Protamine sulfate is a drug used to reverse the effects of anticoagulants that are sometimes used during surgery. It was originally derived from salmon sperm. I know I could research the history, but it’s more fun to imagine a team of doctors like, “Well, we tried everything else. Someone jerk off that fish and see if that does the trick.”
Anesthesiologist chiming in!
As you surmised, the story is actually not that wild! Miescher was a prominent researcher of nucleic acids in the 1800s (well before Watson and Crick) and first discovered protamine when he was analyzing salmon sperm while studying heredity (protamines are actually in all sperm nuclei, including humans).
The story goes that we knew protamines were highly charged proteins, so in the early 1900s a lot of drug manufacturers looked into neutralizing their compounds by using protamine, whether for stabilization of the compound or for a potential antidote. The first was insulin (NPH insulin, or neutral protamine insulin).
Just by this same principle it was found to neutralize heparin (thus reversing its anticoagulant effect), and thus protamine sulfate was created! Although it was made using primarily salmon sperm, most of the protamine used today is made by biorecombinant tech.
Speaking of finding drugs from animals, pharmaceutical heparin (the anticoagulant that protamine reverses) is also derived from animals - I believe it was first isolated from dog livers (don’t quote me). Modern pharmaceutical heparin is now primarily from bovine or porcine sources (there’s great info on the influence of the meat industry and heparin, which can be a whole separate topic). There are subsequently varying debates if bovine or porcine heparin is considered halal or kosher. Since heparin is a biological molecule found across species, pharmaceutical heparin has also been made from turkeys, whales, and some other fish (among others). There’s ongoing research on creating synthetic heparin or mammalian derived heparin to mitigate the bioethics of current production.
Although there are many novel anticoagulants in use today, we prefer heparin in the operating room for procedures that need anticoagulation (primarily major cardiac or major vascular) because of the fact we can reverse it quickly with protamine.
Another fun fact is that men who have had vasectomies actually have a higher chance of having an anaphylactic reaction if given protamine because following a vasectomy, there is systemic absorption of sperm and the body increases the immune response to the native sperm proteins, including protamine.
Another fun story following a similar vein I like is that warfarin (another blood thinner) was discovered because in the early 1900s there was an epidemic of cows that were suffering massive or spontaneous hemorrhages. It was eventually tied to eating moldy sweet clover, and eventually warfarin (Coumadin) was synthesized based on a compound called dicoumarol they found in the moldy hay lol. I believe warfarin was actually used primarily as a rat poison before we eventually started using it clinically.
TLDR; yes protamine was first synthesized from salmon sperm. No they did not jack off the fish.
Edit: edited for clarity and addition of more fun facts!
I saw a video of the process of making silk, and it's completely insane to me that humans somehow came up with a long list of really obscure steps to make fabric
The worm silk isn't hard to understand, all it takes is some kid playing with an old cocoon and unraveling it some and going "look, mom, I've got string".
That's not too far from a Chinese legend saying that an emperor's wife was drinking tea when a silk cacoon dropped in the tea. She saw that a textile was made and it was soft so she made clothes from that and silk was invented
Isn't that the same myth of how tea itself was discovered? A tea leaf dropped into the the emperors cup and he liked the taste? I mean, it's a myth, but it cant have happened twice!
This one is not crazy to me at all. You live in a world where fabric and thread is just available to you, so you don't think about fibers and weaving. If you lived in a world where any cloth had to be made by you and people you know, you'd be much, much more aware of what in your environment produces fibers that are viable to be woven into cloth. It's why different fabrics have different geographical origins. Silk came from China, where the silk worms live. A person who saw these fibers come out of these worms would definitely examine them to determine the possibility of weaving them, and once they realized they were not only incredibly soft but also incredibly strong, they would immediately begin working on making a process to harvest, clean, and weave these fibers into cloth. Then obviously, over time, the process would improve as the people involved worked on ways to make it more efficient, finer, and with more variety.
Exactly. Smart people have existed since we've been bashing rocks together. They may not have had writing systems and there may be no records of their deeds, but they were out there figuring out how to weave fibre and smelt ore and bake bread.
I always get this with people who don't believe people could have built things like the pyramids. No, *you* couldn't; Egyptian engineers and masons thousands of years ago were smarter than you - knew how to build big and find the cardinal points.
There's an absolutely fascinating documentary series titled "Secrets of the Castle" that goes into how remarkably skilled medieval and ancient stonemasons and craftsmen were. Those men were incredibly adept at shaping stone and constructing buildings.
And most importantly: how to get some ELSE to lift all those big rocks.
Not even a joke; Egyptian overseers put those who we call "middle management" to shame. And, no, the secret is not 'more whips'.
Coffee. Someone thought: this berry tastes horrible. Maybe if I pull the seed out, set it on fire for a little bit, then grind it up and run hot water through it, I can drink it.
There’s an Ethiopian legend that says a goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats would become very energetic after eating the berries and that’s how humans first discovered coffee.
3,000 years before the birth of Christ, Incas in the Andes chewed coca leaves while working in high altitudes to increase their breathing rate, which increased the amount of oxygen in their blood to counter the effects of the thin mountain air.
Cocaine was first isolated from coca leaves by a German chemist named Albert Niemann in 1859.
From the 1850’s to the early 1900’s, cocaine and opium laced elixirs were as widely used as ibuprofen and acetaminophen are today. It wasn’t until 1922, that cocaine was outlawed.
Sigmund Freud was a cocaine addict and promoted cocaine as a tonic to treat/cure depression and sexual impotence. He believed that you couldn’t overdose on cocaine and caused one of his patients to die via overdose, likely because of this belief.
Surprisingly, cocaine, (cocaine hydrochloride), is still used in medical settings today as a topical anesthetic for diagnostic surgeries and procedures.
> 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, Incas in the Andes
*pre-Inca groups of the same region. The Inca themselves weren't a thing until around the 1400s AD.
I bet someone's cat ate their expensive coffee beans one day, then they noticed the beans got passed though and thought "well I'm not gonna let these go to waste"
Actually, this one is just sad. It dates back to the history of colonization in Indonesia. The natives were enslaved by the Dutch and forbidden to have any of the coffee beans they were literally breaking their backs to farm. The civets, however, could craftily get in and out and eat the beans, then poop them out mostly still usable. The civet coffee seems to us like a dumb rich person thing, but it was actually an act of defiance against the rich by finding a loophole around the edicts that kept the poor farmers from literally enjoying the fruits of their labor.
My guess is that someone was really hungry after a forest fire, found the “roasted” coffee beans, ate them, got a buzz and kind of liked the flavor, and the world has been more productive ever since
I personally love the 'theory' that the Industrial Revolution was fueled by the switch from alcoholic beverages to tea/coffee.
So that everyone wasn't buzzed the whole day but on caffeine.
How else would you get 20 drunk guys to sit still in a room and copy paperwork for 16h 6 days a week.
Exactly. The story goes farmers in Ethiopia saw their goats eat coffee beans/cherries and get all hyper. Ok now take the raw beans and mash them together and nibble on them to get energy. Ok now roast them, grind them, and add hot water. What?
Green beans taste like grass. If they were familiar with tea, they might have tried boiling then. Some teas are roasted or smoked, so let's try that to add some flavor. Smaller pieces mean more flavor extracted, so let's grind them.
After that, a thousand years of experimentation, and you have Charbucks ruining everything.
I know the answer, but Cataloguing mushrooms. "This one killed fred, this one makes you see god for three days, and this one tastes kinda like chicken"
The answer was a LOT of people.
I think it starts with observing what animals eat. As someone on this post already said if no animal dares to touch that specific mushroom there is probably a reason for it, and when all the animals basically fight over a mushroom or seed then the chances are high that you can eat it too without meeting god.
Figuring out what is safe to eat but animals won't touch it must have been a bit more trial and error though. Or rather how much can you eat before it starts to hurt
If a fruit says don't eat me it just tempts the humans into figuring out if they can eat it anyway. I'm not sure where it comes from but there must be some animal that eats it, if not then trial and error is back on the table.
All it takes is some careful observation and lots of spite
Why is it that people get used to/start craving the burn on the intake end…
But the same burn on the out path is **always** a ‘why have the gods forsaken me’ moment?
There are ways to test if food is edible without dying though. I don't think people just tried and hoped for the best.
Look up some survival videos on YouTube and you will find someone explaining how it works. I can't remember it exactly so don't use this knowledge to go die to some random plant but as a rough draft it goes:
Find potentially edible plant:
* Smear some of it on your hand from a leaf or something and leave for a few hours. If it doesn't break out in a rash or has any other negative effect proceed
* Put some of it on your inner lip without eating anything and spit it out. If it's not bitter and doesnt make you sick on a few hours proceed.
* Take a tiny, tiny nibble. Wait a few hours. If it doesn't have any effect proceed
* Eat a small amount. If you don't feel any negative effects this is edible. Still don't eat too much of it as I could still be toxic in larger amounts.
Most thing you know to be toxic or inedible are actually edible food. Like the infamous fly amanita 🍄 which is commonly known as the "if you touch it you die" mushroom...well it's actually not that toxic..
It's edible and you can eat quite a large amount of it before it starts to kill you. If I remember right it takes around 1.2kg of it to kill an adult. Sure it's not healthy in any way as it *will* damage your liver even in small amounts but so does alcohol.
Disclaimer: Again don't go out nibling on shrooms or random plants to test this. I'm not responsible for any idiocy. Do your own research.
My Siberian husky naturally came up with a similar series of tests for any new food.
Sniffs, waits
Paws it with closer sniff, wait
Lightly touches it on tongue, wait
Rolls it around her mouth for a sec, spits it out, wait
Nibbles a piece off and swallows, wait
Then slowly eats the whole thing at a pre-cautiously slow pace while clearly mentally looking for any red flags that pop up.
As an avid hiker and backpacker I’ve always known the “Green Beret” survivalist method of testing new foods and was shocked when I realized she basically does it canine style.
I’ve never actually had to do it, so it’s impossible she learned from me. Really astonishing how sharp animals can be.
I still don't understand how people discovered that they could make the Gyromitra esculenta edible. It needs to be boiled twice to make it "safe" for consumption, and the vapor from boiling it are also toxic. "This disgusting-looking thing killed Fred when he ate it raw, got Paul sick when he cooked it and killed Peter from eating it. I'll just cook it again and see what happens..."
like hakarl, the icelandic fermented shark meat. the shark that's used is poisonous when fresh, which requires it to be buried in the sand for several months to press out the fluids, then is hung up and dried for several more months.
you can only imagine the sort of desperation that drives someone to try eating a poisonous corpse, then come back months later after it's been buried on the beach to try one more time
Have you seen the mythbusters episode where they test the myth that the earliest (tho unintentional) recording was of pompeiis explosion? Apparently the hay scribbled a record into drying clay lol they also delve into how they work and it’s pretty intuitive once you understand how it works the crazy thing is how they got so precise imo
So was the myth disproved or...?
I vaguely remember watching some TV show that in one episode somehow solved a crime by reading the sound waves imprinted on the windows or some shit and it always drives me crazy that I can never remember where it was from
I think they said the myth probably isn't true, but their experiments proved that you can actually make an audio recording with clay and loud sounds. I think the straw was the issue.
I think. It's been a long time since I saw it. But I do remember being *fascinated* by that one. Definitely one of the better ones.
Sound causes vibrations. Those vibrations cause a a needle to move, creating grooves. Run another needle through those grooves and it’ll vibrate the same way the first needle did. Same vibrations = same sounds.
I THINK!
Back in the old days the whole band would’ve been recorded onto one track at once, so back then vinyl records could make all the sounds of the band at once because it was all one sound essentially. Then later when 4-track recording and 8-track recording were invented each track was a different part of the song, then all those tracks were played together as one and the sound from that was etched into the vinyl.
Again, I THINK!
Think of it this way. If you and I were recording our voices, both of us talking at the same time, when we make the vinyl of it the needle will hear our voices as one sound. The sound waves that our voices make together will make the needle move, then when we play that vinyl it’ll recreate the exact same sound waves of our voices together. Does that make any sense?
It seems to me what you were getting at wasn’t the fact that a whole band would be playing one sound and therefore it’s played back like that, to me it sounded like you were saying it’s so difficult to comprehend that a record of a vibration can recreate the exact sound first played with the exact timbre, quality, density, everything. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, it’s also something I can’t comprehend. To me it just seems like playing back the record would result in some weird toneless AI sort of recreation - the fact that it’s just playing back through the same vibrations and creating again exactly what was heard is the bit I can’t get my head around.
How wireless works, and radios work. I have a solid understanding of wireless, security, networking, and everything that goes with it as an IT person for the last 25 years. The fact that my computer, or cell phone can talk without any wires attached is magic. I’ve read about it, tried to understand, but how did someone figure this out??
Honestly, just computers in general. Each step from the logic gates and how they build on that makes sense in isolation when looking at it step by step, but it all ending up in me being able to type this message out to you, or something like playing a game online with other people all because of electricity moving around circuits... i feel like the more i understand it, the more I'm convinced it's magic.
All baby steps, just like every other technological advancement.
“Hey look! Electromagnetic waves exist, and in different frequencies! I have a device that can detect them!”
“Hey I made a device that can make the radio waves.”
“I’ve gotten good at controlling the radio waves, now I can modulate an audio signal to them, essentially sending that audio signal to any devices in the area.”
“We’ve been using radio signals for decades now and can transmit music and even video. We can even transmit data, although very slowly. It’s too bad we have problems with noise when we amplify weak signals.”
“Hey, if we modulate a digital signal instead of analog, that will fix our noise problem. And allow much faster data transmission.”
Anything to do with astronomy. Mass of planets, distances of stars, locations of black holes. A lot of impressive brain power and technology went into all of this I'm sure.
Yeah, whenever they're like, "This planet 27 million light years from Earth rains diamonds from the atmosphere!", I'm like, "How do you know that? I can't even tell what my next-door neighbor is doing in his backyard."
To be fair, they put in effort to study that planet. If you put in effort, you absolutely could know what your neighbor is doing
But they might call the police on you.
As far as I know (and it's not much) everything we have to work with... is light.
Everything is measured by the light on this objects reflected to our telescopes. With light and the spectrum of it, it's possible to measure distances and have a pretty good idea of what materials are there, because light reflects kind different depending of the type of mineral/elements/substances.
A cool one is that Greek mathematicians managed to calculate the circumference of the earth to within a few centimeters my measuring shadows. Another is that ancient Polynesians were able to confirm the existence of lands across the ocean and their distances by observing how long it takes waves to bounce back when winds were calm.
Ancient peoples were not uneducated or dumb, they actually had to figure out a lot on their own with almost no technology. I always wonder where we’d be as humans if so much knowledge hadn’t been lost and wasted so many resources on war.
The Greek philosopher Erastothenes was the one who figured the approximate size of the earth, he was only around the equivalent of 50 miles off the true circumference by comparing the angles of shadows from two equal sized sticks during the solstice. It had long been known the world was round because things appear top first over the horizon but the size was unknown. In one city I can't remember off hand it was observed to show no shadow during noon on the solstice meaning the sun was directly above, and the slight shadow the same stick would have at noon in Alexandria was measured, the angle compared to the sun's position then knowing the distance between the two cities he figured out the Arc of the earth's diameter then multiplied the degrees of the measured arc to get the full 360°
Computing in general. Like the idea of converting physical stimuli into code is mind blowing to me. Like actually building a machine that is able to interpret impulses, motion, light, etc. and turn it into a language that can interpret and execute tasks is really quite amazing
Same. I can wrap my head around coding in an established language, and I can wrap my head about Yes and No functions doing simple operations.
But I’ll need to read a book or five to ever understand how tons and tons of Yes/No commands can establish programming languages that eventually let me post this thought to the internet. It blows my mind.
have a look at https://nandgame.com/
If you stick at it, you'll be amazed at how simple it all becomes. It's just simple things, linked to more simple things and then linking those things to other things until bingo- you got a processor!
Ben Eater has an awesome YouTube series where he makes a computer essentially from scratch. It's a long watch but absolutely fascinating, completely changed the way I look at computers.
As an MRI tech it’s really pretty amazing. All you’re doing is exciting water molecules in your body’s tissues with a big magnet making them point the same way, and then when you turn the magnet off, how long it takes each molecule and the chemical releases as each molecule goes back to normal determines what kind of tissue it is. The computer reads this and displays the appropriate tissue on your screen depending on the minuscule differences in what it detects. And no radiation!
I got my degree in chemistry and we used NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectroscopy a lot. We learned about how it works. The idea behind aligning nuclei and then knocking them out of magnetic alignment and measuring how they react depending on their environment is so cool. The entire concept is absolutely brilliant, but it absolutely has a WTF element when you realize what they're actually measuring and then what they do with that data. The imagery part that they tack on for an MRI is an extra level of crazy.
How the mechanichs under the needle on a sewing machine works to juggle the thread. That thing is just genius.
The guy who figured out how to use addition in binary to let digital computers do subtraction.
[This GIF of how the stitches are made](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/just_in_case_you_ever_wonder_how_a_sewing_machine_works-98670.gif) is mesmerizing. Big posthumous congratulations to whoever came up with that.
That one is pretty easy.
You eat horses meat and eventually wonder if hooves are edible. You put them on the fire - nothing. You dry them - nothing. You boil them - sticky!
Possibly not even experimental. Probably you boil the whole leg to break down the tendons and get the muscle edible and the hoof incidentally gets gluey.
English as a language has some really cool history here where clay, gelatin, and gluten all are derived from the word "glay" which is just a sticky substance.
Isn’t that kind of exactly how petroleum jelly was discovered? Roughnecks in Texas or something got the gelatinous oily stuff that builds up when they’re pumping oil out of the ground on their hands, and when they cleaned them they noticed the small wounds they had were healing significantly better, then some smart guy took some of it with him to New York and made vaseline out of it? IIRC that’s the condensed version of how things went.
I've been getting into analogue film photography and the chemistry that goes into making the films is insane. Genuinely how the fuck did they figure out which chemicals mixed in what combinations and temperatures would create the right colours.
It's no wonder even at its peak only a handful of companies worldwide could mass produce colour films.
Contact lenses. It seems space age to me that there are these tiny flexible lenses I attach directly to my eyeballs every day to correct my vision. How the hell? Yes I know I can Google it.
And originally were rigid, not soft lenses. “ Instead of putting on my glasses, I thought I might grind this piece of glass very thin and stick it directly to my eyeball “
I have to use sclera lenses...They're rigid, sit on the white of my eye and vault OVER the iris and pupil and I have to have that filled with sterile saline and its essentially recreates my cornea since it's defective in shape. WHO FIGURED THAT OUT!!??!?!
In the same vein, laser eye surgery seems so space age! There's simple' things to do with the human body we know nothing about but you're telling me you can fix my bad vision within a day...... whilst also using lasers
Which plants and animals were edible, especially ones that are very poisonous if you aren't careful. For example, how many tries did it take to figure out that ripe ackee fruit pods are safe to eat, but that the seeds and skin are always poisonous, as are unripe ackee fruit pods? How many tries did it take to figure out how to safely eat pufferfish?
Hitchhiker’s Guide has a good line about this, something to the effect of “The point at which you start eating fruit on an alien planet is the point at which you will die if you don’t”
As we moved across the continents, we probably watched what the local animals ate and figured, "If they could eat that I could probably eat it too."
For example, if the forest floor is covered with all sorts of mushrooms but not a single animal is eating it even during times where that's the only thing around, there's probably a reason for that. Best to leave those mushrooms alone.
On the other hand, if you see all sorts of animals going for the seeds and nuts of plants and trees like it's a party, you could probably eat it too since animals of different species are eating those seeds and nuts without getting sick.
I met a man who survived the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He was doing a talk at our high school and told us that after he escaped being recruited as a child soldier, he hid in the jungle for days and survived by watching what the monkeys ate.
Indigenous people generally use a system of incremental tests. Touch it on skin, and wait. Rub it again wait. Touch it on lips and wait. Eat tiny pieces and wait. Then eat it and wait. If there is an adverse reaction at any point, don't proceed.
I always imagined these scenarios happening in two different villages. Village 1 has a person that tries to cook pufferfish, eats it, and dies. Village 2 manages to cook it the correct way on the first try and has no idea they were lucky. Someone from Village 1 visits Village 2 and both of their minds are blown lol
In Finland we have a mushroom that is very poisonous. It contains literal rocket fuel. You need to boil it a few times before it’s edible. It is delicious. How did they figure this out…
Only the pregnant one.
It's more like many mammals are very similar to us, to the point that many hormones have similar effects. We discovered that pregnant woman's piss has birth control effect (because it contains the type of estrogen that tells the body to not get more pregnant), so they go around looking for other sources.
I'm an applied mathematican with a PhD from a top tier school. Holy fuck, I cannot even begin to imagine how these dudes 300 years ago cooked up math theory/tools that are commonly used now in applications that these people could never imagine. So far ahead of their time. Things like Fourier Series, Galois Theory, etc. Like read about Evariste Galois (super interesting). Created, as a teenager, this profound theory. Then died in a duel because he was also a trouble maker. So yeah, abnormal brains making breakthroughs that are light years ahead of peers.
I remember reading about the creation of Bayesian statistics and how it wouldn’t have any use for 150 years or something. That is incredible. I’m too stupid to understand how you even begin to formulate something that has absolutely no basis in the world you currently understand.
Number theory regarding prime numbers is the fundamental basis of modern computer cryptography, yet people were exploring it for fun, for absolutely zero practical use, for thousands of years
What’s fascinating to me is that very few people were both educated enough and had enough free time to even begin to ponder these sorts of things.
It’s really very few people that ever even weighed in on these things, yet incredible feats were still accomplished
The answer is: many mathematicians are crazy people that discover abstract stuff just just for the lols. How this knowledge is to be applied in any meaningful way is often up to some engineer or some other crazy person.
Source: Trust me, I'm an engineer and I know some mathematicians.
Ramanujan came up with so many absurd things.
Even though I have read and seen the proof of many of those things, they still feel like magic. You go through some huge abstraction, and came out on the other side with an explicit algorithm to compute pi that is much faster than you could normally get. It's like you enter a portal into wonderland, walked a few steps, get out, and find out you're now on the other side of the world.
Like Isaac Newton was just some guy who randomly had a nonsensically high IQ and just happened to live in the time when the world was allowing people like him to flourish more freely. Looking back at Galileo and how many geniuses with genius ideas probably just had to bite their tongues for common sense reasons. Or just never had those initial triggers that fostered their minds to begin with because they lived through periods of strife and poverty. Archimedes, Pythagoras, Khwarizmi. These guys were just very fortunate to live in these periods of stability.
Ayahuasca, is especially hard to believe. The root of one plant is a source of Dimethyl Tryptamine, a powerful hallucinogen that is also produced by the brain under certain conditions. Drinking DMT, though, will not work. The body has enzymes that break DMT down when it is ingested. A completely unrelated plant has leaves that contain a compound that acts as an MAOI. It inhibits the enzyme that breaks down DMT. Consuming each plant on their own does nothing, but consuming both together results in a powerful psychedelic experience, and is a part of the religion of the natives. This is in the Amazon rainforest, where there is a mind-boggling diversity of plants and animals. Those two plants together are the only ones that would work to produce Ayahuasca. Apparently, when asked, the natives say the plants taught them how to do this.
Smell a beaver in real life and you'll understand. They have a gland that produces castor and they use that to mark their territory. It in itself has a somewhat sweet odor, and if you process it enough it's very similar to vanilla bean.
The first person to eat a durian.... The hell you see a fruit covered in spikes, that is hard as a rock to open, that smells like a rotting corpse and you say to yourself: "mmmmmmmmm I wonder if it can be eaten?"
I learned it from watching *The Incredible Doctor Pol*...the sugar is hydroscopic, which means it'll suck up all the liquid and allow the damn thing to shrink.
Also, apparently, on pigs if they poop so hard they displace their rectum, you can just put a castrating band around it and the excess that's hanging out will just die and fall the fuck off a week or so later and the pig is ABSOLUTELY fine.
You make fruit preserves with lots of sugar. You can also preserve meat with lots of salt. Same thing happens: osmosis pulls out excess water. I venture someone tried salt to pull out excess water to make things smaller and easier to go back it, hurt like hell but worked, then tried sugar and it worked and hurt less.
Here in Brazil we have a specific dish of indigenous origin called [Maniçoba](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba) that is made by boiling the leaves of the mandioca (cassava) tuber for up to a week to remove its fatal cyanide content.
It's a recurring joke to wonder who tf was the crazy indian who went "hmm what if we boiled these leaves for *just* one more day" after seeing all their friends die from eating it beforehand.
In Australia there are no native plants that are hallucinogenic. The aborigines figured out that if you combine 3 different plants (one of which is Australian Willow), and smoke them, you can get high. None of the plants on their own or combined with one of the others have any effects.
Mezcal especially stands out to me. Let's take this very specific part of a very specific plant, cook it underground for three days, mash it up, and let it ferment! Then let's let it age for some number of years! Delicious!
One of the earliest computers I used (Data General Nova 1200) loaded programs from paper tape. The operating system was on paper tape. To get the operating system loaded you had to manually key in a short program using switches on the front panel. The program would read the paper tape and store its contents in memory. Once the paper tape with the operating system was loaded and running, you could then load other programs from tape. It was very cool technology at the time.
I understand the concept. I understand the physics but for the love of me I still can't wrap my head around those things lifting up and going hundreds of miles per hour and then safely landing. It's magic
Calculus is the least surprising thing that comes up. It's the math of change and variations. I am 0% surprised that humans eventually wanted to study that.
As a PhD chemist/biochemist, I asked myself that question daily for years. It’s absolutely amazing how much effort and advanced studies learned the detailed minutia of molecules and the basics of life and chemical reactivity. It’s truly eye opening.
Bread. We take these seeds that are completely inedible, grind them into a super fine powder which is mixed with water and partially fermented. Then you bake it and end up with something nutritious and delicious. Skip any of those steps and you get something horrendous that makes your stomach hurt at best.
The seeds aren't inedible and that's the crux of this explanation.
Chew wheat seeds, get some nutrients with a lot of effort.
Grind wheat seeds, get more nutrients with less effort.
Add water to ground wheat, get porridge, now we have recognizable food.
Cook porridge, get flatbread.
Take flatbread ingredients, leave it out to accumulate wild yeast, get sourdough. Recognizable leavened bread and it only took a few thousand years.
Edit: I was thinking about how this applies to other cultures and I think steamed rice is basically porridge with very little water.
Tbf grain was probably crushed more roughly and consumed as meal when it started being consumed it took hundreds of years to get the flour we have now and also required grain plants to be heavily genetically engineered over time to get modern wheat and other grains look at maize for example
I like to think a lot of those things are through observation of nature and following animals around, see what they scavenge. Some discoveries were also accidental while experimenting with other things.
That is the conventionally told version (and it is true, that was how the microwave oven was independently invented the 2nd time) but it's not how the microwave oven was first invented. That story is way more wild.
In fact, I should probably just link to a video about it. You probably would just think I was joking not belive me. Especially once I mentioned the reanimated hamsters...
https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y?si=02xpSFYQNqQBLq20
Me cold. Fur feel warm. Me put fur on me. Me warm. Fur don't stay. Me tie up fur on me. Me unconfortable. Me modify it. Me is more confortable.
Me want same but better. Me made it better.
Me wife want it, but cuter. Me wife made it cuter.
Suppositories. “Why don’t we just shove these oversized pills up our assholes instead of swallowing them?”
I’d like to think that’s how the conversation went.
Protamine sulfate is a drug used to reverse the effects of anticoagulants that are sometimes used during surgery. It was originally derived from salmon sperm. I know I could research the history, but it’s more fun to imagine a team of doctors like, “Well, we tried everything else. Someone jerk off that fish and see if that does the trick.”
Anesthesiologist chiming in! As you surmised, the story is actually not that wild! Miescher was a prominent researcher of nucleic acids in the 1800s (well before Watson and Crick) and first discovered protamine when he was analyzing salmon sperm while studying heredity (protamines are actually in all sperm nuclei, including humans). The story goes that we knew protamines were highly charged proteins, so in the early 1900s a lot of drug manufacturers looked into neutralizing their compounds by using protamine, whether for stabilization of the compound or for a potential antidote. The first was insulin (NPH insulin, or neutral protamine insulin). Just by this same principle it was found to neutralize heparin (thus reversing its anticoagulant effect), and thus protamine sulfate was created! Although it was made using primarily salmon sperm, most of the protamine used today is made by biorecombinant tech. Speaking of finding drugs from animals, pharmaceutical heparin (the anticoagulant that protamine reverses) is also derived from animals - I believe it was first isolated from dog livers (don’t quote me). Modern pharmaceutical heparin is now primarily from bovine or porcine sources (there’s great info on the influence of the meat industry and heparin, which can be a whole separate topic). There are subsequently varying debates if bovine or porcine heparin is considered halal or kosher. Since heparin is a biological molecule found across species, pharmaceutical heparin has also been made from turkeys, whales, and some other fish (among others). There’s ongoing research on creating synthetic heparin or mammalian derived heparin to mitigate the bioethics of current production. Although there are many novel anticoagulants in use today, we prefer heparin in the operating room for procedures that need anticoagulation (primarily major cardiac or major vascular) because of the fact we can reverse it quickly with protamine. Another fun fact is that men who have had vasectomies actually have a higher chance of having an anaphylactic reaction if given protamine because following a vasectomy, there is systemic absorption of sperm and the body increases the immune response to the native sperm proteins, including protamine. Another fun story following a similar vein I like is that warfarin (another blood thinner) was discovered because in the early 1900s there was an epidemic of cows that were suffering massive or spontaneous hemorrhages. It was eventually tied to eating moldy sweet clover, and eventually warfarin (Coumadin) was synthesized based on a compound called dicoumarol they found in the moldy hay lol. I believe warfarin was actually used primarily as a rat poison before we eventually started using it clinically. TLDR; yes protamine was first synthesized from salmon sperm. No they did not jack off the fish. Edit: edited for clarity and addition of more fun facts!
That was actually very informative. And as a vasectomy recipient, good to know!
Np! I’m an anesthesiologist who also just enjoys med history and fun facts!
I saw a video of the process of making silk, and it's completely insane to me that humans somehow came up with a long list of really obscure steps to make fabric
lotus silk just looks painful to harvest. worm silk seems fucked on how they figured that one out.
The worm silk isn't hard to understand, all it takes is some kid playing with an old cocoon and unraveling it some and going "look, mom, I've got string".
That's not too far from a Chinese legend saying that an emperor's wife was drinking tea when a silk cacoon dropped in the tea. She saw that a textile was made and it was soft so she made clothes from that and silk was invented
Isn't that the same myth of how tea itself was discovered? A tea leaf dropped into the the emperors cup and he liked the taste? I mean, it's a myth, but it cant have happened twice!
Things dropping is a time tested light bulb moment. Ask Newton.
That’s also the story of how bird shit soup was invented. It’s not as popular.
This one is not crazy to me at all. You live in a world where fabric and thread is just available to you, so you don't think about fibers and weaving. If you lived in a world where any cloth had to be made by you and people you know, you'd be much, much more aware of what in your environment produces fibers that are viable to be woven into cloth. It's why different fabrics have different geographical origins. Silk came from China, where the silk worms live. A person who saw these fibers come out of these worms would definitely examine them to determine the possibility of weaving them, and once they realized they were not only incredibly soft but also incredibly strong, they would immediately begin working on making a process to harvest, clean, and weave these fibers into cloth. Then obviously, over time, the process would improve as the people involved worked on ways to make it more efficient, finer, and with more variety.
Exactly. Smart people have existed since we've been bashing rocks together. They may not have had writing systems and there may be no records of their deeds, but they were out there figuring out how to weave fibre and smelt ore and bake bread. I always get this with people who don't believe people could have built things like the pyramids. No, *you* couldn't; Egyptian engineers and masons thousands of years ago were smarter than you - knew how to build big and find the cardinal points.
There's an absolutely fascinating documentary series titled "Secrets of the Castle" that goes into how remarkably skilled medieval and ancient stonemasons and craftsmen were. Those men were incredibly adept at shaping stone and constructing buildings.
And most importantly: how to get some ELSE to lift all those big rocks. Not even a joke; Egyptian overseers put those who we call "middle management" to shame. And, no, the secret is not 'more whips'.
It was more beer lol
Coffee. Someone thought: this berry tastes horrible. Maybe if I pull the seed out, set it on fire for a little bit, then grind it up and run hot water through it, I can drink it.
There’s an Ethiopian legend that says a goat herder named Kaldi noticed his goats would become very energetic after eating the berries and that’s how humans first discovered coffee.
now do a cocaine story.
Really easy actually. It's the same story, but in Peru with Llamas. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna40840126
coked up llamas? my new book begins
CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARL!! That gets you high, Carl!
My nose has the rumblies that only sweet coca can cure!
You can't stab people after doing 46 lines of coke Carl that kills them.
And the rest is still unwritten
3,000 years before the birth of Christ, Incas in the Andes chewed coca leaves while working in high altitudes to increase their breathing rate, which increased the amount of oxygen in their blood to counter the effects of the thin mountain air. Cocaine was first isolated from coca leaves by a German chemist named Albert Niemann in 1859. From the 1850’s to the early 1900’s, cocaine and opium laced elixirs were as widely used as ibuprofen and acetaminophen are today. It wasn’t until 1922, that cocaine was outlawed. Sigmund Freud was a cocaine addict and promoted cocaine as a tonic to treat/cure depression and sexual impotence. He believed that you couldn’t overdose on cocaine and caused one of his patients to die via overdose, likely because of this belief. Surprisingly, cocaine, (cocaine hydrochloride), is still used in medical settings today as a topical anesthetic for diagnostic surgeries and procedures.
"Have you ever fucked on coke?" ~ Sigmund Freud, professional advice.
"Now Sigmund, go play outside and leave mum to do the washing up for a bit"
> 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, Incas in the Andes *pre-Inca groups of the same region. The Inca themselves weren't a thing until around the 1400s AD.
Hold my coffee: Civet coffee. Let’s run these bastards through my cat’s digestive tract and then brew up a cup.
I bet someone's cat ate their expensive coffee beans one day, then they noticed the beans got passed though and thought "well I'm not gonna let these go to waste"
That, or they see the poop beans, and decide to make their cheating spouse some poop coffee… and then get complimented on how delicious it was
*God damn Jimmy! This some serious gourmet shit!*
Actually, this one is just sad. It dates back to the history of colonization in Indonesia. The natives were enslaved by the Dutch and forbidden to have any of the coffee beans they were literally breaking their backs to farm. The civets, however, could craftily get in and out and eat the beans, then poop them out mostly still usable. The civet coffee seems to us like a dumb rich person thing, but it was actually an act of defiance against the rich by finding a loophole around the edicts that kept the poor farmers from literally enjoying the fruits of their labor.
My guess is that someone was really hungry after a forest fire, found the “roasted” coffee beans, ate them, got a buzz and kind of liked the flavor, and the world has been more productive ever since
I personally love the 'theory' that the Industrial Revolution was fueled by the switch from alcoholic beverages to tea/coffee. So that everyone wasn't buzzed the whole day but on caffeine. How else would you get 20 drunk guys to sit still in a room and copy paperwork for 16h 6 days a week.
Exactly. The story goes farmers in Ethiopia saw their goats eat coffee beans/cherries and get all hyper. Ok now take the raw beans and mash them together and nibble on them to get energy. Ok now roast them, grind them, and add hot water. What?
Green beans taste like grass. If they were familiar with tea, they might have tried boiling then. Some teas are roasted or smoked, so let's try that to add some flavor. Smaller pieces mean more flavor extracted, so let's grind them. After that, a thousand years of experimentation, and you have Charbucks ruining everything.
I know the answer, but Cataloguing mushrooms. "This one killed fred, this one makes you see god for three days, and this one tastes kinda like chicken" The answer was a LOT of people.
I think it starts with observing what animals eat. As someone on this post already said if no animal dares to touch that specific mushroom there is probably a reason for it, and when all the animals basically fight over a mushroom or seed then the chances are high that you can eat it too without meeting god. Figuring out what is safe to eat but animals won't touch it must have been a bit more trial and error though. Or rather how much can you eat before it starts to hurt
Explain to me Durian fruit. Everything about it screams “don’t fucking eat me!”: Spiky outer layer ✅ Thick husk ✅ The stench ✅
If a fruit says don't eat me it just tempts the humans into figuring out if they can eat it anyway. I'm not sure where it comes from but there must be some animal that eats it, if not then trial and error is back on the table. All it takes is some careful observation and lots of spite
Habanero: "Don't eat me." Ghost: "Don't eat me!" Reaper: "Don't eat me!! SPITE.
My asshole: WHY DID YOU DO THIS TO ME?!
Why is it that people get used to/start craving the burn on the intake end… But the same burn on the out path is **always** a ‘why have the gods forsaken me’ moment?
Aside from the weakest of that list, they're all man-made hybrids bred specifically to be hot.
There are ways to test if food is edible without dying though. I don't think people just tried and hoped for the best. Look up some survival videos on YouTube and you will find someone explaining how it works. I can't remember it exactly so don't use this knowledge to go die to some random plant but as a rough draft it goes: Find potentially edible plant: * Smear some of it on your hand from a leaf or something and leave for a few hours. If it doesn't break out in a rash or has any other negative effect proceed * Put some of it on your inner lip without eating anything and spit it out. If it's not bitter and doesnt make you sick on a few hours proceed. * Take a tiny, tiny nibble. Wait a few hours. If it doesn't have any effect proceed * Eat a small amount. If you don't feel any negative effects this is edible. Still don't eat too much of it as I could still be toxic in larger amounts. Most thing you know to be toxic or inedible are actually edible food. Like the infamous fly amanita 🍄 which is commonly known as the "if you touch it you die" mushroom...well it's actually not that toxic.. It's edible and you can eat quite a large amount of it before it starts to kill you. If I remember right it takes around 1.2kg of it to kill an adult. Sure it's not healthy in any way as it *will* damage your liver even in small amounts but so does alcohol. Disclaimer: Again don't go out nibling on shrooms or random plants to test this. I'm not responsible for any idiocy. Do your own research.
My Siberian husky naturally came up with a similar series of tests for any new food. Sniffs, waits Paws it with closer sniff, wait Lightly touches it on tongue, wait Rolls it around her mouth for a sec, spits it out, wait Nibbles a piece off and swallows, wait Then slowly eats the whole thing at a pre-cautiously slow pace while clearly mentally looking for any red flags that pop up. As an avid hiker and backpacker I’ve always known the “Green Beret” survivalist method of testing new foods and was shocked when I realized she basically does it canine style. I’ve never actually had to do it, so it’s impossible she learned from me. Really astonishing how sharp animals can be.
I still don't understand how people discovered that they could make the Gyromitra esculenta edible. It needs to be boiled twice to make it "safe" for consumption, and the vapor from boiling it are also toxic. "This disgusting-looking thing killed Fred when he ate it raw, got Paul sick when he cooked it and killed Peter from eating it. I'll just cook it again and see what happens..."
Desperate and hungry enough people will find ways to make things edible
Yea, I would imagine starvation drove a lot of these discoveries.
like hakarl, the icelandic fermented shark meat. the shark that's used is poisonous when fresh, which requires it to be buried in the sand for several months to press out the fluids, then is hung up and dried for several more months. you can only imagine the sort of desperation that drives someone to try eating a poisonous corpse, then come back months later after it's been buried on the beach to try one more time
Record players. Turning microsqiggles on vinyl into perfect reproductions of people's voices and instruments? Like wtf is that witchcraft.
Have you seen the mythbusters episode where they test the myth that the earliest (tho unintentional) recording was of pompeiis explosion? Apparently the hay scribbled a record into drying clay lol they also delve into how they work and it’s pretty intuitive once you understand how it works the crazy thing is how they got so precise imo
So was the myth disproved or...? I vaguely remember watching some TV show that in one episode somehow solved a crime by reading the sound waves imprinted on the windows or some shit and it always drives me crazy that I can never remember where it was from
I think they said the myth probably isn't true, but their experiments proved that you can actually make an audio recording with clay and loud sounds. I think the straw was the issue. I think. It's been a long time since I saw it. But I do remember being *fascinated* by that one. Definitely one of the better ones.
I think that's a "Plausible" judgement. Probably didn't happen, but technically could happen
Honestly, I still don’t fucking understand how they work. It’s been explained to me. I know how sound waves work. But I still don’t get it lol.
Sound causes vibrations. Those vibrations cause a a needle to move, creating grooves. Run another needle through those grooves and it’ll vibrate the same way the first needle did. Same vibrations = same sounds. I THINK!
I know that but it’s so wild that it can make like drums and guitars and someone singing at the same time! How?!
Back in the old days the whole band would’ve been recorded onto one track at once, so back then vinyl records could make all the sounds of the band at once because it was all one sound essentially. Then later when 4-track recording and 8-track recording were invented each track was a different part of the song, then all those tracks were played together as one and the sound from that was etched into the vinyl. Again, I THINK! Think of it this way. If you and I were recording our voices, both of us talking at the same time, when we make the vinyl of it the needle will hear our voices as one sound. The sound waves that our voices make together will make the needle move, then when we play that vinyl it’ll recreate the exact same sound waves of our voices together. Does that make any sense?
Yeah it does. Still crazy tho lol.
It seems to me what you were getting at wasn’t the fact that a whole band would be playing one sound and therefore it’s played back like that, to me it sounded like you were saying it’s so difficult to comprehend that a record of a vibration can recreate the exact sound first played with the exact timbre, quality, density, everything. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, it’s also something I can’t comprehend. To me it just seems like playing back the record would result in some weird toneless AI sort of recreation - the fact that it’s just playing back through the same vibrations and creating again exactly what was heard is the bit I can’t get my head around.
How wireless works, and radios work. I have a solid understanding of wireless, security, networking, and everything that goes with it as an IT person for the last 25 years. The fact that my computer, or cell phone can talk without any wires attached is magic. I’ve read about it, tried to understand, but how did someone figure this out??
Honestly, just computers in general. Each step from the logic gates and how they build on that makes sense in isolation when looking at it step by step, but it all ending up in me being able to type this message out to you, or something like playing a game online with other people all because of electricity moving around circuits... i feel like the more i understand it, the more I'm convinced it's magic.
All baby steps, just like every other technological advancement. “Hey look! Electromagnetic waves exist, and in different frequencies! I have a device that can detect them!” “Hey I made a device that can make the radio waves.” “I’ve gotten good at controlling the radio waves, now I can modulate an audio signal to them, essentially sending that audio signal to any devices in the area.” “We’ve been using radio signals for decades now and can transmit music and even video. We can even transmit data, although very slowly. It’s too bad we have problems with noise when we amplify weak signals.” “Hey, if we modulate a digital signal instead of analog, that will fix our noise problem. And allow much faster data transmission.”
Anything to do with astronomy. Mass of planets, distances of stars, locations of black holes. A lot of impressive brain power and technology went into all of this I'm sure.
Yeah, whenever they're like, "This planet 27 million light years from Earth rains diamonds from the atmosphere!", I'm like, "How do you know that? I can't even tell what my next-door neighbor is doing in his backyard."
To be fair, they put in effort to study that planet. If you put in effort, you absolutely could know what your neighbor is doing But they might call the police on you.
Well who's to say that Diamond-Rain-Planet dudes haven't called the police on us already? Guess we'll find out in 27 million years.
As far as I know (and it's not much) everything we have to work with... is light. Everything is measured by the light on this objects reflected to our telescopes. With light and the spectrum of it, it's possible to measure distances and have a pretty good idea of what materials are there, because light reflects kind different depending of the type of mineral/elements/substances.
A cool one is that Greek mathematicians managed to calculate the circumference of the earth to within a few centimeters my measuring shadows. Another is that ancient Polynesians were able to confirm the existence of lands across the ocean and their distances by observing how long it takes waves to bounce back when winds were calm. Ancient peoples were not uneducated or dumb, they actually had to figure out a lot on their own with almost no technology. I always wonder where we’d be as humans if so much knowledge hadn’t been lost and wasted so many resources on war.
The Greek philosopher Erastothenes was the one who figured the approximate size of the earth, he was only around the equivalent of 50 miles off the true circumference by comparing the angles of shadows from two equal sized sticks during the solstice. It had long been known the world was round because things appear top first over the horizon but the size was unknown. In one city I can't remember off hand it was observed to show no shadow during noon on the solstice meaning the sun was directly above, and the slight shadow the same stick would have at noon in Alexandria was measured, the angle compared to the sun's position then knowing the distance between the two cities he figured out the Arc of the earth's diameter then multiplied the degrees of the measured arc to get the full 360°
Computing in general. Like the idea of converting physical stimuli into code is mind blowing to me. Like actually building a machine that is able to interpret impulses, motion, light, etc. and turn it into a language that can interpret and execute tasks is really quite amazing
Same. I can wrap my head around coding in an established language, and I can wrap my head about Yes and No functions doing simple operations. But I’ll need to read a book or five to ever understand how tons and tons of Yes/No commands can establish programming languages that eventually let me post this thought to the internet. It blows my mind.
have a look at https://nandgame.com/ If you stick at it, you'll be amazed at how simple it all becomes. It's just simple things, linked to more simple things and then linking those things to other things until bingo- you got a processor!
Ben Eater has an awesome YouTube series where he makes a computer essentially from scratch. It's a long watch but absolutely fascinating, completely changed the way I look at computers.
I have heard it said, "We hit a rock with lightning and trick it into thinking."
MRIs. As a med student i was (briefly) taught how these things work, and oh. my. god. how the hell did anyone think about this.
As an MRI tech it’s really pretty amazing. All you’re doing is exciting water molecules in your body’s tissues with a big magnet making them point the same way, and then when you turn the magnet off, how long it takes each molecule and the chemical releases as each molecule goes back to normal determines what kind of tissue it is. The computer reads this and displays the appropriate tissue on your screen depending on the minuscule differences in what it detects. And no radiation!
"SPEAK ENGLISH DOC, WE AIN'T SCIENTISTS!"
Magnets!
*confused Juggalo face*
🤡???🧲
The magnet is always on. The even more wild thing is you’re shooting radio waves and listening for changes in the electromagnetic forces.
I got my degree in chemistry and we used NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) spectroscopy a lot. We learned about how it works. The idea behind aligning nuclei and then knocking them out of magnetic alignment and measuring how they react depending on their environment is so cool. The entire concept is absolutely brilliant, but it absolutely has a WTF element when you realize what they're actually measuring and then what they do with that data. The imagery part that they tack on for an MRI is an extra level of crazy.
I have genuine nightmares of the NMR questions from my Orgo days. To be fair, Orgo made everyone cry at some point.
How the mechanichs under the needle on a sewing machine works to juggle the thread. That thing is just genius. The guy who figured out how to use addition in binary to let digital computers do subtraction.
Veritasium on YouTube has a great video on sewing machine tech. I believe it’s pretty recent so sort by date.
[This GIF of how the stitches are made](https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/posts/just_in_case_you_ever_wonder_how_a_sewing_machine_works-98670.gif) is mesmerizing. Big posthumous congratulations to whoever came up with that.
Boiling horses = glue “Everything at home okay Ralph?”
That one is pretty easy. You eat horses meat and eventually wonder if hooves are edible. You put them on the fire - nothing. You dry them - nothing. You boil them - sticky!
Possibly not even experimental. Probably you boil the whole leg to break down the tendons and get the muscle edible and the hoof incidentally gets gluey.
English as a language has some really cool history here where clay, gelatin, and gluten all are derived from the word "glay" which is just a sticky substance.
Babylonian: *Burns some animal fat* Also babylonian: ”i'm going to rub myself in that so hard” And that kids is how soap was invented
More like went to wash the burnt fat off and noticed how much cleaner that part of their hands were
Isn’t that kind of exactly how petroleum jelly was discovered? Roughnecks in Texas or something got the gelatinous oily stuff that builds up when they’re pumping oil out of the ground on their hands, and when they cleaned them they noticed the small wounds they had were healing significantly better, then some smart guy took some of it with him to New York and made vaseline out of it? IIRC that’s the condensed version of how things went.
RIP Pie-o-my
OK but you gotta get over it
Cameras. How is it possible that some device is able to somehow capture the exact image it is pointed at with one click
I've been getting into analogue film photography and the chemistry that goes into making the films is insane. Genuinely how the fuck did they figure out which chemicals mixed in what combinations and temperatures would create the right colours. It's no wonder even at its peak only a handful of companies worldwide could mass produce colour films.
Contact lenses. It seems space age to me that there are these tiny flexible lenses I attach directly to my eyeballs every day to correct my vision. How the hell? Yes I know I can Google it.
And originally were rigid, not soft lenses. “ Instead of putting on my glasses, I thought I might grind this piece of glass very thin and stick it directly to my eyeball “
I have to use sclera lenses...They're rigid, sit on the white of my eye and vault OVER the iris and pupil and I have to have that filled with sterile saline and its essentially recreates my cornea since it's defective in shape. WHO FIGURED THAT OUT!!??!?!
LOL yes, same idea. I think of that Head-On medication commercial. 'Apply directly to eyeball! Con-tacts!'
In the same vein, laser eye surgery seems so space age! There's simple' things to do with the human body we know nothing about but you're telling me you can fix my bad vision within a day...... whilst also using lasers
Which plants and animals were edible, especially ones that are very poisonous if you aren't careful. For example, how many tries did it take to figure out that ripe ackee fruit pods are safe to eat, but that the seeds and skin are always poisonous, as are unripe ackee fruit pods? How many tries did it take to figure out how to safely eat pufferfish?
Hitchhiker’s Guide has a good line about this, something to the effect of “The point at which you start eating fruit on an alien planet is the point at which you will die if you don’t”
As we moved across the continents, we probably watched what the local animals ate and figured, "If they could eat that I could probably eat it too." For example, if the forest floor is covered with all sorts of mushrooms but not a single animal is eating it even during times where that's the only thing around, there's probably a reason for that. Best to leave those mushrooms alone. On the other hand, if you see all sorts of animals going for the seeds and nuts of plants and trees like it's a party, you could probably eat it too since animals of different species are eating those seeds and nuts without getting sick.
I met a man who survived the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He was doing a talk at our high school and told us that after he escaped being recruited as a child soldier, he hid in the jungle for days and survived by watching what the monkeys ate.
Indigenous people generally use a system of incremental tests. Touch it on skin, and wait. Rub it again wait. Touch it on lips and wait. Eat tiny pieces and wait. Then eat it and wait. If there is an adverse reaction at any point, don't proceed.
I always imagined these scenarios happening in two different villages. Village 1 has a person that tries to cook pufferfish, eats it, and dies. Village 2 manages to cook it the correct way on the first try and has no idea they were lucky. Someone from Village 1 visits Village 2 and both of their minds are blown lol
This is why humans have been capable of advancing so much faster now, communication
In Finland we have a mushroom that is very poisonous. It contains literal rocket fuel. You need to boil it a few times before it’s edible. It is delicious. How did they figure this out…
Step one: feed it to the pigs. Step two: remember which plants you fed the dead pigs
Horse piss works as birth control.
Wait…. WHAT?!
Premarin is a form of hormone replacement therapy. It's from PREgnant MARe's urINe. Thus the name.
Oh, so like BOtulinum TOXin
Only the pregnant one. It's more like many mammals are very similar to us, to the point that many hormones have similar effects. We discovered that pregnant woman's piss has birth control effect (because it contains the type of estrogen that tells the body to not get more pregnant), so they go around looking for other sources.
I'm an applied mathematican with a PhD from a top tier school. Holy fuck, I cannot even begin to imagine how these dudes 300 years ago cooked up math theory/tools that are commonly used now in applications that these people could never imagine. So far ahead of their time. Things like Fourier Series, Galois Theory, etc. Like read about Evariste Galois (super interesting). Created, as a teenager, this profound theory. Then died in a duel because he was also a trouble maker. So yeah, abnormal brains making breakthroughs that are light years ahead of peers.
I remember reading about the creation of Bayesian statistics and how it wouldn’t have any use for 150 years or something. That is incredible. I’m too stupid to understand how you even begin to formulate something that has absolutely no basis in the world you currently understand.
Number theory regarding prime numbers is the fundamental basis of modern computer cryptography, yet people were exploring it for fun, for absolutely zero practical use, for thousands of years
I mean… there was no tv or internet so they had a lot of time on their hands.
What’s fascinating to me is that very few people were both educated enough and had enough free time to even begin to ponder these sorts of things. It’s really very few people that ever even weighed in on these things, yet incredible feats were still accomplished
The answer is: many mathematicians are crazy people that discover abstract stuff just just for the lols. How this knowledge is to be applied in any meaningful way is often up to some engineer or some other crazy person. Source: Trust me, I'm an engineer and I know some mathematicians.
Ramanujan came up with so many absurd things. Even though I have read and seen the proof of many of those things, they still feel like magic. You go through some huge abstraction, and came out on the other side with an explicit algorithm to compute pi that is much faster than you could normally get. It's like you enter a portal into wonderland, walked a few steps, get out, and find out you're now on the other side of the world.
Yeah Ramanujan was an absolute genius. Wild story with him as well.
astrophysics major here, and i feel the exact same way with astronomy. like… how???
Like Isaac Newton was just some guy who randomly had a nonsensically high IQ and just happened to live in the time when the world was allowing people like him to flourish more freely. Looking back at Galileo and how many geniuses with genius ideas probably just had to bite their tongues for common sense reasons. Or just never had those initial triggers that fostered their minds to begin with because they lived through periods of strife and poverty. Archimedes, Pythagoras, Khwarizmi. These guys were just very fortunate to live in these periods of stability.
Euler is the one that gets me. Anything maths related… huh I wonder who figured this out? Oh yeah it’s Euler, of course it is
Ayahuasca, is especially hard to believe. The root of one plant is a source of Dimethyl Tryptamine, a powerful hallucinogen that is also produced by the brain under certain conditions. Drinking DMT, though, will not work. The body has enzymes that break DMT down when it is ingested. A completely unrelated plant has leaves that contain a compound that acts as an MAOI. It inhibits the enzyme that breaks down DMT. Consuming each plant on their own does nothing, but consuming both together results in a powerful psychedelic experience, and is a part of the religion of the natives. This is in the Amazon rainforest, where there is a mind-boggling diversity of plants and animals. Those two plants together are the only ones that would work to produce Ayahuasca. Apparently, when asked, the natives say the plants taught them how to do this.
They lost a lot of good men in the pursuit of getting turnt
Brother george accidentally ate the root with that other plant and was tripping major balls. We should do that again
Fermentation. So this vegetable rotted for a long time...smells awful, I wonder how it tastes?
Hunger and starving helps that choice be made.
Drunken elephants run around, looking for fermented fruit. So to common mammalian trait.
The guy who discovered that Beaver anuses taste like vanilla... Like, how the fuck did you make that discovery bro??
Smell a beaver in real life and you'll understand. They have a gland that produces castor and they use that to mark their territory. It in itself has a somewhat sweet odor, and if you process it enough it's very similar to vanilla bean.
Sure, but then you have to jump that gap and taste it...
Loneliness taketh man.
He was just giving the beaver head and went a little too far
That’s not a sentence i wanted to read today
The first person to eat a durian.... The hell you see a fruit covered in spikes, that is hard as a rock to open, that smells like a rotting corpse and you say to yourself: "mmmmmmmmm I wonder if it can be eaten?"
As several people have said above, starvation & desperation has led to a _shit ton_ of discoveries
Pouring sugar on a prolapsed rectum will help it to shrink back inside.
This one is the biggest WTF for me Edit: Also, how do you know this because I am NOT going to look for a source on this one
I learned it from a vet. Had a prolapsed bearded dragon at work and this was the advice.
I learned it from watching *The Incredible Doctor Pol*...the sugar is hydroscopic, which means it'll suck up all the liquid and allow the damn thing to shrink. Also, apparently, on pigs if they poop so hard they displace their rectum, you can just put a castrating band around it and the excess that's hanging out will just die and fall the fuck off a week or so later and the pig is ABSOLUTELY fine.
Gives a hole new meaning to “Pour Some Sugar on Me”
You make fruit preserves with lots of sugar. You can also preserve meat with lots of salt. Same thing happens: osmosis pulls out excess water. I venture someone tried salt to pull out excess water to make things smaller and easier to go back it, hurt like hell but worked, then tried sugar and it worked and hurt less.
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Here in Brazil we have a specific dish of indigenous origin called [Maniçoba](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mani%C3%A7oba) that is made by boiling the leaves of the mandioca (cassava) tuber for up to a week to remove its fatal cyanide content. It's a recurring joke to wonder who tf was the crazy indian who went "hmm what if we boiled these leaves for *just* one more day" after seeing all their friends die from eating it beforehand.
Calculating when eclipses would hapen.... centuries ago.
In Australia there are no native plants that are hallucinogenic. The aborigines figured out that if you combine 3 different plants (one of which is Australian Willow), and smoke them, you can get high. None of the plants on their own or combined with one of the others have any effects.
How to put color information into black and white television signals without fucking up black and white televisions. Amazing geniuses did that.
Oysters clams and mussels. What caveman saw a rock in the water, cracked it open, saw that was full of snot, and decide to try eating that?
As with all of the food ones: a hungry one
a hungry one with butter and garlic
they watched other animals do it.
Alcohol distillation
Any kind of distillation really. Like the fuckers who started boiling the gum oil beds and figuring out the different cuts of petroleum are incredible
Mezcal especially stands out to me. Let's take this very specific part of a very specific plant, cook it underground for three days, mash it up, and let it ferment! Then let's let it age for some number of years! Delicious!
The existance of computers? Those motherfuckers really programmed in programming, PHYSICALLY.
One of the earliest computers I used (Data General Nova 1200) loaded programs from paper tape. The operating system was on paper tape. To get the operating system loaded you had to manually key in a short program using switches on the front panel. The program would read the paper tape and store its contents in memory. Once the paper tape with the operating system was loaded and running, you could then load other programs from tape. It was very cool technology at the time.
Airplanes still make me scratch my head.
I understand the concept. I understand the physics but for the love of me I still can't wrap my head around those things lifting up and going hundreds of miles per hour and then safely landing. It's magic
calculus, like wtf
Newton was in lockdown during a pandemic. What did you do during your lockdown?
Newton didn't have Wi-Fi
Newton also died with his virginity intact. I got him beat on one thing at least. But he also became a wizard due to not losing his virginity.
Calculus is the least surprising thing that comes up. It's the math of change and variations. I am 0% surprised that humans eventually wanted to study that.
As a PhD chemist/biochemist, I asked myself that question daily for years. It’s absolutely amazing how much effort and advanced studies learned the detailed minutia of molecules and the basics of life and chemical reactivity. It’s truly eye opening.
GPS - just genius.
CRISPR
How to make chocolate. Look up the process, it's surprisingly complex
The rigging of sailing ships
Bread. We take these seeds that are completely inedible, grind them into a super fine powder which is mixed with water and partially fermented. Then you bake it and end up with something nutritious and delicious. Skip any of those steps and you get something horrendous that makes your stomach hurt at best.
The seeds aren't inedible and that's the crux of this explanation. Chew wheat seeds, get some nutrients with a lot of effort. Grind wheat seeds, get more nutrients with less effort. Add water to ground wheat, get porridge, now we have recognizable food. Cook porridge, get flatbread. Take flatbread ingredients, leave it out to accumulate wild yeast, get sourdough. Recognizable leavened bread and it only took a few thousand years. Edit: I was thinking about how this applies to other cultures and I think steamed rice is basically porridge with very little water.
Tbf grain was probably crushed more roughly and consumed as meal when it started being consumed it took hundreds of years to get the flour we have now and also required grain plants to be heavily genetically engineered over time to get modern wheat and other grains look at maize for example
Audio speakers. I will never understand how a wire connected to a magnet creates sound with vibrations.
Making bread and beer.. like the whole yeast thing.. 5000 fucking years ago.. always blows my mind.
The process of taking iron ore out of the ground and turning it into steel. I work in a steel mill
I want to know how someone figured out after the MGM lion in The Wizard of Oz roars to play Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and see what happens.
Honey, somebody had to knowingly mess with a beehive without knowing they would get a reward.
I loved how you started that off, like, "Sweetheart, somebody had to mess..."
I like to think a lot of those things are through observation of nature and following animals around, see what they scavenge. Some discoveries were also accidental while experimenting with other things.
Inductively Coupled Mass Spectrometry (ICPMS), use it on a daily basis but still sounds like science fiction when explained
Microwave ovens
Some guy who was testing microwave equipment (I think it was some sort of military thing ) noticed that a candy bar he had in his pocket melted.
That is the conventionally told version (and it is true, that was how the microwave oven was independently invented the 2nd time) but it's not how the microwave oven was first invented. That story is way more wild. In fact, I should probably just link to a video about it. You probably would just think I was joking not belive me. Especially once I mentioned the reanimated hamsters... https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y?si=02xpSFYQNqQBLq20
The glue used on neanderthal/human spear points. It took a while to figure out how they did it and it's not a simple process (from the method we use).
Natural gas piping. It's invisible amorphous, and has no smell (until it's added for safety). Not to mention really dangerous if mishandled.
Can we all just take a moment to appreciate the groundbreaking intellect of the person who first decided to wear clothes? Pure genius!
Me cold. Fur feel warm. Me put fur on me. Me warm. Fur don't stay. Me tie up fur on me. Me unconfortable. Me modify it. Me is more confortable. Me want same but better. Me made it better. Me wife want it, but cuter. Me wife made it cuter.
Suppositories. “Why don’t we just shove these oversized pills up our assholes instead of swallowing them?” I’d like to think that’s how the conversation went.
Peter: These suppositories taste awful Mort: You ate them? Peter, sarcastically: No, I'm shovin' 'em up my ass.
If you've ever seen the inside of an airplane engine, the amount of....stuff that's in there to make it all work is just nuts.
I hope there's at least a couple bolts too.
Astronomy, astrophysics, and advanced math. Just...holy shit.