This ancient skeleton was found to have eight different people in it

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Weirdest thing I learned this week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTubeand everywhere else you listen to podcasts every other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the weirdest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals that the editors of Popular Science can pattern. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you will love the show.

FACT: What scientists thought was one skeleton turned out to be an ancient puzzle made of random bones

By Rachel Feltman

This story starts back in the 1970s in a part of Belgium. Researchers were working around this Roman cemetery in the second century and found a body. Not so surprising for a cemetery, right? It had a needle made of bone, which was quite typical of that period and of the Roman Empire. Again, not that surprising. Scientists were like, “easy peasy, this body we found in a second-century Roman cemetery is the body of someone who lived and died in the Roman Empire during the second century.” It went into a museum labeled as such. But that is not the end of the story.

Recently, researchers began to suspect that something was wrong. Initially, the body had been found lying on its right side with its legs drawn up – which was odd because most bodies at that time and place were buried flat on their backs. They also noticed that the bones didn’t really match, with some looking like they came from much younger people than others. A group of researchers decided to analyze the bones to find out more.

Seam New Scientist recently reportedtheir findings were quite shocking: this skeleton was actually made by eight different people, arranged carefully to mimic a single corpse.

Things get even weirder: While most of the bones date from about 4,212 to 4,445 years ago, the skeleton’s head seems most likely to belong to a Gallo-Roman woman who lived more like 1,800 years ago. We’ll probably never know why someone collected these bones in the first place, let alone how they ended up with a chronologically mismatched head.

Seam the researchers note in their paperthis is not the only known case of ancient people making skeleton puzzles. But for now – and let’s be honest, probably forever – the meaning behind this strange practice will remain a mystery.

FACT: Every time you strike your hand against something, there is a chance that your hand will pass through it

By Cheebs

Quantum physics is wild. So crazy that it is technically speaking possible for your hand to pass through a solid wall – although highly unlikely.

On the small atomic scale, things do not behave as we expect. Normally, objects are solid because the atoms and particles that make them up are tightly packed, and the electrons around them create a kind of “force field” that prevents things from passing through. But in quantum physics, particles like electrons do not have a fixed position. Instead, they exist in a sort of “cloud” of probabilities – meaning there’s always a small chance they could suddenly “pop” through something solid, like a wall.

This is called quantum tunneling. Imagine trying to push a ball through a wall and instead of bouncing back, it just randomly appears on the other side. In theory, something like this could happen to your hand if it were small enough – like the size of a single atom. The problem is that your hand has billions of atoms that all had to experience this at once, so the chances of this actually happening are pretty much zero.

So while it’s technically possible, it’s not something you’re going to see happen in the real world. But that hasn’t stopped people on TikTok from trying!

FACT: Scents used to be an integral part of magic—and they’re honestly pretty magical

By Jess Boddy

Have you ever wondered what a witch smelled like back then? Some people say they smelled really good and others say they smell really, really bad. Anyway, witches from the Odyssey to Salem used scent to their advantage. A drizzle of some scented concoction could supposedly make their victims fall asleep, do their bidding, or even fall completely in love.

Now you might be thinking – this is a science podcast. What’s up with all that magic? But think about it: you can’t see or touch smells, but they can affect you emotionally and even physically. And really, it’s not unlike how people think of magic in cultures around the world—this kind of amorphous thing that can change the way someone acts or feels.

Tune in to this week’s episode to hear all about how “magical” scents can hijack our brains—and maybe even learn how to cast a spell of your own.

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