Toilet Roundup
The United Nations wants the world to engage in some serious toilet talk. Here's why.
Podcast
Something unexpected at the North Pole, World Toilet Day and other toilet news, why golf balls have dimples but racecars don't, how a father's pheromones may control his daughter's growth, and using satellites for archaeology in Egypt.
Dimpled Cars
A listener asks: Would the dimples on a golf ball also speed up a car or an airplane?
Podcast
Your birthday greetings to us, hopeful news about malaria in Africa, robots that can recover from injury, news about Neanderthals, the truth about lie detectors, and money brings out the best and the worst in us.
Resilient Robots
Scientists are developing robots that can recognize and compensate for injuries.
Polygraph Tests
Lie detector tests are used widely in law enforcement and even in some high-security workplaces. But are they accurate?
Podcast
Our special birthday show! A louse killer that's evolution-proof, what comes after Hubble, the universality of color, listening to icebergs, and how physics was different in the early universe.
Vitamin C Plastics
Adding vitamin C could make molecule-by-molecule plastics manufacturing commercially viable.
Next Space Telescope
Hubble's here for another seven years, but what comes after that?
Louse Bustin’
Lice are unlikely to evolve resistence to a new technology for exterminating them.
Podcast
Whiskers could help robots feel, how bee brains are like human brains, a genetic disorder with musical gifts, how a storm at the North Pole damaged an iceberg at the South Pole, and what science is telling scholars about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Robotic Whiskers
When it comes to the sense of feel, whiskers are some of nature's greatest creations. Now engineers can make them, too.
Podcast
How wool is made washable, the earliest horse corral, a parasite that prefers baby boys, a medical robot snail, and how solar flares can affect GPS.
Solar Flares and GPS
Strong solar flares could render some GPS receivers temporarily useless.
Robot Snail
A robot snail could make some medical procedures a lot more comfortable.
Podcast
Kids on caffeine, prairie dogs in love, trading shoelace tags for gold in 15th century Cuba, how aspirin shrinks tumors, and a boy who can play video games with his mind.
Podcast
The truth about star naming, a practical plan for getting rid of fossil fuels, imitating gecko feet, worms in your diet, and why we have a bias against foreigners.
Gecko Feet
Engineers are trying to imitate the amazing properties of the gecko's toes.
Podcast
A fabric that detects biohazards, an excess of men, the cost of a year of life, stopping train derailments with lasers, and the rising number of venomous fish.
Biohazard Wipe
A new fabric can detect just about any biohazard--from E. coli to anthrax--instantly.
Rail Laser
Lasers may help spot hidden track damage that causes train derailments.
Podcast
A good time to be a dinosaur hunter, how your personality affects your health, electricity could heal wounds, plastics made from DNA, and the fastest body parts in the world.
DNA Roundup
DNA carries all of the information needed to make a complex organism. But can it also make crack-resistent eyeglasses?