News Sidequest Megafeed

Keith Conrad
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A collection of stories you might have missed while everyone was focused on the Red Team vs. Blue Team fight newssidequest.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 5h ago

    News Sidequest - Having a baby is too expensive, say 4 in 5 parents / A mom let her 5-year-old collect goose feathers and was charged with neglect / 160-million-year-old sea monster vomit found

    A University of Michigan Mott Children’s Hospital national poll of 2,027 parents finds 81% say having a baby costs more than it should, with 40% of parents of children under 3 reporting they are struggling financially or just getting by, and only 14% saying they used none of the cost-cutting strategies listed. Karyann Parkinson, a law school graduate pregnant with her fifth child, let her 5-year-old walk a half-mile to collect goose feathers at a nearby pond in their gated Williamsburg, Virginia neighborhood — and was placed on the child abuse and neglect registry, convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and given a six-month suspended jail sentence. And paleontologist Dirk Knaust, who spent 30 years examining rock cores for Norwegian energy company Equinor, identified centimeter-sized clumps of shells, worm tubes, and plant bits in samples from 160 million years ago as fossilized plesiosaur vomit — the first such identification ever made. Plus knitted traffic cops, shark-bitten boat survivors, a candidate who won city council on funny signs, and a lucky South Carolina lottery stop. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    News Sidequest - Having a baby is too expensive, say 4 in 5 parents / A mom let her 5-year-old collect goose feathers and was charged with neglect / 160-million-year-old sea monster vomit found

  2. 5h ago

    Sidequests - What the Pope’s Surgery Can Teach the Rest of Us

    Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer was found during routine screening. Days after he announced the diagnosis in St. Peter’s Square, surgeons in Rome removed one lobe of his right lung. Dr. Steven Goldberg, Chief Medical Officer of HealthTrack and a practicing physician, joins me to walk through what happened in the operating room and why removing the whole lobe isn’t cause for alarm. He also explains the three pathology details that will determine whether surgery alone is a cure. Along the way, he discusses why adenocarcinoma is the lung cancer most often found in people who never smoked and who should ask their doctor about low-dose CT screening. The Pope’s prognosis looks hopeful, and the lesson for everyone else is to ask the screening question before symptoms appear. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sidequests - What the Pope’s Surgery Can Teach the Rest of Us

  3. 1d ago

    News Sidequest - One soda a week changes kids’ brains / A whale carried a 19th-century harpoon for over 100 years / A radioactive jet is aimed at Earth

    A King’s College London study of 9,632 children ages 9 to 11 in the ABCD Study found that even one caffeinated drink per week — mostly soda — was linked to smaller cortical surface area across 22 brain regions, with more caffeine linked to less sleep, and both factors associated with more mental health problems six and eighteen months later. A 2007 discovery getting renewed attention: Iñupiat hunters in Alaska harvested a 50-ton bowhead whale and found a fragment of a 19th-century bomb lance embedded near its shoulder blade — a weapon designed to explode inside a whale, manufactured between 1879 and 1885, that the whale had carried for over a century after surviving the original strike. Scientists estimate the whale was 115 to 130 years old at death. And astronomers have confirmed the first known microblazar in our galaxy — a stellar black hole called IRAS 18293-0941, hidden behind a thick dust veil 12,000 light-years away, shooting a plasma jet directly toward Earth at 75% the speed of light. Scientists say there is no danger. Plus a 99-year-old wing-walker, a brewery ghost, the Andy Warhol fraud sentence, and a front-yard Egyptian treasure. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    News Sidequest - One soda a week changes kids’ brains / A whale carried a 19th-century harpoon for over 100 years / A radioactive jet is aimed at Earth

  4. 4d ago

    News Sidequest - Birth memories aren’t real — but your brain might still have them / Frequent napping is linked to higher dementia risk / Luna is home

    The Telegraph covered new research and expert consensus on birth memories: less than 1% of adults claim to remember being born, and neuroscientists are confident it isn’t scientifically possible — the hippocampus is too immature at birth to encode retrievable memories. But newer research suggests infant memories may be encoded earlier than thought and simply become inaccessible rather than never forming. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School study of 995 Medicare beneficiaries tracked over 10 years found that older adults who napped most days or every day had a 48% higher risk of developing dementia — but the key nuance is that the relationship is likely bidirectional: early cognitive decline may cause the napping rather than napping causing the decline. And Luna, a 10-year-old Jack Russell/chihuahua mix who escaped from a Yellowstone National Park cabin when housekeeping accidentally opened the door, survived more than 30 days in a park full of grizzly bears, wolves, and approaching winter — and was finally caught Wednesday in a live trap baited with pieces of her family’s clothing. Plus a bear stealing honey on Winnie-the-Pooh’s 100th birthday, the world’s oldest shipwreck, a woman poisoning her coworker’s lunch, and a Royal Caribbean overboard survivor. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    News Sidequest - Birth memories aren’t real — but your brain might still have them / Frequent napping is linked to higher dementia risk / Luna is home

  5. 4d ago

    Sidequests - Where Does the Death Penalty Stand in the US?

    Tennessee gave Christa Pike two lethal doses, and she survived. The Pentagon planned to livestream a firing squad execution until President Trump called it off. Criminologist Dr. Matthew Robinson of Appalachian State University, author of Death Nation, joins Keith Conrad to explain what these stories reveal about capital punishment in America. He discusses why public opinion rarely shifts for long, how Pike could argue she can’t be executed twice, and why pickpockets once worked the crowds at public hangings. He also explains why lethal injection, the method that looks the most clinical, fails more often than any other. Robinson isn’t arguing about whether some people deserve to die. His question is whether the death penalty works as government policy, and the evidence suggests it doesn’t. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sidequests - Where Does the Death Penalty Stand in the US?

  6. 5d ago

    News Sidequest - Living to 200 is theoretically possible / Nearly half of Americans can’t afford basic necessities / Big dogs age faster because of jumping genes

    The New York Times covered new research suggesting the theoretical human lifespan ceiling may be 146 to 194 years — but even in the most optimistic scenario, irreversible DNA mutations accumulate in ways that eventually stop the heart and brain from functioning. A Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults finds 44% had trouble paying for at least one basic necessity — food, housing, medical care, or transportation — in the past year, with 71% of lower-income adults affected, 27% unable to pay their monthly bills in full, and 1 in 5 Americans using a food bank this year. And an Arizona State University study published in Science, drawing on 864 dogs from the Dog Aging Project, found that larger breeds lose DNA methylation in specific “jumping gene” sequences about 35% faster per year than smaller breeds — offering the first compelling molecular explanation for why Great Danes die at 8 while Chihuahuas live to 15. Plus WWII grenades from an estate sale, AI researchers taking up smoking, the dodo de-extinction update, and a hungry great white. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    News Sidequest - Living to 200 is theoretically possible / Nearly half of Americans can’t afford basic necessities / Big dogs age faster because of jumping genes

  7. 6d ago

    News Sidequest - The American Dream has a price tag: $5.3 million / Amazon built a profile on you and it’s very rude / Pringles will bury you in a can for 200 years of free chips

    Investopedia’s 2026 American Dream analysis puts the lifetime cost of the traditional package — home, two cars, two kids, college, retirement, vacations — at $5.3 million, up from $3.4 million just three years ago, and growing 4.1% this year while wages grew only 3.1%. A college-educated worker earning the median salary their entire career tops out at $4.1 million including Social Security. The shortfall is $1.2 million. Also: Amazon’s “About You” feature, launched in beta in May 2026, has gone viral after customers discovered it contains AI-inferred assumptions including “has flat buttocks,” “has no friends,” “cusses when scared,” and “treats cats as biological children.” And Pringles launched a Halloween promotion today — enter at OnceYouDrop.com, sign a “will and taste-ament,” and one winner gets a custom can-shaped urn and 200 years of free Pringles to pass down to their loved ones. The promotion honors Fredric Baur, who invented the Pringles can and had his own ashes buried in one when he died in 2008. Plus NASA’s cosmic smile, the flock camera turned on police, the Montana softball sisters, and burning french fries. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    News Sidequest - The American Dream has a price tag: $5.3 million / Amazon built a profile on you and it’s very rude / Pringles will bury you in a can for 200 years of free chips

  8. 6d ago

    Sidequests - From the Wright Brothers to Chuck Yeager in Only 44 Years

    In the span of a single human lifetime, humanity went from wondering if flight was possible to breaking the sound barrier. This episode of Sidequests tells the story of that extraordinary leap — and the moment it all came together over the Mojave Desert. But this isn’t just a story about one pilot and one flight. It’s about the compressed, almost unbelievable pace of change that made that moment possible — and what it says about what human beings can do when the circumstances demand it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    Sidequests - From the Wright Brothers to Chuck Yeager in Only 44 Years
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About

A collection of stories you might have missed while everyone was focused on the Red Team vs. Blue Team fight newssidequest.substack.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Information

  • Creator
    Keith Conrad
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    276
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Keith Conrad
  • Show Website
    News Sidequest Megafeed