Something Offbeat

Mar 07 2025 100 ep. 16 mins 73

Something Offbeat Podcast artwork

What’s the deeper story behind that weird headline you forwarded to your friends or shared at the watercooler? We ask questions to gain grounded insight into the stranger news of the week.

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Offbites: From kayaking in a whale to the crime car wash

Mar 07 2025 19 mins

Chris and Lauren discuss four weird news stories: the Old Testament-esque tale of a kayaker being spit out by a whale, smelly flowers in Australia, an ambitious ocean voyage that departed from Philly and a weird Walmart car wash project.

Vintage Offbeat: A bear on Mars

Feb 28 2025 20 mins

This week, people around the world have a change to see a “planetary parade” – you can read about it here: https://www.audacy.com/krld/news/national/7-planets-are-aligning-in-a-planetary-parade-this-week. Back in 2023, “Something Offbeat” investigated why people love looking into the sky. We reached out to two experts: Dartmouth researcher Nathan H. Heller, who specializ

Not quite ‘Jurassic Park’: Scientists want to ‘resurrect’ the woolly mammoth soon

Feb 21 2025 17 mins

Instead of harvesting long-lost DNA like they do in in the “Jurassic Park” film franchise, a company called Colossal is planning to take living species and genetically engineer traits of the extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger and the dodo bird into them. The company employs around 170 scientists and plans are moving forward… faster than you might thin

Offbites: Adventures in déjà vu

Feb 14 2025 22 mins

Stories about stolen eggs, Taylor Swift’s Super Bowl experience, people getting stuck on theme park rides and the possible end of the penny all reminded us of “Something Offbeat” tales from the past.

$2M Roman coin makes us wonder: What's the future of change?

Feb 07 2025 15 mins

A coin from ancient Rome featuring a depiction of Brutus -- yes, the Brutus who killed Julius Caesar -- sold at auction for $2 million. It got us wondering, in 2,000 years, could a penny be worth just as much? And what's the future of physical currency look like anyway? To find out, we talked to Aaron Klein, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, about what our money could l

Did Google just get closer to proving the multiverse? It's complicated.

Jan 31 2025 13 mins

George Musser, a contributing editor at Scientific American, contributing writer at Quanta as well as the author of Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation (2023) and Spooky Action at a Distance (2015) joined “Something Offbeat” to help us get a better understanding of the multiverse and what it has to do with computers.

Visiting the abandoned military base buried under hundreds of feet of ice in Greenland

Jan 24 2025 13 mins

Camp Century was a US military base that was used for less than a decade in the 1960s. Now? It’s all but a memory. William Colgan, a glacier and climate change researcher, currently in Copenhagen, Denmark, as part of the Camp Century Climate Monitoring Program, joins the show to discuss it.

What new 'evidence' tells us (or doesn't) about DB Cooper

Jan 17 2025 20 mins

Today we’re talking about one of the most notorious, long-enduring real-life mysteries out there. The tale of one of the most infamous skyjackers of all time – DB Cooper. Researcher Eric Ulis joins the show to explain the decades-old enigma and help us unpack the latest theories about who Cooper might be.

'Most Offbeat' of the year: From Stonehenge to brain chips

Jan 10 2025 13 mins

Here's a taste of the best stories from the past year to get us ready for 2025.

Offbites: Where the good gifts are

Dec 27 2024 19 mins