Science Podcasts

On this week’s show: Archaeologists are digging up buttons and beads in the Caribbean to better understand the lives of enslaved Africans, and economists are unraveling how the early Roman Catholic Church has influenced psychology today

On this week’s show: How the measles virus induces immune amnesia, making later infections with other diseases more likely, and detecting a small black hole in a binary pair with a red giant star

On this week’s show: Digging into global earthworm populations, detecting bias in an algorithm used to make health care decisions, and a plea for space archaeology

On this week’s show: Uncovering the biological basis of consciousness, and understanding why adults think their generation was always “better”

On this week’s show: New insights into dinosaurs from 300-million-year-old molecules, and stretching rubber bands and twisting memory metals to cool things down

On this week’s show: Detecting childhood eye disease in old photos, and inserting memories into zebra finches

On this week’s show: Social scientists are waiting impatiently for a trove of Facebook data held up by privacy concerns, and fertility researchers examine why so many human eggs have the wrong number of chromosomes

On this week’s show: How dust from an asteroid breakup might have triggered an ice age, and billions of North American birds have vanished

On this week’s show: We hear about a gold mining town more than 5 kilometers above sea level, and learn why studying play behavior is important

On this week’s show: Archaeologists search for a mysterious city that evaded Spanish conquistadors for a century, and linguists find that—no matter how complex their structure—many languages convey information at the same rate