Biology episodes
26 episodes so far
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20 min
Ghosts in Our Genes: How Ancient DNA Rewrote the Human Family Tree
The revolution hidden in ancient bones that shattered everything we thought we knew about who we are
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15 min
The Life Inside Us: How Gut Bacteria Rewrote the Story of the Human Body
The trillion-strong ecosystem living inside you may be running more of your life than your brain
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18 min
How the Zebra Got Its Stripes: The Hidden Mathematics of Living Form
Why a nautilus shell, a hurricane, and a heartbeat all follow the same hidden design principles
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Free
21 min
The First Instrument: How the Human Voice Evolved to Move Us
From the first grunts of our ancestors to opera, oratory and AI speech, the improbable story of the voice
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18 min
Ink from the Deep: The Strange Intelligence of the Octopus
Nine brains, blue blood, and a mind that evolved on a path entirely separate from our own.
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22 min
Written in Our Genes? How DNA Became the New Language of Identity
From Mendel's pea plants to DNA ancestry kits, how the gene became the most contested idea in modern science
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15 min
Born to Migrate: How Animals Navigate the World Without Maps
The astonishing science behind migration, magnetism, and the secret senses that guide life across the planet
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17 min
Running Hot: The Story of Fever and the Myth of 98.6
Inside the strange, contested science of body temperature and what it reveals about what it means to be alive
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24 min
The Dreaming Animal: Why Every Creature Needs to Sleep
A creature with no brain that still sleeps, birds that doze with half a brain in mid-flight, and what the brain does in the dark that it cannot do awake
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15 min
Understanding Instinct: How Evolution Hardwired Behavior into the Brain
The ancient programs running beneath every thought, fear, and impulse you've ever had
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18 min
Classifying the Red Fluid: How Blood Types Transformed Medicine and War
Why early transfusions killed as often as they saved, and how a quiet Viennese pathologist found the reason
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9 min
A History of Pain: From Ether to the Opioid Crisis
The long struggle to understand what pain is, to measure it and to relieve it, from the first anesthetic to today's painkillers
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20 min
The Price of Progress: What the Industrial Revolution Did to the Human Body
Children whose bones bent for lack of sunlight, workers who lost a way of sleeping humans had kept for centuries, and eyes reshaped by close work indoors
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17 min
The Grammar of Genes: Reading DNA, and Then Learning to Edit It
A photograph shown to rivals without its maker's consent, a string of U's that revealed the first word of the code, and twin girls born with edited genomes
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17 min
The Bones Beneath Our Feet: Fossils, DNA and a Messier Story of Human Origins
A skull dismissed as a frowning Cossack's, a cave reached only through Superman's Crawl, and long-lost relatives who turned up inside our own genomes
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19 min
The Electricity of Life: Two Centuries of Doubt About the Body's Voltage
A frog's leg that kicked on a Bologna lab bench, eyes grown on a tadpole's gut, and flatworms coaxed into growing a second head
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19 min
The Fever Ward: Epidemics and the Making of the Hospital
Why Venice made ships wait forty days, what a nurse's charts revealed about a war hospital, and how every new theory of disease rebuilt the ward
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18 min
The Body's Hidden Clock: Why Every Cell Keeps Time
Why bacteria kept time three billion years ago, why night shifts take such a toll, and why the hour you take a drug can change how well it works
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19 min
Salt, Sweat, and Survival: The Strange Science of How Bodies Beat the Heat
From desert nomads to marathon runners, how humans became the planet's greatest heat-endurance animals
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20 min
The Hidden Science of Smell: The Sense Wired to Memory and Emotion
Why one whiff can carry you back decades, how many smells your nose can really tell apart, and what stores pump into their air
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13 min
The Wood Wide Web: What Fungi Really Do Underground
Beneath every forest floor lies a vast fungal network that feeds, communicates, and shapes life on Earth
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18 min
Born in the Dark: The Strange Biology of Life at Hydrothermal Vents
In the crushing blackness of the deep ocean floor, entire ecosystems run on chemistry instead of sunlight.
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20 min
The Language of Light: Why So Many Creatures Glow
Fireflies that flash in code, a fish that hunts with an invisible red beam, and a jellyfish protein that won a Nobel Prize
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22 min
The Hidden Language of Taste: Why Some Love Foods Others Find Revolting
Supertasters, soapy cilantro and the bliss point: how genes, childhood and food companies decide what tastes good to you
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19 min
Seeds of Survival: The Hidden Story of How Plants Travel, Wait, and Conquer
From a 2,000-year-old date palm to the Svalbard vault, the strange engineering of seeds and why civilization rests on them
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18 min
Guests That Never Left: How Ancient Mergers Built the Complex Cell
Two billion years ago, one cell swallowed another and never let go. Every animal, plant and fungus descends from that union.
Hear any of them in full
Every episode is in the Compound app; Compound+ opens the whole library.