Brain Junk

Bad dad mushroom jokes, a “bleeding” mushroom, the world’s largest organism, and so many fungus facts! That little brown mushroom on your pizza has fungal cousins that are more unexpectedly interesting than you would have thought.

Image: Hydnellum peckii – Young specimen – Bellamonte (TN), Italy – 17/08/2005 – personal photo – B.Baldassari

Creative Commons License

Business Insider Largest Living Organism

Image courtesy Pixaby

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Image credit Wikimedia Commons

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Atlas Obscura Chicken of the Woods

Bad dad mushroom jokes, a "bleeding" mushroom, the world's largest organism, and so many fungus facts! That little brown mushroom on your pizza has fungal cousins that are more unexpectedly interesting than you would have thought.

Image: Hydnellum peckii - Young specimen - Bellamonte (TN), Italy - 17/08/2005 - personal photo - B.Baldassari

Creative Commons License

Business Insider Largest Living Organism

Image courtesy Pixaby

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Image credit Wikimedia Commons

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

Atlas Obscura Chicken of the Woods

In the late 19th century, London had the beginnings of homeless shelters. They weren’t always comfortable (try sleeping in a four-penny coffin), but it was better than being left drunk and alone out in the cold.

Trend setting science from 1975. We can’t tell you anything else, it would spoil the surprise!

Trace and Amy try to stump each other with the wildest, weirdest, most outrageous animal facts they could find. There’s chemical warfare snails, bird arsonists, toads with babies bursting out of their backs and MORE. Listen in and play along.

Show Notes: SPOILERS!!!!

The Surinam Toad:   

The mother gestates her babies on her back and then they pop out of her skin. Gross and TRUE. 

https://animals.sandiegozoo.org/animals/surinam-toad

The horned screamer (Anhima cornuta) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_screamer

A sort of pheasant like bird with a terrific shriek and a horn on it’s head and it’s alllll TRUE.

Collared Peccary:

https://nhpbs.org/natureworks/peccary.htm

A little jungle pig that falls over when startled just like the sheep. FALSE. They don’t tip over. They do not tip over, sadly. Or happily for them.

Before they even hatch, Yellow Legged Gull chicks seem to be communication to their nest mates. Amy dives into the how and why.

Show Notes:

https://www.sciencealert.com/baby-birds-can-communicate-with-each-other-from-inside-their-unhatched-eggs

Science Alert - Michelle Starr

Unhatched bird embryos can not only hear the warning calls of adult birds - they can communicate that information to their unhatched brothers and sisters sharing the same nest, remaining safely tucked away in their shells until it is safe to hatch.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-019-0929-8

Authors Jose C Noguera & Alberto Velando

Ecology and Animal Biology Department, Spain

Episode Transcripts:

Welcome to Brain Junk. I'm Trace Kerr and I'm Amy Barton and this is a Brain Storm.

AB: I'm pretty excited about this one because it's how baby birds communicate before hatching. Isn't that great? Cause we've talked a little bit about how newborns learn when they sleep and I love that.

TK: How a new thing learns a thing.

AB: Yeah. So this is about that scientists from, I have to translate this from the University of Vigo in Spain. That's not how it's written here, but that's what it is in America. It's the Departamento de Ecología y Biología Animal, Universidad de Vigo, Vigo, Spain. I took French. Everybody, I can't tell you. The authors of this study study are Jose, Nick Guerra and Alberto Valando. They studied unhatched yellow legged goals and found that the unhatched baby bird embryos and not only heard warning calls of adults, they also can communicate that information to unhatched brothers and sisters sharing the same nest. So they were curious what, how does that happen? What's the mechanism? The scientists did a study, they're like, how does this work? And

TK: Oh, is this another scientist doing horrible things to creatures to do a study?
AB: Not horrible. No. There's moments where it's like, ahhhh, but nobody dies and no birds die.

TK: Okay.

AB: They took lots of these little unhatched yellow legged goals and they put them in little groups of three in incubators and so it looks like ice cube trays in the illustration. Oh, there's a row of three. There's like seven rows of three. They had a control group and a study group and what they would do is one of the eggs would stay in the incubator all the time. It's two neighbors would be pulled out and in the control group they would just be pulled out and put in a quiet box and they wouldn't hear any auditory stimulus and then they go back in the study group, the two eggs and it was always the same two eggs, the same two eggs would be pulled out and they'd be put into a soundproof space and they would be played. The sound of the adult predator alarm calls would be applied, so mama bird freaking out because a predator is coming would be played and then they would return the eggs to the nest. What they found from that is that the test group eggs tended to vibrate more in the incubator. So there would be motion from those eggs but not from the control group. And when the experimental clutches hatched, even the naive egg, the one that wasn't exposed, they all took longer to hatch than the control group control group would hatch kind of on a normal schedule. The ones in the study group hatch later...

Would you pay eight-thousand dollars to impress your friends with a pineapple? No? Well, the Victorians did.

Show Notes:

What do those rain percentages they give you on the news really mean? Why does the snow in Europe sometimes turn orange? Have you ever heard of a firenado? So many things you never knew you wanted to know about weather. Watch out for falling fish.

Show Notes: You’ve got to see to believe

When the US and Canadian governments decided the border between our two countries, a few places got left on the “wrong” side of the line. Those places are called exclaves. On the west coast, Point Roberts became one of those places.

Show Notes:

Point Roberts Wikipedia

CityLab Point Roberts

Atlas Obscura Point Roberts

Image Courtesy pointswithacrew.com

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Trace Kerr, and I’m Amy Barton and this is a Brain Storm.

AB: We’re going to do a geography lesson today. Yay. Today we’re talking about exclaves. I don’t know if that’s the right tone of voice for a geography lesson.

TK: Did you say exclaves?

AB: Yes, I did.

TK: Oh, okay.

AB: Probably the opposite of an enclave, but I did not bother to Google enclave or find a dictionary. An exclave is a portion of territory of one state completely surrounded by territory of another.

TK: Ah, okay. So there’s like a town of the United States that’s in Canada.

AB: That’s the one.

TK: Oh my gosh, is it?

AB: Now, I’m a little surprised. Trace is from the coast, everybody. Well, I say the coast. Anybody who lives in Seattle is not on the coast west to by five to me is the coast or somewhere within like 20 miles of I5 you’re the coast, everybody.

TK: That’s true.

AB: That side of the mountains, pretty much anything on the other side of the pass to me, that’s true. So this is an area that dates back to 1846 when the UK and the u s settled the Pacific northwest American Canadian border dispute. But you didn’t know that was a thing that sounds fancy. There was a treaty and they pretty much got their ruler out and just shot line across Washington State. So 49th parallel. That’s us. They did not pay attention to the little bloop of land that is out in the sound. And that comes down from Canada is not connected to the US at all.

TK: Oh.

AB: And so they’re looking at that. They’re like, Huh, well, you guys can still have that. It’s fine. So we have it and there’s discussion over the years on and off repeatedly, like this doesn’t work super great. What do we think now it’s ours. It just stays ours.

TK: So what is this place called because…

AB: Oh! Point Roberts, I’m sorry. Point Roberts, Washington, everybody. So Washington State, we’re in the upper left. The population as of 2010 was about 1300 folks in the summer. They get up to about 4,500. Um Point Roberts is out in Boundary Bay, not attached to the US at all. You have to drive Bellingham drive to Blaine, Washington and then you’d head up over and around.

TK: Got It.

AB: Cross into Canada and back out of Canada into the US again, it’s about a 40 minute drive.

TK: Wow.

AB: No ferry system.

TK: None.

AB: No. You could take your private boat and there’s no ferry that goes from there.

TK: Nope.

AB: Oh No. So because 1500 people maybe no, they don’t get a ferry.

TK: That’s true.

AB: And infrastructure is a little challenging because their seat of government is in Washington State proper over in Whatcom County and they’re a bit of an afterthought, it sounds like as far as they worked for I think two years to get a stoplight because it’s like you’re so far away to represent the needs you have to prove and they’re so little. They’re school children. There’s a k through three school in 2017 there where students and one nice teacher who taught a k three Combo class.

Turn up the Skrillex to ward off some pesky bloodsucking insects. And possibly your neighbors.

Show Notes:

Smithsonian Mag Skrillex Mosquitos

Photo Credit: Michael Nusbaum, www.mikenusbaum.com

Corrections: 

Skrillex is not EDM according to my husband. I argue that he is credited as an EDM artist by The Internet, but acknowledge it may not be his main genre. 

Sorry. AB

Episode Transcript: 

Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Trace Kerr and I’m Amy Barton and this is a Brain Storm.

AB: I would like to talk about mosquitoes today and specifically the article title. So great. It’s a Smithsonian again.

TK:I love the Smithsonian. They’re such a good resource.

AB: And they did an article about how Skrillex may help ward off mosquito bites. Skrillex so Skrillex is not a cleaning product. It is a musical–(interrupted)

TK: What they…

AB: Yep, I know. Doesn’t it sound like like I’m going to get my Skrillex and really go clean the oven out.

TK Yeah. It sounds like something that would come in a wipe, you know, maybe or with Abrasive, you could get it with extra pumice.

AB: Oh yeah. Skrillex is EDM, which I had to Google. It’s electronic dance music and I’m not, I should’ve looked up how they decided that this might be a subject they wanted to test. The scientists who looked into this wanted to know the effect of different kinds of music on mosquitoes and specifically this Skrillex the dance music. So that’s really low base. Lots of high kind of, you know, it’s, it’s techno kind of, it’s not techno, but you know, for those as my age, techno would be the closest analogous thing. So the Scrillex has a song called Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites and it is all over the place, it’s not super chill and mellow, lots of low, lots of high. And so scientists did an experiment where they put speaker in a cage and put mosquitoes in this cage, no food for the mosquitoes for a long time. They put one male and lots of ladies in the cage. Oh, and a restraint hamster. So this bummer for the hamster, but it’s only mosquitoes. Everybody just remember it’s just mosquitoes.

TK: More science where people are going to be like, we can’t do science.
AB: I know, but this one just results in a need for calamine lotion. So, um, so they had a control and the test cage test cage, they had Skrillex playing control cage. They played no music. It was a silent cage. And what they discovered was that the mosquitoes in the Skrillex cage, they took two to three minutes for them to find the hamster. And that’s a long time. The control cage, 30 seconds found the hamster started biting that poor thing.

TK: I hope that they alleviated the poor hamster.

AB: The Skrillex cage though. It took two to three minutes and they made fewer attempts to feed and when it came to mating, their average was low too because they have a coordinated wing pattern, they just could not. And so, so it was five times fewer in the um, Skrillex cage.

TK: Wow.

AB: Yeah. So the mosquitoes in the silent cage, normal eating normal procreation, but Skrillex is not their jam.
TK: Okay. But now we just had a store at station break and we tend to listen to some Skrillex.

B: Yes. So we listened to, what was it called again?

AB: Scary monsters and Nice sprites.

TK: Okay. I guess, you know, it’s got a lot of really high frequency, like buzzy sounds and I imagine that maybe that’s interfering with mosquito communication.

AB: Yeah.

TK: And if we weren’t listening on a phone, it probably has a decent amount...