Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with a variety of intestinal worms. The idea, called the 'old friends' hypothesis, is that our immune systems evolved to expect these parasites — and without them, the immune system becomes dysregulated, attacking the body itself or overreacting to harmless substances like pollen or peanuts.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with helminths — parasitic worms — as a matter of course. It's only in the past century or so, in wealthy industrialized nations, that we've largely eliminated them. And it's in those same places that allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases have skyrocketed.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions of Homo sapiens, and our immune systems co-evolved with them over millions of years. The idea is that without these old friends, our immune systems become unbalanced — overly aggressive, prone to attacking the body itself or harmless substances like pollen.

TED

A Whale’s-Eye-View of the Ocean | Eric Stackpole | TED

The footage we had seen was not just data. This was an experience of life. It was reminding me why exploration really matters. It's not just about understanding the world with our logical minds. I believe exploration has huge potential to allow us to experience things with emotion and feel the context of why we're here on Earth.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions — so much so that the human immune system may have evolved to expect their presence. Without them, the theory goes, our immune systems can become overactive, mistakenly attacking the body itself or reacting to harmless substances like pollen or peanuts.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with intestinal worms. The worms, in turn, evolved to modulate their hosts' immune responses — keeping inflammation in check so the host could survive and the worms could keep living inside them. The modern, wormy-free immune system, the hypothesis goes, never got that memo and remains primed to overreact.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions to our species, and our immune systems evolved in their presence. The idea, known as the hygiene hypothesis or 'old friends' hypothesis, is that the absence of these organisms in the modern developed world has left our immune systems without the regulatory signals they evolved to expect — potentially contributing to the rise of allergies, autoimmune diseases, and inflammatory conditions.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, intestinal worms were ubiquitous companions. Only in the twentieth century did sanitation campaigns and deworming programs scrub them from the bodies of people in wealthy nations. But some researchers now suspect that in eliminating these parasites, we may have also dismantled part of our immune system's essential operating instructions.

Origins Podcast

Origins Podcast: Moral Economics with Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth: From Prostitution to Kidney Markets

If only we allowed it to. But what generally gets in the way is something called repugnance, which we'll get to. And um and that we that we should overcome our a priori ideas when they're wrong, which is what science is all about.

The Origins Podcast

Motion, from Galileo to Dark Mysteries. Lecture 3 in the Origins Podcast Series on Physics

The fact that it took Galileo to redefine our thinking about motion and intelligent people from Aristotle and onward had thought about how things moved in the world and gotten it totally wrong suggests that motion is not so simple.

The Origins Podcast

What's New in Science, Sabine Hossenfelder & Lawrence Krauss:

I think there's a lot of confusion about you know just you know quantum what what can quantum actually do and so I thought it would it's a good example to explain just what's reality and what's fiction.

Radiolab

Forests on Forests

It didn't take long for them to realize not only was the forest canopy not empty, it was absolutely filled to the brim with life.

Radiolab

The Resistance of a Cow

What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking water and start drinking … urine?

Radiolab

Antibiotic Apocalypse

searching for answers to an alarming threat to humanity's existence as we know it: antibiotic resistance in bacteria

Radiolab

Staph Retreat

The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives.

How to Do Everything

Crickets and Clowns

Crickets, like all insects, are what are called exothermic, which is a more correct term than cold-blooded, which means that they get their heat from the temperature outside.

Radiolab

Snail Sex Tape

There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very surprising habit—erm kink—of making tiny arrows (actually!) and stabbing each other with them.