A 13th-century schoolboy's doodles show that kids have always been like that
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 PopSci's hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, 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.
By Rachel Feltman
Dating back to at least the 1st century in various parts of the world, people have used birch bark as a writing surface. It's soft and easy to scratch into with a stylus, and of course it's easy to peel off the tree.
In parts of Russia, there are so many old manuscripts preserved on birch bark that there's basically a field of study devoted to them. As of 2018, archaeologists had found 1,222 specimens in Russia, and 1,113 of them were from a Medieval town called Novgorod. There's very heavy, waterlogged clay soil there that probably protected the birch bark from oxygen and decay, but it also seems like it was an especially literate place for the time period. While some of these notes use Church Slavonic, most of them are written in a vernacular dialect and many recount personal matters and everyday happenings
Less than 3 percent of the Medieval settlement has actually been excavated systematically. Some estimates suggest that more than 20,000 additional notes are waiting to be discovered.
But the most famous of these birch bark writings come from a single prolific artist who lived there in the 13th century. He drew epic battle scenes and mythical creatures and even rather abstract works. His name was Onfim, and he was a 7-year-old boy.
Onfim's birch bark scraps show signs of schoolwork, with psalms and cyrillic alphabet exercises written out on many of them. But they also show doodles that are charmingly recognizable as the work of a bored kid at school. To learn more about Onfim's adventures (and doodles), listen to this week's episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. And if you're interested in more charming historical scribbles, check out this repository of ancient graffiti.
By Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
I didn't actually learn about eels for the first time this week—I've been obsessed with them for years. Back when I was teaching in the Hudson Valley, I used to take my students to help catch and count baby eels as they migrated upriver from the Sargasso Sea.
These tiny, translucent fish are glassy and delicate, with eyes and spines you can see straight through—and yet they've already traveled thousands of miles.
Eels are mysterious in almost every way: we still don't fully understand how they navigate, how they reproduce, or why they live for decades in freshwater before transforming into long, lean, sex-obsessed creatures that return to the sea to die.
On this week's episode I talk about eels' intersex biology, their magnetic sense of direction, and even the strange detour that eel anatomy took through the hands of Sigmund Freud. This story, for me, is not just about eels—it's also about what their biology tells us about queerness, evolution, and the history of science itself. For more of this kind of natural history, check out my new book 'Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature.'
By Sara Kiley Watson
Lightning strikes millions of trees every year, and for most of them, the outcome is grim: exploded trunks, scorched roots, or a slow, quiet death from internal damage. So when I heard about a tropical tree that not only survives lightning but actually benefits from it, I had to dig in.
This story takes us into the dense forests of Panama, where the towering tonka bean tree—Dipteryx oleifera—has evolved to attract lightning strikes and come out stronger after being zapped. These trees are unusually tall, with wide crowns that seem designed to draw bolts from the sky. When lightning hits, they shed pests. They also outlive their similarly-stricken neighbors, which allows them to claim more sunlight for themselves. This discovery challenges long-held assumptions about lightning and forest ecology…and hints at how climate change could shift that balance even more.
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