Audiofiles!

The man who helped bring the Hubble Space Telescope into focus.

Legions of fetal cells hang out inside a mother for decades after she gives birth — and might even help heal her when she’s sick or hurt.

We’re taught to avoid doing things we’ll regret for the rest of our lives, but why? Author Kathryn Schulz makes the case for cherishing our worst choices — like her tattoo.

In 1941, two warships from Australia and Germany clashed off the coast of western Australia. Both sank. Despite extensive search efforts, the ships weren’t found until 2008, when psychologists analyzed statements given by surviving crew members.

The phenomenon known as genetic sexual attraction occurs when family members who have never met until adulthood find themselves attracted to one another. And for those who experience it, GSA is often shrouded in secrecy, shame, and fear.

The. This. Though. I. And. An. There. That. Psychologist James Pennebaker explains how the words we think about the least can reveal the most about our relationships.

Blaise Allysen Kearsley ponders the question: How do you learn about sexuality when no one tells you anything useful and everyone else seems to know what they’re doing?

Our brain performs all kinds of weird actions that seem counter-intuitive. What tricks do our minds play when we think it’s okay to lie, cheat, or steal? How in control are we of our decisions? And why do our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy?

Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says our beliefs about what makes us happy are often wrong and challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel happy even when things don’t go as planned.

After a terrible loss, science writer Carl Zimmer goes to report from the South Sudan, surrounded by the world’s deadliest parasites.

In 1822, an accidental shooting left Alexis St. Martin with a hole in his gut that wouldn’t heal, but didn’t kill him either. Instead, the strange relationship that developed between the patient and his doctor opened up a one-of-a-kind window into the human body.

Two stories about heart-stopping falls: David Eagleman gets to the bottom of what goes on in our brains during those life or death moments when time seems to slow way down. Plus, the story of Sarita and Simon, who fell in, and then out, of love.

Beethoven would try 70 versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one. But other great ideas seem to come out of the blue. Bob Dylan wrote “Like a Rolling Stone” soon after telling his manager that he was quitting the business. Scientists are now learning more about how such moments occur, says science writer Jonah Lehrer.

At 17, Eleanor Longden started to hear voices and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic — a label she rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic, living happily with the voices.

Alan Turing was the first person to conceive of the computer age. He is considered the father of artificial intelligence. But the world wasn’t kind to Turing. In 1952, he was convicted under a British law prohibiting “acts of gross indecency between men.”

Hidden away in a castle-like mound on the African savannah lives the termite queen. There, in an impenetrable earthen capsule, she lays a quarter of a billion children.

Is there such thing as a good cage? The answer goes back to the ’70s, to the moment the modern zoo was born, embodied by the few tentative steps of a gorilla named Kiki.

Author and Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt explores the 2,000 year-old writings of Lucretius and his “spookily modern” creation tale.

More expensive wines should taste better than cheap ones. It’s like a cardinal rule. But do they? And what does one little rodent in a salad say about a restaurant’s future?

In the US, it’s called a line. In Canada, it’s often referred to as a line-up. Pretty much everywhere else, it’s known as a queue. Benjamen Walker’s preoccupation with the subject led him to find a man known as “Dr. Queue,” a queue theorist at MIT.

At this moment, a quiet war is raging in our oceans. The opponents are microscopic, but the scope is so vast it rivals Lord of the Rings. And it’s vital to our own survival.

An autotune remix of footage from TED talks, Carl Sagan documentaries, Discovery Channel programming, and other things brain. From the Symphony of Science series.

As a brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor got an unusual research opportunity. She had a massive stroke, and watched in fascination as her functions shut down one by one.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has released transcripts and audio recordings made at the NRC Operations Center during the meltdown in Japan. The release of the tapes came at the request of the public radio program “BURN: An Energy Journal.”

Meghan Groome encounters a young science teachers rite of passage.

Within weeks of pledging to send a man to the moon, President Kennedy got cold feet and tried to get out of the commitment by bringing the Soviets on-board. The first of a two-part series on the lead up to Apollo 11′s flight to the moon.

The New York Times reporter Amy Harmon is making no progress on her story about a young autistic man trying to live independently — until she finds a way to reconnect.

Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce, and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

The astounding mad scientist life of Nikola Tesla. Who was this pioneer of radio, radar, and wireless communication, who claimed he saw machines swirling in his head?

The mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems, and transform other worlds.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher takes on the tricky topic of love and explains its evolution, its biochemical foundations, and its social importance.

What strikes most people when they first arrive in Antarctica is the quiet. “It’s the only place in the world that you can actually hear geology happening; all these processes that you’re schooled to think take thousands and thousands of years.”

Most people have one. But why do they choose the numbers they do?

Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. After a long amateur study of their behavior, he came up with a machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

When it comes to politics and media, the left argues that the right is more biased than the left while the right argues that the left is more biased than the right. Who’s right?

The best idea that Susan Schaller ever had came after meeting an isolated young man at a community college. He was 27. Though he had been born deaf, no one had ever taught him to sign. He had lived his entire life without language.

The Vatican conducts a rigorous investigation into whether a boy’s recovery from a flesh-eating bacteria was more than just incredible luck. Plus, an update to the story.

Robert and Danielle tried for years to steer their son away from female clothing. But nothing they did made a difference. Eventually, they found out about a controversial treatment that allows kids to postpone puberty and avoid developing the physical attributes of the sex they were born with (here’s the first part of the series, too).

The dizzying rise and fall of Lincoln Beachey, a pilot whose aeronautic feats changed aviation forever and turned chancy stunts into acrobatic mastery.

Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were adopted as infants. When they were 35 years old, they met and discovered they had been separated after birth, for a research study of identical twins designed to examine the question of nature versus nurture.

A chimp teaches us the ups and downs of growing up human (here’s the epilogue, too).

Like guys shouting over the music to pick up girls at a bar, scientists say urban birds are changing their tune to hear one other above the din.

Whether or not you believe it, about one in 10 people report having an “out of body” experience. And turns out it happens pretty frequently among fighter pilots.

What happens at the moment we slip from life to the other side? When exactly does it happen? What happens afterward? Eleven meditations on how, and even if, we die.

Mild traumatic brain injury has been called a signature wound of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shock waves from roadside bombs can ripple through soldiers’ brains, causing damage that leaves no visible scars. Listen to the second part of this story.

The neurologist tells stories of Charles Bonnet syndrome, an under-reported phenomenon when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations.

There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But you can feel it. As a musician, Sxip Shirey decided that living in New York was a necessary evil. Then, one night on a roof, he had an epiphany that completely changed the way he saw the city.

Steve McGreevy goes to Canada for the Northern Lights. Not to see them, but to hear them. You can do that, with the right equipment. And Steve’s got a van full. He records Natural Radio, the sound of earth’s magnetic field.

Some ideas are just repugnant — like paying for human organs. On the other hand, is it any less repugnant to let thousands of people die every year for want of a kidney that people might be willing to give up if they were able to be compensated?

In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was not a disease, simply by changing the 81-word definition of sexual deviance in its own reference manual. The story of what led up to that change involves a closeted group of gay psychiatrists — and another, even more secret group of gay psychiatrists.

In the early 1990s, many psychologists told patients that their problems could be traced to traumatic events they could not even remember, to memories that had to be recovered through special techniques. Turns out, many of those memories weren’t real.

In the 1960s, a young professor of psychology at Yale set out to test our capacity for obedience and cruelty. Millions of words have been written about the results of Stanley Milgram’s experiment. Less is known about the effect it had on those involved.

A classic example of what an economist would call a matching market — there’s a person who wants a ride, and there’s a person who’s willing to give a ride. There was some sort of equilibrium and somehow that got destroyed. So what happened?

In 1906, a rich family vacationing in Oyster Bay, New York, started to get sick. Very sick. It turns out they’d come down with typhoid, a disease forever associated with one woman: Typhoid Mary. You may think you know this story — you don’t.

Efforts to protect the endangered Kirtland’s warbler have led to the killing of cowbirds and a prescribed burn aimed at creating a new habitat. Tragically, this burn led to the death of a 29-year-old wildlife technician who was dedicated to warbler restoration. How far should we should go to protect one species?

The fight happened a long time ago when they were still in school. But for both Tom and Eric Hoebbel, the fight was a defining event — the kind of family story that gets trotted out for new acquaintances because it seems to convey something important.

In 1946, a psychiatrist named Walter Freeman launched a radical new era in the treatment of mental illness. One of his patients, at age 56, embarked on a quest to discover the story behind the procedure he received as a 12-year-old boy.

Some of science’s great ideas were created in homespun ways. To test his ideas on evolution, Charles Darwin and his butler dropped asparagus into a tub. Darwin’s oldest son studied dead pigeons by letting them float upside down in a bowl.

Thousands of miles apart, two families notice their toddler sons gravitating toward toys and clothes associated with girls. Each family decides to go with radically different approaches, as directed by their therapists (here’s the second part of the series, too).

For reasons that remain mostly mysterious, the note we call “B flat” does the oddest things. It aggravates alligators, it lurks in the stairwell of an office building, and it emanates from a supermassive black hole 250 million light years from Earth.

Laura Buxton, an English girl just shy of ten years old, didn’t realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky. What happened next is something you just couldn’t make up.

The story of how the insatiable millionaire John D. Rockefeller turned an eye to the untapped market of the American South and ended up eradicating the hookworm. And, we’re introduced to Jasper Lawrence, a modern-day entrepreneur whose passion for hookworms stems from lifelong battles with allergies and asthma.

What would it take to design a yawn so powerful that it would make everyone who saw it yawn back? And a dog can make a person yawn, but the other way around?

Dr. Oliver Sacks called her “Mrs. O’C.” She was Irish. She was old. And she had a problem: One night, while sleeping in her room at a Catholic old people’s home in the Bronx, she was awakened by a voice, a female voice singing Irish ballads.

Nine-year-old Isabelle has Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that makes her pathologically trusting. She has no social fear. But as Isabelle gets older, the negative side of her trusting nature has begun to play a larger role.

In the late 1960s, a California TV repairman named Bob Nelson joined a group of enthusiasts who believed they could cheat death with a new technology called cryonics. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still is admitting you’ve screwed up.

A man who’s lost everything, Clive Wearing has what Oliver Sacks calls “the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.” With Clive’s wife, Sacks tries to understand why, amidst so much forgetting, Clive remembers music and love.