We Have Concerns
Episodes
Take Your Peak
29 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Aging can seem like a scary prospect, but a wealth of scientific studies have found that youth isn't all it's cracked up to be. There are plenty of ca...
You Can't Handle the Tooth
27 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Hardened plaque harvested from Neanderthal teeth is loaded with genetic material from plants and animals these prehistoric hominins ate, as well as re...
Man Oar Board
24 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
South African surfer Chris Bertish just pulled off one of the most remarkable feats of human determination, perseverance and sheer grit of all time by...
Monitor Moniker Modeler
22 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Low self monitors tend to use inner beliefs and values in deciding how to behave, while high self monitors tend to monitor their surroundings and chan...
Snake Smile Salesman
20 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Python breeder Justin Kobylka says he spent over eight years selectively breeding ball pythons to finally achieve a smiley face emoji pattern on the r...
The Immortal Cult Hokum
17 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1939 a secretive cult known as the Royal Fraternity of Master Metaphysicians made headlines when its leader, James Bernard Schafer, announced their...
Raindrops Keep Sprawlin' All the Dread
15 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
After noticing an uptick in a rare disease called melioidosis during the rainy season in parts of Southeast Asia and northern Australia, researchers u...
Time Change
13 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The longest personality study of all time, published in Psychology and Aging and recently highlighted by the British Psychological Society, suggests t...
Left Out
10 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
UPS trucks almost never take left-hand turns. By favoring right-hand turns at all times -- unless a left is unavoidable -- the carrier saves millions...
Stop, Chop, and Roll
08 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A French electrician proved himself to be a bona fide MacGyver by building a makeshift motorbike out of his wrecked car after becoming stranded in the...
Magnetical Mystery Ewer
06 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
By analyzing the pottery from an archaeological dig near Jerusalem, scientists have learned that the geomagnetic field around the earth fluctuated wil...
Taking Debate
03 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When you don’t know the actual, statistical likelihood of something, the brain uses the most readily surfaceable image. This is known as the availa...
Spoiler Assert
01 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The majority of Americans have no clear idea what “sell by” labels are trying to tell them. But after 40 years of letting us guess, the grocery in...
All CPU Can Bee
27 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Honeybees' role in pollination enables the production of at least 90 commercially grown crops, including apples, blueberries, melons and broccoli, but...
Addiction Subtraction
24 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Studying its effects in the brain, researchers set out to genetically engineer mice that would be more prone to cocaine addiction. Instead, they crea...
Squid Pro Grow
22 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Human activity has changed the ocean - rising temperatures and acidifying waters has caused fish populations of all kinds to dwindle. But not all crea...
Scooter Commuter Computer
20 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Piaggio, the same company that created the Vespa scooter, has announced it will sell a robot called Gita, which is designed to carry and deliver your ...
Reckoned That Emotion
17 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Many different emotions have similar bodily symptoms. When we are angry, our pulses race, we breathe faster, we feel our faces flush, and our skin bec...
Metal Near Solid
15 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
More than 80 years after it was predicted to be possible, a Harvard University team has finally managed to create metallic hydrogen. Why? For one thin...
Headbanger's Calm
13 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Extreme music – such as heavy metal – can positively influence those experiencing anger, a study by The University of Queensland has revealed. In...
American Hamsternators (LIVE from PAX 2017!)
10 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A very different kind of episode of We Have Concerns, this one was recorded live at the PAX South convention in San Antonio Texas, and consists entire...
Learner's Hermit (LIVE from PAX South 2017!)
08 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Austrian town of Saalfelden in the state of Salzburg is looking for someone to live in a nearby hermitage which was built more than 350 years ago ...
Pig Me (LIVE from PAX South 2017!)
06 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists have created the first successful human-animal hybrids. The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, su...
True to Your Self
03 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Why do we, as humans, have a sense of self? One new theory is that a "self" actually contributes to a stronger and more robust group dynami...
DNA to Z
01 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists have created bacteria that thrive using an expanded "genetic alphabet". The blueprint for all life forms on Earth is written in a...
Fully Operational
30 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
During WWII, there was a mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald had an idea about allied bombers. Essentially, bombers were coming back after bombing ...
O2 Joy
27 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
It's generally thought that the evolution of complex life was a rare, once-in-4.5-billion-years event. But new research suggests that conditions were ...
Thirst World Problems
25 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Everything we eat is flooded with “virtual water,” or water used indirectly to produce food from cradle to grave. In fact, 70% of the world’s wa...
Headset Mindset
23 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
After exploring a virtual world, some people can’t shake the sense that the actual world isn’t real, either. Does the new technology of VR bring ...
Goos of Egypt
20 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Plastic surgeon Stanley Jacobs was obsess with an ancient Egyptian text about surgery known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Particularly, a recipe at th...
Append and Cite Us
18 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists have never been certain what the appendix used to do -- and if it is still, in fact, useless. On Jan. 9, a team of researchers led by scien...
Organ Donor Car'd
16 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
As self-driving cars become the norm, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It’s a transformative advancement, but one that comes ...
Flesh and Tome
13 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A few years ago, three separate books were discovered in Harvard University's library that had particularly strange-looking leather covers. Upon furth...
Mech it Yourself
11 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Some South Koreans have built a mech, and it has taken its first steps. Designed by a veteran of science fiction blockbusters, the 13 foot tall, 1.5 ...
Bat Signals
09 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Researchers recently used a machine learning algorithm to decode the squeaks Egyptian fruit bats make in their roost, revealing that they "speak&...
Color Be Mine
06 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Artist Stuart Semple, creator the world’s ‘pinkest paint’, has a new invention - the world'd 'glitteriest glitter'. The product has been made a...
Toyota Care-ola
04 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The 2015 Japanese census laid out a frightening realization for the country: its population is shrinking. In just five years, between 2010 and 2015, J...
Do Run Run Run
02 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
A new study suggests that high intensity aerobic activity that requires sustained, repetitive locomotor and navigational skills may stress cognitive d...
Hiding with a Chance of Meatballs
30 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Ikea is urging teenagers to stop creeping into its stores and having illegal sleepovers. About 10 "non-sponsored sleepovers" have been logge...
What's in Bad Movie?
28 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of people online have shared memories of a cheesy Nineties movie called “Shazaam”, in which the standup comic Sinbad played a genie. The...
Sham U
26 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A man called Zhao Lianshan distributed fake university admission offers to students admission to the Shandong Institute of Light Industry, through a n...
Do You Hear What AI Hear?
23 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Researchers in Toronto have used a technology called “neural karaoke” to teach a computer to write a song after looking at a photo, and the little...
Hold Fusion
21 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany's Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion en...
Skating on Fin Ice
19 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
An amusement park in Japan has been forced to close its skating rink after a torrent of online criticism over its centerpiece: thousands of fish froze...
Trajectory Plus Time
16 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Why are humans so prone to running late? New findings published in Hippocampus suggest greater familiarity with an area leads us to overestimate its p...
Alien Where
14 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
According to a new study, layers of the upper atmospheres of cold brown dwarf planets sit at temperatures and pressures resembling those on Earth, and...
Sin Full
12 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
When a loved one died in parts of England, Scotland, or Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries, the family would grieve, place bread on the chest of the...
Get Retch Quick
09 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A trio of fishermen in Oman made the catch of a lifetime when they came upon something far more valuable than their normal haul: 176 poundsof sperm-wh...
Forest for the Sprees
07 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Yellowstone National Park contains a narrow corridor less than two miles wide where evildoers could do literally anything, including commit murder, an...
Infinite Improbability Drive
05 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
After months of speculation and leaked documents, NASA's long-awaited EM Drive paper has finally been peer-reviewed and published. And it shows that t...
Recycling Cent-er
02 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A man in Cologne, Germany was recently tried and convicted to ten months in prison for modifying a bottle recycling machine and swindling tens of thou...
Great American Fake Off
30 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a S...
Never Thaw It Coming
28 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Ancient viruses and bacteria that have been cryogenically frozen for millennia are waking up, due to global warming. Siberia's permafrost and Greenla...
Charged Into Battle
25 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air...
A Light Punishment
23 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Police in southern China are punishing drivers who dazzle other road users with full-beam headlights by making them stare into the lights for a minute...
Re-poo-able Energy
21 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
According to a report from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, researchers have converted human feces to oil using a process called hydrothermal li...
Don't Worry, Bee Happy
18 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists at Queen Mary University of London who study bees suggest that insects have something like emotional states, and that a sweet treat can cha...
2016
16 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Some info about this episode: It was recorded right after the US Election We didn't intend it to be an entire episode, it just sort of happened. We h...
A Glass Half Foul
14 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
How do you handle nuclear waste that will be radioactive for millions of years, keeping it from harming people and the environment? It isn’t easy, b...
Motivational Freaker
11 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Basketball players that were grimly reminded of their own inevitable demise before playing took more shots and scored more points in a study published...
We Didn't Fart the Fire
09 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A woman in her 30s was undergoing an operation that involved applying a laser to her cervix, when she passed gas that caught fire causing serious inju...
Yawn of the Dread
07 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Contagious yawning has been linked to empathy levels in several studies. However, new research in the journal Personality and Individual Differences f...
Cult of Personal IT
04 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The mass suicide of members of the UFO cult Heaven’s Gate is one of the most bizarre and enduringly fascinating events of the 90s. But nearly 20 yea...
Of Mice and Skin
02 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists in Japan have transformed mouse skin cells into eggs in a dish, and used those eggs to birth fertile pups. The report marks the first creat...
The Shortest Distance Between Two Pints
31 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A two-year project by an international team of mathematicians has mapped shortest possible journey to visit 25,000 pubs across the UK, and set a new r...
Make the Snake
28 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A team of researchers led by Axel Visel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has replaced part of a mouse's DNA—a small sequence known as ZR...
Coffee Bean and Key Leaks
26 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
One of the busiest Starbucks in the country is the one located inside the CIA, with a captive caffeine-craving audience of thousands of analysts and a...
Jurassic Bark
24 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Though we have spent hundreds of years imagining dinosaurs as reptilian roarers, our understanding of what dinos may have actually looked and sounded ...
Bonobo Knows
21 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
An international study found that chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans seem to have the ability to see the world from someone else's point of view, eve...
Home Is Where the Start Is
19 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
After he was killed by a blow to the face about 9,000 years ago, the 23-year-old hunter was laid to rest in a limestone cave in what is now southweste...
Flight Change
17 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Travellers are used to lost luggage, booking errors and on-board delays - but now an American airline is being sued for mixing up two children and sen...
This I Swear
14 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Every swear word in the English language has been ranked in order of offensiveness. The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, interviewed more than ...
Sounds Fishy
12 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Cornish fish moving north with climate change may struggle to understand Scouse counterparts, study says, making it harder for them to mate. Experts ...
Trend in the Clowns
10 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There’s been a wave of creepy clown sightings across the United States. Going back to late August, there have been dozens of reports of threatening ...
Bird Cage
07 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
An 80-year-old woman said she felt like a prisoner in her own home after she was attacked repeatedly by a flock of seagulls. Barbara Cox was targeted...
Age Old Question
05 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In the latest journal of Aging a UCLA genetics team recorded age-related changes to human DNA, calculating the biological age of blood and estimated a...
FastPass
03 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In a unique, home-spun experiment, researchers found that the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad roller coaster at Disney's Magic Kingdom could help people...
A Clean Pill of Health
30 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists from Deakin University in Melbourne published their findings about a new drug that mimics some of the most important effects of exercise. ...
The Tortoise and the Scare
28 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A 100-year-old tortoise named Touche, owned by the same 60-year-old woman since she was five years old, went missing from his home for 10 days before ...
A Cave New World
26 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The Movile Cave in Romania, just a few miles west from the Black Sea, has been sealed up for around 5.5 million years. Although the air in it is poi...
Bye Polar
23 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Russian scientists have driven away polar bears that besieged their weather station on an island in the Arctic Ocean for two weeks. After five scienti...
Bringing Up Baby
21 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Jeff is back! And he's an honest-to-goodness real life Dad! Anthony takes a moment to check in on the experience of bringing a new Cannata into the ...
Scan You Keep a Secret?
14 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Security researchers Abdul Serwadda and Richard Matovu recently tested a pair of EEG authentication systems to see if it was possible to identify pers...
Not-a-Dog Person
12 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A man who spent the last two years raising two beloved pet dogs has had a bit of a shock. The pair of 'puppies' Wang Kaiyu bought and raised at his h...
Up Sh%t Creek
09 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Firefighters in Norway have pulled a man from the inside of a toilet after he lowered himself in to retrieve a friend's phone and became stuck in the ...
Host in the Shell
07 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
For Hermit crabs, suitable shells are hard to come by. So they have come up with an ingenious scheme. When a crab happens upon a shell, it scopes it ...
Live and Let Diet
05 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A new study, published in Elementa, looks at the consequences of switching the U.S. to different kinds of diet, from full vegan to various kinds of eg...
A Knife Well Tasted
02 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Surgeons in India extracted 40 knives from inside the body of a police officer during a rare, five-hour operation. Surjeet Singh suffers from an unco...
The Prime Sinister
31 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
For the most part, numbers are simply cold indicators, unable of expressing menace or guile, but then there’s Belphegor’s Prime, a supposedly sini...
And the Beasts Shall Inherit the Earth
29 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
What if every animal on the planet has suddenly woken up a rational, self-aware being? Would one creature come to rule all others, much as we humans h...
Cash Out
26 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Sweden is largely a cashless society, with consumers relying on mobile phone payments or plastic. While the U.S. is still far from achieving the same ...
The Net Results
24 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Luke Aikins plummeted from 25,000 feet above the desert landscape of California's Simi Valley without a parachute, landing squarely in a 100 feet x 10...
Leader of the Pachyderm
22 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Despite reported differences in appearance and behavior, DNA evidence finds that Namibian desert elephants share the same DNA as African savanna eleph...
The Bore Ultimatum
19 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A Frenchman is suing his former employer for "bore out" - boredom's equivalent of burnout - which he says turned him into a "profession...
Crash Man Be Cute
17 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Melbourne-based artist Patricia Piccinini has created a life-sized sculpture of what a human being would have to look like in order to survive a car c...
Not Milk?
15 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There’s a cockroach that gives birth to live young, and it produces a “milk” that scientists want humans to drink. Jeff and Anthony talk about ...
Finger Print
12 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Police in Michigan have a new tool for unlocking phones: 3D printing. Law enforcement officers approached a professor at Michigan State earlier this y...
Check Yourself in Store You Wreck Yourself
10 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Research from the United Kingdom found self-service checkouts allowed people to normalize and excuse stealing, even among those who would never consid...
P is for Power
08 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A team of researchers based at the University of the West of England in Bristol has developed a method for turning human effluent into electricity. Ur...
The Last 10%
05 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
A 44-year-old French father of two who found out one day that he had most of his brain missing. Instead his skull is mostly full of liquid, with only ...