Podcasts by We Have Concerns
Jeff Cannata and Anthony Carboni talk about the personal philosophical concerns they find lurking inside everyday things. It
Further podcasts by Jeff Cannata/Anthony Carboni
Podcast on the topic Comedy
All episodes
Test Sessions: The Sky is Falling from 2023-12-13T13:51:11.436630
Jeff read an article about the Fermi Paradox and now he’s bugging out about the end of the world. (Don’t tell him he’s bugging out, though, he’s in denial) Luckily Anthony Carboni, Science Lawye...
Listen
Test Sessions: The Sky is Falling from 2022-03-07T03:12:04.482419
Jeff read an article about the Fermi Paradox and now he’s bugging out about the end of the world. (Don’t tell him he’s bugging out, though, he’s in denial) Luckily Anthony Carboni, Science Lawye...
Listen
Test Sessions: The Sky is Falling from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.281142
Jeff read an article about the Fermi Paradox and now he’s bugging out about the end of the world. (Don’t tell him he’s bugging out, though, he’s in denial) Luckily Anthony Carboni, Science Lawyer, ...
Listen
Test Sessions: Siri, Google Me a Bing Watch from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.280053
Jeff and Anthony talk about Android Wear and wearable technology in general. Anthony is concerned he’s turning into one of those cranky old dads who never gets rid of his VCR because it ‘works perf...
Listen
Living That Brock Life from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.278704
The construction of the world’s largest water slide gets Jeff and Anthony thinking about daredevil mentality, the line between brave and stupid, and the secret wish to be an alpha male.
Th...
Let's Die in Space from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.258056
A simulated Mars mission on Hawaii comes to an end, prompting Jeff and Anthony to wonder whether they'd go to Mars, what it's like to knowingly go somewhere strange to die, and if these fakers even...
Listen
Attention and the BraiSQUIRREL from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.256890
Anthony read an article that argues in favor to short attention spans, and tries to convince Jeff that multitasking is the next step of evolution for humans. To prove his point, he does the entire ...
Listen
Your Baby's Personal Brand from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.255733
A new web service will provide baby name suggestions only for combinations that are still available as unregistered .coms, helping parents ensure their child will not have to grow up with a messy, ...
Listen
Biome Sweet Home from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.242181
There is evidence to suggest that a microbe that lives inside the human stomache may be the key to ending deadly peanut allergies. Indeed, the microbiome that each of us carries around all the tim...
Listen
Follow Your Dreeeeeeam! from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.241206
An article about how one Chinese gamer turned his "gaming addiction" into a profitable business prompts Anthony and Jeff to discuss dreams, responsibility, passion, and choosing the right career. ...
Listen
Mayo on Displayo from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.240117
A museum in Japan devoted entirely to mayonnaise prompts Anthony and Jeff to discuss the proper ways to consume condiments, the joys of seeing mundane "attractions", and the usefulness of obsession...
Listen
Virtual Empathy from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.181441
A new article suggests that the Oculus VR headset may be the first step to allowing people to truly experience what it is like to live a different kind of life. This could allow designers to create...
Listen
The Part of 'No' We don't Understand from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.180470
An article by Kevin Ashton proposes that saying "no" to things is vital to the creative process. Anthony and Jeff wonder why they have such a hard time saying "no" and what that might mean about t...
Listen
Go Go Gadget Soul! from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.179486
Shipyard workers in South Korea have been using Exo Suits to assist them in loading and unloading scrap metal, and Jeff and Anthony desperately want to try it out. But why stop there? Why not repla...
Listen
One For the Books from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.157559
A new article describes the benefits of long-form reading and suggests that the tactile feedback of printed books results in better retention than e-readers. While Jeff and Anthony are definitely ...
Listen
I Don't Know from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.156502
It's counter-intuative and perplexing, but the truth is, the less human beings know about a particular subject, the more they THINK they know about it. This has become known as The Dunning-Kruger ...
Listen
A Tough Pill to Swallow from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.155479
Researchers at MIT have developed a new pill that is much more efficient at delivering medicine into the bloodstream. Instead of a simple spheroid, it is covered in a multitude of tiny spikes, whi...
Listen
Mouse Wheel Fun Run from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.144187
Anthony and Jeff's debate about the joy to be found in running and exercise contuinues. This time, Jeff has an article from the New York Times about a study which showed that mice will spend time ...
Listen
The Crystal Method from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.142809
Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have synthesized crystalline materials that can bind and store oxygen in high concentrations. That means that we may be able to use crystals to r...
Listen
Your Sh@t Don't Stink from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.141889
By actually printing DNA, researchers are now able to create entirely new species. They started with a glow-in-the-dark plant, and now have plans to design microbes that will live in your stomach ...
Listen
Cocoa Beware from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.140945
We are consuming more chocolate than we produce, and at the current deficit we may soon be facing a global cocoa shortage. As a fan of chocolatey goodies, Jeff is worried about a potential joyless...
Listen
Laser Trains! from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.093159
Every Autumn, falling leaves create hazards for the railways. Trains compress the debris by running over it, and the resulting surface becomes slick and unsafe. The solution? Lasers! One Dutch com...
Listen
Here There Be Dragons from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.092171
A woman has a condition that makes her see dragons wherever she goes. Anthony and Jeff discuss perception and reality, and if we know what we see is real.
Listen
Creeping Self Doubt from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.090818
What makes you you? Is the self somewhere in the body or the brain? If you downloaded your brain into a new body, would it be you? ANSWER ME (whatever 'me' is)
Listen
The Bedbug Whisperer from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.089783
In order to find a way to stop bedbugs, Regine Gries allowed herself to be bitten by them 180,000 times over a period of five years. Also, did you know that there's billionaire dinosaur porn? That'...
Listen
Inception Made Easy from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.077781
A new article describes just how easy it is to induce false memories in subjects. In fact, researchers were able to to convice patients that they had done horrible things, including assault with a...
Listen
Sit Stand Die (with Justin Robert Young) from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.069770
How easily you can sit down and stand back up without using your hands can supposedly tell you how long you'll have to live. Jeff and Anthony are joined by Justin Robert Young and to try the test f...
Listen
Under the Sea from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.068789
A Japanese corporation wants to build the perfect underwater city of the future. That is both a real thing that's happening and also something that sounds like the plot of a nightmarish disaster mo...
Listen
Content with Content from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.067784
Songwriter and youtube song-a-day artist Jonathan Mann has a new video online advocating for abolishing the term "Content Creator" for people who release things on the web. His position is that th...
Listen
Why We Can't Have Mice Things from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.058302
A new article on i09 describes animal behaviorist John Calhoun's quest to create the perfect mouse city, complete with abundant food, recreation, and even rodent apartments. Now referred to as the...
Listen
Gross Income (LIVE Episode 100 from the NerdMelt Showroom) from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.057137
A very special 100th episode of We Have Concerns, recorded in front of a live audience at the Nerdmelt Showroom in Los Angeles! Anthony and Jeff discuss the potential to sell your feces to science...
Listen
Zen and the Art of Suicidal Maintenance from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.055911
The mummified remains of a Buddist monk have been discovered inside a statue that dates back over 1,000 years. Even more fascinating, studies reveal that the monk may have been self-mummified! Je...
Listen
Welcome to the Jetpack Future from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.054374
The New Zealand-based Martin Aircraft Company, now listed on the Australian stock exchange, is taking orders for the "world's first practical jetpack" and Jeff couldn't be more excited. But at $20...
Listen
Blind Insight from 2022-02-21T03:01:01.053330
With a headline like "Man Gets Bionic Eye, Sees Wife for the First Time in 20 Years", you might expect a tearful moment of feel-good sentimentality. But the truth of the moment, as evidenced by t...
Listen
Con Charter of Mars from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.994053
Anthony and Jeff had such high hopes for Mars One - the non-profit offering one-way trips to the red planet to anyone willing to apply. But according to at least one high-ranking applicant, the en...
Listen
Altered Beasts from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.993151
Evidence that a hallucinogenic fungus was readily available to Dinosaurs has some scientists speculating that prehistoric creatures were getting high. This leads Anthony and Jeff to discuss all th...
Listen
Urban Vermin Surgeon from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.992282
A dog walker in New York city has turned her apartment into a veterinarian clinic and rehabilitation center for injured squirrels, pigeons, and other overlooked creatures, while keeping it secret f...
Listen
Scared to Death from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.991404
This year the annual haunted house in Waukegan, Illinois provided an extra terror for visitors after an elderly man passed away inside and was mistaken for a prop for nearly 2 weeks. Jeff and Anth...
Listen
Detour a Head from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.976287
A 30-year-old Russian man Valery Spiridonov has volunteered to become the world's first head transplant. His terrible, degenerative spinal disease has forced him to resort to drastic actions, but ...
Listen
Your Head a Splode from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.974057
Anthony and Jeff learn about the affliction known as Exploding Head Syndrome, which, it turns out, is a really misleading name. It leads them to discuss sleep, inner voices, and the peace attained...
Listen
Go Pluck Yourself from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.973164
A new study at USC shows evidence that men who are going bald may actually be able to stimulate their dormant follicles by violently plucking out the remaining hairs that do grow. This counter-int...
Listen
Under Age Thinking from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.955017
Scientists now believe that they have isolated the specific parts of DNA that cause aging in humans. Which leads Anthony and Jeff to think, if they've isolated them, perhaps they can eliminate the...
Listen
Awesomer Gossamer from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.953852
Scientists have discovered that getting spiders to ingest carbon nanotubes will cause them to weave spider silk that is even stronger than their naturally strong tensile strands. This leads Anthon...
Listen
Robodogs Go To Heaven from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.943878
Back in 1999, Sony released a robot dog called Aibo. Now, 15 years later, these toys have started to break down, and Sony has ceased repairing them or manufacturing new models. This has caused th...
Listen
Eye Lens of the See from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.941109
New bionic implant has been developed that can replace the human eye lens. If approved, the surgery would take only 8 mins and give the recipients 3x 20/20 vision, forever. Anthony and Jeff are e...
Listen
Prints Across the Water from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.939864
A company called MX3D has developed a new 3D printer that can print using molten steel. To prove the capability of their invention, they plan to print a fully functional cantilevered bridge in Ams...
Listen
Mins Words from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.883474
Sonja Lang has created the world's smallest functional language. Her creation, Toki Pona, contains only 123 total words, and holds simplicity as its highest ideal. Jeff is enamored by language an...
Listen
An Arm and a Leg (LIVE from the NerdMelt Showroom) from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.882315
In this episode, recorded in front of a live audience at the NerdMelt Showroom in Los Angeles, Anthony and Jeff wrestle with their feelings after seeing the results of an experimental Chinese media...
Listen
Vote Early, Vote Coffin from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.881438
Presidential Candidate Zoltan Istvan is raising money to tour the country in a bus that looks like a coffin to promote the Transhumanism philosophy of immortality. Has there ever been a political ...
Listen
As the Crow Tries from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.871791
A crow recently passed a remarkably complicated, eight stage intelligence test, which required it to perform a number of actions in a specific order to unlock a morsel of food. Jeff and Anthony are...
Listen
Birth Control Control from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.870425
The Bill Gates Foundation has funded research on an implantable remote-controlled contraceptive microchip that can last up to 16 years. Anthony and Jeff try to wrap their minds around the ramifica...
Listen
Public Address System from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.869523
To prove he lived in small village, an Irishman sent his friend a letter addressing it only "Your man Henderson, that boy with the glasses doing his PHD up in Belfast", which, against all odds, was...
Listen
Monkey Sear, Monkey Chew (LIVE from PAX 2015) from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.868644
When given the option between raw and cooked food, chimpanzees seem to prefer the latter, even if it means delaying their gratification. This leads researchers to believe that if given the chance,...
Listen
Choice Words from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.854004
Anthony has become fascinated by British psychologist Elizabeth Stokoe's studies into how simple, subtle phrasing changes can have a huge impact on behavior. Just by substituting a single word her...
Listen
Russian to Try It from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.853124
A Russian scientist admits injecting himself with 3.5 million year old 'eternal life' bacteria, and reports working harder, with reviewed energy. Anthony and Jeff have serious reservations about t...
Listen
Double Dog Pair from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.852288
When Phillip and Paula Dupont learned their dog Melvin was going to die, they decided to spend $100,000 at a South Korean lab to have him cloned. The process and results are both questionable, and...
Listen
Conclusion Delusion from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.851436
Jeff and Anthony have often discussed the brain's annoying propensity to latch on to erroneous conclusions by relating two disparate pieces of data, and a new article in FiveThirtyEight Science bre...
Listen
Shock to the Belief System from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.841945
A new study published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience claims that disabling certain areas of the brain with transcranial magnetic stimulation can reduce a person's belie...
Listen
And the Weiner Is... from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.841030
A company called Clear Foods, which purports to "use genomic technology to analyze the world's foods at a molecular level, ingredient by ingredient," released a report recently that found human DNA...
Listen
Chimera-can Horror Story from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.840144
A man failed a paternity test only to discover that his unborn twin is the biological father of his son. The explanation? He's actually a living chimera, the fusion of two separate people, living...
Listen
Making the Sound Barrier from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.839252
A team of engineers from the Universities of Sussex and Bristol built a sonic tractor beam that uses sound waves to remotely manipulate objects. They can create three different shapes of acoustic ...
Listen
Dubai Our Shirt from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.785564
Previously, on We Have Concerns, Jeff and Anthony pitched the idea of a Jetpack Rescue Squad - a group of first-responders equipped with personal propulsion devices. In fact, you can buy a shirt ...
Listen
Space's Mine from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.783814
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, a measure that lets US companies own any non-organic resources they harvest from ast...
Listen
Time Flies When You're Having Phone from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.782680
Scientists from James Cook University’s Singapore campus have published a study which seems to suggest that modern technology is affecting perception of time. Individuals who use smart phones and ...
Listen
Cluck Bait from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.774224
To combat an epidemic of rabies spread by wild foxes, the Swiss government, from the late seventies through the early nineties, showered their countryside with vaccinated chicken heads. Jeff and A...
Listen
What's Up Dog? from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.772459
Melody Jackson, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, has been outfitting service dogs with computerized vests, so that in an emergency they can find another human and pull a mechanical lever on th...
Listen
Mantis! 3D from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.758089
The praying mantis is the only known invertebrate with 3D perception, so, of course, scientists have created tiny 3D glasses and a tiny theater to test whether the same kinds of 3D techniques used ...
Listen
No Croaking Zone from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.757138
In the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, it is forbidden to die. The reason? The Arctic region is so cold year-round, that bodies simply do not decompose. Anthony and Jeff are fascinated by anywhe...
Listen
Planet 9 From Outer Space from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.756220
Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced that they have found new evidence of a giant icy planet lurking in the darkness of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Th...
Listen
Data Inplants from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.744753
A scientist at the University Medical Centre Maribor, Slovenia has presented a way to encode data directly into the DNA of plants, which would continue to pass along that genetic information to al...
Listen
A Bug in Your Ear (w/ Travis McElroy) from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.743855
In an extremely strange case that can’t be found anywhere in medical history, a girl from Deesa, Gujarat in India has been unlucky enough to be chosen as the host for an ant nest — right inside of ...
Listen
You Mar What You Tweet from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.696485
Microsoft introduced a chatbot that was built to learn from its interactions with Twitter users, but had to disable it after it began spouting some very troubling rhetoric. Anthony and Jeff consid...
Listen
Puppy Thaws from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.695608
Scientists have managed to thaw out and perform an autopsy on an ancient frozen puppy, which was mummified in the Russian permafrost some 12,400 years ago. The next? Obviously, someone wants to c...
Listen
Fail the Testimony from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.687498
The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every expert scientific witness gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defe...
Listen
Building Excitement from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.686302
A growing body of research in cognitive science illuminates the physical and mental toll bland cityscapes exact on residents. It turns out boring architecture may take an emotional toll on the peop...
Listen
Watch Where You're Roaming from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.685451
A small city in southern Germany may be the first place in the world to introduce in-ground traffic lights. The move by authorities in Augsburg comes in response to distracted smartphone users inc...
Listen
Gangs of New Look from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.671481
Wearing a Straw Hat after September 15th was such a fashion faux-pas in 1922 that a group of street toughs began attacking anyone with the gall to do it. The result was a series of violent outbrea...
Listen
Keeping Grandma Swarm from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.670324
Carol Howarth, 65, was amazed when a swarm of over 20,000 insects flew down onto her silver Mitsubishi Outlander, covering the back end of the vehicle. It took a team of 5 beekeepers to deal with ...
Listen
DNA'd to Order from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.668537
A group of 25 scientists has proposed an ambitious project to create a synthetic human genome, or genetic blueprint, in an endeavor raises concerns over the extent to which human life can or should...
Listen
Sell No We Won't Go from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.661046
Buying your first house is supposed to be a joyous occasion, but for young Tamara Holloway, from Nashville, Tennessee it was a terrible nightmare she couldn’t wake up from, because the man she boug...
Listen
Drain Dead from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.658890
A Canadian funeral business is offering "green" funerals by dissolving the dead and pouring them into town sewers. Anthony and Jeff consider if this practice should cause alarm, or if they might o...
Listen
Fire Walk With Me from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.657969
More than 30 people were treated for burns in Dallas after walking on hot coals at an event hosted by self-help guru Tony Robbins. Jeff and Anthony talk about whether they buy into the self-help s...
Listen
Those Lion Eyes from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.651606
Scientists in Botswana are painting intimidating eyes onto the rumps of cattle that graze near wildlife areas to prevent them from being preyed upon by lions. The idea is that the eyes will trick t...
Listen
City Hall of Mirrors from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.650371
With the rise of autonomous machines and the possibility of an invading army comprised of robots, scientists are starting to think about designing spatial environments deliberately to deceive, misd...
Listen
The Last 10% from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.643864
A 44-year-old French father of two who found out one day that he had most of his brain missing. Instead his skull is mostly full of liquid, with only 10% of his brain tissue left. He has a life-lon...
Listen
P is for Power from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.642752
A team of researchers based at the University of the West of England in Bristol has developed a method for turning human effluent into electricity. Urine is basically chemicals in solution, so if t...
Listen
A Knife Well Tasted from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.597597
Surgeons in India extracted 40 knives from inside the body of a police officer during a rare, five-hour operation. Surjeet Singh suffers from an uncontrollable urge to consume knives and had swall...
Listen
Live and Let Diet from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.590197
A new study, published in Elementa, looks at the consequences of switching the U.S. to different kinds of diet, from full vegan to various kinds of egg and cheese-supplemented vegetarian diets. And...
Listen
Host in the Shell from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.589361
For Hermit crabs, suitable shells are hard to come by. So they have come up with an ingenious scheme. When a crab happens upon a shell, it scopes it out – and when it is too big, the crab sits and...
Listen
Up Sh%t Creek from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.588520
Firefighters in Norway have pulled a man from the inside of a toilet after he lowered himself in to retrieve a friend's phone and became stuck in the tank below. Oh yes, the story gets much worse ...
Listen
Age Old Question from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.579425
In the latest journal of Aging a UCLA genetics team recorded age-related changes to human DNA, calculating the biological age of blood and estimated a person’s lifespan. More often than not they fo...
Listen
Of Mice and Skin from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.567746
Scientists in Japan have transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in a dish, and used those eggs to birth fertile pups. The report marks the first creation of eggs entirely outside a mouse. If the pr...
Listen
Cult of Personal IT from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.566519
The mass suicide of members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate is one of the most bizarre and enduringly fascinating events of the 90s. But nearly 20 years after the strange deaths, part of the cult’s l...
Listen
Yawn of the Dread from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.565600
Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy levels in several studies. However, new research in the journal Personality and Individual Differences finds that people with psychopathic traits—espec...
Listen
We Didn't Fart the Fire from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.564742
A woman in her 30s was undergoing an operation that involved applying a laser to her cervix, when she passed gas that caught fire causing serious injuries to her body. Jeff and Anthony discuss the...
Listen
Recycling Cent-er from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.555252
A man in Cologne, Germany was recently tried and convicted to ten months in prison for modifying a bottle recycling machine and swindling tens of thousands of euros from the national recycling syst...
Listen
Infinite Improbability Drive from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.554123
After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that the 'impossible' propulsion system really does a...
Listen
Forest for the Sprees from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.553275
Yellowstone National Park contains a narrow corridor less than two miles wide where evildoers could do literally anything, including commit murder, and the law couldn't touch them. Jeff and Anthony...
Listen
Get Retch Quick from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.552423
A trio of fishermen in Oman made the catch of a lifetime when they came upon something far more valuable than their normal haul: 176 poundsof sperm-whale vomit. The substance – actually an intestin...
Listen
Do Run Run Run from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.543321
A new study suggests that high intensity aerobic activity that requires sustained, repetitive locomotor and navigational skills may stress cognitive domains in ways that lead to altered brain conne...
Listen
Toyota Care-ola from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.542199
The 2015 Japanese census laid out a frightening realization for the country: its population is shrinking. In just five years, between 2010 and 2015, Japan's population shrunk by almost 1 million. B...
Listen
Color Be Mine from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.541284
Artist Stuart Semple, creator the world’s ‘pinkest paint’, has a new invention - the world'd 'glitteriest glitter'. The product has been made available to everyone, as long as buyers ensured that ...
Listen
Bat Signals from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.540367
Researchers recently used a machine learning algorithm to decode the squeaks Egyptian fruit bats make in their roost, revealing that they "speak" to one another as individuals. It turns out, not on...
Listen
True to Your Self from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.376853
Why do we, as humans, have a sense of self? One new theory is that a "self" actually contributes to a stronger and more robust group dynamic. In order for a group to be more capable of surviving,...
Listen
Pig Me (LIVE from PAX South 2017!) from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.376042
Scientists have created the first successful human-animal hybrids. The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, survive, and even grow inside a host animal, in t...
Listen
Learner's Hermit (LIVE from PAX South 2017!) from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.375173
The Austrian town of Saalfelden in the state of Salzburg is looking for someone to live in a nearby hermitage which was built more than 350 years ago in steep, rocky cliffs. So they put out an ad ...
Listen
Spoiler Assert from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.366626
The majority of Americans have no clear idea what “sell by” labels are trying to tell them. But after 40 years of letting us guess, the grocery industry has made moves to clear up the confusion. Th...
Listen
Taking Debate from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.365826
When you don’t know the actual, statistical likelihood of something, the brain uses the most readily surfaceable image. This is known as the availability heuristic, and it has been used by politic...
Listen
Magnetical Mystery Ewer from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.365025
By analyzing the pottery from an archaeological dig near Jerusalem, scientists have learned that the geomagnetic field around the earth fluctuated wildly during early human civilizations —and the n...
Listen
Stop, Chop, and Roll from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.364222
A French electrician proved himself to be a bona fide MacGyver by building a makeshift motorbike out of his wrecked car after becoming stranded in the Moroccan dessert. Jeff thinks this also makes...
Listen
Creative Comeons from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.348560
Creativity is highly prized in Western society—much touted by cultures that claim to value individualism and the entrepreneurial spirit. But scratch beneath the surface, and it turns out that a lot...
Listen
A Snack-na Phobia from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.347747
Scientists Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published their estimate of the amount of spiders in the world, and the amount of biomass they would consume, in the journal the Science of Nature ear...
Listen
Womb with a View from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.306344
For a study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Philadelphia suspended premature lambs, a close animal model for human fetuses, in a special bag filled with lab-made am...
Listen
Worm Your Way Out from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.300779
Scientist Federica Bertocchini of the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain discovered a worm that eats plastic bags and leaves behind antifreeze. Jeff and Anthony discu...
Listen
Mouseplant from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.298933
Researchers have discovered that mole rats can survive for 18 minutes without oxygen. What is even more astonishing is how they manage it. The mole rats effectively become plants, altering their me...
Listen
Bubble Hobble from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.093147
Scientists have healed severe bone fractures in pigs by blasting tiny bubbles with ultrasound in the animals’ bones. The technique encourages the pigs’ bodies to regenerate themselves, and could on...
Listen
New Wrongs Make a Right from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.092284
When humans work together with not-very-smart robots, they’re better at solving problems than when they work only with other people, new research says. Jeff and Anthony debate the value of getting ...
Listen
Go Pharm Go Fowl from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.091420
Authorities in Kuwait had been tracking a homing pigeon that was coming from Iraq. According to local newspaper Al-Rai, there were 178 ecstasy pills were found in a small bag attached to the bird's...
Listen
Blood Money from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.090317
A start-up called Ambrosia is charging $8,000 for blood transfusions from young people. About 100 people have signed up to receive an infusion, founder Dr. Jesse Karmazin announced at the Code Con...
Listen
Rank the Hurting Top from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.081084
The National Health Service has compiled a list of the 20 most painful conditions known to humans. Anthony and Jeff take a gander at the list to see what hurts most, and try to figure out how to a...
Listen
The Hunter Games from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.080177
Some people say that the advent of farming gave people more leisure time to build up civilization, but hunter-gatherers actually have far more leisure time than farmers do, and more still than mode...
Listen
Operating in a Vacuum from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.068226
A new article in Wired considers all of the dangers associated with performing surgery in space. NASA has never had to do it, but has thought about it a lot. And now Jeff and Anthony will think a...
Listen
Harder, Better, CRISPR, Stronger from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.067327
The first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon. The effort, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipo...
Listen
Plan a Head from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.066223
Scientists have figured out why the women’s restroom line is always longer than the men’s. And while the reasons may not surprise you, the solutions just might. They certainly give Anthony and Je...
Listen
The Juice Diet from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.065388
A Finnish research team has taken a step towards the future of food by developing a method for producing food from electricity. If scaling it up proves to be successful, it could be a tool in the f...
Listen
Aquatic Narcotic from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.055273
Scientists have tested the drug-seeking behavior of zebrafish in a tank that allows them to trigger the release of the opioid hydrocodone in the water. The new tool, described in a study published ...
Listen
WHC Program Note from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.053090
Due to a recording error at PAX West last weekend, there will be no new episode today or Monday. We Have Concerns will be back next Wednesday with new content. Thanks for understanding!
Listen
Hawaii Survive-o from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.046662
Six NASA-backed research subjects who have been cooped up in a Mars-like habitat on a remote Hawaii volcano since January emerged from isolation .The crew of four men and two women are part of a st...
Listen
The Dark Night Returns from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.045775
Researchers say 80 percent of North Americans live in areas where light pollution blots out the night sky. Central Idaho officials are proposing the first International Dark Sky Reserve in the Uni...
Listen
Cave Story from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.044913
Indiana University freshman Lukas Cavar was on a spelunking trip to Sullivan Cave about 10 miles south of Bloomington when he became separated Sunday afternoon from 12 other members of the universi...
Listen
Slumber Partly from 2022-02-21T03:01:00.044034
A trio of Caltech grad students noticed some laboratory jellyfish were acting differently when the lights were turned off, and set about determining if they were sleeping. If so, these are the fir...
Listen
500 Ways of Bummer from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.997207
Behold! It is the 500th episode of We Have Concerns! Since that is a nice, round number, Anthony and Jeff take an episode to answer some listener questions and reflect on how the hell they got here.
Listen
I'll Have What She's Having from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.996205
Marine biologists from the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Portsmouth in the UK published a study on the feeding preferences of nudibranches, a kind of sea slug that might be targ...
Listen
Thoughtopilot from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.995363
Brain scans have revealed that when your mind wanders, it switches into “autopilot” mode, enabling you to carry on doing tasks quickly, accurately and without conscious thought. Jeff and Anthony d...
Listen
Pyramid Seam from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.994109
Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza—one of the wonders of the ancient world, and a dazzling feat of architectural genius—contains a hidden void at least a hundred feet long. The void is the first large i...
Listen
Public Dowsing from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.988042
Ten of the 12 water companies in the UK have admitted they are still using the practice of water dowsing despite the lack of scientific evidence for its effectiveness. Jeff and Anthony discuss why...
Listen
Die Hardly from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.987216
Rather than go with realistic methods of death, many films contain unbelievable movie death scenes that viewers accept as possible because they have been shown so many times. These movie death myth...
Listen
Shake, Rattle, and Roil from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.986127
In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this year, Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana predict that, because of Earth’s ...
Listen
A Fish Shout of Water from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.977417
A species of Mexican fish amasses in reproductive orgies so loud they can deafen other sea animals, awed scientists have said, calling for preservation of the “spectacle” threatened by overfishing....
Listen
Bottled Potter from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.976586
A writing team at Botnik Studios used a ‘predictive keyboard’ – a text generator that tries to guess what the next word typed will most likely be - to create a truly hilarious piece of Harry Potter...
Listen
Halve A Seat from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.975737
Psychology grad student William Blatz built a remote-controlled trick chair that would collapse when he pressed a switch. He then had subjects sit in the chair while wearing electrodes to measure h...
Listen
Macaque of the Clones from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.965570
For the first time, scientists say they created cloned primates using the same complicated cloning technique that made Dolly the sheep in 1996. Shanghai scientists created two genetically identical...
Listen
Retro Virus from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.964699
Inside the brain, proteins don’t stick around longer than a few minutes. And yet, our memories can hang on for our entire lifetime. Recently, an international collaboration of researchers discovere...
Listen
Can a Peacock Fly? from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.963876
Any animal could feasibly provide a human with emotional support, but it doesn't mean that they all should. According to a report by the BBC, the concept artist Ventiko offered to buy a seat for he...
Listen
Olympic Meddle from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.954211
Elizabeth Swaney is a 33-year-old skier from Oakland, California who competed in the 2018 Winter Olympics for Hungary. She is not a good skiier. Swaney, who said her grandparents came from Hungary,...
Listen
Bio Shock Intimate from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.953271
When Josiah Zayner watched a biotech CEO drop his pants at a biohacking conference and inject himself with an untested herpes treatment, he realized things had gone off the rails. Zayner is no stra...
Listen
Nowhere You Are from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.952335
In a triumph of data collection and analysis, a team of researchers based at Oxford University has built the tools necessary to calculate how far any dot on a map is from a city — or anything else....
Listen
Black Hole Fun from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.951440
If you ever fell into a black hole, your body would most likely be ripped into shreds and become 'spaghettified' - At least that's the theory put forward by most physicists today. But a new study i...
Listen
Tooth Bomb from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.942041
In the 19th Century, a Pennsylvania dentist called WH Atkinson came across a condition that sounds like the stuff of nightmares. Writing in The Dental Cosmos, the first major journal for American d...
Listen
Photographic Memory from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.940373
Though they may appear crystal clear in our minds, our memories are not a carbon copy of the events we witnessed. Every time we recall a memory, we may accidentally alter it or diminish its accurac...
Listen
Polyphasic Spree (Live From PAX East 2018) from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.939543
Around a third of the population have trouble maintaining sleep throughout the night. While nighttime awakenings are distressing for most sufferers, there is some evidence from our recent past that...
Listen
Trouble Stuffed from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.886194
Judges of the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year have disqualified a winning contestant after the anteater in his prize-winning photograph was judged “highly likely” to be a taxidermy sp...
Listen
Sleep Depredation from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.885381
A study by University of Manchester researchers has shown for the first time that a bad night’s sleep is associated with suicidal thoughts the next day in people with depression. That data revealed...
Listen
The Odds in Your Flavor from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.884563
893.35 quadrillion to one. That’s the likelihood of what’s happened to 20-year-old Dylan McWilliams. He was bitten by a shark, attacked by a bear, and bitten by a rattlesnake—all in just over three...
Listen
Measuring a Cute Angle (W/ Mica Burton) from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.875375
PATRONS GET A BONUS EPISODE WITH MICA. LISTEN TO IT HERE: https://www.patreon.com/posts/19007770/
There are roughly (or, if you prefer, ruffly) a billion dogs on the planet. Although dogs ...
Loch Screen from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.874276
A global team of scientists plans to scour the icy depths of Loch Ness next month using environmental DNA (eDNA) in an experiment that may discover whether Scotland’s fabled monster really does, or...
Listen
Mistake Your Vitamins from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.873446
A new study aimed to examine the benefits of vitamin and mineral supplements for prevention of heart disease, stroke and premature death. This found the most commonly studied ones had no effect, wh...
Listen
Call Made By Your Name from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.872608
What’s in a name? A lot, apparently. New research suggests that your first name shapes the way other people perceive your age, personality, and how good you are at your job – and the findings could...
Listen
One Last One Fermi from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.863477
The sheer abundance of stars in the universe suggests that, somewhere, an intelligent lifeform should be warming itself on a distant planet. Even if life evolves rarely, ET should be phoning. Yet, ...
Listen
So Long and Thanks for All the Fits from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.862199
Thanks so much for sticking with us for 600 episodes! We take a look back at what made us laugh (and learn!). To celebrate the final episode, we introduce the greatest character in the show's histo...
Listen
Magnets is Beards from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.860416
An Australian astrophysicist and research fellow at a Melbourne university injured himself by attempting to invent a device that stops the coronavirus outbreak. Anthony and Jeff discuss the peri...
Listen
Dovetailing Through Space from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.856767
There are more than 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth. At the end of their useful lives, some will continue circling as "zombie" satellites — neither alive nor quite dead.
Listen
Taking To Be Out of the Question from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.855903
If we are all inaccurate perception machines, fallible even in our own ability to process and recall events we experienced, then surely our language should represent how unknowable all things ar...
Listen
Screw Worms. And Birds. And Junk Journals, Too. from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.852191
What's the deal with birds... is a question Anthony and Jeff often ponder, but it's also the title of a new study released in the Scientific Journal of Research and Reviews - which sounds like a le...
Listen
Lake News (with Tom Merritt) from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.848490
Anthony and Jeff are joined by special guest Tom Merritt from Daily Tech News Show to talk about Moose Boulder, “the largest island in the largest lake on the largest island in the largest lake on...
Listen
The Butterfly Effect and Teen Dogs from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.843979
Sure, the butterfly effect is a popular notion in sci-fi, not to mention a staple of the Kutcher oeuvre, but could a small change in time travel result in huge problems? Physicists now have reason ...
Listen
Leave Your Phone and Why You Left? from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.840447
Is your cell phone making you dumber, just by being near you? Researchers now have evidence that the closer your smart device is to you, the less smart you actually are. Anthony and Jeff discuss p...
Listen
Cheaters, Liars, and Ignoble Prize Winners from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.784820
In a new paper, a team of researchers in Spain have identified three different profiles of dishonesty and cheating, and within each profile, two distinct types. Jeff and Anthony discuss the scienc...
Listen
Paradoxes and Mr Fusion from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.784006
Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible, according to the mathematical modelling of a University of Queensland undergraduate student. Jeff and Anthony attempt to step through the method...
Listen
Zeptoseconds and Mummy Twinkies from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.782069
Scientists have measured the shortest unit of time ever: the time it takes a light particle to cross a hydrogen molecule: 247 zeptoseconds. A zeptosecond is a trillionth of a billionth of a second,...
Listen
Good Nature and Micro Boats from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.781200
According to a new experiment at a daycare in Finland, proximity and exposure to nature for just one month may be enough to change a child's immune system. Anthony and Jeff discuss whether it is i...
Listen
Light in Space and New Laws for Robots from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.778356
If you could look at the night sky without stars, galaxies and everything else known to give off visible light, does the universe itself put out a glow? That's a question being addressed by the NO...
Listen
Octopus Punch and HIIT for Life from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.772490
Well, it has finally happened. Octopuses have been observed punching fish. Out of spite. Anthony and Jeff keep their eye on the cephalopods and reiterate their vie that they's aliens. Then, exe...
Listen
Forceful Gaze and Gator Tails from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.771646
Have you ever sensed that someone might be watching you? You get a prickly feeling at the back of your neck and turn to see a stranger staring at you across the room. It sometimes seems that we can...
Listen
Quantum AI and Tiny Rango | #643 from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.768008
What if an AI could learn, not by simply doing an activity over and over, but by actually employing creativity? A new quantum computer aims to do just that, and it has Anthony and Jeff wondering wh...
Listen
Lucid Dreaming and Alone with Your Thoughts from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.764815
An international team of researchers was able to achieve real-time dialogues with people in the midst of lucid dreams, according to a study published in Current Biology. Jeff and Anthony discuss wh...
Listen
Mystery's Afoot and Selfless Parrots from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.756736
When fifteen different severed feet washed up in a section of the Pacific Northwest called the Salish Sea, speculation ran wild of a serial killer, or some other nefarious culprit. But when scienti...
Listen
Bird Thieves and Cruising For Climate Change from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.749688
Birds are criminals. Obviously. But science has found even more proof. Also: climate change is a problem, and cruise ships are a huge part of that problem. BUT WHAT IF WE MADE A CRUISE SHIP TO COMB...
Listen
Exercise for What and Tripping Mice from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.744549
Although everyone can benefit from exercise, the reasons why the same exercise can have different effects in different people is not fully understood. Jeff and Anthony discuss a new study that prov...
Listen
Representational Drift and the Stress of Grey from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.740354
Neuroscientists studying how the sense of smell operates in the brains of mice have discovered a phenomenon they cannot explain. In fact, it may change the entire way we think about how brains work...
Listen
Hot Heads and Cellular Fluidics from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.739357
The hotter the temperature, the more violent humans get. So concludes a new study that compared the rates of violence in the inmate populations of prisons with climate control and those without. An...
Listen
The Kids are Lonely and Close the Open Floorplan from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.701595
A new study finds that a number of markers of loneliness in teenagers has increased significantly in recent years. Anthony and Jeff discuss this trend, what might be causing it, and whether is shou...
Listen
Daddy Short Legs and Chemical Violins from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.698463
Scientists have created "daddy shortlegs," a stunted version of the common household pest daddy longlegs, by suppressing the genes behind the arachnid's famously elongated limbs. Anthony and Jeff a...
Listen
Hot Streaks (with Josh Macuga) from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.694168
Jeff and Anthony are joined this week by host, comedian, and board game designer, Josh Macuga to talk about hot streaks! Is there some way for science to quantify how and when artists hit a prolifi...
Listen
Shock Therapy and Space Mummies from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.693202
Researchers claim, for the first time, to have used custom-fitted deep brain stimulation to substantially alleviate a patient’s decades-long bout with severe depression. Anthony and Jeff discuss th...
Listen
Awake at 3am and Armageddon was Right from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.689982
A new paper by a psychology researcher delves into why so many of us wake up at 3am full of anxiety. It isn't simply stress, but a complex interplay of internal and external processes. Anthony and ...
Listen
Everyone's Thinking About You and Flies are Climbing from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.687876
Do you feel that you worry what other people think of you way more than they worry about what you think of them? Well, a new study indicates that it isn't actually true. People really are obsessing...
Listen
Exo Wombs and the Faint Young Sun Paradox from 2022-02-21T03:00:59.677641
To combat low population growth, some countries are looking into using artificial wombs to grow new humans. Anthony and Jeff examine this dystopian idea to see if it might actually make sense. Then...
Listen
Spider Chef and Musical Webs from 2022-02-17T00:21:20
Researchers recently witnessed a spider shuttling a droplet of water from a small pond up into its web. They suspect the spider was using the droplet to rehydrate its food, behavior they've never b...
Listen
Movies in Space and Shared Creativity from 2022-01-31T08:00
The company co-producing Tom Cruise’s upcoming space movie, has unveiled plans to build a space station module that contains a sports and entertainment arena as well as a content studio by December...
Listen
Lightning Seen and Lightning Round from 2022-01-21T08:00
Scientists have never been able to adequately explain where lightning comes from. Now the first detailed observations of its emergence inside a cloud have exposed how electric fields grow strong en...
Listen
Deadlines and the Do Nothing Rent-a-Man from 2022-01-17T08:00
A new experiment tests the non-monotonic effect of deadline length on task completion. What does that mean? Anthony and Jeff will procrastinate to the absolute last minute, but is that the norm? Ho...
Listen
Alien Dust-os and Pong Brains from 2022-01-14T08:00
New observations of the star known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby's Star, do not close the door on the idea of an advanced alien civilization. Jeff and Anthony step through the new data and imagine the p...
Listen
Vaccinate Aging and Humanity's Black Box from 2022-01-10T08:00
Vaccinating senescent cells was recently reported to improve changes associated with aging in mice. Anthony and Jeff discuss the ramifications for a wide range of disease - oh, and the notion of li...
Listen
Suicide Pods and Eating Plastic from 2021-12-31T08:00
A 3D-printed capsule destined for use in assisted suicide hopes to de-medicalize the process in Switzerland. Jeff and Anthony discuss the idea of choosing when - and how - to die. Then, each Americ...
Listen
Xenobots and Space Crime from 2021-12-20T08:00
The US scientists who created the first living robots say the life forms, known as xenobots, can now reproduce in a way not seen in plants and animals. Anthony and Jeff step through this discovery ...
Listen
Dog Callers and Octopus Rights from 2021-12-10T08:00
A new invention, believed to be the first of its kind, allows dogs to video call their owners. The system, dubbed DogPhone, is the brainchild of University of Glasgow’s Dr Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas an...
Listen
Google Brain and Wisdom Teeth from 2021-11-19T08:00
A new study asserts that access to search engines makes people think they are smarter. Anthony and Jeff break down what this means, and why it is very discouraging. Then, why do we get our wisdom t...
Listen
Corpse Medicine and Tetris Effects from 2021-10-29T07:00
The idea of ingesting human skulls from the freshly killed seems repulsive today, but it was shockingly common among British and other European aristocrats from the 16th century all the way up into...
Listen
See Holograms and Remember your Purpose from 2021-10-15T07:05
A San Jose company has announced a brand new technology that might finally deliver on the promise of real holograms. Jeff and Anthony define the term and dig into what makes this new tech so exciti...
Listen
Potty Trained Cows and a Whiter White from 2021-09-24T20:40:21
Two stories about small, unexpected ways scientists are trying to combat global climate change. First, can greenhouse gases be reduced by training cows to pee in a toilet? Can cows be trained to pe...
Listen
And the Winners Are... from 2021-09-17T07:00
It's that time of year again! The winners of this year's Ig Nobel Prizes have been announced and Anthony and Jeff couldn't be more excited. Every year, the fine folks at Improbable Research award I...
Listen
Human Growth Plants and Zen and the Art of Lying from 2021-09-10T19:57:45
In an effort to combat global hunger, scientists are attempting to create crops with a higher yield without enlarging their footprint. Researchers have even transferred a human protein into plants ...
Listen
Working for Food and Space Pizza from 2021-08-20T07:00
Many animals prefer performing tasks to get food — called "contrafreeloading" - over just getting food for free. But there are two major mammals that buck that trend. Can you guess what they are? J...
Listen
Vibing Minds and Robot Inventors from 2021-08-13T07:05
When we cooperate on certain tasks, our brainwaves might synchronize. So says a new finding from researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Anthony and Jeff discuss ...
Listen
We Need More Monkeys and Women on Mars from 2021-07-30T19:56:13
The US government is breeding more monkeys for biomedical research to offset an ongoing shortage. Anthony and Jeff discuss how the shortage happened, using primates to develop medicines like the CO...
Listen
The Sensation of Touch and Romance Between Friends from 2021-07-16T07:00
While so much energy and progress has been put into recreating believable audio and visual media, the field of haptics remains relatively nascent. Jeff and Anthony look at the cutting edge of recre...
Listen
Kid Free and A Sun on Earth from 2021-06-25T20:17:13
Does choosing to have children affect your happiness? For years, the accepted wisdom was that people with kids tend to report more happiness than those who remain childless. But now a new study del...
Listen
The Ads of Your Dreams and Evolving Culture from 2021-06-18T07:00
A group of dream researchers are calling for the regulation of commercial dream manipulation, so Jeff and Anthony take a look at whether we need to worry about brands incepting our dreams. Then, a ...
Listen
Elephant Trunks and Aurora Borealis from 2021-06-11T07:05
How much do we know about how Elephant trunks work? It turns out, not that much - until now. New research gives a surprising amount of insight into how these incredible animals operate. Anthony and...
Listen
Third Thumb with Dr. Shannon Odell from 2021-05-28T21:36:14
Researchers trained people to use a robotic extra thumb and found they could effectively carry out dexterous tasks in only a few hours. Doctor of Neuroscience Shannon Odell joins Anthony and Jeff t...
Listen
Breathe Through Your Butt and Stack Lego from 2021-05-21T19:47:44
Researchers have demonstrated that the delivery of oxygen gas or oxygenated liquid through the rectum can prevent rats and pigs from asphyxiation. Anthony and Jeff talk about whether one day doctor...
Listen
Unfriending Dunbar and Ending Conversations from 2021-05-14T22:00:46
Dunbar's Number is the theoretical conative limit of friends any human can maintain at once. For years, social scientists have claimed that this upper bound was in tension with our modern, social m...
Listen
What's in a Name and Slowing Dopamine Fasts from 2021-05-10T23:10:44
The maluma-takete effect is the perception that certain kinds of sounds should be attributed to certain physical features. Sonorant sounds like you find in o and b and m tend to be related to round...
Listen
Get More Blue and Less is More from 2021-04-23T07:00
Science has been searching for an organic option to create blue food dye for decades. A new solution may come from the unlikeliest of places: something red. Anthony and Jeff discuss the state of bl...
Listen
Block the Sun and a Battery of Waste from 2021-04-16T07:05
The crisis of global climate change is causing some researchers to consider drastic measures, including the idea of sending nanoparticles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays away from Ear...
Listen
Creating Tears and Encouraging Truth from 2021-03-31T22:21:52
Scientists have created groupings of cells that can cry. Jeff and Anthony debate whether this creates incredible new frontiers, or is a nightmare from which we will never awaken. Then, a new study ...
Listen
Send Sperm to the Moon and Dinosaur Gaps from 2021-03-23T22:15:13
Scientists have suggested that humans could build an "ark" filled with sperm samples — on the moon. The ark would involve shooting the sperm and ova samples of 6.7 million species up to the moon vi...
Listen
Lancelot Drink and Headless Slugs from 2021-03-14T00:54:13
What separates us from the primates? Opposable thumbs? Self-awareness? What if it's water efficiency? Anthony and Jeff discuss a new study just might provide an answer an age-old question in an en...
Listen
How the Dinosaurs Went Extinct and Ambivalence from 2021-02-26T21:21:14
In a paper published in Scientific Reports, Harvard astronomers offer a new view on what may have caused dinosaurs to go extinct 66 million years ago. Jeff and Anthony look at the evidence. Then, w...
Listen
Butterflies in the Rain and More Memories from 2021-02-19T08:05
A drop of rain hitting a butterfly is the equivalent of a bowling ball hitting a human. So how do they survive in the rain? New research reveals a fascinating answer. Jeff and Anthony discuss how ...
Listen
Prehistoric Boning and Micromorts from 2021-01-23T06:46:35
Scientists know a surprising amount about the historical period when Neanderthals and ancient humans were interbreeding, including whether they kissed and the nature of their sexual organs. Jeff a...
Listen
Useful Commutes and Masked Cows from 2021-01-15T20:07:45
Studies show the morning commute is the least favorite part of the day, and the commute home the third-least favorite, but it’s also possible to miss aspects of that enforced time between work and ...
Listen
Alien Radio and Rat Drivers from 2020-12-27T23:07:56
Astronomers behind the most extensive search yet for alien life are investigating an intriguing radio wave emission that appears to have come from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest sta...
Listen
Cookie Efficiency and Lab Meat from 2020-12-20T23:13:42
Have you ever stood over a rolled-out slab of cookie dough and pondered just how to best cut out cookies with as little waste as possible? Now, even math experts have given up on finding a computer...
Listen
Kid Justice and Stone Age Monkeys from 2020-12-11T08:05
A new Yale study shows that many children are willing to make personal sacrifices to punish wrongdoers — and even more so if they believe punishment will teach the transgressor a lesson. Anthony a...
Listen
Dog Buttons and Flying.. Cars? from 2020-11-27T18:35:57
Bunny the dog has 5 million Tik Tok followers and an array of buttons that let's her talk to them. By pressing a button, she can construct rudimentary sentences that her owner believes constitutes...
Listen
Stressful Interruptions and Sky Diamonds from 2020-11-13T08:00
New research suggests that micro interruptions during your day can have both mental a physical health impacts. Anthony and Jeff discuss the stress of being interrupted, as they both interrupt each...
Listen
Octlantis and Tall Boy from 2020-10-27T06:16:12
In Jervis Bay, off Eastern Australia, researchers recently spotted 15 gloomy octopuses congregating, communicating, dwelling together, and even evicting each other from dens at a site the scientist...
Listen
Destroy the Sun and AI Know What You're Thinking from 2020-09-25T07:05:04
A new study finds direct correlation between proton density in the rays of the sun and seismic activity on earth, leading researchers to believe there may be a way to predict earthquakes up to 24 h...
Listen
Life on Venus, but like, not. from 2020-09-18T07:05:13
My stars, the Internet is all excited about this life we found on Venus. Assuming we actually found life on Venus. So here's why we didn't find life on Venus. ALSO: It turns out that over-the-count...
Listen
Save the Bees, Stop the Coal from 2020-09-14T17:50:15
Honeybee venom looks to have positive and dramatic application for the treatment of breast cancer. Anthony and Jeff discuss the details of this encouraging news, and how we need to save the bees. ...
Listen
Artificial Photosynthesis, an Old Dog, and New Picks from 2020-08-28T07:05:03
Researchers have developed a standalone device that converts sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water into a carbon-neutral fuel, without requiring any additional components or electricity. Anthony and...
Listen
Time Crystals and Number Loss from 2020-08-21T06:09:12
Time Crystals. We made them. Well, not we, but researchers at two institutions made them simultaneously! Anthony and Jeff discuss what Time Crystals are and how they may revolutionize watches an...
Listen
PUF and Learn a Language Faster from 2020-08-14T07:05:05
Scientists have created a pattern that, according to researchers, is impossible to duplicate or forge, a feat that could quash counterfeiters. The key to these patterns lies in a two-step verificat...
Listen
Cockroaches Want an Audience and Make it 75% Boys (with Dr Kiki Sanford) from 2020-07-31T20:59:57
Jeff and Anthony are joined by neurophysiologist and science communicator, Dr Kiki Sanford! Sports are returning to empty stadiums during quarantine, and a new study shows that having no one cheer...
Listen
Giving and Gorging from 2020-07-24T07:05:01
People are more likely appreciate gifts that save time over gifts that save money. This, according to a new study that looked at how people estimate social status when receiving a gift. Anthony a...
Listen
Plan for the Worst and Let a Bear in Your House from 2020-07-18T01:07:06
Entire teams of people spend their days imagining what might happen in a crisis to ensure we can be better prepared for when the worst really does happen. Jeff and Anthony discuss their methodolog...
Listen
Math and BBQ from 2020-07-10T07:05:02
Math is hard. So hard, in fact, that most humans would rather deal with nice round numbers than think about the ramifications of real data. Anthony and Jeff discuss Attribute Framing, and its impa...
Listen
Civilization 36 and Bubblebees from 2020-06-26T07:05:12
Using new calculations, scientists theorize that there are likely 36 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. How did they get to that precise number? A...
Listen
Werewolves are Real, and We Can't Leave the Planet from 2020-06-20T00:12:51
Some people really believe they are in the process of changing into a wolf. There have been 13 case reports of such people since 1850, and according to a psychiatric report released in March 2019, ...
Listen
Invisible Squid and Crab Blood from 2020-06-13T01:05:51
Using a protein found in a squid called the opalescent inshore squid, scientists recently found a way to change the refractive index of human kidney cells to resemble that of their environment. The...
Listen
Life, The Universe, and Dom Deluise from 2020-05-29T16:40:12
GET BONUS EPISODES, VIDEO HANGOUTS AND MORE. VISIT: http://patreon.com/wehaveconcerns
The Cannonball Run is a simple, and highly illegal, re...
Listen
Beard Science from 2020-05-22T18:24:02
Let's say we mix human DNA into an animal- at what percentage of human DNA do we start giving it human rights? Also: WERE BEARDS MADE TO BE PUNCHED?
Listen
Blame the Bats, Man from 2020-05-15T07:05:05
An episode wherein we conquer two of society's most nagging scientific questions: "Why do outbreaks always seem to come from bats?" and "Would you rather fight bats or ghosts?"
Listen
Let's Found a Science from 2020-04-24T07:01:08
Screens, social media, and the internet... it's destroying the minds of young people, right? Well, a new study aims to answer that very question by comparing kid behavior from 2010 to kid behav...
Listen
Release the Icelandic Cut from 2020-04-17T07:01
The latest on what terrible, garbage creatures birds are. Oh, and apparently Iceland has been reading a fake version of Dracula for over a century?
Listen
Birth of the Xenobots from 2020-04-11T03:12
Tufts University biologists Douglas Blackiston and Michael Levin have created all programmable organisms called xenobots — golems dreamed in silicon and then written into flesh.
Listen
Hi. We're back. from 2020-03-30T23:06
We Have Concerns returns on April 3rd. Insert your favorite Gandalf or John Wick gif here.
Listen
Sum Answer Bee from 2018-06-29T07:00
Bees seem to understand the idea of zero – the first invertebrate shown to do so. When the insects were encouraged to fly towards a platform carrying fewer shapes than another one, they apparently ...
Listen
Put Your Foot in Your Mouth from 2018-06-27T07:00
If you could taste human flesh in an ethical way, would you? A man was recently in a motorcycle crash that put him face-to-face with the macabre hypothetical. When a car hit his bike and sent him c...
Listen
Psych Warn from 2018-06-25T07:00
The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature. This experiment has been included i...
Listen
Snow vs the Volcano from 2018-06-22T07:00
Hawaii's big island recently got a little bit hairier. Golden filaments resembling human hair measuring up to two feet in length are draped across parts of the island—an unusual effect of the ongoi...
Listen
Alien vs Temperature from 2018-06-20T07:00
Did climate change already kill all the aliens we've been searching for? According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, it's certainly a possibility — and whether humans are doomed to the same fate may al...
Listen
Trip Down The Stares from 2018-06-18T07:00
In 2015, a psychologist in Italy figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not on...
Listen
This Space for Rent from 2018-06-15T07:00
NASA is talking to several international companies about forming a consortium that would take over operation of the International Space Station and run it as a commercial space lab, NASA Administra...
Listen
Mind The Crap from 2018-06-13T07:00
It turns out those gut feelings or pits in your stomach may actually come from your second brain. Scientists from Australia have discovered that human beings have a second brain, and it is located ...
Listen
Permanent Record from 2018-06-11T07:00
When considering musical artists, your favorite record of theirs is often the first to which you listened. It makes sense that the first album one encounters of a band will, over time, accumulate t...
Listen
Rice Guys Finish Last from 2018-05-30T07:00
How you behave in Starbucks may reveal something about whether your ancestors grew wheat or rice. That’s the conclusion of a new study in China, which finds that people descended from wheat farmers...
Listen
Been Taught Stealin’ from 2018-05-28T07:00
The number of self-check out terminals around the world is predicted to reach 325,000 by 2019 and some stores have even become fully self service. But for some supermarket customers, the removal of...
Listen
Memories For Snail from 2018-05-25T07:00
Biologists report they have transferred a memory from one marine snail to another, creating an artificial memory, by injecting RNA from one to another. This research could lead to new ways to treat...
Listen
Working Like a Dog from 2018-05-23T07:00
If you're a dog lover, just being with your pet feels good. So it's no surprise that therapy dogs are healing companions for people with health conditions. Research confirms that the benefits of pe...
Listen
High Blood Treasure from 2018-05-21T07:00
James Harrison, an Australian man whose blood contains a rare antibody that can create a treatment that saves babies' lives, has donated plasma one last time. Harrison, known as "the man with a gol...
Listen
Balloonacy from 2018-05-18T07:00
The words "balloonfest" and "disaster" don't necessarily seem to go together – except in the case of the 1986 Cleveland Balloonfest, which really did end in disaster for the city. The Cleveland Bal...
Listen
Alchemical Intelligence from 2018-05-16T07:00
Ali Rahimi, a researcher in artificial intelligence (AI) at Google, took a swipe at his field last December—and received a 40-second ovation for it. Speaking at an AI conference, Rahimi charged tha...
Listen
The Space Between from 2018-05-14T07:00
In the beginning, the rules of the space bar were simple. Two spaces after each period. Every time. Easy. That made sense in the age of the typewriter. Letters of uniform width looked cramped wi...
Listen
Piggy and the Brain from 2018-05-11T07:00
US-based researchers have successfully kept alive the brain cells of decapitated pigs for 36 hours, sparking concerns over the ethics involved in such frontline research. The researchers said they ...
Listen
Jeff just keeps having babies dot tumblr dot com from 2018-04-30T16:09
Hi! Jeff is in the midst of the Fatherhood Ritual. We'll be back next Monday!
Listen
How the Sausage is Maid from 2018-04-30T07:00
A Canadian man finally got the chance to clear his name after 17 years in exile from a hotel in British Columbia. His ordeal began in 2001, involving a flock of seagulls (the animals, not the band)...
Listen
Doggie Data Care from 2018-04-27T07:00
What can artificial intelligence learn from dogs? Quite a lot, say researchers from the University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI. They recently trained neural networks to interpret and p...
Listen
Sight off the Bat from 2018-04-25T07:00
While hunting for dinner, the big brown bat must hone in on flitting insects and keep track of its surroundings to avoid crashing into them. Now, scientists have taken a peek at what’s going on in ...
Listen
Apparent Teacher Conflicts from 2018-04-23T07:00
John Corcoran grew up in New Mexico in the US during the 1940s and 50s. He graduated from high school, went on to university, and became a teacher in the 1960s - a job he held for 17 years. But, he...
Listen
Magnet Eyes from 2018-04-18T07:00
Birds can sense Earth’s magnetic field, and this uncanny ability may help them fly home from unfamiliar places or navigate migrations that span tens of thousands of kilometers. Scientists have now ...
Listen
The Little Engine That Turd (w/Ify Nwadiwe and Dani Fernandez) from 2018-04-16T07:00
https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-content-18207635
Right now, dozens of train cars carrying 10 million pounds of poop are stranded in a rural Alabama rail yard. Technically it's biowaste, but...
Never Come Down (Live From Pax East 2018) from 2018-04-13T07:00
The thrilling conclusion of our week of episodes recorded live at PAX East 2018 in beautiful Boston! We respond to audience questions.
Listen
Sun Blot (Live From PAX East 2018) from 2018-04-11T07:00
Scientists in developing nations plan to step up research into dimming sunshine to curb climate change, hoping to judge if a man-made chemical sunshade would be less risky than a harmful rise in gl...
Listen
Alone in the Dork from 2018-03-28T07:00
Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics. He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov....
Listen
Lethal Collection from 2018-03-26T07:00
"What if we told you we could back up your mind?" That's the business pitch of Nectome, a preserve-your-brain-and-upload-it company. The catch? They have to kill you first. Its chemical solution ca...
Listen
Twin Galaxies from 2018-03-23T07:00
A new study from NASA has found that astronaut Scott Kelly's genes are no longer identical to those of his identical twin after spending a year in space. Preliminary results from NASA's Twins Study...
Listen
Big Haply Family from 2018-03-21T07:00
IN THE LAST 20 years, genealogy websites have attracted more than 15 million customers by promising insights into your past. It’s deeply personal, affecting stuff. But when your family tree contain...
Listen
Passing the Sniff Test from 2018-03-16T07:00
A dog searching for a lost child is typically given an item of clothing to smell. But what does that scent “look” like? To find out, scientists tested 48 dogs, half of which had special police or r...
Listen
Logo Mindstorms from 2018-03-14T07:01
Humans assign value to brands. Brands represent wealth, strength, and yes, sex. We are our brands. And for some rhesus macaques in a lab, one brand, Adidas, represents monkey genitalia. The researc...
Listen
Special Aged from 2018-03-12T07:01
It's pretty extraordinary for people in their 80s and 90s to keep the same sharp memory as someone several decades younger, and now scientists are peeking into the brains of these "superagers" to u...
Listen
Supple Built Skin from 2018-02-28T08:01
Biomedicine just took another leap forward. University of Colorado Boulder scientists created so-called electronic skin—e-skin for short. The e-skin is a thin, semi-transparent material that can ac...
Listen
Worms and Conditions from 2018-02-26T08:01
After about a week of eye irritation, which she thought might be caused by a stray eyelash, Beckley took a close look in the mirror and found the real culprit. What she pulled out was a wriggling, ...
Listen
Smell Wishers from 2018-02-23T08:01
What are the ingredients of a good relationship? Trust? Communication? Compromise? How about a sense of smell? When researchers in the United Kingdom surveyed almost 500 people with anosmia (the lo...
Listen
Some Snail a Prey from 2018-02-21T23:26
Conservationists have been sounding the alarm over invasive species for years, warning of the damage they can cause to habitats and native animals. But in Florida, an invasive snail might be helpin...
Listen
Face: Your Fears from 2018-02-19T23:15
The next time a police officer in black-tinted glasses gawks at you, they may be pulling up your personal information. Railway police in Zhengzhou, the capital of central China’s Henan province, ar...
Listen
Why Are You Crying? from 2018-02-16T23:08
We can cry out of sadness, fear, frustration, anger, or even joy. But why do streams of liquid leave our eyes? The truth is no one really knows for sure. In a scientific sense, we’re the only organ...
Listen
Don’t Sweat the Ball Stuff from 2018-02-14T08:01
The average athlete loses about a liter of sweat an hour; Alberto Salazar, an American marathoner, lost 3.7 liters per hour and 12 pounds of his total body weight during the 1984 Olympic marathon i...
Listen
Banana Bred from 2018-02-13T01:33
Japanese researchers made a botanical announcement on Monday that quickly circled the world. They had developed a banana with an edible peel, allowing Japanese consumers to eat an entire banana—ski...
Listen
Satellite Rodeo from 2018-01-31T08:00
When Rocket Lab’s Electron reached orbit for the first time on Jan. 21, space-pointed radar noticed a mysterious object in space alongside the three satellites it launched. Rocket Lab has launched ...
Listen
Talking Achoo from 2018-01-29T08:00
Holding back a sneeze by pinching your nose while keeping your mouth closed may cause physical injury. In one such documented case, an otherwise healthy 34-year-old man in the U.K. suffered a tear ...
Listen
Deep Sea Thriver from 2018-01-26T08:01
It’s like having “an elephant stand on your thumb.” That’s how deep-sea physiologist and ecologist Mackenzie Gerringer describes the pressure squeezing down on the deepest known living fish, some 8...
Listen
Smite Angle from 2018-01-24T08:01
Hampshire's Ipley Cross is a notorious crossroads where cyclists keep getting hit and even killed by motorists, despite the mostly level terrain around the place where two roads cross each other at...
Listen
Black Bird Swinging in the Spread of Light from 2018-01-22T08:01
The mating dance of the male superb bird of paradise is like nothing else on Earth, thanks to their feathers, which absorb 99.95 percent of light. That’s nearly none more black, and virtually ident...
Listen
Big Skittle Lies from 2018-01-19T08:01
Do gummy bears really come in different flavors, or do we just think they taste different because they are different colors? While closing your eyes, your accuracy in differentiating flavors majorl...
Listen
The Hottest Fashion from 2018-01-17T08:01
The mid-19th century vogue for flowing, diaphanous women's garments made from open-weave fabrics, combined with gas lighting, candles, and open fires meant that it was extremely common for women to...
Listen
Heroes of Blight and Tragic from 2018-01-15T08:01
At first glance, Miles Traer seems like any other scientist, but this Stanford University geologist has an alter ego. He beats back the forces of environmental destruction and holds the super-power...
Listen
Quantity Time from 2018-01-12T08:01
Despite not being at the end of your life, you may very well be nearing the end of your time with some of the most important people in your life. The majority of the time spent with your parents i...
Listen
Fool Poisoning from 2018-01-10T08:01
The year was 1902. With funding and consent from Congress, Harvey Washington Wiley was about to embark on an experiment he dubbed the “hygienic table trials,” but the Washington news media called h...
Listen
When Aliens a Tax from 2017-12-29T06:29
Since 2007, the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets included $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. The Defense Department has never before acknowled...
Listen
Plantesthesia from 2017-12-27T07:00
Researchers from the journal Annals of Botany report that, just like humans, plants can succumb to the effects of general anesthetic drugs. The finding is striking for a variety of reasons—there’s ...
Listen
Batman Doesn't Need Super Vision from 2017-12-22T06:59
Psychologists have reported in Child Development that when four- to six-year-olds pretended to be Batman while they were doing a boring but important task, it helped them to resist distraction and ...
Listen
Sign on the Clotted Spine from 2017-12-20T15:37
It’s usually OK to be proud of your work and lend your name to it. But most people would draw the line at signing their initials into the flesh of internal organs. Not Dr. Simon Bramhall of the UK,...
Listen
The Nutty Processor from 2017-12-18T06:19
Squirrels can bury up to 10,000 nuts annually, many of which they do go back and find. A recent study on cognition in the journal Royal Society Open Science examines how fox squirrels keep track o...
Listen
Have a Tat Habitat from 2017-12-15T06:24
Engineers at MIT have developed a temporary tattoo that’s 3-D printed with living ink. The tattoo is made up of bacterial cells that are genetically programmed to light up when exposed to different...
Listen
School Injection from 2017-12-13T06:25
Two neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. Anthony and Jeff discuss the idea of injecting infor...
Listen
Ground Control to Major Germ from 2017-12-11T06:41
According to a new study in the journal PeerJ, the interior surfaces of the 17-year-old, 250-mile-high, airtight International Space Station harbor at least 1,000 and perhaps more than 4,000 microb...
Listen
Endeavor Young from 2017-11-22T19:45
A small cluster of stem cells in the brain seems to help mice stay young, and injecting extra stem cells helps them live longer. The hypothalamus, which releases hormones that affect other organs, ...
Listen
Understanding Know from 2017-11-20T06:38
According to new linguistic analysis published in the journal Public Understanding of Science, even scientists who write about public comprehension of scientific ideas overwhelmingly conflate the t...
Listen
Ants vs Zombies from 2017-11-17T08:01
We’ve known about zombie ants for some time. These are ants infected with the parasitic fungus, O. unilateralis, which takes over their bodies amd moved them around like a zombie. This fungus is ...
Listen
Dinky is the Brain from 2017-11-15T06:18
Scientists can grow miniature versions of human brains — called organoids — in the lab, but during the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience two teams of scientists presented previously u...
Listen
Fooly Manmoth from 2017-11-13T18:43
Swallowed by a sinkhole. Washed away by a mudflow. Drowned after falling through thin ice. These are the fates that many unlucky mammoths suffered in Siberia thousands of years ago. Their well-pre...
Listen
Daylight Salving Time from 2017-11-10T08:35
Nathaniel Hoyle of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and his team have been investigating how the time of day affects wound healing, after they discovered that cuts and burns se...
Listen
Death Becomes Sure from 2017-10-30T04:48
According to researchers in New York, a person’s brain is still active after death, meaning in many cases they can be aware that they’ve passed away. Anthony is, of course fascinated with this, an...
Listen
Do Not Pass Go from 2017-10-28T02:42
AlphaGo the AI developed to play the ancient board game, Go, crushed 18-time world champion Lee Sedol and the reigning world number one player, Ke Jie. But now, an even more superior competitor is ...
Listen
Star Crash from 2017-10-23T05:00
For the first time, scientists have caught two neutron stars in the act of colliding, revealing that these strange smashups are the source of heavy elements such as gold and platinum. Anthony and ...
Listen
Downside Effects from 2017-10-20T17:56
When a harmless placebo becomes effective, it becomes harmful, too, causing side-effects seen in actual therapies. In a new study exploring this mysterious “nocebo effect,” researchers pinpoint re...
Listen
Space Mutants from 2017-10-19T04:45
NASA is considering the possibility of actually modifying the DNA of Mars astronauts in order to make their bodies more resilient to the dangers of the trip. Jeff and Anthony discuss whether this i...
Listen
Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On from 2017-10-16T05:13
Chris Ufere, is the founder and CEO of the dream-interpretation app uDreamed, which allows people to record dreams, connect with other dreamers and consult with psychologists to find more resolutio...
Listen
When Pigs Die from 2017-10-14T05:59
A team at Mississippi State University conducted an unusual ecological experiment with 3 actual tons of pig carcasses. Jeff and Anthony dig into the gory details to determine if it was worthwhile.
Listen
Occupational Vehicle from 2017-10-11T05:17
In the mid-2000s, Amazon had a problem. Every year, the company scrambled to find temporary workers during the peak months of hectic commerce leading up to Christmas. In some areas of the country, ...
Listen
Feint Praise from 2017-09-29T06:29
An international team of researchers reports that when children are praised for being smart not only are they quicker to give up in the face of obstacles they are also more likely to be dishonest a...
Listen
Cephal Oppidan from 2017-09-27T04:45
Octlantis is a just-discovered underwater city engineered by octopuses. But that's not all. Octopolis also exists! Ever vigilant to the alien threat that is cephalopods, Anthony and Jeff dig dee...
Listen
Hardly Worker from 2017-09-25T05:00
Ants are cultural signifiers of busy industriousness, but a new paper in Plos One reveals that, across species, about 40% of "worker" ants spend most of their days doing nothing. Jeff and Anthony ...
Listen
The Nose Have It from 2017-09-20T04:54
In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers found that when it comes time for a pack of wild dogs to determine whether to move, the group engages in a bout of sneezing t...
Listen
Evolution of Man from 2017-09-18T04:58
New research claims to have found traces of evidence that humans may indeed still be evolving. A study looked at the DNA of over 200,000 people living across both the United States and Britain, to...
Listen
Watch Your Hands from 2017-08-30T21:45
Using a combination of depth cameras and computer-vision algorithms, a research team has tracked people around two hospital wards and automatically identified when they used gel dispensers to wash ...
Listen
Echo Effect from 2017-08-28T05:00
The research firm eMarketer estimates that 60.5 million people in the U.S.—a little less than a fifth of the population—will use a digital assistant at least once a month this year, and about 36 mi...
Listen
Sloth Sleuth from 2017-08-25T05:00
Usually, tunnels are made either by human engineers or flowing water. But near the town of Novo Hamburgo, Brazil, there are tunnels large enough to drive a car in that were dug by neither - instead...
Listen
The Life Neurotic from 2017-08-23T05:16
Neurotic people may get a lot of flak, but in reality neuroticism is linked to some very good traits—intelligence and creativity among them. And a new study suggests that there may be another, unex...
Listen
Dredge a Mite from 2017-08-21T04:51
When Australian teen Sam Kanizay felt sore after football practice, he decided to soak his legs at Dendy Street Beach in Brighton. Half an hour later, he walked out covered in blood and gore. Tin...
Listen
Tell a Phony from 2017-08-18T06:24
A team from the University of Warwick in England showed doctored photos to 707 people ages 14 to 82 who volunteered to test their ability to spot a fake. The results led to believe that not only ar...
Listen
Healing Touch from 2017-08-16T05:00
Researchers have developed a device that can switch cell function to rescue failing body functions with a single touch. The technology, known as Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), injects genetic code ...
Listen
Quiz Knows from 2017-08-14T06:21
People trying to comment on articles will now be forced to prove they understand what it's about. That's at least at Norwegian broadcaster NRK's website, which will present people who want to leave...
Listen
Pharma to Table from 2017-08-11T05:24
A DIY pharmaceutical revolution is coming - at least according to one scientist trying to make crafting your own prescription drug at home easier. Anthony and Jeff discuss the idea of disrupting t...
Listen
Don't Stay in Contact from 2017-07-31T05:00
A “blueish mass” of 17 contact lenses has been discovered in the eye of a patient who was scheduled for cataract surgery. The 67-year-old patient was unaware that the contact lenses were missing, ...
Listen
All You Breed is Love from 2017-07-28T06:29
People with Williams syndrome, a rare genetic condition, can’t stop hugging people, have no fear of strangers, and love everyone equally. And it may be that this same syndrome is the reason your d...
Listen
Second Strife from 2017-07-26T04:22
According to an MIT study published in The Journal of Human Resources, second-born children are more likely to grow up to become criminals. Anthony and Jeff discuss birth order and whether they be...
Listen
Neither Here Nor There from 2017-07-24T05:00
Researchers from China successfully teleported a photon from Earth to a satellite 500 km away. The work is an essential step towards establishing a global-scale quantum internet. Anthony and Jeff d...
Listen
Higher, Higher, Ants of Fire from 2017-07-21T14:12
After a flood, thousands of homeless fire ants pile on top of one another to build bizarro towers with their own bodies — probably as temporary shelters. All the complex construction project needs ...
Listen
The Old Guard from 2017-07-19T05:00
A new study may shed light on why teenagers sleep late while grandparents are often up at the crack of dawn. Fifty years ago, psychologist Frederick Snyder proposed that animals who live in groups ...
Listen
Stringing Up Baby from 2017-07-17T05:00
Built in 1937 and distributed in London to members of the Chelsea Baby Club, the baby cage was meant for big-city apartments without yards, and would allow small children to receive fresh air and ...
Listen
How to Kill a Gram from 2017-07-14T05:00
Scientists are about to change what a kilogram is. The weights and measures committee will establish a global value for Planck's constant and then will draft a resolution to redefine kilogram base...
Listen
Paternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (w/Vernon Shaw) from 2017-07-12T05:00
Scientists have taken another step toward being able to edit out bad memories while leaving good ones intact — something that could one day be used to treat people suffering from post-traumatic str...
Listen
The Face That Feeds You from 2017-07-10T05:00
Would your dog eat you if you died? Such in the question posed by The National Geographic in a new article. Anthony, as a dog owner himself, has to face the question as he and Jeff get the facts ...
Listen
Post Natal from 2017-06-28T07:09
One of the most significant innovations of the early 20th century might be the Post Office’s decision to start shipping large parcels and packages through the mail. When the Post Office’s Parcel P...
Listen
Not Dimension from 2017-06-26T05:29
Neuroscientists have used a classic branch of maths in a totally new way to peer into the structure of our brains. What they've discovered is that the brain is full of multi-dimensional geometrical...
Listen
Far Fall, eh? from 2017-06-23T05:00
How far can you fall and still survive? Such is the question posed by a new article in Mental Floss. Jeff and Anthony discuss the answer... which might surprise you! (Not that they discuss it......
Listen
Lucy in the Sky with Dolphins from 2017-06-21T05:43
Back in the 1960s, neuroscientist John C. Lilly ran a NASA-funded research unit where humans attempted to communicate with dolphins. Somewhere along the line, LSD got thrown into the mix, a resear...
Listen
Climb of the Sensory from 2017-06-19T05:00
Alex Honnold climbed the mighty El Capitan in Yosemite National Park without any safety gear in about four hours using only his hands and feet. The 31-year-old became the first person to climb the ...
Listen
Circuitry Good Explanation from 2017-06-16T05:00
With each passing breakthrough in artificial intelligence, we’re asking our machines to make increasingly complex and weighty decisions. Trouble is, AIs are starting to act beyond our levels of com...
Listen
No Fear Gear (w/ Anita Sarkeesian) from 2017-06-14T05:00
Virtual reality systems can create out-of-body experiences — and these experiences may be able to reduce the fear of death, according to a recently published study. Anthony, Jeff, and special gues...
Listen
Extra Hasty Crispr from 2017-06-12T05:00
For the past few years, a new scientific tool known as CRISPR-Cas9 has been hailed as the future of medicine. But a new study, published in Nature Methods , found that using CRISPR-Cas9 to edit a ...
Listen
Bugged Bunny from 2017-05-31T06:01
Virtual rabbits across Second Life will fall asleep and never wake up, now that the their digital food supply has been shut down by a legal battle. The player-made and player-sold Ozimals brand of ...
Listen
Irrational Rational Rationale from 2017-05-29T05:00
Researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands surveyed both scientists and highly educated nonscientists and asked them to rate the two categories of people in terms of objectivity, rational...
Listen
Gut and Run from 2017-05-26T05:00
Fear, for the most part, is controlled by the brain’s amygdalae, but a team of researchers at University College Cork have discovered that the gut microbiome, that collection of bacteria that live...
Listen
Race Boast Coast to Coast from 2017-05-24T04:52
On October 30, 1919, Tony Pizzo arrived in New York City chained to his bicycle. He had pedaled 3,000 miles in five-and-a-half months, attached to his bike by a three-and-a-half-foot chain and hand...
Listen
Preserved and Perfect from 2017-05-22T05:00
The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada recently unveiled what is perhaps the best-preserved dinosaur specimen ever unearthed. That’s because, 110 million years later, the bone...
Listen
America Smirks from 2017-05-19T05:15
When residents of other countries are asked “What’s a dead giveaway that someone is American?” one trait comes up over and over again: big, toothy grins. Why do Americans smile so much? Anthony a...
Listen
Tat the Scales from 2017-05-18T03:37
A huge fish covered in ‘tattoos’ has been caught in the Philippines. Where you would expect plain scales, the fish has intricate blue designs of a crown and a shield, lettering and entwined plant ...
Listen
Modern Stone Age Calamity from 2017-05-15T06:08
An exhaustive comparison of Neandertals’ injuries to those of people today finds that water tubing and mishaps involving tables, result in top-heavy fracture patterns most similar to those observed...
Listen
Worry Some from 2017-05-10T06:16
A new paper by Kate Sweeny, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, argues there's an upside to worrying. Anthony, a professional-level worrier, agrees, but Jeff needs som...
Listen
Fighter Starter from 2017-04-28T06:03
We don't always have a good sense of why we fight. What pushes us to the point of conflict, when we know it will make us unhappy? And why does it leave us feeling so glum afterward? Jeff and Anthon...
Listen
Hey R U AR? from 2017-04-26T05:07
When we think of augmented reality face filters, we tend to think of goofy novelties like Halloween masks, face swapping, or inadvertent racist caricatures. But AR could go far beyond that, putting...
Listen
Dino MIght Chicken from 2017-04-24T05:03
A chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak has been developed by scientists. Is this a good thing or a terrifying thing? Jeff and Anthony are here to think it through.
Listen
Ceph Modifying Code from 2017-04-21T05:00
Squids, cuttlefish and octopuses do not follow the normal rules of genetic information, according to research published in the journal Cell. Their RNA is extensively rewritten, particularly the cod...
Listen
Owe de Toilette from 2017-04-19T05:14
Fed up with the theft of toilet paper from public bathrooms, tourist authorities in China's capital have begun using facial recognition technology to limit how much paper a person can take. Jeff a...
Listen
Starscraper from 2017-04-17T16:23
Architecture firm Clouds Architecture Office has proposed a building that, instead of being supported by the ground and reaching up into the sky, would instead hang suspended from an asteroid. Name...
Listen
Tyrannosaurus Sex from 2017-04-14T07:17
Tyrannosaurus Rex had a snout as sensitive to touch as human fingertips, say scientists. Experts believe that males and females rubbed their sensitive faces together in a prehistoric form of fore...
Listen
Owner and Operator from 2017-04-12T06:02
Leonid Rogozov was a Soviet general practitioner who took part in the sixth Soviet Antarctic Expedition in 1960–1961. He was the only doctor stationed at the Novolazarevskaya Station and, while the...
Listen
Never, Never Land from 2017-04-10T05:03
Scientists have long suspected that the common swift remains airborne for extraordinary amounts of time during its annual migration. Now, a team of scientists in Sweden has proved that these birds...
Listen
Your Heart Will Grow On from 2017-03-31T06:36
Scientists have found a way to use spinach to build working human heart muscle, potentially solving a long-standing problem in efforts to repair damaged organs. This opens up an entire field of ve...
Listen
Take Your Peak from 2017-03-29T05:00
Aging can seem like a scary prospect, but a wealth of scientific studies have found that youth isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are plenty of cases in which human beings peak well into middle...
Listen
You Can't Handle the Tooth from 2017-03-27T05:00
Hardened plaque harvested from Neanderthal teeth is loaded with genetic material from plants and animals these prehistoric hominins ate, as well as remnants of microbes that reveal a surprising amo...
Listen
Man Oar Board from 2017-03-24T05:46
South African surfer Chris Bertish just pulled off one of the most remarkable feats of human determination, perseverance and sheer grit of all time by paddleboarding for 93 days, 4,050 miles across...
Listen
Monitor Moniker Modeler from 2017-03-22T05:58
Low self monitors tend to use inner beliefs and values in deciding how to behave, while high self monitors tend to monitor their surroundings and change their behavior to fit in. Anthony and Jeff ...
Listen
Snake Smile Salesman from 2017-03-20T05:00
Python breeder Justin Kobylka says he spent over eight years selectively breeding ball pythons to finally achieve a smiley face emoji pattern on the reptile's skin. Jeff and Anthony discuss pastim...
Listen
The Immortal Cult Hokum from 2017-03-17T05:00
In 1939 a secretive cult known as the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians made headlines when its leader, James Bernard Schafer, announced their intention to conduct an unusual experiment. Th...
Listen
Raindrops Keep Sprawlin' All the Dread from 2017-03-15T05:00
After noticing an uptick in a rare disease called melioidosis during the rainy season in parts of Southeast Asia and northern Australia, researchers used high-speed cameras and fluorescent dye to o...
Listen
Time Change from 2017-03-13T05:02
The longest personality study of all time, published in Psychology and Aging and recently highlighted by the British Psychological Society, suggests that over the course of a lifetime, just as your...
Listen
All CPU Can Bee from 2017-02-27T06:00
Honeybees' role in pollination enables the production of at least 90 commercially grown crops, including apples, blueberries, melons and broccoli, but recently a dwindling bee population has led to...
Listen
Addiction Subtraction from 2017-02-24T16:25
Studying its effects in the brain, researchers set out to genetically engineer mice that would be more prone to cocaine addiction. Instead, they created mice that appear impervious to it. Even af...
Listen
Squid Pro Grow from 2017-02-22T17:10
Human activity has changed the ocean - rising temperatures and acidifying waters has caused fish populations of all kinds to dwindle. But not all creatures are adversely effected. New research sho...
Listen
Scooter Commuter Computer from 2017-02-20T15:14
Piaggio, the same company that created the Vespa scooter, has announced it will sell a robot called Gita, which is designed to carry and deliver your stuff around town. It will follow you, or move...
Listen
Reckoned That Emotion from 2017-02-17T06:00
Many different emotions have similar bodily symptoms. When we are angry, our pulses race, we breathe faster, we feel our faces flush, and our skin becomes sweaty, but when we are happily excited we...
Listen
Metal Near Solid from 2017-02-15T06:00
More than 80 years after it was predicted to be possible, a Harvard University team has finally managed to create metallic hydrogen. Why? For one thing, physicists predict that metallic hydrogen is...
Listen
Headbanger's Calm from 2017-02-13T06:00
Extreme music – such as heavy metal – can positively influence those experiencing anger, a study by The University of Queensland has revealed. In contrast to previous studies linking loud and chao...
Listen
American Hamsternators (LIVE from PAX 2017!) from 2017-02-10T06:00
A very different kind of episode of We Have Concerns, this one was recorded live at the PAX South convention in San Antonio Texas, and consists entirely of questions from the audience. Thanks to e...
Listen
Fully Operational from 2017-01-30T05:46
During WWII, there was a mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald had an idea about allied bombers. Essentially, bombers were coming back after bombing runs with a lot of damage. Engineers were sayin...
Listen
Thirst World Problems from 2017-01-25T06:39
Everything we eat is flooded with “virtual water,” or water used indirectly to produce food from cradle to grave. In fact, 70% of the world’s water consumption feeds the agriculture industry, and d...
Listen
Headset Mindset from 2017-01-23T06:00
After exploring a virtual world, some people can’t shake the sense that the actual world isn’t real, either. Does the new technology of VR bring with it a new kind of depression? Anthony and Jeff...
Listen
Goos of Egypt from 2017-01-20T05:55
Plastic surgeon Stanley Jacobs was obsess with an ancient Egyptian text about surgery known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Particularly, a recipe at the back of the book, titled “Transforming an Old...
Listen
Append and Cite Us from 2017-01-18T07:00
Scientists have never been certain what the appendix used to do -- and if it is still, in fact, useless. On Jan. 9, a team of researchers led by scientists at Midwestern University Arizona College ...
Listen
Organ Donor Car'd from 2017-01-16T06:10
As self-driving cars become the norm, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It’s a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ d...
Listen
Flesh and Tome from 2017-01-13T06:30
A few years ago, three separate books were discovered in Harvard University's library that had particularly strange-looking leather covers. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that the smoot...
Listen
Mech it Yourself from 2017-01-11T16:34
Some South Koreans have built a mech, and it has taken its first steps. Designed by a veteran of science fiction blockbusters, the 13 foot tall, 1.5 ton Method-2 towers over a room on the outskirt...
Listen
Hiding with a Chance of Meatballs from 2016-12-30T06:18
Ikea is urging teenagers to stop creeping into its stores and having illegal sleepovers. About 10 "non-sponsored sleepovers" have been logged across the world by the Swedish furniture giant this ye...
Listen
What's in Bad Movie? from 2016-12-28T06:00
Hundreds of people online have shared memories of a cheesy Nineties movie called “Shazaam”, in which the standup comic Sinbad played a genie. There is no evidence that such a film was ever made. W...
Listen
Do You Hear What AI Hear? from 2016-12-23T06:00
Researchers in Toronto have used a technology called “neural karaoke” to teach a computer to write a song after looking at a photo, and the little carol it penned after viewing a festive Christmas ...
Listen
Hold Fusion from 2016-12-21T06:00
In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany's Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned....
Listen
Skating on Fin Ice from 2016-12-19T06:00
An amusement park in Japan has been forced to close its skating rink after a torrent of online criticism over its centerpiece: thousands of fish frozen into the ice. Space World in the city of Kit...
Listen
Trajectory Plus Time from 2016-12-16T06:00
Why are humans so prone to running late? New findings published in Hippocampus suggest greater familiarity with an area leads us to overestimate its physical distance, but also has the opposite eff...
Listen
Alien Where from 2016-12-14T06:00
According to a new study, layers of the upper atmospheres of cold brown dwarf planets sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and could host microbes that surf on thermal updra...
Listen
Great American Fake Off from 2016-11-30T06:00
Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middl...
Listen
Never Thaw It Coming from 2016-11-28T06:00
Ancient viruses and bacteria that have been cryogenically frozen for millennia are waking up, due to global warming. Siberia's permafrost and Greenland's glaciers are melting and thawing, releasin...
Listen
Charged Into Battle from 2016-11-25T06:00
US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air crews, drone operators and others in the armed...
Listen
A Light Punishment from 2016-11-23T06:00
Police in southern China are punishing drivers who dazzle other road users with full-beam headlights by making them stare into the lights for a minute. Does the punishment fit the crime? Is it ef...
Listen
Re-poo-able Energy from 2016-11-21T06:00
According to a report from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, researchers have converted human feces to oil using a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. Hydrothermal liquefaction “mimics t...
Listen
Don't Worry, Bee Happy from 2016-11-18T06:00
Scientists at Queen Mary University of London who study bees suggest that insects have something like emotional states, and that a sweet treat can change the way bumble bees make decisions, produci...
Listen
A Glass Half Foul from 2016-11-14T06:00
How do you handle nuclear waste that will be radioactive for millions of years, keeping it from harming people and the environment? It isn’t easy, but a researcher has discovered ways to immobilize...
Listen
Motivational Freaker from 2016-11-11T06:00
Basketball players that were grimly reminded of their own inevitable demise before playing took more shots and scored more points in a study published in an upcoming issue of Journal of Sport and E...
Listen
The Shortest Distance Between Two Pints from 2016-10-31T05:00
A two-year project by an international team of mathematicians has mapped shortest possible journey to visit 25,000 pubs across the UK, and set a new record for the longest "traveling salesman probl...
Listen
Make the Snake from 2016-10-28T05:00
A team of researchers led by Axel Visel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has replaced part of a mouse's DNA—a small sequence known as ZRS— with the equivalent sequence from a snake. Tha...
Listen
Coffee Bean and Key Leaks from 2016-10-26T23:27
One of the busiest Starbucks in the country is the one located inside the CIA, with a captive caffeine-craving audience of thousands of analysts and agents working on gathering intelligence and lau...
Listen
Jurassic Bark from 2016-10-24T05:00
Though we have spent hundreds of years imagining dinosaurs as reptilian roarers, our understanding of what dinos may have actually looked and sounded like has evolved. A new study published in Natu...
Listen
Bonobo Knows from 2016-10-21T05:00
An international study found that chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans seem to have the ability to see the world from someone else's point of view, even when they know that point of view is dead wro...
Listen
Home Is Where the Start Is from 2016-10-19T05:00
After he was killed by a blow to the face about 9,000 years ago, the 23-year-old hunter was laid to rest in a limestone cave in what is now southwestern England. Now, say scientists astonishingly ...
Listen
Flight Change from 2016-10-17T05:00
Travellers are used to lost luggage, booking errors and on-board delays - but now an American airline is being sued for mixing up two children and sending them to the wrong cities. Jeff and Anthon...
Listen
This I Swear from 2016-10-14T05:00
Every swear word in the English language has been ranked in order of offensiveness. The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, interviewed more than 200 people across the UK on how offensive they fi...
Listen
Sounds Fishy from 2016-10-12T05:00
Cornish fish moving north with climate change may struggle to understand Scouse counterparts, study says, making it harder for them to mate. Experts believe the fish, which make sounds with their ...
Listen
Trend in the Clowns from 2016-10-10T05:00
There’s been a wave of creepy clown sightings across the United States. Going back to late August, there have been dozens of reports of threatening clowns, largely centered around schools and colle...
Listen
A Clean Pill of Health from 2016-09-30T05:00
Scientists from Deakin University in Melbourne published their findings about a new drug that mimics some of the most important effects of exercise. They were able to show that overweight mice w...
Listen
The Tortoise and the Scare from 2016-09-28T05:00
A 100-year-old tortoise named Touche, owned by the same 60-year-old woman since she was five years old, went missing from his home for 10 days before being found more than six miles away. Anthony ...
Listen
A Cave New World from 2016-09-26T05:00
The Movile Cave in Romania, just a few miles west from the Black Sea, has been sealed up for around 5.5 million years. Although the air in it is poisonous and unbearably humid, scientists have so...
Listen
Bringing Up Baby from 2016-09-21T05:00
Jeff is back! And he's an honest-to-goodness real life Dad! Anthony takes a moment to check in on the experience of bringing a new Cannata into the world.
Listen
Scan You Keep a Secret? from 2016-09-14T05:00
Security researchers Abdul Serwadda and Richard Matovu recently tested a pair of EEG authentication systems to see if it was possible to identify personal information from anonymous brainwave scans...
Listen
Not-a-Dog Person from 2016-09-12T05:00
A man who spent the last two years raising two beloved pet dogs has had a bit of a shock. The pair of 'puppies' Wang Kaiyu bought and raised at his home in Maguan County in southwest China’s Yunna...
Listen
The Prime Sinister from 2016-08-31T05:00
For the most part, numbers are simply cold indicators, unable of expressing menace or guile, but then there’s Belphegor’s Prime, a supposedly sinister numeric palindrome that has a number of odd qu...
Listen
And the Beasts Shall Inherit the Earth from 2016-08-29T05:00
What if every animal on the planet has suddenly woken up a rational, self-aware being? Would one creature come to rule all others, much as we humans have done, or would our varied kind arrive at so...
Listen
The Net Results from 2016-08-24T05:00
Luke Aikins plummeted from 25,000 feet above the desert landscape of California's Simi Valley without a parachute, landing squarely in a 100 feet x 100 feet, two-tiered net set up to catch him. He ...
Listen
Leader of the Pachyderm from 2016-08-22T05:00
Despite reported differences in appearance and behavior, DNA evidence finds that Namibian desert elephants share the same DNA as African savanna elephants. But differences in behavior show that the...
Listen
The Bore Ultimatum from 2016-08-19T05:00
A Frenchman is suing his former employer for "bore out" - boredom's equivalent of burnout - which he says turned him into a "professional zombie". Frederic Desnard wants 360,000 euros for being "ki...
Listen
Crash Man Be Cute from 2016-08-17T05:00
Melbourne-based artist Patricia Piccinini has created a life-sized sculpture of what a human being would have to look like in order to survive a car crash. The result is a grotesquely mutated huma...
Listen
Finger Print from 2016-08-12T05:00
Police in Michigan have a new tool for unlocking phones: 3D printing. Law enforcement officers approached a professor at Michigan State earlier this year to reproduce a murder victim’s fingerprint ...
Listen
Check Yourself in Store You Wreck Yourself from 2016-08-10T05:00
Research from the United Kingdom found self-service checkouts allowed people to normalize and excuse stealing, even among those who would never consider theft in any other setting. Anthony and Jef...
Listen
A Growing Smile from 2016-07-27T05:00
A team of scientists from the University of Nottingham and Harvard University have developed a method of regrowing damaged teeth using a filling-like material seeded from stem cells. The new approa...
Listen
Skin Vogue from 2016-07-20T05:00
Tina Gorjanc has sourced the late designer Alexander McQueen’s DNA to harvest into skin tissue, which she’ll then tan and turn into human leather. In turn, she’ll fashion this leather into an alrea...
Listen
Plate and Switch from 2016-07-18T05:00
A new book called Real Food Fake Food: Why You Don't Know What You're Eating and What You Can Do About It, by Larry Olmsted, has caught Anthony's eye. When we buy fish and beef and olive oil, are ...
Listen
Me Grow Horny from 2016-07-15T05:00
With Rhinos on the brink of extinction, some bioengineers are 3D printing horns to flood the market with fakes, in an attempt to stop the decline. Jeff and Anthony debate the merits of this plan, ...
Listen
Animal Magnetism from 2016-07-13T05:00
A researcher in US thinks he might have finally found evidence of humanity's sixth sense - the ability to detect, in some subconscious way, Earth's magnetic field. Jeff and Anthony consider whethe...
Listen
Manifestingray from 2016-07-11T05:00
Scientists have built a robotic stingray made of heart muscle cells from a rat, a skeleton of gold, plastic fins, and light-activated algae proteins. The tiny, 16-millimeter-long robots take about...
Listen
Dead Shoe Fineries from 2016-06-29T05:39
Remains of found at an altitude of 2,803 metres in the Altai Mountains are being hailed as the first complete Turkik burial found in Central Asia. In the mummy's grave archaeologists found - along...
Listen
Money for Nothing and Your Pics for Fees from 2016-06-27T05:00
WeLab Ltd., a Hong Kong-based online lender that makes loans in China, looks at what apps people have downloaded, where they go using the phone’s GPS tracker, their social networks and their school...
Listen
A Bridge Too Far from 2016-06-24T20:00
The Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon Glass Bridge is found above the Tianmenshan National Forest Park in the mountainous Hunan province of southern China, and is set to become the longest, highest, and mos...
Listen
Booty Call from 2016-06-20T05:00
The wreckage of a 500-year-old Portuguese ship filled with gold coins has been unearthed by miners in a Namibian desert. How did a shipwreck end up in the desert? Jeff and Anthony discuss the stra...
Listen
A Fish's Edge with Visages from 2016-06-17T05:36
Archerfish shoot high-powered water jets from their mouths to stun prey. By training them to direct those jets of spit at certain individuals, scientists have shown that the little guys seem to be...
Listen
Solitary Alignment from 2016-06-15T05:00
In 2006, 20 families occupied the village of Xuenshanshe in China, but as people passed away from old age, and others moved due to the decline of natural resources, Eventually, just a single man r...
Listen
Babel Wish from 2016-06-10T05:00
A new Indigogo campaign claims to offer an earpiece that can translate between languages. Anthony and Jeff have dreamed of a universal communication tool like those in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Ga...
Listen
Meteor's Ours from 2016-05-30T05:00
Japanese research company ALE is bidding to create an artificial meteor shower for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. Jeff and Anthony discuss the tradition of the Olympic...
Listen
Am I Human or Am I Dancer? from 2016-05-27T05:00
Moon Ribas is a ‘cyborg artist’ who can feel every earthquake on the planet through a tiny sensor permanently grafted under her skin near the crook of her elbow. She moves to these vibrations duri...
Listen
Buy Some Bison from 2016-05-25T05:00
A Texas woman sold her seven-year-old housebroken pet bison named Bullet on Craigslist for $5,960. So, of course, Anthony and Jeff take this opportunity to discuss exotic pets, selling things onli...
Listen
Another One Bites for Trust from 2016-05-23T05:00
In order to become a member of the Sateré-Mawé, a tribe of roughly ten thousand members that inhabits the northern region of Amazonas, boys as young as twelve will thrust their hands into gloves fu...
Listen
Discovery Kids! from 2016-05-20T06:59
Using an unprecedented technique of matching stars to the locations of temples on Earth, a 15-year-old Canadian student says he’s discovered a forgotten Mayan city in Mexico. Anthony and Jeff talk ...
Listen
Batteries Caught, Extruded from 2016-05-18T05:00
MIT says that every year in the US there are more than 3,500 reports of swallowed batteries. If left in the stomach or esophagus these can burn the tissue. They have designed a new indigestible or...
Listen
Nature vs Searcher from 2016-05-16T05:00
A small mammal has sabotaged the world's most powerful scientific instrument. The Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile superconducting machine designed to smash protons together at close to the speed ...
Listen
Mind Blind Defined from 2016-05-13T05:00
Certain people, researchers have discovered, can’t summon up mental images — it’s as if their mind’s eye is blind. This month in the journal Cortex, the condition received a name: aphantasia, based...
Listen
The Eye of the Patent Holder from 2016-05-11T05:00
According to a new patent filing, Google has devised a method to inject a device directly into your eyeballs. Per the patent filing, the device is meant to replace your eye's natural lens and is i...
Listen
Castle Hassle from 2016-04-27T05:00
Robert Fidler built a castle at Salfords in Surrey, England without planning permission and hid it behind straw bales for four years. He has now been ordered to tear it down or face 4 months on pr...
Listen
A Boat By Any Other Name from 2016-04-25T05:00
Although Boaty McBoatface decisively won a public poll that Britain's Natural Environment Research Council launched last month to whip up enthusiasm about science, it turns out that will not be th...
Listen
Dream Goblin from 2016-04-22T05:00
The Flyboard Air, made by Franky Zapata‘s Zapata Racing is either a clever fake, or the most impressive hoverboard yet in action. Jeff and Anthony are thrilled byt the possibilities, and imagine g...
Listen
Worry Thwart from 2016-04-20T05:00
Writer and programmer Paul Ford decided to outsource his anxiety by writing a piece of software that would email him expressions of his worst fears every morning. The idea being, that if all his w...
Listen
The Eight Escape from 2016-04-18T05:00
An octopus at the National Aquarium of New Zealand sliped out of its tank, crawled across floor, and escaped down pipe to ocean, leading Anthony and Jeff to worry that the cephalopod uprising has b...
Listen
Prepare Yourself from 2016-04-11T05:00
Science host Greg Foot tries to get to the secret of what human flesh tastes like by performing a biopsy of his leg muscle to smell the aroma of his own cooked flesh. Anthony and Jeff discuss the...
Listen
Safety Worst from 2016-03-30T06:47
The community of Delta, B.C. is looking at updating its Annieville playground with riskier equipment, after a public health expert told the council that kids who play safe when they're young show m...
Listen
If You're Lion I'm Dying from 2016-03-25T06:14
A mountain lion miraculously surviving in the urban mountains in Los Angeles is believed to have breached a 9-foot fence at the Los Angeles Zoo and mauled an 18-pound koala at night. However, all ...
Listen
Keeping Bankrupt with the Joneses from 2016-03-21T05:00
A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that neighbors of lottery winners are unusually likely to go bankrupt, and the larger the lottery prize, the more likely bankruptcy b...
Listen
Hum Linger from 2016-03-18T05:00
Residents of Windsor, the industrial Canadian city that lies just across the river from Detroit, have been experiencing a monotonous type of noise pollution that is usually just referred to as 'The...
Listen
Horse Remorse from 2016-03-16T05:00
Psychologists at Sussex University published a new study that claims a horse can not only tell whether a human might be in a bad mood by simply looking at the human's facial expression, it can do s...
Listen
Fire in the Hull! from 2016-03-14T05:00
Fire behaves very differently in zero gravity, and NASA wants to study it. The problem? It is very, very foolish to set fire to something inside a spacecraft, and there are specific rules prohibit...
Listen
Bob Lawbot from 2016-03-11T06:00
Nineteen-year old British programmer Joshua Browder has created a robotic appeal system for parking tickets. Since its inception in 2015, this robo-lawyer has successfully appealed $3 million wort...
Listen
Maniac Firebird from 2016-02-29T06:00
Certain birds of prey are picking up burning sticks from brush fires and dropping them in dry grass. Why? Because then all the little critters will run away from the fire and out into the open, whe...
Listen
High Fructose Corn Worship from 2016-02-26T06:00
Writer Jeff Wilser ate nothing but processed, packaged junk food for an entire month, and still managed to lose 11 pounds. His hypothesis: If you limit your caloric intake to a moderate amount, b...
Listen
Sleeper Agent from 2016-02-24T06:00
New research published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that being an early riser is in some people's DNA -- and not in others'. The study isolated 15 areas in the human genome that a...
Listen
English as a Sullen Language from 2016-02-22T06:00
While investigating non-English words associated with positive emotions and concepts, a British researcher recently discovered 216 foreign words for which there is no English translation. The conc...
Listen
Southern Cuddle Circle (LIVE from PAX South 2016!) from 2016-02-19T06:00
A very different kind of episode of We Have Concerns, this one was recorded live at the PAX South convention in San Antonio Texas, and consists entirely of questions from the audience. It also fea...
Listen
Black Death of Journalism from 2016-02-17T06:00
An article on Fox News says that scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany have reconstructed the Black Death! Oh no, we're all doomed! Why would scient...
Listen
A Prairie Vole's Home Companion (LIVE from PAX South 2016!) from 2016-02-15T06:00
The prairie vole, unlike 97 percent of mammals, are monogamous, forming bonds that last long after mating, and scientists have been doing experiments to try to understand if the hormone they share ...
Listen
Spectacular Spider-Plan from 2016-02-13T01:19
Jumping spiders, members of the Salticidae family of arachnids, have a level of cognizance rarely seen in creatures of their diminutive size, which enables them to plan ahead and work out the most ...
Listen
Whateverlasting Life (LIVE from PAX South 2016) from 2016-02-10T06:00
Australian startup company Humai claims to be working on a way to transfer a person’s consciousness into an artificial body after they’ve died. This is something Anthony and Jeff have been dying t...
Listen
Cardboard of Surgery from 2016-01-27T06:00
Google Cardboard has helped save the life of a baby who was born missing a lung and half a heart. Surgeons used the inexpensive VR device to map out the experimental operation. Anthony and Jeff e...
Listen
Blart Bots from 2016-01-25T06:00
A Mountain View startup called Knightscope has developed a fleet of crime-fighting machinery it hopes to rent for less than minimum wage to malls. Are mall cop jobs in danger? Will punk kids cowe...
Listen
Tree Howls of Horror from 2016-01-22T06:00
In their continuing series on things that want to kill you, Anthony and Jeff discuss the Manchineel tree, whose poison is so potent, even standing under it during a rainstorm can result in blistere...
Listen
Dragon Braggin' from 2016-01-20T06:00
An essay in The American Journal of Bioethics claims dragons and other spectacular animals could be brought to life using the targeted gene-editing system known as CRISPR-CAS9. Jeff and Anthony are...
Listen
Where the Antelope Syndrome from 2016-01-18T06:00
Over half the Antelope population in Kazakhstan died in 4 days, and scientists are baffled as to the cause. Jeff and Anthony have a few theories, though. Don't worry. It's probably not all dark m...
Listen
Downward Phasing Dog (w/ Christian Spicer) from 2016-01-15T06:00
Are dogs getting dumber because of their association with humans? New new study comparing intelligence of wolves to domesticated canines seems to indicate that might be the case. Anthony, Jeff, a...
Listen
Stalin for Time: The Story of the American Tumbleweed from 2016-01-13T06:00
Jeff and Anthony uncover the remarkable true story of that iconic symbol of the American west, the tumbleweed. Turns out, it was all a lie.
Listen
Occupy Octopi from 2016-01-11T06:00
A giant squid, rarely seen outside of deep waters, was filmed swimming near a pier in central Japan. Even crazier, a local dive shop owner decided to leap into the water and swim with the deadly c...
Listen
It's (Sort of) Your Funeral from 2015-12-28T06:00
South Korean companies think they've figured out how to help depressed employees: throw them into coffins and give them fake funerals. One of us loves this idea, one of us is weirded out by it. CAN...
Listen
New Pain Regained from 2015-12-25T07:59
A woman born incapable of feeling pain has been hurt for the first time, thanks to a drug normally prescribed for opioid overdoses. Jeff and Anthony discuss what it must be like to feel pain for t...
Listen
Ships of Lost Souls from 2015-12-23T23:59
Over the last 5 years, 283 wooden boats have washed up on the shores of Japan, full of decomposing human bodies. No one knows where they came from, who was aboard, or why they died. Of course, th...
Listen
Urine Trouble Pal from 2015-12-21T06:00
The problem of splash-back at the urinal has been tackled by Researchers at Utah State University who have developed a new device that's being called a "black hole for urine." Jeff and Anthony dis...
Listen
Designer Genes from 2015-12-18T06:00
The recent International Summit on Human Gene Editing brought scientists from around the worth together to debate the benefits and potential dangers of experimenting on the human genome. Anthony a...
Listen
Anger Banishment from 2015-12-16T06:00
New research by an archaeologist at the University of York suggests that betrayals of trust were the missing link in understanding the rapid spread of our own species around the world. Jeff and An...
Listen
Spoil Sports from 2015-12-14T06:00
An astrophysicist by the name of Matt Ginsberg believes he will revolutionize the way we will watch sports. He is patenting technology that will predict and display the results of a basketball sho...
Listen
Keep Your Head Worm from 2015-12-11T06:00
Biologists at Tufts University have succeeded in inducing one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering genomic sequence. The disc...
Listen
What Concerns Brock Wilbur? from 2015-11-30T08:00
This double-length episode was recorded back in August of 2015, and was originally released as a Patron-only bonus episode. In it, special guest Brock Wilbur relates his experience volunteering at...
Listen
Face the Truth from 2015-11-27T06:00
Researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland have developed an algorithm that can detect micro-expressions imperceptible to the human eye, which can reveal emotions that usually remain hidden. ...
Listen
Toe Tally Gone from 2015-11-23T06:00
Anthony is full on freaked out after reading a story about dactylolysis spontanea, or human auto-amputation. This is a real thing that happens when the body decided to remove an appendage - most o...
Listen
A Touching Discussion from 2015-11-18T06:00
Scientists from the University of Oxford and Aalto University, Finland, have created “body maps” that show where we feel most uncomfortable getting touched by different people. Jeff and Anthony dis...
Listen
I Be Dead People from 2015-11-16T06:00
Cotard's Syndrome is a rare neurological illness that makes you believe, beyond any rational analysis, that you are dead. Jeff and Anthony discuss a recent case of this disease as well as its hist...
Listen
Running is for Neurons from 2015-11-13T06:00
In a recent TED Talk, neuroscientist Sandrine Thuret explains how our brains can grow new brain cells through neurogenesis. The more active neurogenesis is for you, the more likely you’ll have a be...
Listen
The Amazing Spider-Plan from 2015-10-30T05:00
One of the world's deadliest spiders - the funnel-web spider is native to Australia. No surprise to Anthony and Jeff, who have been chronicling the various ways Australia is dangerous for a while ...
Listen
Bearly Lethal (w/Adam Sessler) from 2015-10-28T05:00
A team of Japanese engineers has designed an adorable robotic bear to aid in assisted suicide. Capable of 23 different methods to end a life, including hands that are powerful enough to crush huma...
Listen
Star Wipes from 2015-10-26T05:00
Several amateur astronomers, gazing at data from the Kepler telescope, discovered an odd flickering from one particular star, usually caused by objects in space passing in front of it. But that us...
Listen
Precogs and Gears from 2015-10-23T05:00
Bioengineers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a mathematical algorithm that can "see" your intention while performing an ordinary action like reaching for a cup or driving st...
Listen
The Bitter Angles of Our Nature from 2015-10-21T05:00
A new study find that people who like bitter foods are more likely to display psychopathic tendencies. Since Anthony loves his coffee black, this leads to some awkward moments as Jeff tries to sur...
Listen
Jog Your Mind from 2015-10-19T05:00
In their ongoing debate over whether running is cool or stupid, Anthony and Jeff consider the new study which links the euphoric feeling from long distance runs not to endorphins, as previously ass...
Listen
Robot Dick Rising from 2015-10-16T05:00
Roboticists have created an automaton with the appearance and behavior of legendary science fiction author, Phillip K. Dick. Quotes from actual interviews are augmented with an AI system that actu...
Listen
Mist Dirt Clean w/Allie Goertz from 2015-10-14T05:00
David Whitlock is a chemist who hasn't showered in 12 years, but reportedly does not stink. Instead of bathing, he has been spraying himself with a concoction of his own devising that he claims br...
Listen
Cloudy with a Chance of Lampreys from 2015-10-12T05:00
One day in June, the Value Village in Fairbanks, Alaska was alerted to a 15 foot long bloodsucking fish in their parking lot.. What could possibly cause a lamprey to materialize so far from water?...
Listen
Short Ape-ttention Span Theater from 2015-09-30T05:16
A new study using eye-tracking software finds that chimps enjoy watching movies featuring humans dressed in ape costumes. Even more surprising, the primates are able to anticipate story turns base...
Listen
Stupid Human Tricks from 2015-09-28T05:00
A Shaolin monk in China recently ran 125 meters across 200 thin planks of wood floating on the water, an incredibly difficult and unprecedented feat some have dubbed "running on water". He trained...
Listen
Ominous Hominid from 2015-09-23T05:00
Amateur cave explorers in South Africa's famous Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site recently made a remarkable discovery: exquisitely preserved remains of a previously unknown evolutionary huma...
Listen
Hyper Sleep Hype from 2015-09-21T14:41
Biomedical scientist Mark Roth believes that suspended animation is within reach. He is conducting experiments using Elemental Reducing Agents to slow down cells' oxygen burning, and predicts that...
Listen
Blue Period from 2015-09-18T07:11
There is evidence to suggest that human beings may not have seen the color blue until modern times. No word for blue shows up in ancient texts, and no one seemed to describe things as "blue" until...
Listen
Drone the Coop from 2015-09-16T05:00
A drone recently flew over the wall at the Mansfield Correctional Institution carrying drugs, cellphones, and other illicit paraphernalia, and landed in the prison yard, starting a riot. Jeff and ...
Listen
It Came From the Audience (LIVE from PAX 2015!!) from 2015-09-14T05:00
In this special, double-length episode, Anthony and Jeff take topic suggestions directly from the crowd during their live panel at PAX 2015. Subjects include the animal stone age, snake fish, the ...
Listen
Cephalopods from Outer Space (LIVE from PAX 2015!) from 2015-09-11T05:00
Anthony has an irrational fear of octopi, the eight-armed denizens of the deep. And now, scientists have sequenced the octopus genome and discovered that their DNA is so different from any other c...
Listen
The Time of Your Life from 2015-08-31T06:02
An Australian designer by the name of Maximilian Kiener has created an interactive representation of the way we perceive our lifespan. The younger you are, the longer time feels, and the older you...
Listen
Shoot the Moonshine (w/ Brian Brushwood, Live from Nerdtacular 2015!) from 2015-08-26T05:00
A Japanese drinks company is sending 5 samples of whiskey up to the International Space Station to study the effects of zero gravity on the fermentation process. Anthony, Jeff, and special guest B...
Listen
Compassionate Affirmative from 2015-08-24T05:00
An article in the New York Times outlines a series of studies which seem to point to the fact that empathy is actually a choice. Is there a benefit to feel something for our fellow man, or could i...
Listen
Better Know a Brock from 2015-08-21T06:30
In this very special episode on We Have Concerns, we talk about the plight of an actual Brock: Brock Leads, a young man from the UK who was playing on a cliff when a disaster of cartoonish proporti...
Listen
Home, Phone E.T. from 2015-08-19T05:03
Stephen Hawking has teamed up with a Russian tycoon to start a new search for extraterrestrial life. The cost? $100 million... and maybe the safety of our entire civilization? Whatever, we'll just ...
Listen
You Shoes, You Lose (Live from Nerdtacular 2015!) from 2015-08-17T18:19
An article on the very scientifically-titled "Healthy, Wild and Free" blog explains why wearing shoes in the house is potentially KILLING YOU. Anthony and Jeff discuss hygiene, etiquette and how ba...
Listen
Fog of War (with Brock Wilbur) from 2015-08-14T06:00
Some newly declassified documents show that the US government knowingly sprayed all of San Francisco with a biological agent after World War II. How often does something like this happen? How many ...
Listen
See Weed, Taste Bacon from 2015-08-12T06:00
A research lab has apparently created a healthy seaweed superfood that tastes like bacon! ... Yeah, that sounds like total marketing speak to us, too. Anthony and Jeff discuss the whole concept of ...
Listen
Hitches Get Stitches from 2015-08-10T06:00
We talk a lot about whether we can trust robots, but can robots trust us? HitchBOT was a robot on a goodwill tour of the world, depending on the kindness of strangers to get from one end of a count...
Listen
Repeat Yourself from 2015-07-31T05:50
For the last ten years, a man in the UK has been waking up every day thinking it is March 14th 2005, the day he was scheduled to receive a root canal. Anthony and Jeff think this sounds like somet...
Listen
The Bots Motel from 2015-07-29T05:00
A hotel has opened in Japan that is staffed almost entirely by robots. While this does seem like a cheap gimmick to Anthony and Jeff, they are still intrigued by the idea, and imagine what staying...
Listen
Fabby Road from 2015-07-27T05:00
A company in the Netherlands is teaming up with the city of Rotterdam to introduce pre-fab roads made from recycled plastics, which will eliminate the harmful emissions that result from asphalt, an...
Listen
Group Think from 2015-07-24T05:00
Scientists have linked together the brains of monkeys to collectively control the movements of an artificial arm, proving that connected brains can cooperate to solve problems. Further, a separate...
Listen
Meal Ordeal from 2015-07-22T05:33
A new paper, published in the Journal of Sensory Studies, attempts to categorize different kinds of picky eaters, in an effort to help parents better deal with their kids at mealtime. Jeff and Ant...
Listen
Butterflight Patterns from 2015-07-20T05:00
Monarch butterflies make an incredible, multi-generational migration from Canada to Mexico, but, strangely, they do not take the the most direct route. Somewhere over Lake Superior, these butterfl...
Listen
Phoney Science from 2015-07-17T05:00
A new study that claims smart phone users are becoming addicted to their devices has garnered alarming headlines like "iPhones Cause Separation Anxiety". But digging a little deeper, Anthony and Je...
Listen
Pro Sting Boasting from 2015-07-15T05:00
In their continuing quest to explore the most terrifying creatures on the planet, Jeff and Anthony take a look at the Tarantula Hawk - a wasp with a sting categorized as among the most painful in t...
Listen
Please Advise from 2015-07-13T05:00
Why is it so hard to take our own advice? A new article breaks down the phenomenon, and suggests some reasons as to why it may be the case. Anthony and Jeff relate to being able to give great advi...
Listen
Dreams of Electric Sheep from 2015-06-29T05:00
In an effort to create a more accurate image recognition system, researchers have been training Google's neural network to pick out objects obscured by denser and denser layers of optical noise. B...
Listen
A Taste of Prison from 2015-06-26T05:00
As a way to raise funds, some US prisons are offering visitors a way to eat what inmates eat. This experience promises to be the "worst meal of your life" and yet still been successful in attracti...
Listen
Sprout on a Limb from 2015-06-24T05:00
For the first time, scientists have managed to grow an arm in a lab. This rat forelimb seems to be functional and able to circulate blood, giving hope that one day we will be able to grow usable r...
Listen
Poo Done It? (with Greg Miller) from 2015-06-22T05:00
A London borough has decided to get to start DNA testing abandoned dog droppings and delivering retroactive tickets to the irresponsible owners. Anthony, Jeff, and special guest Greg Miller from K...
Listen
Placenta and Minus... enta from 2015-06-19T14:05
A new review of scientific literature finds that there is no evidence that eating the afterbirth is good for the mother. It could even be harmful. Which leads Anthony and Jeff to weigh the pros a...
Listen
Cave Man Returns from 2015-06-17T07:06
The de-extinction movement is in full swing, which leads some scientists to consider reconstructing the DNA of Neanderthals. Could that be possible? And what would a prehistoric humanoid be like ...
Listen
Running Man from 2015-06-10T05:00
Dean Karnazes has a rare physiological condition that allows him to process lactic acid more efficiently than other humans and effectively run forever. His list of running accomplishments is truly ...
Listen
Meet Me in the Uncanny Valley from 2015-05-28T16:05
A new virtual reality startup called Project Elysium aims to give Oculus Rift users the ability to have conversations with their deceased loved ones by recreating them digitally, using pictures, vi...
Listen
Embry-Oh No! from 2015-05-27T05:00
Whelp, it's happening. Scientists in China have begun genetically modifying human embryos. While these initial attempts to replace potentially fatal genes with new, safe, designer genes proved un...
Listen
Take My Pulse from 2015-05-22T05:00
When his heart was replaced with a constant, flowing artificial pump in March of 2011, Craig Lewis became the first human ever to live without a pulse. Anthony is eager to disregard his biological...
Listen
Less is Moore's from 2015-05-20T05:00
Moore's Law states that every 2 years the number of transistors on a chip will double. But some scientists predict that in just 10 years, we will hit the upper limit of Moore's Law. Anthony and J...
Listen
No Way, No Cow from 2015-05-18T05:00
A group of biohackers is working on a way to create cheese without ever using an animal. The idea is to take custom-fabricated snippets of DNA and insert them into yeast to fabricate truly vegan c...
Listen
Lounge Lizards in Space from 2015-05-15T05:00
No one had ever observed geckos exhibiting behavior that could be described as "play". That is, until the reptiles were jettisoned into space in an unmanned Russian rocket. One of their collars d...
Listen
Live Long and Proper from 2015-05-13T05:00
A new study pinpoints the geographic locations where the longest-living humans are most concentrated. Analysis of these "Blue Zones" reveals the kinds of activities and diet that contribute to lon...
Listen
Zooslander from 2015-05-11T05:33
The Lujan Zoo outside of Buenos Aires has been dubbed the "World's Most Dangerous Zoo" because it allows visitors to cuddle, fondle, and feed lions, tigers, and bears. But when Anthony and Jeff he...
Listen
You'll Put Your Eye Out (w/ Trisha Hershberger) from 2015-04-29T05:56
A new biotech startup aims to have synthetic, bioprinted eyeballs on the market by 2027. These could not only solve vision problems, but actually upgrade the eye to apply filters or even record vi...
Listen
From a Galaxy Far a Weigh from 2015-04-27T06:00
Cosmologist Fergus Simpson published a new scientific paper in which he suggests that intelligent aliens, if they exist, are likely enormous, weighing at least 650 lbs. Jeff and Anthony are skepti...
Listen
Speedy Spider Spasms from 2015-04-24T05:00
Researchers studying the movements of tarantulas in different climates have discovered that at higher temperatures spiders can actually move much faster. This is due to fluid in their joints becom...
Listen
Medieval Solution from 2015-04-22T05:00
Historians uncovered an Old English book of Medieval remedies and decided to recreate and test them in modern conditions. Shockingly, one of the potions, made up of garlic, onions, and the bile fr...
Listen
Paint Your Poison from 2015-04-20T05:00
Seattle cancer researchers are hoping that they will be able to use scorpion venom to fight deadly brain cancer through a new product called "Tumor Paint." Jeff and Anthony consider the challenges ...
Listen
Blob Water from 2015-04-17T05:00
Plastic water bottles are a massive global pollution problem, but new biotech aims to replace traditional non-biodegradable containers with a thin, algae membrane. The result is an amorphous spher...
Listen
Addiction, Affliction, or Avocation from 2015-04-13T05:00
Anthony and Jeff consider the plight of mice in a cage, given the opportunity to drink clean, natural water, or water laced with illicit drugs. Is their choice dependent on the pure addictive prop...
Listen
The Opticals of Riddick from 2015-04-10T05:00
A group of biohackers in Tehachapi, California have figured out a way to give themselves night vision by squirting a kind of chlorophyll analog called Chlorin e6 directly onto their eyeballs. Anth...
Listen
The Dogtor Will Smell You Now from 2015-03-30T05:00
A scent-trained dog was able to identify the presence or absence of thyroid cancer in human urine more accurately than lab tests, which leads Anthony and Jeff to wonder how much faith they are able...
Listen
Snow Crapped Peaks (w/ Hal Lublin) from 2015-03-27T05:00
So much frozen, un-biodegradeable human waste has been left on Mt Everest by climbers, that it is becoming a problem. In fact, Nepal is now requiring climbers to bring their feces back down the mo...
Listen
Growing Brains from 2015-03-25T05:00
Scientists from the University of Wollongong in Australia are 3D-printing their own tiny, artificial human brains to study the physical properties of psychological conditions like schizophrenia. A...
Listen
Not Really Thereomones from 2015-03-20T05:00
It turns out the idea of human pheromones, tiny molecules that can attract a mate, or make you more likable, are a total fabrication invented to sell perfume. While pheromones do exist in goats an...
Listen
Fly a Plane With Your Brain from 2015-03-18T05:00
A quadriplegic woman who has trained her neural impulses to control a robotic arm, has now flown a jet airplane using only her mind. Anthony is thrilled by the prospect of someday being able to co...
Listen
Carbo Loaded from 2015-03-16T05:00
A man in Britain has been diagnosed with "auto-brewery syndrome." Due to an overgrowth of yeast in his stomach, every time he eats carbohydrates, his body turns them into alcohol and he gets drunk...
Listen
Get Pissed from 2015-03-13T05:00
The residents of St. Pauli, a party district in Hamburg, Germany, were fed up with drunk revelers urinating on the sides of their buildings, so they turned to science to stop the behavior. Paintin...
Listen
The Spike Lobby Makes Good Points from 2015-03-11T05:00
You've heard Anthony and Jeff warn you about the far-reaching influence of the dreaded Spike Lobby. Now it gets real. An article in The Guardian outlines the numerous locations in the UK installi...
Listen
The No Deathbot Guarantee* from 2015-02-25T06:00
*not necessarily a guarantee
One robotics company, Clearpath Robotics, has promised never to make autonomous killing machines, and hopes all future tech companies will get on board with th...
Hale Hydra from 2015-02-23T06:00
The tiny organism known as the hydra is a half inch tube of jelly that inhabits fresh water all over the world, and it may well be functionally immortal. What does that mean? Anthony and Jeff try...
Listen
Harvest Moon from 2015-02-20T06:00
Now that private companies are getting into space, the legalities of who can own celestial bodies comes into question. Specifically, a company called Bigelow Aerospace of Las Vegas wants to start ...
Listen
Spousal Recall from 2015-02-18T06:00
According to researchers at Macquarie University, couples in long-term relationships develop inter-connected memory systems. Each partner can remember only a few details, but together they piece t...
Listen
Super Villain Face from 2015-02-16T06:00
A Venezuelan man had his face surgically altered to look like the Red Skull - Captain America's arch-nemesis in Marvel Comics. His nose was removed, his brow was enlarged, his skin was reddened, a...
Listen
Running is for Dicks from 2015-02-13T08:00
A new study shows that longer, fast-paced running sessions are just as bad for you as not running at all. How much exercise is genuinely good for you? And why do we always think more is better?
Listen
Feels Like Forever from 2015-02-11T08:00
What's more ethical: a life sentence in prison, or a drug that slows someone's perception of time to make them feel like they've spent 10 life sentences in a day? The question was asked last year b...
Listen
The Assassin Defense from 2015-01-30T06:00
NASCAR driver Kurt Busch is attempting to skirt allegations of domestic abuse by claiming that his girlfriend is a trained assassin. Jeff and Anthony proceed to mock any man who would physically as...
Listen
Leaf it Alone from 2015-01-28T07:00
The Australian Gympie-Gympie plant is the one of the most painfully poisonous in the world. People who have just rubbed up against it have gone mad with pain and tried to shoot off their own append...
Listen
This Has All Happened Before from 2015-01-26T17:51
A 23 year-old man has been experiencing constant deja vu for seven years. What would it be like to have the feeling that everything you experienced has happened before? Powerful? Boring? Maddening?...
Listen
Fertility Pro Grammar from 2015-01-23T06:00
A new study finds that men who interact with women during the fertile period of their menstrual cycle tend to be more creative with their grammar. Anthony is impressed that human "peacocking" exten...
Listen
We're Doomed. from 2015-01-21T06:00
Anthony found an article outlining the evidence that Earth is headed for its 6th great extinction event. Animals going extinct, global food tables imbalanced, resource scarcity, all lead up to a m...
Listen
Two Birds With One Stoned from 2015-01-19T08:57
A group of researchers studying the effects of alcohol on speech decided to get some birds drunk. They divided a group of zebra finches - birds that learn and produce sounds similar to humans - in...
Listen
Do What You Scan from 2015-01-16T06:00
A review led by a brain scientist at MIT found growing evidence that brain scans can predict future behaviors. If, one day, we are able to simply scan our brains to determine what kinds of activit...
Listen
Lay Around on Your Astronaut from 2015-01-14T06:00
NASA is conducting a study about the long-term effects of weightlessness by asking applicants to stay completely horizontal for 70 days. In exchange for staying in bed and never standing up up, ev...
Listen
Trial of the Planet of the Apes from 2015-01-12T07:00
A court in Argentina just upheld an animal rights group's request to have an orangutan appear in a court, saying it's illegal to hold 'non-human persons' in cages. Whoops, apes are people now. So i...
Listen
Olfactory Produced from 2014-12-29T06:00
Adrian David Cheok, the founder and director of the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore, is attempting to record odors digitally, and recreate them without the use of chemicals. While a breakthrough in...
Listen
Dawn of the Planet of the Mice from 2014-12-26T06:00
Scientists at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York have successfully implanted human glial cells into the brains of mice to shocking result. Not only were the cells not rejected,...
Listen
Past Word Passwords from 2014-12-24T06:00
A New Yorker article all about passwords has Jeff musing on what Anthony's passwords mean about him. It is a secret people tell themselves every time they log on to something, so what are the most...
Listen
Drying Too Hard from 2014-12-22T06:00
A new study suggests that using hand dryers in public restrooms is actually less hygienic than using paper towels. This leads Jeff and Anthony to discuss bathroom etiquette, personal hygene, germo...
Listen
Nature's Parasitic Hellscape from 2014-12-19T06:00
Anthony and Jeff delve into perhaps the most disturbing topic they have ever tackled. An article in National Geographic features the top 5 most terrifying "zombie" creatures - parasites that get i...
Listen
Work the Planck from 2014-12-15T06:00
According to quantum physics, Planck's Constant is the smallest unit of measure in the universe, beyond which nothing can be further divided. Scientists at the Fermilab are building a Holographic ...
Listen
Sound Shapes from 2014-12-12T06:00
Researchers at the University of Bristol are using ultrasound to create invisible objects in the air that you can reach out and touch. Of course, Anthony and Jeff see this as the first step toward...
Listen
Must Seethe TV from 2014-12-10T06:46
An NPR story about NBC's Peter Pan Live television event points out that a significant portion of the audience of major TV hits are people who self-identify as "hate-watching" the programming. In ...
Listen
Lego Worm Brain from 2014-11-28T06:00
An open source group has recreated the brain of a worm, neuron for neuron, and recently programmed this data into the body of a Lego Mindspring robot. Rather than dictating specific behavior into ...
Listen
28 Days Other from 2014-11-26T06:00
A British performance artist is raising money to live inside the Oculus Rift virtual environment nonstop for 28 days. He will be connected at all times with another human being - someone he has ne...
Listen
Let's Clone a Mammoth from 2014-11-24T06:00
Scientists have found the most well preserved mammoth ever- so fresh they even took a bite of mammoth meat. Does its DNA contain enough complete information to clone it? If so, should we? What happ...
Listen
Tearable Information from 2014-11-21T06:00
Arizona schools are ripping pages about contraception out of text books and Anthony can't believe it. Jeff tries to figure out the motivation behind such a bonehead move, but both guys can't under...
Listen
Time is a Cat Circle from 2014-11-19T07:00
Join us TODAY on our video hangout. Chat with us. Have a beer. Share your concerns. More info on how to join: http://patreon.com/wehaveconcerns
Researchers have just created the world's mo...
You Art What You Eat from 2014-11-17T06:00
The Foodini is an example of the new wave of 3D printers for food. Just fill it with fresh ingredients, and out pops meals like ravioli, pizza, and hamburgers, ready to cook. Anthony detests the ...
Listen
Dress For Succession from 2014-11-14T06:00
Scientists studying the brain's ability to make choices note that the fewer inconsequential decisions you put in front of yourself, the better you'll do when it is time to face a really challenging...
Listen
The Prime Director from 2014-11-12T06:00
Jeff is intrigued by an interview he read about Nasa's one and only Planetary Protection Officer. Her job? To protect OTHER planets from us and ensure the galaxy isn't contaminated by microbes, p...
Listen
Grin and Bear It from 2014-11-10T06:00
Park Rangers are asking visitors to state park and forest areas to please stop taking #bearselfies. Anthony and Jeff try to figure out what would possess a person to approach a wild, deadly creatur...
Listen
Tricked by Treats from 2014-10-31T19:43:51
On this special Halloween episode, Anthony and Jeff consider the nature of of the trick or treat tradition and the urban legend of poisoned Halloween candy. Is asking strangers for food an inheren...
Listen
Leave it to Beaver from 2014-10-29T19:41:24
A new Wired article recounts the medieval myth that beavers, when cornered by hunters, would castrate themselves by chewing off their own testicles. Jeff and Anthony unpack the myth and try to fig...
Listen
Back to the Hoverboard Future from 2014-10-27T05:00
Previously on We Have Concerns... in the Welcome to the Hoverboard Future episode Anthony mocked Jeff's enthusiasm for a mind-bending new technology that indicated that hoverboards may, in fact be ...
Listen
Tell Me How to Feel from 2014-10-24T05:00
A new article describes a study in which doctors told patients they would just be getting a shot of vitamins, but instead gave them something a thousand times more powerful. Whether these subjects...
Listen
Objects that Click from 2014-10-22T05:00
Anthony found an article that describes the community around the IBM Model M keyboard, a sublimely clicky keyboard that has spawned cult-like devotion and a second hand black market. It makes him ...
Listen
Who's the Robo Boss? from 2014-10-20T05:00
Researchers have discovered that employees are actually more content taking orders from a robot than a human being in the workplace. This prompts Anthony and Jeff to wonder what it might take to p...
Listen
That Runner's High from 2014-10-17T05:07:36
As a runner himself, Jeff was very impressed to read of James Lawrence, the endurance athlete who is attempting 50 ultra-distance triathlons, in 50 different states, in 50 straight days. Anthony, ...
Listen
Spider House from 2014-10-15T05:00
Anthony has found a story about a Missouri family fleeing their home because between 4500 and 6000 spiders came "bleeding out of the walls". To which Jeff of course wonders, "What the #%$#?!" Spi...
Listen
Photo Synthesis from 2014-10-13T05:00
Google's Auto Awesome will take the best areas of slightly different photographs and combine them into one new, never-quite-was best version. A new article suggests that this kind of artful interp...
Listen
Saturday Mourning from 2014-10-10T05:00
Saturday morning cartoons are no more! And Jeff has decided that this means something really bad for today's youth - but Anthony is certain that it's a good thing, and that Jeff is just a cranky ol...
Listen
These Hugs Ain't Free from 2014-09-29T07:18:21
A woman in Oregon has opened a cuddle service for those looking for a bit of personal contact, but definitely no sexy stuff. Anthony works through his own issues with touching, Jeff determines the ...
Listen
Sleep Working from 2014-09-26T05:00
Researchers in Paris recently proved that the brain can continue to classify words into categories even after it has gone to sleep, causing Jeff and Anthony to wonder what scientists do to make the...
Listen
Phantom Phone Menace from 2014-09-24T06:00
A new article about the phenomenon of "phantom" phone notifications - those strange moments when you senses a vibration from your cell phone that didn't actually happen - has Jeff ranting on the cr...
Listen
Algorithm is a Dancer from 2014-09-22T06:00
In an attempt to better understand pop music, Dr. Lior Shamir created an algorithm that can correctly identify and track the Beatles artistic output over the evolution of their career. Now, the sa...
Listen
U Mad Bro? from 2014-09-19T07:05:05
Across all cultures and geographies, humans scrunch up their faces in the exact same way when they are angry, and a new article examines several possible evolutionary explanations for the consisten...
Listen
Positively Pessimistic from 2014-09-17T18:54:55
Jeff found an article in the Atlantic that posits that a certain type of negative thinking, called defensive pessimism, might actually be more conducive to productivity and well-being than thinking...
Listen
The Sun is Yellow and Other Lies from 2014-09-15T05:00
Anthony found an article explaining how astronomers gussy up space photography to convey the scope and beauty of the cosmos, and now he has to break it to Jeff that every image he's ever seen of th...
Listen
Telepathy is Real! (kinda) from 2014-09-12T05:00
Researchers have now successfully transferred words from one conscious mind to another over long distances... is a sentence that is technically true, but the details of how they did it reveal that ...
Listen
Cobra Soup from 2014-09-10T05:00
Cooking a Chinese delicacy, a chef in Guangdong province died when the head of a cobra he was preparing bit his hand - long after it had been severed from its body. This freak accident has Jeff an...
Listen
Robo Baby Buggy Bumpers from 2014-08-31T08:00
Several high profile colleges have teamed up to create a universal index of basic knowledge for robots. The theory is that robot brains will need to know how to process even the most elementary in...
Listen
Know More Data from 2014-08-29T05:00
Plug your email address into a particular part of Google and you'll see a map of everywhere you (and your smartphone) have been in the last month. Anthony isn't surprised and thinks anyone who is ...
Listen
Free Monkey Smiles from 2014-08-27T05:00
When a monkey grabbed his camera in Indonesia, snapped the perfect selfie, and the photo went viral, British photojournalist David Slater assumed he'd make a pretty penny from the iconic image. Bu...
Listen
Immortality Transfusion from 2014-08-25T05:00
Researchers in California are planning to treat Alzheimer patients by replacing their blood with blood of young people. Even crazier, there is reason to believe it may work, since old mice have be...
Listen
Welcome to the Hoverboard Future from 2014-08-20T05:30
The "impossible" propulsion drive, which uses microwaves and invisible matter to theoretically power space travel - and which seems to violate the laws of physics, has actually been validated by NA...
Listen
Salmon Fodder from 2014-08-18T09:28:12
Humans controlling waterways by building dams has caused major problems for salmon, who must return to fresh water to breed. But a new company - Whooshh Innovations (not making that up) - has devel...
Listen
Ant-y Social from 2014-08-15T03:01:05
Researchers have determined that individual ant colonies have their own distinct personalities, and that these personalities are shaped by their environments. This leads Jeff and Anthony to wonder...
Listen
White Penguins Can't Jump from 2014-08-13T06:01:56
Fossils discovered in the Antarctic reveal a penguin that reached the approximate size of Lebron James, 6'8 and 250 pounds. That's a big penguin. Jeff and Anthony try to figure out exactly how th...
Listen
Married to a Troll from 2014-08-11T05:42:52
A woman on Reddit discovered that her husband had been leaving vile comments on web sites, so she kicked him out of the house. Anthony and Jeff celebrate this principled woman, discuss the nature ...
Listen
Online Dataing from 2014-07-30T07:56:41
You think Facebook doing experiments on their users is creepy? Wait until you hear how OK Cupid has been messing with people trying to find love. Anthony and Jeff discuss whether sociological stud...
Listen
Luxury and Executioner from 2014-07-28T06:00
Anthony and Jeff are both on board for self-driving cars. But a new article that poses a thought experiment about what might happen if an autonomous automobile had to make a decision to sacrifice ...
Listen
Garbage In, Nothing Out from 2014-07-25T06:00
Jeff and Anthony take a look at an article which suggests the more we consume, the less we create. Would keeping track of all the time spent screwing around on the Internet change your behavior? ...
Listen
Jolt of Personality from 2014-07-23T05:20:01
Trans-cranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) - the process of directly electrocuting parts of the brain to accelerate learning - causes Anthony and Jeff to debate the possibility of the human so...
Listen
Tale as Old as Slime from 2014-07-21T05:59:38
US Customs and Border Security confiscated 67 of the world's largest snails at Los Angeles International airport, on their way from Nigeria to San Dimas, California. Which, of course, leads Anthony...
Listen
Routine Inspection from 2014-07-18T07:00
Anthony and Jeff found an infographic charting the daily routines of some of the world's most famous creative people. Does it reveal anything about the creative process? Is there a way to be produc...
Listen
The Guilt of the Netflix Queue from 2014-07-14T21:47:42
A new study proves we rarely finish the books we start. Our Netflix queues are full of deep, intelligent films that we never watch- why is it so hard to stick to what's good for us?
The Be...
Cupcakes and the Nature of Longing from 2014-07-11T14:14:32
A chain of cupcake stores went out of business and the Internet is FREAKING OUT, MAN. An enterprising eBay user is selling the 'last cupcake' for $250. Jeff and Anthony try to figure out why we cli...
Listen