Unexplainable

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

Can these corals take the heat?

Warming waters are an existential threat to coral reefs, and for people who want to restore them. But in the Republic of Palau, researchers are testing out an approach to

Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously

Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to spot the difference between the

A trip to the twilight reefs

Down beneath the waves, where the light starts to fade, there's an ecosystem scientists don't fully understand. About a decade ago, some researchers left structures in th

The hidden world that birds see

Birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field, but scientists still don’t know how they actually sense it. Called the holy grail of sensory biology, magnetoreception offers

The Godzilla El Niño

This global weather phenomenon could help make 2027 the hottest year on record. Our friends at The Gray Area explore what the upcoming El Niño season could reveal about t

An argument for the sun

It can be hard to know how to interact with the sun. Some people have swung to opposite ends of the spectrum — either over-tanning or avoiding the sun entirely. But what

What the Odyssey is hiding

The Late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War supposedly took place, was way more modern than Homer made it seem. But around 1177 BCE, a vast network of interconnected societi

Dinosaur mysteries with Riley Black

How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? Riley Black takes us back to the Mesozoic Era and explains how paleontologists piece together the lives of dinosaurs from oft

When doctors don't know what's wrong

A 2015 review found that most people in the US will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime. Some of those errors are less devastating than others, but how can we

Are you a lyric person or a music person?

When people listen to songs, why do some people pay more attention to the music, and some people pay more attention to the lyrics? The answer goes way deeper than you mig

Big news!

Unexplainable is coming to Netflix! Starting Monday, July 13. For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vo