Scientafic!

Why do we sweat when we get scared or anxious? It turns out, humans can smell fear in each other’s sweat. But what about horses? Can horses smell fear in human sweat? Are sheep scared of border collies? Can you relieve their fear with Valium? There’s only one way to find out. In this special Halloween episode, Lu and Tirth go trick-or-treating for funny and scary scientific studies. They come back with a study on blood, a study on mummies, some intriguing research on smelling fear in sweat, a couple of inquiries into sheep anxiety, and a case report of a ghostly finding on a CT scan.Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:50 Blood and mummy studies 10:51 Fearful sweat study 17:33 Sheep Valium study 26:55 Let’s read some mail (the spooky finding on a CT scan) 28:23 What did you learn today, outro Article links: Daniel & Egan, 1939. The Quantity of Blood Required to Produce a Tarry Stool. Journal of the American Medical Association. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/1159185 Critchfield & Shue, 2018. The Dead Man Test: a Preliminary Experimental Analysis. Behavior Analysis in Practice. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40617-018-0239-7 Chen & Haviland-Jones, 2000. Human olfactory communication of emotion. Perceptual and Motor Skills. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2466/pms.2000.91.3.771? Jardat et al., 2026. Human emotional odours influence horses’ behaviour and physiology. PLoS One. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0337948Lee et al., 2016. Attention bias to threat indicates anxiety differences in sheep. Biology Letters. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbl/article/12/6/20150977/50512/Attention-bias-to-threat-indicates-anxiety Monk et al., 2018. Attention Bias Test Differentiates Anxiety and Depression in Sheep. Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00246/full Harding, 1996. The case of the haunted scrotum. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1295986/ You can find Recreational Science (#RecSciPod) everywhere great podcasts are found! Follow us on social media @RecSciPod! YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@RecSciPod Instagram https://www.instagram.com/recscipod TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@recscipod BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/recscipod.bsky.social Threads https://www.threads.com/@recscipod Theme music by Dasein: Spotify https://open.spotify.com/track/5fNAhYtrSM9nW9GpCiDpST?si=ea49670388f24e5c YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-WQ6G62lfM Apple Music https://music.apple.com/us/song/cas/1706824849 Recreational Science is produced by Scientafic (https://www.scientafic.com/recscipod)