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.
FACT: A worm falling out of a tree changed the course of human history
Imagine that you are a worm. Well, to be precise, you’re a larva, and you have an important job to do: transform into a moth. So you spin very thin filaments from glands in your head, they bond together into a single long thread, and you wrap that thread around yourself to form a cocoon. All is well until, one day, you fall out of the tree where you live. Unfortunately, you land in literal hot water.
Your worm brain can’t really process this, but you’ve just crashed into the teacup of legendary Chinese empress Leizu. As you die in the hot tea, your cocoon starts falling apart around you. I’m sorry that you’re not conscious to realize this, but the empress is intrigued. She asks one of her ladies in waiting to pull on the thread that’s now visible and see how long it is. The lady steps back, and back, and back even more. She has a really long way to go, considering that a silkworm cocoon can form a fiber that’s a mile long. And yes, little larva, you were a silkworm—and according to legend, you just inspired the cultivation of silk, known as sericulture.
Silk is incredibly strong and durable, and it’s also very lightweight, which means it can be used for all sorts of applications. It makes great clothing because it’s smooth and shiny, easy to dye, and it insulates well. But silk also has military applications. In the early 20th century, it was a component of body armor for stopping bullets, and because it can burn up without leaving a residue, it was used to hold gunpowder for artillery.
This material is so valuable that, hundreds of years ago, it was traded across the ancient world, shipped via a Eurasian network of paths known as the Silk Road. In addition to silk, this route enabled the transfer of spices, perfume, tea, wine, paper, and gunpowder, not to mention culture and religion and scientific ideas. On the less positive side, it also helped with the spread of diseases like the Black Death.
Today, silk is still widely used in clothing and in art. And scientists have done all kinds of things with the material—they’ve used it to make glue that works underwater, construct teeny batteries, create self-healing materials and self-cooling materials and the list goes on. And if you believe the story, all this is due to one little larva of the moth species Bombyx mori, and one hot cup of tea.
FACT: Class clowns playing with papier mache played a crucial role in World War II
The ghost army of World War II is a strange, creative chapter in military history that sounds like something straight out of a spy novel—or a slapstick comedy. During the war, the U.S. Army came up with an unusual tactic: creating a fake army made up of inflatable tanks, dummy trucks, and even paper-mâché soldiers. Their mission? To trick the German forces into believing that a much larger American force was stationed in various locations, diverting attention away from the real operations and damaging enemy morale.
The “ghost army” was made up of a motley crew of artists, architects, set designers, and engineers, all tasked with crafting these illusions. They used huge speakers to simulate the sound of marching soldiers, tanks, and artillery, making it sound like there was a massive army just over the hill. And the deception didn’t stop there—they would create entire fake military bases. The plan was so secretive that even after the war ended, the members of the ghost army were sworn to secrecy. It wasn’t until decades later that these soldiers could finally tell their families—and the world—about their secretive role.
But the ghost army didn’t just make fake tanks and soundtracks; it also helped to pave the way for modern technology. The need to test these massive sound effects led to the creation of anechoic chambers—rooms designed to be as silent as possible, where you can even hear your own blood flow. In fact, these eerie, soundproof spaces are the direct descendants of the ghost army’s original need to experiment with how sound could be manipulated without disturbing the public.
FACT: This elephant learned to shower—and another elephant learned to prank her
On this week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, I talked about Mary, Pang Pha, and Anchali—three elephants at the Berlin Zoo who have been giving scientists a front-row seat to some remarkable (and adorable) behavior. Mary is the eldest—she’s a dignified 54, the queen of this group. Pang Pha is a little younger, and then there’s Anchali, Pang Pha’s cheeky 12-year-old, who’s definitely got a bit of a prankster streak. We’ll get into that in a bit.
The story starts with the elephants’ typical morning routine. The zookeepers spray them down with a hose to help them cool off and clean up. Elephants are known for using their trunks to bathe and cool themselves, but Mary took things to a whole new level. She figured out how to pick up the hose with her trunk and give herself a shower. And we’re talking about a seven-minute shower session—luxurious for an elephant!
What’s even cooler is that Mary didn’t just pick up the hose haphazardly. She’d adjust her grip depending on which part of her body she was targeting. For her sides, she’d grab the hose near the head, like you’d use a handheld showerhead, directing the water exactly where she wanted. But for her back? She’d flip the hose up like a lasso, letting it fall down her back.. This wasn’t just an instinctive use of a hose—Mary was being strategic, and scientists were seriously impressed.
But hold onto your hat, because there’s also some serious elephant mischief going on. While Mary was showering, Anchali, the mischievous 12-year-old, was getting in on the action too—by messing with Mary’s water flow. And by “messing with,” I mean she was actively kinkering the hose to stop the water from flowing. Yep, this little rascal figured out how to twist and press the hose to interrupt Mary’s shower time. The researchers couldn’t be totally sure if Anchali was doing this on purpose, but after watching her repeat the behavior, they were pretty convinced she was intentionally trying to sabotage Mary’s shower.
What made Anchali’s antics even more impressive (and hilarious) is how she did it. For instance, instead of just stepping on the hose (which the elephants had been trained not to do), she came up with a clever workaround. She did something the researchers started calling a “trunk stand,” where she’d press down on the hose with her trunk and add her body weight to kink it. You can see some videos in the study here.
Meanwhile, Pang Pha is famous for a self-taught trick of her own: peeling bananas.
