Unexplainable

Towering walls of water sometimes appear in the ocean without warning or apparent cause. What drives their terrifying power? (First published in 2023) Guest: Ton van der Bremer, associate professor...

Good news can be hard to find, especially when our brains — and the media — are biased against it. Guest: Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director of Vox, and author of the Good News newsletter This...

If you went back 500 million years and re-ran evolution, would life be totally different today? Guests: Richard Lenski and Zachary Blount, evolutionary biologists at Michigan State University Fo...

It's easy to assume there is objective truth in basketball stats. A clear story of what happened in the past. But our friends at Pablo Torre Finds Out uncovered something that throws an entire era int...

Is a solution to climate change…pouring water on hot rocks? Guest: Dylan Matthews, Senior Correspondent at Vox's Future Perfect This episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team. ...

How does any animal know what to do? A neuroscientist argues it's not “instinct.” Something bigger is going on. (First published in 2022) Guest: Mark Blumberg, behavioral neuroscientist at the Univer...

We have a cure for tuberculosis. Why does it still kill over a million people every year? GUEST: John Green, podcaster, YouTube creator and award-winning author of Everything is Tuberculosis and ma...

Figuring out the perfect healthy diet remains stubbornly out of reach. Our friends at Gastropod ask: Why? Guests: Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley, co-hosts of Gastropod For show transcripts, go to...

In coastal California, researchers grapple with potentially losing a landscape they love. Guests: Rebecca Johnson, Director of the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science at the California Acad...

We love our pets. And think we understand them. Are we fooling ourselves? Guests: ⁠Alexandra Horowitz⁠, dog cognition researcher at Barnard College; ⁠Holly Molinaro⁠, animal welfare scientist; ⁠Jar...