You are not alone in your own skin. Millions of microscopic creatures live there too. Our skin is home to entire ecosystems of microscopic life. Bacteria and fungi get most of the attention, but mites are there too. Among the most common are demodex mites, tiny eight-legged relatives of spiders that live inside hair follicles and pores, especially on the face. Almost all adults carry them.

In this episode we explore what these microscopic housemates are actually doing on our bodies and why the idea of them can feel so unsettling. While demodex may be harmless, there are plenty of other mites that can cause problems, from dust mites, to scabies.

Hosts Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt turn this week to Alejandra Perotti, professor of invertebrate biology at the University of Reading, who studies the relationship between mites and humans.

Strange Health is a podcast from The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. Full credits for this episode available here. If you like the show, please consider donating to support our work. You can sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation here.

Hosts: Katie Edwards from The Conversation and Dan Baumgardt, University of Bristol

Executive Producer: Gemma Ware

Editing and mixing: Sikander Khan

Artwork: Alice Mason

• Invisible skin mites called Demodex almost certainly live on your face – but what about your mascara?
• How often should you really be washing your bedding? A microbiologist explains
• Scabies outbreak in UK and Europe – what you need to know

The vagus nerve has become the internet’s favourite body part. On social media, it is everywhere. People hum into their phones, gargle with theatrical enthusiasm, dunk their faces into bowls of ice water and poke at their ears in the hope of “activating” it.

So in this episode we focus our attention on the body’s longest cranial nerve and ask a simple question: what does the vagus nerve actually do, and can we really hack it?

Hosts Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt turn this week to Arshad Majid, a professor of cerebrovascular neurology at the University of Sheffield and an expert in vagus nerve stimulation.

Strange Health is a podcast from The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. Full credits for this episode available here. If you like the show, please consider donating to support our work. You can sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation here.

Hosts: Katie Edwards from The Conversation and Dan Baumgardt, University of Bristol

Executive Producer: Gemma Ware

Editing and mixing: Anouk MIllet

Artwork: Alice Mason

• From decapitation to positive psychology: how one nerve connects body, brain and mind
• Stimulating the pathway connecting body and brain may change chronic condition patients’ lives

Joint cracking is one of those habits most of us acquire without thinking about it. In our third episode, we turn our attention to one of the body’s most common and least understood noises. Knuckles, backs, knees and necks all feature, along with the enduring warning many of us grew up with: “Stop cracking your joints, you’ll get arthritis.” Is there any truth in it? And why can cracking feel so strangely satisfying?

Hosts Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt turn this week to Clodagh Toomey, a specialist in musculoskeletal injury and chronic lifestyle-related diseases such as osteoarthritis, to give you the science behind the myths.

Strange Health is a podcast from The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. If you like the show, please consider donating to support our work. You can sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation here.

Hosts: Katie Edwards from The Conversation and Dan Baumgardt, University of Bristol

Executive Producer: Gemma Ware

Editing and mixing: Anouk MIllet

Artwork: Alice Mason

• Can popping your neck cause a stroke?
• What makes joints pop and crack and is it a sign of disease?
• Joint pain or osteoarthritis? Why exercise should be your first line of treatment

The human body, it turns out, is surprisingly good at making stone. Give it enough time and the right conditions and it will go about crystallising minerals, hardening secretions and, in rare cases, turning tragedy into rock. Gallstones. Kidney stones. Tonsil stones. Salivary stones. And, in one of the strangest and saddest corners of medical history, stone babies.

In our second episode, hosts Katie Edwards, a health editor at The Conversation, and Dan Baumgardt, a practising GP and lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol, take a tour through the stony side of human anatomy and ask why this keeps happening, where these stones form and which ones you actually need to worry about. They talk to Adam Taylor, a professor of anatomy at Lancaster University, who has spent years studying stones in both everyday and extraordinary contexts, including a rare genetic condition called alkaptonuria

Strange Health is a podcast from The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. If you like the show, please consider donating to support our work. You can sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation here.

Hosts: Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt

Executive Producer: Gemma Ware

Editing and mixing: Sikander Khan

Artwork: Alice Mason

• Stone baby: the rare condition that produces a calcified foetus
• Our bodies don’t just make gall and kidney stones – from saliva to tonsils, these are other ones to look out for
• Bubble tea’s dark side: from lead contamination to kidney stones

Social media is full of green juices, charcoal supplements, foot patches and seven-day “liver resets”, all promising to purge the body of mysterious toxins and return it to a purer state. But do you really need to detox your liver?

In the first episode of Strange Health, hosts Katie Edwards, a health editor at The Conversation, and Dan Baumgardt, a practising GP and lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol wince and occasionally laugh their way through some of the internet’s most popular detox trends. They also speak to Trish Lalor, a liver expert from the University of Birmingham, whose message is refreshingly blunt: “your body is really set up to do it by itself.”

Strange Health is a podcast from The Conversation is an independent, not-for-profit news organisation. If you like the show, please consider donating to support our work. You can sign up here for a free daily newsletter from The Conversation here.

Hosts: Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt

Executive Producer: Gemma Ware

Editing and mixing: Sikander Khan

Artwork: Alice Mason