Science for listening

The first episode of "Questionable - The Podcast with Answers" is dedicated to the topic of dark matter. Science assumes that there is much more of it in the universe than of the visible matter, of which humans are also made. Experts around the world are researching dark matter - although no one knows what it is made of. How can this be? And how do researchers even get the idea that dark matter exists? Rafael Lang, professor of physics and astronomy at Purdue University in the United States, takes on the questions. He and the moderator take the audience on a journey into space.

An entertaining excursion into the inside of the body is on the program in episode 2. Then it's all about the intestine, perhaps the most important part of the digestive tract, which can do much more than just digest. It communicates with other organs and is a habitat for billions of microbes. Giulia Enders, physician and author of the bestselling book "Gut with Charm," tells how the gut works and what it has in common with a forest. In addition, Prof. Dr. Detlev Arendt reports from his research: at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, he is investigating what connects sponges, intestinal cells and the brain.

Why do people brave the cold and travel to polar regions? Do the Arctic and Antarctic perhaps have more to offer than just ice? Episode 3 of the experimenta podcast provides answers to these questions. In it, listeners meet polar traveler Arved Fuchs, science historian Prof. Dr. Cornelia Lüdecke from the German Society for Polar Research based in Kiel, and researcher Dr. Frank Wilhelms from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven. All inquisitive minds will learn what it sounds like when the ice cracks under their own feet, why there was a race for the poles at the beginning of the 20th century, and what happens in the ice during modern research.