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What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to Popular Science’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Spotify, YouTube, Apple, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show.
FACT: Yes, portobellos were a marketing invention—but who came up with them?
You may already know that button mushrooms, cremini, and portobello are all the same species of mushroom. But there’s an unsolved mushroom mystery at the heart of this food marketing tale that might prove surprising even to fans of fungi.
First, let’s get the easy part out of the way: Almost all mushrooms grown, sold and eaten in the US are one species called Agaricus bisporus. The species actually grows naturally in the wild as a slightly-brownish mushroom like a cremini you might buy at the store. The “classic” white buttons that have become so ubiquitous in the US are the result of a random mutation. In 1925, a mycologist named Louis Ferdinand Lambert spotted a chalky little freak in his cultivation area in Pennsylvania and decided to propagate it. He called it “Snow White,” and because it grew so uniformly and prolifically, it took the nation by storm. In fact, every white button mushroom you’ve ever eaten is descended from this one happy accident.
This happened to align perfectly with 20th-century American obsessions with pristine, sterile-looking food, which helped the Snow White dominate the market and push brown-colored Agaricus bisporus to the sidelines. That same push for uniformity kept us from enjoying bisporus that outgrew the tidy little button shape. Whether they’re white or brown in color, mushrooms of these species will eventually grow to have broad, flat caps and prominent gills. That was way too rustic for mid-century American sensibilities.
Then came the 1970s and 80s, when counterculture hippies revolted against processed food. Suddenly those big, scaly, overgrown versions of the same mushroom were rebranded as earthy, natural, wholesome “portobellos.” She’s not like other girls! She’s actually dirty on purpose.
But that’s where things get mysterious, because nobody actually knows who came up with the name “portobello” or started selling them as such. There isn’t even a clear origin story for the name (which is not an Italian word). It just… appeared in print in 1986, fully formed.
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about Rachel’s attempts to solve this fungal conspiracy, plus: how Quaker efficiency brought mushroom farming to the US, how Rachel’s Italian relatives perfected it, and how best to go about foraging your own delicious mushrooms without dying.
FACT: Bees have wilder sex lives than you might think
Featuring Dr. Kit Prendergast
This week’s episode features special guest (and fan of the show!) Dr. Kit Prendergast, also known as The Bee Babette. She’s a wild bee scientist from Australia who has published more than 80 scientific articles on bees, including two new species descriptions.
Kit is also a passionate science communicator, and like how The Lorax speaks for the Trees, the Bee Babette speaks for the Bees. Kit combines the performing arts with science and has a show on pollination called “The Birds & the Bees.” She joined us this week to talk all about the surprisingly spicy science of bee sex!
You can find more of her work on her Patreon and Instagram.
FACT: Regular pet dogs are better at finding invasive lanternfly eggs than trained human experts (and they look cuter doing it)
Spotted lanternflies arrived in Pennsylvania in 2014 and have spread to more than 17 states in just 10 years. These cute-looking polka dot bugs suck sap and leave behind “honeydew” that attracts wasps and grows sooty mold, which makes them an absolute menace to vineyards and fruit trees.
Most of us have spent the last few years diligently stomping any spotted lanternflies that hop across our paths, but the real solution has been sleeping on your couch the whole time. A recent Virginia Tech study took 182 volunteer dogs of various breeds—German Shepherds, Labrador Retrievers, Boston terriers, and even miniature poodles—and spent several months training them to detect lanternfly egg masses. The results were stunning, both in controlled tests and out in open fields. Another study found that pet dogs can even outperform trained human specialists by more than 2 to 1. Hooray for citizen science!
2025 PopSci Best of What’s New