Unexplainable
Unexplainable takes listeners right up to the edge of what we know…and then keeps on going. The Unexplainable team — Noam Hassenfeld, Julia Longoria, Byrd Pinkerton, and Meradith Hoddinott — tackles scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and everything we learn diving into the unknown. New episodes Mondays and Wednesdays. From Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Episodes
October 21, 2026 • 25 mins
More than just beautiful flowers, wild orchids have been confounding scientists for years. Our friends at Sidedoor — a podcast from the Smithsonian — set out to find a rare specimen for themselves.
Guest: Lizzie Peabody, host of Sidedoor
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts
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October 19, 2026 • 28 mins
The past few months have been full of Alzheimer's optimism: new ideas that could prevent the disease from taking hold, medications that seem to slow it down, and an experimental surgery that might even be able to reverse its progression. It's a lot of hype. Should we believe it?
Guest: Dylan Scott, senior correspondent at Vox
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
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October 14, 2026 • 36 mins
“If only I could talk with them again.” It’s a common refrain for anyone who is grieving someone they love. Now, we can access technology like deadbots, or AI replicas of a lost loved one, to simulate those conversations, but at what cost? Maybe we’ve always had the capacity — within our own voices — to deepen conversations with the people we’re missing, even after they’re gone. ...
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October 12, 2026 • 28 mins
The future of quantum computing depends on getting way colder than ice cold — down to some of the coldest temperatures in the universe. The quest to build these super refrigerators takes us to nuclear bomb stockpiles, the moon, and … Party City?
Guest: Zack Savitsky, science journalist, author of Cold Rush
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more,...
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October 7, 2026 • 32 mins
Music can give us goosebumps. It can make us cry. It can make us move. How?
Guests: Amelia Meath, songwriter and singer in Sylvan Esso; Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University and author of On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to vox.com/unexplainableAnd please email us! unexplainable@vox.comWe read every email.Support Unexpla...
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October 5, 2026 • 27 mins
Is it yellow? Is it green? Or what if, as one scientist argues, “there’s no such thing as a color?”
Guest: Bevil Conway, visual artist and neuroscientist at the National Eye Institute
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to vox.com/unexplainableAnd please email us! unexplainable@vox.com
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September 28, 2026 • 26 mins
When things fall into bogs, they sometimes wind up being beautifully preserved. This includes bodies, sometimes dating back thousands of years. We’re still trying to understand who was buried in the bogs and why.
Guest: Anna North, journalist and author of Bog Queen
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to vox.com/unexplainableAnd please emai...
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September 23, 2026 • 27 mins
Once upon a time (around 300 million years ago), Earth was home to massive dragonfly-like insects and two meter long millipede-like creatures. Why did they die off?
Guests: Ned Snelling, professor of experimental physiology at the University of Pretoria; Jon Harrison, professor of environmental physiology at Arizona State University
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts
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September 21, 2026 • 35 mins
Five-sixths of all the matter in the universe is this invisible stuff called dark matter, and scientists barely understand what it is. So what happens if we can't answer arguably the biggest mystery in the universe? One physicist decided to quit because he started asking questions that went way beyond what he initially thought science was for.
Guest: Joseph Howlett, reporter at Scientific American
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September 16, 2026 • 26 mins
It's a question that seems impossible to grapple with, but scientists won't take no for an answer. In this collaboration with Scientific American, we take on the big bang and a whole bunch of seemingly impossible questions.
Guests: Rachel Feltman, host of the Science Quickly podcast; Sarah Scoles, senior contributor at Scientific American
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to vox.com/unexplainableAnd...
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September 14, 2026 • 27 mins
An astrophysicist uses the motion of the stars to argue that a single story has been told for 100,000 years. A cognitive anthropologist has questions.
Guests: Ray Norris, astrophysicist; Manvir Singh, cognitive anthropologist at the University of California, Davis
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscriptsFor more, go to vox.com/unexplainableAnd please email us! unexp...
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September 2, 2026 • 36 mins
When scientists write their own rules for life, how do they know what could go wrong before it’s too late?
This is the final episode of our new three-part series, Life from Scratch.
Guests: Kate Adamala, associate professor at the University of Minnesota; David Relman, professor at Stanford University; John Glass, leader of the JCVI Synthetic Biology Group.
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August 31, 2026 • 34 mins
Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala has been making major headlines as her lab creates cells that feed, divide, and grow — all from nonliving parts. It may sound like sci-fi, but Kate believes that these “not quite alive” cells are key to a renewable future.
This is the second episode of our new three-part series, Life from Scratch.
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
Guests: Kate Adamala, as...
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August 26, 2026 • 29 mins
Scientists stripped a cell down to its most essential genes in order to find out what makes life...alive. What they found was more bizarre than they could have imagined.
This is the first episode of our new three-part series, Life from Scratch.
Guests: Kate Adamala, associate professor at the University of Minnesota; John Glass, leader of the JCVI Synthetic Biology Group.
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts
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August 24, 2026 • 44 mins
A few hundred milliseconds are often all you need to recognize a song, but a lot of recent hits have moved away from intros. Our friends at Switched on Pop (along with the National's Aaron Dessner) break down how song intros can shape our perception and what we lose when they disappear.
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
Guests: Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan, hosts of Switched on Pop; Aaron Dessner, producer...
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August 19, 2026 • 26 mins
And if babies forget their earliest experiences, do they still matter?
This episode is a collaboration with Vox's Explain It to Me podcast
Guests: Kristin Ohlson, writer; Tristan Yates, cognitive psychologist at Columbia University; Dana Suskind, professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts
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August 17, 2026 • 30 mins
Warming waters are an existential threat to coral reefs, and for people who want to restore them. But in the Republic of Palau, researchers are testing out an approach to help restored reefs survive hotter temperatures — before it's too late.
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
Guests: Benji Jones, senior environmental correspondent at Vox
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August 10, 2026 • 27 mins
Dismissing pseudoscience is too easy. Understanding why it spreads so quickly is harder. It can teach us why real science works and how to spot the difference between the two.
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
Guest: Hank Green, creator of SciShow and Crash Course, co-host of Vlogbrothers
For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! unexplaina...
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August 5, 2026 • 39 mins
Down beneath the waves, where the light starts to fade, there's an ecosystem scientists don't fully understand. About a decade ago, some researchers left structures in this mysterious world and let them grow encrusted with life. Now they're pulling them back up again and unwrapping them like scientific presents.Guests: Luiz Rocha, ichthyology curator at the California Academy of Sciences, along with Johanna Loacker, Lynn Bonomo, Ch...
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August 3, 2026 • 27 mins
Birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field, but scientists still don’t know how they actually sense it. Called the holy grail of sensory biology, magnetoreception offers a window into the thousands of unique sensory worlds animals experience.
To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix!
Guest: Ed Yong, author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
For show transcripts, g...
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