Strange Bites

Lance Martin
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Science
  • Biweekly

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. 22h ago

    Episode 75: The Screw Built from One Molecule

    More than two thousand years ago, Archimedes designed a spiral that lifts water uphill by turning inside a cylinder. Farmers still use versions of it. Hydroelectric plants use larger ones as turbines. The principle is simple enough that it has survived almost unchanged. Now an international team has built a version that is one molecule long, a few millionths of a millimeter, and wired between two gold electrodes. When electric current passes through the spiral, the molecule rotates. Reverse the voltage and it rotates the other way. Once the rotation becomes continuous, the molecule conducts electricity up to a hundred times better than it does while sitting still. The paper, Current-Driven Molecular Machine with Rotation-Enhanced Conductance, was published in Nature on 22 October 2026. The molecule was synthesized by the group of Michael Pittelkow at the University of Copenhagen. The single-molecule experiments were performed by Oren Tal and Anil Kumar Singh at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Theoretical work came from Fabian Pauly’s group at the University of Augsburg, together with collaborators at the Niels Bohr Institute and Huazhong University. This is Strange Bites. Tonight the lecture is about an ancient machine rebuilt at the scale of a single molecule, and about a feedback loop in which the current that makes the screw turn also makes the screw a better conductor. Sources Nature paper: Current-Driven Molecular Machine with Rotation-Enhanced Conductance. Nature, 22 October 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-11312-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-11312-x University of Augsburg / EurekAlert press release, 22 October 2026: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1148951 ScienceDaily summary: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261030002940.htm Weizmann Institute of Science summary: https://www.weizmann.ca/news/archimedes-screw-the-molecular-version/

    Episode 75: The Screw Built from One Molecule

  2. 2d ago

    Episode 74: The Magnet That Cancels and Still Answers

    For nearly a century, physics treated magnetism in materials as a binary. Either the electron spins lined up in the same direction, making a ferromagnet that sticks to the refrigerator, or they alternated and canceled, making an antiferromagnet with no net magnetization at all. In 2022, theorists proposed a third possibility. They called it altermagnetism. In an altermagnet the spins still alternate and cancel, so there is no external magnetic field, but the crystal lattice around the up spins is rotated relative to the lattice around the down spins. That geometric twist breaks the symmetry that would otherwise make the material identical to its mirror image. The result is zero net magnetization, like an antiferromagnet, plus the ability to carry spin-polarized currents and a chiral signature, like a ferromagnet. A team led by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has now provided direct experimental evidence of that signature in manganese telluride, or MnTe. Using circularly polarized X-rays at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, they observed a chiral response that a conventional antiferromagnet should not produce. The paper, Chiral altermagnon in MnTe, was published in Science on 29 October 2026. The lead author is Daniel Jost, associate scientist at SLAC and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences. This is Strange Bites episode 74. Tonight the story is about a third kind of magnet that was invisible until the lattice twist was measured, and about why zero net magnetization with usable spin currents is useful. SOURCES https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-10-29-slac-researchers-find-proof-altermagnetism-new-magnetic-phase https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261104012256.htm Paper: D. Jost et al. Chiral altermagnon in MnTe. Science, 29 October 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv3196 Related: Faure et al., polarized neutron scattering on MnF2, same issue of Science.

    Episode 74: The Magnet That Cancels and Still Answers

  3. Nov 4

    Episode 73: The Mushroom That Draws Little People

    In southwest China and in the northern Philippines, people who eat a certain wild mushroom without cooking it long enough sometimes report the same thing. They see dozens or hundreds of tiny human figures, three to thirty centimeters tall, walking around real objects, climbing over surfaces, and, in at least one account, jumping off a spoon into a bowl of soup. The figures are often described as elves, clowns, or fairy-like characters in bright clothes. They look solid. They follow the edges of tables. They do not walk through walls. The mushroom is Lanmaoa Asiatica, a bolete sold in markets in Yunnan and known locally as Jian Shou Qing, which means something like “turns blue in the hand.” In the Philippines it is called Sedesdem. Researchers at the University of Utah, Colin Domnauer and Bryn Dentinger, used DNA sequencing to show that the Chinese and Philippine mushrooms are the same species. Chemical and genetic tests found none of the known psychoactive compounds of other mushrooms, including psilocybin. The compound that produces the visions has not been identified. This is Episode 73. Tonight the we learn about a mushroom that makes the same specific hallucination in places thousands of miles apart, and about what that consistency suggests. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261024222021.htm https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/scientists-identify-mushroom-behind-tiny-people-hallucinations/ https://www.sciencealert.com/mushroom-behind-tiny-human-visions-lacks-genes-for-known-psychedelics https://www.futurity.org/mushroom-tiny-people-hallucinations-3342322/ Paper: Domnauer and Dentinger. Mycologia, 2026. (University of Utah / Natural History Museum of Utah.)

    Episode 73: The Mushroom That Draws Little People

  4. Nov 2

    Episode 72: The Fungus Named for a Dinosaur

    In the forests of Yunnan, in southwestern China, a fungus the size of a traffic cone has been growing out of the roots of oak trees, and until 2024 no one in science had named it. The fruiting bodies are whitish to pale yellow, club-like or finger-like, up to fifty centimeters tall and as heavy as 2.2 kilograms. That is the largest known fruiting body in the entire phylum Ascomycota, the group of fungi that make spores in tiny sacs rather than on the gills of a classic mushroom. The species is Dianjunus rex, nicknamed D-rex. It is not just a new species. It required a new genus and a new family, Dianjunaceae, inside the order Xylariales. A molecular clock places the origin of that family around sixty-five million years ago, roughly a million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. The authors are careful. The timing is suggestive. It is not proof that the extinction created the fungus. This is episode 72. Tonight the get into a giant that was hiding in plain sight, and ponder what a dead tree and a molecular clock can still tell us. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261025073034.htm https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147398 https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-uncover-d-rex-gigantic-new-king-fungus-from-china-traces-its-roots-to-65-million-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/meet-d-rex-a-newly-discovered-5-pound-fungus-with-a-65-million-year-old-lineage-49812 Paper: Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, Zhang, Yang, Xie, Su, Liu, Wang, Liu, Yang, Yang, Liu, Shi, Wan, Cheewangkoon, Dai, Senanayake, and Yu. Unearthing a fungal giant: Dianjunaceae fam. nov., a novel Paleocene lineage of Xylariales harboring Dianjunus rex gen. et sp. nov. Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.3389/ffunb.2026.1940464

    Episode 72: The Fungus Named for a Dinosaur

  5. Oct 28

    Episode 71: The Diamond That Answered the Laser

    A diamond the size of a small pebble, floating in a laboratory in Okinawa, moved because the electrons inside it changed their spin. Not because someone pushed it. Not because a magnet was switched on in the ordinary way. Because billions of tiny quantum magnets, trapped in defects in the crystal, were told by a green laser to point a certain way, and the force from those spins was enough to shift the whole levitating assembly by about a hundred nanometers against gravity. The work comes from the Quantum Machines Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, OIST. The paper is in Science Advances, published on October 7, 2026: Spin-force from a Nitrogen-Vacancy ensemble drives a 100 mg levitated resonator. The authors are Anshuman Nayak, Daehee Kim, Shilu Tian, and Jason Twamley. It is the first time a purely quantum force has been seen measurably moving a macroscopic object of this size while that object is subject to gravity. This is Strange Bites episode 70, and tonight the story is about a nudge that is still classical in its response, and about how far we still are from a real Schrödinger’s cat. SOURCES https://www.oist.jp/news-center/news/2026/10/8/first-observation-quantum-spins-shifting-centimeter-scale-object-lab https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first-time-ever-quantum-spins-shift-a-centimeter-scale-object https://scitechdaily.com/a-quantum-breakthrough-inside-a-diamond-could-help-solve-one-of-einsteins-greatest-mysteries/ Paper: Nayak, Kim, Tian, and Twamley. Spin-force from a Nitrogen-Vacancy ensemble drives a 100 mg levitated resonator. Science Advances, 7 October 2026. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aeh0566 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeh0566

    Episode 71: The Diamond That Answered the Laser

  6. Oct 26

    Episode 70: The Ghostly Green Star

    Most stars cannot be green. That has been the rule for as long as anyone has thought carefully about the colors of the sky. Temperature sets the color. Cool stars lean orange. Stars like the Sun are white or pale yellow. The hottest are blue-white. Green sits in a gap that ordinary stellar physics does not fill. A star that looked green would have to be doing something temperature alone cannot do. Astronomers at the University of Warwick have now found one. It is not a living star. It is a white dwarf, the dense remnant of a sun-like star that has already died, catalogued as WD J1330+6435. It sits about 280 light-years away in the constellation Draco. Models of human color vision, applied to its spectrum, say that if you could stand close enough to see its disk, it would glow chartreuse green. Sodium in its atmosphere is swallowing the orange and red light. What is left is green. This is Strange Bites episode 70, and tonight the story is about a color that was not supposed to exist on a star, and about the dead planetary system that painted it. SOURCES https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147389 https://www.reuters.com/science/newly-identified-green-star-leaves-astronomers-amazed-2026-10-16/ https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/green-star-white-dwarf-discovery https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261015120000.htm Paper: Hollands and colleagues. Any colour you like: The diverse chromaticities of white dwarfs. RAS Techniques and Instruments, 2026.

    Episode 70: The Ghostly Green Star

  7. Oct 21

    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

  8. Oct 19

    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
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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
    75
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Lance Martin
  • Show Website
    Strange Bites