On this week’s show: Tracing the roots of epilepsy, and watching lightning, terrestrial gamma ray bursts, and elves from the International Space Station

On this week’s show: A close look at retiring research monkeys, and observations of ejected material from a near-Earth asteroid

On this week’s show: An investigation into the National Institutes of Health’s largest school debt repayment program and turning telecommunication cables into earthquake detectors

On this week’s show: A landslide laboratory in a national park in Taiwan, and a database of songs from around the world

On this week’s show: How researchers studying the Arctic contend with contamination from their noisy, smoky, and bright research ship, and how fast-moving spikes on the Sun’s surface may be powering the tremendous heat of the solar atmosphere

On this week’s show: Archaeologists are digging up buttons and beads in the Caribbean to better understand the lives of enslaved Africans, and economists are unraveling how the early Roman Catholic Church has influenced psychology today

On this week’s show: How the measles virus induces immune amnesia, making later infections with other diseases more likely, and detecting a small black hole in a binary pair with a red giant star

On this week’s show: Digging into global earthworm populations, detecting bias in an algorithm used to make health care decisions, and a plea for space archaeology

On this week’s show: Uncovering the biological basis of consciousness, and understanding why adults think their generation was always “better”

On this week’s show: New insights into dinosaurs from 300-million-year-old molecules, and stretching rubber bands and twisting memory metals to cool things down