Unexplainable

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?

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In 2016, the UN declared antibiotic-resistant bacteria the “greatest and most urgent global risk.” Our best hope just might be phages, or viruses that attack bacteria. Phages’ potential is enormous, but so is everything we don’t know about them.

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Every day, untold numbers of strange organisms rise from the middle of the ocean to its surface. They may be playing a crucial role in slowing climate change, so scientists are struggling to understand this migration ... before it’s too late.

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Scientists don’t understand why so many people suffer from Covid-19 symptoms for months, well after they stop testing positive. But that’s just the start of the mystery. There are other diseases that cast these long shadows, and they point to a major blind spot in medicine.

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A decade ago, psychologists realized much of their science was fatally flawed, calling untold numbers of studies into question. Now, some young psychologists are trying to rebuild the foundations of their field. Can they succeed?

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For millennia, people have been reporting stories of mysterious spheres of light that glow, crackle, and hover eerily during thunderstorms. They’ve been spotted in people’s homes, and are even said to be able to pass through windows. No one knows how ball lightning forms — but that’s not stopping scientists from attempting to recreate it in their labs.

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When scientists examined the DNA of ancient bones found near a Himalayan lake, they were forced to confront a seemingly impossible conclusion.

*This episode has been updated. In the original version, we mixed up carbon isotopes with carbon isotope ratios.

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Sixty years ago, geologists tried to drill down through the Earth’s crust to pull up a piece of the Earth’s mantle. Their mission didn’t go exactly as planned. But it sowed the seeds for a new field of science that’s helped us rewrite not only the history of the planet, but, potentially, our definitions of life itself.

The documentaries featured in this episode are "The First Deep Ocean Drilling: Mohole, Phase 1" and "Project Mohole: Report No. 1."

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Believe it or not, scientists still don't know how the sense of smell works. But they're looking at how powerful it is - dogs can actually sniff out cancer and many other diseases - and they're trying to figure out how to reverse engineer it. In fact, one MIT scientist may have built a robot nose ... without completely understanding how his invention works.

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Article on quantum nose theory: https://bit.ly/3clurfs

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Scientists all over the world are searching for dark matter: an invisible, untouchable substance that holds our universe together. But they haven't found it. Are they chasing a ghost?

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