The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week

The editors at Popular Science magazine spend their days reading research papers and interviewing scientists, and sometimes they come across facts that are just too strange, too funny, or too unsettling to fit neatly into a written article. Those are the facts that end up on this podcast. Rachel Feltman hosts (currently on parental leave, with producer Jess Boddy filling in), and each episode features the team presenting their most surprising recent discoveries. Episodes run 45 minutes to just over an hour and come out bimonthly. The show is now in its tenth season with 221 episodes in the archive. The format is casual but the research is rock-solid — these are professional science journalists who fact-check everything. Recent episodes have featured guest experts and comedians, and the show occasionally records live. Topics range from the history of medical quackery to the biology of deep-sea creatures to the surprisingly dramatic politics of naming new elements. The show holds a 4.6 rating from over 2,100 reviews. Listeners consistently praise the thoroughly researched content and the hosts' ability to make genuinely weird science accessible and entertaining. If you like the feeling of texting a friend "you will NEVER believe what I just learned," this is your show. The facts are carefully chosen to be the kind of thing you will remember and retell, which is exactly the point.