Polar Bears International (PBI) is serious about protecting bears, and in the pursuit of reliable data have gone to some extremes in the past. From burying scientists alive out in the snow to novel collar-camera setups that have enabled them to predict when polar bear moms and their new cubs are going to emerge from their dens. In an era of “drill, baby, drill,” now is a tougher time for polar bears than ever before. An essential step towards getting them the protection they require centers around demystifying their denning habits and what young bears need to survive, so we caught up with Dr Louise Archer, PBI’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, to find out what she’s been working on with a team in Svalbard, Norway.

There’s a strange phenomenon reported among some recipients of organ transplants whereby people report altered memories, tastes, and personality changes. A particularly curious example included a woman who, having never much liked chicken nuggets, found herself compelled to eat them after receiving an organ from a man who had nuggets on his person when he died. Similarly perplexing changes in taste have also been reported among the recipients of bone marrow transplants, from loving gherkins to switching from white to red wine. This is something the UK-based stem cell charity Anthony Nolan knows a thing or two about. We spoke to their senior medical officer Dr Tania Dexter to find out more about what these transplants entail, how they've changed people, and why we think it happens. This interview previously featured in the March 2025 issue of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Check out the full issue to explore: Can We Really Trust Our Memories? Is Robotic Surgery The Future? And The Floating Mountains Of Zhangjiajie. https://www.iflscience.com/can-we-really-trust-our-memories-find-out-more-in-issue-32-of-curious-out-now-78264

Humans smell, there’s no denying it, but are some of those smells sending out chemical signals we aren’t consciously aware of? Are we, like ants, giving off pheromones?    We spoke to Dr Tristram Wyatt, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, to find out.  

It’s perhaps one of the greatest injustices of human bodily functions that the yawn has become so stigmatized in social settings. Crack one out and you’ll likely receive accusations of being bored or rude. It seems ironic, really, because the science of yawning tells us that, if anything, it’s a sign you’re trying harder to pay attention. That’s what we discovered when we sat down with Dr Andrew Gallup, Teaching Professor of Behavioral Biology at Johns Hopkins University and a bit of an expert in yawning. We wanted to find out why this open-mouthed action seems to be so incredibly catching, and discovered along the way that there’s a hell of a lot going on when we yawn.

When we talk about death, we often say things along the lines of “it's a fact of life,” but the view can be very different when you’re facing the real and imminent prospect of no longer existing. Given the chance, can we be so sure that we wouldn’t try anything for a little more time? According to neuroscientist Dr Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston, most of the general public would like 10 years more life than they’re statistically likely to get when asked “how long do you want to live?”, and it seems the hunger for more doesn’t diminish as time goes by. So, what if there was a way that we could postpone the seemingly inevitable by capturing the essence of who a person was, and storing it until future technologies enable us to bring them back? If we found a way to lock in someone’s way of thinking, their memories, and all the parts that make them unique, could we postpone death indefinitely? And why is it nobody’s tried just popping someone’s brain in another body? Join us as we explore all of this and more in this special bumper episode of We Have Questions.

Snow is beautiful, but also powerful and destructive – and, if we’re honest, a bit confusing. For something made entirely of water, it can come in many forms: light and fluffy, sticky and heavy, shaped like a perfect snowflake, or falling in needle-like flecks. Its consistency changes a lot, but so does its color, which got us wondering: why does snow sometimes look blue? To find out, we reached out to Dr Andrew Schwartz at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab in California. As no strangers to snow, and we were delighted to learn that yes, their research sometimes does involve just frolicking in the stuff.

Wake up? Brush your teeth. Going to bed? Brush your teeth. The dental routine of being a human can be a bit monotonous, but it’s an important step towards maintaining a happy mouth. It can be slightly baffling, then, to spot a photo of a bonobo with a seemingly perfect grin. How are wild animals getting away with it as we dutifully march off to our next dental hygienist appointment? Why don’t animals have to brush their teeth? It's a question that led us to the office of Peter Kertesz, who, as well as seeing human patients, is Dental Consultant to ZSL London Zoo and numerous other wildlife establishments around the world. A quick glance at his website shows Kertesz tending to the teeth of everything from elephants to tigers and dolphins with the help of dental nurse Monika Mazurkiewicz. We sat down with Kertesz to find out more about what it’s really like doing dentistry on non-human species, and why their days aren’t bookended by scrubbing their mouth bones.

The mummification process is perhaps one of the most talked about aspects of Ancient Egyptian life. It highlights the morbid curiosity shared by those of us alive at a time when funerary practices have gone in a different direction. It’s also a skewed view, offering us insights into the death rituals of only the ancient very rich. The complex process of mummification is one we’re still trying to understand, not least because trying to step into the mindset of people living thousands of years ago is tricky when you’re burdened with the cultural norms of the 21st century. We know a bit about what they did to their skin, we know a bit about what they did to their organs, but that got us wondering – what happened to the eyes? We sat down with Egyptologist Dr Campbell Price, Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, UK, and author of Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt, to find out. And I must say, I wasn’t expecting the onions.

DNA analysis confirmed in 2023 that a trapdoor spider lost to science had been rediscovered in the Portuguese village it was named after following a 92-year disappearance. Fagilde’s trapdoor spider (Nemesia berlandi) was first described in 1931 before apparently dropping out of existence – but all that changed when an expedition team happened to look under just the right rock.  It marked the 12th “most wanted” lost species to be rediscovered since Re:wild’s Search for Lost Species launched in 2017, which got us wondering: how on Earth does such an epic mission unfold? Fagilde’s trapdoor spider was rediscovered by an expedition team led by the Global Center for Species Survival at the Indianapolis Zoo, where Sérgio Henriques is the resident Invertebrate Conservation Coordinator. We caught up with Henriques to find out just how much work goes into tracking down a missing spider. 

Stick two humans in an enclosed space with nothing to do, and before long, someone is likely to suggest a game of I Spy. Kids are so hot for smartphone games that it inspired its own meme format, and while certain generations might like to tell you this compulsion is a new thing – the fact is, humans have been playing games for thousands of years. It’s believed that gaming actually predates language, begging the question: why do humans play games? We spoke to Kelly Clancy, a neuroscientist and author of Playing With Reality: How Games Shape Our World, to find out.

From the brain-exploding Martians of Mars Attacks! to the wonderful diversity of Men In Black’s extraterrestrial entourage, the possibility of alien life is a concept that has captured the imagination of our entire planet. Most of us only get to explore it at the movies – but for some scientists, the search for alien earths is at the core of their career.  One such scientist is Professor Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer who quite literally wrote the book on Alien Earths. That was why we were so excited to catch up with her at CURIOUS Live to find out what the search for life elsewhere in the universe actually entails, and how we even know what to be on the lookout for. 

Point Nemo is the most remote place on Earth, the coordinates where – most of the time – the nearest humans are those occasionally whizzing overhead on the International Space Station. They sail by at a lofty 408 kilometers (253 miles) above the water’s surface, but recently a father-son explorer duo went splashing through the waters of Point Nemo.  Chris Brown is on a mission to become the first person to tick off traversing all of the “Poles Of Inaccessibility”, and on his latest adventure, he brought along his son, Mika. It would take them 2,688 kilometers (1,670 miles) from the nearest land – a journey that brought with it enormous swells, incredible sea sickness, and a surprise attack from an animal just as they reached the finish line. So, what was it? 

Geese are famously aggressive animals whose sassy attitude appears to be crucial to their social rank. Large in size with peculiar "geese teeth", they can be scary, and yet despite this, 45 percent of Britons reckon they could take on a goose. It’s a curious question that got two naturalists wondering: isn’t it time someone did a podcast on how many animals you could take in a fight?  That’s just one segment of How Many Geese, a nature podcast headed up by Jack Baddams and Roddy Shaw that aims to bring comedy and science together. We caught up with the duo to find out how an expedition to Madagascar led them to podcasting, what sort of animals they’re fighting (theoretically), and what on Earth is up with the world’s biggest wild goose being poisonous. 

Sometimes surgeons need to remove parts of our bodies to make them healthy, but where do those sections of human go? They can be destroyed, but other times – with the patient’s consent – they are handed over to scientists to see what we can learn from diseased tissues. Those scientists work in what we call tissue banks, or biobanks, and they are a curious place indeed. As a technician, you never quite know when – or what – is going to arrive in a bucket at the door, but when it does, they must be treated as rare and valuable, because they are. Removing a tumor doctors hardly ever get to see could be the pivotal moment that leads to a novel therapy, or even a cure, and we have the donors of these tissues to thank for the opportunity. It’s a rich, varied, and unusual place to work, and as luck would have it IFLScience’s very own custom content manager Dr Beccy Corkill used to work in one. So, we sat her down to find out what it’s really like. Episode 2 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “What’s It Like Working In A Human Tissue Bank?” - a question taken from issue 21 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if animals have friends, what was the first work of “art”, and we meet author Professor Chris Lintott and read an excerpt from his new book Our Accidental Universe.Read it here: https://www.iflscience.com/do-animals-have-friends-find-out-more-in-issue-21-of-curious-out-now-73576

Submerged settlements, also known as sunken cities, might sound mythical but they are very real, and while their migration underwater makes them harder to find, it can also preserve them far better than they would have fared surface-side. Marine archaeologist Professor Jon Henderson knows this all too well. As Head of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, his studies have taken him from the frozen crannogs of Scotland to the submerged ancient town of Pavlopetri in southern Laconia, Greece.    Underwater archaeology pits researchers in a race against time as they must study ruins emerging from the sediment before the sea has a chance to wash vital information away. So how do they end up underwater, and what’s in a marine archaeologist's toolkit to capture sunken cities before it’s too late?   Episode 1 of the We Have Questions podcast asks “How Do Sunken Cities End Up Underwater?” - a question taken from issue 20 of CURIOUS, IFLScience's e-magazine. Also in this issue, we ask if technology helps or harms grief, if there is any truth to personality tests, and we meet author Dr Jen Gunter and read an excerpt from her new book BLOOD: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation. Read it here: https://www.iflscience.com/does-technology-help-or-harm-grief-find-out-more-in-issue-20-of-curious-out-now-73026

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