Nature✓

Psychedelics have been used as experimental treatments for mental health conditions for decades, but most have undesirable off-target impacts. A new wave of tailored psychedelic compounds could pave the way for psychedelic therapies with fewer side effects. This compound, called VCU-1012, is so named because it was created at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). - Written & Hosted by @Dr. Ben Rein - Produced & Edited by @Maren Hunsberger - Serotonin images from Aqeela Imamdin & Emiel van d

First observed by these researchers in 2024 and again in 2025, this ramming behavior is something that has never been documented before. While researchers are still unsure what exactly is driving this behavior, they say “Our observations expand the known repertoire of orca predatory strategies on molids [sunfish] and suggest a complex, potentially socially learned behavior that may serve both foraging and parental functions”. - Written, Hosted, & Produced by @Maren Hunsberger - Research footag

The pressure a player feels walking up to take a World Cup penalty isn't so different from the pressure you may feel walking into a job interview. Sport psychologists have spent decades studying how elite athletes can better handle that moment, and the same tools that work for them work for the rest of us too. - Featuring Geir Jordet - Produced & Edited by @Maren Hunsberger - Stock footage: Getty / Fluorescent Films / Lighthouse Films / onuroner - Stock Music & SFX: Adobe - Supervising Produc

Naked mole-rats are…weird, to say the least. Now scientists may have solved the long-standing mystery of how their unique social structure is maintained and the answer is a surprisingly simple and commonplace chemical. It's used in the production of cosmetics and plastics (it’s the active ingredient in many head lice treatments) and also seems to be the key to maintaining a queen’s place in naked mole-rat colonies. - Written, Hosted, & Produced by Shamini Bundell - Edited & Produced by @Maren H

All twenty amino acids were thought to be essential for life…until scientists made a ribosome with only 19 👀 - Written & Hosted by Tosin Thompson - Edited by Stephanie Castillo - Produced by Maren Hunsberger - Stock images: Getty Images / Sci-Monde / Drypsiak / grebeshkovmaxim; Canva - Stock footage: Getty Images / leinGround Squirrels/ Svetlozar Hristov / vdvornyk; Public Domain Assets: Pixabay / Raman Oza; WikiMedia Commons / Christinelmiller / Bailey, T.L. et al. (2015). Nucleic Acids Rese

A surprising archive of ancient DNA could come in the form of…preserved poop. A new discovery of ancient ground squirrel burrows has given scientists a brand new way to explore the genetic landscape of epochs past. - Produced & Hosted by Shamini Bundell - Edited & Co-produced by @Maren Hunsberger - Research and fieldwork footage and stills by The Hakai Institute, Duane Froese and Scott Crocker - Artwork by Julius Csotonyi - Stock images from Getty Images / mikroman6 / Timacoch / NSA Digital Ar

What happens when one of medicine's greatest tools stops working? A scraped knee, childbirth, routine surgery, chemo—surviving any of these depends on being able to stop an infection before it spreads, and that ability is slipping away at an alarming rate as our antibiotics stop working. Drug-resistant infections are already linked to over 5 million deaths a year, and by 2050 that number could climb past 8 million. Because bacteria are evolving. Every dose of antibiotics we use—in hospitals, on

Size really does matter—at least, for fruit fly sperm. Fruit flies have evolved the largest sperm of any organism on Earth. They exhibit this ‘sperm gigantism’ thanks to intense sexual selection on the females’ part. Females prefer larger males, who tend to have longer sperm, and longer sperm will displace a rival mates sperm in the female reporoductive tract. But how does the fruit fly fit thousands of these gigantic sperm inside its tiny internal storage sapce (seminal vesicle)? And how do the

Microplastics have a newly discovered talent: teaming up with greenhouse gases to heat Earth’s atmosphere. A recent paper in Nature Climate Chance investigated the radiative forcing of airborne microplastics and found that these pesky particles aren’t just causing trouble in our water and in our bodies—they should be factored into our climate models, too. - Hosted & Produced by @simonoxfphys - Written & Produced by Tristan Sharman - Edited & Produced by Maren Hunsberger - Supervising Producer:

A whale graveyard millions of years old and over a thousand kilometers long has just been discovered. Not only could it tell us more about the evolution of a mysterious deep-sea denizen, but it’s a prime site for discovering brand new species, too. - Produced by Shamini Bundell & @Maren Hunsberger - Presented by Shamini Bundell - Research footage from Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering, CAS (IDSSE, CAS) - Seafloor bathymetry visualizations copyright Commonwealth of Australia (Geosci

The second ever sperm whale birth caught on camera (and on microphone) is the most in-depth observation of a wild cetacean birth, and can tell us a lot about how whales socialize…and how they communicate. Extra fun fact for you: sperm whales regularly dive up to 7,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, but there is evidence that they are capable of diving up to almost 10,000 feet deep. - Produced and presented by @marenmicrobe - Research footage from Project CETI - Stock music from Triple Scoop / T