Could women actually be better suited to weight lifting than men are?
Plus horny fruit flies and other weird things we learned this week. The post Could women actually be better suited to weight lifting than men are? appeared first on Popular Science.
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.
FACT: Women really are stronger than men
This week’s episode features writer and author Casey Johnston. In her new book, A Physical Education: How I Escaped Diet Culture and Gained the Power of Lifting, Casey “recounts how she learned the process of rupture, rest, and repair—not just within her cells and muscles, but within her spirit.”
For her appearance on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, Casey shared an excerpt of her book that challenges the narrow definition of strength underpinning our fitness culture—one that equates strength with a single max-effort lift, usually performed by men.
After a triumphant arm-wrestling moment against several male competitors at a party, Johnston dove into the physiology behind strength and found that women may actually be better suited to strength training in many ways. Women have a slight edge in type I muscle fibers, more blood flow, faster recovery, and greater endurance under fatigue—traits that don’t show up in powerlifting stats but matter deeply in real-world performance.
The fitness world has long sidelined female physiology as “too complicated,” often treating women as simply “smaller men.” But when we broaden how we define strength—by factoring in total work, recovery, and resilience—women’s bodies might not just keep up. They might actually outpace men’s. For more on the surprising science of strength, check out this week’s episode.
FACT: Horny fruit flies could help save some lives
By Laura Baisas
Fruit flies have helped scientists win six Nobel Prizes—and now they might help us fight mosquito-borne illnesses.
That’s thanks to a parasitic bacteria called Wolbachia that infects insects and seriously messes with their sex lives. It can only pass from mother to offspring, so it rewires infected bugs to mate more, lay more eggs, and in some cases even attempt to mate with other species.
A recent study found that in female fruit flies, Wolbachia changes protein levels in the brain regions that govern decision-making and mating behavior—basically, it makes them unusually eager to reproduce. Understanding how this bacterial puppet master works on a cellular level could help us control mosquito populations that spread diseases like Zika and dengue, or even inspire new pest control strategies that don’t rely on toxic chemicals. In other words: horny fruit flies might save lives.
FACT: The latest trend among teenage capuchin monkeys? Kidnapping.
What looks at first glance like a heartwarming story of cross-species adoption quickly devolves into something much stranger—and much darker.
Researchers reviewing camera trap footage from a remote island off Panama found that a group of adolescent capuchin monkeys were routinely kidnapping baby howler monkeys and carrying them around like accessories. Not to eat, not to raise—just… to have.
It wasn’t aggressive, but it wasn’t nurturing either. The babies cried out. Some died. And even more chilling, the behavior seemed to spread like a trend among young male capuchins. Why? Scientists think they’re probably just bored and have too much free time on their hands. The researchers behind the study called this kidnapping trend a “cultural tradition without clear function, but with destructive outcomes”—and if that doesn’t sound like a metaphor for human behavior, I don’t know what does.
The post Could women actually be better suited to weight lifting than men are? appeared first on Popular Science.
