Episodes
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When Aliens a Tax
Since 2007, the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets included $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. …
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Plantesthesia
Researchers from the journal Annals of Botany report that, just like humans, plants can succumb to the effects of general anesthetic drugs. The finding is striking for a variety of reasons—there’s the pesky fact that plants lack a central nervous …
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Batman Doesn’t Need Super Vision
Psychologists have reported in Child Development that when four- to six-year-olds pretended to be Batman while they were doing a boring but important task, it helped them to resist distraction and stay more focused. The experts don’t know exactly why …
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Sign on the Clotted Spine
It’s usually OK to be proud of your work and lend your name to it. But most people would draw the line at signing their initials into the flesh of internal organs. Not Dr. Simon Bramhall of the UK, apparently. …
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The Nutty Processor
Squirrels can bury up to 10,000 nuts annually, many of which they do go back and find. A recent study on cognition in the journal Royal Society Open Science examines how fox squirrels keep track of their nuts, and whether …
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Have a Tat Habitat
Engineers at MIT have developed a temporary tattoo that’s 3-D printed with living ink. The tattoo is made up of bacterial cells that are genetically programmed to light up when exposed to different types of stimuli. Jeff and Anthony discuss …
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School Injection
Two neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. Anthony and Jeff discuss the idea of injecting information directly into the brain, and what it could mean for …
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Ground Control to Major Germ
According to a new study in the journal PeerJ, the interior surfaces of the 17-year-old, 250-mile-high, airtight International Space Station harbor at least 1,000 and perhaps more than 4,000 microbe species. Jeff and Anthony discuss germs in space, and the …
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Shake, Rattle, and Roil
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this year, Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana predict that, because of Earth’s slowing rotation, the world will see a significant spike …
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Die Hardly
Rather than go with realistic methods of death, many films contain unbelievable movie death scenes that viewers accept as possible because they have been shown so many times. These movie death myths have become tropes that are used throughout the …
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