Gotta Be Kidding Me: Real science. Fake-sounding headlines.

You Gotta Be Freakin' Kidding Me

You know that feeling you get when you read something true but just can't believe it? That's the whole point of this show. Every other week, we dig into the best stories from You Gotta Be Freakin' Kidding Me. Peer-reviewed science and mainstream headlines from around the globe that we couldn't have made up if we'd tried. About five minutes. All of it real. None of it believable. We aren't breaking news. It's breaking us. #YGBFKM Music Credit: "Magic Escape Room" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Episodes

  1. Nov 3

    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. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you’re there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more “wait, what?” moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Grave Snacks. Sticky Tape. Extra DNA.

  2. Oct 20

    Dog Phonics. Italy Unzips. Words Optional.

    What does a brain solving puzzles without language, a dog picking out consonants the same way you do, a mountain range quietly coming apart from below, and a moon that may already be sorting samples of its own potential life all have in common? In every case, what matters most is what's happening out of sight. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about hidden processes and unexpected depths. MIT neuroscientists worked with two stroke patients who had lost the ability to speak or understand language and found they could solve complex logic puzzles just as well as people whose language abilities were still intact. Words may help us explain how we solved something, but they aren’t needed to actually solve it. In Hungary, researchers played streams of made-up syllables to 20 dogs and 20 people and found both species responded more strongly to consonant patterns than vowel patterns, the same bias humans rely on to distinguish words. Beneath the Apennines in Italy, the lower crust is peeling away from the rock above it and sinking into the mantle. A new study argues that this slow unzipping now drives much of the region’s earthquake activity, and the team predicts the two plates may eventually weld back together. And on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, scientists know there’s a liquid ocean buried beneath miles of ice. A lab in Munich recreated what the ocean floor there might look like and then introduced microbes collected from the deep ocean floor off the coast of Japan to see what would happen. The result? The microbes thrived where life shouldn't be possible. A brain that solves hard problems without using language, a dog that listens like a linguist, a mountain range unzipping from the inside, and a moon that may be packaging traces of its own life for collection, all in under six minutes. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you’re there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more “wait, what?” moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Dog Phonics. Italy Unzips. Words Optional.

  3. Oct 6

    Exploding Grandmothers. Wrong Wolf. Missing Time.

    What do two missing hours on a New Hampshire highway, three generations packed inside a single cell, a predator convicted on appearances alone, and an asteroid astronomers have been watching since 1857 all have in common? In every case, the surface told one story and a closer look inside told a different one altogether. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about mistaken assumptions and second looks. A newly discovered microbe from Scottish waters reproduces by growing daughter cells inside its own body. And those daughters, it turns out, already have the next generation developing inside them like Russian dolls that eventually explode. Asteroid 44 Nysa has been catalogued since 1857, but high-resolution imaging from two of the world's most powerful telescopes reveals it may not be one body at all. Three lobes connected by narrow necks suggest a contact trinary, (three separate objects that came together and never let go), with a small moon orbiting the whole arrangement. The thylacine's wolf-like looks got it condemned as a livestock killer and hunted to extinction, but a close analysis of its skull tells a different story entirely: jaws built for fast, snapping bites at small, fast prey, not the prolonged grip needed to wrestle down a sheep. And in September 1961, Betty and Barney Hill drove home through New Hampshire's White Mountains and arrived two hours late, with no explanation either could account for and a story that would become the template for everything that came after. Exploding microbe grandmothers, a hidden trinary asteroid, a predator wrongly accused, and two missing hours in New Hampshire, all in about five minutes. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Exploding Grandmothers. Wrong Wolf. Missing Time.

  4. Sep 22

    Black Hole Lunch. Alien Radio Signal. Whale Artistry.

    What do three feeding black holes packed into one ancient galaxy, an alien-signal search that covered millions of stars but almost none of the radio dial, a humpback whale song that changes with the dive, and a brain tumor treatment that works through the neck have in common? In every case, the real answer came from looking somewhere new. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about perspective and place. A galaxy whose light has traveled more than 12.5 billion years holds not one but three active black holes, including a central pair that astronomers expect to eventually merge. And those mergers may explain why the earliest black holes grew so impossibly fast. A PhD researcher at the University of Manchester searched ALMA telescope data at radio frequencies almost no one has tried for alien signals and found nothing but a much bigger question: when we say we've searched millions of stars and heard silence, exactly where did we listen? Off the coast of Maui, suction-cup tags attached to singing humpback whales revealed that specific song themes appear consistently on the way down, others on the way up, and a wider mix at the bottom. And researchers studying gliomas, brain tumors notoriously resistant to immunotherapy, traced a drug's unexpected success in mice not to the brain itself but to lymph nodes deep in the neck, where antibodies were quietly doing all the work. Three black holes, a search in uncharted frequencies, a whale song that follows the dive, and a cancer response that leads to the neck — all in about seven minutes. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Black Hole Lunch. Alien Radio Signal. Whale Artistry.

  5. Sep 8

    Not Extinct. Secret Star. Blair Mountain.

    What do two animals presumed dead for 6,000 years, a star hiding a century-old secret, a cancer prevention breakthrough hiding in plain sight, and one of the largest armed uprisings in American history have in common? They were all hiding in plain sight the whole time. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about things that were hiding in the open. Two marsupials, a long-fingered possum and a glider belonging to a genus entirely new to science, were discovered alive in the rainforests of New Guinea, despite being presumed extinct for millennia. The catch? The indigenous Maybrat and Tambrauw peoples who live there already knew they existed. Astronomers may have finally spotted Betelgeuse B, a companion star that researchers suspected for decades but couldn't find because Betelgeuse itself, one of the brightest stars in the night sky, was drowning it out. A large-scale Canadian study found that removing the fallopian tubes during routine pelvic surgery reduces the risk of the most lethal form of ovarian cancer by nearly 80%, a discovery that didn't require a new drug or a new test, just a better understanding of where the disease actually begins. And in August 1921, 10,000 armed coal miners marched 60 miles through West Virginia toward a private army on a ridgeline, in what became the largest armed uprising on American soil since the Civil War. It was a pivotal moment in American labor history that almost no one has heard of. Two animals science wrote off, a star with a secret, a cancer finding hiding in surgical schedules, and a battle that rewrote labor law — all in under six minutes. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Not Extinct. Secret Star. Blair Mountain.

  6. Aug 25

    Ghost Whale. Floating Inferno. Forever Young.

    What do the world's rarest whale, a luxury liner that became a floating inferno, a supervolcano with a plumbing problem, and a gut bacteria experiment that made old brains act young again have in common? All four had more going on beneath the surface than anyone expected. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories where the deeper you look, the weirder it gets. A spade-toothed whale known to science for 150 years but never once seen alive finally yields its secrets after washing ashore in New Zealand, revealing nine stomach chambers, hidden vestigial teeth, and a century and a half of unanswered questions. The S.S. Morro Castle, a 1934 luxury cruise liner that caught fire off the New Jersey coast, killing 137 people and then triggered an investigation so tangled and inconclusive it became a second disaster all its own. A study in Science that completely rewrites the textbook on Yellowstone, replacing the classic mantle plume story with something far stranger: a sideways "mantle wind" and a subterranean system that's more sluggish crystal mush than underground lake of fire. And a rodent experiment that transplanted gut microbes from young mice into old ones and watched the older animals' brains physically rewrite their gene expression back toward youth. A mystery whale, a maritime catastrophe, a supervolcano that doesn't work the way we thought, and a gut-brain connection that keeps getting weirder, all in under eight minutes. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Ghost Whale. Floating Inferno. Forever Young.

  7. Aug 11

    Forgotten Plague. Secret Romance. Baby Universe.

    What do a pandemic that erased itself from memory, bull sharks with a decade-long romance, a dime-sized fossil mislabeled for decades, and a dying star that might be giving birth to a new universe have in common? All four had been misread, mislabeled, or forgotten . . . . until they weren't. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron covers four stories where the conventional explanation falls apart. Encephalitis lethargica — the "sleepy sickness" that spread alongside the Spanish Flu, left survivors trapped inside their own bodies, and then simply vanished, cause still unknown. Bull sharks in Fiji returning to the same breeding partners across multiple seasons, sometimes a decade apart, in a population too small to feel safe about. A hatchling embolomere hiding on an Illinois fossil collector's shelf for years, mislabeled as a baby lamprey, that turned out to be 310 million years old and proof that early tetrapods may have skipped the aquatic childhood phase entirely. And a graduate student's master's thesis that opened a serious scientific conversation about whether a collapsing star might birth a tiny universe instead of a black hole. Strange medicine, hidden shark families, a fossil that rewrote vertebrate history, and cosmology born from a homework assignment, all in about eight minutes. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Forgotten Plague. Secret Romance. Baby Universe.

  8. Jul 28

    Vanished Family. Classified Doodle. Silent Explosion.

    What do a family that vanished into the Siberian wilderness, a doodle on hotel stationery, a colony of bacteria, and an explosion missing its own explosion have in common? All four of these stories are true. Only one of them has an ending. In this episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron follows four stories where the obvious answer turns out to be wrong, missing, or classified for 78 years. We cover the Lykov family, Russian Old Believers who fled 250 kilometers into the taiga in 1936 and stayed hidden so long that World War II, the Cold War and the moon landing all happened without them; the Eastern Airlines pilot who sketched a wingless, window-lined object on hotel stationery in 1948, a drawing that stayed buried in Air Force files until this month's fourth PURSUE UAP release; the Baylor researchers who found that genetically identical bacteria split into donors and recipients under antibiotic pressure, passing survival proteins between cells in what amounts to a microscopic mutual aid network; and the deep-space explosion spotted by China's Einstein Probe that matched every signature of a gamma-ray burst except the gamma rays. History, microbiology, astrophysics, declassified government files, all delivered in about five minutes with no jargon and zero apologies. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox. You can also find us on X and Bluesky at @shockandscroll.

    Vanished Family. Classified Doodle. Silent Explosion.

  9. Jul 14

    Zombie Squirrel. Goblin Shark. Volcanic Gold.

    What does a volcano, a thousand-year-old tree, ancient squirrel droppings, and a deep-sea ghost have in common? They're all weirder than anything you'd make up. In this debut episode of Gotta Be Kidding Me, host Tammy Coron digs into four stories that prove the natural world has absolutely no obligation to make sense. And we're here for all of it! We cover the Antarctic volcano that's been scattering gold dust across the ice every single day since 1972 (and why no one's getting rich off it), the legendary Major Oak of Sherwood Forest that survived a millennium of history only to be felled by too much human "help," the Ice Age ground squirrels whose frozen droppings turned out to be a richer genetic archive than bone, and the goblin shark, a 125-million-year-old living fossil that finally let itself be filmed alive for the very first time. Science, history, paleogenomics, volcanology, deep-sea discovery — all delivered in about five minutes with no jargon and zero apologies. 🎙️ New episodes drop about every two weeks. Subscribe so you never miss a story, and visit us at gottabekidding.me for the full articles behind every episode. While you're there, sign up for our free newsletter for even more "wait, what?" moments delivered straight to your inbox.

    Zombie Squirrel. Goblin Shark. Volcanic Gold.
  • 9 Episodes

About

You know that feeling you get when you read something true but just can't believe it? That's the whole point of this show. Every other week, we dig into the best stories from You Gotta Be Freakin' Kidding Me. Peer-reviewed science and mainstream headlines from around the globe that we couldn't have made up if we'd tried. About five minutes. All of it real. None of it believable. We aren't breaking news. It's breaking us. #YGBFKM Music Credit: "Magic Escape Room" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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