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 Spotify, YouTube, Apple, 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: The specific stink of a naked mole rat queen helps keep her colony in line (and infertile) 

By Rachel Feltman

Longtime listeners (and readers) already know that I love naked mole rats. More importantly, you already know that naked mole rats are freaky. They’re basically impervious to pain and seemingly immune to cancer. They’re mysteriously cold-blooded. They could hold the secret to extreme longevity. They barely need oxygen. 

But on this week’s episode, I focus on just a couple of the unique qualities that make the naked mole rat so infamous: the fact that they live in eusocial collectives more similar to ants and bees than to other mammals, and the fact that, when their queens die, the females tend to have vicious battles for dominance. 

Naked mole rat colonies have a hierarchy that loosely aligns with body size, where only the largest females have a shot at becoming queen—and only the queen reproduces. She spends her time having litters of babies that become workers, foragers, fighters or breeding males. For as long as a queen is reproducing at a steady clip, all the other females in her colony will be totally infertile. If something happens to the queen, then the largest remaining females start breeding (and fighting) until one emerges as the victor and ascends the throne. 

Scientists knew that something about the presence of a queen kept other lady mole rats from reproducing, but they weren’t sure what. A new study claims to have the answer: she stinks up the place. 

In sniffing out the many, many chemical compounds that naked mole rats produce, scientists found that isopropyl myristate was common among queens and queens alone. It’s a compound that’s used in a lot of cosmetics and is generally thought to be undetectable to human noses, though the researchers have anecdotally noticed that this might not be entirely true. In mole rats, according to this new research, it has the power to halt fertility so the queen is the colony’s only breeder. 

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about how naked mole rats use scents to suss each other out, how it might be possible for the species to have a peaceful transfer of power, and why “clothed” mole rats are so terrifying to behold.

FACT: No one can agree on what to call this delicious berry 

Featuring Alexis Nikole Nelson 

This week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week featured special guest Alexis Nikole Nelson, otherwise known as Black Forager. Her first book, “Happy Snacking, Don’t Die!”—a gorgeous and accessible guide to foraging wild food—is available for preorder now. 

For Alexis’s fact, she shared the surprisingly complicated story of the juneberry… or is it the shadbush, the sarvis, or the sugarplum? When it comes to the genus Amelanchier, a subset of the rose family that produces an assortment of flowering shrubs and small trees, it’s not the plant that’s complicated. It’s the plant’s name—because there are a lot of them. 

As Alexis explains on this week’s show, her videos on Amelanchier species are always weirdly controversial. These plants inspire more “corrections” from her viewers than anything else she talks about online. In fact, even after explaining the origins and use-cases of a whole bunch of names for our episode (shadbush, shadblow, serviceberry, sarvisberry, chuckley pear, sugarplum, juneberry, saskatoon, and probably a few more that Rachel’s already forgotten about) Alexis is sure that someone, somewhere will come after her for forgetting to mention what Amelanchier fruits are called in their neck of the woods. 

Some of these names are pretty straightforward: the folks who call the fruits juneberries are referring to the month when they tend to get ripe. Similarly, the names with “chad” in them refer to fish called “shads,” which were most abundant at the same time the Amelanchier fruits were in season. The saskatoon berry is not, as you might assume, named for the Canadian city; the berries were such important foodstuffs in the region that the city got its name from the fruit (which itself carries a bastardization of the original Cree name). 

But the commonly shared origin story for one name for the Amelanchier—the serviceberry—is false. Alexis used to believe, as many folks do, that it referred to the fact that the berries ripen in spring—which, given that the ground finally defrosts and loosens up, is also when communities could historically hold funeral services. (Yes, it’s true: for most of human history, if you lived in a place where it got cold and stayed cold all winter, you almost certainly had to keep any dearly departed around until the first thaw.) 

That explanation makes about as much sense as any fruit name, but it’s not actually true. Immigrants who were more familiar with the genus Sorbus clocked similarities in the Amelanchier and named it accordingly. But given enough time (and enough interesting accents) the word “sorbus” settled into “sarvis,” and, in some cases, “service.” 

Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about this contentiously named (but indisputably delicious) little fruit. And don’t forget to order Alexis’s book so you can do some foraging of your own! 

FACT: Pantone wouldn’t exist without birds

Featuring Liz Clayton Fuller

Friend-of-the-pod Liz Clayton Fuller, AKA ipaintbirbs, is back with another story about birds (and also art!) for us this week. 

Did you know that the color teal is named after a duck? The Eurasian teal, to be precise. It’s got such a striking, iconic stripe on its head that it became the poster child for that stunning shade of greenish-blue. 

While not all birds lend their names to the colorwheel, their feathers do host a huge array of different hues. To 19th-century ornithologist Robert Ridgway, that presented a real problem. With all the various colors and shades that one might find on different bird species, he wondered, how were folks supposed to accurately describe them to one another? If one ornithologist thought a finch was blue and another clocked it as being closer to purple, could they mistake their finds for two different species? And how were birders meant to keep an eye out for specific specimens if they couldn’t know for sure what color they were looking for?

Ridgway’s obsession with precision led him to create a book of standardized colors. Now people describing birds—or anything, really—could refer to the hue in Ridgway’s book that best matched what they were looking at. Someone on the other side of the globe could look that reference up for themselves and know exactly what shade of greenish-blue was being discussed. Others would soon be inspired to make their own color guides, and eventually Pantone became the ubiquitous reference and trendsetter it is today.

 

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