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.
(If you’re looking for the Libro.fm referral link Rachel mentioned in this week’s episode, here it is! Libro.fm is an audiobook platform that allows you to support your favorite local indie bookstores. This referral will get you three audiobooks for the price of one.)
FACT: Having a crush on a cartoon character is perfectly normal
By Amanda Reed
Raven from Teen Titans. Misty in Pokémon. Kovu from The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. These are just a few cartoon crushes you’ll find listed in Reddit forums asking the same question: “Is it normal to have a crush on a cartoon?” And the answer is: Yes!
Getting a crush on a cartoon is similar to developing a crush on a real-life person. There’s lots of room for fantasy to exist and grow when we admire someone we don’t know well—we’re simply filling in the blanks with positive assumptions. And that’s even easier to do when you don’t know your crush at all, which isn’t just true for fictional characters.
“If you have a crush on Justin Bieber, for example, it’s as two-dimensional as having a crush on an anime character,” says Dr. Robin Rosenberg, a clinical psychologist in California who studies psychology and fandom. “The concept of Justin Bieber that you’re in love with is not a real person.”
Dr. Kathryn Seifert, a psychologist who has studied and written extensively about child development and sexuality, adds, “Children are not looking for a partner, they are trying to understand relationships … They are curious and learning about relationships and what they mean. It does not mean the same thing for a child to have a crush on someone and an adult falling in love with another person and having adult sexual feelings toward that person.”
So next time you find yourself blushing while playing as Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil 4 or deciding who will go on your “Hear me out” cake for TikTok, just know you’re not alone in your infatuation—that digital man made of polygons has great bangs and a cool jacket! It’s perfectly healthy for your brain to imagine a bunch of other great qualities for him—and for your heart to get all gooey about it.
FACT: We don’t actually know why hammerhead sharks are “like that”
This week’s episode of Weirdest Thing features shark scientist and author Dr. Jasmin Graham. Her latest book is called “Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist.” On today’s episode, she answers the question she gets most often from shark fans: why do hammerhead sharks look like that? Scientists long assumed that there must be some awesome evolutionary advantage to explain their bizarre head shapes. But as Jasmin explains on this episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, the truth is probably a lot more… random.
To hear more about Jasmin’s book, check out her recent interview with Rachel for Science Friday!
FACT: it’s possible that half a million people died over the course of five years simply because there weren’t enough vultures around
Vultures get a bad rap, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes. People focus on the fact that they projectile vomit when stressed and that they eat rotting carcasses butt-first for easy access, but they’re really cool birds. They’ve got, like, industrial-grade cleaning chemicals in their guts and microbiomes of steel. They also help keep humans happy and healthy.
Vultures can pick a carcass clean in less than half an hour, which means less rotting meat on the ground for dangerous bacteria and insects to grow in. They’re way better at spotting and devouring carrion than land scavengers like hyenas and wild dogs. One study found that decomposition is up to three times slower when vultures aren’t around to clean up carcasses. They’re so good at finding food that poachers often kill them to keep them from signaling the presence of a dead elephant or rhino.
They’re also considered a sentinel species, which basically means they’re on the frontlines when it comes to picking up pathogens and other dangerous stuff. If your local vultures are getting sick, that’s a sign something is really wrong with the dead animals they’re eating. And they can also sound the alarm on toxic substances introduced by humans. When the anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, which was once widely used in livestock, started killing off vultures in south asia, that helped us realize it was toxic to lots of animals and plants.
That brings me to the recent study I talked about on this week’s episode, which looked at how the diclofenac-driven dip in vulture populations impacted humans.
Back in the early ‘80s, there were more than 40 million vultures of various species in South Asia. But folks started to notice a sharp decline in the early 90s, especially in India. The population dropped by around 95%. Some individual species dropped by as much as 99.9%. I’ve seen a few experts say this was the fastest wild bird decline in recorded history.
It wasn’t until 2003 that researchers realized the common livestock anti-inflammatory diclofenac was to blame. It’s super toxic to vultures. One simulation model found that if only 1% of carcasses were contaminated by diclofenac, Indian vulture populations would fall by between 60% and 90% annually, and a study of carcasses showed that about 10% were contaminated. India banned the use of the drug in animals in 2006, but their numbers are still really low and they’re considered critically endangered.
According to recent research, the vulture decline has lead to more than half a million human deaths. Listen to the episode to find out how.