The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean

After several heartbreaking setbacks, John James Audubon’s career was in ruins—until he hatched a desperate plan to win new patrons. It involved a rare American eagle, the Bird of Washington. And when the gamble paid off, it made Audubon the most famous ornithologist in history... Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Winning a Nobel Prize is a good thing—mostly. But surprisingly often, Nobel laureates go kooky and start promoting bizarre things like homeopathy, ESP, AIDS denialism, and worse. Psychologists are starting to understand why... Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Nazism was a society-wide catastrophe for Germany, but some professions deserve more blame than others. In particular, there was a surprisingly large percentage of doctors and engineers among the Nazis. Sociologists and historians have now worked out why. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It was one the largest epidemics in American history: 30,000 people paralyzed over a few months in 1930. A dogged epidemiologist eventually traced the cause to adulterated bottles of an illegal liquor/medicine called “jake.” Yet the epidemic is almost completely forgotten. About the only place it survived was in blues songs... Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Rickets was once a devastating disease: up to 90 percent of the children showed symptoms in some cities, including bent spines and bowed legs, and it resulted in many women dying during childbirth. The search for the cause of rickets took decades, and ended with a startling discovery—that much like plants, human beings had the ability to photosynthesize. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

A young woman in the mid-1900s couldn’t take an at-home pregnancy test. Instead, she sent a vial of urine to a clinic, where a technician would, of all things, inject it into a frog, and hormones in the urine would cause the frog to lay eggs. This frog-based test was far faster, easier, and cleaner than any pregnancy test before, and it shifted power for family planning from doctors to women themselves. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It seems like a simple question: how many chromosomes do human beings have? But getting an accurate count proved surprisingly hard for much of last century. In fact, virtually every textbook once cited an incorrect number, until in 1956, a fiery Indonesian scientist finally determined the true count—and had to battle his boss over who would receive credit for this legacy-making discovery. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy