Unexplainable

Genetic libraries are treasure troves of information about life from around the world. They’re helping researchers develop everything from vaccines to crops to cosmetics. But who actually benefits from the discoveries scientists make using all this DNA and RNA?

Guests: Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox’s Future Perfect; Deborah Fuller, professor of microbiology at the University of Washington

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Some scientists think an explosion of AI awareness and feeling might be just around the corner. Others think it’s impossible for an AI to ever become conscious. How will we know?

Guest: Oshan Jarow, staff writer at Vox’s Future Perfect

This episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team.

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It’s that time of year again. If you’re changing things up, there’s a lot of diets out there that claim to help you live longer. Our friends at Today, Explained ask: How much of this is real and how much of it is nonsense?

Guests: Anahad O’Connor, health columnist at the Washington Post; Saul Justin Newman, researcher at the University College London Centre for Longitudinal Studies

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The wildest stories that never made it into our episodes. Until now.

Guests: Amy Boddy, anthropological scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Jayme Locke, transplant surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham; Jonathan Jiang, research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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Dogs were the first domesticated animal in history, emerging from wolves some 20,000 years ago. But how did wolves become dogs? To find the answer, scientists have to play with a lot of puppies. (First published in 2023.)

Guest: Kathryn Lord, evolutionary biology researcher at UMass Chan Medical School

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We know Neanderthals and early modern humans coupled up. But when did they meet, exactly? And where? Some fossilized smoke and a baby tooth might hold clues.

Guest: Adam Cole of HowTown

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It’s not great to be a lab rat. And it turns out, lab rats might not be that great for science either. Could the future be little lab-grown brain clumps?

Guests: Rachel Nuwer, science journalist; Lisa Genzel, professor of neuroscience at Radboud University

This episode has been updated. An earlier version didn’t differentiate between two stages of drug development.

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This week on Unexplainable or Not, we’ve got three scientific mysteries all about left and right. Jonquilyn Hill, host of Vox’s new podcast Explain It to Me, is going to guess which of them has been solved and which ones are still unexplainable.

Guest: S. Furkan Ozturk, researcher at Harvard University

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For decades, scientists thought that placebos only worked if patients didn’t know they were taking them. Not anymore: You can give patients placebos, tell them they’re on sugar pills, and they still might feel better. No one is sure how this works, but it raises a question: Should doctors embrace placebos in mainstream medicine? (First published in 2021.)

Guests: Ted Kaptchuk, professor at Harvard Medical School; Darwin Guevarra, professor of psychology at Miami University; Luana Colloca, professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing

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It makes sense that we run away from scary things. That’s a good way to stay alive. But why do some people also love scary things? Why do people gravitate toward horror?

Guests: Mathias Clasen and Marc Andersen, co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University

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