The Ig Nobel Prize is the bizarro cousin of the Nobel Prize—awarded for odd or unusual research “that first makes you laugh, then makes you think.” Some scientists hate them, and have refused to accept the award. But they’ve grown into a beloved institution—and one with some surprising benefits to science.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Winning a Nobel Prize is a good thing—mostly. But surprisingly often, Nobel laureates go kooky and start promoting bizarre things like homeopathy, ESP, AIDS denialism, and worse. Psychologists are starting to understand why...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A preview of my brand new book, Dinner with King Tut!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Nazism was a society-wide catastrophe for Germany, but some professions deserve more blame than others. In particular, there was a surprisingly large percentage of doctors and engineers among the Nazis. Sociologists and historians have now worked out why.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

When Charles Dickens published Bleak House in 1852, he included a scene where one character spontaneously combusts. 🔥 🔥 🔥 Readers loved it, but one of Dickens’s good friends—a former scientist—blasted Dickens for his scientific ignorance. It ignited one of the strangest controversies in literary history.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It was one the largest epidemics in American history: 30,000 people paralyzed over a few months in 1930. A dogged epidemiologist eventually traced the cause to adulterated bottles of an illegal liquor/medicine called “jake.” Yet the epidemic is almost completely forgotten. About the only place it survived was in blues songs...

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Asbestos was once considered a miracle substance—a wonder of the modern age, due to its role in stopping the fires that once plagued every major city. Unfortunately, it also shreds people’s lungs. Most countries were willing to live with that trade-off, until a crusading doctor named Irving Selikoff made it his life's mission to get asbestos banned.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Rickets was once a devastating disease: up to 90 percent of the children showed symptoms in some cities, including bent spines and bowed legs, and it resulted in many women dying during childbirth. The search for the cause of rickets took decades, and ended with a startling discovery—that much like plants, human beings had the ability to photosynthesize.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Leonard Darwin had a lot to live up to. He was the son of the legendary Charles, and several siblings proved to be brilliant scientists as well. But Leonard never quite measured up as a mediocre military officer and two-bit politician. In his fifties, he pronounced his life a “failure.” But in his sixties, he finally found his calling—the dark pseudoscience of eugenics, a field he embraced in part to prove that he wasn’t the failure he imagined.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A young woman in the mid-1900s couldn’t take an at-home pregnancy test. Instead, she sent a vial of urine to a clinic, where a technician would, of all things, inject it into a frog, and hormones in the urine would cause the frog to lay eggs. This frog-based test was far faster, easier, and cleaner than any pregnancy test before, and it shifted power for family planning from doctors to women themselves.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.