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 Spotify, YouTube, Apple, 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.
This year’s Ig Nobel Prize in biomechanics went to researchers trying to answer a surprisingly complicated question: what’s a kiss? Their definition—”non-agonistic interactions involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer”—was concocted to exclude such exchanges as ants feeding each other with their mouths, bees and birds vomiting at one another, and fish that fight by smashing their open jaws together.
Defining a kiss might seem like a silly scientific endeavor, but it was a crucial first step for their research. Once they had definite criteria for a kiss in place, they went looking for that specific behavior in research about all sorts of primates. By mapping the appearance of kissing the same way they might map any other evolutionary adaptation, they came up with an estimation of how far back the trait could have evolved. The number they landed on is some 20+ million years.
Listen to this week’s episode to hear more about the 2026 Ig Nobel winners, and to learn why kissing is such a mysterious—and unique—human behavior.
Featuring Riley Black
This week’s episode features special guest Riley Black. Her new book, Tyrant Lizard Queen: The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth’s Greatest Carnivore, comes out later this month.
For her guest spot on this week’s Weirdest Thing, Riley decided to tell us all about the fastest—and perhaps fattest—cat in North America.
For decades, paleontologists thought that an extinct cat called Miracinonyx evolved into a cheetah-like springer specifically to chase down North America’s speedy pronghorns. It was a tidy, romantic story of predator and prey evolving together in lockstep until one had gone extinct; it explained why pronghorns were so dang fast, too. But Riley always found the story a little fishy, and she wasn’t the only one: in 2023, researchers noted that these American cats had forearm bones more suited for grasping prey (cougar-style) than for running super fast (like a cheetah).
New research has put another nail in the coffin of the “American cheetah.” For starters, their fossils were found as far north as the Yukon—where they wouldn’t have had any pronghorns to hunt. And based on their DNA, the researchers say, they’re much more closely related to modern pumas. They also had a unique diet: according to isotope analysis, the researchers think the Yukon-dwelling cats feasted on salmon. That leaves us with one big question: what were pronghorns running from?
Featuring Amanda Reed
Old friend-of-the-pod Amanda came back to join us this week. She took us on a tour of mausoleum history.
Walk into Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery, and you’ll find it hard to miss the sphinxes. They’ve got ample bosoms, appropriative headdresses, and nothing whatsoever to do with actual Egyptian funeral traditions. They’re actually monuments to the fortune (and ego) of the late industrialist Emil Winter.
Emil, who got to move into these fancy digs in 1941, was not unique in desiring such an opulent postmortem dwelling. In fact, he decided to have it built after seeing a similar one by the same architect: the Woolworth family mausoleum in New York City.
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about humanity’s enduring desire to build fancy houses for the deceased.
The post Why did kissing evolve? If we want to find out, we’ve got to decide what counts as a kiss first. appeared first on Popular Science.
New terms let Meta crawl sites tied to business users and use the content to train its products, widening rights ad buyers had already granted.
The post Meta’s New Terms Expand Crawling Rights Beyond Advertisers appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
Waterfalls play an essential role in river development and landscape evolution. Researchers are particularly interested in how abrupt changes in the steepness of a river channel, also called knickpoints, develop. Knickpoints vary in size and can be as small as your index finger or as large as Niagara Falls. Researchers from Virginia hypothesized that waterfalls, a type of knickpoint, can influence erosion when a river channel is cut into solid rock, called bedrock.
The researchers wondered whether fractures and other pre-existing weaknesses can influence how water removes rock slabs from a river channel, via an erosional process called plucking. Fractures can form in many different orientations, but the researchers focused on 3. Imagine a flat tabletop that represents a riverbed. Fractures that are parallel to the flat tabletop are called horizontal fractures. If you tip the table so the low end points downstream, that’s the direction of downstream-dipping fractures. If you tip the table so the low end points upstream, that’s the direction of upstream-dipping fractures.
First, the researchers tested how fracture orientation changed erosion before an established knickpoint. They used a man-made channel, called a flume, to simulate a natural river system. To set up the experiment, they glued layers of small tiles about the size of an adult’s thumbnail to a plastic frame and put it in the flume. Then, they placed a layer of unglued tiles upstream of the knickpoint.
To begin the experiment, the researchers incrementally increased the amount of water flowing through the flume every 5 minutes until they reached a maximum flow or all the loose tiles were “eroded.” They considered a tile to be “eroded” once it was transported over the knickpoint and downstream. The researchers measured the water depth at a fixed point upstream of the knickpoint, the number of tiles eroded through plucking, and the volume of water. They repeated this 8 times for each fracture orientation.
The team found differences in the amount and timing of erosion between the 3 orientations. In particular, they saw that erosion began at lower water speeds for horizontal beds than for tilted beds. Based on the observed erosion rates, they concluded that horizontal beds are the most susceptible to erosion, while upstream-dipping beds are the most resistant, and downstream-dipping beds fall between the 2.
The researchers then tested how a knickpoint would develop and influence water flow if all of the tiles were unglued and free to move. They individually stacked almost 5,000 unglued tiles across the channel. Before starting the experiment, they filled the flume slowly with water to submerge all of the tiles without moving them. Then, they increased the water’s speed to start erosion. Instead of collecting measurements as they did in the first experiment, the researchers filmed this experiment and observed how the knickpoint shape changed and how plucking occurred.
The researchers observed that the plucked tiles in this experiment formed piles downstream of the knickpoint in a process known as armoring. This armor of tiles, which represents loose rocks near a waterfall in a natural setting, prevents erosion of the underlying river bed. Only when the water transports the armor downstream can it erode the bedrock and develop a knickpoint.
Unlike the first experiment, researchers found no differences in erosion between fracture orientations in this experiment, but did observe differences in armoring. They found that upstream-dipping beds had the least armoring because water quickly transported piles of tiles near the waterfall downstream. Downstream-dipping beds had the most armoring, and their eroded tiles took longer to move downstream.
The team concluded that waterfalls will erode at different rates based on their fracture orientation and armoring processes. The orientation of bedrock fractures also impacts the shape of the waterfall and the river channel around it. So the next time you see a large waterfall, consider that it may have started as a small fracture the size of your thumbnail.
The post Bedrock fractures shape waterfalls appeared first on Sciworthy.
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