Houston Museum of Natural Science
43 episodes listed below
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A museum is only as special as the treasures it watches over. For the Houston Museum of Natural Science, that’s more than 2.5 million objects. Each of these amazing items -- from hulking dinosaur mummies to delicate butterfly wings and intricately carved seashells -- has a story.Got an object you’d like to learn more about? How about a science question you’ve been dying to ask? Let us know at [email protected].
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Museum settings become gateways to clear conversations about evidence, scientific processes, and the people who care for specimens, animals, and observatories.
HMNS Beyond Bones Podcast turns museum objects and exhibits into starting points for curious, grounded conversations. Johnny Hemberger meets specialists where the work happens, moving from Egyptian mummification and Ice Age giants to animal care, asteroid naming, bourbon…
Beef jerky is the mummy analogy, if your museum curiosity has a strong stomach.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A fossil story that makes ancient disease feel immediate, personal, and oddly familiar.
It begins with a plain-looking dinosaur skeleton and then quietly changes the angle. A Gorgosaurus mount turns out to carry signs of cancer, then parasite eggs, so the bones stop reading like a display piece and start looking like a body with a past.
A museum-floor look at mineral basics, crystal structure, and why ice can count.
Minerals & Geology with Alex Ruff follows a museum-floor conversation about what geologists count as a mineral, with the Alma Queen rhodochrosite specimen in view.
A strange premise becomes a clear, patient look at how fossils change over time.
Radioactive Fossils takes a strange premise and turns it into a clear, grounded look at how bones can mineralize, demineralize, and sometimes end up in uranium-bearing settings.
A calm, practical tour through asteroid concern, planet watching, and a widely visible lunar eclipse.
This episode keeps its footing by treating the asteroid scare as a doorway into the rest of the sky, not as the whole story. It moves cleanly from 2024 YR4 and the usual meteor confusion to the spring planet lineup, the next visible lunar eclipse, and the MA2 Mercury capsule.
A museum-floor look at how Egyptian burial became mummification, ritual, and preservation.
This episode treats mummification plainly: it starts with sand burials in Egypt, where wind and animals could uncover the dead, then follows the work of drying, anointing, wrapping, and placing the body in public ritual.
A direct look at the care behind a live-animal exhibit.
This episode follows Johnny Hemberger through the Houston Museum of Natural Science's new Extreme Animals Alive exhibit, with Stephanie Bradbury in the fennec fox area explaining how live animals come into the museum's care and what that work looks like day to day.
A lively correction of fossil myths, anchored by museum-side detail.
Johnny Hemberger and James Washington turn dinosaur conspiracies into a clear, good-humored look at why fossil science is so often misunderstood.
A museum-side look at the warriors, the emperor behind them, and why the story keeps shifting.
China's terracotta warriors sit at the center, but the episode keeps widening to the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, the museum's role in framing the find, and the way archaeology keeps changing the picture. Johnny Hemberger and Dr.
Steven Novella and a rotating panel dissect weekly science news and debunk pseudoscience claims.
Bob McDonald anchors weekly multi-segment interviews on new research, from cricket courtship to moon missions.
Vox reporters trace how Botox, brain-speech implants, and scientific disputes actually happened.
Johnny Hemberger starts with a familiar crowd-pleaser: are dinosaurs fake, are fossils real, and should anybody be worried about radioactivity?
This episode provides a layman's introduction to quantum computing, explaining qubits, superposition, and the challenges like instability and scaling.
HMNS Beyond Bones Podcast focuses on fossil preparation through a 50–55 million-year-old garfish from the Green River Formation, with Colin Diggins explaining why its articulated scales and fins take hundreds or thousands of hours to expose.
HMNS Beyond Bones Podcast pairs Johnny Hemberger with paleontology lab manager Colin Diggins to compare Arimatherium, Glyptodon, and the museum's replica fossils in Houston's Morian Hall of Paleontology.
Johnny Hemberger opens by warning that things may get morbidly descriptive.
HM&S Beyond Bones features bourbon expert Randy Bruner discussing the science and history of bourbon.
Johnny Hemberger welcomes Dr.
A paleontologist discusses how evidence of diseases like cancer, injuries, and parasites in dinosaur fossils makes these extinct creatures more relatable and real, using specific examples including a Gorgosaurus with bone cancer, brain cancer, and a leg fracture.
Johnny Hemberger opens by asking how close anyone should be to worrying about asteroid 2024 YR4, when the planets can be seen together, when the next visible lunar eclipse will happen, and what the MA2 Mercury capsule means.
An asteroid got Tracy Canass's name.
Johnny Hemberger and Stephanie Bradbury talk inside the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s new exhibit, Extreme Animals Alive, with the fennec foxes Ember and Blaze nearby.
The Alma Queen sets the table.
Radioactive fossils are not far-fetched.