Placebo Effect
Scientists look to the brain to find out why some people respond better to the placebo effect than others.
Podcast
Sparrows that prefer up-to-date songs, glaciers and global warming, upwardly mobile robots, bacteria to combat oil spills, and how self-tanners work.
Self Tanners
A listener asks: Do self-tanners give you the same tan as the sun?
How Fetuses Breathe
A listener asks: How do babies breathe inside the womb?
Plant Medicine Roundup
Lifesaving drugs are being developed from unexpected sources.
Podcast
How the solar system formed, determining the standard for the kilogram, how brain damage affects art, cancer drugs from trees, protecting ports with underwater using sound.
Podcast
The importance of bubbles, living on icebergs, family-oriented plants, eye medicine from oven cleaner, and how water gets from your mouth to your muscles.
Water to Muscles
A listener asks: How does water get from your mouth to your tissues?
Podcast
Listening to muscles, yoga may stave off depression, a blood-based bandage, a protein inhibits aging in fruitflies, and whether lizards or snakes evolved first.
Genetic Typo Detector
A new technique could spot errors in genetic sequences.
Podcast
Making sounds morph, a lost herd of elephants, twins' secret languages, runaway carbon emissions, and the marriage-obesity connection.
Negative Pressure
Vacuums don't only clean carpets. They can help wounds heal, too.
Suggestible Sin Roundup
Mentioning a bad behavior may lead people to engage in it.
Podcast
Lasers + diamonds = cool physics, TV ads make kids eat more junk food, the domestic robot is inching closer to reality, talking about sin could lead to it, and a listener asks why allergies exist.
Mental Illness Gene
One gene may underlie two devastating mental illnesses.