How to read minds

We’re back in the archives for a Halloween special, and this one comes with a warning: don’t listen on a full moon. Dan, Ciaran and Stevie each pick a favourite Halloween monster and hold it up to the light. Wicked’s Laura Pick and Professor Marion Gibson of the University of Exeter trace the witch back to the trials of the 1560s, when around 500 people in England alone, almost all of them women, were put to death for what often turned out to be knowing a great deal about plants. National Trust archaeologist Nancy Grace describes the mummified cats and witch bottles still turning up in old chimneys, hidden there to keep witches out. Storyteller Lari Don explains that werewolf stories are far older than Hollywood’s silver bullets, and that drinking rainwater from a wolf’s paw print will turn you just as surely. Author Alex Foulkes reveals why the earliest vampires were almost always rich men in castles, and which perfectly natural changes to a body after death convinced people the dead had come back. Three monsters, one common thread: science nobody had worked out yet. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’re back in the archives with one of the biggest mysteries this show has ever taken on: us. Modern humans have only been around for about 200,000 years, a blink of an eye next to the three billion years life has existed on Earth. We’re not the biggest, the fastest or the strongest animal out there, so how did we end up running the planet? Dan and Michael follow the clues from a strange skull dug out of a German quarry in 1856 to the Neanderthal DNA almost all of us still carry. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Unstoppable Us, argues our real superpower is storytelling, and geneticist Aoife McLysaght explains why we share so much of our DNA with chimpanzees, and how humans are still evolving right now. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dan and Michael explore the biggest mystery of them all: how did everything begin? Around 75 years ago, British astronomer Fred Hoyle went on the radio and used the term "Big Bang" for the very first time. The odd thing is, he was making fun of it. He didn't believe a word of it, and he never changed his mind. So how do we know the Big Bang really happened? Astrophysicist Dr Maggie Lieu from the University of Nottingham explains how Edwin Hubble worked out that the universe is expanding, and why that means everything must have started from one infinitely small, infinitely hot point. She also tells the story of the two scientists at Bell Labs who found the leftover glow of the Big Bang, but spent ages scrubbing pigeon poo off their antenna first because they were convinced the signal was just noise. Then theoretical astrophysicist and science communicator Ethan Siegel explains why Fred Hoyle was so against the idea, how he turned out to be right about where carbon, nitrogen and oxygen come from, and what might happen at the other end of the story. Will the universe end in a big crunch, freeze forever, or do something nobody expected? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are you a lucky person? Do you have a lucky number, a lucky shirt, or a favourite pair of lucky pants? In this episode of Mysteries of Science, hosts Dan and Michael investigate one of life's slipperiest puzzles: is luck actually real, or is it just a story we tell ourselves? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're in the archives for another episode of Mysteries of Science. In our first of season three, released on April Fool's Day, hosts Dan, Stevie, and Michael take a deep dive into three of the most famous scientific hoaxes. We're looking at the Cottingley Fairy photographs, crop circles, and zero gravity day... See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.