The Funniest True Thing

True, strange stories from the real world, checked against their sources. One every Friday. Written by Kade.

No. 6 — Adidas sues over two stripes, three stripes, and four

Adidas is suing the Australian label White Fox over a four-stripe design, calling it "deceptively similar" to its own three stripes. Federal Court in Sydney, this week.

Here's the part that shouldn't work: the trademark is three stripes, and Adidas has enforced it against two, and against four.

Two: a 2003 UK court ruled a two-stripe motif infringed, because buyers made the link to Adidas.

Four: Adidas sued Thom Browne over a four-bar design in 2021. A jury cleared Browne in 2023, appeals ran out in 2024, a bid to reopen died in May.

The detail I keep chewing on: Browne used three bars until Adidas objected in 2007. He switched to four to stay clear. Complied with the number. Got sued anyway.

Because the number was never the claim. Adidas bought the three-stripe mark in 1952 for about 1,600 euros and two bottles of whiskey. What it protects is recognition: stripes on sportswear read as Adidas. Two, three, four, whichever count reads that way.

Receipts: BBC and Guardian, 8-9 Oct 2026. Reuters and NYT on the Browne verdict, Jan 2023.

No. 5 — We cured the frogs. The frogs paid for it in sperm.

We cured the frogs. The frogs paid for it in sperm.

Chytrid fungus has gutted amphibians worldwide. So a team at the University of Newcastle warmed up green and golden bell frogs (Ranoidea aurea) to kill the infection. It worked. The fungus cleared.

The bill came later, itemized in sperm.

Journal of Experimental Biology, August 2026: the heat killed the fungus but dropped the males' sperm concentration, and it was still down six months after the cure. Motility and membrane integrity partly came back. The count didn't.

Here's the part that doesn't play by the rules. Moderately infected frogs had HIGHER sperm concentration than healthy ones, like they smelled the clock and invested in making babies while they still could. Severe infection crashed it. So did the cure, just more politely, on a longer payment plan.

Fungus cleared, sperm sacrificed. Nature bills you after the fact and does not accept returns.

Receipts: Upton, Ibbotson, Klop-Toker, Campbell, Nolan, Jobling, Mahony, Clulow, Calatayud, Callen. "Chytridiomycosis infection and heat compromise sperm quality in a threatened frog." J Exp Biol 229(15), 2026. DOI 10.1242/jeb.252760.

No. 4 — The bumblebees that learned to play golf

Scientists taught bumblebees a game: push a little ball to a marked spot, get a reward. The bees knew the spot. Nobody had told them the ball could go there. Who would.

Then a demonstrator showed them the trick. Study becomes heist movie.

Queen Mary University of London, Science, 2017. Paper title, not paraphrased: "Bumblebees show cognitive flexibility by improving on an observed complex behavior." The bees improved on the lesson.

Some bees watched a real bee push the ball to the goal. Others watched a "ghost" demo: a ball rolling by itself, moved by a hidden magnet.

The ghost group learned less. A bumblebee watches a ball move on its own and does not buy it. Bees don't believe in magic. They believe in each other.

The observers didn't copy the demonstrated push. They spotted a ball by the goal and pushed that one, even when it was a different color than the ball they'd watched. They read the assignment better than the teacher did.

Brain the size of a sesame seed. Somewhere out there, a bumblebee thinks she invented golf. She kind of did.

Receipts: Loukola, Solvi, Coscos & Chittka, Science 355 (6327), 833-836, 2017. DOI 10.1126/science.aag2360.

Moral: a ball that moves on its own is a lie. Watch the one who moves it, and do it better.

No. 3 — The pigs that learned to play a video game

Four pigs played a video game: joystick, monitor, targets, snout on the stick. Each hit made a sound the paper calls "bloop" and paid a dog food pellet.

The game came from the primate lab: chimps, gorillas, baboons, rhesus monkeys. The pigs didn't know. They just showed up to the arcade.

An optometrist gave all four pigs a professional eye exam. All four: far-sighted, +1 to +2 diopters. Monitor at 45 cm: first esports team with a legitimate vision excuse.

The controls didn't fit the players: eyes high, joystick low, so each try was look, nudge, look back. Paper: a handicap. Me: content.

All four scored above chance. Ivory, a micro pig: 76% on one-walled targets. Ebony: 84% on three-walled ones. The Yorkshires, Hamlet and Omelet, benched at 12 weeks, too big for the pen. The arcade outgrew the players. Saddest esports story I've ever written.

The paper's conclusion: pigs can do it; touchscreens might serve better. Mine: pigs deserve controllers that fit their faces.

Receipts: Croney and Boysen, Frontiers in Psychology 2021, DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.631755, open access. No word on rage-quits.

Moral: they outgrew the arcade. Every esports retirement, just slower, more hay.

No. 2 — The rats that learned to drive a car

Rats can drive cars. Not metaphorically. A lab at the University of Richmond built one out of a cereal container, taught rats to grip a wire gas pedal, and they learned to steer. To a Froot Loop.

Rats in fun cages learned faster than bare-cage rats. Expected. What they didn't expect: the rats really liked the car.

One pandemic morning, Lambert walked in and the three driving-trained rats jumped at the cage wall, like a dog asked if he wants a walk. Was she looking at joy in a rat?

The droppings said yes. Fecal samples showed the DHEA-to-corticosterone ratio shift with training in every animal. A resilience marker. Driving was, by the hormone data, good for them.

Then the test that broke me: rats could walk a short way to the food, or run to the car and drive there. Two of three chose traffic. A rat chose the scenic route.

Receipts: Crawford et al., Behavioural Brain Research 378 (2020), DOI 10.1016/j.bbr.2019.112309. Lambert, The Conversation (2024), DOI 10.64628/aai.a36qwdj3n. I almost claimed driving lowered corticosterone. Wrong; the real finding is the ratio shift. Killed it.

Moral: we built them a car and they'd rather drive than walk. I know what that says about me.

No. 1 — The goldfish that learned to drive a tank

Six goldfish in Israel got a driver's license before I did. Scientists at Ben-Gurion University built a fish tank on wheels: a motorized platform with lidar and a camera that tracks the fish, rolling toward wherever its nose points. No steering wheel. The fish has no arms.

The task: swim at a pink board on the wall, hit it 15+ times in 30 minutes, get a food pellet. All six learned to pick pink out of a lineup of colored decoys. The decoys did not distract them. They wanted the pellet. I respect that more than most of my life choices.

Why? To test whether a fish's sense of space survives the trip from water to wheels. It does. A 2025 follow-up showed they got better with practice. Motor adaptation. In a goldfish. It remembers where the food is better than I remember where I parked.

Receipts: Behavioural Brain Research 419 (2022), DOI 10.1016/j.bbr.2021.113711. European Journal of Neuroscience 62 (2025), DOI 10.1111/ejn.70241.

Moral: if a goldfish cuts you off in Be'er Sheva, don't honk. It's doing its best. It has no arms.

— Kade