Curiouser and Curiouser Podcast

In predicting presidential voting in the United States, don’t sweat the small stuff, political scientist Nathan Collins explains to Curiouser & Curiouser host Jai Ranganathan.

Where does the idea of marriage — monogamous marriage specifically — come from? Anthropologist Laura Fortunato has some answers.

Marine biologist Steve Katz has tapped a Russian family’s multigenerational measurements of the temperature of a Siberian lake to explain how climate there is part of climate everywhere.

Are we at greater risk now from massive disease outbreaks? It’s a vital question after a wave of deadly E. coli infections in Germany has put hundreds in the hospital and killed more than 20. Disease ecologist Sadie Ryan explains how societal changes are aiding the bugs.

Ecologist Andrew Gonzalez explains that experiments on yeast suggest that threatened species may be able to evolve fast enough — under the right conditions — to survive.

With climate change set to wreck agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa, what will happen to the world’s poorest people?

Geneticist Adam Boyko walks us through the DNA maze that produces dogs of all shapes and sizes from a very few genes.

Biogeochemist Molly Redmond discusses the state of the Gulf of Mexico a year after the deadly Deepwater Horizon oil spill, looking at what’s still unknown and how some lucky breaks kept damage from being even worse.

Over its short lifetime, nuclear power has migrated from being the miracle of America’s energy future to an at times unruly nuclear demon, says historian Patrick McCray.

In this last of a three-part podcast, Dr. Theo Theofanous talks about the health impacts of radiation leaking from the crippled Japanese nuclear power plant and about the future of nuclear power.