Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel bomb here with a classic
Speaker 1: brain Stuff episode. In this one, we delve into a
Speaker 1: study that aimed to discover whether all of humans ingenuity
Speaker 1: really makes us any cleaner than other animals, like, for example, chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel bomb here, Your parents probably
Speaker 1: spent years yelling at you to clean your room and
Speaker 1: make your bed, and sure, a neatly made bed looks tidy,
Speaker 1: but science says that hardly matters. It seems no matter
Speaker 1: how tight your bed corners are, how many quarters you
Speaker 1: can bounce off that blanket, your bed still isn't as
Speaker 1: clean as a chimpanzee's. Yep, Apparently chips are clean. We
Speaker 1: humans are the pigs, which are also quite clean, but
Speaker 1: that's a whole other episode. Researchers at North Carolina State
Speaker 1: University compared human beds to the tree top nests that
Speaker 1: chimpanzees make for themselves nightly. The scientists weren't looking for
Speaker 1: smooth sheets, though, they were comparing microbes and insects and spiders.
Speaker 1: The lead author on the paper, PhD student Megan Thoemus,
Speaker 1: notes that human beds usually contain some of the same
Speaker 1: microorganisms that are found in the rest of the house.
Speaker 1: She means germs, but she's being nice about it, she
Speaker 1: said in a press statement. For example, about thirty of
Speaker 1: bacteria in human beds stem from our own bodies, including fecal, oral,
Speaker 1: and skin bacteria, which actually, when you put it that way,
Speaker 1: we're not sure as technically nice. Chimpanzees are closely related
Speaker 1: to humans in evolutionary terms, so though i us in
Speaker 1: her team wanted to see if the chimps beds were
Speaker 1: filled with similar bacteria and bugs as humans beds, the
Speaker 1: answer turned out to be no. The team swabbed forty
Speaker 1: one abandoned chimp beds located in trees in Tanzania to
Speaker 1: look for microbes. They also vacuumed fifteen of those nests
Speaker 1: to pick up any tiny critters like parasitic insects and spiders.
Speaker 1: What they found was a far more verse group of
Speaker 1: microbes in the chimp nests, which makes sense because the
Speaker 1: nests are outdoors and the microbes reflect what you'd expect
Speaker 1: to find in the forest where chimpanzees live. But researchers
Speaker 1: did not find nearly as much fecal, oral, or skin
Speaker 1: bacteria as they did in the human beds, only about
Speaker 1: three point five percent, which was a surprise. The chimp
Speaker 1: nests also had no insects or spiders, though the team
Speaker 1: expected to see some parasitic species in the nests, but no.
Speaker 1: Tho Emma said there were only four ectoparasites found across
Speaker 1: all the nests we looked at, and that's four individual specimens,
Speaker 1: not four different species. Granted, chimps do build new nests
Speaker 1: every night, and they are careful defecators, but fecal matter
Speaker 1: does build up in chimp for so the researchers expected
Speaker 1: to find more of it than they did, even in
Speaker 1: freshly built nests. The Emma said, this work really highlights
Speaker 1: the role that man made structures play in shaping the
Speaker 1: ecosystems of our immediate environment. In some ways, our attempts
Speaker 1: to create a clean environment for ourselves may actually make
Speaker 1: our surroundings less ideal. Today's episode is based on the
Speaker 1: article your bed has more poop than the Chimps on
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com, written by Kristen hall Geisler.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of by Heart Radio in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works dot com and it's produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. Before more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the
Speaker 1: I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows.