We Have Concerns

The latest on what terrible, garbage creatures birds are. Oh, and apparently Iceland has been reading a fake version of Dracula for over a century?

Tufts University biologists Douglas Blackiston and Michael Levin have created all programmable organisms called xenobots — golems dreamed in silicon and then written into flesh.

Magnets is Beards

We Have Concerns returns on April 3rd. Insert your favorite Gandalf or John Wick gif here.

Thanks so much for sticking with us for 600 episodes! We take a look back at what made us laugh (and learn!). To celebrate the final episode, we introduce the greatest character in the show's history.

The sheer abundance of stars in the universe suggests that, somewhere, an intelligent lifeform should be warming itself on a distant planet. Even if life evolves rarely, ET should be phoning. Yet, by all appearances, humanity seems to be flying solo in our galaxy, and perhaps the universe. Many solutions have been proposed to solve this riddle, known as the Fermi Paradox. Researchers of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute believe It’s likely intelligent life doesn’t exist at all, outside of Earth. Jeff and Anthony think we're lacking supporting evidence of such.

Bees seem to understand the idea of zero – the first invertebrate shown to do so. When the insects were encouraged to fly towards a platform carrying fewer shapes than another one, they apparently recognised “no shapes” as a smaller value than “some shapes”. Jeff and Anthony zero in on the topic.

If you could taste human flesh in an ethical way, would you? A man was recently in a motorcycle crash that put him face-to-face with the macabre hypothetical. When a car hit his bike and sent him careening into a nearby forest, his foot was shattered to the point that he would never walk on it again. When the doctor asked if he wanted to amputate, his one question was, “Can I keep it?” He invited his closest friends for a very personal dinner. Jeff and Anthony make a pact.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature. This experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically. But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit. Jeff and Anthony try the experiment out for themselves and flip a coin to see who gets to be the guard.

Hawaii's big island recently got a little bit hairier. Golden filaments resembling human hair measuring up to two feet in length are draped across parts of the island—an unusual effect of the ongoing eruption from Kīlauea volcano. These strands may look like biological matter, but they’re actually made of glass. Jeff and Anthony look into discount Hawaiian vacation packages.

Did climate change already kill all the aliens we've been searching for? According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, it's certainly a possibility — and whether humans are doomed to the same fate may already be out of our hands. Jeff and Anthony once again consider the repercussions of running the air conditioner during a recording session.

In 2015, a psychologist in Italy figured out how to induce a drug-free altered state of consciousness by asking 20 volunteers to sit and stare into each other's eyes for 10 minutes straight. Not only did the deceptively simple task bring on strange 'out of body' experiences for the volunteers, it also caused them to see hallucinations of monsters, their relatives, and themselves in their partner's face. Jeff and Anthony have been recording this podcast for years, facing each other. We finally have an explanation for some of the more unhinged episodes.

NASA is talking to several international companies about forming a consortium that would take over operation of the International Space Station and run it as a commercial space lab, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in an interview. The White House touched off a heated discussion about the future of the orbiting laboratory earlier this year when it said it planned to end direct government funding of the station by 2025, while working on a transition plan to turn the station over to the private sector. Jeff and Anthony are appropriately frustrated.

It turns out those gut feelings or pits in your stomach may actually come from your second brain. Scientists from Australia have discovered that human beings have a second brain, and it is located in the butt. Called the enteric nervous system (ENS), it controls the muscle movement in the colon independently of the central nervous system. Jeff and Anthony try to make it through the episode without butting heads.

When considering musical artists, your favorite record of theirs is often the first to which you listened. It makes sense that the first album one encounters of a band will, over time, accumulate the most repeat listens. It has the chance to rack up plays before the listener explores the rest of the catalog. However, there might be more to this. Jeff and Anthony liked this study better after a few reads through.