A Scroll Rated "Zero for Readability" Gave Up Nearly 2,000 Years of Secrets
Shelved in the 1980s with a readability score of zero, a Herculaneum scroll yielded 22 columns of ancient Greek without anyone opening it.
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Latest Stories
UFO Whistleblowers Are Free to Speak. Just Not to You.
New oversight panels and a whistleblower memo raise the stakes, but a still-unreleased helicopter encounter report leaves the biggest question untouched.
A Plant With No Leaves, No Chlorophyll, and Apparently No Shame
It can't photosynthesize. It can't survive on its own. So this plant went underground, tapped into a host, and started rewriting its own DNA with borrowed code.
Sleeper Sharks From Thousands of Miles Away Feast on a Sunken Cow
Scientists dropped a cow a mile underwater to study deep-sea scavengers. Sharks that belong 4,000 miles north showed up instead. And they weren't alone.
Underwater Volcano Coughed Up 4.5-Billion-Year-Old Magma
Mayotte's newborn volcano erupted a chemical echo of Earth's molten infancy.
Vanished Family. Classified Doodle. Silent Explosion.
In this episode of the Gotta Be Kidding Me podcast, host Tammy Coron follows four stories where the obvious answer turns out to be wrong, missing, or classified for 78 years.
A Mislabeled Fossil in a Veteran's Garage Rewrote the Story of How We Got Legs
A fossil the size of a dime, mislabeled for decades, has collapsed the textbook story of how the first vertebrates walked onto land.
These Catfish Have Been Catching Cancer From Each Other
Cancer has been passing between catfish in Lake Memphremagog. It is only the fourth transmissible cancer ever found in any animal, and the first in fish.
Bull Sharks in Fiji Keep Finding the Same Mates. Every Year. For a Decade.
The DNA said the same two sharks had pups together years apart. Bull sharks were supposed to be solitary. What else have we gotten wrong?
Oil Made the Osage the Richest People on Earth. Their Neighbors Married Them for the Inheritance and Killed Them.
In 1920s Oklahoma, the Osage Nation became the wealthiest people per capita on earth. Then someone figured out how to inherit their oil money.
Older Adults Took a Placebo Knowing It Was Fake. Their Memory Improved Anyway.
A study gave people pills they knew were fake. Memory improved. Stress dropped. Physical performance went up.
One Bag of Cheetos Nearly Broke a Cave That Took Millions of Years to Build
A cave that survived millions of years of geological time met its match in a dropped snack bag. What does it take to break an ecosystem this old?
A Dying Star May Spark an Entire Baby Universe Inside Itself
What if a dying star doesn't collapse into a black hole, but births an entirely new universe instead? The math behind gravastars just got a lot harder to ignore.
A Shark With No Voice Box Is Making Sounds at 155 Decibels
Scientists assumed sharks were silent. Then a PhD student in a New Zealand lab heard something that sounded like electric sparks. The sharks were the ones making it.
A Meteor Crashed Through a New Jersey Roof Carrying the Building Blocks of Life Inside
A rock came through someone's bedroom ceiling in New Jersey. What was inside it wasn't ordinary space debris.
Scientists Turned a Parasitic Worm Into a Living Drug Factory
Scientists engineered a hookworm to manufacture and deliver medicine inside a living host. What the parasite spent millions of years perfecting, researchers just learned to program.
The Gym Was Always the Most Interesting Room in the Building
A student protest. A locked basement door. A narrow gap in the wall. What Roman teenagers left behind 1,800 years ago was hiding under a gym the whole time.
Nine Sharks. One Week. All the Weird.
From an 80-foot prehistoric giant to a bull shark following your stormwater runoff, YGBFKM has been covering sharks all year. Shark Week is a good excuse to catch up.