There is precedent for humans connecting with other living things, like getting attention, love, and companionship from dogs and cats and a few other animals that have been domesticated to provide partnership. Now, there’s a new option for meeting this need — social robots — who may end up being even better at fulfilling the human desire for connection.

When an Austrian bug collector discovered a new species of beetle in the 1930s, he bestowed upon it the name of a person he greatly admired. He called it Anophthalmus hitleri — and sent Adolf Hitler a note announcing the onomastic tribute. After nearly 90 years, should species still be named after horrible people?

Long before Julius Caesar became one of the most powerful rulers in the world, he was a relatively unknown curator of the Via Appia, a road stretching from Rome on the Tyrrhenian Coast to the Salento Peninsula on the Adriatic Sea. Our guest John Keahey traversed the Via Appia, and he joins us to talk about it.

A new book by Lowell Baier is not just a history of The Endangered Species Act, but an explanation of what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong in the implementation of this historic federal statute.

Slavery in the United States is often thought to be an institution of the American South, but western states played a part as well. In Utah, a law passed in 1852 made slavery and the slave trade legal, and this law was passed under the urging of the first territorial governor, Brigham Young. Historian Paul Reeve joins the program to discuss newly unearthed documents about Brigham Young and Utah's history.

Water crises are nothing new. Indeed they’ve influenced the very course of human history again and again but we’ve never had a planet with 10 billion people on it before, and so can we solve the water crisis at a global scale?

If we are going to go to Mars, we’re going to need to bring a lot of things that we need to live that the red planet, so far as we can tell, just doesn’t have... and that includes bugs.

Autism Spectrum Disorder exists on a continuum of behaviors, capabilities, and deviations from norms — and for a very long time, that spectrum didn't include much space for girls.

Almost all large organizations — from government entities to universities to private businesses — engage in sexual harassment prevention training. And yet the problem persists.

The recent disaster in Maui was the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, and it has highlighted a gaping hole in the country's disaster response.