The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean

How did they spread vaccines around the world in the early 1800s? By injecting orphans and forcing them onto a ship...

Why otherwise sane and rational doctors love experimenting on themselves—up to and including self-surgery...

When a crank scientist needed to get the attention of Einstein and others for his crazy physics theory, there was only one sure way he knew to get publicity: murder...

How the brilliant geek Nikola Tesla grew obsessed with an outlandish “death ray,” and the ray’s surprising connection to Donald Trump

How one heroic doctor, and his revolting experiments, singlehandedly ended the deadliest dietary epidemic disease in American history...

How the Central Intelligence Agency’s recklessly outrageous Operation Midnight Climax revealed some surprising psychological insights into sex, drugs, and human nature...

How two Russian scientists defied death and imprisonment to run a top-secret genetics experiment, and what it revealed about how dogs, babies, and stuffed animals manipulate our minds...  

An Oliver-Sacks-like tale of a man with brain damage who can’t read numbers—even though he can still read words just fine! His amazing case could also shed light on the mysteries of human consciousness...

How did the nonstick frying pan in your kitchen make the first atomic bomb possible? A story about the innocent-seeming Teflon for this week’s 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs...

A story for the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs: How a now-forgotten teahouse in Los Alamos and its unlikely owners—the spitfire Edith Warner and the Pueblo builder Tilano Montoya—influenced Robert Oppenheimer and changed the face of the whole Manhattan Project...