Conspiracy theorists hate uncertainty, a mushroom hot pot in China can apparently summon tiny imaginary people, a bunch of seeds have been sitting underground since the 1800s waiting for their moment and scientists are trying to quantify why words like boobs are funny. This week is a mixed bag of psychology, botany and childish humour, which is basically the entire scientific enterprise when you strip away the grant applications.

Venting might be making you angrier, Neanderthals apparently had a type, and unborn babies are already forming strong opinions about kale. This week we bounce from modern psychology to ancient DNA to fetal facial expressions, with a quick detour into pokie machines and how they might be made a little less addictive.

AI is casually reaching for the nuclear button, a Norwegian scientist accidentally speed-ran his way into Havana Syndrome territory, and a brain glitch has turned a marathon runner into the kind of person who says things like, "this foam has notes of regret." It is a neat little trio of stories that all land on the same uncomfortable point. The future is weird, the human brain is weirder, and neither of them comes with a user manual.

Hippos with hidden bits, hearts that take a mechanical detour, and a medical case study that will make you sit down and reconsider every life choice that led you to having a body. Showcasing the very best of when science is equal parts fascinating and deeply inconvenient. We are talking population control in zoos, post surgery brain fog, and a man whose internal plumbing was re-routed in the most unhelpful way possible.

Aliens might crash the economy, your brain might solve puzzles while you are drooling on a pillow, and someone, somewhere, has forced an emergency department to call the bomb squad for reasons that should never need explaining. This week is a perfect reminder that the world is held together by vibes, paperwork, and a thin layer of social agreement that can be shattered by a UFO, a dream, or an artillery shell in the wrong place.

Winter Olympians are allegedly gaming their suit seams for extra lift, the ocean is still capable of throwing an absolutely giant wall of water at your face with no warning, and somewhere in Queensland, a blob of pitch is taking nearly a century to prove it is technically a liquid. This week, we bounce from sports cheating to monster waves to the slowest experiment on Earth, with science doing what it does best and refusing to be tidy.

People are arguing about porn again. Magic mushrooms are being pitched as a health supplement. And a flu study managed to do the one thing flu is famous for not doing, which is spread. This week, we are bouncing between sex, psychedelics, and infectious disease, which sounds like a bad uni share house, but it is actually a pretty good episode.

Everyone wants to live forever, dogs are out here doing actual jobs, and someone has tried to work out where heaven might be using astronomy. We dig into the strange science of longevity, including research suggesting reproduction and lifespan might be linked in uncomfortable ways. Then they meet the working dogs sniffing out invasive species, guarding airport runways, and generally making the rest of us look lazy.

The FBI is on the hunt for Bigfoot. Scientists are pulling apart your pint. Fame is a lot more dangerous than it looks from the outside. This week, we’re jumping into the odd corners where government files, molecular mysteries and rockstar statistics all cross paths. Some stories get solved, some just get weirder and some might make you think twice about chasing the spotlight.

AI is making people feel smarter than they are, ancient Australia had crocodiles that dropped out of trees and Gen Z is busy rewriting the rules on everything from ironing to history. This week, we’re diving into a world where technology inflates our egos, prehistoric predators take the high ground and the youngest generation both celebrates and questions the past.

Science has a habit of making the weird feel wonderfully ordinary. This week, we’re serving up a trio of stories that blur the line between curiosity and absurdity. From chickens moonlighting as beauty judges to casual world record breakers and the real-life roots of a mythical horned rabbit, it turns out the world is even stranger than you think.

Ventriloquists dominated the airwaves, grown adults smashed chestnuts for dubious glory and even stone-skimming competitions have their own cheating scandals. This week, we’re diving into the delightfully bizarre world where stage tricks work on radio, nut-bashing gets competitive and skipping stones is anything but innocent. Turns out, the stranger the pastime, the bigger the drama.

Academics are arguing about the ethics of sex with aliens, dogs have evolved literal “puppy eyes” just to manipulate us and StaffCop is quietly transforming your workplace into a digital panopticon. This week, we’re plunging into a world where interstellar romance is a genuine debate, canines have evolved to become emotional con artists and your boss might be watching more than your timesheets.

A Rome-based research team discovered that poetry can act as a universal backdoor to jailbreak AI systems, medieval physicians believed flatulent foods were powerful aphrodisiacs, tech billionaire Palmer Luckey is now advocating for submarines that travel through Earth's crust and a Dublin man contracted penile tuberculosis after working with deer.

Sika deer on Japan's Yakushima Island let macaque monkeys groom them in exchange for food scraps, except some deer also let the monkeys mount them sexually, which scientists are calling "interspecies sexual behaviour".

Nederland, Colorado hosts an annual "Frozen Dead Guy Day" festival celebrating Bredo Morstoel, a Norwegian grandfather whose body has been preserved in a shed on dry ice for decades after his grandson's cryogenic preservation dreams went sideways.

And the Brazilian Butt Lift has an unexpected side effect called "BBL smell" - a rancid odour resulting from fat necrosis when transferred fat cells die and decompose inside the body.

Horseshoe theory suggests political extremes loop back around until far-left and far-right ideologies find disturbing common ground. Scientists are using AI to decode brain activity and caption your thoughts, which raises uncomfortable questions about privacy and future thought-policing. And evolutionary biologists discovered that your fingers and toes developed from genetic blueprints originally designed for a fish's cloaca - meaning your hands evolved from ancient fish butt architecture.

Scientists in the mid-20th century bombarded plants with gamma radiation to create mutations that would yield stronger crops, which sounds like a mad scientist's fever dream but actually happened in atomic gardens around the world. Microwaves have been accused of causing cancer, zapping nutrients and possibly spying on you, though none of these conspiracies hold up under scrutiny and we're all still nuking leftovers anyway. And "phubbing" - snubbing someone by looking at your phone instead of paying attention to them - has become so prevalent that we've created connections across continents yet can't maintain eye contact with the person sitting across from us.

A woman survived without a stomach or small bowel after a catastrophic medical episode at her 18th birthday party, proving the human body is more adaptable than we thought. Philosophers and tech billionaires are convinced we're living in a computer simulation, though Canadian physicists disagree and insist our universe is real. And forensic scientists discovered that your DNA floats in the air wherever you breathe, meaning you're leaving genetic evidence in every room you enter - except mysteriously not in cars, which apparently offer some kind of DNA stealth mode.

Donald Trump's Nuclear Regulatory Commission is resurrecting decommissioned nuclear power plants, racing to get them online with what appears to be questionable safety oversight. Companies are practicing "greenhushing" - doing environmental good but staying silent about it, NASA calculated Earth's expiry date at one billion years from now, a man named Les Stewart spent 16 years typing the numbers one to one million in words for a Guinness World Record, and Waymo admits that driverless car fatalities are inevitable, planning for "when" rather than "if" accidents happen.

Correlation doesn't equal causation, but that doesn't stop us from finding patterns in the strangest places. Pentagon pizza orders spike right before major military operations, proving that pepperoni consumption is apparently a national security indicator. A study found that kids who play video games are measurably smarter than TV-watching children, which vindicates every parent who gave up fighting the Xbox battle. And the Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that China and Saudi Arabia lead in governmental trust, raising the question: are people genuinely trusting their governments or just too scared to say otherwise?