Brain Junk

Born in 1832, Mary Fields was the first African-American female Star Route mail carrier in the United States. Wearing two guns that she sometimes belted over men’s clothing, Stagecoach Mary had no time for mail thieves in 1890s Montana.

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

Stagecoach Mary Transcript:

AB: I am going to tell you about Stagecoach Mary, it’s a wonderful story and for me it’s the message of “try a thing. You never know what will happen. Throw your hat in the ring.”

TK: Oh, that’s good.

AB: Yeah. Stagecoach Mary was actually named Mary Fields and she was born a slave and freed and worked in the home of a judge in Tennessee until the wife died, and judge couldn’t take care of the kids, so they sent kids to family somewhere else. She took the kids on that trip, and met Mother Mary Amadeus when she got there and ended up being linked with Mother Mary Amadeus a lot of her life. She dropped the kids off with family and then stayed with Mother Mary until she, Mother Amadeus, went to Montana. She got sick and Mary followed her to take care of her. So she must have known her long enough to develop some kind of bond. Mary ended up staying with her  in montana and working, and she became pretty well known in the community.The Native americans called her White Crow because she acted like a white woman but was black. Because she had been so long in the company of a white home she didn’t have to her peers around, the white family were her peers, and so she was an anomaly in the community. The white people also did not know what to do with her. They said she drinks whiskey and she swears and she is a Republican which makes her a low, foul creature. No commentary on political views.I don’t know what that looked like at that time period, in the late 1880’s-I think things have shifted since that time.

TK: Yeah, a little bit.

AB: So she stood out in her community, was a really interesting person. And she stayed and worked for a long time. She actually seems to be have somewhat beloved but also stood out, in 1894 after several complaints and an incident with a disgruntled man. Things ended in gun play. Although she was beloved enough that when laws changed where women couldn’t be in the saloons, she was granted clements, she could go in still. But my favorite thing about Mary Fields in her exciting, interesting life is that she was the first African American female star route mail carrier in the US. star routes were not directly government employees, they were contract work. So you would bid and then you could have people running it for you. You supervised it, you had to make sure the work got done. But, you didn’t have to do it. She did all the work and the way she got this job is in 1895, she was almost sixty, but she was hired for this star route because she was the fastest applicant to hitch a team of six horses. That’s how she won.

TK: At the age of sixty?

AB: that’s right

TK: badass!

AB: right? Go Mary. and so she served two terms , approximately eight years i believe. They were four year terms. She drove a horse team with a mule named Moses on it and never missed a day. Her reliability is what got her the name Stagecoach Mary. never snow too deep for her. Sometimes she delivered the mail on her shoulders on snow shoes.

TK: Wow!

AB: So, she retired at seventy one but continued to babysit in the cascades and operated a laundry s...

Amaryllis and her bleeding heart, the origin of the Milky Way, Maori style, Thor and Loki crash a wedding and hippo poop. They didn’t teach these myths in school.

Two percent of the population has the almost uncanny ability to recognize and remember faces from chance meetings even years before. We talk about how and why AND tell you about a test you can take to see where you fit on the spectrum.

Here’s the link for the test!!!!

Super Recognizers 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 heard this NPR story about a Scotland Yard Super Recognizer.

AB: I like that idea.

TK: They are used to identify people of interest from closed circuit television. So let’s talk about what a super recognizer is. That’s a person who can memorize a person’s face in an instant and they’re able to recall them years later. So even if you only met once, like if I saw you across the room, then four or five years later if I bumped into you, I’d be like “Hey! I bumped into you at the so-and-so’s party!” and you don’t even remember the party. Well, there were people who were studying reasons for why people have trouble recognizing familiar faces. And these researchers, led by Russell Duchenne, they were doing some studies and then they had four people who had better than ordinary ability to memorize faces.

AB: But not memory overall in general.

TK: Well no, but this isn’t memorizing, this is this super recognizing thing. One person said “I learned to stop surprising people with comments like “Weren’t you at so and so concert last fall and I recognize you?”. Another one said “I have to pretend I don’t remember people because it seems like I’m stalking them.”

AB: It’s weird.

TK: Yeah, or they mean more to me than they do when I recall that we saw each other. And so they’ll be like “Oh! She remembered me!” and it’s like, no, I remember everybody. Don’t take it personally.

AB Before I had kids I would say I had, I would say a little better than average-I’m not a super recognizer, but I could probably remember “Oh hey, it’s Sally from fourth grade! How are you?” Now that I have kids that’s gone away, but totally is a little bit weird for people that don’t.

TK: And since we’re on a spectrum, so, in this paper, they tested the four people who were  super recognizers against 24 other regular people. With the BFTW test-the Before they were Famous test.

AB: I was making up my on in my head. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger working in a Dairy Queen…

TK: Yes, or and they will also remove the hair and things like that, so you’re just looking at the facial features. And it was startling how much better the super recognizers did. They have graphs and, you know, you’ve got your straight line, which is the median, and your 26 people are kind sprinkled all around it on the lower 1/3rd and then the four were way up on thir own for recognizing faces.

AB: Even without the context of “Oh, he’s a redhead.”?

TK: Yeah, they don’t exactly know why some people are so much better at this. Most agree that being able to recognize faces is important. They found that infants demonstrate a preference for faces within an hour of birth, even if it’s just a paper plate with two eyes and a smile on it. They will look at those things, so we’re attuned to look at faces. And it does seem to be genetic. They’ve tested identical twins versus fraternal twins. So identical twins, they’re one egg...

Meet C. explodens; where worker ants rupture their own abdomens–filled with toxic goo–to protect the colony from predators.

Exploding Ants Transcript:

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

And this Brain Storm was actually inspired by the delightful Lani Caraway, who sent us a wonderful post. And this is a bit of a divergence from that, but Lani, you did inspire this. So it’s about exploding ants.

TK: Oh god!

AB: So great! All of my subjects are SO cheerful.

TK: I would imagine the ants don’t feel so great about the exploding part.

AB: They’re doing it for the greater good, so I would imagine they feel noble in their moment of sacrifice.

TK: Of explosion? All right, Tell me about exploding ants.

AB:In the spring of 2018 a group of scientists officially published the name and description of the species colobopsis explodens, and they call them c explodens in a lot of their papers. And apparently, to categorize a species it’s not, you know, they name it after themselves and it happens in that moment. It is not. They observe the thing, but until they describe the whole structured colony, in this case, the queen, the worker, females, males, the whole ball of wax, they won’t give it a name. And so finally, this year they had enough information they observed. There was a whole colony at Kuala Belalong Field Studies in Brunai, and so scientists had been watching the ants eagerly. And one of the interesting things about this group is, there is a group of ants in the doorway and as the ants come in and go out the guard ants just touch everybody. Just “Hey, Bob, hey Jim.” Actually it’s all ladies.

TK: I was going to say they’re all female, so it’s like “Hey Bertha.”

AB: And so the cool thing, the reason they’re called the c explodens is that as this touching process is happening, these guard ants, if they perceive a predator and not Phyllis, what happens when a predator is perceived when their nest is being invaded, they rupture their own abdomens and that releases a sticky, bright yellow fluid that has toxins in it that oozes onto the predator and it’s toxic so they will die. And so they really are sacrificing themselves for the greater good of the colony. Which is something that we saw in-again, I wish you could see Trace’s face-uh, we saw that in the sick ants episode. They’re willing to do what is best for the colony. It’s such an interesting phenomenon to see in multiple ways. I think Trace is looking for a video of the exploding ants.

TK: You bet your bippy I’m looking for a video of the exploding ants.

AB: Alice Laciny is a graduate student from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, and she is one of the authors on the paper. You’ll have to go, I’m going to put a link to the article in the New York Times on this, and go read it, because they made her very relatable. At one point they realized “Oh my gosh! There’s males flying out of the colony!” So they go dashing after them to try to document and catch, because they need to have samples of this. So I just have this image of her running through the forest with her little vials trying to catch them.

TK: Oh gosh-this is awful! They explode upon contact-oh! And here’s an ant covered with goo.

AB: That’s why it touches them and doesn’t just observe. You might get the death grab,

One more example of how farmers MacGyver everything. No phone lines? Use the fence.

Barbed Wire Phones:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m Amy Barton.

And I’m Trace Kerr, and it’s time for a Brain Storm. This was a subject that in the middle of the night practically, my daughter says “You’ve got to check this out!” and so here we are.

AB: Alright.

TK: So in 1874, we have the invention of barbed wire, and people start using to do fencing all around their farms, you know, to keep their animals in, and in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell came up with the telephone. Well, by the 1880’s, farmers were figuring out that they could set up their own phones, because the rural areas were not getting phone lines it was just too expensive to run that stuff all over the place  because you’ve got a 200 acre farm, and then another 200 acre farm.

AB: Yeahhh.

TK: Well they were taking smooth wire from their phone, to the top wire of their barbed wire fence and hooking it up. And then, you know, the guy at the next farm is taking the wire and he’s going out and hooking it to the barbed wire fence, so surrounding farms were all connected through miles of wire AND..

AB: They already were, so...huh!

TK: Yeah, so they’re hooking the phone up the fence in their yard and up to 20 farmers could be connected that way.

AB: Giant party line?
TK: Yes. So it was a party line, and the quality wasn’t all that great, but still, they credit it with helping with depression, and isolation because one farm wife, she was saying that she was on a 160 acre farm and she was all by herself, all day long, she said that everybody had their own, individual ring that they came up with. So, you know, if it was two shorts, because you cranked the phone, you knew that was Thelma’s house, and if it was three longs you knew it was this person’s house. She said the minute it rang everybody ran for the phone. And everybody knew everybody’s business because you know, it’s a party line.What was great about this, is in an emergency, you got one long, everybody knows that’s an emergency and they all go to their phones, and they all know what to do.

AB: So you don’t have that delay in “well could somebody ride out to John’s farm and get the doctor”, everybody already knows.

TK: Yup. Everybody knows and everybody could help. And Atlas Obscura had an article in there, and this one particular community, five rings meant that someone with a radio had the evening news on, and then everybody could pick up and listen to the news and get the weather report.

AB: That is excellent! That is so resourceful. I love that creativity. Wow.

TK: I do to. So you’d think that as time marched on, that this would kind of fade.Well, several farms in Texas had barbed wire phones until the 1970’s.

AB: Wow-really?

TK: Yeah!

AB: Wow! I was just thinking as you talked that is totally something that my grandpa and his buddies, it sounds like that generation, and his parents, would have been the kind of folks who would “Well I’ve got some wire in the garage, I bet we could…”

TK: Just hook up the phone, and then if you had, and you know, if your fence broke, yes that would interrupt...

The internet claims lobsters are immortal. Amy pulls a Dana Scully and debunks the heck out of that idea.

Long Lives of Lobsters Transcript:

Welcome to Brain Junk, I’m Trace Kerr.

And I’m Amy Barton, and this is a Brain Storm! I have good news, and bad news: Lobsters are not immortal.

TK: Oh.

AB: I didn’t realize, until recently, that was a hypothesized thing, they do not live forever.

TK: OK. (laughs)

AB: So backtracking to why there was this thought. Apparently all growing living things have what scientists call senescence, and that is the process of deteriorating with age. Loss of a cell’s power of division and growth.

TK: Right.

AB: That’s not an observed thing in lobsters, basically. They keep growing and growing and growing, they shed their skin, and then they grow some more. Then the internet says “They’re immortal! They live forever!”

TK: Well, and there was probably some thought, I mean even back in the day-you see this lobster, and it sheds it’s shell, then it’s soft and it gets a new shell and they just keep getting bigger and bigger. It would be easy to guess that hey, where’s the limit? It just keeps going.

AB: Yes. And they keep pulling giant lobsters out of the deep, deep ocean, and so you see these huge creatures and think “Wow!”. And so it is true, lobsters keeping eating , growing and reproducing right up until the end of life, like most decapod crustaceans, that’s also crayfish and shrimp, they have intermediate growth. That means they don’t reach a set size limit in their lifetime and they continue to grow til they die, or, they actually are more often killed than die of natural causes.

TK: Yeah, I was going to say they continue growing until they end up on someone’s dinner plate probably.

AB: Mmmhmmm, yeah. That is often the case.According to Carl Wilson, he is the Lead Lobster Biologist, I just want to say that again. “Hi, I’m Carl Wilson, the Lead Lobster Biologist  with the Maine Department of Marine Resources.” He probably doesn’t sound like that.

TK: Probably not at all.

AB: If that were me I’d be “Hi! I’m Amy Barton, the Lead Lobster Lady. I’m a biologist.” I would totally lead with that title.

TK: I would too.

AB: He says between ten and fifteen percent of lobsters die naturally.

TK: Wow! That’s low. How long is a lobster life?

AB: Mmmmmmm…..I didn’t do that science. Could be years and years.

TK: Let’s find out, cause that’s something I think I want to know.

AB:But they do, initially as they’re young lobsters, they do molt and regrow their shells many times in their early life as they are getting up to adult size. And then it’s more of an annual process. How many annual processes is it, Trace?

TK: Well, it says that they can grow up to four feet long and weigh as much as forty pounds AND it is believed lobsters can live as long as 100 years.

AB:So they’re roughly the size of a second grader at death.

TK: Oh god!

AB: Can...

We explore a study that explains how sometimes, if you look at the data in just the right way, backpacks are as safe as parachutes.

Jump out of an airplane transcript:

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

TK: Amy, what if I told you there was a medical study that proves that parachutes don’t save people that fall out of airplanes.

AB: I would be skeptical and delighted that someone did that research.

TK: Right? So cardiologist Robert Ye, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, he decided to do a study to talk about the potential problems with research shortcuts. The people in his department, when they were on airplanes, would ask their seatmates if they would be willing to participate in a trial where they had a 50% chance of jumping out of the plane without a parachute. Everybody said no.

AB: Agreed.

TK: What a shocker, right? So they got other scientists to agree to participate in this trial. They had 23 people who were either given a backpack or a parachute and those people jumped out of either a biplane or a helicopter. K?

AB: Wow!

TK So the biplane was on the runway and the helicopter was on the runway, and although all authors and people in this study suffered from substantial abdominal discomfort from laughing, it’s technically correct that parachutes that parachutes performed no better than backpacks.

AB: I would agree.

TK: The problem that they were looking at is they didn’t have the high risk people for injury in the study, which is what happens in a lot of studies. They will be testing for the results they kind of want to get. What the people who were doing this parachute thing were saying is, the people who should have been in this study are people who are actually flying the aircraft.  Because then if you were giving them parachutes and backpacks, well you’d know, that 100% parachutes are better, right?

AB: They are!

TK: What’s the takeaway? Read the fine print.

AB: For sure. And scientists are diabolically hilarious nerds. I love them.

TK: I know. I do too. And that’s my Brain Storm!

AB: Want to hear more? We’re on Facebook and Instagram as BrainJunkPodcast, and you can find us on Twitter as @MyBrainJunk. Trace and I will catch you next time, with more of everything you never knew you wanted to know, and I guarantee you will not be bored.

TK: Especially if you’re one of the guys that got the backpack instead of the parachute.

AB: Yeah, if you didn’t read your contract carefully?
TK: Right? Who knows what could happen.

Not the big yawn that you’d think. These 100,000 or so codes are used to determine your bill. Some of those codes are hilarious. Bit by cow and struck by orca, just to name a few.

Medical Insurance Codes Transcript:

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

AB: About insurance codes.

TK: >Snores<

AB: I know! You guys are all so excited! Please, pause the show if you’re going to go to the bathroom,  don’t let it run, because I have good things to share with you! My aunt is nurse, she’s been a nurse for a long time, and I remember a few years ago she was talking about how we couldn’t go biking on certain days because her days off were restricted because they were learning a new computer system, and now, reading this article I found, it was because the World Health Organization updated the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Basically, what that long phrase is, is when you go in to see a medical professional for a reason, there used to be about 14,000 reasons for all the medical things. Ever.

TK: Codes. Codes that they would use?

AB: Yup! And that affects your billing. What your insurance company sees as having been done to you, what they will pay for, what you’re responsible for, and so the World Health Organization said “We’re going to expand this, give you a little more detail.” The ‘little more detail’ that came out in October 2015 was 100,000 codes. So that’s like a six, seven fold increase. Huge, huge explosion. So, hence that whole hospitals adopting new databases.and they had to update to accommodate this. What’s awesome about this is that expansion of codes has led to some really excellent codes.

• Bitten by a cow.


• Bitten by a chicken.


• Here’s one of my favorites: Pedestrian on foot injured in collision with roller skater.

These are insurance codes like you could go into your doctor and report that, and there’s a code for that!

TK: Wow!

AB: You could be hurt at the library or the opera specifically.

TK: >Laughing< I’m sorry!

AB: Here’s another good one, this one’s for you, Jodie Ruster: accident while knitting or crocheting.

TK: “Oh I fell on the needle and it’s right here through my spleen!”

AB: >Makes a sound simulating knitting needle impalement<

AB: How about struck by orca, initial encounter. My husband is like ‘do they not insure the secondary encounter?’
TK: I know, that’s what I was just going to say! What about another encounter?

AB: I don’t know if there’s a code for secondary encounter. Made me really happy that there was an initial one.

Struck by marine mammals.

How about burn due to water skis on fire. I didn’t read that one when I was reading the list. That one’s new to me and I love it!  

Struck by Macaw.

Sucked into jet engine.

The rings of icy dust around Saturn are so much younger than the planet. Where did they come from and why are they going away?

Saturn’s Rings Transcript:

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

TK: So Amy, Saturn’s got lots of rings around it, we’ve seen that.

AB: Yes!

TK: Well, scientists have wondered if Saturn was ‘born’ with it’s rings. Like if it all came together and those rings were there, and it turns out that’s not the case.

AB: Really.

TK: Yeah.The rings are relatively young and they’re disappearing.

AB: Really? So we are at the apex and they’re headed back down?

TK: Yes. The planet is somewhere around 4 billion years old and the rings are about 100 million years old. They formed pretty recently. Where did they come from in the first place?
AB: Yes, and I’m concerned…

TK: And the best guess right now is that icy moons collided and the debris stuck. It got pulled in by Saturn’s gravity and now it’s going around, and around, and around. And they’ve found that the rings are slowly getting pulled into the planet.

AB: Not out and away.

TK: No. So James Donahue of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight says that the ring rain that is being pulled into the planet drains an amount of water product that could fill an Olympic size swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in a half an hour. So it’s gravity that’s doing the pulling of the rings toward the planet as a rain of icy dust. And, ok, so how do we even know this?

AB: Yes!

TK: OK. So the following particles interact with Saturn’s upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, and as these particles are falling they become charged and these ions glow in infrared light. So the Keck Telescope, which we’ve got up there looking around the universe, they pointed that at Saturn, and they can see this glow.

AB: Neat!

TK: Yeah. Scientists estimate that the rings will be gone in about 300,000 million years.

AB: Oh, we are not going to see this in our lifetime. I was standing here thinking “OK, so it’s gaining more mass, and is that going to upset it from it’s rotation, and Doomsday!”

TK: No.It’s just the water is falling down to the planet.

AB: It’s cool?
TK: Yeah, But there is a theory, though, that if this is true, if Saturn was not born with it’s rings and it’s slowly taking them into the planet, that it might be that Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, that have very thin ring systems, might have at one time had much more substantial ring systems, and we’re just seeing them at the end of their process.

AB: That makes sense. That’s interesting. So much to know about space.

TK: I know, right?

AB: I’m always amazed at how scientists can know something that happened 300,000 million years ago and they’ve got the data to back it up.

TK: And math!

AB: Math.

Ostriches, honey badgers, spiders pretending to be ants and even tiny honey bees, there’s no telling who will come out on top in this animals vs. episode.