The Mold That Shouldn't Have Been There
In 1928, Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to a contaminated petri dish he should have thrown away — and instead noticed something that would eventually save hundreds of millions of lives. But ...
14 Jul 35min
The Man Who Froze Time and Called It Nothing
In 1965, two Bell Labs engineers thought their antenna was broken — what they were actually hearing was the first echo of the Big Bang, a 13.8-billion-year-old signal hiding inside what they dismissed...
11 Jul 34min
The Woman Who Touched the Sun and Wasn't Believed for Forty Years
In 1925, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin ran the numbers and discovered that stars — including our sun — are made almost entirely of hydrogen, overturning everything astronomers thought they knew about the c...
9 Jul 30min
The Scientist Who Caught a Disease She Wasn't Supposed to Study
In 1983, a tenacious Australian physician named Barry Marshall drank a beaker of bacteria to prove his colleagues wrong — and won a Nobel Prize two decades later for upending everything medicine thoug...
7 Jul 31min
The Corpse That Wouldn't Stop Moving
In 1944, a team of scientists thought they'd solved the greatest mystery in biology — only to realize they'd accidentally asked a different question entirely, one that would ignite a forty-year war ov...
3 Jul 33min
The Woman Who Tasted Shapes
In 1981, a chemist at a pharmaceutical company accidentally brushed her hand across her mouth and discovered one of the sweetest substances ever found — a compound she wasn't supposed to be making, in...
2 Jul 32min
The Surgeon Who Operated on His Own Reflection
In 1929, a young German cardiologist named Werner Forssmann threaded a rubber catheter through his own arm vein and into his beating heart — then walked to the X-ray department to photograph his proof...
19 Jun 32min
The Woman Who Froze Time in a Fern
In 1912, a Serbian mathematician named Milutin Milanković set out to calculate the temperature of every planet in the solar system using nothing but pencil, paper, and a theory that nearly everyone ig...
18 Jun 33min
