Unhealthy Curiosity

For thousands of years, doctors believed urine revealed the hidden workings of the body. By peering at a patient’s wee, they diagnosed everything from epilepsy to death — sometimes without even meeting the patient.This episode explores the strange history of uroscopy, the rise of the “piss prophets”, and why modern doctors still occasionally ask you for a wee sample today.

Your DNA can build a body, grow a tumour, or implicate you in a crime. This episode explores what happens when DNA evidence meets identical twins, and why one of Europe’s most feared serial killers turned out to be much stranger than anyone expected.

Your oesophagus was never designed to handle acid splashes — and yet, sometimes it has to. This episode looks at heartburn — why it happens, the neat trick emergency doctors use to distinguish it from a heart attack, and what spaceflight reveals about reflux.

Many animals use chemical signals — pheromones — to find mates, mark territory, and warn of danger. Humans, despite popular belief, can’t detect them. This episode examines these signals — including the anatomical relic of our pheromone-sniffing past, still sitting in the middle of your face.

Can stress really make someone sweat blood? In rare cases, yes. This episode explores the strange condition known as hematidrosis — and why hippos seem to have it too.

When you eat meat, you’re eating muscle — the same tissue that moves your own body. This episode explores the anatomical overlap between butcher’s cuts and human muscles, and what cannibals and curious journalists have reported about the smell and taste of human flesh. A brief lesson in comparative anatomy, with some unsettling culinary implications.

No windows. No watches. No TV. When humans were sealed underground for weeks at a time without clocks, their biology kept time anyway. This episode explores the bunker experiments that revealed the brain’s internal clock — and why it’s so stubborn.

From Magellan’s three-year voyage to the invention of the International Date Line, this episode explores how humans resolved the problem of lost and gained days on paper — but not in human physiology.

Julius Caesar hid his baldness with a comb-over. Not even a dictator can dictate his own hairline.In this episode, I explore the strange hormonal paradox behind male pattern baldness — why the same androgens that thicken your beard can shrink the follicles on your scalp. From ancient observations to twentieth-century hormone experiments, this is the biology of balding.