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The reason humans get goosebumps – or, to be technical, experience horripilation – when scared is simple enough: perceived threats are met with a rush of adrenaline through the bloodstream, causing muscle contractions that make hairs stand on end. This made our much hairier ancestors appear larger to potential predators. But why does our skin react this way when we’re cold or when we’re moved by a song, a landscape or a painting? Or even when we drink lemon juice? This video from NPR’s Skunk Bear probes some of the evolutionary origins of our skin’s most mysterious adaptation.
Producers: Adam Cole, Ryan Kellman
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
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Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
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Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
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Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
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War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
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Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
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Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
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Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
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Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes