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Using stories from science’s past to understand our world
An entomologist from Texas supposedly came up with ‘the single most original idea’ to eradicate screwworms. The Disappearing Spoon has the story.
Find out what a strange little sparrow can teach us about love, sex, and human biology in this episode of The Disappearing Spoon.
Nuclear waste remains dangerous for millennia, so how do we keep people in the distant future away from it?
Learn what two famous neurological traumas—one involving a U.S. president, the other a Supreme Court justice—can teach us about how our own brains perceive reality in this episode of The Disappearing Spoon.
A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit.
This episode of The Disappearing Spoon is the third in a three-part series on legendary physicists and their dumbest mistakes.