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Learn about why children write letters backward; how dogs know when you’re lying to them; and mountains on neutron stars.

Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan demystifies psychosomatic illnesses. Then, learn how scientists saw behind a black hole.

Learn about how to avoid getting dragged down by “Sludge”; how hybrid fruit like plumcots are made; and pirate parlance.

Learn about non-human animals that say hello and goodbye; life on Snowball Earth; and how to learn skills twice as fast.

Learn about why you eat more when you’re tired; a legendary submerged Egyptian city; and a trick for keeping the peace.

Learn about the mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death; and a woolly mammoth that walked VERY far.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler explains how “Nudge” has changed the world. Plus: squirrel-inspired robots!

Learn about time crystals; why researchers freeze-dried sperm on a postcard; and batching tasks instead of multitasking.

Learn about the harmful effects of the “mass hysteria” label; why you say “like”; and the link between beauty and moral worth.

Luke Tipple speaks with Dr. Riley Elliott, a marine biologist from New Zealand who recently tagged baby great white sharks, which are rarely seen in the wild. They talk about how climate change is affecting shark pupping grounds, why fishers are wrong to think there are “too many sharks,” and about Dr. Elliott’s Great White App, which allows users to track great white sharks in the ocean.

In this season’s final episode, Luke welcomes Emmy-winning filmmaker and conservationist Shawn Heinrichs to discuss the state of sharks in the ocean. They go over how both legal and illegal fishing operations are decimating the ocean’s wildlife, what it’s like to have a hit put out on you for exposing criminal enterprises to the world, and whether or not NOAA’s data on “sustainable” fishing can really be trusted.

This week, we do things a little differently, as Shark Week’s Luke Tipple invites Adventure Aaron into the podcast studio to talk about his incredible near-death experience on the open water. Adventure Aaron gets into what it takes to circumnavigate the world in an ocean rowboat, what it’s like to stare eye-to-eye with an oceanic white tip that probably wants you for lunch, and everything else that happened to him when his boat was capsized, and he was lost by himself at sea.

Shark Week’s Luke Tipple is joined by longtime filmmaker and Emmy-award-winner Andy Casagrande. He’s filmed and appeared in dozens of shark documentaries, and might just be the most prolific shark cinematographer in history. He talks with Luke about his career, the contentious term “shark porn,” and the future of the industry. And at the end, our researcher Sierra talks about the unprecedented ways that sharks are currently endangered.

Host Luke Tipple is joined this week by renowned Harvard professor, Dr. Avi Loeb, who recently led a deep-sea expedition to discover if evidence for advanced alien life crash-landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. They discuss the recent Congressional UFO hearings, how the last seventy years of research into extraterrestrial life has been potentially misguided, and the challenges of searching for tiny objects on the bottom of the ocean.

Host Luke Tipple welcomes a pair of divers – Leigh Cobb and Josh Eccles – who have taken their passion for sharks and turned it into a dangerous career. They explore what it takes to swim with sharks for a living, then go into common myths and facts on what to do in the open water – if you ever come face to face with a shark. Plus, our researcher Sierra drops by with a new species of shark discovered in the freezing depths of the ocean.