You're listening to part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
What's that mango? So you know what's funny? You know what's funny. Your headband is funny. But sorry it interrupt Go ahead.
Well, we've been friends for a little over twenty five years now.
I think we actually known each other for twenty seven years now, if I'm not mistake, but I said friend, right, gotcha, gotcha.
But think of all the fun things that have happened in the last twenty five years, right, Like this's the launch of the iPod, thousands of songs in your pocket. Social media exploited with Facebook. People started dancing Gungnam style and we're taught how to duggy for some reason. There's planking and photos that became a fad, and Lady Gaga wore a meat dress to the MTV video War.
I think that summed it up. I think you actually covered everything.
Yeah, yeah, I mean we also had a block president, our first black president, gay marriage became legal, and people challenge each other with ice buckets. But for me, everything really starts with that meat dress.
Yeah, and don't forget we launched a little magazine from our drm room called Mental Flaws way back in the year two thousand. Yeah, I can't believe.
It's been almost twenty five years since that first issue hit newsstands. But this week's super special edition of Part Time Genius is all about celebrating this last quarter century. Every day this week, we're gonna be counting down the twenty five greatest science ideas of the past twenty five years, and we are sending out lots of fun prizes to our listeners too.
But I've just got one question for you, mego, why are you wearing a velord tracksuit and a homemade headband? Again, I don't really understand what's happening.
Here because I am pump Oh got it, Okay, so let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson, and of course I'm here with my friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and over there attending to what I thought was a Bob Ross chia pet but is actually a vintage, discontinued Albert Einstein chia pet. Is our pal and producer Dylan Fagan and Mengo. I think Einstein with sprouts for his hair is exactly the energy we're trying to pull for this week's twenty five list.
Yeah, that's right. Well, so I kind of want to start by having you tell our listeners about how we became friends, because I was definitely trivia obsessed as a kid.
I think I've mentioned that when cable came to my neighborhood in third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with doubledare and every day in the summer we would practice drilling each other with trivia questions and setting up these challenges all over our houses and the creek in the backyard, and you know, we're just trying to get ourselves physically prepped for this thing. We want to be ready in case a producer just called us up to be on the show. Yeah, but you were obviously obsessed
with lists. I was very much obsessed with lists. I think this started when I was probably eleven or twelve years old.
I just love making lists. They all started as pretty basic. It's like, here's my list of presidents, here's my list of state capitals. And then it got a little weirder over the years. It was like, here's a list of my favorite left handed artists and favorite you know books with more than four hundred pages or whatever it might
have been. It was just fun to keep lists, and people would ask like, why do you do this, and I didn't really know the answer, other than it just felt good to collect this information, you know, and to just know this information, So anyway was what I did.
I love it, and so when we started Mental Fluss, we were definitely list obsessed. And one of my favorite annual things that we do was we would declare the most important books of the last twenty five years for the most important music of the last time five years of TV shows, And the lists were always so fun and totally unexpected. You came away just appreciating all these
other amazing things. I don't know about you, but I think for me, part of the reason I wanted to do a big science list this week was because right now, you know, there's so much talk about AI and gene therapies and those kind of dominate the headlines. Yeah, but I also love the weird, fun inventions and and kind of the joy of Obama at the Science Fair shooting
rockets and things. And you know, science is obviously nerdy, but it's also cool and weird and fun, and I thought it would be just really fun to celebrate it.
That sounds good, but I feel like before we dive in, we really have to talk about the process and everything that goes into how we choose a list like this. So before we jump in, do you want to start by giving a little rationale of how we chose all of these things?
Yeah, totally so, Gabe, Mary, our friend Lucas Riley. They helped us look up a whole bunch of ideas and then we pare them down to things that truly delighted or impressed us. Ideally both of those things. And then you and I picked a bunch and researched some more. And now's the fun part where we get to like take turns presenting the ideas. Plus we are sending part time genius certificates to all of the winners, which they can put on their.
Refrigerators, all of the winners.
Yeah, and also atomic fireballs, the most sciencey candy we could find in honor of this week's Signs special.
You know, it's funny that we're choosing fireballs because, as my kids know, I love fireballs. So we have this special cabinet at our house just outside the kitchen called the Center of Excellence, and it's basically where all of my candy obsessions get to be stored because I'll fall in love with the candy. We were at a great sushi restaurant and I love the little treats they bring you at the end of it, and I decided I
needed to order those in bulk. I ordered some atomic fireballs in bulk, and then I move on to the next thing, but we just keep them in that collection. So it's a big prize, and we're giving out prizes on our insta all week as well.
Right, Yeah, so Mary is running contest for us all week and has a bunch of ridiculous swag to send out. She and the person who manages our social media, our friend Calypso. So after you listen, head over to our Instagram handle at part Time Genius and go win some stuff. Were to send it out, but that is way too much set up. Let's just get into.
It all right, Okay, So don't let the number fool you. Our list is kicking off with an innovation that happens to tackle one of the biggest problems in all of society, and that is how to get ketchup out of a bottle. Now, as we all know, there is nothing more frustrating than holding a ketchup bottle at a forty five degree angle over your food, shaking it vigorously and having absolutely nothing come out. And for years there were only two solutions.
People would jam a knife in a bottle. I feel like you don't see that as much anymore, remember jamming as a kid. I feel like people just would put that knife in there and then give it a stir and they hope the ketchup would start flowing. Also, there's the smack the number trick, where people figured out that if you give the number fifty seven on the side of a glass bottle of hinds a nice wallap, it
would get the ketchup moving. But of course the problem with both of those is that you could end up with way too much ketchup on your fries.
Yeah, it's kind of a ketchup conundrum that we've all experienced.
It's exactly right, and one of the biggest leaps forward for all of humanity and our quest board an appropriate amount of ketchup was the upside down ketchup bottle.
Right, so you are obviously talking about the ketchup bottles where the dispenser is on the bottom and it's sitting on there and the gravity is just kind of pulling it down.
Right, that's exactly right. That bottle, or rather the valve in it, was invented by a gentleman named Paul Brown. Now, his idea wasn't specifically for ketchup. He just thought a better valve would work for most liquids, from dish detergent to hand sanitizers to whatever it may be. This is in the nineteen nineties, so Paul Brown had this dream,
but he really struggled to make it a reality. He made one hundred and eleven different prototypes, Wow, maxed out a bunch of credit cards, borrowed money from his folks to you know, make a better valve for dispensing liquid.
And while trying to make this valve, like, what was he trying to solve for exactly Well, he realized that to make a better squeeze bottle, you wanted the nozzle to open when you place pressure on it, but then you need it to completely close up when the pressure is removed, so there's no accidental leaking from this Anyway, After years of failures, his one hundred and twelfth prototype work, and once he'd perfected his valve, everyone came calling in,
including NASA, who saw I used for the valve in space and was trying to make leak proof cups for astronauts. Wow shampoo bottlers who wanted a more convenient bottle for their soaps and shampoos also came calling on him as well, and eventually, after he pitched it to Hines, they saw
his innovation as part of a catch up revolution. They started this ad campaign about the quote waiting man, where a guy is just sitting and holding a glass ketchup bottle vertically over his meal and nothing is moving or happening for like twenty seconds, and then is why comes over, squeezes the perfect amount of ketchup onto his food and solves the problem in a second. And the ad slogan was quote no weight, no mess, no anticipation.
It is so funny that as a society we are so impatient that we need our ketchup immediately. Yeah, it's just a condiment.
I don't know why you're you really don't get it. It's super important that we get it quickly. But I was actually thinking this too, to be honest, until I read this Malcolm Gladwell piece on ketchup, and this was a piece that he wrote for The New Yorker, and in it he quotes a food professor who calls ketchup the Esperanto of cuisine because it's one of the few foods that satisfies your cravings for salty, sweet, sour, bitter,
and dow mommy all at once. If you think about it, that's that's actually true, and that's part of the reason the world loves ketchup so much. But back to Brown. According to the patent professor, this is a website on inventors and patents. Today, about seventy five percent of Hinz bottles that are sold are upside down squeeze bottles now, And it wasn't long before Brown paid off his credit cards and paid his parents back. Of course, I.
Mean, I do love this, but this invention is from the nineteen nineties, right, so like it doesn't quite make the twenty five year cut off.
Lit. I thought you were going to call me out for that, but I'm actually not done yet. So all of those lay the groundwork for the quote problem of ketchup.
Look at me being impatient.
Yeah, you're doing that. But even though Paul Brown Squeeze bottle valve helped us get much more ketchup out of bottles, the truth is it's hard to get the last bits of ketchup out of there, and that means there's a lot of food wasts. But that's where some grad students
from MIT came in. In twenty twelve, that is, within the last twenty five years here a PhD candidate named Dave Smith and a team of mechanical engineers and nanotechnologists at MIT's Varnacy Research Group had been working on various lubricants and coatings to solve various issues. So they were tackling things like how to coat an oil or gas line so that there's no clogs, or how to cote a windshield so that the water doesn't collect on it
and is more easily pushed off by your wipers. But then they started wondering what would happen if they applied some of their technology to consumer packaging. I think the idea started with the frustration of getting honey out of a bottle, you know, because there's still so much in there at that point.
Yeah, I mean it's obviously annoying, but why were they putting all this technology towards food bottles.
Well, according to Fast Company, that's one of the questions they got asked the most. And the answer is that the market for bottles and I'm just talking sauce bottles here is a seventeen billion dollar market and if you could solve food waste there, you could basically save a million tons of food from being thrown out every single year.
That's pretty incredible.
Yeah, So they created this coating called liquid glide, and it's really miraculous. Like if you watch the videos, the Ketchup flows out of the bottle almost like a liquid with nothing left in the bottle. As Professor Krippa Varnasi puts it, there's this fundamental friction constraint called no slip boundary condition between a liquid and a solid. And so because they basically created a new surface for the liquid to move on, you can get the product to slide
across the surface. And so he continues describing this. He says that, Aha, moment that we could get around a fundamental constraint of fluid dynamics.
That's really cool that they can take this like uncooperative fluid like Ketchup and just make a glide out.
Yeah, and all the applications for this are actually pretty crazy. It isn't just ketchup or honey that it affects suddenly, Like you can get toothpaste out of a tube more effectively, which makes that recyclable. You can use variations on medical devices to get essential fluids out of bags like. It's really remarkable.
I love that. So, of course, congratulations, doctor Varnossi and team will be sending you a part time genius certificate for your achievement and a handful of atomic fireballs for your important work.
Such a great price, right.
So, sitting at number twenty four is a pretty whimsical invention that maybe means more to me than it means to you. It is a floating hot tub boat invented in Finland called the hot tug, which sounds a little dirty, but this loading tub is actually really wonderful.
And there's this story about why you like hot tubs so much. I'm guessing I mean, to.
Be clear, I do like hot tubs in the appropriate context. My friend Dave is a hot tub behind his place in Idaho, and you can sit out there when it's snowing and look at the Grand Tetons behind you, and that is incredible. But also there was one time when I was on a work trip and I showed up at a hotel room in a dicey neighborhood that had been booked for me, and there was a giant hot tub in the middle of the hotel room, and that was less appeeling.
Yeah, I could see maybe avoiding that.
But as you might know, I hate cold water. And part of the reason is that when I was on my study of broad trip, and this is so many years ago in Tibet, we were hunting for this anthropological evidence of a semi nomadic civilization, and there hadn't been a lot of study done in this region of Tibet.
It was pretty pristine and hard for academics to get to anyway, my friends and I saw these hots that were set up across this little river, and we knew we wanted to get to it, and there was a bridge about two hours up one way and one hour down the other way, and so my friends were like,
we should probably just cross this river. And to be clear, there was snow on the ground at the time and the water was ice cold, and we didn't want to get our clothes wet, so basically we got naked and cross this thing so we'd have dry clothes on the other side. And I just remember getting up to my ankles and being like, I've never been this cold, and then getting up to my knees and being like I've never been this cold, and then getting to my waist.
But the current was also crazy strong, and I almost slipped out some moss and somehow caught myself with the stick and it was miserable. But I just remember being so cold for so long, and the worst part was the huts weren't any big discovery, so it was just like a normal settlement. But I was very angry, and since then I don't really go in cold water, but I will go in hot water, and that's where the hot tug comes in.
Wow, I'm with you on the cold water. I don't understand people that can do the cold plunge thing. It's just I don't get it. But anyway, tell me more about this invention.
So it is the brainchild of a Dutch furniture designer. His name is Frank de Bruyne. And it's not just a barrel with heat under it. So this thing is a beautiful two thousand liter eight seater jacuzzi boat. And according to an interview with the New York Post, Jabrun actually grew up on a barge where his parents were skippers, and he'd always loved campfires and nature and looking up
at the stars. And at some point he wondered, like, what if you could have a mobile hot tub, like not just something that was parked in your backyard, but something that would allow you to float out wherever you were, and that could be on a lake or a fjord.
And so he created this boat with an electric motor, so it is entirely quiet for the nature aspect, but the hot tub contraption is also entirely stable, so you can sit in the hot tub and then stand up and dive off the side into like a crisp, refreshing lake and you won't tip anything over. To me, it feels like a really beautiful way to float your way
through a cold land escape. Like imagine being in one of these off the coast of Alaska or in the Pacific Northwest, And that's kind of de Bruyn's dream too. Right now, the hot tubs are cost prohibitive. They run about fifteen thousand to twenty thousand dollars. But his hope is that national parks and cities will buy fleets of these things and then rent them out to people like me, you know, tourists who hate the cold but love nature.
That sounds pretty awesome. I'm on board, Mango. The next one for me is a discovery that deals with one of my biggest pet peeves. Tangled headphones and chords so frustrating. And this comes from a British scientist named Robert Matthews from Aston University. So over the years, people have tried to deal with knots in tons of ways. You can very carefully coil up chords using special reels. They're actually
a ton of anti nodding gadgets out there. But Robert Matthews developed a mathematical theory which has an incredibly simple answer. According to his loop conjecture, one of the easiest things you can do is clip the ends of a chord together to form a loop. Based on his mathematical models, forming a simple loop produces a tenfold reduction in the
risk of knots forming in the headphone course. That's amazing, But what's also sweet about his theory is that Matthews organized something called the British not Experiment, where, according to Science Daily, kids at schools across the country looked at this phenomena with quote various cord thickness, rigidity, and other parameters likely to affect nodding risk.
I mean, tangled chords are definitely one of my biggest pet peeves, and every year I try so many different ways to make sure that my Christmas lights don't get tangled or chords don't get tangled. And I'm just kind of fascinated by this idea that if you just loop the chords, it solves the issue.
Yeah, And Matthews points out that even though it feels trivial in nature, quote, the phenomena of spontaneous nodding is of great significance in other areas, including polymer chemistry and molecular biology. Like if you consider there's over a meter of DNA crammed into every one of our selves, and any knots can dramatically increase the risk of genetic malfunction, you can see how there might be some really interesting applications there, Like Matthew's points to some anti cancer drugs
that work by affecting not formation. And cancer cells, and he's hoping that the loop conjecture can lead to new approaches in drug design.
That's amazing that you can tackle something that's annoying like headphones and it solves genetic problem.
Yeah, something almost as important like cancer.
Right, Yeah, well that is pretty awesome. I know we've got lots more to cover, from space perfumes to bird esthetics, but before we get to any of that, let's take a quick break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're talking about twenty five great science ideas over the last twenty five years. And I forgot Mengo. What number are we on? All right, number twenty two? So Mango, what do you have next?
Well, let's talk about the sense of smell, because when it comes to memory and emotion, there is no sense quite as powerful as scent. And for me, like a whiff of jasmine takes me to my grandmother's backyard and India, there's a certain wet grass and pavement smell that reminds me of monsoons and also spring in Delaware. Yeah, also lemon pledge weirdly reminds me of when my sister and I used to have to dust wood furniture every Saturday
after cartoons. So are there any distinctive sense that you can think of.
It's funny that you mentioned your grandmother. I feel like everybody who you know had the benefit of being able to go to a grandmother's house has a certain scent there. For me, it was the smell of bacon, because my granddad cooked bacon every single morning of his life, and so whenever you walk into that house, you're just like bacon. I love that.
Mike Myers always talks about like how it smells like soup, whinny he thinks.
About old people. This is a little better than that.
So our next guest knows a lot about scent. It's what he does for a living. And our pal Mary actually got him on the phone.
I'm Steve Pierce. I've worked in the flame room fragrance industry for more than forty years in various roles and now a consult for some companies in that industry. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, to be honest.
So Steve has a degree and applied biochemistry and says he's been interested in smells since he was a kid. So back in the early two thousands, he was approached by a museum curator who wanted to make an exhibit about impossible smells, like smells that were so fleeting or so far in the past that no one's been able to experience them. And one of the impossible smells he developed for this exhibit was the scent of the Mere
Space Station as it fell back to Earth. The exhibit was a huge hit and people were fascinated.
It made a bit of a splash. It was on TV all the rest of it. And it was a few months after that that I got this call from someone at NASA. He explained his role as having to smell every single component that went into the Space Shuttle to make sure that when astronauts were up there, there was nothing that was going to create an off an unpleasant environment for them to live and work in.
So I'm trying to imagine this guy's work day, like he walked around sniffing rocket parts.
Yeah, I guess something like that, And I guess he told Steve that NASA had a smell problem.
They had astronauts returning to Earth who'd gone for a vehicular walk outside. So they'd gone outside to service satellites and do all the things they do, and then when they got back inside, they were going through the airlock and they'd repressurized, take their suit helmet off, and then
they got hit by this smell. And a number of them came back and said, look, we went through all this training about fitness, about psychology here, about how to fly things, how to service satellites, how to walk as they nobody warned us about this smell.
Never would have thought that space had a smell. Apparently NASA hadn't either, So they asked Steve if you could recreate the scent of space for training purposes, and he was like, sure, I'll give it a try. So NASA put him in touch with some astronauts so he could get a first hand account of the space smell.
They were pretty consistent in terms of it, focusing on things like hot metal. They said fried steak, but I kind of think that was when maybe they were near a barbecue which was hot metal, and they were associating the fried steak and the hot metal. And one of them described it as the scent of the hot metal when he was welding on his motorbike as a young
man and things like this. So that was the description that I had to go for and try and recreate that in a safe way that could be used during the training.
So around the same time, some other papers came out that offered all these hypotheses about what space smell like based on beectroscopic analysis, and two of the notes that got mentioned were raspberries and rum, which I've read about and it sounds really nice. But Steve didn't buy it. None of the astronauts he'd interviewed mentioned any of those scents, so he stuck to his brief of hot metal and meat.
And the more he thought about it, the more it made sense because when the astronauts were outside, their suits were bombarded by high velocity particles and solar wind, so when they came back inside, they detected the odor left by all that energy.
So we managed to recreate the smell for NASA.
Yeah, I mean, it took a couple of months, but he did. And unfortunately, in the time he was working, his NASA contact had retired or maybe been laid off, like to this day Steven in shore, which all he knew was that he called NASA to say, hey, I've got your space smell, and NASA was like, we don't know where you're talking about, man.
I couldn't find anyone else to want to take it forward, so it was a bit disappointing to have done that work and then not be able to see it put to use. So I kind of parked it.
The story might have ended there, but the BBC happened to visit Steve's lab for a report on fragrance and flavors.
The reporter asked if he'd worked on anything particularly unusual, and Steve said, well, as a matter of fact, I made the scent of space for NASA, and that turned into the kicker of the piece, and then another media storm erupted, so the news traveled to this side of the Atlantic and Steve was contacted by an American education advocate who wanted to leverage the scent to raise money
for STEM programs. Right, this is awesome. So the initial goal was something like, let's sell two thousand dollars of this perfume, and in the end the project raised over six hundred thousand dollars on kickstar.
Isn't that amazing?
And the idea was that for every bottle someone bought, a bottle would get sent to a school. But this meant a new challenge for Steve.
Before, I wasn't worried about skin contact and things like that. I was just thinking people would smell it. No, that would be the end of it. Now I had to go back to the drawing board and reformulate it to make sure it was completely safe in case anybody accidentally sprayed it in their eye or swallowed it, or make sure there were no allergens in there and so on.
So what's more, Steve had actually developed a second space scent. He met the astronaut Charles Duke at a conference, and Duke could actually walk down the Moon with the Apollo eleven crew, So naturally Steve wanted to know what that had smelled like.
And of course he's, well, of course you can't smell anything through the suit, and he's having a joke and all that, But then he says, when you get inside and you're covered in this fine dust, he starts explaining to everyone about it. Takes his helmet off, he says, and all you can smell is this smell of the moon, he says. And everyone thinks it smells of cheese and makes all these jokes about it, but he says, it smells like spent gunpowder.
So the scent of Space and the Scent of the Moon became available through this kickstarter. And now Steve does want to make it very clear that he is not involved in any of the logistics for fulfillment with this Space scent product. He just made vats of the stuff
and had it shift to a distributor. But he is really happy about all the bottles that made their way to schools and STEM programs, And he told us one of his proudest moments was meeting a dad whose son had really severe learning disabilities, but he was fascinated by space and being able to smell it made it come to life in this incredible, vivid way.
Oh that's so cool. I do have to ask my go have you smelled this stuff? And if so, is it good?
I don't think the word is good, like maybe interesting, fascinating, meaty. I looked up out to Space on perfume review website and a lot of people complained that it didn't smell like something you'd wear, which makes sense because that wasn't the intention. But what's really interesting is several reviewers mentioned that the scent made them feel a sense of loneliness or dispair and so we actually asked Steve about this.
I wouldn't have used words like despair and loneliness. I can understand if people are putting that concept of the fragrance alongside the fact that you're in an airless and void of space and you're weightless. If it manages to conjure up those feelings, I can understand why they might describe it as that. There's definitely a meaty element to it. It is quite harsh and metallic as well. I would
have said I would have described it as that. The other image I had was if you've ever been the electrical sparks and you get that blue flash and there's that sense of burning although nothing's burning, it's almost like the ozone in the air that's created in that high energy impact. Those were the kind of images I was
trying to recreate. I never set out to make anyone feel despair, but you know what, when you're working on these things on your own and you're sometimes coming up against a bit of a block and trying to improve it, sometimes that can feel pretty lonely as well.
And maybe that's the next challenge for a fragrance scientist like Steve, like figure out a way to bottle the scent of loneliness along with one that makes you feel maybe more like you're surrounded by people you love.
That's a great idea.
Anyway, I'm sure everyone's wondering, Okay, how can I get a whiff of this? Well, we manage to get our hands on a bottle of the Space scent and a bottle of the Moon scent, and.
We squirted it on a fire mall.
So we are giving them away today on our Instagram. So go check it out at part time Genius to see how you can win.
I'm gonna apply. So for anyone who's suffered from jet lag, you know how hard it can be to try to get your body clock to shift time zones. It is really not a pleasant process. But for a bunch of hamsters, at least one thing has helped, taking viagra. You can see any of this coming to do jet lag, Hamsters, viagra? Can you work those into the sentence? It's like the weirdest success, Mad Live success.
So why were they giving viagra to hamster?
What else would you give them? Mango? But anyway, it's really only in small doses. So, as the Smithsonian points out, since nineteen ninety eight, when viagra was first approved by the FDA. Scientists have found all sorts of other uses for the drug, including for flowers. Actually, so if you crush viagra into a vase, it can help your fresh
cut flowers last longer. It's also good for treating blood pressure, and in two thousand and seven, a trio of Argentinian scientists figured out that injecting a small amount of viagra into a hamster will help cure it of jet lag.
I mean, of course it has to be a small dose, right, These are hamster. These are also scientists, so they could do whatever, but anyway. But it's basically enough viagra to affect them, but not enough to get them aroused or anything like that.
But back to the jet lag. Normally, humans tend to take a full day to adjust for an hour of change, So if you travel to Singapore from New York, it'll take your body about twelve days to fully adjust to that time change. But with viagra, the hamsters were covered in about half of that period. And do we know why this is Well, according to the Smithsonian quote, they believe even happened because the drug raises levels of a
molecule called cyclic guanascene monophosphate in the body. cGMP is the molecule that expands blood vessels, which helps with getting men excited. That's how it works from that purpose. But cGMP also speeds up the body's internal clock, which is how it combats jet lag. Anyway, the most fascinating thing about this study, or to me at least, was that
the viagra only worked when hamsters were traveling east. Like, the viagra helped if you adjusted the time zone from New York to London, but if you had them going west, it basically had no effect. I heard viagra's the same way, So.
That is wilds Well, I've got another discovery about animals, but before we get to that, let's take one last break.
Welcome back to Part Time Genius, where we're counting down the twenty five greatest science ideas of the past twenty five years. All right, mango, we are all the way too.
Why those sesame street numbers never get old to me? And at number twenty, we're going to cover one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time, according to me, which is why chickens like Denzel Washington more than you.
More than I like Denzel Washington, or they like Denzel more than they like me.
They like Denzel more than they liked Okay, god, okn me, they preferred Denze.
Making sure I didn't know if I was part of this study.
Now, over the years, there have been lots of discoveries about chickens. We know that the color of a chicken's eggs often coincides with the color of the bird's ear lobes. We know that today's chickens descended from the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia about eight thousand years ago, and they were probably first domesticated not for meat, but as early alarms systems like watchdogs, but birds right, bird dogs?
Yeah.
But perhaps most importantly, chickens can tell other chickens apart, and studies have shown they can easily identify up to thirty other chickens at a chicken party, but once the numbers get to about one hundred, they get more confused. They can't keep tracked. I mean, it's like people. Yeah, it feels fair. But in two thousand and two, in a paper called quote Chickens prefer beautiful humans. This is actually the title of the scientist Stefano Ghirlanda Listen, Loote
Jensen and Magnus Anquist. Don't worry, it'll be spelled properly on the certificates. They all discovered that much like humans, chickens are attracted to symmetrical faces, and in the experiment, chickens pecked more at screens with symmetrical faces, and these results actually match the results of humans who were asked
to choose between the same faces. According to nat GEO, the study was limited in that only tests did a small number of chickens and humans, but the results may suggest the mutual admiration for symmetry is rooted in the nervous system. Isn't that awesome? So it's not really based on cultural influences, but it's triggered by something in the brain.
Yeah, well, you said this was only a small number of chickens, so I'm still not quite on board with the idea that they like Denzel more than you. But we'll see. And actually, you know what, you know, I have chickens and chickens that lay different colored eggs. Huh. I did not know that chickens had ear lobes, much less ear lobes that you could use to detect what sort of eggs they would lay. But anyway, it's all super fascinating. So back to this idea of the chickens
preferring symmetrical faces. Do we know the evolutionary reason for that? Like, why do humans and chickens prefer these faces?
We don't know yet. But nat Geo did have a fun kicker to the piece. They wrote, quote, what could be more humiliating than a chicken who sees your Tinder profile and swipes left? I think that's a good way to answer.
So that is definitely. We have reached the end of day one in our countdown of the twenty five best science ideas from the past twenty five years. Now, remember we got four more days to go, so be sure to tune in all week. Don't forget to enter today's giveaway on our Instagram at part time Genius and Mengo. What's the teas up for tomorrow?
So we have got stories about lobsters, dolphins and bike helmets. Oh yeah, the trio, although unfortunately none of these involve lobsters and dolphins wearing bike helmets. But it's still going to be fun, I promise. Anyway, that's it for today's episode from Gabe, Dylan, Mary, Will and myself. Thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongays Chatikler, and research by our good
pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's EPISO was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts and Vinny Shorey. For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.