Earwax: Portable Time Capsules

didn't realize what it was a thing. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that I'd ever sniffed ear wax because I feel like you really at your sniffing stage with bodily excretions at a far younger age, and I don't remember encountering ear wax as a child. Bright. I mean, that's more of your your parents domain right to deal with whatever your ear wax situation is, or maybe the doctor.

But but then once you reach the age where you are removing your own ear wax, hopefully you're at a point where you're not going to smell it a lot. That's my stance on the WHO way and if you do, that's fine. This is not a place of judgment. I will disclose not that I smell at your wax, but that's one of those things that if I'm kind of thinking about something or I'm lost in my head, I will find that my finger is drifting up to my ear and all. Sometimes you're like, yeah, I'm at work,

I don't need to be exploring my ear canals right now. Well, as we get older, we have to explore our ear canals more because all sorts of stuff goes wrong in there, right, I mean, you end up with hair growing for no reason. You end up with I mean it has a reason, but not but there's a limit, come on, body, you know, yeah? Yeah, and then then the ear wax can get a little

out of out of control. I think we've all been in that situation where you've you've been around uh, an older individual, maybe somebody you know or related to, or maybe not, and you glimpse inside that ear and it

and you'll see something just horrific. Be it a big tough of like rabbit fur growing out, or like an orb of earwax just setting there like it's like it's a spaceship that's going to be launched out of the body and out into the void crude with with all sorts of little organisms from the person's head well, which is kind of like what we're going to talk about today, this sort of time capsule that that you can sometimes contain.

And according to Dr Rick Tights, an emergency room doctor, he said, I have over the year's teen live and dead bugs, broken off Q tips, pieces of chocolate, nuts and cookies, toy parts in some unidentifiable objects. So yes, sometimes things get stuck in there, and particularly when you're talking about Toddler's intentionally stuck in there. Yeah, thankfully I have not experienced that firsthand yet, but I mean, you know, it was more about the nose. Oh yeah, I'm experiencing

the nose big time. But yeah, that is good times, by the way, Yeah, so far, it's just finger up there most of the day. But they the yeah, the the the ear canal and are sticking of things into it. One of the stories that always comes to mind when I think about Q tips going in the ear or bugs going into the ear, which if you haven't experienced that, it can be pretty horrific because a bugets in there

and starts flapping its wings. It's incredibly loud. Um. John Hanning speak one of the gentlemen who discovered the source of the Nile, along with the Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was left temporarily temporarily deaf uh after a beetle crawled into his ear and he tried to remove it with a knife. That this is an eighteen fifty six during an Eastern African expedition to find the African Great Lakes.

So I always think about that one whenever I because there was a rather horrific portrayal of it in the movie The Mountains of the Moon, which was about speaking Burton, well, thank you, because this is high roach season in Georgia where we live, and they're they're scattering themselves all over the place, all over the floors and there after your canals. Yeah, I mean it's a nice safe refuge for them, right, I mean until we have to stab them with something

and and and deafen ourselves. Or if you're going to actually do the correct thing, uh, use some sort of like alcohol or oil or some sort of water. Don't go to the doctor, or go to the doctor, but don't go don't grab a knife and start stabbing at the beetle in your head. No, don't try to recreate the eight Yeah, alright, So what exactly is ear wax? This is kind of fascinating. It's a It's actually a

kind of sweat called saruman and apricrene. Sweat glands add protein and fats to sweat, okay, And this is a kind of modified form of these sweat glands found in the ear canal, and its output is ear wax. Yeah. So this is oil and protein, but about half of it is dead skin cells. Essentially. You can think of it this way. This is what I'm thinking about it. Anyway. Ear wax is a river of dead skin cells flowing out of your ear. Because if you did not have

that outward flow, what would happen? You would just have a build up of dead skin cells in your ear. Right, It's true, and that's good that you say it that that way. It is a flow. In fact, the cells inside the ear canal are unique in the human body. They migrate and according to Professor Shakil said, at London's Royal National

there was an ear hospital. You could put an ink dot on the ear drum and then watch it move over a few weeks and it would be carried out by the movement of these cells, so that this is very intentional. This flow of amber ear wax lava stuff is dying in there. We have to get it out. We have to get it out of the air canal. And so it follows the river of your life. Yeah, and the normal sort of movement of the jaw also helps it along. And you know, eating and talking that

assists with the with the movement. But let's talk about the more interesting aspects of it, which are the protective qualities. Yeah, that's right. It's uh, you know, certainly it's moving the dead skin cells. It's help, but it's it's helping to keep the canal clean overall. It's uh, it's preventing it from itching. Yeah, and it's lubricating it in that way

so then it doesn't itch. And then it's kind of like a fly catcher for dirt and bacteria, which is so cool because we again this stuff is maligned, right, we get Q tips. Uh, we try to get it out of our ear. We're like, oh, it's disgusting, but in fact it is protecting us. And between one thousand to two thousand glands produce anti microbial peptides. It also contains lie de zyme and antibacterial enzyme capable of destroying

bacterial cell walls. So it's not just ushering stuff out and catching stuff, but it's also kind of washing it at certain moments and making sure that bacteria does not live in your body. Yeah, because this is just another open doorway into the head, and therefore it, I mean, it makes sense that it should have certain protections in place. Indeed, all right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna have a little more about the science of ear wax, what our ear wax can

tell us about ourselves and others. Hey, we're back, um

talking about ear wax. Here's a little to that that I wasn't aware of until I was looking around for odd bits on ear wax, and I found out that in medieval times, ear wax was actually used as a pigment component in the illumination of manuscripts, which instantly made me think of the various uh fictions where you'll encounter and and of course also occasionally real life examples of say a book that's bound in human skin or a book that's written in human blood, but I've never seen

a horror movie or horror story where there's some sort of mysterious volume that's written in human ear wax. So is it the preservative qualities of the fats in it? I guess that might be part of it. I mean,

there's not a whole lot of color to it. I mean, we would well discuss We definitely would be talking about western ear wax here, so we'll be talking about, oh, you know that that that waxy yellow tint, but uh, or and it's gonna get a little darker in age, so I could see it possibly playing into into coloration as well. Or maybe you're just setting there in the scriptorium all day, Uh, you're eliminating manuscripts, and occasionally your

brush is going to go into the ear canal. You know, it's gonna go out, it's gonna go in the notes, it's gonna go a lot of places, and it's gonna make its way into the final version of the manuscript, and then you have your oprah aha moment. Yeah, yeah, all right, So that's kind of the perfect segue into what we're about to talk about. And you had already mentioned that western ear wax is far different than someone

from say East Asia. Yes, And this was borne out by scientists at the Monell Institute, and they were inspired to see if ethnic groups have different ear wax odors after they learned that the same gene controls both the person's underarm odor and the type of ear wax that they make, so that's the place they will come from.

Does the ear wax smell differently? They measure the concentration of twelve volatile organic compounds found in ear wax in groups of East Asian and white men, and what they found is that if you are East Asian or Native American, it's likely to be dry and white, kind of flaky, and but if you would describe yourself as white or black, your ear wax would probably be yellow and sticky and smelling. Yea.

My wife and I actually rando a little this. We brought our child in to see the pediatrician because he is is racially Han Chinese and the we are Uh Caucasian, and he initially had a certain amount of of wax build up in his ears that had to be taken care of. But the pediatrician had some difficulties figuring exactly what was going on because I don't think she was as exposed as much to to this this East Asian variant of ear wax, which is again flaki or dryer.

And and therefore, if you're if you look going into an ear and you're expecting to see Western ear wax, you're gonna be a little thrown for a curve of the material itself has a has a different a different consistency. See Okay, And that's that's one of those things that you just don't know until you get in the ear canal. Right, so did she smell it? I don't think she smelled it.

I haven't smelled it either, you know, But but it would but would apparently have less of an odor, as would as would his sweat, which I'm all for anything to keep this child less stinky right on. Yeah, And considering again that this is a variant of the apocrine sweat gland, and we know the apprine sweat gland producing some really funky stuff. So it's not too crazy that your ear wax might smell. But you're probably still wondering, like, why are there scientists sniffing ear wax? Why do they

think that's so important? Well, it turns out that they also that the Institute Monel Institute studies a rare genetic disorder called maple syrup urine disease ease, which can be easily diagnosed through the scent of ear wax compounds and swabbing someone's ears is much simpler and cheaper than doing

genetic testing. And when I when we talk about this maple syrup urine disease really literally your your sweat and your ear wax smells like maple syrup because it's a metabolism disorder and it's passed down through families and which the body can't break down certain parts of proteins. And it might seem like, oh, that's lovely if you just smell like maple syrup all the time, but in fact it's it's a it can be really dangerous that disease.

It can cause bring damage, coma and cognitive disabilities. So all of this makes sense right that that ear wax would provide some insight into what's going on genetically, because again it's composed of dead skin cells. It's a uh, it contains the output of of of the two thousand different glands working at once, So it's not just some stupid byproduct of a human body. It's a very very telling by product of the human body. Yeah, And the hope is that by examining this ear wax we can

begin to tell more and more about someone's health and wellness. Um. But because we're talking about these again portable time capsules telling us something about the body. And there's nothing more indicative of this ability than whales and their gigantic ear plugs of ear wax. Yeah, and it really is like an ear plug composed of their own ear wax that they accumulate throughout their entire life. Uh. And they eventually

reach a size of in length. Yeah, they're huge and unlike humans, you know, which we shed our ear wax and our our dead skin cells. Um, these filter feeding whales do retain it your entire lives. And so what happens is that it's recording life events similarly to the rings of a tree. And in fact, they used to They've known for a while that this is a good way to tell how old a whale was. Just see

how how big the ear plug is. But you can tell been more exactly because the wax is laid down in light and dark bands, with each band correlating roughly to a six month period, so all of that can be examined and you can figure out what's going on. Sasha Usenko and environmental scientists at Baylor University in Waco, Texas extracted an ear plug from a blue whale. It was killed in a collision with a ship off the

coast of Santa Barbara and California. And that plug of ear wax was a nice, big, healthy, twenty four point five centimeters long. But they found is that this twelve year old male had come into contact with sixteen different pollutants like pesticides and flame retardants. Wow. So you can look at this thing, which is again like a like a core sample of the different segmentary layers in this in this creature's life, it's a timeline, a waxy timeline of its life. You can see where has it come

into contact with pollutants. You can see where as it had a lot of stress. Where can you see the stress hormones in the wax sample. Yeah, you can even see the testosterone and surge indicating when it was maturing. And then as you say, yeah, these cortisol levels going

up doubling in some cases. In fact, one of the biggest peaks in stress hormone cortisol that they saw was right after the whale had reached sexual maturity about ten years old, suggesting that there was stress from sexual competition. You can even see the amount of pollutants and hormones transferred to the whale from its mother while it was while it was inside her, and apparently the majority of those contaminants of those um those bits of chemical pollutants

were transferred during that time. So this is of course all very useful information in studying the blue whale and trying to figure out how we can keep the population of blue whales from shrinking even further. It's already far smaller than it needs to be. Yeah, And even the effects of pollution, because although flame retardant has been banned for fifty years, it's apparently still out there particles of in the ocean. So we've talked about this before, the

ocean being this great, big, unexplored area for us. We don't have a great understanding of the breadth and depth of it and how our environment impacts it. And this is just one other indication of of how stuff that we just use on a regular basis really has a long term impact indeed, I mean that the shadow cast by any of these these these pollutants is far greater

than we typically realize. Indeed. All right, but back to the ear wax and humans, I think we should probably end this podcast by saying, obviously, don't pick up that Q tip as much as you want to and jam it into your ear canal, and please please do not get an ear cone and engage in what's called ear candling,

which we've talked about at length. Have you have You've done it before, I've done it before, and there's you know, you know there's something wrong when you have your head tipped over and you have something on fire in your ear. You know that that shouldn't be going on. And the flame on these things climbs pretty high. It's it's not really I mean, it's to be honest, the sensation is

kind of interesting. You know. I won't I won't say that I hated having my ear candled, but but it's it also felt very dangerous, like we're going to catch the health and fire at any given moment doing this and ultimately doesn't really do any good. In fact, they can have it can it can actually harm you. The FDA warrants. They not only can ear candles lead to obviously burns, they can also block the ear canal or

perforate the ear drums. So there's really no reason to do it, and you want to explain that in your situation, right, Yeah, So I decided to candle my ear whole and they're like, all right, go getting that line. I just got your candled. Yeah. Yeah, but the Q tip, of course, that's still a cautionary thing. I mean, the package says don't stick it in your ear, which leads to the question, what are they want? What

are we supposed to be using them for? I always think just the outside of the ear, just a little maze around the actual ear canal. Sure, okay, that's valid. That's a good place to use it. You know, I've I've heard of individuals who have traveled to other countries. I think this particular friend of a friend that went to Eastern Europe and they went to the store. They were staying there for a nextended period of time no Q tips, So he was like, what am I gonna do?

How I'm gonna clean my ears? So he ended up just getting pieces of tissue and then you know, twisting it up and then trying to clean his ears that way. That doing that, he ended up getting tissue caught in his ear, stuck in his ear canal, and then had to go to the doctor for that. So that raises the question, Well, if we live in a world without Q tips, then when we still stick things in our ears and we'd still have to go to the emergency room,

I don't know. I feel like the e er there was would probably be like another American tried to d I O y a Q tip. That's my Eastern European. That's good, that's good. I was buying it. Um. And if you need a little something else to encourage you not to go digging around with a Q tip, I recommend using out the scene in the most recent season I think it is of Girls, Oh Yeah, where she she ends up going a little too deep with a cute tip and then has to do the other ear

to cancel it out. Well, she has obsessive compulsive disorder, which is why she's jamming it into her ear in the first place. Um. But like a lot a lot of a lot of that show is painful to watch, but that scene in particular was was painful on a very physical level, because you're just going don't do that to your ears? Yeah. Yeah, And if you really need to do that, you feel like you've got at your

wife poem, you gotta go see the doctor. Right. And in fact, there is a great little video that I sent you and I said, green geting awful, which shows a professional extraction of a giant chunk of ear wax. And it looks like when they're taking it out, looks like a croissant that's been stuped into someone's ear. Can you imagine? I can imagine. I can picture it because you made me watch the video. Are are we going to turn that video into a science on the Web episode?

I think so? All right, we must be down look forward to that everyone in the meantime. Uh And certainly if you want to go ahead and see if that video has published yet, and it may have, who knows what the timeline isn't the sort of thing, UH, go to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is

where you will find all the podcast episodes. That's where you'll find links out to our very social media account to find our blog posts of videos, everything you could want to know about Julie and myself and uh you know we'd like to hear from you on this ear wax situation. Yeah, it's a safe place you can send

us your thoughts on it. You can let us know what the consistency and the smell is if you happen to know that any odd ear wax stories were gained for them, and you could do that by sending an email to blow the mind at how step works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, how stuff works dot com be you or about