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. The next Weirdest Thing LIVE SHOW is happening on February 8 at Caveat in New York City. Livestream tickets are also available!  FACT: Soda really does taste different in the air By Amanda Reed I love enjoying a free carbonated beverage on a plane. Who doesn’t? However, my Sky-et Coke doesn’t always hit quite the same when I’m among the clouds. It turns out that there’s an actual, physiological reason for the shift in soda taste we experience while flying. The combination of low air pressure and cabin dryness dulls taste buds and messes with our odor receptors, leading to a decrease in sweet and salty flavor detection of about 30%. The noisy atmosphere of a plane can impact your sense of taste, too. Airlines are very aware of the phenomenon and have sponsored studies on it.  But if you’re a ginger ale fan, you’re in luck: It’s one of the few carbonated beverages that’s better 30,000 feet in the air. The dulling of our sweet receptors means it comes across as sharper and more flavorful in the sky. Tomato juice is also a popular plane choice, because umami taste receptors don’t suffer the same problems when we’re airborne.  FACT: Bear attacks can happen anywhere By Alex Goldman Almost exactly 109 years ago, the “Sankebetsu brown bear incident” rocked the small Japanese village of Sankebetsu Rokusen-sawa.  Sankebetsu is a very small part of Hokkaido, which is the northern island of Japan. And it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere.  On December 9, 1915—during a snowy winter—a bear showed up inside a family’s house and attacked them. That would have been tragic, of course, but the story doesn’t end there—this isn’t referred to as an “incident” for nothing. The next day the locals put together a big search party—and made a lot of attempts to shoot this bear down. Not only did the bear in question escape, but it showed up again and attacked and killed more people.  This bear—who was probably hungry and desperate after waking up mid-hibernation—was eventually put down. But while Japan would see a sharp drop in their bear population due to over-hunting in the decades to come, bear attacks are now on the rise again.  FACT: Orcas are bringing back a wild fashion trend from the ‘80s By Rachel Feltman Back in the summer of 1987, a female orca in the Puget Sound made a bold fashion choice: she surfaced with a dead salmon on her nose and proceeded to carry it around.  That kicked off the now infamous dead fish hat trend. One expert told ABC News it was “the cool thing to do for that entire summer” among a few local orca pods. As of last month, the trend seems to be making a comeback. Find out more about this sick fashion trend on the latest episode of The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week. The post Yes, ginger ale really does taste better on a plane. Here’s why. appeared first on Popular Science.