The Weird Science Drop #1🧪 Thursday 24 April 2025
Inaugural souvenir launch edition - why you should party like it's 1,000,002,020, drinking wee is bad, purple is made up by your 🧠, and the man who created a two-headed dog.
“Mhoro!* Welcome to the launch of The Weird Science Drop. Science is weird, and here’s the proof. This shiny new newsletter will deliver crazy chemistry, bonkers biology, foolish physics and lots more straight to your inbox every week. So please subscribe. You won’t be mad to, even if the stories featured most likely will be!”
Click to take me to…
📷 Cool Photo - anyone parked at the bottom of the ocean?
🎧 For Your Ear Holes - go on a wild geological ride
📊 Infographic Magic - respect the cockroach
🤯 Weird Science Factoid - when to avoid the bank
👴 About the fellow who wrote this
Weird Science News ✍
🐟 The sea’s a weird place and it just got a little weirder after scientists on an expedition to the South Sandwich Islands near Antarctica spotted a bizarre creature with parasitic pig tails. In a video from the Schmidt Ocean Institute, two copepods - small crustaceans - are seen positioned on either side of a deep sea rattail fish’s head. Long egg sacs attached at the back of the parasites make it look like the fish is sporting a nifty haircut. James Bernot, from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told Live Science:
"They feed on blood and fluids from their host using their scraping mouth parts that are embedded in the muscle of the fish."
Charming little creatures, I’m sure you would agree.
🍺 Peep Show called it the ‘mellow yellow’ and the ‘original vaccine’ but while drinking your own urine is indeed a noble and ancient tradition to cure what ails you, it might come as no surprise that guzzling down wee is not good for you. According to pharmacy lecturer Dipa Kamdar, drinking any pee - be that your own, someone else’s, or the animal variety - puts extra strain on your kidneys, increases the risk of stomach infections, and will ultimately lead to dehydration. It also tastes really bad. Still not convinced? Get the full story here via The Conversation
🌍 Time to party like it’s 1,000,002,020? We have an exact year for when all life on Earth gives up the ghost and throws in the towel. Scientists from the US and Japan plugged best guesses into a bunch of advanced mathematical models and tasked a supercomputer to come up with the ultimate answer to the question: when will life on Earth be impossible? And the fancy desktop coughed up a rather specific answer: 1,000,002,021. By then, our Sun will be pumping out too much heat for anything to survive on the third planet. Get the full low-down here via La Grada. It’s a little like this but in reverse…
🚀 And talking of Prince, if The Purple One were still alive today he’d be aghast to learn the colour purple isn’t real and our brains just made it up. So says Popular Mechanics here, the human eye can’t see the colour as it’s not actually on the visual spectrum. In nature, ‘purple’ is a very strange mix of wavelengths from opposite extremes, so our noggins have invented a way of deciphering it by bending the spectrum into a circle so that blue and red come together and, hey presto, you get what we see as purple.
🤠 Texans were walking around fully armed six-and-a-half thousand years ago. Quelle surprise. A weapons kit has been found in a cave by a team of archaeologists from Sul Ross State University and the University of Kansas near the small, desert town of Marfa in the Lone Star State. The arsenal featured a throwing spear, boomerang, and several wooden, poisoned-tipped darts and stone projectiles. Center for Big Bend Studies archaeologist Bryon Schroeder said:
“A person came to the back of the cave and went through their hunting gear piece by piece: ‘This is good. This is not good. I need to remake this leather pouch a little bit.’ And then they went on their way,”
Pick up your pointy stick and read more at Archaeology Magazine.
While looking into this, I stumbled across Marfa’s other claim to fame; the mysterious ‘Marfa ghosts lights’ - glowing little orbs regularly seen flying around the sky. Scientists got down there and said they were nothing more remarkable than car lights. Although the first historical record of the lights was way back in 1883 so… 🛸?
Weird Scientist 🐶+🐶+🔪+🧵=☠+😲
Charles Claude Guthrie should have been a Nobel Prize winner, but he got too carried away with his scalpel. Charlie was an American physiologist in the early 1900s and made huge contributions in the fields of resuscitation, transplants and surgery. Transplants you say? Well, this is where the professor boarded the Unhinged Express holding a one-way ticket to Loonyville.
He sewed the head of one dog onto another dog. This wasn't a replacement. He wanted to create a two-headed dog. The procedure was described at the time:
"The transplanted head was sewn on at the base of the neck, upside down, so the two dogs are chin to chin, giving an impression of intimacy, despite what must have been at the very least a strained coexistence."
Freaky fellow. I presume it was just this kind of dodgy experiment that gave the Nobel Jury pause for doubt.
How we got here ⛱
Early humans slapped on their own prehistoric sunscreen to keep themselves safe from ‘death rays from space’, new research has shown. A study from the University of Michigan claims ancient Homo sapiens applied ochre, a mineral with sun-protective properties, on their skin during a time when the magnetic North Pole was wandering all over Europe.
The poles often move around, sometimes ‘flipping’ out and switching places in a natural process that has happened almost 200 times since the Earth formed.
Luckily for us, great-uncle Ug and great-aunty Ugette navigated this spell of deadly weather some 40,000 years ago by covering themselves in ochre, wearing more clothes and spending lots of time hanging out in their caves.
It just so happens that around this time the Neanderthal population in the same part of the world vanished 🤔.
According to researchers, the findings show people can adapt to survive on a planet whose atmosphere looks a lot different to the one we enjoy today with implications for the search for life on other planets.
Photo of the Week 📷
A deep water survey investigating a US aircraft carrier sunk by the Japanese during WWII was surprised to find a mystery car at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is asking for help in identifying the vehicle that went down with the USS Yorktown during the Battle of Midway in 1942.
For your ear holes 🎧
Infographic Magic 📊
Cool Quote 🗣
“I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.”
Carl Sagan
Weird Science Factoid 🤯
Half of bank robberies take place on a Friday.
Weird Science Fries on the Side 🍟 (aka the best of the rest)
Our galactic neighbor Andromeda has a bunch of satellite galaxies — and they're pointing at us
Massive hole the size of Switzerland appeared in the Antarctic sea ice, now we know why
Scientists discover what caused the woolly mammoth to die-off
Archaeologists discover ‘unique find’ that may lead to ruins of ancient, long-lost civilization
Wild chimpanzees filmed by scientists bonding over alcoholic fruit
About me 👴
Daniel Smith is an old experienced journalist who has worked for a host of news publishers on both sides of the Atlantic. A long, long time ago, he fancied himself as an astrophysicist but instead turned out to be the worst scientist since the man who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world by pressing the big red button but is safely behind a desk writing this newsletter, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... The Weird Science Drop.
Have I missed anything? 🚨
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Edition Number: 1
* Mhoro = hello in Shona