M⁴: Medicine, Mystery, Mayhem... and Sometimes Murder

Most people can barely recall a stranger's face after a few minutes. Then there are the outliers, the small slice of the population who can pick a face out of a crowd years later, from a single glimpse, even through disguises. We dig into the research on super recognizers: how scientists identify them, what's happening differently in their brains, and how police departments and border agencies have started recruiting them as real investigative tools. It's a rare case where a "superpower" isn't science fiction, it's just measurable human variation. In this episode, Andrea and Crystal break down what the studies actually show, and what it means for the rest of us who can barely remember a name at a party.

At 19 years old, Loren Schauers made a choice most of us will never have to face.This week, Andrea and Crystal cover the story of a young man whose ordinary workday on a bridge construction site turned into a fight to survive an accident that should have killed him instantly. We break down the injuries, the split-second decisions that saved his life, and the radical surgery that let him keep living, even after losing half his body. It's a story about the limits of the human body, and what it takes to keep going when everything changes in an instant.

He was a physician. He held the rank of general. And for over a decade, he ran one of the most horrifying human experimentation programs in modern history — and walked away from it a free man.This week, we head to Manchuria to unpack the story of Unit 731, the covert biological and chemical warfare research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, and the doctor who built it. We're talking vivisection without anesthesia, deliberate frostbite experiments, and weaponized plague fleas — all conducted under the banner of "scientific research." We'll walk through how a licensed physician convinced his government to fund it, why the victims were stripped of even the dignity of a name, and how a deal with American occupation forces after the war meant almost no one was ever held accountable.As two nurses, this one hit different. We talk about what it means when the Hippocratic Oath gets weaponized, and how the West's Cold War priorities let a war crime of staggering scale disappear from most history books entirely.** Content note: this episode discusses graphic human experimentation and wartime atrocities.