Episodes
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Yawn of the Dread
Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy levels in several studies. However, new research in the journal Personality and Individual Differences finds that people with psychopathic traits—especially a lack of empathy—are not as susceptible to catching a case of the …
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Cult of Personal IT
The mass suicide of members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate is one of the most bizarre and enduringly fascinating events of the 90s. But nearly 20 years after the strange deaths, part of the cult’s legacy lives on via …
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Of Mice and Skin
Scientists in Japan have transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in a dish, and used those eggs to birth fertile pups. The report marks the first creation of eggs entirely outside a mouse. If the process could be made to …
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The Shortest Distance Between Two Pints
A two-year project by an international team of mathematicians has mapped shortest possible journey to visit 25,000 pubs across the UK, and set a new record for the longest “traveling salesman problem” ever solved. Jeff and Anthony discuss pub crawls, …
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Make the Snake
A team of researchers led by Axel Visel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has replaced part of a mouse’s DNA—a small sequence known as ZRS— with the equivalent sequence from a snake. That tiny change was enough to “serpentize” …
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Coffee Bean and Key Leaks
One of the busiest Starbucks in the country is the one located inside the CIA, with a captive caffeine-craving audience of thousands of analysts and agents working on gathering intelligence and launching covert operations around the world. The baristas go …
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Jurassic Bark
Though we have spent hundreds of years imagining dinosaurs as reptilian roarers, our understanding of what dinos may have actually looked and sounded like has evolved. A new study published in Nature reveals that dinosaurs may have been far less …
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Bonobo Knows
An international study found that chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans seem to have the ability to see the world from someone else’s point of view, even when they know that point of view is dead wrong — a trait that once …
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Home Is Where the Start Is
After he was killed by a blow to the face about 9,000 years ago, the 23-year-old hunter was laid to rest in a limestone cave in what is now southwestern England. Now, say scientists astonishingly bridging 90 centuries and 300 …
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Flight Change
Travellers are used to lost luggage, booking errors and on-board delays – but now an American airline is being sued for mixing up two children and sending them to the wrong cities. Jeff and Anthony discuss this astonishing error, and …
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