Strange Bites

Lance Martin

Strange Bites is a short science podcast. Lance Martin takes a real discovery in biology, physics, neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, or paleontology and explains it in about fifteen minutes, with just enough story to make the facts stick.New episodes twice a week. Recent bites include a brain built from two lineages, bacteria that grow their own wires, a gene that can still jump, and fossils that may have been an animal’s compass. Sources are in the show notes. The science is not simplified past recognition. It is told so you can follow it. If you want weird science, new discoveries, and a science podcast you can finish on a walk, start anywhere. Stay strange. Question everything.

  1. 1d ago

    Episode 69: The Rule That Does Not Care About Size

    A black hole does not care how big it is when it decides to burp. That is the finding, stripped to one sentence. Whether the hole is about ten times the mass of the Sun or millions of times heavier, it appears to launch its powerful jets at the same point in its feeding cycle. The critical mark is about two percent of a limit called the Eddington limit, the point where the outward push of radiation balances the inward pull of gravity. The work was led by Dr. Adelle Goodwin at Curtin University’s International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, with Dr. Andrew Mummery at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. It is published in Nature Astronomy under the title A universal critical accretion rate for black hole jet formation. They looked at stars being torn apart by supermassive black holes, events called tidal disruption events, and found a pattern that matches what we already knew from much smaller holes in our own galaxy. This is Strange Bites episode69. Tonight the Story is about a rule that seems to ignore size, and about why some black holes go quiet and then light up hundreds or thousands of days later. SOURCES https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144361 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1144447 https://scitechdaily.com/astronomers-discover-a-universal-trigger-for-black-hole-jets/ Paper: Goodwin, Mummery, and colleagues. A universal critical accretion rate for black hole jet formation. Nature Astronomy.

    Episode 69: The Rule That Does Not Care About Size

  2. 3d ago

    Episode 68: The Tail That Chose to Leave

    About ninety-nine million years ago, in a forest that is now northern Myanmar, a small lizard made a decision that is still sitting in a piece of amber. Something came for it. The lizard dropped its tail. The tail did not come off by accident. The break is clean, the muscle ring is still there, and the shape matches what a living lizard does on purpose when it leaves a piece of itself behind. The specimen is a detached tail, catalogued as SMNHTAU.R.21353, held at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History in Tel Aviv. It is the first direct fossil evidence of voluntary tail shedding in a vertebrate. Not a broken bone. Not a bite mark. A completed escape, frozen in resin. Tonight the story is about a defensive trick that was already working in the mid-Cretaceous, and about what amber can keep when stone cannot. SOURCES https://www.palaeo-electronica.org/content/2026/5967-first-fossil-evidence-for-a-dropped-lizard-tail https://doi.org/10.26879/1706 https://www.palaeo-electronica.org/content/2026/5983-first-fossil-evidence-for-a-dropped-lizard-tail-supplemental-materials Paper: Fabrikant, Christopoulos, Nasser, and Davranoglou. Direct fossil evidence of caudal autotomy in a Cretaceous lizard. Palaeontologia Electronica, 29(3):a38, 2026.

    Episode 68: The Tail That Chose to Leave

  3. Oct 14

    Episode 67: The Needle in the Stone

    Somewhere under the Atlantic, in mud that has not seen daylight since the Cretaceous, there is a needle smaller than a speck of dust. It is made of magnetite, the same iron mineral a compass desires, but it is not a compass you could hold. It’s about the size of a bacterial cell and its magnetism is arranged like a tornado around a hollow center. Whatever grew it was reading the planet. These are magnetofossils. Giant ones, shaped like spearheads, spindles, bullets, and needles, left in seafloor sediment by an animal we still cannot name. A team at the University of Cambridge, working with the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin, took the first three-dimensional pictures of the magnetism inside one of them and found a structure that looks built to sense both the direction and the strength of Earth’s field. Direction tells you which way is north. Strength, changing from place to place, tells you where you are. This is Strange Bites episode 67. Tonight we learn about a compass with no owner, and about the oldest evidence we have that an animal was navigating by the planet itself. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260930020329.htm https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1106425 https://www.reuters.com/science/magnetic-fossils-may-reveal-ancient-creatures-internal-gps-system-2025-11-17/ Paper: Harrison and colleagues. Communications Earth and Environment, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s43247-025-02721-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02721-3

    Episode 67: The Needle in the Stone

  4. Oct 12

    Episode 66: The Gene That Refused to Sit Still

    There is a gene in you that was supposed to have retired. It learned a job in the brain, the kind of job a settled gene is allowed to keep, and then it refused to sit down. Most of the old movers in the human genome are fossils. This one kept the knife. The gene is called BC200. It is expressed mainly in neurons. It began, millions of years ago, as a transposon, one of the mobile pieces of DNA we still call jumping genes. Genes that come from that kind of ancestry usually lose the ability to move once evolution puts them to work. BC200 did not. Cornell researchers found copies of it inside a human poxvirus, and the paper that followed says the movement never really stopped. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261002080013.htm https://www.sciencealert.com/dna-from-a-human-brain-gene-has-turned-up-in-a-virus https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/never-seen-before-type-of-human-jumping-gene-found-in-poxvirus-416882 Paper: Gao, Pritham, Feschotte, Sun. Escape of the BC200 gene to a human poxvirus reveals its persistent transposition in primates. Science, 24 September 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aeh3441 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeh3441

    Episode 66: The Gene That Refused to Sit Still

  5. Oct 7

    Episode 65: The Microbe that Learned to Flip a Neuron

    On October 5, 2026, in Stockholm, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet gave the Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three people who never set out to build a remote control for memory. Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel share it “for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics.” The prize money is 12 million Swedish kronor, split three ways. The press line is almost too clean: light-seeking algae gave us a switch for nerve cells. Here is the less clean version, which is the better one. This is Episode 65. Sources https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/press-release/ https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2026/popular-information/ https://www.science.org/content/article/method-controlling-brain-cells-light-wins-nobel https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/deisseroth-hegemann-nagelwin-2026-nobel-medicine-prize-2026-10-05/ https://www.the-scientist.com/nobel-prize-for-optogenetics-75099 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1936192100 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1072068 https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1525 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11028 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01351-4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12860890/ Key papers behind those links: Nagel et al., Science 2002 (channelrhodopsin-1); Nagel et al., PNAS 2003 (channelrhodopsin-2); Boyden, Zhang, Bamberg, Nagel, Deisseroth et al., Nature Neuroscience 2005; Aravanis et al., Journal of Neural Engineering 2007 (living mouse); Liu et al., Nature 2012 (fear engram); Sahel et al., Nature Medicine 2021 (partial vision restoration).

    Episode 65: The Microbe that Learned to Flip a Neuron

  6. Oct 5

    Episode 64: Is Your Brain One Organ or Two?

    Put a finger on the back of your neck. Not hard. Just enough to feel the pulse. That pulse is not a thought. It is an older employee. It keeps the heart honest. It keeps the lungs from quitting mid-sentence. It will still be on the clock when the part of you that writes poems has gone to bed. For centuries we called the whole arrangement one organ. One brain. One you. Stanford opened the box and found a seam. The paper dropped in Nature Neuroscience, September 18, 2026. The title sounds harmless until you sit with it: Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain. Three things to hold onto while we dive into the details. First, the front of the brain and the back of the brain do not come from the same parent cell. Second, that split is ancient. Not a human quirk. A half-billion-year habit. Third, once you respect the split, you can grow the neurons medicine kept failing to grow. Sources https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2026/09/two-separate-brains.html https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2026/09/human-brain-two-separate-organs https://www.sci.news/othersciences/neuroscience/human-brain-two-organs-15078.html https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260920222352.htm https://neurosciencenews.com/brain-separate-organs-evolution-31219/ https://scitechdaily.com/stanford-researchers-discover-that-the-human-brain-may-be-two-separate-organs-fused-together/ Paper: Jokhai, Dundes, et al., “Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain,” Nature Neuroscience, 18 September 2026.

    Episode 64: Is Your Brain One Organ or Two?

  7. Sep 30

    Episode 63: The Frequency of the Heart

    You can hear a heart from across a room if the room is quiet enough. A wet drum in the dark that has been keeping time since before you had a name. Most of the time it does the job without asking for applause. Sixty to a hundred beats a minute. In. Out. Squeeze. Rest. A little electric spark jumps from a knot of cells at the top of the right atrium, races down hidden highways, and the muscle obeys. Until it doesn’t. Then the drum misses. Skips. Stutters. Races like a frightened animal. For about three million people in the United States alone, the modern answer has been the same for decades: cut a pocket in the chest, slide in a metal box the size of a match tin, and thread wires into the living muscle so a computer can shout “now” at the heart in a language of voltage. It works. It has saved an ocean of lives. It is also a small act of invasion we have learned to call normal. In Episode 63 we head back to June of 2026 where a team at MIT, working with partners at the USC, Harvard, UCLA, and Caltech, published a different idea in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. They asked whether the heart could be taught to take orders from sound. From outside the body. From a sticker about the size of a postage stamp. This is the story of that sticker, and of the strange new sentence it writes across the chest Sources https://news.mit.edu/2026/ultrasound-based-pacemaker-noninvasively-steadies-heart-0602 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-026-01673-z https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2026/06/a-pacemaker-without-surgery-usc-viterbis-qifa-zhou-and-teams-ultrasound-breakthrough-could-change-heart-care/ https://physicsworld.com/a/wearable-pacemaker-uses-ultrasound-to-control-heart-rhythm/ https://spectrum.ieee.org/pacemaker-and-ultrasound https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/new-wearable-ultrasound-pacemaker-works-outside-body-2026a1000ndu https://interestingengineering.com/science/mit-non-invasive-wearable-pacemaker https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/mit-scientists-replace-pacemakers-with-wearable-ultrasound-patch/ https://news.mit.edu/2022/ultrasound-stickers-0728

    Episode 63: The Frequency of the Heart

  8. Sep 28

    Episode 62: Fountain of Youth for Your Eyes??

    Close your eyes for a second. Not all the way. Just enough that the world goes soft. Behind those lids is a piece of your brain that crawled forward during evolution and learned how to drink light. Those cells, the ones that grab photons and fire them down a cable into your skull, are some of the most stubborn cells you own. Once they die, they do not come back. Medicine has spent a century treating that as a law of nature. In 2020, a lab in Boston published a paper that treated it like a suggestion. Episode 62 is a story about three genes, a common antibiotic, a Nobel Prize that almost went too far, and a quiet idea that aging might not be rust. It might be a lost instruction manual. And if that is true, if the damage we call “getting old” is partly a reading error, then some of the most permanent losses in the human body may not be permanent at all. Sources https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2975-4 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7752134/ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03403-0 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10739681/ https://www.lifebiosciences.com/life-biosciences-announces-fda-clearance-of-ind-application-for-er-100-in-optic-neuropathies/ https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2026/06/09/3308634/0/en/Life-Biosciences-Announces-First-Patient-Dosed-in-Phase-1-Trial-of-ER-100-for-Optic-Neuropathies.html https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT07290244 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01836-7 https://www.wired.com/story/longevity-startup-doses-first-human-in-bid-to-reverse-age-related-sight-loss/ https://www.lifebiosciences.com/pipeline/ https://lifespan.io/life-biosciences-claims-visual-restoration-in-primates/ https://boxlifemagazine.com/eye-brain-age-reversal-gene-combo/ https://time.com/collection/longevity-leaders/2026/david-sinclair/

    Episode 62: Fountain of Youth for Your Eyes??
See All (69)

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Strange Bites is a short science podcast. Lance Martin takes a real discovery in biology, physics, neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, or paleontology and explains it in about fifteen minutes, with just enough story to make the facts stick.New episodes twice a week. Recent bites include a brain built from two lineages, bacteria that grow their own wires, a gene that can still jump, and fossils that may have been an animal’s compass. Sources are in the show notes. The science is not simplified past recognition. It is told so you can follow it. If you want weird science, new discoveries, and a science podcast you can finish on a walk, start anywhere. Stay strange. Question everything.

Information

  • Creator
    Lance Martin
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    69
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Lance Martin
  • Show Website
    Strange Bites