Brain Candy

NPR's Shankar Vedantam tells Steve Inskeep about a Halloween experiment to see whether children can be swayed to change their political preferences with candy.

For three seasons, fans have flocked to Hulu for East Los High. The teen soap follows its characters through the tumult of adolescence and uses a secret weapon to deliver life lessons along the way.

Once an obscure hub of specialists, the yearly gathering of the Society for Neuroscience now draws some of the biggest and brightest from other fields too, seeking answers to brain and body secrets.

Paleontologist Jack Horner explains what dinosaurs tell us about our own origins and what we can learn by attempting to revive a piece of the past.

Juan Enriquez argues that human evolution is far from over — Homo sapiens are becoming a new species right before our eyes.

David Christian explains the history of the universe from the big bang, and how humans occupy little more than a millisecond on that cosmic timeline.

Louise Leakey describes her family's long search for early human remains in Africa, and how unlocking that mystery is the key to understanding our past and our future.

Geneticist Spencer Wells describes how he uses DNA samples to trace our individual origins going back 2,000 generations.

Geneticist Spencer Wells tells the story of early humans, and our eventual migration from Africa.

Harold Kroto shared a Nobel in 1996 for finding a new type of carbon molecule that ignited the field of nanotechnology. Find a passion where — with hard work — you can be the best, he advises.