Grave Snacks. Sticky Tape. Extra DNA.

What do a dingo still being fed centuries after his death, three prehistoric stone pillars traced to the wrong quarry, trees that can fix their own posture without any outside help, and a bacterial enzyme that reads four letters it was never meant to see have in common? Every one of them did much more than anyone thought was possible.

In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about things that exceed their expected limits. Along the Darling River in Australia, Barkindji people buried a dingo about a thousand years ago and then kept adding freshwater mussel shells to the site for roughly five hundred years after his death. Barkindji Elders suggest the shells were a way of continuing to feed him, a relationship that didn't end at burial. Near Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, three sandstone pillars known as the Devil's Arrows weigh up to twenty-five metric tons each, and for decades the leading theory placed their origin at nearby Plumpton Rocks. Researchers using sticky tape to collect microscopic mineral grains found a different answer: Brimham Rocks, eleven miles away. Why prehistoric people chose the harder haul remains a mystery. In France, scientists tilted young poplar trees sideways and then placed them on rotating platforms inside evenly lit spheres, stripping away any directional cue from light or gravity. The poplars straightened themselves anyway, using proprioception, the same internal sense that tells you where your arm is when your eyes are closed. And at UC San Diego, researchers tested whether RNA polymerase, the enzyme that copies DNA into RNA, could handle hachimoji, an experimental eight-letter DNA alphabet built from four natural letters and four synthetic ones. It could read all eight just fine. Apparently nobody told it the alphabet was supposed to stop at four.

A dingo cared for across centuries, stones from a quarry farther than anyone expected, trees that self-correct without a compass, and an enzyme that reads letters it's never seen before, all in under six minutes.

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