This is your brain on pleasure (even the guil...

When producer Berly McCoy was out on her local frozen lake, she saw something she'd never seen before. There were dark spidery, star-shaped patterns in the ice and they freaked her out. So, we called an expert to find out more about them. In today’s episode, geophysicist Victor T ...  Show more

In 1999 hundreds of gray whales washed up along the west coast of North America. More in 2000. They lost an estimated 25% of their population. But then the whale population recovered and people moved on. Until it happened again in 2019. And 2020, and 2021. It’s still happening to ...  Show more

Recently, a group of world-leading scientists called for a halt on research to create ‘mirror life’ microbes amid concerns that the synthetic organisms would present an ‘unprecedented risk’ to life on Earth. Ian Sample tells Madeleine Finlay about why this work initially seemed e ...  Show more

You’re probably familiar with the concept of handedness—a glove made for your left hand looks basically like the one for your right hand, but won’t fit—it’s a mirror image. Many of life’s important molecules, including proteins and DNA, are chiral, meaning they can exist in ei ...

Guest: Dr. Filipe Pereira is an Associate Professor at the Lund Stem Cell Center at Lund University. The Pereira lab studies how hematopoietic cell fate is specified, maintained, and eventually modified or reversed. Inspired by the fields of stem cell biology, immunology, and can ...  Show more

Mitochondria are known as the powerhouse of the cell—but new research suggests they might be far more complex. Columbia University’s Martin Picard joins Scientific American’s Rachel Feltman to explore how these tiny organelles could be communicating and what that might mean for e ...  Show more