Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

I'm Cody Goff. And I'm Ashley Hamer.

Today you learn about how mammals can breathe through their butts, and how babies remember their birth language even if

they don't use it. We'll also answer a listener question about why your reflection

is upside down in a spoon. Let's satisfy some curiosity. The butt is way more versatile than you might

expect. The terminal end of the digestive tract is best known for waste disposal, but new research suggests it could be good for

breathing? You heard that right. It's not just turtles. Mammals, possibly including humans, have the capacity to absorb oxygen through the rectum.

This new discovery is objectively hilarious. There's no denying it. But the researchers aren't just

in it for the giggles. The project actually aims to help one particular group

patients with severe lung failure.

Right now, mechanical ventilators are the technology of choice to help people who can't breathe on their own.

But as we've all seen during the pandemic, ventilators have a lot of shortcomings.

That's why researchers are looking for alternatives.

This particular line of research found inspiration in the animal kingdom. It turns out that a ton of

animals have a plan B for breathing and that's B for butt. There are fish that

will momentarily surface and swallow a big gulp of air when oxygen levels in the water get too low for comfort.

But they don't have lungs, so that air goes into the digestive tract to be absorbed into the blood.

And turtles are famously known to take in oxygen through their butts.

We actually got a listener question about this one.

They do that during winters spent at the bottoms of ponds. This

all suggests that maybe mammals could do the same thing. The researchers haven't

started testing this theory in humans, but they've reported promising results in experiments using mice and pigs.

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