Brain Junk

Born in Kansas in 1877, Maud grew up to be the first white female tattoo artist in the United States.

Show Notes:

image:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/maud-wagner

Maud Stevens Wagner http://www.theheroinecollective.com/maud-wagner/ List

Episode Transcript: 

Welcome to brain junk. I’m Amy Barton and I’m Trace Kerr and it’s time for a Brain Storm.

TK: So I found this website, theheroincollective.com heroin. It sounded weird like the lady. Yeah, like you know, male hero. Right. And they had an article about this woman named Maude Stevens Wagner.

AB: I like her name.

TK: I like her name too. You need to Google her and take a look because she is the first known female tattoo artists in the United States.

AB: Really?

TK: Yes. Born in Kansas in 1877 Maud Stevens Wagner was a young adult in Kansas. She began her career as a circus performer. She was doing acrobatics and contortionists and things like that and she worked her way up from local circuses to a bigger circus. And then she was at the St Louis World’s fair in 1904.

AB: Really?

Yup. Here we are. Circling back around. Remember for a while there, it seemed like everything happened at the Saint Louis world’s fair.
AB: Well, I think it did.

TK: Maude happened there and there she met Gus Wagner who was called the tattooed globe trotter.

AB: Awesome.

TK: And he had, uh, tattoos all over his body.

AB: I’m hoping he was bald with a map on his head.

TK: Yeah. And he was known for stick and poke tattoos.

AB: Ooh. So like the traditional tribal.

TK: Well kind of. So machines were already becoming a thing then tattoo machines and it’s got, you know, a whole bunch of little needles in there poking into the skin will stick and poke is one needle and you’re getting ink on it and then yes, you’re doing your tattoo.

AB: Oh, that sounds laborious. Dot by dot by dot.

TK: Yeah. So, and there’s some debates about how it went down, but it is thought that in return for a date. So Gus Wagner was like, Hey, contortion actually want to go out. She demanded lessons on how to Tattoo.
AB: I like the idea.

TK: So she learned how to do the stick and poke method from Wagner and they got married and she was soon covered with tattoos herself.

AB: I just looked up a picture, she totally was.

TK: Let me describe some of them. So she had a woman sitting astride, a lion on her chest, a patriotic, patriotic eagle, and an American flag on her left bicep along with her name, monkeys, horses, butterflies, trees, like palm trees, swallows. These were tattoos that were very popular at the time.

AB: Okay.

TK: And also popular for the stick and poke particular style. And as she got more tattoos on her body, not only was she tattooing other people, but then she also became a circus sideshow.

AB: She was a tattooed woman.

TK: Yeah. That would’ve been pretty rare outside of the sailors. So she was doing her contortions and things like that, but she was more of a headlining kind of thing than one of the group.
AB: So Maud, Gus, they had a daughter Loveta and Maude began teaching Lavetta the stick and poke tattoo method when she was nine.

AB: Wow. Really?

TK: Yup. But here’s the interesting thing. So Maud refu...

A half-marathon running dog, Japan’s pet cafes, cats maybe recognizing their names (because cats am I right?), and expensive pet pampering. We’ve got it all in this end of summer, back to school episode.

Show Notes:

Ikefukurou Cafe:

• Owls! You can carry them around and pet them


• They are on instagram! Https://instagram.com/ikefukurou_cafe?igshid=n8thw413ky46

This episode will have you outside with a sharpened stake, a hammer, a slab of metal and an empty coffee can. That’s right, we’re going to be talking about charming worms right out of the ground and explaining the science behind how it works. ‘Cause it DOES work and you’re going to want to try.

Show Notes:

Worm Charming aka worm grunting http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/10/21/2396935.htm

Seagulls tap dancing on dirt to scare up worms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N93bKtWB6w

Episode Transcript

Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Amy Barton, and I’m Trace Kerr and it’s time for a Brain Storm.

TK: So I have some truly stellar show notes for this little brainstorm. And it all centers around a video that Zo sent me on Instagram. Seagulls tap dancing on dirt to scare up worms. She was like, have you ever seen this? And it’s a regular looking seagull, you know, white and gray and it’s in grass, but it’s tamped down the grass to where it’s bare dirt and it looks like it’s doing a tap dance. It’s just Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah, Dah. You want put flamenco music in the back, kind of back, back and forth, back and forth. And the title underneath said, seagull making it sound like rain. So worms, worms will come to the surface. And I said, I don’t know about that. So what are the seagulls doing when they’re tapping their little feet? They’re creating vibrations and the worms are coming to the surface. And a lot of people thought that the sound is mimicking rain. So if you put in the seagull thing, one of the first thing that comes up is something called worm charming.

AB: Ooh, I liked that.

TK That he goes to the warm charmers. They are worm. Charming. Oh yes. And then also people can worm charm or as we like to call it, worm grunting.

AB: I am for sure right now in my real life, my son will be late. As soon as he listens to this, he’s like, we’re going to go do some warm, charming. We have to go make this happen.

TK: You have to try worm charming that people do. You drive a wooden stake into the ground and you have a piece of metal, 10 pounds of metal. It looks almost like a wood file. And they get on their knees and they run rump across the top of the wood.

AB: Really?

TK: Yes. And you can see the ground around the base of the wood vibraver yeah, there’s shivering in the thing.

AB: Okay.

TK: Yeah. And then they call that a roofing iron. So they’re running that across the top to create this warbling sound. And I am not kidding. Hundreds of worms come to the surface if you’re in the right place.

AB: I kind of want to try this now.

TK: And there’s, there’s a worm grunting festival in Sop chupy Oh Gosh, sorry Florida. That dates back a hundred years. Hundreds of warm grunterswould apply their skills in the Apalachicola national forest. They would, they were harvesting millions of worms for sport fishing and actually in the 1960s had to close the forest to the warm grunters. AB: Wow.

TK:Because they were concerned that they were going to decimate the worm population. So and watching people do it, they’re making the noise this across the top of the stick and then you see worms shooting out of the dirt. I wanted to try like run, but it looks like they’re running. I know I went and tried it this afternoon and I don’t think I banged my stick into the ground far enough and I didn’t have a big enough piece of metal cause I was running it across the top and I was making vibrations like within an inch of the stick. When you’re watching these people do it with their 10 pound weight, it’s at least a foot around that. You can see the ground jumping and does it like a file? How does it make the, it looks like the piece, it clearly can’t be flat. It has to have some sort...

Absorbing oxygen through their “skin” and pumping blood with their guts, the Giant Sea Spider isn’t a true spider, but it’s close. Too close for Trace.

Show Notes: 

Live Science Sea Spider Study

Image Courtesy Live Science.

Episode Transcript

Welcome to brain junk. I’m trace Kerr and I’m Amy Barton. And this is a brainstorm.

AB: I am super excited to talk to you about this subject. It is giant sea spiders.

TK: Oh God.

Yeah. Not just little spiders. Big, big, big spiders. You know, I like context for the size of things, right? Yes. So giant sea spiders truly are giant. They’re about 28 inches. 70 centimeters. So for your context, the actor Vern Troyer 32 inches. So it’s almost one Vern Troyer. Danny Devito is two giant sea spiders tall.

TK: I like nothing about this. So it’s like the size of a basketball.

Yeah, bigger I think. Ah, 28 inches.

TK: Imagine Danny Devito cut in half floating in the ocean. That’s also equally horrifying.
AB: This podcast has taken a turn and we are in my first point already. So giant sea spiders, they live in the deep, deep, cold, cold. And scientists are curious about how, how do they get so big and the process, how do they stay alive? So scientists from the University of Hawaii at, I’m gonna say Minoa, a doctoral student of zoology. Kaitlin Shishido did some studies to see how does this happen. So what they did was they, let’s ramble. Okay. Back to my notes.

TK: Sounds good.

AB: It’s an actual spider, like it’s not a crab that looks like a spider.

TK: How do we have an underwater spider?

AB: That part I didn’t look up. You know, I’m only interested in the one thing.

TK: I know. The way they breathe that bothers me.

AB: Oh, actually this is, that’s totally what this is all about. Then you, okay. Derailed me.

TK: I’m sorry.
AB: What was eventually found was that the way that they can grow so huge is that their exoskeletons become holey like Swiss cheese. As they grow, they get more and more holey, which means they can take in more and more oxygen. Oh, so they did some studies and then the idea known as oxygen temperature hypothesis suggests that animals living in extremely cold waters can grow to extraordinary sizes because they have slow metabolisms. The water can hold more oxygen than warm water can. So there’s lots of water, lots of oxygen available. It’s a lot of work for your body to capture oxygen and bring it into cells. It’s a big process. Okay. And so the bigger we get, the harder it is for our bodies. But that doesn’t seem to be the case with these guys. They don’t have that problem. And one of the reasons is that cold water, they need less oxygen.
They get more because the water is more heavily oxygenated and so you can grow more in the cold water. So the researchers went to McMurdo Station in Antarctica to study spiders.

TK: Oh my gosh.

AB: Yeah. They had to go to Alaska to find the Alaska spiders. Trace is looking them up.

TK: I’m looking up spiders keep going.

AB: They’re going full and horrifying there.

TK: Totally. So, and what are they called again?

AB: Giant Sea spiders.

TK: Oh, I hate everything about this. Okay, keep going. Sorry.

AB: So we’re at McMurdo station. Yep. They’re getting themselves some spiders and they went ahead and put them in spider bootcamp. And this is going to horrify you even more because what they did to test the relative health of the spiders versus… Trace is doing it looks like the potty dance. But it’s a, it looks like the alien, like it’s going to attach itself to your face.
TK: Exactly. But it’s kind of skinny or like an anemic it. Oh, okay. I’m...

At the age of 42, Bridget Mason won a court case in California that freed her and her daughters from slavery. She went on to become a California real estate developer and a prolific philanthropist. She also funded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. That church stands to this day and its 19,000 members share in her legacy.

Episode Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk. I’m Amy Barton and I’m Trace Kerr and it’s time for a Brain Storm.
TK: So one thing I don’t normally do is research people. I don’t know why I’m, I’m a big like animal science kind of super freak. And so, I was talking to Zoe and she was like, mom, you need to talk about some amazing women. So great. I went looking and I found Bridget “Biddy” Mason.
AB: I had a grandma named Bitty.
TK: You did?
AB: Step grandma.
TK: Oh, well I don’t think she was probably born in 1818.
AB: That does not apply to this. No, she was not. As kids, we thought she was, but no, she was not.
TK: You’re like, she’s ancient. Well, Biddy Mason. She was a slave. She was sold from family to family in Georgia and South Carolina before being owned by a family of Mormon. Converts.
AB: Wow.
TK: Yup. Who decided to move their home from a plantation in Mississippi to Utah territory. So this is when she was 30 that this happened. She was still a slave and she was given the job of hurding her owner’s cattle on this 1700 mile trek behind a 300 wagon caravan to the new homestead
AB: That’s so far. I mean, just so many logistical questions about that choice.
TK: This woman’s life is just amazing. They moved to Utah territory when she was 30 in 1851 when Betty was 33, the household moved again to San Bernardino, California.
AB: Oh my word.
TK: Well, and here’s the crazy thing. Uh, in 1850, California became a free state, no slavery. It’s suspected that she did not know at the time that it was a free state and they moved there and then not long after they moved, they’re fearful that he would lose his slaves. Bitties owner moved them to Texas.
AB: Oh my word. That poor woman, the thousands of miles that she probably walk.
TK: But here’s what’s, so here’s where her life begins to turn around and everything changes. Well, help by members of the black community, most particularly by a young man who was interested in marrying one of her daughters. In 1856, she petitioned the court and won freedom for herself and her daughters in total 13 members of her extended family.
AB: Wow.
And she moved them all to Los Angeles and worked as a midwife. After 10 years of hard work and savings, she bought a site on Spring Street in Los Angeles for $250 becoming one of the first black women to own land in Los Angeles. That’s a big deal. The property ownership, huge deal. I mean, think about it. And that was, you know, 1860s she managed to save $250 it was a lot of money.
AB: Yeah. I’m wondering about the, I’ve heard it’s not easy to figure out the math difference from then to today, but what it was worth, what was probably, it was worth a lot.
TK: Yeah. So you’d think, okay, so here’s someone who’s in her mid forties you know, and this is in the late 1800’s.
AB: What’s life expectancy like?
Well, in 1884 at the age of 66 she sold a parcel of land because she continued to purchase land…
AB: Smart lady!
TK: for $1,500 and she built a commercial building with rentals in it.
AB: Oh, nice man.
TK: Her business skills were so cool that she accumulated a fortune of almost $300,000
AB: Holy cow. That is big.
TK: I know. In her lifetime.
AB: Wow.
TK: And wait, there’s more. Bridget Mason was the founding member of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1872 she gave to charities. She visited inmates. And so here’s the thing that really roasted my cookies. So she died January 5th, 1891 and was buried in an unmarked gra...

Just in time for vacation season here in the US, Brain Junk goes on the road (metaphorically) to bring you cool places we’ve been or want to go. Carlsbad Caverns, the Seattle gum wall, a visit to the Weeki Watchee Mermaids, or a B&B shaped like a beagle. Don’t forget to bring licorice for Amy and, buckle up, Trace called shotgun.

Show Notes:

https://www.dogbarkpark.com/lodging-bed-and-breakfast/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40616-4

Ants hunt for food, but how do they know how to get back? Content warning: Science is messy. Some ants were harmed and we talk about it. Not in great detail, but we thought you should know.

Episode Transcript:

AB: Welcome to bring to them Amy Barton. And I’m trace Kerr and it’s time for a Brain Storm.

TK: So we’re gonna talk about ants. This was an idea that, uh, my daughter’s threw at me the other day because she saw a picture, I think on Instagram. It’s on stilts.

AB: I’m excited already.

TK: Right? Science magazine, 2006. So ants that live in the Sahara desert, they never seem to get lost. You know, they wander everywhere and yet when they find food, so they’re wandering around and these meandering trails, they find some food and then they turn and immediately make a straight shot back to the nest.

AB: Wow.

TK: Yeah. So scientists had already discovered that there’s ants had one trick up their tiny sleeves and that is that the desert ants seem to memorize the position of landmarks. to keep track of the direction they’re facing. They don’t have a bloodhound sense of smell, but so they’ll find the food and go, okay, mountains are over here. That means, you know, the nest is that way. But then one of the things they wondered is how do they know how far they’ve come? Yes, that’s a legit, how do they know when to stop and you know, to look for the nest. So one theory was they were keeping track of their steps, like a mini ant fitbit. We’ve hit 1400 guys. Time to stop. So they have a some sort of internal step counters. So Matthias Villinger, a biologist at the University of alm and Germany. They set up an ant colony outside the lab and they let 25 ants take a 10 meter trip from the nest and then they collected them. Some of the ants were given stilts on all six legs and I have pictures of this in the show notes. They effectively double the length of their legs. They look like they’re wearing little stilettos, some ants. I know some ants were the control group, so they didn’t do anything to them and they were given food and let go. And the ants that were the control group took their food, went straight back to the nest and they were good. The ants on the stilts walked five meters farther past the nest. Half the distance. More beyond colluded. Yeah, more because they were walking bit longer steps. Oh. And then they stopped and then they looked around for the nest fed.

AB: Bummer dude. What happened?

TK: And then I have to tell you about the third group of ants and I was a little torn about talking about this, but you talked about dropping off worm heads. So um, science is messy. Yes. The third group of ants that made the 10 meter trip, they called them the stub group.
AB: Oh!

TK: Because while they put stilts on a batch of ants to see if they would walk farther, they amputated the legs half of the legs, like at the knees, another group of ants and he still walk and they could still that. I was thinking, how hardcore are you to get your job done that your legs have been amputated and yet you still pick up your piece of food and you try to walk back to the nest.

AB: They only went five meters?

TK: They went half the distance and then they stopped and looked for the nest and they couldn’t find it. All right. I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to meet Jim, the scientists at a party. What do you do, Jim? Tell me about your work. Well, today I put stilts on ants. Yeah. And Bob over there. He chopped the legs off of them. But here’s the really, this is what caught my attention when I was researching this. Okay. So this was in science magazine, right? And the original paper is titled The ant odometer stepping on stilts and stumps.

AB: The one thing I have learned through our time podcasting for Brain Junk is that scientists have a much stronger sense of whimsy than I expected. Yeah. I love that brainstorm. Wow.

TK: I’m s...

Like a scaly cheetah, galloping crocs were a terror both on land and in the water. Good thing they lived 100 million years ago.

Where Trace shows how much she can’t math OR spell and Amy reveals she multitasks better with a high cognitive load. We also look into the science of how infants acquire language while asleep and how to build muscle without exercise.

Sending a little love to our listeners in the Southern Hemisphere. It might be summer here, but it's the middle of winter down south. Turn on some lights, friends, and get to feeling better.