Of Rats and Men

NPR’s Anas Baba is one of the last remaining journalists in Gaza working full-time for an American news organization. A year into the ceasefire, more than 1400 people have been killed in Israeli attacks, nearly 5,000 injured. And those numbers rise nearly every day. What has the ...  Show more

We live in a moment with almost daily reminders of how fragile life on Earth is whether it be from climate change, nuclear weapons or AI. In this episode, we bring you a story from the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove dinosaurs to extinction. And how it might have h ...  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

This episode may have you reconsidering what you think about rats. That’s because at this training and research center in Tanzania, African Giant Pouched Rats are being raised up to sniff out landmines and disease, proving to be the heroes we all need. 

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The nightmare vision of black rats tangled by the tail continues to intrigue and revolt us, but what is its origin? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture into the sewers of history to seek answers. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

The first true lab rat was the Wistar rat, a strain specifically bred for biomedical research. In his “rat universe” experiments, John B. Calhoun placed large numbers of these rats in a controlled environment for more than a year, and found evidence for the same anxieties sparked ...  Show more