The Disappearing Spoon: a science history podcast with Sam Kean

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Accounting for Taste

Scientists have confirmed five basic human tastes—sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami. But is that all? Debate now rages about adding a sixth or seventh or even eighth(!) to the Big Five...

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  The Sad Story of Darwin’s Self-Procleimed “Stupidest” Child

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  The Birds and the Bees and the Frogs

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  The Would-Be Saint's Battle over Down Syndrome

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  The Battle over Human Chromosomes

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  The Halley's Comet Panic

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  The Winter when People Ate Tulips

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  Why Keep a Diary of a Toxic Snakebite?

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  Machiavellian Microbes

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  The Woman Who “Turned Back a Plague of Old Testament Proportions”

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  The Doom Lurking inside Trees

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  The Mona Lisa of the Seine

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  Savant Idiots

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  When Mummymania Swept the World

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  The Sadder Side of the Nobel Prizes

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  The Scientific Way to Fool a Nazi

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  The Mysterious Mote