If you’re a female and you want to use a contraceptive pill, patch, injection, or device, you have over 250 options. But if you’re a male and you want a contraceptive, you have three options. You can get a vasectomy, you can use condoms, which can have up to a 18% failure rate, or you can use what sex researchers politely call “the withdrawal method,” which is highly unreliable. But there could be another male contraceptive very soon. So what took so long?

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In this episode of Tiny Show and Tell Us, a listener writes in to tell us about being born 3 months premature likely due to their mom having HELLP syndrome, a variant of preeclampsia, and taking part in early trials for surfactants. Then we discuss why horseshoe crab blood is blue and the exciting generation of a one-electron bond between carbon atoms.

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For thousands of years, the rise and fall of empires and the global economy were closely tied to something you might not expect: spices. The spice trade began around 1000 BCE, localized to southeast Asia and the Middle East. But by the beginning of the next millennia, it had rapidly expanded and nations vied to control it. Today it’s typically far less work to find and purchase spices you want, but just because they’re no longer starting wars that upend nations doesn’t mean they’re any less important. Because while you might think spices are mostly about making your food taste good, science — and particularly chemistry — is finding they can do a whole lot more.

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