The Earth once vibrated for 9 days straight

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.

FACT: A seismic “donk” once rocked the world

By Sara Kiley Watson 

On September 16, 2023, vibrations shook the entire world—and didn’t stop for nine days. The phenomenon started in East Greenland, but in the space of an hour, the strange hums had spread via the Earth’s crust and reached all the way to the other end of the world in Antarctica. Across the entire world, seismic monitoring stations, the ones we typically use to keep an eye on earthquakes and the like, started lighting up in response. But the noise that came through to the seismologists was nothing like the quick, car-crash-like noise that typically occurs with earthquakes. Instead, every 90 seconds, you’d hear this one “donk”—and it looked far from normal on a graph. 

The cause? A domino-fall that started with climate change. A melting glacier could no longer support a mountaintop in a fjord in East Greenland, and when that mountain top came crashing down it created a mega-tsunami about 650 feet tall. That tsunami then created a rocking seiche, or a standing wave, which was stuck going back and forth inside the narrow fjord. This back and forth motion made the whole planet shake. Luckily, there were no casualties in this remote corner of the world, but it’s another spooky reminder of how climate change can make for strangeness that sends the whole world buzzing. 

FACT: You probably can’t make yourself immune to poison 

By Trace Dominguez 

One of my favorite questions we ever got on That’s Absurd, Please Elaborate came from a listener named Tessa on Spotify. She asked: How long would it have taken Wesley to build up his immunity to iocane powder? You know, that iconic scene in The Princess Bride—poisoned wine, a battle of wits, one man drops dead, the other smugly reveals he’s been microdosing poison this whole time?

I went way too hard on this one. Like, 40-minutes-of-absurd-scientific-deep-dive hard. Because I had to know: could you actually do that? Could you really build up immunity to a poison?

This week on Weirdest Thing, I dig into the wild history of Mithridates VI—aka the Poison King—who allegedly drank small amounts of poison daily to become immune (and yeah, probably was not a great dude). I break down the science of what poisons and venoms actually are, how they affect the body differently, and whether you can train your immune system to fight them off.

Spoiler: poisons like arsenic or cyanide mess with your body in ways you can’t just “get used to.” But venoms—like the kind from the insanely venomous inland taipan snake (which is, of course, Australian)—now, that’s a different story. Venoms trigger immune responses, meaning there’s some basis for building tolerance…if you’re very careful.

To get the full deep dive on poison (and venom) immunity, check out my show That’s Absurd Please Elaborate. 

FACT: Peeing might be contagious (in chimps) 

By Rachel Feltman

Pee comes up pretty often on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. We’ve talked about folks selling it. We’ve talked about doctors drinking it. We’ve talked about why you can’t help but let it loose the second you get home from running errands. We’ve even talked about how some bugs can use “super propulsion” to launch their urine out like little missiles. On this week’s episode, we’re exploring that phenomenon where people get up to use the bathroom together—except in chimps. 

A new study out of Japan has uncovered previously undocumented behavior in one of our closest animal relatives: contagious urination. Researchers at the Kumamoto Sanctuary observed 20 captive chimpanzees for more than 600 hours, recording over 1,300 individual urination events. They found a statistically significant phenomenon of chimps being more likely to pee right after seeing other chimps go.

This clustering of urination events wasn’t random. Chimps were more likely to pee if they were within visual range of a peer who’d just done the same, and higher-ranking individuals were more likely to set off a chain reaction. Surprisingly, though, the likelihood of simultaneous peeing didn’t seem to depend on how socially close the chimps were, which sets this behavior apart from better-known contagious behaviors like yawning.

Contagious yawning, common in humans and other social animals, is thought to be linked to social bonding, empathy, and group coordination—but the evolutionary driver behind contagious peeing remains unclear. The researchers offered a few ideas: it might be a way of preparing for a group activity (“everyone go before we get back on the road!”), or it could help keep scent markers concentrated in one place, reducing the chances of predators catching a whiff. But we can’t know for sure! 

 

More deals, reviews, and buying guides

The PopSci team has tested hundreds of products and spent thousands of hours trying to find the best gear and gadgets you can buy.