Please note our museum hours while we undergo renovations.
Museum HoursWed–Fri: 12:30pm–5pm | Sat: 10am–5pm

The Disappearing Spoon podcast

Topsy-Turvy Tales from Our Scientific Past

The Art of Counting Chromosomes

How did the simple act of counting human chromosomes become a saga that destroyed a friendship and started a battle over the cause of Down syndrome?

Listen

The Disappearing Spoon is Distillations’ sister podcast, hosted by best-selling author Sam Kean. The show examines overlooked stories from our past, such as the dental superiority of hunter-gatherers, the sex lives of dinosaurs, and many more moments that never made the history books. When the footnote becomes the real story, small moments become surprisingly powerful.

Arts & Culture

Kangaroo (and Pig and Monkey and Dog and Donkey) Courts

The long, wacky, and surprisingly thought-provoking history of trying animals in human courts.

Health & Medicine

The Anatomy Riots

How early anatomists provoked some of the strangest riots in history by stealing the dead bodies of the poor.

Arts & Culture

When a Hole in the Head Is a Good Thing

How a rogue archaeologist in Peru found indisputable evidence of something previously unthinkable—ancient neurosurgery.

Health & Medicine

When Mosquitoes Cured Insanity

How an early 20th-century doctor pitted one scourge (malaria) against another (syphilis).

Environment

The Death of the Lord God Bird

How greed—and a group of Nazi prisoners—killed off one of the most iconic birds in American history: the ivory-billed woodpecker.

Health & Medicine

Chewing It Over—and Over and Over and Over

How a weird “scientific” diet fad conquered America in the early 1900s.

Arts & Culture

What’s the Longest Word in the English Language?

And what does it have to do with the unusual chemistry of carbon?

Health & Medicine

Why Don’t We Have a Male Birth Control Pill Yet?

Scientists created an effective male birth control pill in the 1950s, but it had one undesirable side effect.

People & Politics

Crowdfunding Radium

When American women bought Marie Curie a vital gram of the element.

Arts & Culture

Parking Lot or Peking Lot?

Have modern archeologists finally tracked down the legendary ‘Peking Man’ bones?

Health & Medicine

Orphan Vaccines

When the global vaccine supply chain depended on children.

People & Politics

Tales of Love and Madness from the Periodic Table

An interview with author Sam Kean.