker 2: other part is like, yeah, I mean, plastic is that
Speaker 2: was made by magic, that was made by human wit
Speaker 2: and ingenuity. It has no connection to the natural world.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, That plastic is the refined and reprocessed remains
Speaker 3: of organisms. That lived millions of years ago.
Speaker 2: But the idea of the tarantula hand here is actually
Speaker 2: key to the study. I'm exaggerating a little bit by
Speaker 2: making it to a tarantula and making it a robot
Speaker 2: reaching for you. But the whole paper here is about
Speaker 2: the idea of repurposing a dead spider as a quote
Speaker 2: unquote ready to use actuator. And they highlight that there's
Speaker 2: actually fewer steps involved, like this is a shortcut. This
Speaker 2: is not like that. This is not something where you'd
Speaker 2: be doing it and you'd be overworking for just some
Speaker 2: sort of grotesque mechanism. No, they're saying, like you actually
Speaker 2: would have to do less to take advantage of this
Speaker 2: fewer steps in the production. I love this, They write,
Speaker 2: quote The unique walking mechanism of spiders relying on hydraulic
Speaker 2: pressure rather than antagonistic muscle pairs to extend their legs
Speaker 2: results in a necrobotic gripper that naturally resides in its
Speaker 2: closed state and can be opened by applying pressure. The
Speaker 2: necrobodic gripper is capable of grasping objects with irregular geometries
Speaker 2: and up to one hundred and thirty percent of its
Speaker 2: own mass Furthermore, the gripper can serve as a handheld
Speaker 2: device and innately camouflages in outdoor environments. Okay, the last sense,
Speaker 2: I don't know why that part is important. Do we
Speaker 2: need a stealth hand that grab things one hundred and
Speaker 2: thirty percent of its own mass? I don't know, but
Speaker 2: it does give us more horror movie ideas, I suppose.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that one seems a little bit. I don't know,
Speaker 3: but I never thought about this before. But yeah, So
Speaker 3: they're talking about how the idea that like, when a
Speaker 3: spider closes its legs, it's operating on a different mechanism
Speaker 3: than how say, mammals would move their limbs. Mammals, as
Speaker 3: it says, move their limbs with antagonistic muscle pairs, so
Speaker 3: you know, muscles contracting or relaxing in order to bend
Speaker 3: the skeleton of the joints, whereas with spiders it has
Speaker 3: to do with an internal hydraulic pressure state to cause
Speaker 3: the legs to extend. And so when the pressure is
Speaker 3: relaxed that is when the legs close, which I guess
Speaker 3: makes sense because when you see a dead spider, it
Speaker 3: tends to have its legs curled up exactly.
Speaker 2: They point that out. Yeah, when a spider dies, the
Speaker 2: pressure is no longer opposing the flex or muscles, and
Speaker 2: so you get that curled up appearance. This is exactly
Speaker 2: how you find them if you start busting open dirt
Speaker 2: dobber nests and you find them scrolled away in there
Speaker 2: to feed the growing young. But they do point out
Speaker 2: by the way, that we don't need to stop at spiders.
Speaker 2: All manner of bioderived parts could be repurposed in an
Speaker 2: engineered system. And again, there's nothing creepy about a spider
Speaker 2: handed necrobot at all, so we shouldn't, you know, act
Speaker 2: like it is. But I included images, and I imagine
Speaker 2: these images can be I think the paper itself is
Speaker 2: not behind a paywall or anything, so folks can pull
Speaker 2: this up. You can find a link on the eight
Speaker 2: Nobel Prizes website, but they show exactly the steps that
Speaker 2: are involved, and it involves first of all, euthanizing the
Speaker 2: spider and then a fabrication, a step that requires just
Speaker 2: one thing to be done, and that's quote, inserting a
Speaker 2: needle into the prosoma region of a deceased spider and
Speaker 2: fixing the needle to the spider's body. With glue to
Speaker 2: form a hermatic seal.
Speaker 3: This is still not creepy, folks, Stop stop acting like yeah.
Speaker 2: So the legs grip inward and then pressure is applied
Speaker 2: via the syringe that you just glued to the dead
Speaker 2: spider to extend the legs and open the gripper and
Speaker 2: then there you see the step. See the third step
Speaker 2: in the illustration is just using the necrobotic gripper the
Speaker 2: syringe powered effect here to open and close the spider
Speaker 2: as if it were a claw.
Speaker 3: This is truly one of my favorite Ignobel studies we
Speaker 3: have done.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, this one's amazing and it opens my
Speaker 2: mind to this whole world that I had no idea
Speaker 2: was really on the menu for the future, but there
Speaker 2: it is. So why is it funny? I think it's
Speaker 2: obvious that you know, the dead spider is now a
Speaker 2: robot hand. A dead spider has been used well, first
Speaker 2: of all, created, they did euthanize it, but then made
Speaker 2: into this gripper device. That alone is just inherently morbidly funny.
Speaker 3: Now, if you wanted to have a cruelty free dead
Speaker 3: spider robot hand, presumably you could bust up mud Wasp
Speaker 3: nests and find all the dead spiders inside, you know,
Speaker 3: get them out, and then stab needles in them and
Speaker 3: glue those needles in place, and then use the hydraulic
Speaker 3: pressure to make your little robot hands.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I like that idea. I certainly don't want to
Speaker 2: encourage anyone to hurt and kill spiders without real need to. Here,
Speaker 2: I do wonder. I don't think they got into this
Speaker 2: in the article. Maybe they did and I missed it,
Speaker 2: But I wonder if there might be a risk in
Speaker 2: using an already dead spider in that the organic materials
Speaker 2: might have decomposed to some degree and you wouldn't get
Speaker 2: the same grip.
Speaker 3: Now then again, way, so I was joking anyway, But
Speaker 3: now that I think about it, the spiders in the
Speaker 3: in the wasp nest, are those technically going to be dead?
Speaker 3: Or are they paralyzed and still alive in order to
Speaker 3: preserve them longer so they can be food for the young.
Speaker 2: I don't remember off the top of my head. I
Speaker 2: know it varies with different parasitic wasps exactly how they
Speaker 2: carry out the deed. Sometimes, you know, there's a laying
Speaker 2: of eggs on the hosts. Sometimes they are inserted within
Speaker 2: it varies from species to species, and you know, depending
Speaker 2: on what their their host organism happens to be. It
Speaker 2: might also depend with the dirt dobber ness when you're
Speaker 2: catching them. But you know, if you want a pristine
Speaker 2: spider necro gripper, I think you do have to make
Speaker 2: the dead spider yourself. You have to make it dead yourself. Now,
Speaker 2: why is it important this study? Well, you know again,
Speaker 2: I think the idea of you know, of just necrobotics
Speaker 2: in general, it's it's nothing to scoff at. You know,
Speaker 2: we might consider a kind of post synthetic or beyond
Speaker 2: that synthetic material science of the future. You know, well,
Speaker 2: machines of the future will continue to have synthetic parts.
Speaker 2: What if biotic and even repurpose tissues play on an
Speaker 2: important role in at least key parts of the design,
Speaker 2: particularly where you need some sort of like, you know,
Speaker 2: a mechanical interact to take place, and you could either,
Speaker 2: you know, you could fine tune some sort of artificial
Speaker 2: system and gears and three D printed pieces, or you
Speaker 2: could turn to pre existing structures and materials, be it
Speaker 2: the muscles of a rat's heart or the you know,
Speaker 2: the fantastic limbs of a spider.
Speaker 3: Shake hands with spider.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I do love this idea of the tarantula hand spider. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It makes me think of the like tarantula up hand
Speaker 2: puppets that you sometimes see. And it's one of these
Speaker 2: things too that if we saw this in a movie
Speaker 2: from the sixties, we would say this is ridiculous. This
Speaker 2: is like robot Monster. They clearly just had a robot
Speaker 2: costume and two of these spider hand puppets and they
Speaker 2: just made it all up. But no, they actually had
Speaker 2: had glimpsed the future had they made this movie.
Speaker 3: All Right, you ready for the next prize?
Speaker 2: Yeah? What do you have for us here?
Speaker 3: Okay? So the twenty twenty three Chemistry and Geology Prize
Speaker 3: was awarded for a twenty seventeen article called Eating Fossils,
Speaker 3: written for the newsletter of the Paleontological Association, a UK
Speaker 3: based group that promotes the study of paleontology and publishes
Speaker 3: multiple academic journals, and the author is Yan Zawichevich, a
Speaker 3: geologist and stratigrapher who is an emeritus professor of paleobiology
Speaker 3: at the University of Lester in the UK. And a
Speaker 3: note so I said he's a geologist and a stratigrapher.
Speaker 3: Stratigraphy is the subdiscipline of geology that's focused on understanding
Speaker 3: geological strata, meaning the layers of rock in Earth's crust,
Speaker 3: how they form, how they're ordered and structured, and so forth.
Speaker 3: It's also worth flagging, as I mentioned earlier, that usually
Speaker 3: the winners of the Ignobel Prizes are studies published in
Speaker 3: scientific journals. This is not one of those. This is
Speaker 3: instead a sort of historical interest feature about, as the
Speaker 3: title says, eating fossils and congrats to Zowachevitch. Because I
Speaker 3: loved this article, so I'm going to start just by
Speaker 3: reading the opening passage. The rock lying by the roadside
Speaker 3: did not look like much of interest at first, a
Speaker 3: rather nondescript limestone with little more to show to casual
Speaker 3: observation than a few vague blotches. Anyway, old habits die hard,
Speaker 3: so I picked it up, licked the surface, and put
Speaker 3: it and my hand lens to my eye. Now, okay,
Speaker 3: so half of that picture makes sense to a non expert.
Speaker 3: As a non geologist, I might expect a geologist to
Speaker 3: pick up a rock and use a magnifying lens to
Speaker 3: look at it. But licking the rock is that part
Speaker 3: of the standard geology modus operandi.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'd never heard of this before.
Speaker 3: It seems to some extent. Yes, yes, as Zawachevitch says,
Speaker 3: licking the rock, of course, is part of the geologist
Speaker 3: and paleontologists armory of tried and much tested techniques used
Speaker 3: to help survive in the field. Wetting the surface allows
Speaker 3: fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than
Speaker 3: being lost in the blur of intersecting micro reflections and
Speaker 3: micro refractions that come out of a dry surface. And
Speaker 3: I thought about that for a second. I said, oh,
Speaker 3: that is really interesting. I think many of us will
Speaker 3: have noticed that a wet rock looks very different than
Speaker 3: a dry rock. A wet rock has you can see
Speaker 3: some of the textures and the grain more sharply. Some
Speaker 3: of the structure of the mineral is revealed. And of course,
Speaker 3: if you know, don't have like a I don't know,
Speaker 3: like a bucket of water with you, you of course
Speaker 3: have some water in your mouth, you can lick the
Speaker 3: rock or spit on it, put some sali on it,
Speaker 3: and see that grain and structure with more clarity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I guess it allows you to put a
Speaker 2: very control amount of moisture on the rock as well.
Speaker 2: Whereas you're pouring a little water from your canteen, you're
Speaker 2: gonna waste more of your water and so forth.
Speaker 3: And Zawachevich says that it just so happened on this
Speaker 3: day with this rock is big old slabbery tongue helped
Speaker 3: reveal something amazing. The rock he found contained the most
Speaker 3: remarkably preserved numbulites, which are fossil remnants of a variety
Speaker 3: of four amniferin And I'll have more to say about
Speaker 3: these organisms in a bit, but in this particular fossil,
Speaker 3: these ancient organisms, their shells were preserved with three dimensional structure, intact,
Speaker 3: all bound together in a chunk of calcite. So, having
Speaker 3: established that the main purpose of licking the rock is
Speaker 3: to be able to see it better, you still might
Speaker 3: be wondering what does a collection of fossilized for aminifera taste,
Speaker 3: like Zawachevich writes, quote, the taste now was likely merely
Speaker 3: registered as generically slightly dusty and then instantly forgotten. I
Speaker 3: had always thought it entirely superfluous to identification, but perhaps
Speaker 3: not so as we contemporary types develop capabilities in one direction,
Speaker 3: we might be entirely losing them in another. Go right
Speaker 3: back to the beginnings of our science, and our ancestors
Speaker 3: and their senses were attuned to different settings. One could, then,
Speaker 3: it seems, literally develop a taste for stratigraphy.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: So Zawachevich goes on to talk about an important figure
Speaker 3: in the history of his field, a man he calls
Speaker 3: this ancestral stratigrapher, the Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino, who lived
Speaker 3: seventeen fourteen to seventeen ninety five, who notably came up
Speaker 3: with the idea of a geological division of Earth's history
Speaker 3: into different periods that would correlate with strata in the crust.
Speaker 3: These periods he called the primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary,
Speaker 3: and these categories have been majorly revised and refined by
Speaker 3: modern geologists, but the basic principle still sticks that you
Speaker 3: can identify sedimentary rock layers and correlate them with different
Speaker 3: historical periods in which they were laid down. So Sawichewitch
Speaker 3: describes Arduino as quote a busy man who had to
Speaker 3: be everywhere at once. This guy apparently worked as a
Speaker 3: mining engineer and as a surveyor, but was also just
Speaker 3: an all purpose freak for rocks and fossils. He ravenously
Speaker 3: collected and studied them from all over the northeast of Italy,
Speaker 3: from the Alps down to the Po River delta around Venice.
Speaker 3: And he called himself a mineralogist, meaning he was into
Speaker 3: all different types. He was into fossils, sediments, springs and
Speaker 3: all that stuff, everything about the earth. Now, the interesting
Speaker 3: thing is that despite his importance in the history of
Speaker 3: this branch of geology, Arduino was in some sense an amateur,
Speaker 3: and he did not publish his theories in books. Instead,
Speaker 3: they appeared in letters that he sent to a friend
Speaker 3: of his who was a professor at the University of Padua,
Speaker 3: who in turn published Ardueno's letters in a Venetian journal,
Speaker 3: which then filtered out to other scholars who took the
Speaker 3: ideas and refined them further, and they ended up morphing
Speaker 3: into the ideas we have today in stratigraphy. But here's
Speaker 3: where we get back to the flavor of rocks and fossils.
Speaker 3: Zawachevich describes these letters that Arduino wrote to his friend
Speaker 3: the Professor, which were only translated into English and published
Speaker 3: in full the year before this article, So I guess
Speaker 3: that would have been twenty sixteen. And Zawachevich says that
Speaker 3: these are fun reading, full of enthusiastic conversational style, and
Speaker 3: also just full of gushing about crushing. And all of
Speaker 3: Arduino's crushes are rocks and minerals and mineral springs awesome.
Speaker 3: So I want to read a passage here where Sawichevich
Speaker 3: is setting up and quoting sections of these letters. So
Speaker 3: this is Sawaichevitch writing it first. Quote Fossil shells in
Speaker 3: a mud rock, for instance, and coal fragments, when burned,
Speaker 3: leave an ash that quote. As soon as it is
Speaker 3: placed on the tongue, it burns like fire and leaves
Speaker 3: a flavor equally bitter and urinous. When spat out, it
Speaker 3: leaves a certain sweetness and a skinned tongue. Springs that
Speaker 3: emerge from a stratum full of marquesite and coal quote
Speaker 3: have an acid, spicy flavor. Vitriolic, yes, but with a
Speaker 3: certain pleasantness that I cannot describe, like the acidity of wine.
Speaker 3: These waters quote made me far less nauseous than did
Speaker 3: the waters from the same source that I have tasted
Speaker 3: here in Vincenza and at the skio. The white and
Speaker 3: micacious sediment from one stratum has no taste in the
Speaker 3: raw state, he said, but one's burnt quote acquired a
Speaker 3: flavor as well as a caustic quality from the calcining
Speaker 3: of the spar This man loved rocks. He loved to
Speaker 3: collect them. He wanted to understand them, and he wanted
Speaker 3: to know which ones tasted like pea, and which ones
Speaker 3: were spicy, and which ones tasted like a fine montepulciano.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: And Zawachevich says that Arduino also described in exquisite detail
Speaker 3: the appearance and smell of mineral specimens as they were burned, dissolved, boiled,
Speaker 3: and so forth. And he says that Arduino was doing
Speaker 3: something that partially kind of feels like alchemy and partially
Speaker 3: just kind of feels like rapturous sensual pleasure at the
Speaker 3: experience of rocks, but then in part is also very
Speaker 3: detailed scientific analysis. You know, he's making an interesting point
Speaker 3: that without the modern equipment that we use for chemical
Speaker 3: analysis of minerals, information about taste and smell was actually
Speaker 3: very useful data to log which would maybe help us
Speaker 3: better understand what these minerals were. In a way, the
Speaker 3: tongue could be seen as like the chemistry lab of
Speaker 3: the body. I think you could argue that it exists
Speaker 3: primarily to do fast chemical analysis on anything that is
Speaker 3: about to enter the digestive tract. And this would be
Speaker 3: both for screening purposes, so to reject chemicals that could
Speaker 3: hurt us, but also for conditioning purposes to cause immediate
Speaker 3: pleasure when we're eating something nutritionally desirable, to sort of
Speaker 3: condition our brains to repeat the behavior that got that
Speaker 3: substance into the mouth.
Speaker 2: This is Yeah, this is all a great point because
Speaker 2: I think it's very easy for human beings to think
Speaker 2: of like, you know, we're very visual. It's easy to
Speaker 2: sort of cut out all the other senses and only
Speaker 2: focus on the visual and then the intellectual and of course,
Speaker 2: you know, intellectual information that's been recorded and so forth,
Speaker 2: and forget that. Yeah, we do have sensory awareness in
Speaker 2: these other realms as well, and those senses can be
Speaker 2: used to understand and catalog the world. It reminds me
Speaker 2: a bit of I think we talked about this in
Speaker 2: the past when we were talking about mushroom foraging that
Speaker 2: experienced foragers, and I want to underline that experienced foragers
Speaker 2: will sometimes taste but not consume taste and then spit
Speaker 2: out portions of fung guy that they're in the process
Speaker 2: of identifying, and they'll utilize that additional sense data into
Speaker 2: their identification process. Again, experts not eating the mushrooms. Don't
Speaker 2: attempt this if you if you were not an expert,
Speaker 2: don't eat any mushrooms because you listen to this podcast,
Speaker 2: et cetera. All the standard disclaimers, but examples of you
Speaker 2: know this sort of you know older way of using
Speaker 2: all the senses to try and understand bits of the
Speaker 2: natural world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's a great point and a great
Speaker 3: point of comparison. Likewise, I would say the same thing
Speaker 3: for minerals. Don't just go tasting rocks and sediment and minerals.
Speaker 3: You know, you don't know what you're putting in your mouth,
Speaker 3: and it could very well be dangerous. But given those
Speaker 3: caveats about safety, especially if you don't have to do
Speaker 3: this to the eighteenth century mineralogist trying to understand the
Speaker 3: mineral world with a comparatively limited toolkit, tasting sediment and
Speaker 3: rocks and fossils and spring water makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3: Those flavors are potentially useful information. Yeah, all right, So
Speaker 3: that's the first subsection of Zavachevic's essay here about eating fossils,
Speaker 3: but there are more. He next goes on to talk
Speaker 3: about the story of the nineteen fifty one Explorers Club
Speaker 3: dinner at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, which famously,
Speaker 3: or maybe better to say, infamously, served attendees a meat
Speaker 3: dish that the host of the event originally claimed was
Speaker 3: the meat of Megatherium, an extinct genus of giant groundsloth.
Speaker 3: The later reports in the media, I think specifically in
Speaker 3: the Christian Science Monitor, claimed that the meat had actually
Speaker 3: been from a wooly mammoth. In both cases these animals,
Speaker 3: the animals in question were long extinct. So the story
Speaker 3: went that the meat served at this dinner had been excavated,
Speaker 3: frozen from a site at the Aleutian Islands, and held
Speaker 3: in stock by a man named Father Bernard Hubbard, popularly
Speaker 3: known in the media as the Glacier Priest. This sounds
Speaker 3: more and more like a D and D scenario to us.
Speaker 2: Yes, the glaciers now request that you consume the precious
Speaker 2: fossil meat. Go ahead and give us a constitution check
Speaker 2: on all that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, better have only the fighter eat at first.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, even the wooly mammoth meat. Though this is
Speaker 2: of course, you know, we do know that that organic
Speaker 2: material from wooly mammoths have been preserved in like, you know,
Speaker 2: snow and frozen environments. Is this real? Did they really
Speaker 2: eat frozen wooly mammoth?
Speaker 3: Well that's what the report said originally, But in twenty
Speaker 3: fourteen this story was finally proven to be a hoax
Speaker 3: because apparently one member of the Explorers Club who had
Speaker 3: been unable to attend the dinner in nineteen fifty one,
Speaker 3: somehow got his portion of the dish to go. I
Speaker 3: guess they gave to go contain. I don't know how
Speaker 3: he got it, but he never ate it, and somehow
Speaker 3: his portion of this meat dish ended up at the
Speaker 3: Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, preserved somehow. I don't
Speaker 3: know if they packed it in formaldehyde or whatever, but
Speaker 3: they somehow preserved it and had it there at the museum.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just in the fridge the whole time.
Speaker 3: I hope not yeah, Gary's leftovers. Yeah. In twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: testing of the sample revealed, despite the fact that the
Speaker 3: meat had been cooked more than sixty years before, that
Speaker 3: it was not mammoth and it was not sloth. But
Speaker 3: it was actually do you want to take a guess?
Speaker 2: Oh, I mean you're attempted to guess something close to
Speaker 2: a wooly mammoth like an elephant.
Speaker 3: Right, it was actually turtle meat. So I went and
Speaker 3: looked up at zawachevitch doesn't include it. But I had
Speaker 3: to know more, so I went and looked up the
Speaker 3: paper in question here. This was a paper published in
Speaker 3: Plus one in twenty sixteen by Jessica R. Glass, Matt Davis,
Speaker 3: Timothy Walsh, Eric Sargius, and Adelgisa Checone. Title of the
Speaker 3: paper was Frozen mammoth or Giant ground sloth served for
Speaker 3: dinner at the Explorers Club. This was the year twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: Just to note that it is apparently more difficult to
Speaker 3: do DNA testing on older remains, and also more difficult
Speaker 3: to do DNA testing on meat that has been cooked,
Speaker 3: but they did succeed at testing it. This is from
Speaker 3: their abstract quote. We sequenced a fragment of the mitochondrial
Speaker 3: cytochrome B gene and studied archival material to verify its identity, which,
Speaker 3: if genuine, would extend the range of megatherium over six
Speaker 3: hundred percent because if it actually came from the Aleutian
Speaker 3: Islands or from the Glacier, priest no idea that giant
Speaker 3: ground sloths were living there at any point. But anyway,
Speaker 3: they say, if it actually was genuine, it would extend
Speaker 3: the range of megatherium over six hundred percent quote and
Speaker 3: alter our views on groundsloth evolution. Our results indicate that
Speaker 3: the meat was not mammoth or megatherium, but green sea
Speaker 3: turtle Chelonia midas. The prehistoric dinner was likely an elaborate
Speaker 3: publicity stunt, now specifically the green sea turtle. This is sad.
Speaker 3: I should add that this animal is considered endangered today.
Speaker 3: I don't know what its status was in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 3: But I'm so confused because if you're doing a hoax,
Speaker 3: why would you try to pass off sea turtle as
Speaker 3: extinct giant groundsloth meat? Why not just to use like
Speaker 3: beef for goat or something.
Speaker 2: M I guess I guess you could argue that you
Speaker 2: would want to serve something that is edible, of course,
Speaker 2: but also case different like that people are going to
Speaker 2: try it and they're not going to say, oh, this
Speaker 2: tastes just like beef, or this tastes just like chicken.
Speaker 2: They're gonna be like, what, this is a little different.
Speaker 2: This is strange. And it makes sense that it's strange
Speaker 2: because I'm eating a creature that has been extinct for
Speaker 2: so long. That being said, it seems like, are there
Speaker 2: not multiple culinary methods you could use to sort of
Speaker 2: weirden up your meat and make it taste strange, like
Speaker 2: different marinades and so forth.
Speaker 3: Probably, I mean they could be people could be like, huh,
Speaker 3: this tastes a lot like goat, but that wouldn't prove
Speaker 3: that it was goat. You could still continue your home.
Speaker 3: Maybe it's just that, yeah, mammoth meat tastes like goat.
Speaker 2: This makes me think of the whole situation of mock
Speaker 2: turtle and like trying to then replicate turtle meat by
Speaker 2: turning to other animals, Like why is the turtle wrapped
Speaker 2: up in this weird cycle of imitation meats?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Okay, so there's another example of people claiming that
Speaker 3: they were eating the meat of a quarter million year
Speaker 3: old organism, but in fact it was just a It
Speaker 3: was just a sea turtle for some reason. But finally,
Speaker 3: in this essay, Zawychevic comes back around to the subject
Speaker 3: of numulites mentioned earlier, because those were the remarkably preserved
Speaker 3: three dimensional fossils in that rock that he told the
Speaker 3: story about finding on the side of the road and
Speaker 3: licking to see better. Numbulites are fascinating in their own right.
Speaker 3: So numulites are a genus of for iminifer dating back
Speaker 3: millions of years, notable for their disc shaped or lins
Speaker 3: shaped shells, which are found abundantly in fossil form. The
Speaker 3: organisms themselves are single celled protozoa and they form this
Speaker 3: protective shell on the outside called a test. These tests
Speaker 3: or shells have been observed since ancient times. In fact,
Speaker 3: what's called numulitic limestone, which is that's sedimentary calcium carbonate
Speaker 3: rock from archaic seafloors, contain huge proportions of numulite fossils.
Speaker 3: Numbulytic limestone was what was quarried out by the ancient
Speaker 3: Egyptians and used to build the Pyramids of Giza. So
Speaker 3: the pyramids are made at least in part out of
Speaker 3: fossil rock containing the shells of all these organisms. And
Speaker 3: these disc shaped fossils in the pyramid blocks were noticed
Speaker 3: by the ancients, people didn't necessarily understand that they were
Speaker 3: fossilized shells of you know, trillions of single salt marine organisms.
Speaker 3: I've read elsewhere that in the fifth century BCE, the
Speaker 3: Greek historian Herodotus thought that these discs were lentils that
Speaker 3: had turned to stone. So maybe like, ooh, the people
Speaker 3: who built the pyramids so long ago, they spilled some
Speaker 3: lentils all over the place while they were building them,
Speaker 3: and now these lentils turned into rocks. But in fact
Speaker 3: they are these protozoan shells, and these shells can grow
Speaker 3: to enormous sizes in some cases for some species, especially
Speaker 3: for a single celled organism. Zawichevich mentions that I guess
Speaker 3: this would be the species. I don't know how to
Speaker 3: say this quite I think Numulitis milika put which means
Speaker 3: the thousand head nomulite. This can grow a shell sixteen
Speaker 3: centimeters in diameter. That's for a single celled organism. Wow,
Speaker 3: and these really these tough outer shells, and the size
Speaker 3: of these organisms raise questions about like what in the
Speaker 3: ocean could actually successfully eat them, and this leads down
Speaker 3: another road where where Zawichevich ends up talking about a
Speaker 3: deliciously weird obsolete thesis from a nineteenth to twentieth century
Speaker 3: British zoologist named Randolph Randolph Kirkpatrick who worked at the
Speaker 3: British Natural History Museum from eighteen eighty six to nineteen
Speaker 3: twenty seven, and in nineteen twelve Kirkpatrick published a book
Speaker 3: that was called the Numbulosphere, An Account of the Organic
Speaker 3: Origin of so called igneous rocks and abyssle red clays.
Speaker 3: And this book, while now regarded as totally wrong and
Speaker 3: based entirely on observational error and classification error in looking
Speaker 3: at the grain of rocks, seems nevertheless to hold an
Speaker 3: almost kind of cherished place in the hearts of many
Speaker 3: geologists and paleontologists. In this essay he cites Stephen J.
Speaker 3: Gould as one of these people who, like everybody knows,
Speaker 3: this thesis is totally wrong, but there's something about it
Speaker 3: that they seem to find pleasant and amusing and almost
Speaker 3: almost sweet or cute. So what did Kirkpatrick argue, Well,
Speaker 3: I want to read here from Zawichevic's summary quote. The ocean,
Speaker 3: Kirkpatrick said, is full of organisms which efficiently extract calcium,
Speaker 3: carbon and silica from the seawater to create myriad skeletons,
Speaker 3: which then go on to become geological strata. Look at
Speaker 3: thin sections of those ancient strata through a microscope and
Speaker 3: you will see traces of those skeletons, many of them,
Speaker 3: he went on to say, show the traces of the
Speaker 3: curved shells and chambers of numulites. These were not always obvious,
Speaker 3: but could be detected with the trained eye. That trained
Speaker 3: eye then put other rocks under the microscope, with just
Speaker 3: a little more training, the same shapes could be detected
Speaker 3: in all of the specimens that Kirkpatrick looked at, including
Speaker 3: in lavas, granites, and even meteorites. The inference was clear.
Speaker 3: So what was that inference? It is that all the
Speaker 3: rocks on the surface of the Earth are numbulites. The
Speaker 3: Earth itself, Kirkpatrick thought, was essentially encased in a four
Speaker 3: a miniferent test of its own. There was a shell
Speaker 3: for the planet made out of rocks that were made
Speaker 3: out of the fossilized, indigestible shells of marine organisms. From million,
Speaker 3: millions of years past, so like whatever other kind of
Speaker 3: rock you might think it is. Kirkpatrick was like, no,
Speaker 3: that's actually just a version of numulite shells that you know,
Speaker 3: looks different for some.
Speaker 2: Reason, numulites all the way down the one.
Speaker 3: I didn't get to the bottom of this, but I
Speaker 3: was wondering, wait, why did he think that about meteorites though?
Speaker 3: Did he also think there were noumulites in space or
Speaker 3: maybe he thought they didn't really come from space?
Speaker 2: Surely that I mean that also is unbelievable, but maybe
Speaker 2: less unbelievable than like, not only this world, but all worlds.
Speaker 2: It's numulites throughout the cosmos. Yeah, the idea that like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, meteorites, that's not real. What you're looking at
Speaker 2: is nomulites.
Speaker 3: But I guess that connects to the eating fossils idea,
Speaker 3: because it's like, oh, you got these organisms, you know,
Speaker 3: candyt them, can't digest those shells. Where do they go?
Speaker 3: They end up on the bottom of the ocean, And
Speaker 3: in fact, they really do become a lot of you know,
Speaker 3: a big part of these these sedimentary fossil rocks, these limestones.
Speaker 3: But it is not the case that that all the
Speaker 3: rocks on Earth are actually from anomulites.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 3: So, in my opinion, big props to Yen Zawachevic for
Speaker 3: this essay, which I would say it's a bull's eye
Speaker 3: on the motto of the Ignobel Prizes. Yes, this this
Speaker 3: essay has a lot of historical tidbits that are quite
Speaker 3: funny and silly, but it also made me think in
Speaker 3: numerous ways very interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we often really enjoy an incorrect
Speaker 2: hypothesis about the natural world. You know, I instantly think
Speaker 2: to the idea of the aquatic ape, the aquatic ape
Speaker 2: hypothesis that we covered on the show a while back.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously not true, but it is intriguing to
Speaker 2: sort of dive into it and think about how, you know,
Speaker 2: people became devoted to this idea. And yeah, and then
Speaker 2: on top of this, this whole idea of just geologists tasting rocks,
Speaker 2: how that factors into their you know, their their analysis
Speaker 2: of the geology.
Speaker 3: What is the taste of the e sn epic.
Speaker 2: Ask your local geologist.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, I think we're going to have to call
Speaker 3: it there, but we will be back next time to
Speaker 3: talk about more of this year's Ignobel winners. And don't worry,
Speaker 3: we are going to be talking about the nose hairs
Speaker 3: of a dead man.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, nose hairs. That may be where we start.
Speaker 2: Next time. We're going to start with the nose hair,
Speaker 2: which makes sense. They're they're right up front, as you
Speaker 2: have probably noticed in the mirror. So yeah, I hope
Speaker 2: you will join us for that episode going to be
Speaker 2: here I guess Tuesday. In the meantime, if you would
Speaker 2: like to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow
Speaker 2: your Mind, we'll just remind you that we're primarily a
Speaker 2: science podcast. We get into you know, little history, little philosophy,
Speaker 2: a little what have you. But those core episodes are
Speaker 2: going to come out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays
Speaker 2: we do a listener mail that your chance to write
Speaker 2: in and chat with us about past, current and future episodes.
Speaker 2: On Wednesdays we do a short form artifact or monster
Speaker 2: fact episode unless it's being preempted by something, and then
Speaker 2: on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just
Speaker 2: talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
Speaker 3: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 3: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
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