March 4, 2010 • 15 mins
Are you a fan of running outside without shoes? Many people enjoy walking barefoot, especially in warmer weather. Yet there's a dark side to the joy of a shoe-free life: parasites. Listen in and learn more about parasites in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alice and I don't look at the science
editor at how stuff works dot com. This is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're
(00:23):
taking you on a journey. We're running with parasites. Yept
running running barefoot, actually, which I didn't. I really wasn't
that aware that this was a thing until you blogged
about it. Like people are really into doing like marathon
running with no shoes or socks on. Right, it is
a thing. It is a big thing. But first we
are you kind of a believer in going barefoot in
(00:45):
the summertime? No, because, um, I my family spent a
couple of years up in Newfoundland, Canada, but most of
my time has been spent in the South. So we
were very I mean, it was really hammered into us
that you just you don't go walking around outside barefoot.
You know, you know, things will crawl into you, or
you'll step on something gross or sharp or um. You know,
(01:09):
for any number of reason, keep the shoes on when
you're outside. That's funny because I didn't. I don't remember
having any of that sort of public health message drilled
into my head when I was a kid. I mean,
a sign of summer for me was taking off my
shoes running around, whether it was wait, where'd you grow
up in Connecticut? Ware? There there are no sharp things outside.
(01:31):
It's just christine and wonderful. I guess. So, I guess
Connecticut has has none of those things. I don't know,
it's just we. We never really I never really thought
about it. You know. I would go on like hot pavement,
I would go to the pool. I would probably go
on disgusting places that I should not have gone barefoot.
Well I will. I do. Think my shoes off at
the beach now, now that's different. That may not be safe.
So you don't peel your socks off at the shore's edge. No, no, Well,
(01:56):
a lot of people are going barefoot now, and they're
going barefoot running in particular. UM actually tried it one
night because I was so curious. I am a bit
of an amateur runner, and I was curious because they say,
UM that it can improve your form when you're out there.
If you lose the shoes, you can improve your running efficiency. UM.
And this is based in the idea that we evolved
(02:19):
with these feet and if these feet can't cut it,
I mean, you know, if God had minister where Nike's,
we've been born with them, right, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So
there's this whole athletic oriented subculture out there that's going barefoot,
and mostly it's runners. Um, but it's it's by no
means a new thing. I mean, in nineteen sixty there
is an Olympic gold medal winner shuffle along without shoes
(02:42):
in Rome. And before sneakers were invented, which was in
the early nineteenth century, UM, which incidentally was married to
the volcanization of rubber and Charles Goodyear. It's a whole
separate story, but pretty interesting. Um, before sneakers were invented,
you have to think that people weren't necessarily always running
in shoes. And then you have guys like Fitdipity is right,
(03:03):
the Porsche lab who had to you know, run the
first marathon. Who was the messenger for that barefoot I
don't know. I did a little searching on that. Well yeah, yeah,
I mean they and and you had like naked wrestling
and all that. I mean, the old Olympics were pretty
h you know, don't let clothing get in the way
of a good sporting event, right, So we're kind of
(03:24):
getting back to our roots. Um with people running barefoot.
I mean there's a there's a whole culture out of
their barefoot races, their barefoot forums online. And for some
barefoot runners there are of course parasites, and the big
one is hookworm. Yes, hookworms, which are which are pretty
pretty like a lot of parasites, pretty amazing creatures. Um. Basically,
(03:48):
the life cycle here is, uh, you step on a
hookworm larva, and it crawls up through the sole of
your foot, makes its way up into your digestive system
where it breeds and reproduces, and then come back out
through the form of excrement and then crawls away from
the excrement to be stepped on again. So it's this uh,
this cycle. So I guess the main thing is you
(04:11):
would hope that that he's a barefoot running marathons would
would not be going through latrine zones or uh dog
parks or anything of that nature. How prevalent is hooker
in the US, well, uh, much much better than it was.
I understand you can still you can certainly still get it.
(04:32):
But if it's interesting around. Uh. Uh. John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Was looking for his next big project, right, and he
really wanted to help out the American South, where incidentally
we're podcasting from right now. Uh. And he was he
was kind of perturbed by the by the fact that,
like the the economic engine of the South was not
(04:54):
really getting going again. And uh so he sent down,
he formed a commission and sent people down to like
crunch the number and stuff and you know, see what
was wrong? You know, what what do we need to
need to do to kick started? And they they're taking
a lot of sick days from hookorm manufactus. Well, they
just found that a lot of Southerners were slow, pale, weak,
kind of gollamy, you know, and um and you know,
(05:17):
so they were they came back and they said, well,
there's no nothing wrong with this, that or the other,
but they seem like they might have some sort of
a lazy disease. So then Rockefeller lazy disease. Yeah, So
Rockefeller sends down a bunch of of doctors and they
start looking at some of the factors and they start
seeing that a lot of it is tied to the
soil types, like areas where there's like rich soil rich farmers,
(05:40):
then you have a lot of these pale gollamy uh Southerners. Um,
and then the poor farmers tend to be a little
better off. So it turned out that the big deal
was hookworms. Um. This was this ended up leading to
basically the invention of the outhouse because they they conducted
some experiments right to just see like how far the
(06:02):
hookworms travel from said excrement. So they put the they
put the pooh if you will, in a sandbox. Um. Um.
One of the few times when poo and a sandbox,
I guess was was the it was okay, yeah, And
then they may they measured to see how far the
larvak traveled each day, all right, three days hookworm races, yeah,
(06:23):
basically yeah. And they found that in three days it
could travel three ft and then it couldn't go any
farther it was, and then it would live for seven
days total and then it would die. All right. So
the problem was that you had these uh, poor anemic
Southerners going out there, um and they would you know,
they would be using the restroom in the same general
(06:45):
area and uh, and then you know, every day they're
getting more hookworms because the hookworms are, you know, moving
three ft out in every direction from where they're going. Right,
So the answer is you dig a hole at six
ft deep, all right, so the hookworm can only go
up four ft and and then maybe it's like just
a superhero of a hookworm. It could you know, I
(07:05):
don't know, maybe it would go five feet, but there's
no way it's getting six right, not without just hookworm
in the in the Guinness World Book corrector's right, would
have to be some sort of super hookworm. So so yeah,
suddenly they Dundee Rockefeller people started saying, hey, how about this.
Let's dig a hole for everybody to poop in, and
we'll put a little house over it, and bam, the
(07:26):
outhouse is born. Excellent, excellent. They even had this cool
little film which you can actually watch online. The Rockefeller
people still have it up and uh and it's called
Unhooking the Hookworm, in which it refers to, uh, this
parasite is quote one of man's most dangerous enemies. Well
(07:46):
so it sounds like it certainly was for a while.
But I mean, hookworm is not the only thing that
you could encounter while you're running barefoot. Um, there's a
whole host of nasty infections out there that are just
waiting for your poor, unsuspect acting but faster feet. Um well,
I mean let's start with the basic one. There's there's
also athletes foot or tinya pettis. Yeah, and then there's
(08:09):
also stuff like you could get a staff infection, of course,
and nobody wants a staff infection or um fungal mace atoma.
And this one, I just dare you to look at
some pictures of this on the web. It is Oh,
it's terrible, It's terrible. It tends to occur more in
a tropical uh climate such as Mexico. And then like
what what do the photos look like? It's just narrowly
(08:31):
like what color? Is it more like a red or
a green? Well, actually, the foot that I saw was
it was kind of a brownish color um that was
starting to sort of fold in on itsse. It was
really terrible. And then um, you have stufinitely like sporo chicosis.
And this is um an infection that comes from handling
thorny plants, phagnum moss or stuff like build Hey, and
(08:52):
granted we're not going to be handling this stuff on
a daily basis. Maybe it's not something you might encounter
on a roadway, but if you're doing a little trail
running your stuff like that, you could technically encounter something
an infection like this. Do they run trails barefoot as well?
I'm not sure. I think actually the bare road is
your is your friends when, because otherwise it sounds like
(09:13):
these guys would just be running around on like just
big gross stumps, you know, with things crawling in and
out of them. So if you're still looking to run
barefoot or somewhat barefoot, we we came up with a
couple of solutions for you. Yeah, one and this is
pretty These are pretty cool. I I do not own
a pair, but I have a friend who has some.
There the Vibram five fingers and like a foot glove
(09:37):
basically like they tend to be like the ones I
saw the ones that my my friend has or are black,
so they kind of look like like guerrilla feet they
put on, and you know, and you can you can
you can wiggle his toes in them and all and
uh and yeah you just run with those. They you know,
you wouldn't want to wear them like on a date,
but uh, but they're pretty cool. For the whole barefoot
(09:59):
running thing. And uh in the manufacturers, yeah, they're yeah,
they're they're there. They can be kind of prices. I
think it's comparable to a tour running shoet. I think
they price up at about eighty dollars or something. Yeah,
so that's one solution. Well, what's the difference between a
vibr and five finger do hicky and just running with socks?
You don't run outside in your sock feed, did you.
(10:20):
Your folks weren't into that either, and then that was
one of our rules. You walk outside in your sock feed,
you can't get wet. But what if you read outside
in socks with those little you know, the skitter things
on the bottom, you know, like they make kids socks
with those little still, you're gonna step in a puddle
or something and it's gonna be gross. But these, I
think the vibr and five fingers they're you know, like
they have some grip to them, but they're they're rubbery.
(10:41):
You know, they're not going to soak up a bunch
of gunk. Okay, all right, So then you could always
also run indoors, right, yeah, and that would cut out
some things. But I don't know, it's like we're talking
about you know, like there's a lot of athletes foot
in gyms. So right, so infections don't really respect the
(11:01):
indoor outdoor boundaries that we make for them. Well, of
course your last option is you could just take your
chances and run outside. Be damned. Uh. And you know,
as far as the hookworms are concerned, um, as they
go into on an episode of Radio Lab, there are
some people think these aren't that aren't that bad? Um.
(11:21):
This is based on the idea that or the observation
that asthma is less likely uh in someone that has hookworms,
and that that asthma and allergies aren't as common in
the developing world. UM, so many places you still have
you know, a lot of these sanitation issues. And the
argument is that that hookworms and humans have co evolved
(11:44):
over thousands of years. Uh and to the point where, um,
you have an individual that would be susceptible to asthma
or um um or allergies or any number of conditions
that are basically the immune system turning on itself, right
and in these people to hookworm. UM it manages to
keep those things in check almost like a symbiotic kind
(12:05):
of relationship. There's because there are arguments that like, if
you have like tin hookworms more or less, like that's
like a good Advocates are saying that's a good number
of hookworms to sort of keep your body in check.
But you're not. You get like fifty and you're getting
into into you're gonna become an emic. And that's where
we get the slow pale um. But that's we should
(12:30):
stress that's not an approved treatment. But but the one
guy that actually interviewed on Radio Lab, this guy Jasper
Lawrence of deranged dot com, he actually traveled down to
uh uh I think it was Cameroon and got himself
some hookworms. Yeah, got himself some hookworms, took a taxi
(12:50):
out to some latrine areas and marched around in his
bare feet and uh, last last I heard, he was
still selling his own hookworm um from his own feces
online to people who were interested in this uh again, uh,
non approved treatment. Thank you, Jasper for making that service available.
(13:13):
So I'm pretty sure I'm not going to go out
and buy some hook rooms. But this whole podcast did
make me think about um shoes and shoes and their
role and culture. Are you guys. The shoes off household,
um increasingly so, especially of course when it's when there's
snow and slush outside. But but I think after our
we traveled to Thailand in the fall, and they're very
(13:33):
much a shoes off culture, and are you know, very
big on also like things like don't point with your shoes, etcetera.
You go, you you fly on Thai airlines and you
have to put your shoes in a separate box than
your like pocket things, because to combine them into one
box would just be um grotesque, you know. And really,
I mean these are I mean, these are shoes. These
(13:55):
are things we walk around all over you know, the
subway with, or we we kill bugs. They're you know,
et cetera. They're they're kind of nasty, and you know,
maybe we should take them off at the at the
front door more often, or even in the office. I mean,
I'm wearing shoes right now. But yeah, we should have
a bin as soon as you walk in the office
where you check your shoes and people just walk around
and stocking feet all day, where everybody has their own slat.
(14:16):
Although what could happen as happened in Sex in the City,
is you could lose a sweet pair of shoes. On
the other hand, think about it. If you're not caring
about your shoes, then think about you know, your shoe
budget goes down, you're spending less money. Who cares, You're
just going to be cruising around and flip flops all
the time. So it does make me curious if like
extensive shoes or a thing in Thailand as well, I
(14:38):
don't have to look into that or you know, please
contact us. So if you'd like to learn more about
marathons or green marathons or even skin parasites, you can
head to our home page at how staff works dot com.
And while you're there, check out our blogs, where we
talk about all sorts of stuff, from you know, breaking
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for the week. And if you want to tell us
(14:59):
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us an email at science stuff at how stuff works
dot com for more onness and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com. Want more how
stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff
(15:20):
works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff from the Science Lab from how stuff
works dot com. Hey guys, and welcome to the podcast.
This is Alice and I don't look at the science
editor at how stuff works dot com. This is Robert Lamb,
science writer at how stuff works dot com. Today we're
(00:23):
taking you on a journey. We're running with parasites. Yept
running running barefoot, actually, which I didn't. I really wasn't
that aware that this was a thing until you blogged
about it. Like people are really into doing like marathon
running with no shoes or socks on. Right, it is
a thing. It is a big thing. But first we
are you kind of a believer in going barefoot in
(00:45):
the summertime? No, because, um, I my family spent a
couple of years up in Newfoundland, Canada, but most of
my time has been spent in the South. So we
were very I mean, it was really hammered into us
that you just you don't go walking around outside barefoot.
You know, you know, things will crawl into you, or
you'll step on something gross or sharp or um. You know,
(01:09):
for any number of reason, keep the shoes on when
you're outside. That's funny because I didn't. I don't remember
having any of that sort of public health message drilled
into my head when I was a kid. I mean,
a sign of summer for me was taking off my
shoes running around, whether it was wait, where'd you grow
up in Connecticut? Ware? There there are no sharp things outside.
(01:31):
It's just christine and wonderful. I guess. So, I guess
Connecticut has has none of those things. I don't know,
it's just we. We never really I never really thought
about it. You know. I would go on like hot pavement,
I would go to the pool. I would probably go
on disgusting places that I should not have gone barefoot.
Well I will. I do. Think my shoes off at
the beach now, now that's different. That may not be safe.
So you don't peel your socks off at the shore's edge. No, no, Well,
(01:56):
a lot of people are going barefoot now, and they're
going barefoot running in particular. UM actually tried it one
night because I was so curious. I am a bit
of an amateur runner, and I was curious because they say,
UM that it can improve your form when you're out there.
If you lose the shoes, you can improve your running efficiency. UM.
And this is based in the idea that we evolved
(02:19):
with these feet and if these feet can't cut it,
I mean, you know, if God had minister where Nike's,
we've been born with them, right, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. So
there's this whole athletic oriented subculture out there that's going barefoot,
and mostly it's runners. Um, but it's it's by no
means a new thing. I mean, in nineteen sixty there
is an Olympic gold medal winner shuffle along without shoes
(02:42):
in Rome. And before sneakers were invented, which was in
the early nineteenth century, UM, which incidentally was married to
the volcanization of rubber and Charles Goodyear. It's a whole
separate story, but pretty interesting. Um, before sneakers were invented,
you have to think that people weren't necessarily always running
in shoes. And then you have guys like Fitdipity is right,
(03:03):
the Porsche lab who had to you know, run the
first marathon. Who was the messenger for that barefoot I
don't know. I did a little searching on that. Well yeah, yeah,
I mean they and and you had like naked wrestling
and all that. I mean, the old Olympics were pretty
h you know, don't let clothing get in the way
of a good sporting event, right, So we're kind of
(03:24):
getting back to our roots. Um with people running barefoot.
I mean there's a there's a whole culture out of
their barefoot races, their barefoot forums online. And for some
barefoot runners there are of course parasites, and the big
one is hookworm. Yes, hookworms, which are which are pretty
pretty like a lot of parasites, pretty amazing creatures. Um. Basically,
(03:48):
the life cycle here is, uh, you step on a
hookworm larva, and it crawls up through the sole of
your foot, makes its way up into your digestive system
where it breeds and reproduces, and then come back out
through the form of excrement and then crawls away from
the excrement to be stepped on again. So it's this uh,
this cycle. So I guess the main thing is you
(04:11):
would hope that that he's a barefoot running marathons would
would not be going through latrine zones or uh dog
parks or anything of that nature. How prevalent is hooker
in the US, well, uh, much much better than it was.
I understand you can still you can certainly still get it.
(04:32):
But if it's interesting around. Uh. Uh. John D. Rockefeller Sr.
Was looking for his next big project, right, and he
really wanted to help out the American South, where incidentally
we're podcasting from right now. Uh. And he was he
was kind of perturbed by the by the fact that,
like the the economic engine of the South was not
(04:54):
really getting going again. And uh so he sent down,
he formed a commission and sent people down to like
crunch the number and stuff and you know, see what
was wrong? You know, what what do we need to
need to do to kick started? And they they're taking
a lot of sick days from hookorm manufactus. Well, they
just found that a lot of Southerners were slow, pale, weak,
kind of gollamy, you know, and um and you know,
(05:17):
so they were they came back and they said, well,
there's no nothing wrong with this, that or the other,
but they seem like they might have some sort of
a lazy disease. So then Rockefeller lazy disease. Yeah, So
Rockefeller sends down a bunch of of doctors and they
start looking at some of the factors and they start
seeing that a lot of it is tied to the
soil types, like areas where there's like rich soil rich farmers,
(05:40):
then you have a lot of these pale gollamy uh Southerners. Um,
and then the poor farmers tend to be a little
better off. So it turned out that the big deal
was hookworms. Um. This was this ended up leading to
basically the invention of the outhouse because they they conducted
some experiments right to just see like how far the
(06:02):
hookworms travel from said excrement. So they put the they
put the pooh if you will, in a sandbox. Um. Um.
One of the few times when poo and a sandbox,
I guess was was the it was okay, yeah, And
then they may they measured to see how far the
larvak traveled each day, all right, three days hookworm races, yeah,
(06:23):
basically yeah. And they found that in three days it
could travel three ft and then it couldn't go any
farther it was, and then it would live for seven
days total and then it would die. All right. So
the problem was that you had these uh, poor anemic
Southerners going out there, um and they would you know,
they would be using the restroom in the same general
(06:45):
area and uh, and then you know, every day they're
getting more hookworms because the hookworms are, you know, moving
three ft out in every direction from where they're going. Right,
So the answer is you dig a hole at six
ft deep, all right, so the hookworm can only go
up four ft and and then maybe it's like just
a superhero of a hookworm. It could you know, I
(07:05):
don't know, maybe it would go five feet, but there's
no way it's getting six right, not without just hookworm
in the in the Guinness World Book corrector's right, would
have to be some sort of super hookworm. So so yeah,
suddenly they Dundee Rockefeller people started saying, hey, how about this.
Let's dig a hole for everybody to poop in, and
we'll put a little house over it, and bam, the
(07:26):
outhouse is born. Excellent, excellent. They even had this cool
little film which you can actually watch online. The Rockefeller
people still have it up and uh and it's called
Unhooking the Hookworm, in which it refers to, uh, this
parasite is quote one of man's most dangerous enemies. Well
(07:46):
so it sounds like it certainly was for a while.
But I mean, hookworm is not the only thing that
you could encounter while you're running barefoot. Um, there's a
whole host of nasty infections out there that are just
waiting for your poor, unsuspect acting but faster feet. Um well,
I mean let's start with the basic one. There's there's
also athletes foot or tinya pettis. Yeah, and then there's
(08:09):
also stuff like you could get a staff infection, of course,
and nobody wants a staff infection or um fungal mace atoma.
And this one, I just dare you to look at
some pictures of this on the web. It is Oh,
it's terrible, It's terrible. It tends to occur more in
a tropical uh climate such as Mexico. And then like
what what do the photos look like? It's just narrowly
(08:31):
like what color? Is it more like a red or
a green? Well, actually, the foot that I saw was
it was kind of a brownish color um that was
starting to sort of fold in on itsse. It was
really terrible. And then um, you have stufinitely like sporo chicosis.
And this is um an infection that comes from handling
thorny plants, phagnum moss or stuff like build Hey, and
(08:52):
granted we're not going to be handling this stuff on
a daily basis. Maybe it's not something you might encounter
on a roadway, but if you're doing a little trail
running your stuff like that, you could technically encounter something
an infection like this. Do they run trails barefoot as well?
I'm not sure. I think actually the bare road is
your is your friends when, because otherwise it sounds like
(09:13):
these guys would just be running around on like just
big gross stumps, you know, with things crawling in and
out of them. So if you're still looking to run
barefoot or somewhat barefoot, we we came up with a
couple of solutions for you. Yeah, one and this is
pretty These are pretty cool. I I do not own
a pair, but I have a friend who has some.
There the Vibram five fingers and like a foot glove
(09:37):
basically like they tend to be like the ones I
saw the ones that my my friend has or are black,
so they kind of look like like guerrilla feet they
put on, and you know, and you can you can
you can wiggle his toes in them and all and
uh and yeah you just run with those. They you know,
you wouldn't want to wear them like on a date,
but uh, but they're pretty cool. For the whole barefoot
(09:59):
running thing. And uh in the manufacturers, yeah, they're yeah,
they're they're there. They can be kind of prices. I
think it's comparable to a tour running shoet. I think
they price up at about eighty dollars or something. Yeah,
so that's one solution. Well, what's the difference between a
vibr and five finger do hicky and just running with socks?
You don't run outside in your sock feed, did you.
(10:20):
Your folks weren't into that either, and then that was
one of our rules. You walk outside in your sock feed,
you can't get wet. But what if you read outside
in socks with those little you know, the skitter things
on the bottom, you know, like they make kids socks
with those little still, you're gonna step in a puddle
or something and it's gonna be gross. But these, I
think the vibr and five fingers they're you know, like
they have some grip to them, but they're they're rubbery.
(10:41):
You know, they're not going to soak up a bunch
of gunk. Okay, all right, So then you could always
also run indoors, right, yeah, and that would cut out
some things. But I don't know, it's like we're talking
about you know, like there's a lot of athletes foot
in gyms. So right, so infections don't really respect the
(11:01):
indoor outdoor boundaries that we make for them. Well, of
course your last option is you could just take your
chances and run outside. Be damned. Uh. And you know,
as far as the hookworms are concerned, um, as they
go into on an episode of Radio Lab, there are
some people think these aren't that aren't that bad? Um.
(11:21):
This is based on the idea that or the observation
that asthma is less likely uh in someone that has hookworms,
and that that asthma and allergies aren't as common in
the developing world. UM, so many places you still have
you know, a lot of these sanitation issues. And the
argument is that that hookworms and humans have co evolved
(11:44):
over thousands of years. Uh and to the point where, um,
you have an individual that would be susceptible to asthma
or um um or allergies or any number of conditions
that are basically the immune system turning on itself, right
and in these people to hookworm. UM it manages to
keep those things in check almost like a symbiotic kind
(12:05):
of relationship. There's because there are arguments that like, if
you have like tin hookworms more or less, like that's
like a good Advocates are saying that's a good number
of hookworms to sort of keep your body in check.
But you're not. You get like fifty and you're getting
into into you're gonna become an emic. And that's where
we get the slow pale um. But that's we should
(12:30):
stress that's not an approved treatment. But but the one
guy that actually interviewed on Radio Lab, this guy Jasper
Lawrence of deranged dot com, he actually traveled down to
uh uh I think it was Cameroon and got himself
some hookworms. Yeah, got himself some hookworms, took a taxi
(12:50):
out to some latrine areas and marched around in his
bare feet and uh, last last I heard, he was
still selling his own hookworm um from his own feces
online to people who were interested in this uh again, uh,
non approved treatment. Thank you, Jasper for making that service available.
(13:13):
So I'm pretty sure I'm not going to go out
and buy some hook rooms. But this whole podcast did
make me think about um shoes and shoes and their
role and culture. Are you guys. The shoes off household,
um increasingly so, especially of course when it's when there's
snow and slush outside. But but I think after our
we traveled to Thailand in the fall, and they're very
(13:33):
much a shoes off culture, and are you know, very
big on also like things like don't point with your shoes, etcetera.
You go, you you fly on Thai airlines and you
have to put your shoes in a separate box than
your like pocket things, because to combine them into one
box would just be um grotesque, you know. And really,
I mean these are I mean, these are shoes. These
(13:55):
are things we walk around all over you know, the
subway with, or we we kill bugs. They're you know,
et cetera. They're they're kind of nasty, and you know,
maybe we should take them off at the at the
front door more often, or even in the office. I mean,
I'm wearing shoes right now. But yeah, we should have
a bin as soon as you walk in the office
where you check your shoes and people just walk around
and stocking feet all day, where everybody has their own slat.
(14:16):
Although what could happen as happened in Sex in the City,
is you could lose a sweet pair of shoes. On
the other hand, think about it. If you're not caring
about your shoes, then think about you know, your shoe
budget goes down, you're spending less money. Who cares, You're
just going to be cruising around and flip flops all
the time. So it does make me curious if like
extensive shoes or a thing in Thailand as well, I
(14:38):
don't have to look into that or you know, please
contact us. So if you'd like to learn more about
marathons or green marathons or even skin parasites, you can
head to our home page at how staff works dot com.
And while you're there, check out our blogs, where we
talk about all sorts of stuff, from you know, breaking
science news to whatever articles we happen to be researching
for the week. And if you want to tell us
(14:59):
about your adventures with parasites, are running or both, send
us an email at science stuff at how stuff works
dot com for more onness and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com. Want more how
stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff
(15:20):
works dot com home page
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