Let's face it:
our world can be downright weird.
Crawling with creatures you've never heard of.
I can't believe that's a living thing.
Full of the unexpected,
like freak weather exploding out of the blue.
I thought I was gonna die.
And rocks that spontaneously combust.
I thought it was dynamite going off.
And the unexplained.
An unborn twin discovered inside a brain.
There was multiple hair follicles, bone, and teeth.
We've scoured the globe to bring you the very weirdest stories.
I sent it to my family. I sent it to my friends.
I sent it to other monkey researchers
and said, "Have you seen this?"
In this series, we'll examine the evidence,
test the science,and unravel the mysteries.
We'll discover what in the weird world
-- Captions by VITAC -- www.vitac.com
In this episode...
we'll uncover the secrets to some of the natural world's weirdest mysteries.
How could the Sun's rays exterminate birds in flight?
And why have these monkeys become trained in first aid?
Exactly how do you get spider silk from a goat?
And how far would a porcupine go to find true love?
Well, it all starts in Nevada...
longtime home of the weird,
known for its unexplained sightings
and bizarre conspiracy theories.
But, in 2013,
something just as weird, but very real,
was spotted in the skies.
A local photographer captured these strange explosions.
I saw these objects going across the frame of the video.
Sometimes they would change direction;
sometimes they'd go up, sometimes they'd go down
and I didn't know, at first, what they were.
*
Sometimes they would dive down,
maybe like it was trying to escape from something.
Sometimes it would turn around and go in the other direction.
But what were they?
Well, it was too early in the day for fireworks.
Military testing, perhaps?
I examined the videos closely
and I was able to see a little flapping motion,
which was their little wings were flapping.
Wildlife officials found the bodies of birds,
birds that had fallen to their death from clear skies.
They found about 83 different species of birds.
*
Everything from very small birds, like hummingbirds;
to doves; to larger birds,
like ravens and raptors,a peregrine falcon.
A bizarre collection of different species,
but with one thing in common.
The feathers were sort of melted and they were in fragments.
The birds were all burned alive.
So, what could be to blame?
Well, it's a conundrum worthy of Area 51,
but it is one that can be explained,
via a quick trip over the pond.
September 2013. Central London.
We've had temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsiusratures in the last few minutes
and if I just look at the current temperature, well, it's still 42 degree.
People have been trying to cook eggs.
My colleague realized there was smoke coming out.
He smelled it and we looked back.
The carpet was on fire.
Melted bicycles.
Burned cars.
We realized it was from the big building.
And all fingers pointed at the building above,
that was burning a hot spot on the pavement below it.
But how?
Well, the building creates a curved, mirrored surface
that reflects sunlight towards a central point.
So, just like a giant magnifying glass,
it focuses the beam, creating a hot spot
powerful enough to damage stationary objects.
Impressive, but it's still not enough to set birds on fire in flight.
For that, you'd need to upscale.
This isn't a mirage.
This is Ivanpah,
a power plant with a difference.
300,000 mirrors reflect the desert Sun onto a central tower...
boiling water to create steam, which then generates energy.
Extraordinary engineering,
but, with an unexpectedly deadly side effect
and, to demonstrate the power of Ivanpah,
we can recreate it.
Ivanpah in miniature.
These tiny mirrors reflect the light.
But, crucially, it's not scattered.
The mirrors are perfectly angled.
It's a parabolic curve focusing the light onto a center point.
And turbo charging that light and the heat intensity.
Now, it's hot enough to roast wood, even melt lead.
And feathers?
Well, they simply don't stand a chance.
But, on an industrial scale, in this heat,
the power generated is off the chart.
**As the desert Sun hits Ivanpah's 300,000 mirrors,
the light is reflected towards the towers,
*creating temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Centigrade.
The experiment in green energy had created a solar death ray.
So, what can the plant do, to solve this very sad problem?
They've been willing to modify their software system.
They've also been working to test out deterrent systems,
to scare birds away from the danger zone around the towers.
Let's hope they find a solution that works.
*
In the 1600s,
Antonio Stradivari took a piece of spruce and made a violin.
Today, his instruments are the most famous on the planet.
Every music collector wants to own one
and every dealer wants to get their hands on one.
When I pick up one of these instruments,
there's always something a bit special and magic about it.
*
An instrument from the golden period,which this instrument is from,
could be worth from a few million dollars to $12 million or $15 million
and, if it's a great one, more.
At $142,000. At $145,000.
And their desirability is down to one thing:
sound.
It's got a real magic aura to it
and it's partly for that reason that people have tried to figure out
what is the so-called secret of Stradivari.
Yes, for 300 years,
craftsmen have tried to discover the secret to Stradivari's sound.
They've tested every theory.
The wood's been soaked in seawater or the varnish
has volcanic ash in it,was another one I remember.
But they've all failed.
Until, that is...
**
a scandal hit the headlines.
Stradivari's most famous violin is called the Messiah...
described as the ultimate violin.
But, back in 1999,
it was suggested that this priceless piece of musical history wasn't the real deal,
that it was a fake.
The uproar amongst musos was deafening.
To calm the clamor,
the Messiah was brought under the scrutiny of specialists.
It was a thrilling moment, for me,
when they took it out of the case
and I have gloves on and they put it in my hands and said,
"Here's a musical instrument worth millions of dollars,
Grissino-Mayer; do what you want with it."
*
Henri and other tree-ring experts studying the Messiah's wood.
We use pattern-matching,in the tree rings sciences,
to determine when these tree rings were formed.
The rings of the Messiah matched perfectly
with samples taken from the Stradivari Forest.
When I saw that,I knew that this was not a fake; it was not a copy.
This was an instrument that was contemporary
with Antonio Stradivarius and, in all likelihood,
was made by Antonio Stradivarius.
So, the Messiah's wood gave the world's most famous violin the ring of authenticity.
But it had also revealed something much more exciting,
and it's all to do with the Sun.
We know that every ring represents a year in a tree's life,
but the thickness of each ring is just as important.
*A wide ring tells us that, during that year,
the tree grew very quickly.
*But a thin ring means exactly the opposite.
That means the tree grew slowly.
And the Messiah had incredibly thin rings,
so tightly packed,
that the wood was 3 times more dense than that of a modern instrument.
Dense enough to create an exceptional sound.
But why was this wood so dense,
and what's the Sun got to do with it?
Well, when Stradivari was making violins in the Italian Alps,
the Sun was behaving very strangely.
Between 1300 and the late 1800s, its power was reduced.
Lakes froze.
The days darkened.
It was a little Ice Age.
Now, imagine you're a tree growing close to a certain violinmaker's house.
You'd be using every last ray of reduced sunlight,
but growing very, very slowly.
Starting to fall into place?
Henri's hypothesis is that the Sun, or the lack of it,
created superdense, supermusical spruce.
But the perfect violin is nothing without the perfect strings to play.
In 2012, a Japanese researcher decided to make
the world's most beautiful- sounding violin strings.
Listen to this
The sound is described by those n the know as softer, more profound.
Which is downright weird,
because Dr Osaki isn't a musician.
He's a medical researcher
and he made the strings with the help of his lab partners...
300 orb web spiders.
Their silk fibers, combined together,
are tough enough to be played.
And Dr. Osaki puts the strings' unique sound
down to the way the fibers compact together,
leaving barely any air gaps between the strands.
But, with 15,000 strands needed to make every string,
it's unlikely to hit the mass market.
I mean, you'd need a silkmaking factory to kit out an orchestra,
and that's a ludicrous idea, right?
Well, no.
Not for one extraordinary scientist,
who's discovered the secret of spider-silk manufacturing.
Spider silk is the strongest fiber that's found in nature.
It has a tensile strength greater than Kevlar
and has an elasticity or elongation greater than nylon.
So, it means we can use it for different medical products,
like artificial ligaments, artificial tendons,
hard body parts,for airplane parts,
even for protective clothing.
A silk aeroplane?
You'd need tons of the stuff.
But Randy's not running a spider sweatshop.
So, the problem with using spider silk
from spiders themselves is the spiders can't be farmed.
They're territorial, they're cannibalistic,
so, if you put a lot of them together,
they kill each other until everybody has enough room,
so you've got to come up with another manufacturing method.
Born and bred in Utah, Randy has farming in his blood.
Goats are his thing and, although they might look normal,
these goats are anything but normal.
You see, inside their cells is a little something extra,
something spidery.
The majority of these goats have a gene in them
that came from a spider.
We took the DNA for the spider-silk gene.
That DNA was then injected into an embryo
and we take the embryos and we implant them into an accepter female
and, 5 months later, she has a baby goat for us.
Real-life spider-kids.
That will grow up to produce spider silk in their milk.
Now, this isn't actually as weird as you might first think
because spider silk, when in the spider, is also a liquid.
But I have to say, this is where the similarity ends,
because spiders have special spinnerets
that spin the liquid into solid lines of silk.
But how do you get silk out of a goat?
Lewis: So, we take the milk from the goats here.
We take it back to the lab
and we purify the spider-silk protein out of it.
And then we try to mimic what the spider does,
in terms of actually making the fiber,
so we try to spin it so that we pull it,
instead of pushing it out.
And then, we stretch it, which is exactly the same thing that a spider does.
This year's crop of kids look cute now,
but, soon, they'll be spider- goat silk-making machines.
So, our very best goat makes about 4 grams of spider-silk protein per liter.
She produces 8 eight liters per day, so about 32 grams per day,
and that's enough to spin 32,000 meters of silk.
That's the length of 300 football pitches.
For now, though, they're more interested in Randy's trousers.
Well, I suppose they're still 99.9% goat, after all.
So what next?
Let's take a trip to India.
Kanpur train station.
The platform bustling with passengers,
unaware that they are about to witness a dramatic event
as a body falls onto the tracks.
A male macaque has been electrocuted,
crossing live wires overhead, and there's no sign of life.
But then, something bizarre happens.
Another macaque grabs the body.
Shakes it.
Pummels it.
Bites it.
Even submerges it in water.
For 20 minutes, he keeps up this violent cycle.
And then, to the absolute amazement of the crowd,
the macaque begins to come round.
Now, unsurprisingly, the film went viral.
Over a million people wanted to watch this monkey CPR.
And, amongst those viewers, was a macaque specialist.
Here was this macaque that seemed to be performing CPR on his buddy.
I sent it to my family. I sent it to my friends.
I sent it to other monkey researchers
and said,"Have you seen this? Have you seen what's happening with these animals in India?"
I knew there had to be more to this story.
There had to be a backstory.
Lisa got inside the mind of the macaque.
Jones-Engel: Females stay in a troop from birth to death.
But males, as they reach sexual maturity,
actually have to migrate out.
And they do that, typically, together
and then they formed kind of these boy bands,
these male bands that are kind of moving throughout the area,
in search of another troop to join.
As I looked at the bigger part of the video,the longer video clip,
this was clearly almost all males together.
They could be brothers; they could be siblings of some kind.
These two animals would've known each other.
Okay.
But this is hardly the gentle care of brothers-in-arms.
The macaque's behavior is brutal.
They are not fragile flowers.
I mean, I like to think that macaques are fairly bombproof.
If he had wanted to hurt that animal,
if he had wanted to kill him,,
there is nothing that would've stopped him.
It's clear that this animal is committed
to getting this other monkey back on his feet.
So, this truly is tough love,
one friend saving another.
But how on Earth did he know what to do?
The wires that actually are extended throughout these urban areas are great,
they're like highways for macaques, you know?
They are constantly kind of moving across them.
A handy shortcut,
but pick the wrong wire and you're in for a shock.
Electrocutions are very, very common for monkeys in South and Southeast Asia.
Lisa believes that this macaque is no stranger to electrical mishap.
She thinks he's been in this situation before.
They've seen animals get electrocuted;
they've seen them drop and they know
that they've got to go in there and kind of do this very vigorous agitation.
This streetwise macaque has learned,
from previous experience,
that brute force and perseverance can bring a friend back from the brink.
His buddy came in there and did what an urban macaque's gonna do.
They're going to assess the situation.
They're gonna step in; they've gonna change their behavior.
They're gonna adapt to the situation
and he brought his buddy back.
That's a good monkey.
Macaques may be kind to each other,
but, to us, they can be trouble.
Yeah, in parts of India, their populations have exploded,
particularly in cities,
where they're making a real nuisance of themselves.
The station at Lucknow, in North India,
was a favorite monkey hangout,
until the local authorities brought in a man with a unique skillset
to tackle these troublemakers.
Acchan Miyan is Lucknow's official monkey man.
The monkeys at the station are too used to people to be scared away by them,
but a man-sized monkey, mm, that's a serious threat.
Monkeys respect hierarchy; they respect authority.
Those monkeys know that somebody's here who's going to kind of lay down the law.
And it's not the face paint;
it's Acchan's acting that really counts.
It's the way he moves; it's the way he makes eye contact.
He doesn't even have to have a stick in his hand.
He can just kind of walk through in a way that every monkey's gonna be like,
"Oh. Maybe we should leave."
Tama Zoo, near Tokyo.
And that?
well, that's the head keeper, dressed up as a snow leopard.
Why?
Well, the zoo staff are taking part in breakout tests,
rehearsing procedures,
should any of their animals escape in the event of an earthquake.
Oh, look. Bang.
There goes the tranquilizer.
And he's down.
Method acting at its, uh, best.
Now, this might look like some strange new Japanese game show,
but actually, this role-play is quite serious.
In June 2015,
a major flood set zoo animals loose on the streets of Tbilisi, in Georgia.
Rescue workers managed to save some,
but, very sadly,
many animals were lost in the unfortunate aftermath of this event.
Keeping animals and public safe is at the heart of this bizarre yearly escapade.
And, in fact, it's become so popular with visitors that other wildlife parks around the world
have now been inspired to follow suit.
It's a fun way to ensure that visitors and animals are kept safe.
But at Israel's Ramat Gan Zoo,
keeping the residents on the premises
isn't the problem.
This is Dorit,
an Indian crested porcupine, native to Israel.
Abandoned as a baby,
she's been handreared by the staff at the zoo.
We got really, really attached to her.
We've known her since she was just a cute little, tiny baby.
They raised her here at the wildlife hospital,
so we all got to chip in and bottle-feed her
and get really, really attached to her
and see her grow into this beautiful, beautiful porcupine.
And, for nearly a decade,
Dorit's lived a quiet life.
That was, until early 2015,
when strange sightings started to concern her keepers.
Like, every morning,
I come to the exhibit to see Dorit,
to feed her, to clean the yard
and, a special day, one special day,
I came here and I saw the poop.
Instead of being inside the exhibit, it was outside.
And I thought to myself,
"One of the keepers was very lazy yesterday.
Instead of put it the garbage, just throw it away.
Never mind.
I'll clean it up."
The other keepers denied any slacking,
but the poo kept appearing.
I came the other day and I saw, again,
the poop was outside of the exhibit.
Then, a couple of weeks later,
just as the mysterious poo was starting to become a bit of an issue,
an alarm went up.
A call from the primate department came:
"Your porcupine's out on the loose.
We see her. She's right here. She's escaped."
We rushed to Dorit's enclosure and there she was,
just being her happy old Dorit self.
How could Dorit have been in two places at once?
It was time to get to the bottom of this mystery.
We decided to put a camera trap.
Because they're nocturnal, they're mostly active at night
and we wanted to see what was goin' on.
At first, just a few feral cats.
A frisky cock.
But then...
We realized, when we looked at the footage,
that there's a male porcupine that comes in every night
for the past month to visit her.
Dorit wasn't breaking out.
A wild male was breaking in.
He's not just defecating next to her;
he's actually interacting with her through the bars.
They touch noses; they sniff each other.
Dorit had a secret lover.
It's most likely that he smelled her
and came all the way into the zoo to meet her,
which is quite exciting.
Porcupines, you see, give off a very powerful scent
that their quills help to stir up and distribute over long distances.
It's how male and female porcupines find each other
and then become inseparable for life.
Dorit's lover was so intoxicated with her aroma
that he traveled through the Safari Park,
past the hippos, past the rhinos, and the giraffe,
just to be by her side.
The story kind of broke our heart because he found a very special lady,
but he can't be with her.
We can't quite release her because we're afraid for her.
She's imprinted on people.
We're afraid that she'll come close to people and that they hurt her.
We can't bring him in to her
because he's a wild porcupine and it's unfair to bring him into captivity
when he belongs out in the wild.
So the zoo staff are left with only one option:
to hope that frustration!
eventually gets the better of Dorit's late-night lover.
So we're hoping for him that he'll give up one day and find,
you know, another wild porcupine to be with
and, now that we know that Dorit is interested in boys,
we'll definitely consider bringing her a nice boy porcupine to be with.
I hope for her to find a nice man,
also handsome like her.
The city of Raleigh.
Leafy, quiet, safe.
Well, until the spring of 2009, when all of that changed.
We're a midsize government town.
A lot of beige architecture.
Don't get a lot of monsters.
Like every city,
below the roads and pavements is a network of sewers.
And, like in every city, they need inspecting.
We have to monitor the condition of the pipes on a frequent basis
because they can get blocked.
Strange things you'll see are snakes, money; there's jewelry
and we certainly see our fair share of rats.
But on April the 27th,
the cameras captured something,
the likes of which this city had never seen.
So, it appeared that they were going down
either a 6- or 8-inch pipe with this robot
and they came across a really unusual,
somewhat animated,
slimy substance.
The feed from the cameras
showed a bizarre clump of a strange and unidentified substance,
slimy and smooth, reacting to the robot's light,
pulsating and morphing.
I was at a loss for an explanation.
It was really something that I'd seen out of a science fiction movie.
The discovery of something strange lurking in the sewers
didn't stay secret for long.
There was a clamor,
you know, a great alarm in the streets.
It was as though Godzilla had shown up.
We were all extremely excited and, of course,
dashed right out to find out about it.
The sewer blob became a sensation.
Everyone had their own theory.
There was a movie called "The Blob,"
and so everyone was making a lot of "Blob" references.
People thought that it was pudding come to life.
People thought that it was radioactive.
We were getting a lot of questions and, unfortunately,
we didn't have any good answers.
Maybe it was an experiment gone wrong.
Maybe something slithered out of a test tube and into the sewer system.
If only.
But what was the truth behind the headline?
Fingers pointed towards these:
Bryozoa,
thousands of tiny aquatic animals that live together,
clustered along the bottom of ships and docks.
But this theory didn't quite add up.
Most Bryozoans live in the ocean
and actually have these hard,
little coffinlike boxes that each Bryozoan body is in.
When there's a lot of them in one place,
they can look like a big, fleshy blob.
However, this blob was a bit too big
and not quite the right color to be freshwater Bryozoans.
So, what was this pulsating mass?
Could there really be a sensible scientific explanation?
These are worms, annelid worms,
actually, close relatives of earthworms.
It's actually not quite known, how many species,
but they're loosely called Tubifex.
Tubifex worms live in the water,
anchoring themselves against the current and grabbing food as it passes.
Tubifex, in the wild,
typically lives in stagnant water.
They can handle quite low oxygen.
They have this deep-red blood that gives them their color.
It allows them to absorb the oxygen through their thin skin.
The prime real estate for something like a Tubifex is somewhere where you
can attach to the bottom firmly and there's food going by.
Obviously, a sewer wouldn't be our first choice for a home,
but for a Tubifex, it's absolutely perfect.
That many resources in one place,
you can get really dense clumps of them.
So, not a single monster, at all,
but a colony that moves like one.
Each worm can sense movement around it and then it can also contract,
so that's almost like a chain of dominoes.
This town is in danger.
How can it be stopped?
I think people are generally weirded out by whatever lives in the sewer
and, if it's a giant, shiny, slimy, pulsing ball of worms,
then I can understand why they'd be grossed out.
Deep below the surface,
a group of scientists are surveying the ocean floor
when they spot something unusual.
What the...?
- Oh, it's... - Oh.
Garbage?
My goodness.
Their remote camera picks up a bizarre object moving in the current.
Oh, my gosh!
I can't believe that's a living thing.
That's amazing. Oh, how cool!
- What? - I mean...
Spotting this strange sea creature
has made these seasoned scientists a little bit giddy.
What is this?
I guess siphonophore?
Yep. Wow.
You've probably never heard of a siphonophore,
but Dr. Dunn understands their excitement.
I remember the first time I saw a siphonophore live in the water.
They look like swimming glass chandeliers.
They look like nothing else.
It's as if, all of a sudden,
there's this whole new life form that you've never heard of,right in front of you.
But what is this beautifully bizarre animal?
A siphonophore is a cnidarian,so it's a relative of corals
and many of the jellyfish that people are familiar with.
Siphonophores live in the open ocean,
forming the most intricate shapes, in astonishing colors.
They look like glass sculptures.
They're absolutely beautiful.
They really look like something from another world.
And what might really surprise you
is that these spectacular sea creatures aren't rare.
Siphonophores are the largest,
most abundant organisms that most people have never heard of.
Most people haven't seen a siphonophore,
because they're so fragile that they're destroyed before they get close to the coast.
They're just churned over in the waves.
They can't handle the sediment in the water.
But siphonophores aren't only abundant and beautiful.
They're also some of the most bizarre animals in our oceans.
When we're born, we have one cute, little baby body
and then, that baby body has all the parts of the adult,
but they just get bigger as we enlarge.
A siphonophore grows in a completely different way.
What they do is they're born as one little baby body
and then, instead of that baby body growing,
that baby body just makes more baby bodies
and each of them are specialized for particular tasks.
Some bodies are specialized for tasks like feeding.
Others are specialized for tasks like swimming.
And this growth continues in a conveyorlike fashion
through the life of the siphonophore.
So, if we grew like a siphonophore,
we'd start life as a baby,
but, rather than growing bigger,
this baby would grow more babies out of its side.
Some of these babies would only be able to eat
because they'd only have a mouth.
Other babies would only be able to walk
because they just had legs.
It's a weird, weird world.