Do you guys? Is this how you guys record normally? You you're remote?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I love in Italy, so.
Yeah, I'm in New York.
So it's it's a reasonable time difference. And I'm sure y'all have found totally.
Yeah, as you have an Australian guest, then boy howdy right.
Not for the time difference, for their wild antics, it's.
For the spiders that come out of the screen.
Hello, and welcome to Let's Learn Everything, the show where we learn about anything and everything interesting. Today, we have two very special guests who are going to be asking us a size question what, and then we have some miscellaneous questions of our own.
See how they like it.
My name is Caroline, and I want to tell you a little bit about our guests. Separately, we have the host of Creature Feature with a background in psychology and evolutionary biology, and of course we also have our full time Jeopardy champion. Together, they're the hosts of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating our neighbors over at Max Fun.
Hello, thank you so much, it's so excited.
And my name is Alex Schmidt. And there's my friend Katie Golden who doesn't return that's me.
Hello.
Hello.
We will hear about that question in a second, but of course Ella and Tom also have some questions.
For our hosts.
Let's be still here unfortunately.
My name is Tom and I'll be asking our guest Katie, how does your degree in evolutionary biology inform my favorite Twitter account, birds Right activist.
My name is Ella, and I'll be asking our guest Alex, how did you bring the buffalo emoji into the world.
I'm excited to talk about it.
Yeah, yes, And now this is where both of you guys speak in unison.
Alex and Katie, would you like to share with us?
Yeah?
We love this show and this seemed like a joyful opportunity to look into the question of have birds ever been to space?
Birds?
Wonderful space.
There's so many birds on the Earth. Have they made it to space or not?
Just like flying high enough you that was where.
My brain was just by like flapping up there or in a little bird.
They have the advantage, They've had years of advantage over us.
That's so true.
Are you doing birds.
Hold on tiny bird rockets?
Yeah, anything off the ground is a home game for them.
It's true.
It's a it's a home match very easy.
Oh, I'm so interested thinking about the because they're flying already, so if they're in space, how does that mess with them?
There's problems.
Before we answer all of these questions, first off, thank you so much for coming on to the show. We're so excited to have you both here. We just want to know before we begin. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your podcast, and also what your backgrounds are, because I know Katie you've got is it a degree in psychology and evolutionary biology, we want to know about you as well, Alex, so tell us all.
Yeah, Katie, First I will settle the degree right now.
Yeah, well, my degree is in bird astronauts. No, so yeah, my degree is in psychology and I studied psychology with evolutionary biology. So I really wanted to have a degree in animal behavior, but it didn't exist at the time, at least at this boy I went to, so I kind of just di wied my own learning path. But yeah, so it's so, I really love evolutionary biology and specifically animal behavior because I am I'm interested in human psychology as well and in the ways in which we are
similar to animals. That's always fascinated me when we have behaviors that you see both in animals and people, and I think it's so important to I mean, I think sometimes we don't give animals enough credit. We're like, well, you know, they have this behavior, but it's probably just for some boring evolutionary reasons, like actually, maybe they are playing, maybe they are having fun. Maybe they do feel this,
you know, maybe they do feel compassionate love. And so I think that it's really really cool to look at behaviors of animals, both very scientifically, but also giving them enough credit as conscious beings that they have really complex and fun. Like if you see a little elephant and it looks like it's playing, maybe it's just having fun.
Ah, that's a nice thought. I like, wow, so lovely.
Oh my goodness.
Plus, I just want to see a little elephant all the time, you know.
Now it's a good time to introduce my new soccer league baby elephants.
I would pay good money.
Actually, we once talked about if elephants are left or right handed. So this comes right into all of the stuff we love here.
Which tusk would an elephant use at a ball around?
I've got to know, Yeah, their trunk swing left or right.
Yeah, and Alex Yeah. I. As far as my education, my degree was mainly in history, and also then I studied a lot of media, different things, and I think I got excited about science kind of outside of that. And also then my summer job as a teenager and then growing from there was as a zoo tour guide, So that was probably one of my more scientific activities at Brookfield Zoo outside Cogua, Illinois.
So you've seen the baby elephants playing.
So you've coached little League.
I legitimate, I'd say my main job was to show people a baby polar bear. Like they would get on the tram and they would say, when do we see the baby polar bear named Hudson that I've heard about in all of Chicago media, And I'd be like later and they'd be like, not soon enough. Don't like that, so jump off the train.
Yeah, oh my goodness, that's fantastic.
And then with making our podcast equally incredibly fasting, we get to find out about mainly history and science are kind of the two styles of story, but it's about why things people think are ordinary amazing.
It's a real joy to get to make it.
And it's a wonderful podcast. And I imagine we have overlap in anyway, definitely, because our topics offen a line. In fact, I one of your topics from a while ago about period products actually inspired something I did on the podcast So lovely. Yeah, So I think if anyone hasn't listened to it, they should go straight away after this.
After this, it's like a big podcasting stew We keep adding in ingredients.
That's so nice and yeah.
Part of being overjoyed about being relatively new to join a maximum fun as being with shows like you guys who are so so thank you.
Yeah.
Start, Shall we dive into your questions? So do you want to do? You want to say it again?
It's have birds ever been to space?
Space birds? Wonderful space birds.
We have a theme for the episode.
So this is just a yes or no question, right.
Yeah, right, it's just yes, so yes, yes.
I want to say yes.
But maybe, like I know Tom joked about it, but I know that some birds can fly very very hard. I wonder how that's the answer.
So my thought is, like I haven't seen a video of a bird on the is s like bothering an astronaut, But I don't know.
But the last time we talked about this, when we talked about space babies, like and I covered some animals a bit worn in space. Tommy didn't know that a bunch of animals. I've never heard of birds being space, But I also hadn't heard of frogs or jellyfish or flies.
But you know, I also wonder what counts as space, you know.
And what counts as bird.
I got to You've gotta enlighten us maybe.
A little bit.
Yeah, yeah, I want to start peeling this one apart.
Yeah, this is we mainly found about human space missions bringing them to space, and then also looked briefly into can't like canned birds just fly themselves up there without our help? Like do they have to wait for the bus to leave you?
I'm so glad we all share the same brain sell.
Yeah, but also, why would you take a bird into space?
Yeah?
That is a better question.
Are you trying to see if a bird can fly in space?
That's such a good question. Canibir fly in space? Caliber Are we going to answer that? Am I get ahead of myself? I'm getting excited?
Yeah, apparently the super short answer is they can't fly in the vacuum of space and they can kind of flap around in a space station and.
It's extremely funny, very very funny.
Do we have a video? Do you have a link to this?
There is one brief video.
Should we approach this question maybe more straightforward?
I'm so excited. I'm so excited. Do you have a Do you have an order? You want to go through things? Because we will follow your order. You just have to tell you just have to guide us through.
Yeah, let's do.
Let's do a quick summary of birds and space missions. Because it turns out, no, they can't fly themselves to space. It's just too high. Unfortunately, they can't just go there themselves.
I'm not that surprised by that answer.
I'm not surprised, but I am disappointed.
Have they really tried before yet? Like, have we asked birds? Maybe they just haven't tried.
They're just not trying hard enough.
There's like, hey, there's no chips, there's no French fries up in space. So what am I going to do?
If we dangle some French fries off the space station? Wood birds fly.
The space Yeah, if you put some chips, some chippy's on a space rocket. A seagull would definitely try, because they will try anything for chips. Do we know, incidentally, how highed bird has ever been able to fly up?
Yeah, let's do that because it turns out, you know, no birds can reach space from Earth. Apparently, NASA says there's a boundary called the Carman line kar M A N which is sort of the official boundary from the atmosphere to which is one hundred kilometers up or about sixty two miles.
Okay, wow, and birds.
Can't really go that high. But apparently the highest flying bird species is Repel's griffon vulture. Yes, which is an African vulture species that can go about as high as passenger jets.
Totally wow.
And we partly know that because one went into the engine.
Of one unfortunately, so that was a way of measuring it.
But they are the way to find out.
Let's assign the blame appropriately, the engine ate the bird. Bird pudding really sad because these are actually critically endangered birds. And I love, I love a vulture. They are really amazing birds and they I think they sometimes creep people out because they have those bald heads, but those bald faces are really important when they are eating carrion. Because they actually like to be clean. They don't want to
be really nasty. So having that bald face makes it's a lot easier to dive into some carrion and it doesn't get stuck in their feathers. So yeah, they're actually quite clean birds.
That's amazing. I had never thought about that before.
And I would recommend anyone listening to go and look at a picture of a baby vulture a vulture chick, because they are so adorable. Yeah, look like they're wearing little fur coats.
They are so cute. They're like they're voguing the whole time. Put them on the runway.
It is high fashion.
They are cute.
Yeah, and they're extraordinarily high flying. That that bird can get up to heights a bit over thirty six thousand feet wow, ten kilometers up, which is you know, very high, but nowhere in near space.
So quite quite a bit shorter than space.
Yeah, because space is one hundred kilometers.
They have a special adaptation of their blood that it's a protein adaptation that makes their blood much more efficient and transporting oxygen, and that's how they can survive such a high altitude, which is you know, really fantastic.
Are you kidding me.
That's so incredible, so cool, you might say, secretly incredibly fascinating.
Okay, this could be in some creature feature having a maximum amount of fun right now, Well.
Let's learn everything about it.
Huh, my brother, my brother?
No, okay, okay, I'm I'm just amazed that like these adaptations are I don't know they like I'm imagining like a cyclist when they do like blood doping, and then like, that's amazing.
That's nuts.
Got a blood dope with vulture blood. Don't do it. Sorry, I guess I have to say, don't do it. They're endangered.
Yeah, that's true, and you shouldn't do it.
Yeah, you'll cycle much faster, but then you'll keep stapping to feed.
You know, it's not good.
Much.
But yeah, so that's it. Turns out birds can't fly themselves there. They have to ride our ships if they want to go to space.
Yeah, that's sad, but I understand birds. It's okay, we're putting too much pressure on them already.
It's fine. So I guess the next step is putting them on ships for some reason? And how often are we doing that and why? And how do they hope?
My next thought is like, are we taking like chickens into space to lay eggs?
Oh?
Yeah, do they do? Have they had chicks in space of eggs hatched in space?
Space babies?
I guess Another question is which birds?
Yeah? Right, yeah, this question topics really turned around where we're just like bombarding you with loads of questions.
This is this is everything I wondered.
And yeah, the super short version is it's pretty close to that chickens and eggs curiosity. There are two countries that have tried to put some form of eggs or birds in space. It was first and starting in nineteen seventy nine, they tried to bring the Japanese quail species bring their eggs up.
So we really lost the space race, is what you're saying.
We lost.
We beat them to the moon and they were like, how do we counter birds?
And the other.
Program is the US and with chicken eggs that was the bird we picked in the US.
So we did start with eggs.
Space farming I think was the goal.
Space farming, I like that was the Russian's goal.
Yeah, yeh see, if we could get a sustainable food source in space with delicious quails, whoa.
Yeah, no, Joe, I guess that's kind of makes sense. It seems preemptive to start with the chickens and not just like some kind of vegetable, you know, who.
Needs grains to feed the chicken. Well, we could just take the chicken straight up there, right, you know.
Yeah.
I don't know why they didn't already have them in nugget form, but.
That's true.
That's such a space age way to get that food up there, right, like fish sticks and stuff, but all the finest frozen dinner approaches to meats do that.
Yeah, great, like when you go to the museum when you got the freeze dried full chicken.
I guess that they thought that if they could see if these birds could reproduce and lay eggs in space, then you just keep the birds there, maybe feed them space grain and then just kind of the bird floats around and then pops out an egg and then you've got space breakfast yummy.
Yeah, because that's that's pretty much what the Russians wanted to do.
And it's so it doesn't sound like it was success based on your tone.
Yeah, so it was.
It was successful ish, which is neat. It turns out like both programs wanted to see what happens if you fertilize eggs on Earth, bring them to space, and then either hatch them there or study them there and hatch them back on Earth. And the Russians successfully hatched quails in space. Wow, and then American chicken eggs hatched back on Earth successfully.
To this, I can't believe I missed this in the Space Babies episode.
This is and that episode is amazing.
By the way this was. It was very helpful for putting this together.
So they.
How did they adapt in space and back online?
Surely that would be poorly basically.
Yeah, one of the things we found is that rats couldn't really tell up from down very well. They got confused by gravity.
So yeah, they couldn't. I mean, we have this wonderful video. I don't know, Alex if you want to, if you want to explain it, but it's my actually my favorite video of all time now of these little quails trying to fly in space.
Oh yeah, I don't know what's best for showing out to listeners, but it's a British narrator and it's on YouTube.
I don't know who produced it, probably the BBC, but it's.
About a minute of quails on board the mir space station around nineteen ninety because they were hatched on Mirror by the I think still Soviets, the Soviet Union hadn't ended yet.
Let's have a look you we'll throw this in the show notes.
They hatch and they kind of flap and bounce around, and there's one cosmonaut sort of poking it with his.
Finger, like booping it in with micro gravity. It's a good time. It's up there. I feel like an animal video.
Oh my god.
Everyone is completely open mouthed and a gape.
There's a lot of hands that faces.
This is Amaze's great. Okay, so just just describe it. There is this tiny, tiny little quail chick and it's very slowly earning over and zero g and now, oh no, and now and now it's exactly that's the perfect music. And now they're kind of spinning really fast in the air, flapping and not going anywhere. Oh the biggest quail can slightly fly.
Around, flies a strong wad.
They look disorientated.
How was no one not talking about this every moment of every single day. We have this footage.
That's an excellent video. This video only has twenty three thousand views. I know everyone should have seen this.
Yeah, turn off.
I don't know, mister beast, I don't everything against them. This is the YouTube video you should see, is the point. Yeah, it's great.
Yeah, I'm watching it again.
This is so this video of everyone I know. If I cannot post it to our social media, yeah, so people can look because it's wonderful and it'll be in the show notes.
I'm also just fully blown away that they successfully did that. That's wild that they hatched in space and we're hanging out.
Yeah.
Were they able to find out anything? Do they have anything developmentally wrong? Were they okay?
They I couldn't find great information on what happened to the quails when they were returned to the Earth, but a blog I found that a few of them returned and they had weird body structure from the lack of gravity and died pretty quickly, So it seems like they don't do well back on the Earth.
From this situation.
I also heard that they had like a huge sense of ONWI after having seen the badness of our existence from the perspective of only a god and then returning to Earth.
I think about that somewhere.
It was okay that one was that's quite good.
No, no, no, don't.
Left the station.
Here we go because they That is one of the hypotheses about if if human birth in space is that bone formation would be really bad because of the low like you have really low density bones and they wouldn't like you know, you get when a child is born, their skull isn't like fully fused and all of this. It doesn't necessarily need gravity, but it all kind of plays into it. So maybe they had like bad bone structure. Ultimately, poor babies.
Yeah, it seems like they were like okay while they were still in space bones wise, but then when you put on that Earth gravity on it afterward. It's It's funny because the first American chicken who hatched on Earth after the space trip seemed to be generally fine because they just lived on Earth for a full time.
So I get, yeah, they need to develop on Earth maybe to get all of the benefits.
Yeah.
Also, behaviorally they struggled, right, Alex, They couldn't really mate in space normally.
Oh and she could have formed the chloacal kiss.
Nope, which is, to be fair, quite an acrobatic stunt.
Anyways, I'm looking at that video and how they were rotating wildly out of control. I can't imagine them aligning themselves very well to rub but right.
Yeah, it is now thinking of every Space Mission movie where they try to dock the two ships, it's.
Just I guess thinking of two thousand and one a space odysty but it's birds.
I'm sorry, I'm watching the video again.
Yeah, apparently the quails were not interested in mating, and they weren't really able to consume food very well, and the cosmonauts had to strap them in the little harnesses to make them secured in position enough to receive food and eat it.
Tiny bird space high chairs.
There's something It is sad to think of it. There's always something I find adorable. And when you have to make tiny implementation for animals in science, like what we learn about they made a tiny rat straight jacket.
Yeah, tiny b helmets.
Yeah exactly.
But it's cute, very very cute. I wonder even if they were able to manage the like say, you could have some kind of I don't know, motor control in space, they probably didn't even know who to mate with because if they didn't imprint on an adult quail, I don't see how they have known like to like, I think they would have seen the astronauts as who they should
mate with and then maybe start humping. You know. Ah, I don't know who the cosmonauts were, but because there was actually a study on earth quails where they imprinted them on an albino variant of quails, and they pretty much across the word. All the ones that were imprinted on this albino quail only wanted to mate with albino quails, which is a problem because they're very rare.
Interesting.
I didn't realize the imprinting instinct was so strong. Wow, like mating reasons.
Yeah, that's also so interesting because like that's such a sci fi concept and such a like psychology concept of like the first generation of humans born entirely in space. But you can then also apply that to animals where it's like you will need like this transitory generation that's an in between and then you can have like the first generation. It's just so I hadn't thought about that aspect of this whole process. That's amazing.
We'll need we'll need like tiny VR headsets for birds to teach them about.
Maybe the sci fi books write themselves.
The bird matrix and the educational video like, so you're a quail, what life is?
You may be noticing your body is going through changes. Let's talk feathers.
Love very good.
That is fun ta stick.
Yeah, And it took a Russians a while to like execute this successfully. They tried to do it for the first time in nineteen seventy nine, but they think that the eggs they sent up then received too much radiation and too high of temperatures because one hatched wasn't really like a successful quail even by space standards. But like what like one source I found said that they were
born without heads, like very strange, horrible situation around. But in nineteen ninety they successfully hatched like actual quails.
I say, nineteen ninety yeah, yeah, that is so recent.
But also it took them like such a long time to get to that point, from like unsuccessful to figuring it.
Out right, Yeah, that's eleven years, Yeah, trying.
Yeah, there's a study kind of ongoing right now where they're taking freeze dried sperm into space to test if there's radiation damage to it, to.
See if we could human sperm or.
I think they started with mouse sperm, but I think they're going to do human sperm as well, or they're in the process, so and they thought it was actually fine. So maybe there's something different about birds, maybe because in the egg they're less protected from radiation or something along those lines.
I mean, eggshells are pretty thin, so they I mean there's like sometimes eggs have certain coloration that helps protect them from like sun U V raysed here on Earth. But we're also protected by our atmosphere, which you know, it's it's like kind of like you can wear sunscreen down on Earth and that protects you from the radiation. But once you're outside of the atmosphere, like I think astronauts have a special room on the space station that they like have to hide in when there's a big
wave of radiation that comes from the sun. So it's a I don't think the thin shell of an egg would be enough to protect it from that level of radiation.
So what I'm hearing is bird egg sunscreen as a mark it.
Then it's so so refreshing to hear three words that have never been put together language. I was thinking, like an egg carton that is like has like NASA on it as like gold foil all over.
That might work foil, I think would always work. I don't know much about foil or how it could stop radiation, but I'm gonna say yes, space foil.
When in doubt, go shiny, you know, just.
It is the higher tech.
Yes, absolutely, science science.
I mean it is interesting because there's actually so there are birds living in the Chernobyl exclusion Zone get out of that. I have actually adapted to the high levels of I mean a slightly different type of radiation obviously not from the Sun but from the nuclear whoopsie daisy. But they they actually have evolved to have higher levels of antioxidants and that helps protect them from the radiation.
And it actually, in some ways it can make them even healthier because like they have a lot of antioxidants, so that can help in other ways. You know, antioxidants will fight against free radicals, which is like when you have radiation, it knocks atoms loose, that can you know, little particles loose, and then that knocks into like your DNA and then causes problems. And so the antioxidants actually can like bind to these like take up these free
electrons and then prevent that DNA damage. So these birds have developed more of these antioxidants. So I wonder if given enough time, if space birds would develop that.
I was just thinking that probably happened over many, many generations. They kind of developed that, not immunity, but that, yeah, benefit adaptation.
But I wonder if you took the antioxidant rich birds I'm sent them into space.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
Let's let's send the chernobyl burs to space.
We should send chernobyl birds to space. Why hasn't anyone done.
This on screen? For noble bird space? That's amazing.
So do we have any other examples?
Are they the main two?
It's really these two programs like the apparent, and it's also experiments that apparently pretty much stopped after the early nineties because in the Russian case, they decided that this basically proved quails didn't work as a food source for a long year's long space mission. Because part of the hope was can we just breed quail as we go to Mars or the outer reaches of the galaxy? I guess, and they said no, the quail are too weird in space.
They don't do well, and they're so cute.
Yeah there is.
Yeah, it's a species called Japanese quail. I hadn't seen it before, but it's all over East Asia.
It's very cute, it's great.
And then the American experiment was mainly just to see what happens to chicken eggs in space. It wasn't like a long term, far attempt. But the first main attempt was unfortunately a dozen fertilized chicken eggs sent up in nineteen eighty six on the Challenger space Shuttle mission. So it exploded and that that ends. Oh that's right, unfortunate, but they and then in nineteen eighty nine they sent thirty two fertilized chicken eggs on the space Shell Discovery.
It was called the Chicken Embryo Development in Space Experiment or short chicks in Space nuts Like they made a fun little acron.
Theirds love their acronyms.
Yeah, no, that's that's a good one, though.
God I'm annoyed at that one. That one's really good.
Yeah you say so.
That's also such a room full of male astronauts. Oh yeah, kicksen space.
Like you're there alone, you're not you're not allowed to frightenize. Chicken's going to start to look a little sexy.
That's how they trick the astronauts. They're like, no, on this mission, there's got to be chicks in space. I guess it was really naive of me to think that this wouldn't have been a food program. But I'm curious, Katie, especially with your some of your bird knowledge, what bird you would like to have seen in space or are curious about.
I'd love to see a hummingbird in space because they wow. Their method of movement is very different from other birds, their flight movement. I wonder if they would have more success.
Uh.
They they have a very specific kind of thing where their wings create these little vortices, and there is air in the space station. Now, I don't think a hummingbird would do well in the vacuum of space, but on a space station, I'm wondering if there's enough sort of ambient air that they could generate their own little sort
of controlled vord. But I'm not sure if they would do well because they are very sensitive little creatures and they need to have food pretty constantly, so they would need to have some way to feed them pretty regularly, and they're so delicate. But yeah, I would if I'd be very interested to see if hummingbirds have more success flying in space.
That's that would be very interesting. I'd like to put up my suggestion as a Canada goose, is that.
Just because you don't want them on Earth, you want them.
Because I would love to see that the chaos that would ensue if.
You don't want for any reason other than just the chaos of it.
I love that.
I think the sheer anger in them will cause them to be successful in space.
And again imagining two thousand and one a Space Odyssey, but Hal is played by an angry Canada goose.
Yes, Katie, I'm imagining. I'm imagining aliens though. It's just like the craning neck of the goose, like looking around corners and being like.
What if it was?
What if it was?
That?
Like iss politics stuff where it's like, I mean, Canada built the iron. We have to let them sound a goose, right, they build these.
That's how it works. It's just you put in, you get out.
You know, it's only fair.
This is such a specific question. I don't know if you know the answer. Did the could the birds make noise? The chickens they clucking normally? I don't know why.
I great question.
No idea yeah, I think it's the only hatched ones up there are the quails, So we don't know about chicken noises in space.
They should technically be able to. They might again if they don't have the learning process. I mean, it would be very interesting because I'm sure they could make some noise. I don't know how much. Quails don't have that complex of songs. Their songs would probably be off because they have nothing to kind of learn from, like their calls, not really songs, more like these calls. If you tried to put a songbird in space with no sort of not a lot of learning, it would be very interesting.
I think that that'ud be another thing. I'd like to see sort of songbirds in space and to study sort of there. Yeah, although there's plenty, there's plenty of like ways to isolate songbirds on Earth and study how messed up we could get those songs to be.
But it's not cool unless it's in space space exactly.
I have imagining they don't have parents to learn from. But then astronaut Chris Hadfield starts playing the guitar and the bird just joins it, and everyone's heart melts.
You know, they just learn a lot David Bowie.
With the American chickens. So they it's it's partly interesting with the radiation. This this Discovery mission orbited Earth for five days, went around eighty times, and then nothing hatched
in space. But when they returned, we did hatch a chicken, and apparently they named the chicken Kentucky and then as like a gag, well not as a gag, they let it live at the Louisville Zoo in Louisville, Kentucky, but as a gag they put up signage that said they were the original recipe of space chickens, which is like a KFC references who don't know American fast food, but that's when.
They get them so tasty.
Yeah that's cruel. Yeah, I love it.
This chicken should be a space hero and instead we're going like, yeah, we bread and eat your family, right, delicious spices.
Like the mission was just for science and then you know we did bits about frying Mamma Earth, you know, crazy silly, and the.
Chicken was fine. Yeah, there was no they were just they carried on. They didn't die early or anything.
Yeah, it seems like the radiation didn't mess them up terribly. And yeah, they got to grow up truth gravity. So there's nothing at least in the main source. Here is an amazing piece from Audubon, but they add and other stuff. There's no word of any problems.
Yeah, wow, goodness.
But that's it.
Yeah, Like I didn't know anything about this. And apparently Audubon research shit because they did a Q and A in twenty seventeen where somebody asked them of birds and busness space and they just said no, And then people brought up this stuff and they were like, no, there is actually this like little secret, weird history of a few birds in space.
Wow.
That is so interesting and I'm so curious to see what the future holds for birds going into space. I'm sure it's not the last time that we're going to try and bring them up.
So that is yeah, so much fun. So NASA and whatever the Russian space was it called, please take our birds into consideration.
We know you're listening. Yeah, we know your Max Fun supporters. We'd like to order one hummingbird and one Canada goose please.
Yeah, be sure to link that Babies and Space episode you hoped that in case people haven't heard it, like that cockroach story especially.
Wow, amazing, won't spoil it.
Thank you for coming onto our podcast and plugging off on this.
This is how we get invited back.
But I don't know what it was about them. I just love them so much.
So the first question I want to ask our guests was to ask Katie how her background in science influences her Twitter account birds Rights Activists, which at first I said mostly as a joke, but now having heard all of these bird facts. Oh, and I also should say fanning out a little bit. Because I was very late to Twitter. One of the first Twitter accounts I ever followed was birds Rights Activists, and so when I made
that connection, I lost my mind. But you know, it is very interesting and I feel like, you know, me and Ella and Caroline have a similar path of like from science into the science comedy world. And I'm curious how much of that both like informs how you do creative stuff, and how much of it do you actually get to like use your some of those factoids in that science brain.
Yeah, I mean, I would say, actually, I've always loved birds. When I was really little, I would chase after them because I thought if I could like grab one, I could convince it to be my friend. I thought I just needed to listen to reason. So my mom would watch me just like run around the yard trying to chase after birds. I once tried to make a little like Wiley coyote trap, where it was a box, a shoe box and a little stick and string, and I
just like sat there. Nothing happened, but I sat there for a good ten minutes.
I did love that Wiley's story. I love that so much.
Wow, that's incredible.
And then you tried dressing up as like a female bird, and then yeah.
I think there's something. They're so cute, but they're also oh so alien, and I love that they are literally little dinosaurs. They're the only living dinosaur and they when you see like an ostrich or a rea or a cassowary, you can really see these are dinosaurs. These are modern dinosaurs, which I love that about them, But they are also really there's something so funny about their behavior where they just are so self obsessed and wonderful.
And I.
And there's something so kind of unapologetically ostentatious about birds, the male birds of so many species, just flaunting their beauty doing all these things. They're like the most I don't know. They're they're the most adorably arrogant species of animals, and so I think that their personalities are always really interesting to me, and I've always been fascinated by it, and it's probably that's part of the reason I probably
was interested in animals in general. And so yeah, I mean I think, oh, I never really specifically studied bird behavior. It was just like sort of general evolutionary biology, general psychology,
but I would. I would go bird watching a lot, and I just I think that they're Yeah, it's it's the they're alien enough from us, very different from mammals, that it is really fascinating to me to see so many of these behaviors that I empathize with, like really wanting to look pretty and you know, like cocking your head all the time, like a am I pretty? Tell me I'm pretty?
Katie. Just a little add on question to that, do you have a favorite bird song?
Oh, that's a really good question. Gosh, I mean, my favorite this is not really a bird's song, this is a bird call. But my favorite sort of juxtaposition of a bird called to what the bird looks like is peacocks, because peacocks are these beautiful elegant birds and then they do their call and just like that you could ever hear.
But yeah, I mean there are I think my favorite, my favorite sort of fact about like a bird song or birds sound is that there are these birds called the club wing mannequins, and they are the only bird to do a thing called stridulation, which is how you put a lot of insects produce sound using stridulations where you actually rub two body parts together, usually one has some bridges against it.
That's how crickets right.
Exactly exactly like crickets cicadas, and it can produce this really loud sound. And club wing mannequins I'll use these modified weathers and wings and rub these together very rapidly to create this like really interesting. It sounds like they're using their voice though it sounds like a like like and it sounds beautiful and it's like but this is
actually produced through stridulation. And they are so committed to the bit that there cannot fly good, like they have sacrificed being able to fly really well, like they can fly, but they're really clumsy and really awkward, and it's it's just amazing, and I love I love that they are so such divas that they're like, I don't need to fly good, I just need to sound good.
That I posted a video of the sound they make. What that sounds just like it's that's so credible.
Yeah, just like it's singing. But no, it's just rubbing than feathers together.
It's like it sounds almost like a like a foam vibrating, very high pitched wild.
That's so weird.
And the physical movement is such a like speedy up and down and it looks like when a character is dancing and a children's computer animated movie. It has very the movie sing energy.
You know, like it's Yeah, I just.
I love the rizz of birds, the world's best rizzarned. It's a new I think it's a gen Z thing, zoomer thing. They say. They say riz all the time. I'm so old, but.
Carolines Caroline's resident gen Z.
So riz am I allowed to say riz as a millennial?
Yes, go for it, okay, especially about birds.
Maybe just don't text it, just say it.
Okay, Okay, Oh, I have some apology text to send okay, And.
I got two guests with a ton of raise.
Okay, So I have a question for Alex Now. So back in one of our episodes, Tom did a breakdown of emoji things, the history of emojis. It was wonderful, and he did mention that you came up with the buffalo emojis, but basically, yeah, in my head, I doesn't. I'm like, how does someone I know came up with an emoji that people use? Like that's wild to me? What's that? What?
What?
What?
And well, I also want to say, this is something that I actively didn't have time to include in that episode, was like the process of like making like how a bill becomes a bill, how an emoji becomes an emoji? And so I'm I and I did that purposefully because I knew one day we'd have you on.
Yeah it's all pay it off.
Yeah.
It was a really wonderful experience that it turns out anyone in the public can propose an emoji. It's not gate enough to only specific people. And it oddly had a lot to do with podcasting, Like I heard an episode of It's called Welcome to Macintosh by Mark Bramhill, but then they featured it on ninety nine percent Invisible, hosted by Roman Mars, who at least one person on the show does an amazing impression.
On there we go ed.
And so they talked about him proposing the person in lotus position emoji and all the genders of that. And it turns out there's this nonprofit called unicode that's basically made of volunteers from all the big tech companies. And so if you go to them, write up a proposal and go through at least one round of back and forth with them, which was my experience, and also they were super friendly, super nice, but you basically need to
make a convincing proposal. I think mine was like eighteen pages of why this.
Should be an emotion?
What no, I'm sorry, and parts of it were big pictures of graphs. It's cool, you know, but but yeah, once you basically convince them that it's a symbol that would have lasting usefulness, they will say yes or no and do it. And so I got to get the bison emoji.
Set up a bison sorry not buffalo.
We talked about in the in the episode, how like these are ostensibly permanent, like they're in once they're in the code that they don't want to like reverse that. So this like longstanding, this has been sure eighteen pages to convince that's so, that's.
Such a legacy. That's an amazing legacy.
To why like eighteen pages worth of things to say?
Yeah, could do you have an example of some of the kind of arguments you made? Oh?
Yeah, well, I learned in the process that you know, I knew there was a North American bison. I learned there's a European bison as well. It's mostly in kind of Poland and Belarus, sort of in eastern Europe and forests there, and it used to have a bigger range, but just human population growth pushed it out, and so I was like, it's an international symbol. This means various
things to various cultures. And then and like Buffalo is the common American name for it, and so the city of Buffalo, New York, and a lot of different things like that were helpful, and I think I think I also picked on some other already included emoji. I was like, there's already two kinds of camel, how can there be no bison? You know that you kind of look at the existing keyboard and growing shade.
How dare those camels?
That's so cool?
And it was a whole I ended up making a mini podcast about it because there were also a lot of kind of personally things and elements related to it. Katie guests on the mini podcast, and it was wonderful interest a part about how bison are cool, but it was also partly that my dad really loved bison. And he also worked at a place in Illinois where there's like a particle accelerator, and then on top of the particle accelerator, they have prairie that's being restored in some bisons.
We would go see those and stuff. But like, after he passed away, I thought about, what's.
The thing I can do?
And that was the thing I could do was an emojic.
That's so so Also, I hope that was a line in the proposal. My dad really liked.
Them idea, But yeah, it would it would be funny if I revealed that, like Unicode super interested in Dad's They want to know tell them about your dad.
The secret you've got submit on Father's Day. Yeah, I'm thinking for a bonus episode now, each of us should write a paper on an emoji that we could propose.
You want me to write a paper for a bonus episode? A symbol?
I don't think so Tom.
Let's learn everything. Discord users come and tell us what proposal that's and everything you should write as for an emoji, and we can do it together.
The double middle finger emoji. I'm trying to think, like, what's us, what's our?
Yeah, but it is like before I did it and heard about it, I really thought there would be some kind of like you need to no computers or you need to work in a tech.
Husband to stop me.
But you can just do it and and there's public guidelines for how to do it.
That's wild.
I love.
That's amazing.
Yeah, I feel like I want to go and read the public guidelines just to see.
I feel like I want to try now, but I can't give anything.
We're interesting. You guys want to write a paper for a sound like fort.
But there must be so many proposals for emoji. It's amazing that your your emoji got selected and will be looked at by future archaeologists trying to decode our hieroglyphics of the twenty first century.
Yeah, that's such a good way to look at when the bison are an extinct, that'll be what remains whoa.
When it's aliens, But those aliens turn out to be birds that we shot off into space and who have all.
It's all coming together, it's all one thing.
Come back to Earth and they're like, God, damn it, you blew it all the hell.
Dirty. It's just a giant bison emoji. For some reason, I don't know how just work. One question I do want to ask is because y'all have been on and hosted and started and guested on just a slew of podcasts, and I'm just curious how your podcast journey, how how happened? How? How how do how do you do?
And how do you come together?
Oh?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there you go ahead.
So I'll tell the story. Don't worry.
You ran into each other at a bookstore and you like you crashed into each other and you're helping each other pick up books and you're like, oh this is on animals, Oh this is on history, And then.
We kept going No, you go ahead, now, yous.
Yeah.
The secret is politeness, you know, but I a lot of it is probably We both worked at a website called cracked dot com. That is, it's not really good anymore, but like I got there through doing social media stuff and making gifts and editing, writing like a lot of other things I was doing. And then they had a podcast and contributed to that, and and then got to host a podcast for them for a while. And so the start of it was basically working at comedy websites for me.
Yeah.
Yeah, and then I got to meet Katie there because they especially I remember when she was like getting hired, especially, somebody said that the pro bird rights person might be willing to work here. It would be amazing if we could might be willing they possibly get their help with things.
You know, I just I want you to continue, but I just have to just very quickly highlight that you said, Jiff, and that's very upsetting to me. I know, I know, all right.
Yeah it's a whole thing. But yeah, you put it in post.
Don't worry.
We're a strong gift team here.
So I really are. I think this does mean that you're not allowed to come back.
I'm sorry, can renounce your ways and and and see can.
We please the show again? Have you guys heard of a show called Let's Learn Everything Everything? Yeah?
I was just saying about that.
Yeah, I say, give it's really good. They're all really charming.
Okay, all right, but.
Watch yourself Okay, you can say a bit longer. Yeah, sorry, I completely interrupted you.
I think Alex, I think we bonded initially over our mutual respect for Peanuts comics.
That's real.
And I would draw a sort of dark version of Peanuts just to just to get Alex's because he was such a Peanuts appreciator. So I did a version where Snoopy just was a huge bully.
You know.
I think that we started collaborating more after that and eventually podcasting.
Oh wow, I'm like humongous fan of Peanuts and Snoopy, And there there might be slight typing sounds in me right now because I'm looking for the tweet where there's a bunch of Keys comics.
But they're great.
It's it's Snoopy being a dark figure like he kind of is in the real strips, where just he just pushes Charlie Brown around.
It's great.
We'll we'll put a link. We'll put a link to that in the in the show notes so you can go and look at Keys.
All great friendships start with an amazing bite.
Yeah, it doesn't start with politeness being a bully.
Our relationship three of us definitely didn't stop with politeness so correct? Yeah, shall we do?
She doesn't plugs and shout outs yeah.
Anyway, are you going so high?
Any keep going up and up and up.
Like I just did positive gestures. So I think that forced Caroline to keep speaking.
And one more for the dogs listening.
Thank you both so so much before we go, plug yourselves, plug your podcast?
Where can the people find you?
Well?
Have you heard of this podcast called amazing host invites genius gifts, top top quality for sure.
Actually plug yourself actually, and we're.
So excited to be on maximum fun with y'all ed and making secretly incredibly fascinating false can search the words secretly in their app. It's the red one that comes up, but it's it's a joy to make it. And then Katie's amazing podcast on her own is creature feature about animals and science and more about animals.
Not always in space though, yeah, sometimes on Earth most of the time, actually.
On unfortunately disappoint that's disappointing, isn't it?
Yeah, so boring, so boring once even on Earth, a bunch of worms and stuff.
Actually, there is one pretty good podcast that is hosted on Earth, actually, yeah, which is we Won't Say You have to listen to all three of them to.
Find out it's a secret.
Incredibly fascinating. Oh my god.
Okay, okay, and are there any socials I would like to plug as well for the two of you, yeah.
Pro bird rights, but but also.
Alex Schmitzstagram on Instagram and I have not really ramped up on TikTok much yet, but Alex SCHMDDI on TikTok and then it's siff pod on everything for the pretty secret. Incredibly fascinating.
You have some great risk on there, such rizz.
Manage it so I can handle it, you know. Geez.
Yeah, I'm also on the Blue Sky I know. I love bird tweets on there, so I had some invite cords if you guys, I'm going on here.
John and Carolina just approaching the camera very slowly and menacingly.
I would like to add, but yeah, thank you truly, thank y'all so so so much, learned the time, and also had a bunch of chaotic fund This is a delight. You'll are amazing.
I love it. I love the chaos of this episode. It was wonderful. Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you so much for having us wonderful.
So on this episode we have learned all about the birds that have gone into space. They can't fly there, but humans have taken there and they have done some weird things trying to fly around in there.
We have learnt.
About Katie's background in birds, the lover of birds, the trying to trap birds, how that allowed to her amazing Twitter account, and also learned about the process the eighteen page longation to get the bus to be an emoji. Join us next time, where we will learn about.
Every day.
Let's Learn Everything is a maximum fun podcast hosted and produced by Ella Hubber, Tom Land, and Caroline Broker, with editing and music by the wonderful and talented Tom Land.
Join us next time, where we will learn and we all say it about.
We will say it ready, everything. We will say everything, everything, everything, the worst one we've ever done again. We should start telling people that in advance before we get to that point. This has happened almost every time we've had a guest, We're like, We're like, it's happening, and everyone's and the guests are all like, what's happened.
I just didn't think of myself as getting able to do it, you know, so that's right.
I have permission. Am I a part of things? Or am I not a part of things?
You're always oppose things.
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