5 things we learned this week

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1 Pickles from McDonald’s cheeseburgers are art. That’s according to Australian artist Matthew Griffin, who flung one on to the ceiling of an art gallery in New Zealand and put a $NZ10,000 (£5,300) price tag on it. The self-described ‘sculpture’, entitled Pickle, stayed in place at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland for an entire month.

2 Almost every sea turtle born in Florida in the past four years has been female. Turtle eggs incubated below 27C develop into males, but if the temperature is consistently above 31C, the hatchlings will be female. In normal times this has resulted in a rough mix of males and females being born. But with ever hotter weather, the trend for more and more girls looks baked in.

3 The guests on top podcasts may not be there on merit alone. Some people are forking out as much as $50,000 (£41,000) to be interviewed on the top shows, says Bloomberg. Appearance fees are generally paid to secure a whole-episode slot.

The practice – which may be legally questionable – is ‘particularly popular among podcasts in the wellness, cryptocurrency and business arenas’.

4 This summer’s fashion is all about frumpiness. Forget the fully-waxed and spray-tanned bodies of Victoria’s Secret models, says Linda Wells in Air Mail – we’d rather go ‘Elon Musk pasty’. High heels and swanky jewellery are being swapped out for bucket hats, oversized linen shirts, and pyjamas in the middle of the day. Even designers are getting involved: Chanel has started making ‘so-called dad sandals’, and the ever-glamorous Manolo Blahnik recently debuted a bejewelled Birkenstock.

5 Hurricane names are more consequential than you might think. A 2014 study covering 62 years of records found that ‘lady hurricanes caused significantly more deaths than the gentlemen’, says The New Yorker. This is probably because people see the female storms as less threatening, and thus don’t prepare properly for them. When participants were asked to rank the riskiness of a hurricane based on a map and a description of its future intensity, they consistently thought the men would be worse than the women.

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