Jad and Robert will be at Tekserve in NYC tonight to talk a bit about how the show is made and answer listener questions. Watch the live stream at 6pm ET.

Professor William Barklow was on vacation when this happened. He was in Tanzania sitting on a river bank gazing about, when all of a sudden a hippopotamus pushed its head out of the river right in front of him, opened its huge mouth and bellowed.

You've got them... under your skin... Well, hopefully not. But if you did get infected with blood flukes, would it make you feel better to know they're monogamous creatures, pairing up and sticking together for years, sometimes even decades? Warms the heart.

You thought, didn't you, that when a caterpillar gets ready to turn itself into a butterfly, it spins itself a cocoon, using silk. I thought that. But, apparently, what happens is different, more like a scene from the movie Alien.

We pay tribute to the ingenious (and stomach-churning) ways that parasites hook up with hosts in our Parasites episode. Case in point: the parasitic nematode, which turns an ant's rear end into a ripe-looking red morsel that, to a hungry bird, looks like a juicy berry.

Vincent van Gogh painted rolling, tumbling air in the sky. He used paint and a brush. Ocean waves are also Van Goghs when they crash onto beaches. They paint the sky with salt.

Are those butterflies in your stomach... or did something else worm its way into your system? In honor of our Parasites episode, we imagine how some of our favorite (most disgustingly fascinating?) parasites might look for love (and a stable host) online. Up first...the Paaarasitic Wasp!

How loud is the loudest sound we can produce? Kiss fans got a taste at an Ottawa concert, but Chris Butler got closer in his sealed, reinforced, amped-up car. Bombs aside, (we'd rather not, thank you ) can we go louder? How much louder

The world's most famous ant scholar likes a good prank. His secret fantasy, he told the novelist Michael Crichton, would be to steal a 25 million year old alarm signal from an ancient ant and use it to panic a modern nest. Oh, what fun! But can he do it?

A med student is paired with a patient her age. She does her job. They talk. They bond. The patient gets better. She's thrilled. And then ...

Look where you like through the 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of our planet, and you will find only one ounce of it. It's really, really, really rare. Possibly the rarest thing in the universe.

At first, you couldn't ask for a better meal plan. The food is free, delivered straight to you. It lands, literally, right at your feet. All you have to do is bend over and eat. Except: the portions are very small and tend to slip away rather quickly. That's why sandpipers seem so frantic when you see them at the beach. Their food keeps disappearing.

It's America's birthday this week, when we celebrate government of, by and for the People, which has me thinking of two particular people, my mother and my aunt, who argued politics at our family dinner table. If families in this country are anything like mine, America's democratic achievement is nothing short of a miracle.

One of the great dinosaur puzzles, the dinosaur mystery, is why did they suddenly die off? Scientists have been debating this question for almost a hundred years and one of the most beautiful notions came from an insect scholar who thought maybe caterpillars did it.

At night, in the ocean, they look like little Broadway billboards with dazzling trills of rainbow colored light. They have eight little runways on their bodies for light display. What are they?

You find a hair on a table top. A cigarette butt on the street. You take it home, and using not especially sophisticated tools, you recover traces of DNA. Can you now reconstruct the face of the person whose hair that was? Who smoked that cigarette?

Carl Sagan once wrote a mischievous paper called "A Search for Life on Earth from the Galileo Spacecraft". Being a living Earthling, he knew he'd find life here. So what was he really up to? The experiment he ran in 1990 is about to be repeated in a few weeks. Here's my closer look.

Every so often you see something deeply, truly, can't-believe-they-can-do-this astonishing. This is one of those. A small invention, inserted into a brain, that can silence a neural nightmare with the push of a button. Andrew Johnson is going to push that button.

Back in the 1950's, a young doctor decided to try hypnosis on a teenager suffering from the worst case of warts he'd ever seen. And it worked...even though it turned out the boy didn't have warts, but an incurable disease. Check out the before and after photos from the story in our Placebo show.