Doctor and special correspondent Avir Mitra takes Executive Editor Soren Wheeler, plus a live studio audience, on a journey from the operating room to inside the body to the farm to the sewers and back again—searching for answers to an alarming
A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But in
If a species is horrible enough, do we have the right to kill it forever?
Seventy years ago, a nightmare parasite feasted on the live flesh of warm-blooded creatures in North America: the screwworm. That is, until a young scientist named Edward F
In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very
In this episode, first aired in 2014, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—spaces where we know what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but can’t see what happens in-between.
From the darkest parts of metamorphosis to a sixty-year
Before he was even born, Sarah and Ross Gray knew that their son Thomas wouldn’t live long. But as they let go of him, they made a decision that reverberated through a world that they never bothered to think about. Years later, after a couple of
In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck.
Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the architecture of the web, he was no closer to an
In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran this episode in 2021: Five stories that run the gamut from snakes to stars. We start out underwater
One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back of her brain called the cerebellum. A couple weeks later, her doctors took a bit