All upcoming Inside Science: Human Biology programs

The COVID-19 pandemic won't be our last, says biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts of the National Museum of Natural History, because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. Drawing on her new book, The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, from Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, Sholts travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why such pandemics and many other infectious disease events are an inescapable threat of our own making.

From beneficial yeasts that aid digestion to toxic molds that cause disease, we are constantly navigating a world filled with fungi. Drawing on the latest advances in mycology, biologist Nicholas P. Money explores the amazing ways fungi interact with our bodies, showing how our health and well-being depend on an immense ecosystem of yeasts and molds inside and all around us.

Humans have long thought of their bodies and minds as separate spheres of existence, with the body as physical and the mind as mental. But such thinking is a barrier to discovery and understanding, and a new framework is needed, argues neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. He shares his latest research, which says that human beings are a composite of four fundamental realms of existence—biological, neurobiological, cognitive, and conscious. Together our realms account for all of what and who we are, LeDoux says.