Something Offbeat

Remember the fun of naming your pet? Now, imagine taking on the task of naming an entire species. Earlier this year, Dr. Christopher Whalen of Yale University got that chance. This week on Something Offbeat, we talk to Whalen about his discovery – an ancient ancestor of the octopus that he named after President Joe Biden – and to Dr. Brittany Kenyon-Flatt of North Carolina State University about the history behind scientific names.

Crews rescued seven people from a ride that got stuck at a carnival outside St. Louis earlier this summer. That's despite county officials inspecting the attractions before the fair opened, according to organizers.

Amusement ride safety consultant Ken Martin explains that there's plenty that can wrong between the time of an inspection and when it's time for the ride to run, especially when the human element is introduced to the situation.

It’s not hard to find gruesome, macabre images or videos – they’re on TV, in horror movies and online. But what if you wanted to see them in person? Through a series of donations and transactions, the body of a 98-year-old World War II veteran from Louisiana ended up on a table in an Oregon hotel ballroom where attendees paid as much as $500 to view a public dissection.

Dr. Gail Saltz, associate professor of psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian Hospital Weill-Cornell School of Medicine and host of the “How Can I Help?" podcast, explains what drives people to seek out such spectacles and what that fascination with death can tell us about ourselves and our society.

Hosted by Mike Rogers, produced by Lauren Barry and Chris Blake, audio editing by Chris Blake, original music by Myron Kaplan, editorial support from Cooper Moll.

Last month, NASA announced it would commission a study on unidentified aerial phenomenon, or UAPs, otherwise known as UFOs. Why now? Does this new program signal that an alien visit could be imminent? Dr. Avi Loeb, a Harvard professor, bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and head of the Galileo Project, joined Something Offbeat to provide a better understanding of what the public might get out of UFO research.

Spongy moth caterpillars have taken over the lives of a Maine couple this year, from ruining trees to popping up in food. This week, Angela Mech, assistant professor of forest entomology at the University of Maine, and Erika Hasle, a conservation ecologist with the Keller Science Action Center at The Field Museum in Chicago, joined Something Offbeat to fill us in on the outbreak and explore how climate change influences human interactions with the insect world.