The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean

William Halford thought he had a surefire vaccine to stop herpes. And he wasn’t going to let anything—laws, ethics, his patients’ well-being—stop him from saving the world...

Paul Stoutenburgh knew more atomic secrets than anyone on Earth. So was that why he killed himself? And if not, why was the government (seemingly) so uninterested in getting to the bottom of his death?

Can you really collapse and wake up speaking a totally new language? Not quite. But “foreign accent syndrome” is a real, frightening—and bizarre—neurological disorder...

What a bizarre site in Africa—a 1.7-billion-year-old, completely natural nuclear reactor—says about the future of energy production on planet Earth...

Genetic genealogy can catch brutal killers. It can also unmask affairs, secret adoptions, and other dark secrets. As well as expose you—yes, you—to the unholy alliance of Big Tech and shady police work...

He coulda would shoulda been the next Einstein. Instead, Robert Oppenheimer fritted away his talents on trendy science and political gamesmanship—and it burned him deep in his soul...

Leonardo da Vinci was brilliant, groundbreaking—and especially with regard to his science—wildly overrated. All because he lacked one all-important quality: sitzfleisch...

An update on the spring season of Disappearing Spoon (early episodes for Patreon subscribers!), plus a trailer for the new "Innate" series from the great people behind the Science History Institute's "Distillations podcast"

The “mouse utopia” experiment showed just how quickly animal heaven can turn into animal hell—and revealed how eager human beings are to interpret science through the lens of extremist politics...

Polar explorer Douglas Mawson made several mistakes on his harrowing journey across Antarctica. But the biggest blunder involved eating animal livers oversaturated with vitamin A, a sure death sentence...