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An 1886 color illustration depicting a crowd of people, including men, women, and children, gathered around a massive wheel of cheese in the East Room of the White House. A man in a dark coat is carving into the cheese with a knife, while others eagerly reach out with their own knives and hands to take a piece. In the foreground, a small boy sits on the floor eating a piece of the cheese. This event commemorates the distribution of the "Mammoth Cheese" gifted to President Andrew Jackson in 1835.
Food Safety

Andrew Jackson’s White House once hosted a cheese feeding frenzy

The seventh president’s farewell party featured 1,400 pounds of cheddar. Things got messy.

By Tom Hawking

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Vintage vaccine skeptics thought medicine would turn kids into demon cows

Plus horror movie empaths and other weird things we learned this week.

Rachel Feltman

Rachel Feltman

Host

At Popular Science, we report and write dozens of stories every week. And while a lot of the fun facts we stumble across make it into our articles, there are lots of other weird facts that we just keep around the office. So we figured, why not share those with you? Welcome to The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week.

Latest Articles

A part of a fossilized mammal skull, with sediment in a tooth socket that turned out to be a nest built by a prehistoric bee.
Bees

Ancient bees laid eggs inside bones

A 20,000 year old fossil uncovered in a tarantula-filled cave has paleontologists stunned.

By Andrew Paul

A salt grain-sized microrobot on a human finger to illustrate size
Robots

Dancing robot is the size of a grain of salt

The fully programmable, autonomous microbot only costs one penny to make.

By Andrew Paul

A cross sectional image of an actively growing microbialite from South Africa.
Land

‘Living rocks’ suck up a lot of carbon

Super tough microbialites are some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth.

By Laura Baisas

Young sad girl sitting alone at home on sofa listening to sad music on wireless headphones crying and wiping her nose with a paper tissue.
Mental Health

Pop music has gotten sadder over the last 50 years

Analysis of 20,186 songs from the Billboard Top 100 indicates that the lyrics are also more simple.

By Andrew Paul

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged an extremely large and symmetric protostellar jet at the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy in the forming cluster Sh2-284. From tip to tip, this protostellar jet is 8 light-years across, about double the distance from our Sun to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.
Space Telescope

Massive newborn star is firing two plasma jets at once

Sh2-284 lives on the edge of the Milky Way galaxy.

By Andrew Paul

A thin sheet of plastic covered in transparent MOCHI film
Engineering

Bubble wrap-like material could help insulate glass windows

Only five millimeters of this experimental material called MOCHI can shield your hand from a flame.

By Andrew Paul

A scene from the Bayeux Tapestry showing a medieval dining scene involving Bishop Odo of Bayeux.
Archaeology

Famous phallic tapestry may have entertained monks during meals

The 770-pound Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Norman conquest of England in 1066.

By Laura Baisas

A black and white image showing the evolution of man.
Evolution

Is our picture of evolution still stuck in the past?

We may have ditched the monkey-to-man meme, but the myth of humans as nature’s “pinnacle of evolution” persists in subtler ways.

By Prosanta Chakrabarty / MIT Press Reader

a caterpillar hanging from stick
Insects

Young moths hiss at predators 

Researchers theorize that they might be imitating snakes.

By Margherita Bassi

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Popular Science has been demystifying the worlds of science and technology since 1872. We explain the inner workings of the phone in your pocket, explore world-changing innovations, and examine everything from the marvels of deep space to the secret lives of staples like bread. We deliver an engaging, approachable, and inclusive look at emerging technologies and scientific advances.
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