Junk Diet Rewires Rat Brains

New evidence points to the evolution of the ability for bacteria to grab nitrogen from the atmosphere some 3.2 billion years ago, about 1.2 billion years earlier than thought—with implications for finding extraterrestrial life. Lee Billings reports 

A dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way may consist of more dark matter than regular matter.* Clara Moskowitz reports 

This is Brain Awareness Week. In this episode, you can learn more about what you eat affects the health of your brain. Dr. Lisa Mosconi, Alzheimer's researcher, and nutritionist gives us a step by step guide to what foods to eat and what foods to avoid for best brain health.

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Calories are ubiquitous across most of the world and have been used to help people manage their weight for more than a century. But have we been counting them wrong all along? In this episode, Emily Thomas finds out how the calorie is a lot more complex than many of us realise. H ...  Show more

Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a controversial new paper that estimates how many rodents are used in research in the United States each year. Though there is no official number, the paper suggests there might be more than 100 million rats and mi ...  Show more

Bringers of plague, schleppers of pizza slices, garbage gobblers. Rats have adapted over the millennia to survive and thrive in human company, much to our amazement and (often) disgust. But love them or hate them, our past and our future is bound up with these little hustlers. Fo ...  Show more