Welcome to How Stuff Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren vocal Baum, a researcher and writer. Here it has Stuff Works. Every week, I'm bringing you three stories from our team about the weird and wondrous advances we've seen in science, technology, and culture. This week, the mating habits of microscopic tartegrades have finally been caught on film, and they're appropriately weird unrelated. If you can smell asparagus in urine, you can thank
your ancestors for a few newly identified genes. But first, a more sober story from senior writer Jonathan Strickland and our freelancer Kate Kirshner. Software that's supposed to manage criminal court cases has been throwing some serious errors, leading to innocent people being thrown in jail. Imagine being arrested for a crime you didn't commit. Your throne in jail. Your life is turned upside down. Nobody framed you. It's not due to police corruption. You're are in the slammer because
of a computer error. This isn't just an upsetting hypothetical situation. This is something happening to too many people right now in places like Alameda County, in California. At Fault is a criminal system management software package called the Odyssey Case Manager. It's meant to track and organize criminal cases and make the judicial system more efficient. It's software used in several jurisdictions across the United States, and it's leading to innocent
people being put in jail. In some instances, the system shows warrants as active even after they've been dismissed, and others, the software has mistakenly tagged people as sex offenders, forcing them to register as such. This is far more serious than getting the Blue screen of death before you're able to save your work. According to ours technic as Cyrus Farivar, Alameda County has been relying upon an older case management
system called Corpus. It's possible that the twenty six documented errors popped up when county employed Yes tried to convert old files into the Odyssey Case Manager format. Whatever the underlying reason for the errors, the result is sobering. Justice isn't just blind, She's also working on a buggy computer system.
Next up, staff editor Eves Jeff Coote and our freelance writer Jesselyn Shields explain how researchers came to identify the genes responsible for the dubious advantage of being able to smell asparagus P. If you're not one yourself, you've probably heard about people who can smell asparagus in their P. The researchers found hundreds of variants across multiple deans, but the study doesn't address a lot asparagus, of all foods, makes our urine stink and why our bodies have obviously
put so much effort into detecting metabolas asparagus MP. Research going back to the nineteen fifties has shown that some people produce asparagus sent at urine and some don't, some people can smell it and some can't, and some of that research identified the two metabolites responsible for the odor, but nobody had investigated whether the ability to smell these two compounds, called methane ethiol and s methyl diosters is
written on our genes. In the new study, the research team at Harvard found that of nearly seven thousand participants, about could smell the metabolize in their urine after eating asparagus, and six could not. They called the latter group asparagus anosmic. After looking at nine million genetic variants and those who are asparagus anosmic. They linked the deficiency to eight hundred seventy one sequence variations and chromosome one on genes related
to our sense of smell. Strangely enough, even though women are known to correctly and consistently identify smells more often than men, fewer women reported being able to smell their own asparagus p. Because the study relied on the participant's reports, the researchers aren't sure whether some of the women fibbed about the smell of their urine out of modesty. The
researchers can see that the study has limitations. For instance, it only included people of European descent, so there's no telling whether the same genetic variants would be in people of other ethnicities. Also, self reporting always leaves a little wiggle room for interpretation, and subjects reported on the smell of their own urine rather than the urine of other people. But don't worry if you can't smell the asparagus on Europe. The researchers have your back, they write in their report.
Future replications studies are necessary before considering targeted therapies to help anosmic people discover what they are missing. Finally, this week, senior writer Robert Lamb and That Men's Jocelyn Shields explore the strange, amazing mating habits of everyone's favorite microscopic space faring animal, tartar grades. We all know tartar grades, or
water bears, or tough as nails. This little micro animal as a fighter if there ever was one, and it's a new study in the Zoological Journal points out they're also lovers with an absurd amount of foreplay. Tartar grades thrive in a variety of habitats, from the Himalayan mountains to the deep ocean, and they're the only known animal capable of surviving the harsh void of outer space. Dry them out, freeze them up, but decline of assabaran bounce
right back. Subjected to any of these trials, a tartar grade will transform into a desiccated little husk. But when it's over, you just add a little water to the corpse in a will plump right back up to life and munch on some alergy like nothing happened. When brought back to Earth after spending ten days blasted by space radiation, a tartar grade will happily revive and lay a clutch
of viable eggs. But what about tartar grade love making? Now, they're around the twelve hundred species of the philing tartar Gradia out there, and not all of them mate in the same way. Summer bisexual, summer, hermaphroditic, and others reproduce a sexually. But new video footage captured by a team of researchers at the Sickenberg Museum of Natural History and Gorlitz, Germany, provides some insight into how the deed is done in one bisexual species of tartar Grade called Isocivius dot CiCi.
And though it might not look like much to the untrained eye, the researchers assure us that things get weird. The animals mate right after the female has molded, something that happens several times a year. The researchers paired off thirty male female couples and then filmed them in flagrante de lecto. They found that after the female's outer skin detaches,
she lays eggs inside it. If for whatever reason, no male happens to waddle by after she lays her eggs, no biggie, she just reabsorbs them back into her body, but if there is a male around, he sort of wraps his body around her head and the to engage in an hour long mutual stimulation marathon, in which he might ejaculate several times into the space between her old skin and her new skin, fertilizing her eggs in the process while you've got your self new plumbus i mean
tarte grades. Witnessing this unusual sex spectacle is raised almost as many questions as it's answered. For instance, how does the mail direct his steam into the right place if he's essentially injecting it under her skin? And why so much for play? But hey, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that the ultimate rugged survivor organism is also an accomplished lover with a flair for the exotic. That's our show for this week. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Further thanks to our audio producer Dylan Fagan and our editorial liaisons Alice and Laddermilk and Christopher Hassiotis. Subscribe to now Now for more of the latest science news, and send us links to anything you'd like to hear us cover, plus your New Year's resolution, Though before warned, I'll hold
you accountable. You can send us an email at now podcast at how stuff works dot com, and of course, for lots more stories like these, head on over to our home planet Now dot how stuff works dot com