Big Picture Science

“The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise,” said Mark Twain. In this, our final episode marking the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we consider how efforts to control the Mighty Mississippi – a river engineered from its Minnesota headwaters to its G

What happens to us after we die is as much a question for anthropology and ecology as it is for theology.  Death and decay are not comfortable subjects, but some scientists study them unflinchingly, knowing that doing so yields valuable scientific insights about decomposition. We hear about The Body Farm at the Univers

Shipwrecks are scenes of tragedy, but they are also bits of history frozen in time that can provide insights into events and ideas from long ago. That is, if we can find them.  From an 11th century Viking sailing ship to a WW II era British cargo ship with a mailbag of letters onboard amazingly preserved, an underwater

Long before Orson Welles provoked a panic with his 1938 radio broadcast of a Martian invasion in War of the Worlds, we were fascinated with the possibility of life on the Red Planet. We may be a step closer to finding it after the Perseverance rover turned up tantalizing evidence of possible ancient life in the form of

The tiny bean-shaped structures in your cells – mitochondria – are little powerhouses. Recent research suggests they may unlock overall good health, or, when they fail, cause diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer’s. How strong is the science for these claims and what, if anything, should we be doing to improve our mi

We’re hurtling towards a post-antibiotic world, as the overuse of antibiotics has given rise to dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. Can we fight back using viruses as weapons? An obscure medical therapy uses certain viruses called bacteriophages to treat infection. For a century attempts to turn phage-therapy into a lif