The Disappearing Spoon podcast
The Mysterious Mote
This bonus episode highlights an excerpt from Ferris Jabr’s book Becoming Earth.
The Disappearing Spoon is Distillations’ sister podcast, hosted by best-selling author Sam Kean. The show examines overlooked stories from our past, such as the dental superiority of hunter-gatherers, the sex lives of dinosaurs, and many more moments that never made the history books. When the footnote becomes the real story, small moments become surprisingly powerful.
The Harvard Medical School Janitor Who Solved a Murder
In a building full of dead bodies, how can you tell a murder victim from an unlucky stiff?
Burn After Watching
The world’s first plastic made Hollywood possible—and killed thousands of people along the way.
History’s First Car Crash Victim
How a steam-powered automobile in 1869 snuffed out the life of the brilliant naturalist and astronomer Mary Ward.
Real-Life Zombies
What a bizarre psychological disorder can teach us about memory, human nature, and our sense of who we are.
How Climate Change Will Remake the Human Body
Scientists know how other animals’ bodies will change in warmer climates, but how will human beings respond?
The ‘Mary Poppins’ Cancer
The life of chimney sweeps was nasty, poor, brutish, filthy dirty, and usually short, thanks to a rare cancer of the genitals.
Kangaroo (and Pig and Monkey and Dog and Donkey) Courts
The long, wacky, and surprisingly thought-provoking history of trying animals in human courts.
The Anatomy Riots
How early anatomists provoked some of the strangest riots in history by stealing the dead bodies of the poor.
When a Hole in the Head Is a Good Thing
How a rogue archaeologist in Peru found indisputable evidence of something previously unthinkable—ancient neurosurgery.
When Mosquitoes Cured Insanity
How an early 20th-century doctor pitted one scourge (malaria) against another (syphilis).
The Death of the Lord God Bird
How greed—and a group of Nazi prisoners—killed off one of the most iconic birds in American history: the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Chewing It Over—and Over and Over and Over
How a weird “scientific” diet fad conquered America in the early 1900s.
What’s the Longest Word in the English Language?
And what does it have to do with the unusual chemistry of carbon?
Why Don’t We Have a Male Birth Control Pill Yet?
Scientists created an effective male birth control pill in the 1950s, but it had one undesirable side effect.
Crowdfunding Radium
When American women bought Marie Curie a vital gram of the element.
Parking Lot or Peking Lot?
Have modern archeologists finally tracked down the legendary ‘Peking Man’ bones?
Orphan Vaccines
When the global vaccine supply chain depended on children.
Tales of Love and Madness from the Periodic Table
An interview with author Sam Kean.