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Unexplainable takes listeners right up to the edge of what we know…and then keeps on going. The Unexplainable team — Noam Hassenfeld, Julia Longoria, Byrd Pinkerton, and Meradith Hoddinott — tackles scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and everything we learn diving into the unknown. New episodes Mondays and Wednesdays.
From Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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- What can we do about antibiotic resistance? · 24 min.More than 1 million people are estimated to die from drug-resistant infections every year, and that number is rising. But there are some surprising potential solutions in soil…
- Emily St. John Mandel on science in fiction · 27 min.Science has some really weird, wonderful ideas. Some of them are hard to prove in fact, but Emily St. John Mandel does a great job of playing with them in fiction — in works like…
- What are you laughing at? · 19 min.Scientists are trying to figure out what makes something funny. We compare notes with comedians Atsuko Okatsuka, Josh Johnson, Dulcé Sloan, and Chris Fleming (Originally…
- Why are we ticklish? · 23 min.Socrates, Aristotle, Galileo, and Darwin couldn't figure it out. But one scientist has built a tickle robot (named Hektor) to try and settle the mystery of ticklishness once and…
- How does creativity work? · 25 min.You know that feeling when time and space melt away and new ideas seem to flow through you? Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains what we know about how creative flow states…
- Spider Web 2.0 · 22 min.Spider silk can be stronger than steel by weight and tougher than Kevlar. Can scientists make their own? Guest: Greg Holland, professor in the Department of Chemistry and…
- The wild orchid mystery · 26 min.More than just beautiful flowers, wild orchids have been confounding scientists for years. Our friends at Sidedoor — a podcast from the Smithsonian — set out to find a rare…
- An Alzheimer's breakthrough? · 28 min.The past few months have been full of Alzheimer's optimism: new ideas that could prevent the disease from taking hold, medications that seem to slow it down, and an experimental…
- Talking with the dead · 36 min.“If only I could talk with them again.” It’s a common refrain for anyone who is grieving someone they love. Now, we can access technology like deadbots, or AI replicas of a lost…
- What’s cooler than being cool? · 29 min.The future of quantum computing depends on getting way colder than ice cold — down to some of the coldest temperatures in the universe. The quest to build these super…
- How does music move us? (feat. Sylvan Esso's Amelia Meath) · 32 min.Music can give us goosebumps. It can make us cry. It can make us move. How? Guests: Amelia Meath, songwriter and singer in Sylvan Esso; Elizabeth Margulis, director of the…
- What color is a tennis ball? · 28 min.Is it yellow? Is it green? Or what if, as one scientist argues, “there’s no such thing as a color?” Guest: Bevil Conway, visual artist and neuroscientist at the National Eye…
- The bodies buried in the bog · 26 min.When things fall into bogs, they sometimes wind up being beautifully preserved. This includes bodies, sometimes dating back thousands of years. We’re still trying to understand…
- What happened to the giant bugs? · 27 min.Once upon a time (around 300 million years ago), Earth was home to massive dragonfly-like insects and two meter long millipede-like creatures. Why did they die off? Guests: Ned…
- Dark matter and the end of answers · 35 min.Five-sixths of all the matter in the universe is this invisible stuff called dark matter, and scientists barely understand what it is. So what happens if we can't answer arguably…
- What happened before the big bang? · 26 min.It's a question that seems impossible to grapple with, but scientists won't take no for an answer. In this collaboration with Scientific American, we take on the big bang and a…
- What's the oldest story ever told? · 27 min.An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions. Guests: Ray Norris…
- Stopping the science that could stop the world · 36 min.When scientists write their own rules for life, how do they know what could go wrong before it’s too late? This is the final episode of our new three-part series, Life from…
- A breakthrough in synthetic life · 34 min.Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala has been making major headlines as her lab creates cells that feed, divide, and grow — all from nonliving parts. It may sound like sci-fi, but…
- Life from scratch · 30 min.Scientists stripped a cell down to its most essential genes in order to find out what makes life...alive. What they found was more bizarre than they could have imagined. This is…
- The idea of a song · 44 min.A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at Switched on Pop (along with the…
- Why can’t I remember being a baby? · 27 min.And if babies forget their earliest experiences, do they still matter? This episode is a collaboration with Vox's Explain It to Me podcast Guests: Kristin Ohlson, writer…
- Can these corals take the heat? · 31 min.Warming waters are an existential threat to coral reefs, and for people who want to restore them. But in the Republic of Palau, researchers are testing out an approach to help…
- Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously · 27 min.Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to spot the difference between the two…
- A trip to the twilight reefs · 40 min.Down beneath the waves, where the light starts to fade, there's an ecosystem scientists don't fully understand. About a decade ago, some researchers left structures in this…
- The hidden world that birds see · 28 min.Birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field, but scientists still don’t know how they actually sense it. Called the holy grail of sensory biology, magnetoreception offers a…
- The Godzilla El Niño · 44 min.This global weather phenomenon could help make 2027 the hottest year on record. Our friends at The Gray Area explore what the upcoming El Niño season could reveal about the…
- An argument for the sun · 31 min.It can be hard to know how to interact with the sun. Some people have swung to opposite ends of the spectrum — either over-tanning or avoiding the sun entirely. But what would a…
- What the Odyssey is hiding · 25 min.The Late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War supposedly took place, was way more modern than Homer made it seem. But around 1177 BCE, a vast network of interconnected societies…
- Dinosaur mysteries with Riley Black · 32 min.How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? Riley Black takes us back to the Mesozoic Era and explains how paleontologists piece together the lives of dinosaurs from often…
- When doctors don't know what's wrong · 32 min.A 2015 review found that most people in the US will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime. Some of those errors are less devastating than others, but how can we help…
- Are you a lyric person or a music person? · 33 min.When people listen to songs, why do some people pay more attention to the music, and some people pay more attention to the lyrics? The answer goes way deeper than you might think…
- Big news! · 3 min.Unexplainable is coming to Netflix! Starting Monday, July 13. For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to…
- Are we all living in an enormous black hole? · 26 min.It’s possible that the entire observable universe is inside a black hole. All we need to do in order to find out is … build a gigantic particle collider around the moon…
- Risky business · 30 min.As the world gets warmer and storms get worse, insurance companies are jacking up rates or refusing to cover homeowners altogether. Is the future uninsurable? (Originally aired…
- A period piece · 20 min.Periods and menstrual fluid have long been overlooked by scientists. Now, researchers are starting to suspect they might be sources of medical treasure. (Originally aired in…
- Bird people and deep space shrapnel · 27 min.Two mysteries we can't stop thinking about: Is lightning actually caused by cosmic rays? And why don't birds play chess? Articles featured: “What Causes Lightning?” by Charlie…
- Should we really kill all the lanternflies? · 33 min.When an invasive bug landed on the East Coast, people embraced the order to squish it to death. But what has all that squishing done to us? Guests: Julie Urban, professor in the…
- Sean tries raw milk · 32 min.Sean Rameswaram, co-host of Today, Explained, recently went on a dairy adventure. Noam talks to Sean about what he learned, and about why raw milk is gaining popularity, even…
- A new species in New York · 26 min.Around 90% of life on Earth is unknown. Can Benji find a new species in his backyard? Guests: Benji Jones, Vox senior correspondent, and the NYC species project. For show…
- The disaster problem · 1 t. 0 min.Climate change is making hurricanes, floods, and wildfires harder to prepare for just as confidence in the government’s disaster response is collapsing. Our friends at On the…
- The lost Lyme vaccine · 38 min.Vijay Sikand is a family doctor in the Connecticut town that gave Lyme disease its name. When a pharmaceutical company came to town to test a vaccine, he built a career and a…
- The cells we share · 36 min.Fetuses leave cells behind in their parents' bodies, where they braid themselves into tissues, and remain, for years. What are they doing in there? (Originally aired in 2023)…
- The man who bet against humanity — and lost · 17 min.Paul Ehrlich was famous for predicting a population explosion that would destroy the planet, but he didn't count on human ingenuity. Guest: Bryan Walsh, Vox senior editorial…
- The aftermath · 42 min.What would life look like after a global nuclear war? Would underground bunkers work? What would we do for food? What about radioactive snow?! In this episode of Are We…
- A better Black Death story · 32 min.What happens when researchers reexamine some of the basic facts about the Black Death? They start rewriting history and rethinking blame. Guests: Hannah Barker, professor at…
- The hunt for a lost species · 28 min.One of the world’s most biodiverse aquifers is full of strange, blind creatures that have evolved in isolation for millions of years. But one is missing. (Originally aired in…
- Dark matter music · 34 min.Pioneering musicians Beatie Wolfe and Brian Eno released their latest album Liminal by broadcasting it from a 50-foot microwave antenna. Noam talks to Beatie about why “dark…
- I glow, therefore I am · 28 min.Today on the show: a double feature — two mysteries in one episode. First, it seems like all living things emit a faint glow that disappears when they die. Then, is the…
- Is everything inflammation? · 32 min.To hear some people tell it — especially people on TikTok — inflammation is the root of all disease. It's... not that simple. But inflammation does have a lot to teach us about…
