Strange Bites

About Strange Bites

Strange Bites is a short science podcast. Lance Martin takes a real discovery in biology, physics, neuroscience, genetics, anthropology, or paleontology and explains it in about fifteen minutes, with just enough story to make the facts stick.New episodes twice a week. Recent bites include a brain built from two lineages, bacteria that grow their own wires, a gene that can still jump, and fossils that may have been an animal’s compass. Sources are in the show notes. The science is not simplified past recognition. It is told so you can follow it. If you want weird science, new discoveries, and a science podcast you can finish on a walk, start anywhere. Stay strange. Question everything.

Publisher

Lance Martin

Category

science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

21 Feb 2026

Latest episode

9 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

74 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Nov 2026

   Episode 74: The Magnet That Cancels and Still Answers

   For nearly a century, physics treated magnetism in materials as a binary. Either the electron spins lined up in the same direction, making a ferromagnet that sticks to the refrigerator, or they alternated and canceled, making an antiferromagnet with no net magnetization at all. In 2022, theorists proposed a third possibility. They called it altermagnetism. In an altermagnet the spins still alternate and cancel, so there is no external magnetic field, but the crystal lattice around the up spins is rotated relative to the lattice around the down spins. That geometric twist breaks the symmetry that would otherwise make the material identical to its mirror image. The result is zero net magnetization, like an antiferromagnet, plus the ability to carry spin-polarized currents and a chiral signature, like a ferromagnet. A team led by the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has now provided direct experimental evidence of that signature in manganese telluride, or MnTe. Using circularly polarized X-rays at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France, they observed a chiral response that a conventional antiferromagnet should not produce. The paper, Chiral altermagnon in MnTe, was published in Science on 29 October 2026. The lead author is Daniel Jost, associate scientist at SLAC and the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences. This is Strange Bites episode 74. Tonight the story is about a third kind of magnet that was invisible until the lattice twist was measured, and about why zero net magnetization with usable spin currents is useful. SOURCES https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2026-10-29-slac-researchers-find-proof-altermagnetism-new-magnetic-phase https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261104012256.htm Paper: D. Jost et al. Chiral altermagnon in MnTe. Science, 29 October 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.adv3196 Related: Faure et al., polarized neutron scattering on MnF2, same issue of Science.

2. 

   4 Nov 2026

   Episode 73: The Mushroom That Draws Little People

   In southwest China and in the northern Philippines, people who eat a certain wild mushroom without cooking it long enough sometimes report the same thing. They see dozens or hundreds of tiny human figures, three to thirty centimeters tall, walking around real objects, climbing over surfaces, and, in at least one account, jumping off a spoon into a bowl of soup. The figures are often described as elves, clowns, or fairy-like characters in bright clothes. They look solid. They follow the edges of tables. They do not walk through walls. The mushroom is Lanmaoa Asiatica, a bolete sold in markets in Yunnan and known locally as Jian Shou Qing, which means something like “turns blue in the hand.” In the Philippines it is called Sedesdem. Researchers at the University of Utah, Colin Domnauer and Bryn Dentinger, used DNA sequencing to show that the Chinese and Philippine mushrooms are the same species. Chemical and genetic tests found none of the known psychoactive compounds of other mushrooms, including psilocybin. The compound that produces the visions has not been identified. This is Episode 73. Tonight the we learn about a mushroom that makes the same specific hallucination in places thousands of miles apart, and about what that consistency suggests. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261024222021.htm https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/scientists-identify-mushroom-behind-tiny-people-hallucinations/ https://www.sciencealert.com/mushroom-behind-tiny-human-visions-lacks-genes-for-known-psychedelics https://www.futurity.org/mushroom-tiny-people-hallucinations-3342322/ Paper: Domnauer and Dentinger. Mycologia, 2026. (University of Utah / Natural History Museum of Utah.)

3. 

   2 Nov 2026

   Episode 72: The Fungus Named for a Dinosaur

   In the forests of Yunnan, in southwestern China, a fungus the size of a traffic cone has been growing out of the roots of oak trees, and until 2024 no one in science had named it. The fruiting bodies are whitish to pale yellow, club-like or finger-like, up to fifty centimeters tall and as heavy as 2.2 kilograms. That is the largest known fruiting body in the entire phylum Ascomycota, the group of fungi that make spores in tiny sacs rather than on the gills of a classic mushroom. The species is Dianjunus rex, nicknamed D-rex. It is not just a new species. It required a new genus and a new family, Dianjunaceae, inside the order Xylariales. A molecular clock places the origin of that family around sixty-five million years ago, roughly a million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. The authors are careful. The timing is suggestive. It is not proof that the extinction created the fungus. This is episode 72. Tonight the get into a giant that was hiding in plain sight, and ponder what a dead tree and a molecular clock can still tell us. SOURCES https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261025073034.htm https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1147398 https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-uncover-d-rex-gigantic-new-king-fungus-from-china-traces-its-roots-to-65-million-years https://www.discovermagazine.com/meet-d-rex-a-newly-discovered-5-pound-fungus-with-a-65-million-year-old-lineage-49812 Paper: Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, Zhang, Yang, Xie, Su, Liu, Wang, Liu, Yang, Yang, Liu, Shi, Wan, Cheewangkoon, Dai, Senanayake, and Yu. Unearthing a fungal giant: Dianjunaceae fam. nov., a novel Paleocene lineage of Xylariales harboring Dianjunus rex gen. et sp. nov. Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 2026. DOI: 10.3389/ffunb.2026.1940464

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

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Guest appearances

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