Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: my My My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's Halloween. Uh. There are a lot of issues that
Speaker 1: one needs to be familiar with. You know, you need
Speaker 1: to be be careful out there as your trick or treating.
Speaker 1: Be careful of the cars that are driving around. If
Speaker 1: you're driving, be careful of tricker treaters, and of course
Speaker 1: be careful of the walking dead, particularly uh, the ancient
Speaker 1: Egyptian mummies that may stir to lie in their very
Speaker 1: museums throughout the world and then start walking the streets
Speaker 1: because they tend to be they tend to be understandably
Speaker 1: piste off. Before we go to the undead roaming around us,
Speaker 1: I do want to point out, do not eat this
Speaker 1: popcorn balls or candied apples, alright, folks, if it's not prepackaged,
Speaker 1: don't put in your mouth because it might have a
Speaker 1: spider in it. Well, there have been reasonably showing up
Speaker 1: and stuff like those people are really people real, yeah,
Speaker 1: all right, but let's get to the real right here,
Speaker 1: because that's just sort of a sidebar, let's talk about
Speaker 1: the debt. Yes, so the ongoing mummy crisis. So have
Speaker 1: most of you familiar with this, You've got you know,
Speaker 1: word of it on NPR, what have you. Uh? So
Speaker 1: you have these dried up bodies. They were once the
Speaker 1: honored dead of ancient Egypt, especially prepared for a journey
Speaker 1: into the afterlife. And uh. And you can imagine they're thinking,
Speaker 1: you know, when they lay down for their final rest,
Speaker 1: they think they're gonna wake up in the second Aaru,
Speaker 1: the fields of Russias. So they're gonna be on this
Speaker 1: we on this fabricous journey into the afterlife where they
Speaker 1: have all these magical powers and uh. And they can
Speaker 1: sort of warp the world to their to their desires.
Speaker 1: But instead they're waking up in like a Baltimore museum
Speaker 1: or in some German grandfather's attic, and they're upset. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're in plexiglass. People are taking pictures of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So what's happening here? Why are the ancient ancient Egyptian
Speaker 1: mummies coming back to life? Well to understand and this,
Speaker 1: we have to talk about something that exists, uh, not
Speaker 1: only in the unnatural world of walking dead, but in
Speaker 1: the natural world of actual organisms, and that of course
Speaker 1: is an hydrobiosis. That's right. Before we get to anhydro biosis.
Speaker 1: Let me just mention though, that that the way that
Speaker 1: mummies were prepared really has a lot to do with this,
Speaker 1: with the way that they were sort of reconstituted, and
Speaker 1: as we know it um when we look at the
Speaker 1: Egyptian mummification process, it's a pretty amazing thing that they did,
Speaker 1: given that none of this was written down as far
Speaker 1: as we know, but we do know that after the
Speaker 1: lights were sort of shut out in the brain, that
Speaker 1: the Egyptians would actually remove all internal organs from the body,
Speaker 1: sometimes keeping the heart intact, and then the body was
Speaker 1: salted for thirty days in order to remove the moisture
Speaker 1: from the body. And then they had all sorts of
Speaker 1: perfumed oils and resins put on their skin, and they
Speaker 1: were wrapped several several several times. If they were super
Speaker 1: fancy royal people, then they got the sarcophagus or they
Speaker 1: got you some sort of painted face. So just keep
Speaker 1: that in mind when we talk about this idea of
Speaker 1: an hydrobiosis and some of the mummies that we see
Speaker 1: out there on the street. Yes. Uh, an hydrobiosis means
Speaker 1: life without water, and it is a state of actual
Speaker 1: suspended animation in a dry meadow biologic condition. In other words,
Speaker 1: the specimen survives without water and without undergoing metamorphosis for
Speaker 1: an extended period of time. Now we can look at
Speaker 1: the year seventeen o two, the father of microbiology, Anthony
Speaker 1: van Lewin Hook, who discovered that when dry and lifeless
Speaker 1: dust or what looked to be lifeless dust from a
Speaker 1: gutter roof which we rehydrated with clean water, small as
Speaker 1: he calls it, amcules became active within an hour, variously
Speaker 1: adhering to the glass, sometimes creeping along it, and sometimes
Speaker 1: swimming about. So those were some of our first cues
Speaker 1: about this process. Yeah, and we we see various examples
Speaker 1: of this in the natural world. For instance, if you've
Speaker 1: ever ordered a pack of sea monkeys, you've you've seen
Speaker 1: I've seen this. Now sea monkeys will not last in
Speaker 1: a package for ten thousand years. But uh, there are
Speaker 1: there are other animals and organisms and plants out there
Speaker 1: that do stretch the limit a little a little further.
Speaker 1: For instance, there's there the so called resurrection plants. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes they go by the name resurrection plant rose of
Speaker 1: Jericho uh simpera viva, meaning everlasting, and they are especially
Speaker 1: good at anhydrobiosis, so they enter a dry, dormant state
Speaker 1: between the rain, between rain seasons that may last years.
Speaker 1: And elsewhere in the plant Kingdom, we've seen lotus seeds
Speaker 1: that have germinated successfully after a millennium in the dust. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what's so amazing about these resurrection plants is that
Speaker 1: they could go for you know, years and years and years,
Speaker 1: and when it finally rains, then they sort of flower
Speaker 1: out and they absorb all of that rain. So it
Speaker 1: is this rehydration process that's amazing to me. And then
Speaker 1: we have nematode worms. Yeah, nematode worms are are also
Speaker 1: capable of this and actually a number of multicellular animals
Speaker 1: are known to uh to bounce back after this extended
Speaker 1: period of dryness. Also, our friends the water bears. Yes,
Speaker 1: I love these guys. They're about a millimeter long, their arthropods,
Speaker 1: and they're found usually in moist places like moss and lychen,
Speaker 1: but they can survive anywhere. Yeah, and we will, we
Speaker 1: will definitely come back and do a full episode on
Speaker 1: water bears at some point. In the future because they're
Speaker 1: just too cool. Yeah. They can withstand temperatures ranging from
Speaker 1: nearly absolute zero to above the boiling point of water.
Speaker 1: They can hold up to massive doses of radiation as
Speaker 1: as NASA has found out um over a century, over
Speaker 1: a century without food or water, and they can even
Speaker 1: exist in the vacuum of space. And to top it
Speaker 1: all off, they're kind of cute. They they are kind
Speaker 1: of cuddly looking, and they don't really quite look like
Speaker 1: a bear. I guess they look as as much like
Speaker 1: a bear as anything on that scale is going to
Speaker 1: look like a bear. They just chubby, little cute things.
Speaker 1: And they also have the awesomeness of an hydrobiosis. All right,
Speaker 1: so what you're saying, Well, those are plants. Those are
Speaker 1: some tiny animals. But but what about the the human body?
Speaker 1: Is there any science, any natural world science that can
Speaker 1: explain the unnatural resurrection of a dried out mummy. Well
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and when we come
Speaker 1: back we will discuss just that. Okay, we're back, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about whether or not those mummies that we're
Speaker 1: seeing in news footage, if if they are just walk
Speaker 1: around because of anihydrobiosis or if it's some sort of
Speaker 1: DARPA experiment gone wrong. Yeah, it's the thing about humans
Speaker 1: and an anhydrobiosis. The the reason that our examples involved
Speaker 1: very small animals and plant tissue is because there's a
Speaker 1: great deal of desiccation damage that it can occur to
Speaker 1: a tissue when it's dried out, even if it's you know,
Speaker 1: expertly dried out, so that even it's not just a
Speaker 1: simple matter of takeaway water and then add water back. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are a number of other things that have to
Speaker 1: be in play for that to be possible. That's right.
Speaker 1: There is a paper called ana hydro Biotic Potential in
Speaker 1: Man Implications in Medicine which was published in Medical Hypotheses
Speaker 1: by Pereira and Locus sent Us. Yes, Brazilian researchers who
Speaker 1: believe that that that the anhydrobiosis is potentially an area
Speaker 1: that we that we might exploit in order to preserve tissues.
Speaker 1: Not so. I mean, we can you can get really
Speaker 1: sci fi about it and imagine mummies being sent to
Speaker 1: other planets, uh to colonize it and build space pyramids.
Speaker 1: But for the most part they're interested in terms of uh,
Speaker 1: we have donor organs wouldn't be to dry those out,
Speaker 1: store those in in this in this this dry setting,
Speaker 1: and then add water and implant them as needed. Now, yeah,
Speaker 1: that this is their idea behind all this, that mammals
Speaker 1: and humans have a cryptic ani hydrobiotic ability, which they
Speaker 1: say has not been discovered yet because of an unknown
Speaker 1: specific preconditioning stage that is necessary. They're saying it's there,
Speaker 1: we sh haven't discovered it, and if we can, then
Speaker 1: it could be a huge boon to the way that
Speaker 1: we um operate on a medical level. Now, research blogger
Speaker 1: aiden or Sten has called out a few problems with
Speaker 1: this hypothesis. So that might make you feel a little
Speaker 1: bit better about the mummies you see in the street.
Speaker 1: I don't know, he says. First, and a hydrobiotic survival
Speaker 1: is advantageous only if a species lives in a habitat
Speaker 1: that is periodically desiccated, meaning dehydrated, and if the species
Speaker 1: has no means of surviving the dry period, So he says,
Speaker 1: with a few exceptions, and a hydrobiosis is normally seen
Speaker 1: in microscopic animals and he's just larger animals, especially most humans,
Speaker 1: UM can deal with the drying of our habitats by
Speaker 1: migrating to a wetter habitat, or preventing body loss from
Speaker 1: or or preventing water loss from their bodies. The second problem,
Speaker 1: he says, is that it's really unlikely that the ability
Speaker 1: to survive and anihydro biosis will be retained if there's
Speaker 1: no need for it. Yeah, like, why keep that special
Speaker 1: feature around in an organism if there's no benefit to it, Right,
Speaker 1: That's exactly the saying. If a trait becomes unnecessary, it
Speaker 1: may persist, be lost, or become a vestige. But really
Speaker 1: there's probably not this ability to reconstitute our organs unless
Speaker 1: there's magic involved, which is probably the case with these
Speaker 1: these these mummies. They're there, So what's happening here? You know,
Speaker 1: they're they're roaming the street. They're forcibly removing our brains
Speaker 1: with coat hangers in some cases. And we can only
Speaker 1: assume that what's happening is atmospheric moisture raises them from
Speaker 1: their slumber in search of life giving water and you know,
Speaker 1: a little little BC style vengeance, So you think it's
Speaker 1: some equal parts reconstitution with the mummy's curse. They're trying
Speaker 1: to avenge the people who have put men plexiglass and
Speaker 1: stared at them. Yeah, because they're they're They're not supposed
Speaker 1: to be waking up in a Baltimore mar museum or
Speaker 1: a German attic. They're supposed to be waking up in
Speaker 1: the afterlife, or at least wake up in their tombs
Speaker 1: with all their stuff still there. But they're on the
Speaker 1: other side of the globe. You're right, No, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's that's upsetting, and the violence is understanding, particularly the
Speaker 1: Egyptian mummies, right, because they really bought into this idea
Speaker 1: of the afterlife is a beautiful thing, not necessarily a
Speaker 1: scary thing like we do more in our modern day
Speaker 1: accounts of the afterlife. All right, Well, let's move on
Speaker 1: to another organism, uh that you may encounter this Halloween,
Speaker 1: another creature of the unnatural world that we can discuss
Speaker 1: with examples from the natural world, and that of course,
Speaker 1: is the troll. Now you you you originate from Michigan,
Speaker 1: from the Northern United States? Do you have trolls in Michigan? Well,
Speaker 1: not that I know of, But I have to rethink
Speaker 1: some of the terrain because I was looking at Oslo
Speaker 1: born Folkloi's lie Luna Larsen, who lives in Minnesota, and
Speaker 1: she's the author of The Troll with No Heart in
Speaker 1: His Body, And she says that troll remains are found
Speaker 1: all over the place in Minnesota, which makes you really
Speaker 1: want to go back to Michigan and check this out.
Speaker 1: She says that if you look at piles of rocks
Speaker 1: that could be burst trolls, and we'll talk more about that,
Speaker 1: gnarled tree roots are especially prevalent, and those are ancient trolls,
Speaker 1: and then strange land formations that could be actually the
Speaker 1: supine troll bodies, so you could actually see perhaps some
Speaker 1: of the vertebra of that troll worked into the landscapes.
Speaker 1: Is there everywhere, We're just not looking for him. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: and it makes me want to go on like the
Speaker 1: troll Tour of Minnesota. They if anybody is listening in
Speaker 1: Minnesota and you guys need a boost there in your tourism,
Speaker 1: you got to do that. Yeah, get on it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. So trolls are are interesting organisms. We start
Speaker 1: looking at the different tales that that inform us about them. Um,
Speaker 1: for instance, um, you know, we're all for mebe was
Speaker 1: sort of the idea of a grotesque culking troll. Uh,
Speaker 1: this monstrous ogre like beasts. But did you know that,
Speaker 1: according to some accounts, Uh, the troll wives are sometimes
Speaker 1: beautiful redheads. I've heard about this. In fact, I think
Speaker 1: that you did a blog post about this, warning people
Speaker 1: of this, and you are actually had a reference picture
Speaker 1: of Christina Hendrix. Yes, she might be a troll wife. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, she looks beautiful, she looks human, she's got
Speaker 1: red hair, right, But if you approach her then a
Speaker 1: large male troll might attack you. You know what I
Speaker 1: love about this trope is that it perfectly plays into
Speaker 1: the old trope of the hooker with the john and
Speaker 1: the pimp. Yah. Yeah, you know, you learn a customer
Speaker 1: and then in the customer's wall it gets stolen. It's
Speaker 1: sort of the same thing with these trolls. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: if if we're to try and understand this scenario, because
Speaker 1: ultimately we're talking about another species in which one gender
Speaker 1: of the species looks like a gender of our species,
Speaker 1: that it seems kind of crazy, But we see similar
Speaker 1: situations in the natural world, and we call it aggressive mimicry. Uh,
Speaker 1: not unlike that practiced by a female of Photinus fireflies.
Speaker 1: They mimic the mating dances of Photinas ignitius fireflies, and
Speaker 1: they lure them end and then devour them. So the
Speaker 1: fam female role may appear as a beautiful woman as
Speaker 1: a means of attracting male humans which they're mini folk
Speaker 1: than you know, brutalize and or eat. Yeah, and now
Speaker 1: a less aggressive act. Of course, you can look at
Speaker 1: the viceroy butterflies, which actually mimic the same color and
Speaker 1: pattering of the monarch butterflies, which are toxic. Um. Of
Speaker 1: course we don't have any luring in here, but you
Speaker 1: see all these examples in nature where uh, creatures can
Speaker 1: sort of morph a little bit, or they can mimic
Speaker 1: in order to either survive or attack. Yeah, the African
Speaker 1: swallowtail butterfly actually has like several different female morphs that
Speaker 1: exist within the specie. There's some that that that look
Speaker 1: like another butterfly species. There are some that look more
Speaker 1: like there are more masculine in appearance. Um, it's I
Speaker 1: think an all told, they're fourteen different varieties of morphs
Speaker 1: in that particular species is pretty amazing, it really is.
Speaker 1: I mean, can you imagine being able to morph into
Speaker 1: something like fourteen different looks for yourself, fourteen different variety
Speaker 1: of of of female like morpho, morphologically distinct. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's pretty crazy. But in the insect world, you quickly
Speaker 1: find that what seems crazy in the human world, what
Speaker 1: something that is the stuff of folk tales in the
Speaker 1: human world, is just everyday life in the insect world, right,
Speaker 1: And it makes that troll, the female troll masquerading as
Speaker 1: Christina Hendrix, seems really sort of like pretty you know,
Speaker 1: one oh one comparison. All Right, we're gonna take a
Speaker 1: quick break and when we get back, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the troll Hunter documentary. Hey, we're back. So
Speaker 1: we're talking about trolls. We're talking about the ways that
Speaker 1: we can look to the natural world to understand the
Speaker 1: denizens of the unnatural world. And so with trolls, who
Speaker 1: probably you know, most people are not that familiar with
Speaker 1: the whole troll life situation. But but far more likely
Speaker 1: you know, that sunlight will turn them to stone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: these are subterranean creatures. They cannot be out in daylight.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of different theories that were put forward,
Speaker 1: and we have seen some of the effects of them
Speaker 1: actually exposed to light. And I say that documentary Troll
Speaker 1: Hunter from and this was dealing with the Norwegian trolls,
Speaker 1: the jott Ners, the wringlefinches, and the Tussa lad as
Speaker 1: well as the mountain Kings. Yeah. According to the film,
Speaker 1: the noncturnal troll cannot convert vitamin D, which you know
Speaker 1: most of us in the daylit world received from sunlight.
Speaker 1: They can't convert that into calcium. So when the troll
Speaker 1: absorbs vitamin D from direct sunlight or UV rays, their
Speaker 1: bodies rapidly suffer from acute vitamin D toxicity or we
Speaker 1: also call this hyper vitamin osis D. And we see
Speaker 1: this in humans, right, Yeah, this is in the natural world.
Speaker 1: This is an actual real thing. Um. The causes are
Speaker 1: typically you're looking at an excess of vitamin D that
Speaker 1: abnormally boost levels of calcium in the blood. It can
Speaker 1: severy severely damaged bone, soft tissues and kidneys over time,
Speaker 1: and it's almost always caused by forms of vitamin D
Speaker 1: need a doctor's prescription. So generally what's happening is you're
Speaker 1: taking too much vitamin D is a supplement and you're
Speaker 1: experiencing uh stuff like you know, these symptoms, but also constipation,
Speaker 1: decrease appetite, et cetera. And generally the way you fix
Speaker 1: it is you stop taking all that extra vitamin D. Now,
Speaker 1: we don't know about the constipation and trolls, but we
Speaker 1: do know that in younger trolls, the excess vitamin D
Speaker 1: causes an intense and painful build up for gas in
Speaker 1: its stomach and veins, and this results in a full
Speaker 1: body fragmentation. In other words, they explode, floating troll all
Speaker 1: over the place. Now, in the older trolls, though, according
Speaker 1: to the troll Hunter, the veins are too constricted. They
Speaker 1: cause the expansion to occur in the creatures bones, and
Speaker 1: this reaction causes the creatures entire body to calcify, to
Speaker 1: turn into stone, to use the language of folklore. Yes,
Speaker 1: now this is all all good and well, um, but
Speaker 1: they are roaming among us, so it's something to look
Speaker 1: out for, especially the Christina Hendrix of them. Yeah, watch
Speaker 1: out for the for the for the troll wives. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know you mentioned a wife slop, when I
Speaker 1: wonder if we're gonna know they have wife slop. Sure
Speaker 1: they have celebrity wife slop. Have they considered troll wife
Speaker 1: swop as a television show. I'm sure you've seen some
Speaker 1: of the buzz on the Internet that there's been some
Speaker 1: theories put forth that there have been troll wives on
Speaker 1: their already and we just didn't know it because again
Speaker 1: they're aggressive mimicry. Well, that's gonna make my rewatching of
Speaker 1: those series all all the more interesting now. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you know you've got your mummy friends out there. We
Speaker 1: should treat them kindly because again, they didn't want to
Speaker 1: be something that we just glcked at in museums or
Speaker 1: as you say, in German attics. And uh, we have
Speaker 1: learned a lot from from mummies. I mean we've been
Speaker 1: able to look at their DNA and look at disease.
Speaker 1: We've been able to to even look at their diets.
Speaker 1: You know. So they've given us a lot. We need
Speaker 1: to give them a hand that their gifts to science
Speaker 1: and gifts to archaeology, even as they sometimes strangle archaeologists
Speaker 1: and scientists. Trolls, on the other hand, as we know,
Speaker 1: just on the Internet, they're there to be avoided. They're
Speaker 1: not given us much. Yeah, I don't know why so
Speaker 1: many of them have Internet connections, I mean, because they're
Speaker 1: under bridges, even like if they're using wireless, it's got
Speaker 1: to disrupt your signal a bit. You know. These these
Speaker 1: are things that we should probably look at certain corporations
Speaker 1: and begin to ask them questions about why they're able
Speaker 1: to have access. Why are you granting internet access to trolls,
Speaker 1: to nocternal monsters, something that we could uncoverag they're probably
Speaker 1: sending the wives into the store to get them. That's
Speaker 1: my bet. That's the other perk of that kind of mimicry,
Speaker 1: because you can you then use the wife that appears
Speaker 1: human to infiltrate uh, you know, human systems. Wow, this
Speaker 1: is yeah. I mean I I I'm telling you, I
Speaker 1: was about to say, as a woman, I would never say,
Speaker 1: don't trust another woman. I'm gonna look twice next time.
Speaker 1: But I exit that office store and I look at
Speaker 1: my my female co workers because possibly they could be
Speaker 1: exhibiting this aggressive mimicry. Ladder milk. All right, Well there
Speaker 1: you go, um, a couple of unnatural creatures that we
Speaker 1: are looking at through the guise of natural science. So
Speaker 1: let us know what you think about all that, particularly trolls,
Speaker 1: particularly mummies, and the possible science behind them, as explored
Speaker 1: in various bits of media. We'd love to hear from
Speaker 1: you and uh and certainly we hope everyone out there
Speaker 1: has a happy Halloween. If you want to check out
Speaker 1: other Halloween related stuff that we've put out, and we
Speaker 1: tend to put out Halloween related stuff all year long,
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