Loading...

PODCAST

Strange Bites

Strange Bites is a short science podcast. Lance Martin takes a real discovery in biology, physics, neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, or paleontology and explains it in about fifteen minutes, with just enough story to make the facts stick. New episodes twice a week. Recent bites include a brain built from two lineages, bacteria that grow their own wires, a gene that can still jump, and fossils that may have been an animal’s compass. Sources are in the show notes. The science is not simplified

science

All Episodes

00:10:24

Episode 66: The Gene That Refused to Sit Still

Strange Bites ·

2026/10/12

There is a gene in you that was supposed to have retired. It learned a job in the brain, the kind of job a settled gene is allowed to keep, and then it refused to sit down. Most of the old movers in the human genome are fossils. This one kept the knife.The gene is called BC200. It is expressed mainly in neurons. It began, millions of years ago, as a transposon, one of the mobile pieces of DNA we still call jumping genes. Genes that come from that kind of ancestry usually lose the ability to move

en

00:15:21

Episode 65: The Microbe that Learned to Flip a Neuron

Strange Bites ·

2026/10/07

On October 5, 2026, in Stockholm, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet gave the Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three people who never set out to build a remote control for memory. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel share it “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” The prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor, split three ways. The press line is almost too clean: light-seeking algae gave us a switch for nerve cells. Here is the less clean

en

00:12:42

Episode 64: Is Your Brain One Organ or Two?

Strange Bites ·

2026/10/05

Put a finger on the back of your neck.Not hard. Just enough to feel the pulse.That pulse is not a thought. It is an older employee. It keeps the heart honest. It keeps the lungs from quitting mid-sentence. It will still be on the clock when the part of you that writes poems has gone to bed. For centuries we called the whole arrangement one organ. One brain. One you. Stanford opened the box and found a seam.The paper dropped in Nature Neuroscience, September 18, 2026. The title sounds harmless until

en

00:15:50

Episode 63: The Frequency of the Heart

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/30

You can hear a heart from across a room if the room is quiet enough. A wet drum in the dark that has been keeping time since before you had a name. Most of the time it does the job without asking for applause. Sixty to a hundred beats a minute. In. Out. Squeeze. Rest. A little electric spark jumps from a knot of cells at the top of the right atrium, races down hidden highways, and the muscle obeys. Until it doesn’t.Then the drum misses. Skips. Stutters. Races like a frightened animal. For about

en

00:18:09

Episode 62: Fountain of Youth for Your Eyes??

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/28

Close your eyes for a second. Not all the way. Just enough that the world goes soft. Behind those lids is a piece of your brain that crawled forward during evolution and learned how to drink light. Those cells, the ones that grab photons and fire them down a cable into your skull, are some of the most stubborn cells you own. Once they die, they do not come back. Medicine has spent a century treating that as a law of nature. In 2020, a lab in Boston published a paper that treated it like a

en

00:13:07

Episode 61: The 11,000 Year Old Human/Leopard Statue

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/23

Eleven thousand years ago, someone in what is now southeastern Turkey sat down with a block of limestone and carved a story we still cannot read. A person sitting on the back of a leopard. In Episode 61, we bring that story back into the light.Imagine you are standing in the dry hills of the Tektek Mountains. The wind that tastes like dust and thyme. Its a landscape that looks empty until you realize it is anything but. Under those hills sits a necklace of ancient sites archaeologists now call Taş

en

00:14:21

Episode 60: Bacteria that Grows Metal Cables

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/21

In episode 60 we crawl into the muck and find a creature that does not wait for a plug. It grows its own power lines out of nickel it steals from the dirt, braids them thinner than thought, and runs electricity through a body that can be thousands of cells long.The discovery is real. The new structural work is led by Filip Meysman at the University of Antwerp, with colleagues including Bent Smets and Silvia Hidalgo Martinez. It landed in Nature Communications under a title that sounds like an

en

00:15:34

Episode 59: Living Circuit Boards

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/16

In Episode 59 we walk into a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where engineers did not build a faster chip. They taught bacteria to act like the tiny switches inside your phone… and then they printed those living switches onto a plate and watched a circuit board wake up and grow.The discovery is real. The paper landed in Nature Chemical Biology on August 17, 2026. The facts stay on the table. The story around them is

en

00:15:17

Episode 58: The Devil Flower

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/14

In Episode 58 we talk a walk through a mountain forest in western Thailand. It’s May. The air is wet. The ground is a carpet of dead leaves. Small bamboo leans in. Almost nothing down here wants to be seen. Then something does.It is not green. It is not pretty in the postcard way. It looks like a thumb-sized lantern that crawled out of a nightmare and decided to bloom. Black body. Three thin horns. Two orange patches near the base that stare back at you like eyes. This is not folklore. This is a

en

00:14:38

Episode 57: The Hidden Magic in the Sea Squirt

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/10

There is an animal that looks like a mistake. It has no face you would trust. It does not hunt. It does not run. It sits on a rock in cold water, pumps the ocean through a hole in its head, and filters dinner out of the dark.In Korea they call it meongge. In Japan they call it hoya. On a plate it looks like something the sea coughed up and then thought better of. People eat it anyway. Raw. Sometimes still twitching.Scientists have a colder name for the whole family: Ascidiacea. Sea squirts. And here

en

00:15:05

Episode 56: The Cookie That Used to Be a Bottle

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/08

Picture the last plastic water bottle you threw away. Not the heroic one you rinsed and dropped in the blue bin. The other one. The one that rolled under the passenger seat and cooked all summer. The one that still had a little warm water in the bottom and a label that had given up being a label.Now picture that bottle… becoming dessert.Vanilla-scented. Protein-rich. Piped out of a 3D printer in the shape of a tiny Greek letter. Sitting on a plate next to a NASA patch like it has every right to be

en

00:08:41

Episode 55: The Real Syrax Dragon

Strange Bites ·

2026/09/02

In Episode 55 we head up high in the cool, mist-wrapped mountains of western Thailand, the forest doesn’t care what the maps say. It doesn’t care what the textbooks claim. Above thirteen hundred meters in Mae Wong National Park, the air is thinner, the light is softer, and the trees hold secrets that science has only just begun to notice. In April 2025, two researchers Poramad and Krittiya Trivalairat were climbing into that forest looking for a lizard they already thought they knew. The books and

en

00:08:20

Episode 54: A Cat’s Invisible Calling Card

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/31

In Episode 54 we step into the dark with the creatures who own the night… and the chemical secrets they leave behind.It’s three in the morning on a quiet suburban street. A black cat slips along a fence line, pauses, and sprays a precise arc of urine against the wood. Then it vanishes into the shadows. A few hours later another cat arrives. It freezes. Its mouth opens slightly, the classic flehmen grimace, that weird open-mouthed “stinky face” cat owners know so well. The second cat is reading

en

00:07:14

Episode 53: Is Aging just a Maintenance Failure?

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/27

In Episode 53 we float into a city that never sleeps. Not a city of concrete and steel. A city made of soft, glowing rooms, each one smaller than a grain of sand. Inside every room, tiny power stations hum day and night. They take the food you ate and the air you breathe and turn them into pure energy. These power stations are called mitochondria. For decades we’ve called them the powerhouses of the cell. But that name is too quiet. Too polite. Think of them instead as a living power grid. In a

en

00:15:00

Episode 52: The Helix That Remembers

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/25

Every living thing you have ever loved is a library. A single gram of DNA can hold about two hundred and fifteen million gigabytes of information. That is the recipe for you, for a fern, for a virus, for every ancestor who ever survived long enough to pass a letter forward. Life has been writing itself down for four billion years. It never asked for a hard drive. It was one. And then, in a lab in Pennsylvania, someone asked that library to do something it was never built to do. Sit still, Conduct

en

00:08:00

Episode 51: The Y That Holds The World

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/19

In episode 51 we’re going deep into the heart of the thing that makes you… you. The thing that makes the chair you’re sitting in solid, the air you’re breathing real, and keeps stars above your head burning.For fifty years, physicists have been arguing over a deceptively simple question: What actually carries the identity of a proton? What keeps matter from dissolving into a fog of pure energy?Tonight we don’t just answer that question, we rewrite the address of reality itself.SourcesPrimary paper:

en

00:09:11

Episode 50 - The Single Wrong Letter

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/17

Wow! Fifty EpisodesFifty strange bites of the universe.From the first quiet story to this one, tonight we mark a milestone. Fifty times we’ve sat together in the dark, turning real science into something a little more mysterious, a little more human.To every one of you who has listened, shared, questioned, or simply stayed strange with me… thank you. You’ve kept the signal alive.This is Strange Bites, Episode 50.In the endless library of you, three billion letters are stacked like stars in a dark

en

00:09:17

Episode 49: Cancer's Best Friend

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/13

In episode 49 we’re going hunting in a place most of us never think about, the hidden city inside a tumor. Cancer has always been the ultimate horror movie killer. You think you’ve finished it. The chemo hits like a silver bullet. Most of the cells die. The scans look clear. Everyone breathes again.But some cells don’t die.They just… change.They stop dividing. They go quiet. Scientists call this state cellular Senescence, a kind of cellular retirement. The cell is still alive, still metabolically

en

00:08:34

Episode 48: The Ghosts in Our Blood

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/11

Imagine the human genome as a vast, haunted library. Every shelf is a chromosome. Every book is a stretch of DNA. Most of the books tell ordinary stories, how to build a hand, how to fight a fever. But some of the pages are written in a different hand. Older. Stranger. The handwriting of people who no longer walk the Earth.For years we knew two of those writers: the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. We had pieces of their actual DNA. We could hold their pages up to the light and say, “Yes. That’s

en

00:11:13

The Rock-Eaters of the Antrim Shale

Strange Bites ·

2026/08/07

You’re standing on a quiet stretch of northern Michigan farmland. The air smells like wet soil and diesel. In front of you is a steel wellhead, nothing dramatic, just another gas well punched into the Antrim Shale, a black, organic-rich rock layer laid down three hundred and fifty million years ago when this part of the world was a shallow, oxygen-starved sea.Energy companies drill these wells, pump up water mixed with natural gas, strip out the methane, and move on. Most people never think twice

en

67 results

Similar Podcasts

NÖÖRDS - Der Podcast

NÖÖRDS

Science News Daily

brief.news

Astronomy Cast

Fraser Cain and Dr. Pamela Gay

The SCP Experience

Dr. NoSleep Studios

Strange Bites

Lance Martin