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.

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.