Skip to main content

The weirdest things we learned this week: nudist founding fathers and vampire lore

[ad_1]


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 iTunes, Anchor, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every 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: Benjamin Franklin liked to sit around naked



By Rachel Feltman



Air bathing is exactly what it sounds like: It's like bathing, but with air. Of course, one could also refer to air bathing as "sitting around in the nude," and they definitely wouldn't be wrong. One famous proponent of this practice was none other than Benjamin Franklin. Here's a paper on the subject written in the early 1900s, featuring excerpts from the founding father's pro-nude-naptime letters.



I hoped to uncover the true health benefits of sitting around sans clothing—there's no good research on the subject, by the way—but as I discuss in this week's episode of the show, I came across a surprising twist. And yes: just like the last surprising twist I found, it involves Nazis. They're everywhere! Go figure. You can read more about Joe Knowles, whose time spent living naked and alone (allegedly) in the wilderness showcases the creepy rhetoric of the American eugenics movement, in this Boston Magazine retrospective. I also mention his hilariously laudatory book on the so-called experiment, which you can peruse for yourself for tidbits about how exposure to the elements would help American men maintain the strength of the race. And if that connection to eugenics and Nazism is still a little too subtle for you, read up on how the Nazi party co-opted the tenants of the nudist movement (while disavowing anything as liberal as actually running around nude) here.



To end on the lightest possible note (sorry!) here is a photo I found of Eugen Sandow, largely considered the father of modern bodybuilding. Knowles, pictured above, claims his measurements were comparable to the famous athlete's stats after his stint in the woods. This will make you laugh.


FACT: Vampires are compulsive counters (and other bizarre vampire facts)



By Jessica Boddy



I recently caught up with a former history professor of mine, Theodora Kelly Trimble from the University of Pittsburgh, and she reminded me of a rather grim figure from the 16th and 17th centuries: Elizabeth Bathory. Bathory was a Hungarian countess who was quite possibly the most deadly serial killer of all time—she’s thought to have tortured and killed over 600 young women. Her murders were rather gory, and some saw her bathing in the blood of her victims, an act thought to preserve her youth and beauty. This led people to believe that she was a vampire. (She was even born in Transylvania!) Bathory was tried and charged for her crimes, and as punishment, the Hungarian people built a wall to barricade her into her castle’s tower. There was a little slot for air and food to pass through, but other than that, she could not leave.



Researching this got me thinking about just how weird the culture surrounding vampire lore is, so I decided to check out my notes from Kelly’s class (which was about vampire myths throughout history and across cultures). Among my favorite facts is a classic vampire burial technique: sprinkle poppy seeds on a supposed vampire’s grave, and he or she will never come to hunt you. This is because vampires are, supposedly, compulsive counters, and would spend all night counting the poppy seeds you left. I also brushed up on porphyria, a disease that causes sun sensitivity and receding gums, making its sufferers look very pale and have very large teeth. Though not overly common today, porphyria was thought to occur more in individuals who repeatedly married within their families—like, for instance, in small villages in the valleys of Transylvania.



FACT: Cutting up hot peppers can give you a condition called jalapeño hands



By Claire Maldarelli



A while back, as I was catching up with my sister over the phone, she mentioned to me something odd: Shortly after cutting up hot peppers for a recipe, her thumb started burning and wouldn’t stop. After googling her symptoms, she found that, in fact, this is a not-so-uncommon condition that in the medical literature goes by many names, including but not limited to: hot pepper hands, jalapeño hands, jalapeño thumb, and Hunan hand syndrome.



As a health editor and self-proclaimed hypochondriac, I was surprised and interested (a disease I had never heard of!). Turns out, the culprit is capsaicin, a chemical compound found in the fruit of plants within the capsicum family, including red chili peppers, jalapeños, and habaneros. This colorless and odorless compound binds to pain receptors, triggering the sensation of intense heat or burning. But I won’t ruin all the surprises that come with jalapeño hands. Listen to this week’s episode for more about this bizarre reaction to hot peppers, how to treat it, some crazy case studies, and of course, some hot pepper cutting best practices to prevent the burn.



[ad_2]

Written By Rachel Feltman, Jessica Boddy, Claire Maldarelli

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

Humans flourished through a supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago (so you can make it through Tuesday)

[ad_1] About 74,000 years ago, a large chunk of a Pacific island exploded. It sent ash and other debris around the world, including to the southern tip of Africa, where it would be found by a team of international scientists and entered as the latest data point in one of the hottest debates in paleoanthropology ( I know ): Did the Toba supervolcano thrust our planet into a 1,000-year volcanic winter, thus bottle-necking animals and plants alike? Or was it just a little blip on our historic radar? That’s the contentious arena into which our intrepid researchers venture, this time with a new study in Nature establishing that humans in modern-day South Africa not only survived, but flourished after the Toba eruption. Where once was (we think, maybe) a mountain, there is now a huge caldera with a lake inside, and an island inside that. Their evidence shows that debris from the explosion landed 9,000 kilometers (5592.3 miles) away, the farthest distance traveled ever recorded for the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they're too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.

[ad_1] John Gluck’s excitement about studying parent-child separation quickly soured. He’d been thrilled to arrive at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1960s, his spot in the lab of renowned behavioral psychologist Harry Harlow secure. Harlow had cemented his legacy more than a decade earlier when his experiments showed the devastating effects of broken parent-child bonds in rhesus monkeys. As a graduate student researcher, Gluck would use Harlow’s monkey colony to study the impact of such disruption on intellectual ability. Gluck found academic success, and stayed in touch with Harlow long after graduation. His mentor even sent Gluck monkeys to use in his own laboratory. But in the three years Gluck spent with Harlow—and the subsequent three decades he spent as a leading animal researcher in his own right—his concern for the well-being of his former test subjects overshadowed his enthusiasm for animal research. Separating parent and child,...
Post a Comment
Read more