Where did that come from?

No one disputes that Patterson, 50, served death cap mushrooms to her guests for lunch in the rural town of Leongatha, but she says she did it unknowingly.Patterson said Wednesday she splurged on expensive ingredients and researched ideas to find “something special” to serve. She deviated from her chosen recipe to improve the “bland” flavor, she said.

She believed she was adding dried fungi bought from an Asian supermarket from a container in her pantry, she told the court.“Now I think that there was a possibility that there were foraged ones in there as well,” she told her lawyer, Colin Mandy. Patterson had foraged wild mushrooms for years, she told the court Tuesday, and had put some in her pantry weeks before the deaths.Patterson, who formally separated from her husband Simon Patterson in 2015, said she felt “hurt” when Simon told her the night before the lunch that he “wasn’t comfortable” attending.

She earlier told his relatives that she’d arranged the meal to discuss her health. Patterson admitted this week that she never had cancer — but after a health scare, she told her in-laws she did.In reality, Patterson said she intended to have weight loss surgery. But she was too embarrassed to tell anybody and planned to pretend to her in-laws that she was undergoing cancer treatment instead, she said.

“I was ashamed of the fact that I didn’t have control over my body or what I ate,” a tearful Patterson said Wednesday. “I didn’t want to tell anybody, but I shouldn’t have lied to them.”

The accused said she believes she was spared the worst effects of the poisoned meal because she self-induced vomiting shortly after her lunch guests left. She had binged on most of a cake and then made herself throw up — a problem she said she had struggled with for decades.“It’s kind of a freak accident that it actually happened,” said David Nesvorny with the Southwest Research Institute.

Realizing they’d stumbled on something new, the researchersearlier this year in The Astrophysical Journal.

The spiral is “a striking shift in our understanding of the outer solar system,” planetary scientist Andre Izidoro with Rice University, who was not involved with the study, said in an email.The discovery, relying on data on how celestial objects move and using simulations, will be difficult to confirm with observations. But knowing more about the orbits of distant comets could give scientists some clues, Izidoro said.