What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast.
The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.
FACT: Contemporary archaeology digs up lost stories from recent history—including skater culture
If you go to the University of Glasgow’s website right now and check out their archaeology research, you’ll find a page on “Kelvin Wheelies.” That sounds like it could be the whimsical nickname of some historical Scottish figure, but it is, in fact, the name of the country’s first skatepark, which opened in Kelvingrove Park back in May of 1978.
This £100,000 state-of-the-art facility had bowls, half-pipes, and slalom runs—everything you’d want if you were a Scottish teenager trying to board. But Kelvin Wheelies closed in 1983 and has been slowly getting swallowed by trees and shrubs ever since.
Now archaeologists are digging it up as part of something called “contemporary archaeology“—basically using the same tools they’d use on ancient Roman ruins to study stuff from the 20th and 21st centuries. This field started with a professor having his students literally dig through garbage in the 1970s (he called it “garbology”), and now researchers are studying everything from Lego pieces that fell off a container ship in 1997 to the infamous landfill full of terrible E.T. Atari cartridges that marked the video game crash of the early ’80s.
The idea is that our short-term cultural memory is nowhere near as good as we assume, and we forget important stuff way faster than we think unless someone bothers to catalogue it with serious scientific rigor. Listen to this week’s episode to learn how empty swimming pools during a California drought managed to revolutionize skateboarding, why archaeologists think your recent past is just as worth preserving as ancient civilizations, and how visits to Burning Man could help us understand ancient nomadic peoples.
FACT: Gossip can spread like a literal virus
This week’s episode features special guest Annalee Newitz. You might remember Annalee from their previous appearances, where they talked about how to survive and thrive during an apocalypse and why our future robot overlords might move a lot like roller derby players. That second factoid was inspired by their research for their latest sci-fi book, “Automatic Noodle,” which is out now!
On this week’s episode of Weirdest Thing, Annalee dives into the summer of 1789—when something called the “Great Fear” swept across France. There was a huge wealth disparity, and peasants were suffering under the rule of the nobility. Then rumors started spreading about armed brigands that would come to town to steal what little harvest folks had left, so towns raised militias to fight back. But when the brigands never showed up, these militias did something else instead: they attacked castles and burned land deeds, effectively redistributing property from aristocrats back to the people.
For centuries, historians debated whether this was closer to a case of mass hysteria or an instance of calculated political action. Then physicists and network analysts decided to settle it by treating the rumors like a disease outbreak. They mapped how the gossip spread using epidemiological models and found it infected people at a rate of 1.5 per day—the same as COVID. But here’s the kicker: the “disease” hit educated, wealthy towns hardest, and specifically targeted areas where burning a paper land title would be enough to legally transfer ownership. That strongly suggests the peasants weren’t panicking, but rather using strategic misinformation to justify a coordinated seizure of property.
Listen to learn how 18th-century French revolutionaries basically invented tactical rumor warfare, and how the same epidemiological tools can track modern political movements.
FACT: Dire wolves were majestic, but they also had terrible knees
By Laura Baisis
Planet Earth used to be home to some animals that were significantly larger than those we have living here today. And we’re not only talking about dinosaurs. These were also some giant mammals and birds.
About 20,000 years ago, giant armadillo relatives called Glyptodonts roamed South America. They were about 661 to over 4,000 pounds at 5.5 to 11 feet long. By comparison, the average armadillo today is about 30 inches long and 159 pounds. Glyptodonts went extinct about 6,000 to 7,000 years ago, but not before serving as an important food source for some early humans.
Eagles with wingspans close to 10-feet soared over southern Australia 60,000 years ago and had talons so big they could snatch a koala or small kangaroo.There were also large predatory marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs about 246 million years ago that grew up to 13 feet and stalked the seas that covered up present day Nevada.
Studying these giant extinct animals can give us important insights into living animals and how to help them as they face modern problems. That’s where direwolves come in. The dire wolves who roamed the Earth up until the end of the last ice age, may have had the same bone disease that plague cats and dogs today called osteochondrosis. This common developmental bone disease that impacts joints in vertebrates, including domesticated species like house pets and humans. In 2024, a team of paleontologists identified signs of osteochondrosis in over 500 limb bones of dire wolves that lived around 55,000 to 12,000 years ago in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles
Almost three percent of young adult and juvenile dire wolves showed defects in the knee joints, which tended to be a bit bigger at over 12 millimeters. Understanding this disease and its history could help treat the dogs suffering with it today.
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