If you have any friends that you first met as a roommate or dorm neighbor at college, this show is for you. Research from Ohio State University finds bats can become close when they’re made to live together too.
The Brandt’s vole has an interesting way to protect itself from predators overhead: a research project found that the little rodent cuts the grass so it can keep a lookout.
Vox recently asked scientists what they thought Earth life might be like in a million years. And the answers are pretty wild. Plus: today's the first day of a City Climb at Edge, a program in New York City where thrillseekers can climb until they’re close to the top of a skyscraper, over 1,200 feet up.
If you listen to our show, your ears are doing the work, unless you’re a certain type of roundworm that researchers have just shown can react to sound even though they don't have any ear-like organs. Plus: a crater on the moon has a new name in honor of the great Black explorer Matthew Henson.
Social distancing is a thing in the octopus world. According to new research out of the University of Sydney, some females will tell males to back off by throwing stuff at them. Plus: it was this week in 2019 that a drunk feral pig in western Australia picked a fight with a cow, which is probably one of the weirdest sentences of the week.
Research from 2018 at Princeton University found that male fruit flies use their wings to improvise musical sounds to win the attention of females. I just wish they didn't try to do all of it in my house. Plus: a teen in the UK makes friends with a bee!
Today in 1947, two men who had climbed Oregon's Mount Hood and stayed overnight woke up to find a surprise: a quart of milk and the morning newspaper. Who would climb a mountain just to leave those items? Plus: a study out of the University of Greenwich finds that bees get an actual buzz out of naturally-occurring caffeine.
UCLA did the research: at least 65 different animal species apart from humans exhibit vocal play sounds that are similar to laughter. So what kind of jokes should we be telling them? Plus: how an acclaimed 1972 movie might have been lost forever, if the man hunting for the original copy had shown up a week later.
Fifteen people just took part in the Deep Time project, where they lived in a cave in France as far away from time as we can get. And some interesting things happened. Plus: scientists in Brazil have just spotted a pumpkin toadlet, a tiny orange amphibian that glows green under ultraviolet light.
Physarum polycephalum is pretty smart for a slime mold. It can find its way back to the places where food had previously been even though it doesn't have a nervous system. Researchers in Germany have just figured out how this organism does it. Plus: American Beatlemania may have begun in February 1964, but George Harrison had made a nice, quiet trip to southern Illinois the previous fall.
