What’s the weirdest factor you discovered this week? Well, no matter it’s, we promise you’ll have an excellent weirder reply should you hearken to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all over the place else you hearken to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favourite supply for the strangest science-adjacent information, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you just like the tales on this publish, we assure you’ll love the present.
Heads up: Rachel and Jess are planning a livestream Q&A within the close to future, in addition to different enjoyable bonus content material! Follow Rachel on Patreon and Jess on Twitch to remain updated.
FACT: Parking says a lot about who we’re as a society
By Amanda Reed
My accomplice not too long ago learn a actually attention-grabbing ebook—“Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” by Henry Grabar—and instructed me all me about it over dinner and NA beers. It seems folks go cuckoo bananas as quickly as they step into a automobile and attempt to park, and there’s tons to unpack.
There are social and psychological causes behind parking and highway rage. Many guidelines of the highway are self-imposed. (e.g., “The left lane is the passing lane, don’t hog it up”). People get indignant once they see different folks not doing this “socially acceptable” factor and take it upon themselves to right the opposite particular person—generally in violent methods.
Parking theorist Sarah Marusek says that parking follows what she calls “frontier law,” the place folks discover a public spot and declare it as theirs a la the 1800s. They don’t want to do this, nonetheless: There are between 1-2 billion parking areas within the US. A examine of 27 mixed-use neighborhoods discovered that parking was over-supplied by 65 %. Neighborhoods with resident-reported “parking shortages” have been nonetheless oversupplied by 45 %.
Drivers are just about toddlers who don’t need to share their pencil for worry of shedding it and by no means getting it again, regardless of there being loads of different pencils on this world. We as a society wrestle with sharing and being inconvenienced, which we see in on a regular basis life by so many issues, just like the response to COVID-19, school debt reduction, healthcare … and now, parking.
FACT: Some penguins take 10,000 naps a day
By Rachel Feltman
As we’ve mentioned in earlier episodes, sleep is each very mysterious and essential. All animals do it—even ones with out brains or central nervous techniques (I’m you, jellyfish). And many single-celled organisms have circadian rhythms, which means they’ve organic capabilities that observe roughly 24-hour cycles.
We know sleep is important, however we don’t know precisely what it does or how it advanced. One method we will begin to study extra about snoozing is to take a look at how different animals do it, since many of the actually strong analysis now we have is on primates and rodents.
That’s the place a latest examine on chinstrap penguins is available in. Researchers discovered that these flightless birds in Antarctica get about 11 hours of sleep a day, which doesn’t sound all that exceptional at face worth. But the actual kicker is how they get it: in increments of roughly 4 seconds.
Scientists frolicked with a colony of hundreds of breeding chinstrap penguins, protecting shut tabs on 14 of them particularly. From the skin, it appeared just like the penguins have been doing the form of sluggish blinking and head jerking you’d count on from sleep-deprived new dad and mom. We already know that these animals spend weeks hardly sleeping to guard their nests from predators and different penguins seeking to steal pebbles or eggs, with dad and mom buying and selling off time spent both looking or guarding. The researchers needed to connect electrodes to the birds to even inform they have been sleeping in any respect. But they have been: all these little blinks and head nods have been temporary intervals of sleep. They did this about 10,000 occasions a day, including as much as an apparently ample 11 hours.
Listen to this week’s episode to listen to extra about the examine—and what it means (and doesn’t imply) for humans who depend on micronaps to get by. Plus: Some bonus enjoyable information on different unusual animal sleeping habits!
FACT: This medieval torture system was really a fable
By Jess Boddy
So, I’ve been pondering a lot about iron maidens recently. Not the band, however the legendary torture system of yore. They have been (supposedly) these big, human-sized cupboards with spikes on the within. You open it up, put within the torturee, and shut it. Ouch!!
What bought me pondering about iron maidens, you ask? Well, Resident Evil 4 did, after all. The enemies known as iron maidens in that sport are a few of the most terrifying in any horror sport that I’ve ever performed. But it seems, “real life” iron maidens have been most likely simply as fictional as those in RE4.
After 18th-century German thinker Johann Philipp Siebenkees proposed the thought of iron maidens getting used for torture, the thought unfold like wildfire within the 1800s. Victorian period people stored pointing the finger on the Medieval period people earlier than them, saying they have been the barbarians who used these spiky cupboards (amongst different units, together with chastity belts) to torture ne’er do wells. But this appears to be a traditional case of juicy gossip and well-crafted misinformation trumping good sense. Listen to the episode to listen to all about how the iron maiden fable started (it includes a barrel of disgrace!), proliferated, and finally bought debunked.