This week, 100 genomes from the Bronze Age, a tumultuous time in human history.

This is where the archaeologists have been hypothesising for a long time that some major changes must have happened.

And the US Defence Department has a new biology office, and it's not afraid of a challenge.

DARPA is a place where you're challenged to solve impossible problems.

We look at ways to say yes, not the way to say no.

Plus the genetic mutation that protects against a deadly disease.

This is the Nature podcast for June the 11th, 2015.

I'm Kerry Smith.

And I'm Adam Levy.

In the mid-20th century, a mystery epidemic plagued a remote region of Papua New Guinea.

The disease, known as Kuru, caused physical and mental deterioration and eventually death.

When someone died in one of these communities, the tradition wasn't to bury or cremate them.

Instead, their body would be eaten.

It turned out that eating the brain, which had been made spongy by the disease, was the cause of new infections.

Unlike other infectious diseases, though, Kuru isn't caused by a microbe.

Kuru is a prion disease,

caused by proteins that don't fold properly. These misfolded proteins clump together and recruit

others to join their tangled web. But some people from the affected communities didn't get

Kuru. Researcher John Collins from University College London

has been studying the genes of these survivors.

I paid him a visit at his lab.

He told me what causes humans to develop one of these deadly diseases

...