Ep 210 Histoplasmosis: Bats, birds, and budding yeast

Once thought to be a rare, always fatal disease, histoplasmosis is now recognized as one of the most prevalent fungal infections in North America. It infects hundreds of thousands of people every year, and its distribution is growing. In this episode, we dissect this abundant fungus, examining how …

Special Episode: Dr. Olivia Weisser & The Dreaded Pox

In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even more fear than these other killers: syphilis. So feared and so stigmatized was syphilis that it was sometimes called “the secret disease.” A diagnosis …

Ep 209 Dietary Guidelines Part 2: Why is there protein in everything?

If you’ve come across the latest dietary guidelines, a few things may have caught your attention: a big ol’ steak front and center in the new “inverted pyramid”, beef tallow and butter recommended as “healthy” fats, a declaration that the war on protein is ending. “Since when have we been at war wi…

Ep 208 Dietary Guidelines Part 1: Who’s behind these guidelines?

Over the decades, dietary guidelines have taken a diverse array of shapes, from pamphlets to wheels, from plates to pyramids. In many cases, the shapes have changed more than the recommendations they contain. This week and next, we explore those recommendations - who’s making them, how they have ch…

Special Episode: Adam Kucharski & Proof

Why do we believe what we believe? Is what we believe the truth? How can we convince others of our beliefs? If you’ve ever found yourself pondering these questions, you know that the answers are rarely clear-cut. We need to form beliefs in order to navigate the world, but how skilled are we at eval…

Ep 207 Tear Gas: How can a chemical weapon be “humane”?

Tear gas is an expected, normalized part of protests today. But its use in international war is banned. How can that be? That’s just one of the questions we investigate in this episode. First, we take you through the long history of tear gas and its emergence alongside deadlier chemical weapons bef…

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 …