Scientists used melted mummy juice to make sourdough bread
Popular Science...
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FACT: Scientists used yeast found in a mummy for a sourdough bread recipe
In 1991, German hikers spotted a torso sticking out of glacier ice in the Ötztal Alps, looking like it was trying to army crawl its way out of the mountain. They reported it to the police, who treated it like a recent death. It took days (and a famous mountaineer pointing out that the corpse’s axe looked, uh, old) before anyone realized this was actually a 5,300-year-old mummy.
Enter Ötzi the Iceman, who we now know probably was murdered (by way of a flint arrowhead to the shoulder), ate lots of game, sported a few tattoos, had damaged lungs from constant fire exposure, and lived to be about 46. We know all of this because his body was naturally mummified by the conditions of the glacier, preserving lots of organs and soft tissue for study. (That’s also why police thought he was a recent casualty of some kind of misadventure on the mountain.) He’s now kept in a specially controlled cold cell in a museum where he’s regularly sprayed down with sterile water to stay moist (gross).
Scientists recently found some yeast species living in Ötzi that they suspect made a home in him sometime after he died, but before he got put on ice in a modern museum environment. They found some fascinating stuff about his microbiome in general, but today’s episode focuses on a strange little sidequest one of the researchers went on: using the mummy yeast to make sourdough bread. While it took some trial and error, this mummy yeast eventually made decent dough. Tune in to this week’s episode to learn more about this yummy mummy!
FACT: Mushrooms can teach us a lot about mutual aid
Featuring Pattie Gonia
This week’s episode features special guest Pattie Gonia! Pattie shared some facts and feelings about mycelium.
Mycelium are thread-like fungal networks that run through the soil, connecting entire forests in what scientists call the “wood wide web.” And they’re a fantastic example of mutual aid in the wild.
Trees use these networks to share carbon, nitrogen, and water. Established trees funnel sugars to struggling seedlings in the shade. Older trees direct more resources to their own kin and neighbors in need. Dying trees dump their remaining resources into the network as a last act of generosity.
To make things even more radical, the mycelium that facilitate this mutual aid network don’t steal resources from plants; they trade. They say “You give me sugar, I’ll give you minerals and water.” It’s a genuine exchange economy built on reciprocity, not extraction.
Listen to this week’s episode to hear Pattie talk more about mycelium—including how it breaks the idea of a sex binary.
FACT: Scientists brought the most famous architects in the world to UC Berkeley for a weekend to run bizarre tests on them, then hid the results for 60 years
Featuring Moiya McTier
Our other guest this week is friend-of-the-pod Dr. Moiya McTier! She shared a strange historical interlude she learned about while working on her upcoming book, Mothers of Invention: A History of Creativity from the Greek Muses.
In 1958, UC Berkeley invited a bunch of writers and architects to campus for a live-in creative assessment. This included several stars at the top of the field, such as I.M. Pei (best known for the Louvre Pyramid) and Louis Kahn (known for The National Assembly Building in Bangladesh, among other things). For an entire weekend, these architects lived and hung out together while scientists subjected them to a litany of personality tests. The wild range of quizzes and activities—including an exercise where the participants ranked one another—were meant to reveal new insights on creativity. Instead, the results got boxed up and stored in a Berkeley closet until 2016.
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about what these bizarre experiments actually found, why creativity is in crisis, and what Moiya thinks we can do to get our creative juices flowing again.
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