Ep 206 Oropouche Virus: More than a smidge worrisome

Though discovered relatively recently, Oropouche virus has been making headlines as an emerging vector-borne infectious disease on the rise. Not transmitted by the usual suspects (like ticks and mosquitoes), this virus is instead spread through the bites of midges or no-see-ums. Since these arthrop…

Ep 205 Cancer Part 4: Where do things stand today?

For the entirety of our species’ history, our approach to cancer has largely been to react, to design new therapies and better combinations of treatments. This energy has certainly been well-spent, but what if we didn’t have to use treatment at all? Or what if we could minimize the use of aggressiv…

Ep 204 Cancer Part 3: How do we treat it?

A century and a half ago, the list of effective cancer treatments was essentially a single entry: surgery. Today, in 2026, you’d need pages to contain the number of treatments available, and multiple notebooks to delineate all of the various therapies currently in development. It is nothing short o…

Special Episode: Lawrence Ingrassia & A Fatal Inheritance

For centuries, physicians noticed that cancer sometimes ran in families, but until the 1960s, an answer to this mystery remained out of reach. Only then were scientists beginning to unlock the cellular dynamics underlying cancer, and what they found finally allowed grief-stricken families to put a …

Ep 203 Cancer Part 2: Why does it happen?

Each of our cells can become cancerous. It’s an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable truth. Nor is it a truth restricted to our species - cancer is a consequence of complex life. The features that make a cell cancerous are those that, under other circumstances, are beneficial, essential even, for an indi…

Ep 202 Cancer Part 1: What is it?

Cancer has touched every one of us in some capacity, and learning of a diagnosis inspires many more questions than it answers. In this four-part series on cancer, we aim to lay a foundation of knowledge that will help make sense of this multifaceted disease. We begin our four-part series on cancer …

Special Episode: Jon Adams and Edmund Ramsden & Rat City

What happens if you put a bunch of rats in an enclosure and provision them with unlimited food and water? Researcher John B. Calhoun was committed to finding out. Results from Calhoun’s “rat utopia” experiments from the mid-20th century revealed a behavioral dark side that emerged as space grew inc…

Ep 201 Poop Part 2: Flushed away

Poop is an incredibly valuable and massively underutilized resource. However, most of us don’t see it that way because of our evolutionarily ingrained disgust towards poop. Flush toilets and intricate sewer systems have revolutionized health and hygiene by whisking our poop far away where we don’t …

Ep 200 Poop Part 1: How the sausage gets made

It might be stinky and it might be unpleasant to behold, but we all do it. For many of us, our poop is out of sight, out of mind once we flush it away. But for the next hour and fifteen minutes or so, we’re going to bring it back into mind as we delve into the rich world of poop. This episode, the …

Special Episode: Nicola Twilley & Frostbite

For much of the world, refrigeration is such a commonplace technology that we rarely stop to wonder at the many ways it has transformed our lives. From the foods we grow to where we grow them, from how they taste to what we eat, refrigeration has dramatically - and quite recently - changed our rela…