March 6, 2017 • 13 mins
Ancient armies sometimes used hallucinogenic honey as a bioweapon. New research shows how different squid brains are from human brains. Plus, we break down why hot food seems more satisfying than cold food.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to host toff Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at host Works eight. Every
week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
the weird and wonders advances we've seen in science, technology,
and culture. This week, new research into squid brains shows
how different cephalopods really are from humans and explains how
(00:24):
they pull off some of their most amazing feats and unrelated,
we answer one of those burning questions, why does hot
food seems so much more satisfying than cold food? But first,
staff editor Christopher Hassiotis and our freelance writer Laurie L.
Dove explores a strange bit of food history. Ancient armies
sometimes waged war using hallucinogenic honey. In two thousand eight,
(00:51):
a middle aged couple decided to improve their sex life,
so they spent a week eating raw honey gathered from
near Turkey's Black Sea. But then they ended up in
a hospital with symptoms that mimiced heart attacks. The culprit
mad honey poisoning a little known destroyer that has brought
down ancient armies and in modern times been rumored to
have a hallucinatory effect that increases sexual performance. Mad honey
(01:14):
is produced by bees that ingest the nectar of Rhododendron
ponticum and other poisonous plants that grow in Japan, Nepal, Brazil,
parts of North America and Europe, and the Eastern Black
Sea region of Turkey. The naturally toxic syrup reportedly tastes
more bitter than normal honey, and the toxicity is stronger
and fresh honey gathered in the springtime, when rhododendrons are
(01:34):
among the first plants to bloom. Mad honey can go
from intoxicating to lethal in just a few tablespoons, and
because potency varies from hive to hive, there's really no
surer way to tell when enough is enough. In the
case of the couple who wound up in the emergency room,
increasingly large doses of the toxically tinged honey caused acute
inferior myocardial infarctions, adding to the dizziness, hypotension, and loss
(01:57):
of consciousness they may already have experienced from their first taste.
The honey is so potent that ancient armies used it
as a weapon, and quite effectively too. According to Adrian Mayer,
a research scholar in classics and a historian specializing in
ancient biological and chemical warfare. This goes back awhile the
ancient Greek commander Xenophon led an army of ten thousand
(02:19):
soldiers from Persia back to Greece in the year four
o one b CE. He prided himself on choosing healthy
and safe campsites for his soldiers while in hostile territory,
and set up shop in Pontus on the Black Sea
coast in northeast Turkey. He noted nothing unusual, but did
make note of an extraordinary number of swarming bees, and
so that his men soon discovered the hives and gorged
(02:41):
themselves on the sweet treat of wild honey. Xenophon recorded
his thoughts for posterity and was quote appalled when his
soldiers suddenly behaved like crazed madmen and collapsed en mass.
His entire army was paralyzed and incapacitated for days, totally
vulnerable to possible enemy attack. Although Xenophon's army recovered before
they were discovered and slam sane, the Roman general Pompey
(03:01):
was not so lucky. According to Mayor in the year
sixty five b c E. During a war against King
Mithradates of Pontus, Pompey and his troops traveled through the
exact same area where Xenophan's army had eaten that mad honey.
His soldiers dined on honeycombs, unaware they were actually trapped
set by their enemies along the route. One thousand Roman
soldiers were ambushed and killed after being rendered inert by
(03:24):
the toxic honey. In addition to being a trap, there
are also instances of mad honey being used in mead
as a way of stalling encroaching forces. Mead or honey wine,
is made by fermenting honey with water and then flavoring
the mixture with fruits and spices. Two notable occurrences of
mead made with mad honey took place in the same
region where the armies of Xenophon and Pompey once stalled.
(03:45):
In the year ninety six, the Russian foes of Olga
of Kiev fell to a similar ruse when they accepted
several tons of mead to drink from Olga's allies. All
five thousand Russian soldiers were massacred where they collapsed wheeling
and delirious, and in fourteen eighty nine in the same region,
a Russian army slaughtered ten thousand Tatars who had drunk
(04:05):
many casks of mead the Russians had deliberately left behind
in their abandoned camp. So that was then, But what
about now? Mad honey still poses a threat to outsiders
unfamiliar with its potency, though it's treated differently by locals
who use it medicinally. In Turkish culture, mad honey is
seen as a type of medicine known as deli bal,
and is used in small amounts to treat hypertension, diabetes, mellotists,
(04:27):
and stomach diseases. In Nepal, the indigenous Guruon community uses
mad honey not only for medicinal purposes, but also for
its hallucinogenic properties as well in ritual. The curious and
determined have purchased mad honey from Internet sites or from
shopkeepers and eight piaries who surreptitiously sell the substance in
regions where it's produced. Mad honey these days reportedly cost
(04:47):
nearly a hundred and seventy dollars per pound, made more
expensive both by its active ingredient grayanotoxin, which causes paralysis
and breathing stoppage, and by the difficulty of obtaining it.
In Nepal, for instance, this hallucinatory honey is harvested by
people who repel down craggy cliffs while chanting calming words
to keep away swarms of bees. Although honey and meat
(05:08):
were among the only natural sweets and antiquity as irresistible
as candy, today's soldiers are presumably well supplied with candy
bars and able to forego the temptation of found hives.
But then again, it's easy to envision a scenario where
soldiers might accept gifts of food or drink from seemingly
friendly hosts secretly allied with enemies waiting in ambush. Sounds
like a delicious but deadly trojan horse. Uh, make that
(05:31):
trojan bee. Next up, our audio producer Dylan Fagin, along
with freelance writer jescely and Shields, explain how physiology and
nostalgic combine to make hot food seem more cravable than
cold food. You know that ravenously hungry feeling you get
(05:52):
after going swimming. It feels like you could go to
an all you can eat buffet and make them rethink
their business strategy. Even though a salad, granola bar, or
even in a nice smoothie would probably satisfy you, a
voice echoing out of the deepest recesses of your brain
commands you defeat. It's something hot, the entire large pizza,
perhaps a whole side of rose hog, thirteen plates of
spaghetti covered in butter and parmesan cheese. There could be
(06:14):
a lot of reasons we create warm foods when we're
especially hungry, but one of them probably has to do
with the link between smell and taste. We talked with
doctor Stephen Secor, an associate professor in the University of
Alabama Department of Biological Sciences who studies the physiological design
of digestive systems. He pointed out that hot foods give
off far more airborne particles than cold foods, and because
(06:36):
our sense of taste actually involves a lot of input
from smell, hot foods give us more to love than
cold foods. Do. Just consider how quickly the smell of
meat or vegetables cooking on the barbecue can make you
feel hungry. You might have not been ready for lunch before,
but now you shure us that cold gaspacho simply doesn't
stimulate the senses like a warm minestrone. So even though
we intellectually know that cold soup is going to be
(06:58):
tasting and fill us up, our factory apparatus hasn't yet
been apprised of the situation that makes it hard to
get all the parts of our brain on the gaspacho
Bandwagon smell may not be the only reason we create
a hot meal more than a cold one. Heating food
unlocks calories and nutrients that we wouldn't be able to
get eating the food raw, and our big old brains
are very calorie needy. Our preference for hot meals might
(07:20):
have something to do with our brains steering us towards
the most potential calories possible in the moment of hunger.
According to Richard Ringham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard an
author of Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, the
important comparison is between foods that are cooked and differ
only in temperature. Ringham says that hot food very likely
gields more energy gain than cold food, partly because of
(07:41):
the changes in digestibility. One example is that starch becomes
increasingly refractory after hot bread cools, which could be one
reason why we like hot toast. In the case of
lipid rich foods, the closer of fat is to its
melting point when eaten probably the easier it is digested.
According to Sea corps Well, it's possible we crave a
warm meal because it makes it easier to digest and
(08:03):
get the calories more quickly. He doesn't necessarily agree that
we crave hot food because it's more nutritious, he said,
a cooked hamburger that is cold or hot would probably
provide an equal amount of calories and take the same
amount of effort to digest. So while there might be
some selected drive hidden in our behavior to crave cooked
food for nutritional gains, the craving is very likely driven
by a nice memory of the taste and smell of
(08:24):
burger right off the grill, or your mom's macaroni and cheeks. Finally,
this week, Managing editor Alison louder Milk and MS. Jescelyn
Shields dive into new research into one of my favorite topics,
the eld rich and evasive inner workings of squid and
(08:45):
other cephalopods. Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman once said, if
you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.
The same could be said about cephalopods, those invertebrates that
include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. The last ancestor we shared
(09:07):
with one of these animated jello salads was probably a
worm of some kind. So our DNA is basically nothing
like their's, not that they care. They didn't really do
evolution the same way we did, but nevertheless managed to
independently evolve into uncannily clever camouflage artists with large, complex brains,
close circulatory systems, and camera style eyes just like ours,
(09:30):
well not just like ours. The thing about cephalopods is
they've had five dred million years of independent evolution to
figure out how to do things their own way. Any
test you can create to measure something in a human intelligence, say,
isn't gonna work for an octopus, which is why neurobiologists
studying cephalopods are kind of like electricians figuring out the
(09:51):
electrical grid on an alien planet. Here's evolutionary biologists. Dr
Sabrina Panky on cephalopods. We've known for fifty years that
the cephalopod brain is easily the most complex among invertebrates,
and also that there dazzingly intricate body patterning behavior is
controlled by motor centers in the brain. Figuring out the
neural bases of complex behaviors is inherently difficult in any animal,
(10:13):
but trying to figure out how a squid can completely
change its body patterning in a matter of milliseconds is
a sticky wicket. One hypothesis has been that body coloration
is organized in the cephalopod brain somatotropically. That means one
specific part of the central nervous system is solely responsible
for controlling the patterning in a distinct patch of skin.
(10:35):
After all, that's how it works in our mammalian cortex.
But a news study published in the Journal of Neuroscience
shows again cephalopods aren't like us, very not like us.
The research team proposes that the oval squid, also known
as the big fin reef squid, achieves its skin patterning
through mosaic organization. That the squid actually use multiple motor
(10:57):
centers within the optic lib of their brain to pretty
a single skin pattern like stripes, bands, or spots. The
fact that several parts of the brain work together at
once to create a single display allows for greater complexity
and the resulting pattern. It'd be like using multiple keyboards
to write the same document all at the same time.
We vertebrates just don't do things that way. Researches at
(11:20):
Taiwan's National Chingwa University think that because several different areas
of the optic lobe can be used to display a
single skin pattern in a specific body part, a dark
mantle stripe, the tentacles poke it up fins. The squid
are able to flash up to about fourteen distinct patterns
in the blink of an eye. Fourteen distinct patterns. We
(11:40):
tend to think of redundancy as inefficient, but cephalopods have
overlapping parts of their brains to create specific patterns on
specific body parts, meaning if one part of their brain
is busy, they can still flash information onto their bodies
with awe inspiring quickness. Just think if you had a
bunch of different parts of your brain in charge of
remembering a single word, your word recall skills would be amazing.
(12:03):
Dr Chow, one of the lead researchers involved in the
squid study, told us the squid's ability to quickly switch
different body patterns and visual communication a sort of like
an alphabet visual language. The researchers think the color patterns
displayed by the squid are not only used as a
communication signal to the same species, but also used to
hide or warn off other potential predators a prey. This
(12:25):
research also highlights the fact that though we vertebrates tend
to think we've got the best systems for doing everything,
cephalopods might be onto something, at least when it comes
to efficient communication. That's our show for this week. Thank
you so much for tuning in. Further thanks to our
audio producer Dylan Fagin and our editorial liaison Alison louder Milk.
(12:49):
Subscribe to now Now for more of the latest science
news and send us links to anything you'd like to
hear us cover plus a favorite quote of yours. Doesn't
matter what it's about. You can send us an email
at now podcast at how staff works dot com, and
of course, for lots more stories like these, head on
over to our home planet now dot how staff works
dot com.
Welcome to host toff Works Now. I'm your host, Lauren Vogelbaum,
a researcher and writer. Here at host Works eight. Every
week I'm bringing you three stories from our team about
the weird and wonders advances we've seen in science, technology,
and culture. This week, new research into squid brains shows
how different cephalopods really are from humans and explains how
(00:24):
they pull off some of their most amazing feats and unrelated,
we answer one of those burning questions, why does hot
food seems so much more satisfying than cold food? But first,
staff editor Christopher Hassiotis and our freelance writer Laurie L.
Dove explores a strange bit of food history. Ancient armies
sometimes waged war using hallucinogenic honey. In two thousand eight,
(00:51):
a middle aged couple decided to improve their sex life,
so they spent a week eating raw honey gathered from
near Turkey's Black Sea. But then they ended up in
a hospital with symptoms that mimiced heart attacks. The culprit
mad honey poisoning a little known destroyer that has brought
down ancient armies and in modern times been rumored to
have a hallucinatory effect that increases sexual performance. Mad honey
(01:14):
is produced by bees that ingest the nectar of Rhododendron
ponticum and other poisonous plants that grow in Japan, Nepal, Brazil,
parts of North America and Europe, and the Eastern Black
Sea region of Turkey. The naturally toxic syrup reportedly tastes
more bitter than normal honey, and the toxicity is stronger
and fresh honey gathered in the springtime, when rhododendrons are
(01:34):
among the first plants to bloom. Mad honey can go
from intoxicating to lethal in just a few tablespoons, and
because potency varies from hive to hive, there's really no
surer way to tell when enough is enough. In the
case of the couple who wound up in the emergency room,
increasingly large doses of the toxically tinged honey caused acute
inferior myocardial infarctions, adding to the dizziness, hypotension, and loss
(01:57):
of consciousness they may already have experienced from their first taste.
The honey is so potent that ancient armies used it
as a weapon, and quite effectively too. According to Adrian Mayer,
a research scholar in classics and a historian specializing in
ancient biological and chemical warfare. This goes back awhile the
ancient Greek commander Xenophon led an army of ten thousand
(02:19):
soldiers from Persia back to Greece in the year four
o one b CE. He prided himself on choosing healthy
and safe campsites for his soldiers while in hostile territory,
and set up shop in Pontus on the Black Sea
coast in northeast Turkey. He noted nothing unusual, but did
make note of an extraordinary number of swarming bees, and
so that his men soon discovered the hives and gorged
(02:41):
themselves on the sweet treat of wild honey. Xenophon recorded
his thoughts for posterity and was quote appalled when his
soldiers suddenly behaved like crazed madmen and collapsed en mass.
His entire army was paralyzed and incapacitated for days, totally
vulnerable to possible enemy attack. Although Xenophon's army recovered before
they were discovered and slam sane, the Roman general Pompey
(03:01):
was not so lucky. According to Mayor in the year
sixty five b c E. During a war against King
Mithradates of Pontus, Pompey and his troops traveled through the
exact same area where Xenophan's army had eaten that mad honey.
His soldiers dined on honeycombs, unaware they were actually trapped
set by their enemies along the route. One thousand Roman
soldiers were ambushed and killed after being rendered inert by
(03:24):
the toxic honey. In addition to being a trap, there
are also instances of mad honey being used in mead
as a way of stalling encroaching forces. Mead or honey wine,
is made by fermenting honey with water and then flavoring
the mixture with fruits and spices. Two notable occurrences of
mead made with mad honey took place in the same
region where the armies of Xenophon and Pompey once stalled.
(03:45):
In the year ninety six, the Russian foes of Olga
of Kiev fell to a similar ruse when they accepted
several tons of mead to drink from Olga's allies. All
five thousand Russian soldiers were massacred where they collapsed wheeling
and delirious, and in fourteen eighty nine in the same region,
a Russian army slaughtered ten thousand Tatars who had drunk
(04:05):
many casks of mead the Russians had deliberately left behind
in their abandoned camp. So that was then, But what
about now? Mad honey still poses a threat to outsiders
unfamiliar with its potency, though it's treated differently by locals
who use it medicinally. In Turkish culture, mad honey is
seen as a type of medicine known as deli bal,
and is used in small amounts to treat hypertension, diabetes, mellotists,
(04:27):
and stomach diseases. In Nepal, the indigenous Guruon community uses
mad honey not only for medicinal purposes, but also for
its hallucinogenic properties as well in ritual. The curious and
determined have purchased mad honey from Internet sites or from
shopkeepers and eight piaries who surreptitiously sell the substance in
regions where it's produced. Mad honey these days reportedly cost
(04:47):
nearly a hundred and seventy dollars per pound, made more
expensive both by its active ingredient grayanotoxin, which causes paralysis
and breathing stoppage, and by the difficulty of obtaining it.
In Nepal, for instance, this hallucinatory honey is harvested by
people who repel down craggy cliffs while chanting calming words
to keep away swarms of bees. Although honey and meat
(05:08):
were among the only natural sweets and antiquity as irresistible
as candy, today's soldiers are presumably well supplied with candy
bars and able to forego the temptation of found hives.
But then again, it's easy to envision a scenario where
soldiers might accept gifts of food or drink from seemingly
friendly hosts secretly allied with enemies waiting in ambush. Sounds
like a delicious but deadly trojan horse. Uh, make that
(05:31):
trojan bee. Next up, our audio producer Dylan Fagin, along
with freelance writer jescely and Shields, explain how physiology and
nostalgic combine to make hot food seem more cravable than
cold food. You know that ravenously hungry feeling you get
(05:52):
after going swimming. It feels like you could go to
an all you can eat buffet and make them rethink
their business strategy. Even though a salad, granola bar, or
even in a nice smoothie would probably satisfy you, a
voice echoing out of the deepest recesses of your brain
commands you defeat. It's something hot, the entire large pizza,
perhaps a whole side of rose hog, thirteen plates of
spaghetti covered in butter and parmesan cheese. There could be
(06:14):
a lot of reasons we create warm foods when we're
especially hungry, but one of them probably has to do
with the link between smell and taste. We talked with
doctor Stephen Secor, an associate professor in the University of
Alabama Department of Biological Sciences who studies the physiological design
of digestive systems. He pointed out that hot foods give
off far more airborne particles than cold foods, and because
(06:36):
our sense of taste actually involves a lot of input
from smell, hot foods give us more to love than
cold foods. Do. Just consider how quickly the smell of
meat or vegetables cooking on the barbecue can make you
feel hungry. You might have not been ready for lunch before,
but now you shure us that cold gaspacho simply doesn't
stimulate the senses like a warm minestrone. So even though
we intellectually know that cold soup is going to be
(06:58):
tasting and fill us up, our factory apparatus hasn't yet
been apprised of the situation that makes it hard to
get all the parts of our brain on the gaspacho
Bandwagon smell may not be the only reason we create
a hot meal more than a cold one. Heating food
unlocks calories and nutrients that we wouldn't be able to
get eating the food raw, and our big old brains
are very calorie needy. Our preference for hot meals might
(07:20):
have something to do with our brains steering us towards
the most potential calories possible in the moment of hunger.
According to Richard Ringham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard an
author of Catching Fire, How Cooking Made Us Human, the
important comparison is between foods that are cooked and differ
only in temperature. Ringham says that hot food very likely
gields more energy gain than cold food, partly because of
(07:41):
the changes in digestibility. One example is that starch becomes
increasingly refractory after hot bread cools, which could be one
reason why we like hot toast. In the case of
lipid rich foods, the closer of fat is to its
melting point when eaten probably the easier it is digested.
According to Sea corps Well, it's possible we crave a
warm meal because it makes it easier to digest and
(08:03):
get the calories more quickly. He doesn't necessarily agree that
we crave hot food because it's more nutritious, he said,
a cooked hamburger that is cold or hot would probably
provide an equal amount of calories and take the same
amount of effort to digest. So while there might be
some selected drive hidden in our behavior to crave cooked
food for nutritional gains, the craving is very likely driven
by a nice memory of the taste and smell of
(08:24):
burger right off the grill, or your mom's macaroni and cheeks. Finally,
this week, Managing editor Alison louder Milk and MS. Jescelyn
Shields dive into new research into one of my favorite topics,
the eld rich and evasive inner workings of squid and
(08:45):
other cephalopods. Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman once said, if
you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.
The same could be said about cephalopods, those invertebrates that
include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. The last ancestor we shared
(09:07):
with one of these animated jello salads was probably a
worm of some kind. So our DNA is basically nothing
like their's, not that they care. They didn't really do
evolution the same way we did, but nevertheless managed to
independently evolve into uncannily clever camouflage artists with large, complex brains,
close circulatory systems, and camera style eyes just like ours,
(09:30):
well not just like ours. The thing about cephalopods is
they've had five dred million years of independent evolution to
figure out how to do things their own way. Any
test you can create to measure something in a human intelligence, say,
isn't gonna work for an octopus, which is why neurobiologists
studying cephalopods are kind of like electricians figuring out the
(09:51):
electrical grid on an alien planet. Here's evolutionary biologists. Dr
Sabrina Panky on cephalopods. We've known for fifty years that
the cephalopod brain is easily the most complex among invertebrates,
and also that there dazzingly intricate body patterning behavior is
controlled by motor centers in the brain. Figuring out the
neural bases of complex behaviors is inherently difficult in any animal,
(10:13):
but trying to figure out how a squid can completely
change its body patterning in a matter of milliseconds is
a sticky wicket. One hypothesis has been that body coloration
is organized in the cephalopod brain somatotropically. That means one
specific part of the central nervous system is solely responsible
for controlling the patterning in a distinct patch of skin.
(10:35):
After all, that's how it works in our mammalian cortex.
But a news study published in the Journal of Neuroscience
shows again cephalopods aren't like us, very not like us.
The research team proposes that the oval squid, also known
as the big fin reef squid, achieves its skin patterning
through mosaic organization. That the squid actually use multiple motor
(10:57):
centers within the optic lib of their brain to pretty
a single skin pattern like stripes, bands, or spots. The
fact that several parts of the brain work together at
once to create a single display allows for greater complexity
and the resulting pattern. It'd be like using multiple keyboards
to write the same document all at the same time.
We vertebrates just don't do things that way. Researches at
(11:20):
Taiwan's National Chingwa University think that because several different areas
of the optic lobe can be used to display a
single skin pattern in a specific body part, a dark
mantle stripe, the tentacles poke it up fins. The squid
are able to flash up to about fourteen distinct patterns
in the blink of an eye. Fourteen distinct patterns. We
(11:40):
tend to think of redundancy as inefficient, but cephalopods have
overlapping parts of their brains to create specific patterns on
specific body parts, meaning if one part of their brain
is busy, they can still flash information onto their bodies
with awe inspiring quickness. Just think if you had a
bunch of different parts of your brain in charge of
remembering a single word, your word recall skills would be amazing.
(12:03):
Dr Chow, one of the lead researchers involved in the
squid study, told us the squid's ability to quickly switch
different body patterns and visual communication a sort of like
an alphabet visual language. The researchers think the color patterns
displayed by the squid are not only used as a
communication signal to the same species, but also used to
hide or warn off other potential predators a prey. This
(12:25):
research also highlights the fact that though we vertebrates tend
to think we've got the best systems for doing everything,
cephalopods might be onto something, at least when it comes
to efficient communication. That's our show for this week. Thank
you so much for tuning in. Further thanks to our
audio producer Dylan Fagin and our editorial liaison Alison louder Milk.
(12:49):
Subscribe to now Now for more of the latest science
news and send us links to anything you'd like to
hear us cover plus a favorite quote of yours. Doesn't
matter what it's about. You can send us an email
at now podcast at how staff works dot com, and
of course, for lots more stories like these, head on
over to our home planet now dot how staff works
dot com.
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