Unexplainable

Drugs like ecstasy and mushrooms have shown promise as mental health treatments, but they’re also exposing some major cracks in how scientists study the brain.

Guests: Jonathan Lambert, science journalist; Boris Heifets, professor at Stanford University of Medicine; Amy Mcguire, professor at Baylor College of Medicine

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How we feel emotionally may be influenced by unseen troves of microbial life that live inside us. Is it possible to harness this gut power? (First published in 2022)

Guests: Michael Gershon, professor of pathology at Columbia University; and Katerina Johnson, microbiome researcher at Oxford University

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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?

Guests: Umair Irfan, correspondent at Vox; Karen Clark, co-founder and CEO of Karen Clark & Company; Joe Skuba, VP at The Gray Insurance Company; and Carolyn Kousky, Associate VP at Environmental Defense Fund

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Doctors have started transplanting animal organs into people, hoping this experimental procedure could one day solve an organ shortage crisis that kills 17 Americans every day. Is this really the solution?

Guests: Muhammad Mohiuddin, professor of surgery at University of Maryland School of Medicine; L. Syd Johnson, professor of clinical bioethics at SUNY Upstate Medical University

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Scientists have lots of ways to try to answer that question, and lots of different predictions. So how do they figure out one set of numbers we can all work with?

Guests: Umair Irfan, correspondent at Vox; Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at The Breakthrough Institute; Neil Swart, research scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis

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Probably not. But Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz decided to try anyway, putting his body — and specifically his butt — on the line to answer a seemingly straightforward question: Is it possible to build up a tolerance to poison oak by eating it?

Guest: Jeff Horwitz, reporter at the Wall Street Journal; and Mahmoud ElSohly, professor of pharmaceutics at the University of Mississippi

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Scientists just discovered oxygen being produced without sunlight — without photosynthesis — at the bottom of the ocean. This “dark oxygen” could fundamentally change the story we tell of life on Earth and in the rest of the universe.

Guest: Alycia Smith, ecologist at Heriot-Watt University

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For decades, search and rescue teams followed an accepted playbook. Now, scientists are helping them reimagine how to find lost people.

Guests: Robert Koester, author of Lost Person Behavior, and Paul Doherty, search and rescue researcher

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With antibiotic resistance on the rise, some scientists are turning to viruses as a medical tool. But we barely know anything about the bacteria-eating viruses all around us. (First published in 2021)

Guest: Nicola Twilley, host of Gastropod

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Our bodies are teeming with viruses. But some of them, called phages, might play a really important role in keeping us healthy.

Guest: Tom Ireland, author of The Good Virus

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