News Sidequest Megafeed

IFLScience spent a night at a famously haunted British castle and came back with a better question: why do people pay to be scared? Scientists call it recreational fear, and it works because the body treats fear and excitement almost the same way. Also: a study of 57,793 older adults in 24 countries links staying socially active, especially volunteering and sports clubs, to better memory and thinking over time. And NPR reports that a median-income renter would need 16 years to save for a starter home, twice as long as in 2019. Plus a runaway kangaroo, a Texas man who returned $128,000 he found on an ATM, an extinct tiger head found under a bed, and scientists who nuked an asteroid in a computer.

A new Cambridge review in Psychological Medicine pulls together years of research on reading for pleasure. It links reading to better attention and memory, fewer mental health problems, and a lower risk of dementia, though most of the evidence shows a link rather than proof. Also: failed startups are selling their old Slack messages and emails to AI companies. One shutdown service says it has handled nearly 100 deals in the past year, and experts doubt the promise that the data is anonymous. And a TikToker’s advice that married men should avoid close friendships with other women has viewers split. Plus a couple struck by lightning, delivery robots accused of scanning faces, a startup tapping an underwater volcano, and Mariah Carey’s legal win.

Pope Leo XIV’s lung cancer was found during routine screening. Days after he announced the diagnosis in St. Peter’s Square, surgeons in Rome removed one lobe of his right lung.Dr. Steven Goldberg, Chief Medical Officer of HealthTrack and a practicing physician, joins me to walk through what happened in the operating room and why removing the whole lobe isn’t cause for alarm. He also explains the three pathology details that will determine whether surgery alone is a cure. Along the way, he discusses why adenocarcinoma is the lung cancer most often found in people who never smoked and who should ask their doctor about low-dose CT screening.The Pope’s prognosis looks hopeful, and the lesson for everyone else is to ask the screening question before symptoms appear.

A University of Michigan Mott Children’s Hospital national poll of 2,027 parents finds 81% say having a baby costs more than it should, with 40% of parents of children under 3 reporting they are struggling financially or just getting by, and only 14% saying they used none of the cost-cutting strategies listed. Karyann Parkinson, a law school graduate pregnant with her fifth child, let her 5-year-old walk a half-mile to collect goose feathers at a nearby pond in their gated Williamsburg, Virginia neighborhood — and was placed on the child abuse and neglect registry, convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and given a six-month suspended jail sentence. And paleontologist Dirk Knaust, who spent 30 years examining rock cores for Norwegian energy company Equinor, identified centimeter-sized clumps of shells, worm tubes, and plant bits in samples from 160 million years ago as fossilized plesiosaur vomit — the first such identification ever made. Plus knitted traffic cops, shark-bitten boat survivors, a candidate who won city council on funny signs, and a lucky South Carolina lottery stop.

A King’s College London study of 9,632 children ages 9 to 11 in the ABCD Study found that even one caffeinated drink per week — mostly soda — was linked to smaller cortical surface area across 22 brain regions, with more caffeine linked to less sleep, and both factors associated with more mental health problems six and eighteen months later. A 2007 discovery getting renewed attention: Iñupiat hunters in Alaska harvested a 50-ton bowhead whale and found a fragment of a 19th-century bomb lance embedded near its shoulder blade — a weapon designed to explode inside a whale, manufactured between 1879 and 1885, that the whale had carried for over a century after surviving the original strike. Scientists estimate the whale was 115 to 130 years old at death. And astronomers have confirmed the first known microblazar in our galaxy — a stellar black hole called IRAS 18293-0941, hidden behind a thick dust veil 12,000 light-years away, shooting a plasma jet directly toward Earth at 75% the speed of light. Scientists say there is no danger. Plus a 99-year-old wing-walker, a brewery ghost, the Andy Warhol fraud sentence, and a front-yard Egyptian treasure.

The Telegraph covered new research and expert consensus on birth memories: less than 1% of adults claim to remember being born, and neuroscientists are confident it isn’t scientifically possible — the hippocampus is too immature at birth to encode retrievable memories. But newer research suggests infant memories may be encoded earlier than thought and simply become inaccessible rather than never forming. A Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School study of 995 Medicare beneficiaries tracked over 10 years found that older adults who napped most days or every day had a 48% higher risk of developing dementia — but the key nuance is that the relationship is likely bidirectional: early cognitive decline may cause the napping rather than napping causing the decline. And Luna, a 10-year-old Jack Russell/chihuahua mix who escaped from a Yellowstone National Park cabin when housekeeping accidentally opened the door, survived more than 30 days in a park full of grizzly bears, wolves, and approaching winter — and was finally caught Wednesday in a live trap baited with pieces of her family’s clothing. Plus a bear stealing honey on Winnie-the-Pooh’s 100th birthday, the world’s oldest shipwreck, a woman poisoning her coworker’s lunch, and a Royal Caribbean overboard survivor.

Tennessee gave Christa Pike two lethal doses, and she survived. The Pentagon planned to livestream a firing squad execution until President Trump called it off.Criminologist Dr. Matthew Robinson of Appalachian State University, author of Death Nation, joins Keith Conrad to explain what these stories reveal about capital punishment in America. He discusses why public opinion rarely shifts for long, how Pike could argue she can’t be executed twice, and why pickpockets once worked the crowds at public hangings. He also explains why lethal injection, the method that looks the most clinical, fails more often than any other.Robinson isn’t arguing about whether some people deserve to die. His question is whether the death penalty works as government policy, and the evidence suggests it doesn’t.

The New York Times covered new research suggesting the theoretical human lifespan ceiling may be 146 to 194 years — but even in the most optimistic scenario, irreversible DNA mutations accumulate in ways that eventually stop the heart and brain from functioning. A Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults finds 44% had trouble paying for at least one basic necessity — food, housing, medical care, or transportation — in the past year, with 71% of lower-income adults affected, 27% unable to pay their monthly bills in full, and 1 in 5 Americans using a food bank this year. And an Arizona State University study published in Science, drawing on 864 dogs from the Dog Aging Project, found that larger breeds lose DNA methylation in specific “jumping gene” sequences about 35% faster per year than smaller breeds — offering the first compelling molecular explanation for why Great Danes die at 8 while Chihuahuas live to 15. Plus WWII grenades from an estate sale, AI researchers taking up smoking, the dodo de-extinction update, and a hungry great white.