It’s not great to be a lab rat. And it turns out, lab rats might not be that great for science either. Could the future be little lab-grown brain clumps?

Guests: Rachel Nuwer, science journalist; Lisa Genzel, professor of neuroscience at Radboud University

This episode has been updated. An earlier version didn’t differentiate between two stages of drug development.

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This week on Unexplainable or Not, we’ve got three scientific mysteries all about left and right. Jonquilyn Hill, host of Vox’s new podcast Explain It to Me, is going to guess which of them has been solved and which ones are still unexplainable.

Guest: S. Furkan Ozturk, researcher at Harvard University

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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.)

Guests: Ted Kaptchuk, professor at Harvard Medical School; Darwin Guevarra, professor of psychology at Miami University; Luana Colloca, professor at the University of Maryland School of Nursing

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It makes sense that we run away from scary things. That’s a good way to stay alive. But why do some people also love scary things? Why do people gravitate toward horror?

Guests: Mathias Clasen and Marc Andersen, co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University

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Drugs like ecstasy and mushrooms have shown promise as mental health treatments, but they’re also exposing some major cracks in how scientists study the brain.

Guests: Jonathan Lambert, science journalist; Boris Heifets, professor at Stanford University of Medicine; Amy Mcguire, professor at Baylor College of Medicine

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How we feel emotionally may be influenced by unseen troves of microbial life that live inside us. Is it possible to harness this gut power? (First published in 2022)

Guests: Michael Gershon, professor of pathology at Columbia University; and Katerina Johnson, microbiome researcher at Oxford University

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As the world gets warmer and storms get worse, insurance companies are jacking up rates — or refusing to cover homeowners altogether. Is the future uninsurable?

Guests: Umair Irfan, correspondent at Vox; Karen Clark, co-founder and CEO of Karen Clark & Company; Joe Skuba, VP at The Gray Insurance Company; and Carolyn Kousky, Associate VP at Environmental Defense Fund

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Doctors have started transplanting animal organs into people, hoping this experimental procedure could one day solve an organ shortage crisis that kills 17 Americans every day. Is this really the solution?

Guests: Muhammad Mohiuddin, professor of surgery at University of Maryland School of Medicine; L. Syd Johnson, professor of clinical bioethics at SUNY Upstate Medical University

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Scientists have lots of ways to try to answer that question, and lots of different predictions. So how do they figure out one set of numbers we can all work with?

Guests: Umair Irfan, correspondent at Vox; Zeke Hausfather, climate scientist at The Breakthrough Institute; Neil Swart, research scientist at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis

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Probably not. But Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz decided to try anyway, putting his body — and specifically his butt — on the line to answer a seemingly straightforward question: Is it possible to build up a tolerance to poison oak by eating it?

Guest: Jeff Horwitz, reporter at the Wall Street Journal; and Mahmoud ElSohly, professor of pharmaceutics at the University of Mississippi

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Scientists just discovered oxygen being produced without sunlight — without photosynthesis — at the bottom of the ocean. This “dark oxygen” could fundamentally change the story we tell of life on Earth and in the rest of the universe.

Guest: Alycia Smith, ecologist at Heriot-Watt University

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