The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean
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The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean
A topsy-turvy science-y history podcast by Sam Kean. I examine overlooked stories from our past: the dental superiority of hunter-gatherers, the crooked Nazis who saved thousands of American lives, the American immigrants who developed the most successful cancer screening tool in history, the sex li...
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The Dignity of the Ig Nobel Prizes
The Ig Nobel Prize is the bizarro cousin of the Nobel Prize—awarded for odd or unusual research “that first makes you laugh, then makes you think.” So...
The Nobel Disease
Winning a Nobel Prize is a good thing—mostly. But surprisingly often, Nobel laureates go kooky and start promoting bizarre things like homeopathy, ESP...
Dinner with King Tut audiobook preview
A preview of my brand new book, Dinner with King Tut!
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our co...
Why Doctors and Scientists Embraced the Nazis
Nazism was a society-wide catastrophe for Germany, but some professions deserve more blame than others. In particular, there was a surprisingly large...
Hotter than the Dickens
When Charles Dickens published Bleak House in 1852, he included a scene where one character spontaneously combusts. 🔥 🔥 🔥 Readers loved it, but one...
Jake Leg Blues
It was one the largest epidemics in American history: 30,000 people paralyzed over a few months in 1930. A dogged epidemiologist eventually traced the...
The Worst of Times, the Asbestos Times
Asbestos was once considered a miracle substance—a wonder of the modern age, due to its role in stopping the fires that once plagued every major city....
Human Photosynthesis
Rickets was once a devastating disease: up to 90 percent of the children showed symptoms in some cities, including bent spines and bowed legs, and it...
The Sad Story of Darwin’s Self-Procleimed “Stupidest” Child
Leonard Darwin had a lot to live up to. He was the son of the legendary Charles, and several siblings proved to be brilliant scientists as well. But L...
The Birds and the Bees and the Frogs
A young woman in the mid-1900s couldn’t take an at-home pregnancy test. Instead, she sent a vial of urine to a clinic, where a technician would, of al...
The Would-Be Saint's Battle over Down Syndrome
After scientists had a handle on how many chromosomes humans have, other researchers began exploring whether certain ailments might be caused by chrom...
The Battle over Human Chromosomes
It seems like a simple question: how many chromosomes do human beings have? But getting an accurate count proved surprisingly hard for much of last ce...
The Halley's Comet Panic
The 1910 return of Halley’s comet was greeted with rapture around the world—at least at first. Due to irresponsible speculation by scientists about th...
The Winter when People Ate Tulips
It’s the 80th anniversary of the Dutch Hongerwinter during World War II, which led to widespread starvation, and an inadvertent breakthrough in treati...
Why Keep a Diary of a Toxic Snakebite?
After 40 years of studying snakes, Karl Schmidt finally suffered his first bite. And when he did, he kept a gruesome diary to document the suffering a...
Machiavellian Microbes
Parasites can force animals to do nefarious things by manipulating their minds—including, uncomfortably, the minds of human beings.
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The Woman Who “Turned Back a Plague of Old Testament Proportions”
In refusing to approve the drug thalidomide, FDA scientist Frances Oldham Kelsey spared thousands of babies from deadly birth defects and revolutioniz...
The Doom Lurking inside Trees
Japanese physicist Fusa Miyake has sparked a revolution in archaeology by studying radioactive tree rings—work that also terrifies astronomers, who fe...
The Mona Lisa of the Seine
A woman who drowned in Paris became one of the most famous faces in the world as the model for CPR dummies, saving millions of lives and inspiring art...
Savant Idiots
In the early 1800s, the first Egyptian mummies in Europe served as a crucial test for evolution—a test that, according to people then, evolution flunk...
When Mummymania Swept the World
In the 1800s, mummies found their way into everything from fertilizer to food, and were especially prized as medicine. Mummymania was a strange time.....
The Sadder Side of the Nobel Prizes
How did a man who developed a Nobel Prize–worthy idea (green-fluorescing protein, GFP) end up driving a shuttle van for a living, and missing the Priz...
The Scientific Way to Fool a Nazi
Physicist Gyorgy Hevesy had a talent for tricks and stunts—including one that prevented Nazi stormtroopers from stealing a gold Nobel Prize.
Hos...
The Mysterious Mote
A summer bonus episode: Russ Schnell's professors mocked him for believing that plants somehow caused hailstorms. He not only proved them wrong, but u...
The Science of D-Day
Ahead of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, a look at the surprisingly important role science played in shaping—and remaking—an invasion that...
Can Plastic Surgery Keep You out of Prison?
One doctor’s controversial crusade to keep men and women out of prison through nose jobs, eye lifts, and other plastic surgery.
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The Russian Roswell
In 1959, nine Russian hikers mysteriously died on a trek through the snowy wilderness—fueling a half-century of hysterical conspiracies. Has science f...
When Tenure Means Life and Death
After a tenure dispute, mechanical engineer Valery Fabrikant murdered four colleagues in cold blood at his university in Montreal. So why is he still...
A Deadly Soup for Babies
Chemist Justus von Liebig was perhaps the most famous scientist in the world in the mid-1800s—but quickly became infamous for his role in the killing...
How the “Worst Serial Killer in Holland’s History” Went Free
Patient after patient died under the care of a single nurse in Holland. So why did so many statisticians think Lucia de Berk was innocent?
Hoste...
The Eclipse that Killed a King
Rama IV of Siam (from the “King and I” musical) used an eclipse to save his kingdom from greedy colonial powers. But it cost him his own life in the e...
When Generosity Turns Pathological
One Brazilian man’s brain damage transformed him into a selfless giver. So why did he infuriate so many people—and what does his case say about the bi...
The Sex-Cult “Antichrist” Who Rocketed Us to Space (part 2)
Jack Parsons was a devil-worshipping FBI rat who led a sex cult and was bosom buddies with L. Ron Hubbard. He was also one of the most important rocke...
The Sex-Cult “Antichrist” Who Rocketed Us to Space (part 1)
Jack Parsons was a devil-worshiping FBI rat who led a sex cult and was bosom buddies with L. Ron Hubbard. He was also one of the most important rocket...
Don't Drink the Milk bonus episode - Milk: From mutations to mustaches
Who put the cheese in your stuffed-crust pizza? Or cows on a Caribbean island? And when more than half the world's population can't actually digest mi...
Was Darwin a Murderer?
In 1878, two Paris dandies murdered an old woman—and blamed Charles Darwin for their crime. But the wild scandal that followed only solidified Darwin...
Mass Psychosis in Food Science
Americans happily ate monosodium glutamate for decades. Then one (possibly fake) letter sparked mass hysteria over “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, and...
Accounting for Taste
Scientists have confirmed five basic human tastes—sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. But is that all? Debate now rages about adding a sixth or sev...
If Indiana Jones Were a Swindler
James Mellaart discovered one of the most important archaeological sites ever, Çatalhöyük in Turkey. But his lust for treasure—and a penchant for frau...
The British Tobacco Empire
He helped launch the British Empire and spawned a public-health epidemic that killed hundreds of millions of people. Blame him for the lost colony of...