Something Offbeat

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 think. Faye Flam, a science journalist who is researching the topic for Bloomberg, joined the show to discuss the project.

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.

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 look like in the future.

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.

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.

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.

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

Rodney Jacobs of Stinson Lumber in Oregon joined the show. He’s responsible for selecting the tree that is placed in downtown Portland every year. And there’s a lot more that goes into it than you’d think.

Anthony Clarke, a researcher from Curtin University, joined the show to discuss new findings about Stonehenge that have revealed yet another mystery related to the ancient landmark: how did one of the stones travel all the way from Scotland to reach the Salisbury Plain?