This week, the value of failed experiments. There's a lot of information trapped within those dark

reactions, those failed reactions. And hungry humans, why we burn more calories than our ape cousins.

Humans are spending something like 400 more calories a day than the other apes are. So it's a

massive amount of energy that we have available to us that the other apes are. So it's a massive amount of energy that we have

available to us that the other apes just don't use. Plus using ketamine to treat depression

without the side effects. This is the nature podcast for May the 5th, 2016. I'm Adam Levy.

And I'm Kerry Smith.

It goes without saying that we love science here at the nature podcast, but then again, we don't actually have to do any of it.

And something that many a student has realised about science, usually around halfway through their PhD,

is that a lot of the time it just doesn't work.

It might be because you did the experiment wrong, or your hypothesis was wrong, or in the case of

chemist Alex Norquist, because you're looking for a needle in a haystack.

But these fruitless experiments needn't be wasted.

Charmany Bundell rang Alex at Haverford College in the U.S.

to find out how his lab is using failed reactions to discover rare new materials.

So what we do in my lab is we try to make new materials, new materials that

contain combinations of reactants or combinations of chemicals that haven't necessarily

been put together before.

And we study these materials because there's a wide range of physical properties that these

things can exhibit for a lot of different applications, a lot of different properties.

So you're kind of trying to discover new materials that might be able to do really cool things.

Right. Oftentimes things whose structures and compositions,

...