Episodes

Chemist Gary Patti explains his research with metabolism and its uses-including creating a possible cure for cancer.

Chemist Tim Wencewicz talks about the antibiotic resistance and what his lab is doing to solve it.

E.A. Quinn describes her fieldwork in Nepal, where she works with community partners to understand the health of mothers and infants under extreme conditions.

Boston University music professor André de Quadros emphasizes using the arts for social change-including influencing healthy habits in a society.

Corinna Treitel shares the story of the Nazis' obsession with natural foods and compares their ideas about nutrition to how we think about it today.

Rebecca Lester, an anthropologist who studies eating disorder conditions, describes the most persistent myths about eating disorders that pervade both popular culture and the medical field.

Anya Plutynski shares her story of being diagnosed with breast cancer, her opinions on ongoing debates over breast cancer screening, and ideas from her book on philosophical issues dealing with cancer.

Javier Moscoso-a professor of history and philosophy of science at the Institute of History at the Spanish National Research Council-looks at the historical representations of pain and pain as a social experience.

Rebecca Messbarger explains how La Specola museum in Italy and its wax inhabitants helped set the course for a new Enlightenment era, and how one figure, the Venus, became central to this new regime of the human body.

Luis Salas shares a fascinating and revealing story about Galen of Pergamum, his rivals, and the heart of an elephant.

Erik Herzog explains how the brain's "master clock" works and how genetics can influence our daily biological rhythms.

Catherine Lang wants to improve the ways that doctors and physical therapists help people recover from stroke. She shares some dramatic findings from one ongoing experiment.

Even in the era of corporate social responsibility, tobacco companies push to sell cigarettes around the world. Anthropologist Peter Benson, author of "Tobacco Capitalism" weighs in.

Anthropologist Lewis Wall is helping one Ethiopian woman attempt to create a local, sustainable solution to the problem of adolescent girls staying away from school due to menstruation.

As director of the Institute for Public Health at Washington University, William Powderly believes that in order to be innovative and find useful solutions to global health challenges, effective partnerships are key. But how do these partnerships form, and what types of partnerships are most effective

Mentioning the word "physics" brings to mind things like gravity, relativity, mass and volume, or even dark matter. Rarely do we think about how these principles affect the inner workings of our own bodies

As principal investigator of For the Sake of All, a multi-disciplinary project in collaboration with St. Louis University on the health and well-being of African Americans in St. Louis, Jason Purnell has researched how factors like education and access to healthy foods affect St. Louisans. Purnell describes the project, explains why differences between zip codes can be so shocking, and shares the types of policy changes that he believes could create positive change.

In order to carry out daily tasks like taking medication, attending meetings, and bringing lunch to work, we first need to remember to do those things. Professor Mark McDaniel describes his research on prospective memory.