Strange Bites

Lance Martin

Strange Bites is a short science podcast. Lance Martin takes a real discovery in biology, physics, neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, or paleontology and explains it in about fifteen minutes, with just enough story to make the facts stick.New episodes twice a week.

Recent bites include a brain built from two lineages, bacteria that grow their own wires, a gene that can still jump, and fossils that may have been an animal’s compass. Sources are in the show notes. The science is not simplified past recognition. It is told so you can follow it.

If you want weird science, new discoveries, and a science podcast you can finish on a walk, start anywhere. Stay strange. Question everything.

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S1 · E75
Today · 10 min
Episode 75: The Screw Built from One Molecule
More than two thousand years ago, Archimedes designed a spiral that lifts water uphill by turning inside a cylinder. Farmers still use versions of it. Hydroelectric plants use larger ones as turbines. The principle is simple enough that it has survived almost unchanged. Now an international team has built a version that is one molecule long, a few millionths of a millimeter, and wired between two gold electrodes. When electric current passes through the spiral, the molecule rotates. Reverse the voltage and it rotates the other way. Once the rotation becomes continuous, the molecule conducts electricity up to a hundred times better than it does while sitting still. The paper, Current-Driven Molecular Machine with Rotation-Enhanced Conductance, was published in Nature on 22 October 2026. The molecule was synthesized by the group of Michael Pittelkow at the University of Copenhagen. The single-molecule experiments were performed by Oren Tal and Anil Kumar Singh at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Theoretical work came from Fabian Pauly’s group at the University of Augsburg, together with collaborators at the Niels Bohr Institute and Huazhong University. This is Strange Bites. Tonight the lecture is about an ancient machine rebuilt at the scale of a single molecule, and about a feedback loop in which the current that makes the screw turn also makes the screw a better conductor. Sources Nature paper: Current-Driven Molecular Machine with Rotation-Enhanced Conductance. Nature, 22 October 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11312-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11312-x University of Augsburg / EurekAlert press release, 22 October 2026: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1148951 ScienceDaily summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261030002940.htm Weizmann Institute of Science summary: https://www.weizmann.ca/news/archimedes-screw-the-molecular-version/
S1 · E74
Monday · 12 min
Episode 74: The Magnet That Cancels and Still Answers
For nearly a century, physics treated magnetism in materials as a binary. Either the electron spins lined up in the same direction, making a ferromagnet that sticks to the refrigerator, or they alternated and canceled, making an antiferromagnet with no net magnetization at all. In 2022, theorists proposed a third possibility. They called it altermagnetism. In an altermagnet the spins still alternate and cancel, so there is no external magnetic field, but the crystal lattice around the up spins is rotated relative to the lattice around the down spins. That geometric twist breaks the symmetry that would otherwise make the material identical to its mirror image. The result is zero net magnetization, like an antiferromagnet, plus the ability to carry spin-polarized currents and a chiral signature, like a ferromagnet. A team led by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has now provided direct experimental evidence of that signature in manganese telluride, or MnTe. Using circularly polarized X-rays at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, they observed a chiral response that a conventional antiferromagnet should not produce. The paper, Chiral altermagnon in MnTe, was published in Science on 29 October 2026. The lead author is Daniel Jost, associate scientist at SLAC and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences. This is Strange Bites episode 74. Tonight the story is about a third kind of magnet that was invisible until the lattice twist was measured, and about why zero net magnetization with usable spin currents is useful. SOURCES https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-10-29-slac-researchers-find-proof-altermagnetism-new-magnetic-phase https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261104012256.htm Paper: D. Jost et al. Chiral altermagnon in MnTe. Science, 29 October 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv3196 Related: Faure et al., polarized neutron scattering on MnF2, same issue of Science.
S1 · E73
November 4 · 12 min
Episode 73: The Mushroom That Draws Little People
In southwest China and in the northern Philippines, people who eat a certain wild mushroom without cooking it long enough sometimes report the same thing. They see dozens or hundreds of tiny human figures, three to thirty centimeters tall, walking around real objects, climbing over surfaces, and, in at least one account, jumping off a spoon into a bowl of soup. The figures are often described as elves, clowns, or fairy-like characters in bright clothes. They look solid. They follow the edges of tables. They do not walk through walls. The mushroom is Lanmaoa Asiatica, a bolete sold in markets in Yunnan and known locally as Jian Shou Qing, which means something like “turns blue in the hand.” In the Philippines it is called Sedesdem. Researchers at the University of Utah, Colin Domnauer and Bryn Dentinger, used DNA sequencing to show that the Chinese and Philippine mushrooms are the same species. Chemical and genetic tests found none of the known psychoactive compounds of other mushrooms, including psilocybin. The compound that produces the visions has not been identified. This is Episode 73. Tonight the we learn about a mushroom that makes the same specific hallucination in places thousands of miles apart, and about what that consistency suggests. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261024222021.htm https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/scientists-identify-mushroom-behind-tiny-people-hallucinations/ https://www.sciencealert.com/mushroom-behind-tiny-human-visions-lacks-genes-for-known-psychedelics https://www.futurity.org/mushroom-tiny-people-hallucinations-3342322/ Paper: Domnauer and Dentinger. Mycologia, 2026. (University of Utah / Natural History Museum of Utah.)
S1 · E72
November 2 · 12 min
Episode 72: The Fungus Named for a Dinosaur
In the forests of Yunnan, in southwestern China, a fungus the size of a traffic cone has been growing out of the roots of oak trees, and until 2024 no one in science had named it. The fruiting bodies are whitish to pale yellow, club-like or finger-like, up to fifty centimeters tall and as heavy as 2.2 kilograms. That is the largest known fruiting body in the entire phylum Ascomycota, the group of fungi that make spores in tiny sacs rather than on the gills of a classic mushroom. The species is Dianjunus rex, nicknamed D-rex. It is not just a new species. It required a new genus and a new family, Dianjunaceae, inside the order Xylariales. A molecular clock places the origin of that family around sixty-five million years ago, roughly a million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. The authors are careful. The timing is suggestive. It is not proof that the extinction created the fungus. This is episode 72. Tonight the get into a giant that was hiding in plain sight, and ponder what a dead tree and a molecular clock can still tell us. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261025073034.htm https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147398 https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-uncover-d-rex-gigantic-new-king-fungus-from-china-traces-its-roots-to-65-million-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/meet-d-rex-a-newly-discovered-5-pound-fungus-with-a-65-million-year-old-lineage-49812 Paper: Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, Zhang, Yang, Xie, Su, Liu, Wang, Liu, Yang, Yang, Liu, Shi, Wan, Cheewangkoon, Dai, Senanayake, and Yu. Unearthing a fungal giant: Dianjunaceae fam. nov., a novel Paleocene lineage of Xylariales harboring Dianjunus rex gen. et sp. nov. Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.3389/ffunb.2026.1940464
S1 · E71
October 28 · 12 min
Episode 71: The Diamond That Answered the Laser
A diamond the size of a small pebble, floating in a laboratory in Okinawa, moved because the electrons inside it changed their spin. Not because someone pushed it. Not because a magnet was switched on in the ordinary way. Because billions of tiny quantum magnets, trapped in defects in the crystal, were told by a green laser to point a certain way, and the force from those spins was enough to shift the whole levitating assembly by about a hundred nanometers against gravity. The work comes from the Quantum Machines Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, OIST. The paper is in Science Advances, published on October 7, 2026: Spin-force from a Nitrogen-Vacancy ensemble drives a 100 mg levitated resonator. The authors are Anshuman Nayak, Daehee Kim, Shilu Tian, and Jason Twamley. It is the first time a purely quantum force has been seen measurably moving a macroscopic object of this size while that object is subject to gravity. This is Strange Bites episode 70, and tonight the story is about a nudge that is still classical in its response, and about how far we still are from a real Schrödinger’s cat. SOURCES https://www.oist.jp/news-center/news/2026/10/8/first-observation-quantum-spins-shifting-centimeter-scale-object-lab https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first-time-ever-quantum-spins-shift-a-centimeter-scale-object https://scitechdaily.com/a-quantum-breakthrough-inside-a-diamond-could-help-solve-one-of-einsteins-greatest-mysteries/ Paper: Nayak, Kim, Tian, and Twamley. Spin-force from a Nitrogen-Vacancy ensemble drives a 100 mg levitated resonator. Science Advances, 7 October 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh0566 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeh0566
S1 · E70
October 26 · 12 min
Episode 70: The Ghostly Green Star
Most stars cannot be green. That has been the rule for as long as anyone has thought carefully about the colors of the sky. Temperature sets the color. Cool stars lean orange. Stars like the Sun are white or pale yellow. The hottest are blue-white. Green sits in a gap that ordinary stellar physics does not fill. A star that looked green would have to be doing something temperature alone cannot do. Astronomers at the University of Warwick have now found one. It is not a living star. It is a white dwarf, the dense remnant of a sun-like star that has already died, catalogued as WD J1330+6435. It sits about 280 light-years away in the constellation Draco. Models of human color vision, applied to its spectrum, say that if you could stand close enough to see its disk, it would glow chartreuse green. Sodium in its atmosphere is swallowing the orange and red light. What is left is green. This is Strange Bites episode 70, and tonight the story is about a color that was not supposed to exist on a star, and about the dead planetary system that painted it. SOURCES https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147389 https://www.reuters.com/science/newly-identified-green-star-leaves-astronomers-amazed-2026-10-16/ https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/green-star-white-dwarf-discovery https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015120000.htm Paper: Hollands and colleagues. Any colour you like: The diverse chromaticities of white dwarfs. RAS Techniques and Instruments, 2026.
S1 · E69
October 21 · 11 min
Episode 69: The Rule That Does Not Care About Size
A black hole does not care how big it is when it decides to burp. That is the finding, stripped to one sentence. Whether the hole is about ten times the mass of the Sun or millions of times heavier, it appears to launch its powerful jets at the same point in its feeding cycle. The critical mark is about two percent of a limit called the Eddington limit, the point where the outward push of radiation balances the inward pull of gravity. The work was led by Dr. Adelle Goodwin at Curtin University’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, with Dr. Andrew Mummery at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It is published in Nature Astronomy under the title A universal critical accretion rate for black hole jet formation. They looked at stars being torn apart by supermassive black holes, events called tidal disruption events, and found a pattern that matches what we already knew from much smaller holes in our own galaxy. This is Strange Bites episode69. Tonight the Story is about a rule that seems to ignore size, and about why some black holes go quiet and then light up hundreds or thousands of days later. SOURCES https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144361 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144447 https://scitechdaily.com/astronomers-discover-a-universal-trigger-for-black-hole-jets/ Paper: Goodwin, Mummery, and colleagues. A universal critical accretion rate for black hole jet formation. Nature Astronomy.
S1 · E68
October 19 · 12 min
Episode 68: The Tail That Chose to Leave
About ninety-nine million years ago, in a forest that is now northern Myanmar, a small lizard made a decision that is still sitting in a piece of amber. Something came for it. The lizard dropped its tail. The tail did not come off by accident. The break is clean, the muscle ring is still there, and the shape matches what a living lizard does on purpose when it leaves a piece of itself behind. The specimen is a detached tail, catalogued as SMNHTAU.R.21353, held at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. It is the first direct fossil evidence of voluntary tail shedding in a vertebrate. Not a broken bone. Not a bite mark. A completed escape, frozen in resin. Tonight the story is about a defensive trick that was already working in the mid-Cretaceous, and about what amber can keep when stone cannot. SOURCES https://www.palaeo-electronica.org/content/2026/5967-first-fossil-evidence-for-a-dropped-lizard-tail https://doi.org/10.26879/1706 https://www.palaeo-electronica.org/content/2026/5983-first-fossil-evidence-for-a-dropped-lizard-tail-supplemental-materials Paper: Fabrikant, Christopoulos, Nasser, and Davranoglou. Direct fossil evidence of caudal autotomy in a Cretaceous lizard. Palaeontologia Electronica, 29(3):a38, 2026.
S1 · E67
October 14 · 9 min
Episode 67: The Needle in the Stone
Somewhere under the Atlantic, in mud that has not seen daylight since the Cretaceous, there is a needle smaller than a speck of dust. It is made of magnetite, the same iron mineral a compass desires, but it is not a compass you could hold. It’s about the size of a bacterial cell and its magnetism is arranged like a tornado around a hollow center. Whatever grew it was reading the planet. These are magnetofossils. Giant ones, shaped like spearheads, spindles, bullets, and needles, left in seafloor sediment by an animal we still cannot name. A team at the University of Cambridge, working with the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, took the first three-dimensional pictures of the magnetism inside one of them and found a structure that looks built to sense both the direction and the strength of Earth’s field. Direction tells you which way is north. Strength, changing from place to place, tells you where you are. This is Strange Bites episode 67. Tonight we learn about a compass with no owner, and about the oldest evidence we have that an animal was navigating by the planet itself. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260930020329.htm https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1106425 https://www.reuters.com/science/magnetic-fossils-may-reveal-ancient-creatures-internal-gps-system-2025-11-17/ Paper: Harrison and colleagues. Communications Earth and Environment, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02721-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02721-3
S1 · E66
October 12 · 10 min
Episode 66: The Gene That Refused to Sit Still
There is a gene in you that was supposed to have retired. It learned a job in the brain, the kind of job a settled gene is allowed to keep, and then it refused to sit down. Most of the old movers in the human genome are fossils. This one kept the knife. The gene is called BC200. It is expressed mainly in neurons. It began, millions of years ago, as a transposon, one of the mobile pieces of DNA we still call jumping genes. Genes that come from that kind of ancestry usually lose the ability to move once evolution puts them to work. BC200 did not. Cornell researchers found copies of it inside a human poxvirus, and the paper that followed says the movement never really stopped. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261002080013.htm https://www.sciencealert.com/dna-from-a-human-brain-gene-has-turned-up-in-a-virus https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/never-seen-before-type-of-human-jumping-gene-found-in-poxvirus-416882 Paper: Gao, Pritham, Feschotte, Sun. Escape of the BC200 gene to a human poxvirus reveals its persistent transposition in primates. Science, 24 September 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeh3441 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeh3441
S1 · E65
October 7 · 15 min
Episode 65: The Microbe that Learned to Flip a Neuron
On October 5, 2026, in Stockholm, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet gave the Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three people who never set out to build a remote control for memory. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel share it “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” The prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor, split three ways. The press line is almost too clean: light-seeking algae gave us a switch for nerve cells. Here is the less clean version, which is the better one. This is Episode 65. Sources https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/popular-information/ https://www.science.org/content/article/method-controlling-brain-cells-light-wins-nobel https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/deisseroth-hegemann-nagelwin-2026-nobel-medicine-prize-2026-10-05/ https://www.the-scientist.com/nobel-prize-for-optogenetics-75099 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1936192100 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1072068 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1525 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11028 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01351-4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12860890/ Key papers behind those links: Nagel et al., Science 2002 (channelrhodopsin-1); Nagel et al., PNAS 2003 (channelrhodopsin-2); Boyden, Zhang, Bamberg, Nagel, Deisseroth et al., Nature Neuroscience 2005; Aravanis et al., Journal of Neural Engineering 2007 (living mouse); Liu et al., Nature 2012 (fear engram); Sahel et al., Nature Medicine 2021 (partial vision restoration).
S1 · E64
October 5 · 12 min
Episode 64: Is Your Brain One Organ or Two?
Put a finger on the back of your neck. Not hard. Just enough to feel the pulse. That pulse is not a thought. It is an older employee. It keeps the heart honest. It keeps the lungs from quitting mid-sentence. It will still be on the clock when the part of you that writes poems has gone to bed. For centuries we called the whole arrangement one organ. One brain. One you. Stanford opened the box and found a seam. The paper dropped in Nature Neuroscience, September 18, 2026. The title sounds harmless until you sit with it: Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain. Three things to hold onto while we dive into the details. First, the front of the brain and the back of the brain do not come from the same parent cell. Second, that split is ancient. Not a human quirk. A half-billion-year habit. Third, once you respect the split, you can grow the neurons medicine kept failing to grow. Sources https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/09/human-brain-two-separate-organs https://www.sci.news/othersciences/neuroscience/human-brain-two-organs-15078.html https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260920222352.htm https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-separate-organs-evolution-31219/ https://scitechdaily.com/stanford-researchers-discover-that-the-human-brain-may-be-two-separate-organs-fused-together/ Paper: Jokhai, Dundes, et al., “Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain,” Nature Neuroscience, 18 September 2026.
S1 · E63
September 30 · 15 min
Episode 63: The Frequency of the Heart
You can hear a heart from across a room if the room is quiet enough. A wet drum in the dark that has been keeping time since before you had a name. Most of the time it does the job without asking for applause. Sixty to a hundred beats a minute. In. Out. Squeeze. Rest. A little electric spark jumps from a knot of cells at the top of the right atrium, races down hidden highways, and the muscle obeys. Until it doesn’t. Then the drum misses. Skips. Stutters. Races like a frightened animal. For about three million people in the United States alone, the modern answer has been the same for decades: cut a pocket in the chest, slide in a metal box the size of a match tin, and thread wires into the living muscle so a computer can shout “now” at the heart in a language of voltage. It works. It has saved an ocean of lives. It is also a small act of invasion we have learned to call normal. In Episode 63 we head back to June of 2026 where a team at MIT, working with partners at the USC, Harvard, UCLA, and Caltech, published a different idea in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. They asked whether the heart could be taught to take orders from sound. From outside the body. From a sticker about the size of a postage stamp. This is the story of that sticker, and of the strange new sentence it writes across the chest Sources https://news.mit.edu/2026/ultrasound-based-pacemaker-noninvasively-steadies-heart-0602 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01673-z https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2026/06/a-pacemaker-without-surgery-usc-viterbis-qifa-zhou-and-teams-ultrasound-breakthrough-could-change-heart-care/ https://physicsworld.com/a/wearable-pacemaker-uses-ultrasound-to-control-heart-rhythm/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/pacemaker-and-ultrasound https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/new-wearable-ultrasound-pacemaker-works-outside-body-2026a1000ndu https://interestingengineering.com/science/mit-non-invasive-wearable-pacemaker https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/mit-scientists-replace-pacemakers-with-wearable-ultrasound-patch/ https://news.mit.edu/2022/ultrasound-stickers-0728
S1 · E62
September 28 · 18 min
Episode 62: Fountain of Youth for Your Eyes??
Close your eyes for a second. Not all the way. Just enough that the world goes soft. Behind those lids is a piece of your brain that crawled forward during evolution and learned how to drink light. Those cells, the ones that grab photons and fire them down a cable into your skull, are some of the most stubborn cells you own. Once they die, they do not come back. Medicine has spent a century treating that as a law of nature. In 2020, a lab in Boston published a paper that treated it like a suggestion. Episode 62 is a story about three genes, a common antibiotic, a Nobel Prize that almost went too far, and a quiet idea that aging might not be rust. It might be a lost instruction manual. And if that is true, if the damage we call “getting old” is partly a reading error, then some of the most permanent losses in the human body may not be permanent at all. Sources https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7752134/ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03403-0 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10739681/ https://www.lifebiosciences.com/life-biosciences-announces-fda-clearance-of-ind-application-for-er-100-in-optic-neuropathies/ https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/06/09/3308634/0/en/Life-Biosciences-Announces-First-Patient-Dosed-in-Phase-1-Trial-of-ER-100-for-Optic-Neuropathies.html https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07290244 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01836-7 https://www.wired.com/story/longevity-startup-doses-first-human-in-bid-to-reverse-age-related-sight-loss/ https://www.lifebiosciences.com/pipeline/ https://lifespan.io/life-biosciences-claims-visual-restoration-in-primates/ https://boxlifemagazine.com/eye-brain-age-reversal-gene-combo/ https://time.com/collection/longevity-leaders/2026/david-sinclair/
S1 · E61
September 23 · 13 min
Episode 61: The 11,000 Year Old Human/Leopard Statue
Eleven thousand years ago, someone in what is now southeastern Turkey sat down with a block of limestone and carved a story we still cannot read. A person sitting on the back of a leopard. In Episode 61, we bring that story back into the light. Imagine you are standing in the dry hills of the Tektek Mountains. The wind that tastes like dust and thyme. Its a landscape that looks empty until you realize it is anything but. Under those hills sits a necklace of ancient sites archaeologists now call Taş Tepeler, the Stone Hills. Göbekli Tepe is the famous sibling, the one with the T-shaped pillars and the wild-animal carvings that rewrote textbooks. About thirty miles east of it is Karahan Tepe. Same world. Same era. Less famous. Just as strange. Karahan Tepe belongs to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. That is a fancy way of saying: people were already building big stone rooms, already carving human faces and animal bodies, and they had not invented pottery yet. No wheels. No writing. No metal tools. Woolly mammoths were still wandering other parts of the planet. And here, on a hill in what is now Şanlıurfa Province, communities were cutting chambers into bedrock and lining walls with benches. Systematic digging only started in 2019, under Professor Necmi Karul of Istanbul University. In a handful of seasons the site has poured out human statues, leopard heads, snarling cats on people’s backs, a giant seated figure with ribs like a starving man, even a T-shaped pillar with a human face. The people who lived here were not doodling. They were thinking in stone. Sources https://basin.ktb.gov.tr/TR-472351/karahantepede-11-bin-yillik-benzersiz-heykel.html https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/08/28/neolithic-sculpture-of-human-riding-a-leopard-discovered-in-turkey https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-uncover-a-neolithic-sculpture-of-a-human-riding-a-leopard-thats-unlike-anything-we-have-encountered-before-180989477/ https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/middle-east/unlike-anything-seen-before-archaeologists-unearth-a-unique-11-000-year-old-statue-of-a-person-riding-a-leopard-from-one-of-the-worlds-earliest-settlements https://karahantepe.net/human-on-leopard-statue https://arkeonews.net/a-unique-11000-year-old-statue-of-a-human-sitting-on-a-leopard-unearthed-at-karahantepe/ https://www.anatolianarchaeology.net/11000-year-old-statue-found-at-karahantepe-shows-a-human-sitting-on-a-leopard/ https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/76809 https://www.discovermagazine.com/an-11-000-year-old-sculpture-of-a-person-riding-a-leopard-offers-a-new-glimpse-into-neolithic-t-rkiye-49604 https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/karahantepe-leopard-statue-00103122 https://www.iflscience.com/unusual-11000-year-old-statue-of-a-human-riding-a-leopard-discovered-at-karahan-tepe-one-of-humanitys-oldest-settlements-84499 https://www.bta.bg/en/news/balkans/1191391-11-000-year-old-statue-of-human-riding-leopard-discovered-at-karahantepe-in-t-rk https://www.zmescience.com/science/archaeology/statue-man-riding-leopard-turkey/ https://tastepeler.org/en
S1 · E60
September 21 · 14 min
Episode 60: Bacteria that Grows Metal Cables
In episode 60 we crawl into the muck and find a creature that does not wait for a plug. It grows its own power lines out of nickel it steals from the dirt, braids them thinner than thought, and runs electricity through a body that can be thousands of cells long. The discovery is real. The new structural work is led by Filip Meysman at the University of Antwerp, with colleagues including Bent Smets and Silvia Hidalgo Martinez. It landed in Nature Communications under a title that sounds like an electrician’s fever dream: highly efficient long-range conduction through a biosynthetic nickel-organic framework. Sources https://thedebrief.org/scientists-discover-bacteria-growing-microscopic-electrical-wires-with-extraordinary-conductivity/ https://www.science.org/content/article/metal-scaffolds-turn-bacteria-live-wires https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-76989-0 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.10.681601v1 https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13117 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24312-4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8238962/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12115-7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_bacteria https://asm.org/articles/2022/july/cable-bacteria-electric-marvels-of-the-microbial-w
S1 · E59
September 16 · 15 min
Episode 59: Living Circuit Boards
In Episode 59 we walk into a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where engineers did not build a faster chip. They taught bacteria to act like the tiny switches inside your phone… and then they printed those living switches onto a plate and watched a circuit board wake up and grow. The discovery is real. The paper landed in Nature Chemical Biology on August 17, 2026. The facts stay on the table. The story around them is ours. Sources https://news.mit.edu/2026/mit-engineers-connect-bacteria-to-create-living-transistors-0817 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-026-02300-3 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260901070526.htm https://scitechdaily.com/mit-engineers-create-a-living-circuit-board-from-bacteria/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/scientists-turn-bacteria-into-transistors-to-build-living-circuit-boards/ https://www.hackster.io/news/mit-scientists-build-computer-circuits-out-of-living-bacteria-f4f34d2a06b0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41589-026-02300-3
S1 · E58
September 14 · 15 min
Episode 58: The Devil Flower
In Episode 58 we talk a walk through a mountain forest in western Thailand. It’s May. The air is wet. The ground is a carpet of dead leaves. Small bamboo leans in. Almost nothing down here wants to be seen. Then something does. It is not green. It is not pretty in the postcard way. It looks like a thumb-sized lantern that crawled out of a nightmare and decided to bloom. Black body. Three thin horns. Two orange patches near the base that stare back at you like eyes. This is not folklore. This is a plant. And it doesn’t eat sunlight. On May 13th, 2025, botanists working in Thong Pha PhumNational Park, in Kanchanaburi Province, found a plant that did not match the book. Sources https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.278.202868 https://phytokeys.pensoft.net/article/202868/ https://blog.pensoft.net/2026/09/02/new-devil-flower-species-discovered-in-thai-national-park/ https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1141681 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260903064217.htm https://gizmodo.com/this-newly-discovered-demonic-looking-flower-is-nightmare-fuel-2000806199 https://www.discovermagazine.com/a-newly-discovered-devil-flower-hides-beneath-the-forest-floor-before-emerging-with-black-petals-and-demon-like-eyes-49625 https://phys.org/news/2026-09-devil-species-thai-national.html https://academic.oup.com/botlinnean/article-abstract/193/3/287/5815711
S1 · E57
September 10 · 14 min
Episode 57: The Hidden Magic in the Sea Squirt
There is an animal that looks like a mistake. It has no face you would trust. It does not hunt. It does not run. It sits on a rock in cold water, pumps the ocean through a hole in its head, and filters dinner out of the dark. In Korea they call it meongge. In Japan they call it hoya. On a plate it looks like something the sea coughed up and then thought better of. People eat it anyway. Raw. Sometimes still twitching. Scientists have a colder name for the whole family: Ascidiacea. Sea squirts. And here is the part that should not be true. A fat hidden in that rubbery little sack was fed to old mice for two months. The mice found a hidden platform in a pool the way younger mice do. The connections in their brains thickened. The brain’s own immune cells stopped shouting. And the old coats on their backs grew new hair, darker, thicker, glossier. If aging is a slow leak in the membrane of the self, somebody just found a patch in the tide. This is Episode 57: The Magic Sea Squirt. Sources https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/molecular-biosciences/articles/10.3389/fmolb.2022.815320/full https://doi.org/10.3389/fmolb.2022.815320 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35281262/ https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260902234518.htm https://www.lifespan.io/news/plasmalogens-alleviate-age-related-cognitive-decline-in-mice/ https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2026.1906996/full https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2026.1906996 https://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/28/17/6328 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10488995/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5360580/ https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/05/electrical-pulses-rejuvenate-sea-squirts-offering-clues-on-human-aging
S1 · E56
September 8 · 15 min
Episode 56: The Cookie That Used to Be a Bottle
Picture the last plastic water bottle you threw away. Not the heroic one you rinsed and dropped in the blue bin. The other one. The one that rolled under the passenger seat and cooked all summer. The one that still had a little warm water in the bottom and a label that had given up being a label. Now picture that bottle… becoming dessert. Vanilla-scented. Protein-rich. Piped out of a 3D printer in the shape of a tiny Greek letter. Sitting on a plate next to a NASA patch like it has every right to be there. Before you gag, because that's how I felt it, you are not being asked to chew a bottle. You are being asked to consider something stranger. That the carbon in trash and the carbon in a cookie are, at the atomic level, the same kind of leftover star-stuff. And that a few stubborn people in southern Illinois have taught yeast how to notice. This Episode 56 The Cookie That Used to Be a Bottle Sources https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139679 https://www.acs.org/pressroom/presspacs/2026/august/this-cookie-started-its-life-as-a-plastic-bottle.html https://acs.digitellinc.com/live/37/session/586399 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQywN1VuMKU https://news.siu.edu/2021/11/110221-SIU-research-team-aims-to-move-food-replication-from-science-fiction-to-reality.php https://thesouthern.com/news/education/siu-researchers-mitigate-two-problems-by-transforming-waste-plastic-into-food/article_c5762c24-fad5-545d-a6c3-52f5e2a969a9.html https://www.newscientist.com/article/2585463-plastic-bottles-can-be-turned-into-edible-vanilla-flavour-cookies/ https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/aug/24/cookies-plastic-astronauts-space-food https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1139678 https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/08/24/cookies-made-from-plastic-bottles-could-ease-food-shortages-feed-nasa-crews-in-space/ https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-made-a-cookie-out-of-recycled-plastic-slurry-welcome-to-2026 https://www.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/engineered-yeasts-turn-pet-bottles-and-crop-waste-into-3d-printed-protein-cookies.html https://www.earth.com/plants/scientists-turn-plastic-bottle-waste-into-vanilla-scented-cookies/ https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2021/gc/d1gc00931a

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