Science Podcasts

On this week’s show: New research shows psychoactive drugs were present at the dawn of the first complex societies, and a long-term study that questions how plants will deal with rising carbon dioxide levels

On this week’s show: Genes from modern day Latin Americans are revealing a lot about colonial times, and optical tweezers are opening the door to new molecules for quantum computing

On this week’s show: Viking seafarers may have navigated with legendary crystals, and how to put an octopus to sleep

On this week’s show: Chimp retirement picks up speed, taking x-rays with single-pixel cameras, the 2018 U.S. science budget’s boost, and our monthly books segment

Stories on a possible cause for severe morning sickness and how a mother mouse's care for her pups might trigger changes to the genomes in their brain cells

Stories on humanity’s brush with annihilation 74,000 years ago and how animals avoid gross things for their own safety.

Stories on animals that didn’t need human help to become tame; false news spreads deeper, wider, and faster than true news—with or without bots; and listening for gender and sexual orientation in human speech

Stories on hints of dark matter at the dawn of the cosmos, what giant family trees can tell us about human behavior, and how people think they would react to alien microbes

Live news stories from the AAAS Annual Meeting, new dates on cave paintings reveal a Neandertal’s hand, and a review of a geologist’s book on wild times in Iceland

Stories on what we can learn from gene activity after death, and whether the sugar industry really influenced U.S. nutrition policy