Powerful as it is, the FDA can’t keep every single cockroach leg out of your lunch.
Instead, it decides on safe proportions of nasty stuff to allow in certain food products.
Every 500 grams of canned tomatoes, for example, can legally harbor about 10 fruit fly eggs or
two maggots. Some mixing and matching is fine, too, so a manufacturer could
technically toss in five eggs and one maggot without the FDA knocking on the factory door.
An average of 225 insect fragments can make it into each 225 grams of
pasta. That’s practically a bit of bug in every bite. A 225-gram box of raw pasta can
also have roughly 4.5 rodent hairs in it. A hundred-pound bag of shelled peanuts can
contain 20 whole insects. A pound of cocoa beans can have 10 milligrams of “mammalian excreta.”
That is … vaguer than I would prefer. Will all these unsavory substances in
your food kill you? No. And to be fair to the good maggot-purveyors of America,
the numbers I quoted above are all legal maximums—if a company is consistently
churning out boxes of pasta with 224 insect fragments inside, the FDA is probably going
to step in. Will you enjoy boxed macaroni a little less from here on out, though? Maybe.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss. Thanks to Stephen Decker,
whose YouTube comment got us looking into just how much rodent contamination is considered
acceptable. We have an upcoming episode about the dark origins of nursery rhymes. If you know a good
example we should include, drop it down below for a chance to be featured in that episode.
The possible presence of rat poop in your cocoa is probably something you’d prefer not to know,
but I’m not stopping there. This episode is all about fascinating facts that you’ll wish
you never learned, from what really makes your eyes red in public pools to literally
everything about anglerfish sex. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
When your eyes get red and irritated after swimming in a public pool, you probably assume
chlorine is the culprit. Instead, you should be blaming all the people who peed in the pool.
The nitrogen in urine mixes with chlorine to create a compound called chloramine—and
that’s what bothers your eyeballs. Chloramine is also what gives pools that classic ‘chlorine’
odor. So if your neighborhood pool reeks of chemicals, it’s probably just brimming with pee.
Speaking of pee, you spent a good five or six months drinking yours.
Yeah, you. Around week 13 of development, fetuses have fully functioning kidneys that filter urine
into the amniotic fluid … which they then drink. It’s not the only off-putting element of dinner
in the womb. Fetuses also grow a very fine layer of downy hair known as lanugo.
This helps bind their skin to a white protective coating called the vernix casseosa. Just to
complete the mental picture, Healthline describes this as a “waxy, cheese-like substance.” In Latin,
the term essentially means “cheesy varnish.” Though babies are often born with some vernix
and lanugo left on them, they start to shed both in the weeks before their due date.
It all ends up floating in the amniotic fluid, where it, too, becomes baby food.
And you thought pureed peas were gross. A teratoma, like other tumors, is an errant
cluster of tissue that can be benign or malignant. But this isn’t just a garden-variety lump.
Teratomas can contain bone, muscle, hair, and even teeth. Hair and teeth. It’s not exactly a tiny
head growing inside your body, but it has a little too much in common with one for my comfort.
Teratomas are made up of germ cells, a.k.a. reproductive cells. And while they can
technically develop anywhere, they’re most often found in reproductive organs like the ovaries and
testes. Tailbones are another common location. Like all other medical issues,
teratomas—though often noncancerous—are no laughing matter. Having said that,
if there’s a low-budget horror movie where a teratoma takes over its human host, I would
like to hear about it in the comments below. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion isn’t just home
to make-believe members of the undead. It’s also played host to quite a few actual dead
people—well, their ashes, at least. Disney parks are an extremely popular place for
people to scatter their loved ones’ remains, and the Haunted Mansion tops the list of hot spots.
As one Disneyland employee told The Wall Street Journal in 2018,
“The Haunted Mansion probably has so much human ashes in it that it’s not even funny.” I don’t
know, I’m gonna say it’s a little bit funny? For the record, sprinkling human ashes on Disney
grounds is prohibited, and custodians grab the vacuum whenever they see any. The code for that
task is “HEPA cleanup,” after the especially strong filter used while sucking them up.
So the next time you see a sooty patch outside Sleeping Beauty castle, just know that it’s
not because Bert the chimney sweep stopped by. In 1980, the World Health Organization announced
that smallpox was officially gone from the globe. Natural cases no longer occurred, and all research
labs that had samples of the smallpox virus had to destroy them. Specimens were preserved
in only two places: the CDC’s lab in Atlanta, and another high-security facility in Russia.
So, you can imagine everyone’s horror when, in 2014, not one, not two, but six vials of
the smallpox virus were unearthed in an FDA lab in Maryland. They weren’t exactly kept
under lock and key, either—they were just sitting in a box in an old storeroom.
The samples reportedly dated back to around the 1950s, when everyone was playing it a little
faster and looser with certain deadly substances. With the help of the FBI, they were transferred
to the CDC’s Atlanta location and installed in a level four biosafety lab—the highest level
there is. As NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel explained at the time, “That’s the kind
of lab where people are wearing moon suits.” Thankfully, nobody was infected. But it makes
you wonder … What other potentially lethal and highly contagious pathogens are just
chilling in a forgotten box as we speak?
Or … trapped beneath some rapidly thawing permafrost?
In 2020, NASA and the European Space Agency launched an initiative to study how the
deterioration of Arctic permafrost might affect global methane levels. But researchers found that
this thick layer of frozen ground may not just unlock methane as it melts. As the ESA
reported in 2021, it also “has the potential to release antibiotic-resistant bacteria,
undiscovered viruses and even radioactive waste from Cold War nuclear reactors and submarines.”
Suddenly, those rogue smallpox samples seem like small potatoes.
The next time you set sail for the Caribbean on a luxurious cruise,
try not to think about the morgue belowdecks. Most cruise ships have one, along with body bags,
in case a passenger passes away on board. Morbid as it is, things would definitely
be worse if ships had nowhere to store a corpse. According to one urban legend, chefs would serve
heaping helpings of ice cream to diners whenever someone died—not as a consolation gesture,
but because they needed to empty a freezer so that there was somewhere cold to preserve the body.
While an impromptu ice cream doesn’t actually spell death, “Operation Rising Star” actually
does. That’s the term some cruise officials use to let other employees know that someone just died.
If you hear “Operation Bright Star,” someone’s in the midst of a serious medical emergency.
Let’s talk about anesthesia awareness, also called unintended intraoperative awareness, a phenomenon
as self-explanatory as it is scary. Basically, you’re anesthetized for surgery, but then you
wake up—to some degree—during the procedure. Before you get too freaked out, it’s pretty
rare. According to the American Society of Anesthesiologists, it’s thought to occur in
only about one to two of every 1000 procedures that require general anesthesia. Moreover,
it’s often completely painless, and some patients are only vaguely aware of what’s going on.
That said, there have been some horror stories. In 2008, 44-year-old Canada native Donna Penner
was about 10 minutes into a laparoscopy when she suddenly awoke on the table.
As she told the Associated Press, “The next thing I heard was the surgeon speak up and
ask for the scalpel. I felt him make the first incision into my abdomen.”
While the general anesthetic clearly hadn’t done its job, the paralytic drugs had. So not only was
Penner in excruciating pain, but she couldn’t alert anyone. In her words, “I couldn’t even
move my eyes back and forth … I tried to make tears. … I wanted to scream. I tried to scream.”
She described the pain as “pure torture.” Penner even claims she had an out-of-body experience
in order to cope. So I guess that’s a valid option if the same thing ever happens to you.
Everybody knows that Disney/Pixar’s Finding Nemo isn’t exactly accurate.
Fish don’t speak English, sea turtles don’t act like surfers, and pelicans generally don’t help
marine animals escape from dentist offices. It’s probably a good thing that the filmmakers
used some artistic license. If the story were a true reflection of aquatic life,
the heartwarming bond between Nemo and his father would’ve developed a little differently.
In reality, when a dominant female clownfish dies, the dominant male becomes a female and
reproduces with the largest male in the group. So here’s what would’ve happened
after that barracuda took out Nemo’s mother, as explained by fisheries scientist Patrick Cooney:
“ … his father transforms into a female now that his female mate is dead. Since Nemo is the only
other clownfish around, he becomes a male and mates with his father (who is now a female).”
That Oedipal nightmare might be hard to forget next time you watch Finding Nemo. But it’s not the
only … let’s say “creative” method of reproduction going on in the ocean. In certain species of
deep-sea anglerfish, the much smaller male bites into the side of a female and just … never lets
go. His body becomes part of hers, and since he no longer needs to see or swim, his eyes and fins
begin to disappear. After a while, he looks less like a fish and more like a fleshy protrusion.
But he’s not dead: His mate feeds him nutrients through their now-connected blood vessels,
and in return he supplies her with sperm. And they say romance is dead.
But before you grimace at the male anglerfish’s parasitic existence, you should know that you
have parasites, too. One particular kind lives on your face—or, more specifically,
in the hair follicles on your face. These scaly, eight-legged critters are
called Demodex mites, and they’re known for gobbling down oil and skin cells that end
up in your follicles. Their life cycle is only a few weeks long, but don’t worry—they
make good use of their brief time on Earth/you, crawling on your skin while you’re asleep.
It gets worse. Demodex mites lack anuses or any other way to get rid of waste.
So they just store it all inside their bodies and let it spill out after they die and start
decomposing. That waste did come from your skin in the first place, if it makes you feel any better.
I’ll end on a slightly less disgusting note. When you smell something,
it’s because odor molecules from that thing are actually getting in your nose.
Fresh-baked cookies? Yes. Puke? Poop? Putrid meat? Also yes. Look, I said *slightly* less disgusting.
Thanks for watching and also: I’m sorry. We’ll see you next time!