Ira questions the motives of overly ambitious scientists and inventors. (2 minutes)

If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t we heard from the extraterrestrials yet? Producer David Kestenbaum explains The Fermi Paradox to host Ira Glass. The possibility that we are alone in the universe makes David sad.

Ira talks to Biba Struja – a Serbian man who says that when he was in high school, he discovered that he seemed to have a high resistance to electricity. It’s a power that he’s utilized, but is mostly a curse.

A year ago, we did a story about a study that found that a simple 20-minute conversation could change someone’s mind about controversial issues like gay marriage and abortion. But a few weeks after we aired the story, the study was discredited.

Ira asks Jefrey Emtman do to the impossible—describe the indescribable color he sees in his left eye. Jefrey Emtman is the host of the podcast Here Be Monsters.

We sent a reporter named Dan Grech to the Hundred Year Starship Public Symposium, which aims to tackle the technological problems related to interstellar space travel. And as host Ira Glass explains, Dan found this gathering to be way more adventurous than your average scientific conference.

Host Ira Glass tells the stories of two professors, each making a calculation that no one had made before. One gets acclaim.

Ira Glass tells the story of how science is being used to fight the ultimate neighborhood plague: Dog poop.

Do cell phones give people brain tumors? Ira speaks with Christopher Ketcham, who wrote an article on this subject for GQ magazine.

You can divide all living creatures into two camps. We humans are in one camp, along with lots of other things like dogs and birds and trees and caterpillars.

A bad apple, at least at work, can spoil the whole barrel. And there's research to prove it.

Ira and Albert Donnay read a true ghost story that appeared in a medical journal in 1921. A "Mrs.

Psychologist Harry Harlow sets out to prove, through a series of experiments with monkeys, that love is a key to normal development in children.

Ralph and Sandra Fisher, who run a show-animal business in Texas, had a beloved Brahman bull named Chance. Chance was the gentlest bull they'd ever seen, more like a pet dog than a bull.

You can divide all living creatures into two camps. We humans are in one camp, along with lots of other things like dogs and birds and trees and caterpillars.

Host Ira Glass visits Arlington Racetrack on opening day with four regulars who explain their quasi-scientific systems for winning.

Ira visits marital researcher John Gottman, who's part of a generation of researchers that have revolutionized the way we see marriage by observing successful and unsuccessful marriages and trying to figure out what the successful happy ones are doing that the ones who end up in divorce are not. Marriage research and links to marriage education programs for couples are online at www.smartmarriages.com.

Host Ira Glass reminds the audience about the old TV series MacGyver, about the guy who stops bad guys without a gun. He uses science and sheer ingenuity to invent solutions.

You can divide all living creatures into two camps. We humans are in one camp, along with lots of other things like dogs and birds and trees and caterpillars.

Producer Alex Blumberg explains that he wanted to do this show because of his conflicted relationship with his own testosterone. He tells host Ira Glass that the reasons go back to a girl in his eighth-grade homeroom and the 1970s seminal feminist novel The Women's Room. We also hear from a man who stopped producing testosterone due to a medical treatment and found that his entire personality was altered.

We hear two stories of everyday life which are more easily understood if one knows some of the laws of physics, specifically the Mediocrity Principle and the Casimir Effect.