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:
By Nathan Lents
This week’s episode features special guest Nathan Lents, a professor of biology at John Jay and the author of “The Sexual Evolution: How 500 Million Years of Sex, Gender, and Mating Shape Modern Relationships.” For his fact on the show, he focused on the sex lives of some very loud—and not particularly loyal—birds.
Female dunnocks have figured out the ultimate relationship power move: they make copulatory calls during sex, but only with their side partners. They do this specifically to summon their main mate back home. It’s not about pleasure or attracting more males—it’s about resources, which in this case means snacks.
Female dunnocks don’t seem to have a problem with their primary partners having sex with others. But they don’t want their dudes sticking around with side chicks for long enough to start feeding them. When a female dunnock is left alone too long, she’s liable to get busy with one of her secondary partners. Then, she calls out loudly. Her primary partner hears this, races back to the nest, chases away the other male, and immediately has sex with her to replace the competitor’s sperm. He also brings food that might otherwise have gone to another female. The louder she is with her side pieces, the more provisions she gets from her main squeeze.
For decades, scientists assumed these calls were just about male competition or female submission. But when researchers finally started studying female birds as active agents with their own agendas, they discovered something much more sophisticated: a female using strategic infidelity to secure maximum resources while maintaining genetic diversity. It turns out monogamy in the animal world is way more complicated than anyone imagined.
FACT: If you survive a snake bite, you should probably go thank a horse
Out of about 4,000 snake species on Earth, roughly 600 are venomous. Some pack enough neurotoxin to paralyze you with a single bite. If you get bitten by one of these deadly critters and live to tell the tale, you probably owe your life to a horse.
The process of making anti-venom hasn’t changed much since the 1890s (when, just for some context, doctors were still prescribing heroin for coughs). First, folks milk venom from snakes by massaging their venom glands into glass containers. Then scientists inject that venom into horses—yes, into horses—a little bit at a time. They do this over the course of several months, increasing the dose gradually. This process allows the horse to build up antibodies that protect it from the venom’s effects. Finally, the antivenom-makers extract some of the horse’s blood (up to five liters in about 10 minutes!) to harvest those antibodies.
One round of horse incubation can produce 2,000 vials of scorpion anti-venom or 200 vials of African snake anti-venom. They’re supposedly quite pampered throughout the process, but the process still takes a toll on their health over time. It’s also, obviously, pretty slow. So scientists and animal rights advocates alike would love to find some good alternatives to horse incubators (other than people).
Luckily, Australian skinks have evolved their own molecular armor against cobra venom—using the exact same sugar-blocking mechanism that cobras use to resist their own toxins. Listen to this week’s episode to learn how these little lizards could revolutionize how we treat the world’s deadliest bites.
FACT: Cans have existed for way longer than can openers have
Here’s a perfect example of humanity’s knack for stumbling onto brilliant solutions without understanding them: In 1795, Napoleon offered 12,000 francs to anyone who could figure out how to preserve food for his army. French confectioner Nicolas Appert spent years on the challenge, eventually creating the world’s first food bottling factory by sealing food in glass jars with cork and wax, then boiling them. His technique worked beautifully…but he had no idea why.
Appert thought it was all about removing air from the containers. He had no clue he was actually killing bacteria and creating vacuum seals. It wasn’t until Louis Pasteur demonstrated that microorganisms cause spoilage—a full half-century later—that anyone truly understood the science behind canning.
But that’s just part of my weird fact for this week. Here’s the rest: We started using metal cans in 1810, but didn’t invent the can opener until 1855. For 45 years, people generally opened cans with hammers and chisels. It’s not that no one would have come up with the idea of a can opening tool, but the cans in question would never have yielded to the sort of kitchen aids we rely on today. Early cans were massive hunks of metal, sometimes literal wrought iron. They often weighed more than the food inside them and could be over an eighth of an inch thick. Soldiers were known to use bayonets, rocks, and even gunfire to get their cans open.
When folks did start patenting and marketing can openers, they were basically just handled little blades that left jagged edges everywhere. The process was so dangerous that grocery store clerks would open cans for customers to take home. The familiar rotating wheel can opener didn’t appear until 1870—and people still weren’t impressed, because you had to pierce the can first anyway.
So every time you effortlessly pop open a can, you’re using technology that took humanity nearly a century to perfect, solving a problem we created by inventing preservation methods we didn’t even understand.
