We Have Concerns

US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air crews, drone operators and others in the armed f…

Police in southern China are punishing drivers who dazzle other road users with full-beam headlights by making them stare into the lights for a minute. Does the punishment fit the crime? Is it effe…

According to a report from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, researchers have converted human feces to oil using a process called hydrothermal liquefaction. Hydrothermal liquefaction “mimics the…

Scientists at Queen Mary University of London who study bees suggest that insects have something like emotional states, and that a sweet treat can change the way bumble bees make decisions, producing…

Some info about this episode:

1. It was recorded right after the US Election
2. We didn't intend it to be an entire episode, it just sort of happened. We had concerns, y'know?
3. You don't have to listen to …

How do you handle nuclear waste that will be radioactive for millions of years, keeping it from harming people and the environment? It isn’t easy, but a researcher has discovered ways to immobilize s…

Basketball players that were grimly reminded of their own inevitable demise before playing took more shots and scored more points in a study published in an upcoming issue of Journal of Sport and Exe…

A woman in her 30s was undergoing an operation that involved applying a laser to her cervix, when she passed gas that caught fire causing serious injuries to her body. Jeff and Anthony discuss the i…

Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy levels in several studies. However, new research in the journal Personality and Individual Differences finds that people with psychopathic traits—especia…

The mass suicide of members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate is one of the most bizarre and enduringly fascinating events of the 90s. But nearly 20 years after the strange deaths, part of the cult’s leg…

Scientists in Japan have transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in a dish, and used those eggs to birth fertile pups. The report marks the first creation of eggs entirely outside a mouse. If the proc…

A two-year project by an international team of mathematicians has mapped shortest possible journey to visit 25,000 pubs across the UK, and set a new record for the longest "traveling salesman problem…

A team of researchers led by Axel Visel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has replaced part of a mouse's DNA—a small sequence known as ZRS— with the equivalent sequence from a snake. That …

One of the busiest Starbucks in the country is the one located inside the CIA, with a captive caffeine-craving audience of thousands of analysts and agents working on gathering intelligence and launc…

Though we have spent hundreds of years imagining dinosaurs as reptilian roarers, our understanding of what dinos may have actually looked and sounded like has evolved. A new study published in Nature…

An international study found that chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans seem to have the ability to see the world from someone else's point of view, even when they know that point of view is dead wrong…

After he was killed by a blow to the face about 9,000 years ago, the 23-year-old hunter was laid to rest in a limestone cave in what is now southwestern England. Now, say scientists astonishingly br…

Travellers are used to lost luggage, booking errors and on-board delays - but now an American airline is being sued for mixing up two children and sending them to the wrong cities. Jeff and Anthony …

Every swear word in the English language has been ranked in order of offensiveness. The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, interviewed more than 200 people across the UK on how offensive they find…

Cornish fish moving north with climate change may struggle to understand Scouse counterparts, study says, making it harder for them to mate. Experts believe the fish, which make sounds with their sw…