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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.