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: DnD is good for your brain
On this week’s episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, I covered a couple mini-facts—one of which is that tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons seem to be really good for players’ mental health.Â
This story actually comes from my other podcast, Science Quickly. You can check out my video on the recent boom in DnD-related scientific research (featuring famous DM Brennan Lee Mulligan) here:
Dungeons and Dragons surged in popularity during COVID lockdowns, and the spike in interest has inspired several TTRPG-loving academics to bring their favorite game into the lab.There’s a lot of research left to do, but a growing body of evidence suggests that tabletop games can help players in all sorts of ways. Check out this week’s episode—and the video above—to learn more!
I also talked about why sharks play dead when they get flipped upside down. According to a recent study, the answer could be… just ’cause.Â
FACT: Marathon swimmers have to get really good at peeing in the ocean
By Laura BaisisÂ
As a young swimmer in New Jersey, endless laps in a concrete box was just too boring for me. I longed to be on some kind of “ocean swim team,” so I became an open-water marathon swimmer in my early 20s.Â
A marathon swim is any event over 6.2 miles or 10K in a river, lake, ocean, really any body of water that is not a pool. The sport has roots in Ancient Greece with the legend of Leander swimming across the Hellespont to his lover the goddess Hero. Inspired by Leander, the poet Lord Byron swam the water separating Europe and Asia, along with Lieutenant Ekenhead, on their second attempt in 1810. Modern marathon swimming was born in 1875, when Matthew Webb became the first person to successfully swim across the English Channel. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman and sixth person to ever swim the channel. A 10K open-water swim was also added to the Olympics in 2008.
Now, the peeing thing. You have to drink a lot of water to stay hydrated and also consume calories when swimming for hours at a time. It varies person to person, but most swimmers will eat every 30 minutes. We call these “feeds” and they must be done in the water while treading or sometimes laying on your back like an otter, since you can’t hang on to the boat or kayak. With that, comes practice peeing while swimming in open water…not in the pool. Don’t pee in pools.
FACT:Â A biologist in NYC rediscovered a salamander after 60 years
I’ve been super into salamanders lately. Even if you also love these little guys, you might be surprised to learn that a small population actually lives in Manhattan.Â
Despite the city’s reputation as a concrete jungle, these dusky salamanders have managed to survive in some rocky, hidden corners of Highbridge Park for decades. Even when the park was full of garbage, these salamanders continued to hang on.Â
On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, I talk about how fragile and isolated this little urban habitat really is—and how conservation even works in a place where nature and urban life have become intertwined. For more on urban wildlife, subscribe to my newsletter and check out my new book, Wild NYC.
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