A summer bonus episode: Russ Schnell's professors mocked him for believing that plants somehow caused hailstorms. He not only proved them wrong, but uncovered profound connections between life, earth, and the air above...

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 could have easily been a disaster...

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 scientists in history. (Episode 1 of 2)

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 milk, is it really essential for a healthy diet? On a trip through time and taste—to dairy-obsessed Bulgaria, colonial Trinidad and Tobago and the ‘Got Milk?’ era—we explore humanity's millennia-long relationship with milk.

Listen to Don't Drink the Milk wherever you get your podcasts! https://pod.link/1704462801

Also on YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpBAZYDqAE8nzvIRx2dApgkDi3zkSe3GS

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 as the greatest scientist of his age...

Americans happily ate monosodium glutamate for decades. Then one (possibly fake) letter sparked mass hysteria over “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, and the bogus MSG scare was born...

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 seventh or even eighth(!) to the Big Five...

James Mellaart discovered one of the most important archaeological sites ever, Çatalhöyük in Turkey. But his lust for treasure—and a penchant for fraud—led him to throw it all away...

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 Roanoke, too. Thomas Harriot has a lot to answer for...

She helped discover arguably the most important drug in history. And she got zero credit. They called her Moldy Mary—but she turned that insult into triumph...

As recent submersible tragedies reveal, it’s harder to reach extreme ocean depths than the Moon. Meet the people who got there first—and barely lived to tell to the tale...

You wouldn’t think a lanky, awkward balloon geek would inspire Hollywood. But the death-defying Auguste Piccard was a worthy namesake for Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek fame...

One doctor’s controversial crusade to keep men and women out of prison through nose jobs, eye lifts, and other plastic surgery.

Albert Einstein’s relativity was just another theory at first, speculative and unproven—until Arthur Eddington and a special eclipse. Meet the weirdo scientist who made Einstein into *Einstein*...

It was the most powerful emotional moment of Albert Einstein’s life—the instant he knew he was a genius. But in confirming his theory of relativity, it also opened him up to attacks, sometimes rather vicious, from around the world...

Despite what you’ve heard, neuroscience’s most famous patient did not turn into a lying, drunken psychopath. He’s actually an amazing example of resiliency and overcoming trauma...

Is it serious historical work? Respectable gossip? Blatantly prying into people’s lives? Retro-diagnosing historical celebrities like Darwin and Lincoln and Hitler and Poe is all of the above and more...

During the Nazi invasion of Russia during World War II, nine Soviet scientists starved to death surrounded by millions of delicious fruits, seeds, and nuts. Were they mad? No. They wanted to save humankind from doomsday...

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...

In 1959, nine Russian hikers mysteriously died on a trek through the snowy wilderness—fueling a half-century of hysterical conspiracies. Has science finally cracked the case?

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...

Automobiles kill several million animals every single day. Scientists are still coming to grips with the carnage...

Thomas Schall was first blind member of Congress. There, he envisioned a better, smarter, more efficient world—brought about by his radical new calendar. Too bad the rest of us couldn’t see the future as clearly as he did...

The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in Korea is a place of guns and heartache and anger—and also one of the most thriving natural wildlife habitats on Earth...

Naked mole-rats are medical marvels—impervious to cancer and immune to old age. Too bad they’re also vicious murderers...

The Johnny Appleseed of Disney fame was complete bunk. He brought not wholesome apples to people, but liquor—and lots of it, all thanks to the bizarre biology of this misunderstood fruit...

After a tenure dispute, mechanical engineer Valery Fabrikant murdered four colleagues in cold blood at his university in Montreal. So why is he still allowed to publish scientific papers?

It fueled slavery, as well as the Nazi death machine. It kills millions of people every year through cancer and heart disease. And you almost certainly have some in your home. That’s the legacy of sugar...

Warfarin was the best rat poison in history. It’s also, now, one of the most important, life-saving—and freakishly unlikely—drugs in the history of medicine...

Dr. Walter Freeman blamed himself for the death of his favorite son. But instead of reflecting or growing personally, he used that death to become the most notorious lobotomist in the history of medicine...

A bonus excerpt from my book The Icepick Surgeon on the making of the Unabomber, through a cruel, unethical psychology experiment at Harvard University...

Like Leonardo and Albrecht Dürer before him, photographer Eadweard Muybridge was a legendary pioneer in both art and science. He was also a cold-blooded murderer.

Charles Byrne was an eight-foot Irish giant ️who loved a beer or 3 with the lads. His funeral became a legendary party—as well as one of biggest scandals in science history, when a famous anatomist named John Hunter stole his body for dissection.

The New York Times one credited biologist Edward Knipling with “the most original idea of the 20th century.” What was it? A way to fight the screwworm, the vilest parasite on earth—and maybe stop malaria, the deadliest disease in human history, too.

What a strange little sparrow can teach us about love, sex, human biology, and a whole lot more...

Can we ever truly lie to ourselves? Actually, yes—just ask Woodrow Wilson and William O. Douglas. They’re two famous examples of a bizarrely common neurological disorder. One that you might have fallen victim to yourself...

In 1971, Stephen Hawking made a hasty, emotional mistake in a paper about black holes—and it turned out to be the smartest thing he ever did. Sometimes in science, big blunders are the best way forward...

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 of four starving infants.

Albert Einstein’s self-proclaimed “biggest blunder”—the cosmological constant in his theory of relativity—turned out to not be blunder at all. In fact, it might hold the key to the future of physics. (Now that’s genius!)

You think Isaac Newton was smart? Not so fast. He made one mistake so dumb that scholars still shake their heads over it. Find out how to avoid this mistake—and be smarter than Newton—in this episode...

When Impressionist painter Claude Monet developed cataracts, he thought his painting career was over. Hardly. He actually developed a human superpower—the ability to see, like bees do, a much wider range of colors...

Charles Darwin didn’t give a crap about Galápagos finches, despite what you maybe heard. So what animals did light his fire while forming his theory of evolution? Pigeons, worms, and especially a despised marine pest—the lowly barnacle...