Reducing cartel violence in Mexico, and what to read and see this fall
The key to shrinking cartels is cutting recruitment, and a roundup of books, video games, movies, and more First up on this week’s show: modeling ...
Why cats love tuna, and powering robots with tiny explosions
Receptors that give our feline friends a craving for meat, and using combustion to propel insect-size robots First up on this week’s episode, Onli...
Extreme ocean currents from a volcano, and why it’s taking so long to wire green energy into the U.S. grid
How the Tonga eruption caused some of the fastest underwater flows in history, and why many U.S. renewable energy projects are on hold First up...
Reducing calculus trauma, and teaching AI to smell
How active learning improves calculus teaching, and using machine learning to map odors in the smell space First up on this week’s show, Laird Kra...
The source of solar wind, hackers and salt halt research, and a book on how institutions decide gender
A close look at a coronal hole, how salt and hackers can affect science, and the latest book in our series on science, sex, and gender First up on th...
What killed off North American megafauna, and making languages less complicated
Ancient wildfires may have doomed Southern California’s big mammals, and do insular societies have more complex languages? First up on this week’s...
Why some trees find one another repulsive, and why we don’t know how much our hands weigh
First up on this week’s show, we hear about the skewed perception of our own hands, extremely weird giant viruses, champion regenerating flatworms, an...
Tracing the genetic history of African Americans using ancient DNA, and ethical questions at a famously weird medical museum
Bringing together ancient DNA from a burial site and a giant database of consumer ancestry DNA helps fill gaps in African American ancestry, and a rec...
Researchers collaborate with a social media giant, ancient livestock, and sex and gender in South Africa
On this week’s show: evaluating scientific collaborations between independent scholars and industry, farming in ancient Europe, and a book from our se...
Adding thousands of languages to the AI lexicon, and the genes behind our bones
A massive effort by African volunteers is ensuring artificial intelligence understands their native languages, and measuring 40,000 skeletons Our AI ...