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Unexplainable takes listeners right up to the edge of what we know…and then keeps on going. The Unexplainable team — Noam Hassenfeld, Julia Longoria, Byrd Pinkerton, and Meradith Hoddinott — tackles scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and everything we learn diving into the unknown. New episodes Mondays and Wednesdays.
From Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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How does creativity work?
You know that feeling when time and space melt away and new ideas seem to flow through you? Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains what we know about how creative flow states might change the way the networks in our brains interact. Guest:
Spider Web 2.0
Spider silk can be stronger than steel by weight and tougher than Kevlar. Can scientists make their own? Guest: Greg Holland (https://hollandlab.sdsu.edu/members/the-pi/), professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at San Die
The wild orchid mystery
More than just beautiful flowers, wild orchids have been confounding scientists for years. Our friends at Sidedoor — a podcast from the Smithsonian — set out to find a rare specimen for themselves. Guest: Lizzie Peabody (https://www.lizzi
An Alzheimer's breakthrough?
The past few months have been full of Alzheimer's optimism: new ideas that could prevent the disease from taking hold, medications that seem to slow it down, and an experimental surgery that might even be able to reverse its progression. It
Talking with the dead
“If only I could talk with them again.” It’s a common refrain for anyone who is grieving someone they love. Now, we can access technology like deadbots, or AI replicas of a lost loved one, to simulate those conversations, but at what cost?
What’s cooler than being cool?
The future of quantum computing depends on getting way colder than ice cold — down to some of the coldest temperatures in the universe. The quest to build these super refrigerators takes us to nuclear bomb stockpiles, the moon, and … Party
How does music move us? (feat. Sylvan Esso's Amelia Meath)
Music can give us goosebumps. It can make us cry. It can make us move. How? Guests: Amelia Meath, songwriter and singer in Sylvan Esso (https://www.sylvanesso.com/); Elizabeth Margulis (https://www.elizabethmargulis.com/), director of the M
What color is a tennis ball?
Is it yellow? Is it green? Or what if, as one scientist argues, “there’s no such thing as a color?” Guest: Bevil Conway (https://bevilconway.com/), visual artist (https://bevilconway.com/?page_id=309) and neuroscientist at the National Eye
The bodies buried in the bog
When things fall into bogs, they sometimes wind up being beautifully preserved. This includes bodies, sometimes dating back thousands of years. We’re still trying to understand who was buried in the bogs and why. Guest: Anna North (https://
What happened to the giant bugs?
Once upon a time (around 300 million years ago), Earth was home to massive dragonfly-like insects and two meter long millipede-like creatures. Why did they die off? Guests: Ned Snelling (https://www.up.ac.za/research-matters/researcher/edwa
Dark matter and the end of answers
Five-sixths of all the matter in the universe is this invisible stuff called dark matter, and scientists barely understand what it is. So what happens if we can't answer arguably the biggest mystery in the universe? One physicist decided to
What happened before the big bang?
It's a question that seems impossible to grapple with, but scientists won't take no for an answer. In this collaboration with Scientific American, we take on the big bang and a whole bunch of seemingly impossible questions. Guests: Rachel F
What's the oldest story ever told?
An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions. Guests: Ray Norris (https://people.csiro.au/n/r/ray-norris), astrophysicist; Manvir Singh
Stopping the science that could stop the world
When scientists write their own rules for life, how do they know what could go wrong before it’s too late? This is the final episode of our new three-part series, Life from Scratch. Guests: Kate Adamala (https://cbs.umn.edu/directory/kate-a
A breakthrough in synthetic life
Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala has been making major headlines as her lab creates cells that feed, divide, and grow — all from nonliving parts. It may sound like sci-fi, but Kate believes that these “not quite alive” cells are key to a re
Life from scratch
Scientists stripped a cell down to its most essential genes in order to find out what makes life...alive. What they found was more bizarre than they could have imagined. This is the first episode of our new three-part series, Life from Scra
The idea of a song
A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at Switched on Pop (https://open.spotify.com/show/1sgWaKtQxwfjUpZnnK8r7J) (along with the National's
Why can’t I remember being a baby?
And if babies forget their earliest experiences, do they still matter? This episode is a collaboration with Vox's Explain It to Me (https://open.spotify.com/show/1vSUO6Bg4abtjRF7fnGpT1) podcast Guests: Kristin Ohlson (https://www.kristinohl
Can these corals take the heat?
Warming waters are an existential threat to coral reefs, and for people who want to restore them. But in the Republic of Palau, researchers are testing out an approach to help restored reefs survive hotter temperatures — before it's too lat
Why Hank Green takes pseudoscience seriously
Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to spot the difference between the two. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix (https://www.
A trip to the twilight reefs
Down beneath the waves, where the light starts to fade, there's an ecosystem scientists don't fully understand. About a decade ago, some researchers left structures in this mysterious world and let them grow encrusted with life. Now they're
The hidden world that birds see
Birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field, but scientists still don’t know how they actually sense it. Called the holy grail of sensory biology, magnetoreception offers a window into the thousands of unique sensory worlds animals experien
The Godzilla El Niño
This global weather phenomenon could help make 2027 the hottest year on record. Our friends at The Gray Area explore what the upcoming El Niño season could reveal about the future of our climate. Guests: Sean Illing (https://www.vox.com/aut
An argument for the sun
It can be hard to know how to interact with the sun. Some people have swung to opposite ends of the spectrum — either over-tanning or avoiding the sun entirely. But what would a middle ground look like? To watch this episode on video, find
What the Odyssey is hiding
The Late Bronze Age, when the Trojan War supposedly took place, was way more modern than Homer made it seem. But around 1177 BCE, a vast network of interconnected societies suddenly collapsed. What caused arguably the greatest societal coll
Dinosaur mysteries with Riley Black
How do we know what we know about dinosaurs? Riley Black takes us back to the Mesozoic Era and explains how paleontologists piece together the lives of dinosaurs from often fragmentary clues. To watch this episode on video, find us on Netfl
When doctors don't know what's wrong
A 2015 review found that most people in the US will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime. Some of those errors are less devastating than others, but how can we help people get better answers about their health? One family's searc
Are you a lyric person or a music person?
When people listen to songs, why do some people pay more attention to the music, and some people pay more attention to the lyrics? The answer goes way deeper than you might think — to the heart of what it means to hear anything at all. To w
Big news!
Unexplainable is coming to Netflix! Starting Monday, July 13. For show transcripts, go to (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bMXuLuyy3zTLCnblKVWUBq4Gd84PY8sG)http://vox.com/unxtranscripts (https://drive.goog
Are we all living in an enormous black hole?
It’s possible that the entire observable universe is inside a black hole. All we need to do in order to find out is … build a gigantic particle collider around the moon. (Originally aired in 2024) Guest: James Beacham (https://jbbeacham.com
