Unexplainable

What are you laughing at?

Scientists are trying to figure out what makes something funny. We compare notes with comedians ⁠Atsuko Okatsuka⁠, ⁠Josh Johnson⁠, ⁠Dulcé Sloan⁠, and ⁠Chris Fleming⁠ (Ori

Why are we ticklish?

Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, and Darwin couldn't figure it out. But one scientist has built a tickle robot (named Hektor) to try and settle the mystery of ticklishness o

How does creativity work?

You know that feeling when time and space melt away and new ideas seem to flow through you? Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains what we know about how creative flow st

Spider Web 2.0

Spider silk can be stronger than steel by weight and tougher than Kevlar. Can scientists make their own? Guest: Greg Holland, professor in the Department of Chemistry an

The wild orchid mystery

More than just beautiful flowers, wild orchids have been confounding scientists for years. Our friends at Sidedoor — a podcast from the Smithsonian — set out to find a ra

An Alzheimer's breakthrough?

The past few months have been full of Alzheimer's optimism: new ideas that could prevent the disease from taking hold, medications that seem to slow it down, and an exper

Talking with the dead

“If only I could talk with them again.” It’s a common refrain for anyone who is grieving someone they love. Now, we can access technology like deadbots, or AI replicas of

What’s cooler than being cool?

The future of quantum computing depends on getting way colder than ice cold — down to some of the coldest temperatures in the universe. The quest to build these super ref

How does music move us? (feat. Sylvan Esso's Amelia Meath)

Music can give us goosebumps. It can make us cry. It can make us move. How? Guests: Amelia Meath, songwriter and singer in Sylvan Esso; Elizabeth Margulis,  director of

What color is a tennis ball?

Is it yellow? Is it green? Or what if, as one scientist argues, “there’s no such thing as a color?” Guest: Bevil Conway, visual artist and neuroscientist at the National

The bodies buried in the bog

When things fall into bogs, they sometimes wind up being beautifully preserved. This includes bodies, sometimes dating back thousands of years. We’re still trying to unde

What happened to the giant bugs?

Once upon a time (around 300 million years ago), Earth was home to massive dragonfly-like insects and two meter long millipede-like creatures. Why did they die off? Gues

Dark matter and the end of answers

Five-sixths of all the matter in the universe is this invisible stuff called dark matter, and scientists barely understand what it is. So what happens if we can't answer

What happened before the big bang?

It's a question that seems impossible to grapple with, but scientists won't take no for an answer. In this collaboration with Scientific American, we take on the big bang

What's the oldest story ever told?

An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions. Guests: Ray Norris

Stopping the science that could stop the world

When scientists write their own rules for life, how do they know what could go wrong before it’s too late? This is the final episode of our new three-part series, Life f

A breakthrough in synthetic life

Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala has been making major headlines as her lab creates cells that feed, divide, and grow — all from nonliving parts. It may sound like sci-fi

Life from scratch

Scientists stripped a cell down to its most essential genes in order to find out what makes life...alive. What they found was more bizarre than they could have imagined.

The idea of a song

A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at ⁠Switched on Pop⁠ (along with

Why can’t I remember being a baby?

And if babies forget their earliest experiences, do they still matter? This episode is a collaboration with Vox's Explain It to Me podcast Guests: Kristin Ohlson, write