For decades, scientists thought that placebos only worked if patients didn’t know they were taking them. Not anymore: You can give patients placebos, tell them they’re on sugar pills, and they still might feel better. No one is sure how this works, but it raises a question: Should doctors embrace placebos in mainstream medicine? (First published in 2021.)
Gu ... Show More
Feb 4
Mysterious objects near the beginning of time
Astronomers are putting together a new picture of the early universe. It involves a lot of very weird black holes, and it could help us understand how our own galaxy formed. Guest: Caitlin Casey, astronomer at UC Santa Barbara For show transcripts, go to v ... Show More
26m 16s
Feb 2
Cloud atlas
It’s surprisingly hard to predict how clouds form, move, and change, but it’s essential to try. Because how clouds react to a warming world helps determine how hot our future will be. Guests: Vox contributor Umair Irfan, scientists Scott M. Collis, Angeline Pendergrass, and autho ... Show More
29m 2s
Oct 2025
What does caffeine do to our bodies?
Sweet, caffeinated energy drinks are in the headlines again as the UK Government says it wants to ban under 16s from buying them. Some can contain the equivalent caffeine as 2 to 4 espressos. James Betts, Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Bath, explains the s ... Show More
28m 21s
Mar 2025
Magic, Skepticism, and Success w/ Dr. Richard Wiseman
This week, Scott is joined by Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist renowned for his work on magic, illusion, deception, luck, and self-development. As the UK's only Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Dr. Wiseman has published ov ... Show More
1h 6m
Mar 2025
The Life Scientific - Ijeoma Uchegbu
Imagine a nanoparticle, less that a thousandth of the width of a human hair, that is so precise that it can carry a medicine to just where it’s needed in the body, improving the drug’s impact and reducing side effects.Ijeoma Uchegbu, Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at Uni ... Show More
26m 28s
Oct 2025
Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act ... Show More
51m 39s
Every hand-crafted instrument from violin maker Michael Doran holds its own unexplainable questions. Guest: Michael Doran of Doran’s Violin’s For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to v ... Show More
