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Radiolab
Description

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Episodes
  • 2026 / 3 / 27
    Antibiotic Apocalypse

    Doctor and special correspondent Avir Mitra takes Executive Editor Soren Wheeler, plus a live studio audience, on a journey from the operating room to inside the body to the farm to the sewers and back...

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  • 2026 / 3 / 13
    Return of the Flesh-Eaters

    If a species is horrible enough, do we have the right to kill it forever? Seventy years ago, a nightmare parasite feasted on the live flesh of warm-blooded creatures in North America: the screwworm. That is,...

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  • 2026 / 3 / 6
    Snail Sex Tape

    In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti...

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  • 2026 / 2 / 13
    Time is Honey

    In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck. Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the...

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  • 2026 / 1 / 30
    Song of the Cerebellum

    One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back and bottom of her brain called the...

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  • 2026 / 1 / 23
    You and Me and Mr. Self-esteem

    Most of us spend some part of our lives feeling bad about ourselves and wanting to feel better. But this preoccupation is a surprisingly new one in the history of the world, and can largely be traced back to...

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  • 2026 / 1 / 23
    You and Me and Mr. Self-Esteem

    Most of us spend some part of our lives feeling bad about ourselves and wanting to feel better. But this preoccupation is a surprisingly new one in the history of the world, and can largely be traced back to...

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  • 2026 / 1 / 9
    Brain Balls

    When neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster was a brand new postdoc, she accidentally used an expired protein gel in a lab experiment and noticed something weird. The stem cells she was trying to grow in a dish...

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  • 2026 / 1 / 2
    Moon Trees

    In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34...

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  • 2025 / 12 / 26
    Fertility Cliff

    As she -- and her friends — approached the age of 35, senior correspondent Molly Webster kept hearing a phrase over and over: “fertility cliff.” It was a short-hand term to describe what she was told would...

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  • 2025 / 12 / 12
    The Alien in the Room

    It’s faster than a speeding bullet. It’s smarter than a polymath genius. It’s everywhere but it’s invisible. It’s artificial intelligence. But what actually is it?Today we ask this simple question and explore...

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  • 2025 / 12 / 5
    Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company

    A year ago we brought you a show called Shell Game where a journalist named Evan Ratliff made an AI copy of himself. Now on season 2 of the show, Evan’s using AI to do more than just mimic himself — he’s...

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  • 2025 / 11 / 28
    Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

    Our original host Jad Abumrad returns to share a new podcast series he’s just released. It’s all about Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician who created a genre, then a movement, then tried to use his hypnotic beats...

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  • 2025 / 11 / 21
    Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal

    Today on the show, we’re bringing you an episode from Our Common Nature (https://link.podtrac.com/v7mx144d), a new podcast series where cellist Yo-Yo Ma and host Ana González travel around the United States...

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  • 2025 / 11 / 14
    Quantum Refuge

    Qasem Waleed is a 28-year-old physicist who has lived in Gaza his whole life. In 2024, he joined a chorus of Palestinians sharing videos and pictures and writing about the chaos and violence they were living...

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  • 2025 / 10 / 31
    The Glow Below

    A call to oceanographer Edie Widder about a fish with a very odd immune system quickly becomes something else: a dive into the deep sea, into a world of brilliant light. But down there, the light doesn’t...

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  • 2025 / 10 / 17
    Content Warning

    Over the past five years TikTok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say, it’s not how you’d expect.Today we continue our yearslong exploration of what you can and can’t post online....

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  • 2025 / 10 / 10
    Creation Story

    Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistoric caves, fossils that help us understand the origin of our...

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  • 2025 / 9 / 26
    Voice

    Over the course of millions of years, human voices have evolved to hold startling power. These clouds of vibrating air carry crucial information about who we are–and we rely on them to push ourselves up and...

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  • 2025 / 9 / 19
    The Spark of Life

    In the 1920s, a Russian biologist studying onion roots made a surprising discovery: underground, down in the darkness, it seemed like the cells inside the onion roots were making their own … light. The “onion...

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  • 2025 / 9 / 12
    Los Frikis

    How a group of 80’s Cuban misfits found rock-and-roll and created a revolution within a revolution, going into exile without ever leaving home. Reporter Luis Trelles brings us the story of punk rock’s...

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  • 2025 / 9 / 5
    Screaming Into the Void

    In August we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One about a...

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  • 2025 / 8 / 29
    Music Hat

    With this episode, we’re putting on our music hat. For a program that relies so much on scoring and sound, it’s not often we talk about the musicians and the music they make that inspire us. Today, that...

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  • 2025 / 8 / 22
    The Medical Matchmaking Machine

    As he finished his medical residency exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his condition...

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  • 2025 / 8 / 15
    Weighing Good Intentions

    In an episode first released in 2010, then-producer Lulu Miller drives to Michigan to track down the endangered Kirtland’s warbler. Efforts to protect the bird have lead to the killing of cowbirds (a species...

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  • 2025 / 8 / 8
    The Menopause Mystery

    Until recently, scientists assumed humans were the only species in which females went through menopause, and lived a substantial part of their lives after they were no longer able to reproduce. And they had...

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  • 2025 / 8 / 1
    Galaxy Quenching

    This week: the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some galaxies burn bright and others dim and sputter out. And in...

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  • 2025 / 7 / 25
    The Nothing Behind Everything

    This week, two conversations from the archives about parts of the world that are imperceptible to us, verging on almost unthinkable. We start with a moment of uncertainty in physics. Inspired by an essay...

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  • 2025 / 7 / 18
    More Perfect: The Hate Debate

    Back in 2017 our colleagues at More Perfect gathered a room full of people together to debate a straight forward question: Can free speech go too far? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has changed,...

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  • 2025 / 7 / 11
    Desperately Seeking Symmetry

    This hour of Radiolab, former co-hosts Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence -- from the origins of the universe, to what...

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  • 2025 / 7 / 4
    On [The Divided Dial]: Fishing In The Night

    Have you heard On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial? It’s awesome and you should, and now you will. In this episode they tell the story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 27
    Sex, Ducks and the Founding Feud

    Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution.What does a betrayed lover’s revenge have to do with an international chemical weapons treaty? More than...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 19
    Mystery Bay

    This is episode four of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Alison Kock was working at a car wash in Cape Town when she made a discovery that completely changed the course of her life. Inside a...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 18
    The Shark Inside You

    This is episode three of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Today, we take a trip across the world, from the south coast of Australia to … Wisconsin. Here, scientists are scouring shark blood to...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 17
    The Cage

    This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, sharks that battle giant octopuses. Hollywood has...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 16
    Making a Monster

    Episode one of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Rodney Fox went into the ocean one summer day in 1963. He came out barely alive, his body torn apart by a great white shark. At the time, it was...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 13
    Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks

    In the summer of 1975, Jaws scared an entire generation out of the water. The film burned an idea into our cultural memory: they are mindless, man-eating monsters. We set out to tell a different story about...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 13
    Double-Blasted

    We first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show we’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again today. It’s about a man who experienced maybe one of the most...

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  • 2025 / 6 / 6
    The Elixir of Life

    Doctor and special correspondent, Avir Mitra takes Lulu on an epic journey live on stage at a little basement club called Caveat, here in New York. Starting with an ingredient in breastmilk that babies can’t...

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  • 2025 / 5 / 30
    A Flock of Two

    Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. In this episode, first aired more than a decade ago, Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk—it...

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  • 2025 / 5 / 23
    The Echo in the Machine

    Today you can convert speech to text with the click of a button. Youtube does it for all our videos. Our phones will do it in real time. It’s frictionless. And yet, if it weren’t for an unlikely crew of...

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  • 2025 / 5 / 16
    How to Cure What Ails You

    Now that we have the ability to see inside the brain without opening anyone's skull, we'll be able to map and define brain activity and peg it to behavior and feelings. Right? Well, maybe not, or maybe not...

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  • 2025 / 5 / 9
    The First Known Earthly Voice

    What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature magazine Orion. She called the issue “Queer Planet: A...

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  • 2025 / 5 / 2
    Terrestrials: The Snow Beast

    Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for ancient...

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  • 2025 / 4 / 25
    The Age of Aquaticus

    For years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73℃/163℉. At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze weren’t convinced. What began as their simple...

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  • 2025 / 4 / 18
    Ghosts in the Green Machine

    In honor of our Earth, on her day, we have two stories about the overlooked, ignored, and neglected parts of nature. In the first half, we learn about an epic battle that is raging across the globe every day,...

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  • 2025 / 4 / 11
    Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow

    A couple years ago, an entomologist named Martha Weiss got a letter from a little boy in Japan saying he wanted to replicate a famous study of hers. We covered that original study on Radiolab more than a...

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  • 2025 / 4 / 4
    Killer Empathy

    In an episode first aired in 2012, Lulu Miller introduces us to Jeff Lockwood, a professor at the University of Wyoming, who spent a part of his career studying a particularly ferocious set of insects:...

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  • 2025 / 3 / 28
    Malthusian Swerve

    Earth can sustain life for another 100 million years, but can we?In this episode, we partnered with the team at Planet Money to take stock of the essential raw materials that enable us to live as we do here...

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  • 2025 / 3 / 21
    Everybody's Got One

    We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a struggle,...

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  • 2025 / 2 / 28
    Revenge of the Miasma

    Today we uncover an invisible killer hidden, for over a hundred years, by reasonable disbelief. Science journalist extraordinaire Carl Zimmer tells us the story of a centuries-long battle of ideas that came...

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  • 2025 / 2 / 21
    The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

    Today, a story that starts small and private, with one woman alone in her bathroom, as she makes a quiet, startling discovery about her own body. But that small, private moment grows and grows, and pretty...

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  • 2025 / 2 / 14
    Quantum Birds

    Annie McEwen went to a mountain in Pennsylvania to help catch some migratory owls. Then Scott Weidensaul peeled back the owl’s feathery face disc, so that she could look at the back of its eyeball. No owls...

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  • 2025 / 2 / 7
    Vertigogo

    In this episode, first aired in 2012, we have two stories of brains pushed off-course. We relive a surreal day in the life of a young researcher hijacked by her own brain, and hear from a librarian...

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  • 2025 / 1 / 31
    Forever Fresh

    We eat apples in the summer and enjoy bananas in the winter. When we do this, we go against the natural order of life which is towards death and decay. What gives? This week, Latif Nasser spoke with Nicola...

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  • 2025 / 1 / 29
    Radiolab | We Go Places

    Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone...

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  • 2025 / 1 / 24
    Nukes

    In an episode first reported in 2017, we bring you a look up and down the US nuclear chain of command to find out who gets to authorize their use and who can stand in the way of Armageddon. President Richard...

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  • 2025 / 1 / 17
    The Darkest Dark

    We fall down the looking glass with Sönke Johnsen, a biologist who finds himself staring at one of the darkest things on the planet. So dark, it’s almost like he’s holding a blackhole in his hands. On his...

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  • 2025 / 1 / 10
    Smarty Plants

    In an episode we first aired in 2018, we asked the question, do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? To remember? Or even learn? Well, it depends on who you ask. Jad and Robert, they are...

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  • 2025 / 1 / 3
    Match Made in Marrow

    In an episode first reported in 2017, we bring you what may be, maybe the greatest gift one person could give to another. You never know what might happen when you sign up to donate bone marrow. You might...

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  • 2024 / 12 / 24
    Probing Where the Sun Does Shine: A Holiday Special

    This holiday season, we want to take you on a trip around the heavens.First, co-host Latif Nasser, with the help of Nour Raouafi, of NASA, and an edge-cutting piece of equipment, explain how we may finally be...

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  • 2024 / 12 / 20
    Curiosity Killed the Adage

    The early bird gets the worm. What goes around, comes around. It’s always darkest just before dawn. We carry these little nuggets of wisdom—these adages—with us, deep in our psyche. But recently we started...

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  • 2024 / 12 / 6
    How Stockholm Stuck

    In August of 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson walked into the lobby of a bank in central Stockholm. He fired his submachine gun at the ceiling and yelled “The party starts now!” Then he started taking hostages. For the...

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  • 2024 / 11 / 29
    Less Than Kilogram

    In today’s story, which originally aired in 2014, we meet a very special cylinder. It's the gold standard (or, in this case, the platinum-iridium standard) for measuring mass. For decades it's been coddled...

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  • 2024 / 11 / 22
    Science Vs: The Funniest Joke in the World

    When he rounded them up, he had a 100.A few months ago, Wendy Zukerman invited our own Latif Nasser to come on her show, and, of course, he jumped at the chance. Laughter ensued, as they set off to find the...

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  • 2024 / 11 / 8
    The Ecstasy of an Open Brain

    As we grow up, there are little windows of time when we can learn very, very fast, and very, very deeply. Scientists call these moments, critical periods. Real, neurological, biological states when our brain...

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  • 2024 / 10 / 25
    The Unpopular Vote

    As the US Presidential Election nears, Radiolab covers the closest we ever came to abolishing the Electoral College.In the 1960s, then-President Lyndon Johnson approached an ambitious young Senator known as...

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  • 2024 / 10 / 18
    Tweak the Vote

    Back in 2018, when this episode first aired, there was a feeling that democracy was on the ropes. In the United States and abroad, citizens of democracies are feeling increasingly alienated, disaffected, and...

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  • 2024 / 10 / 11
    Why Don't Sex Scandals Matter Anymore?

    In 1987, Gary Hart was a young charismatic Democrat, poised to win his party’s nomination and possibly the presidency. Many of us know the story of what happened next, and even if you don’t, it’s a familiar...

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  • 2024 / 10 / 4
    Terrestrials: Stumpisode

    As dead as they seem, tree stumps are hubs of life and relationships. Co-host Lulu Miller is back with another season of her hit spinoff show Terrestrials, and to celebrate, we’re sharing the first episode...

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  • 2024 / 9 / 20
    A Little Pompeiian Fish Sauce Goes a Long Way

    Today we follow a sleuth who has spent over a decade working to solve an epic mystery hiding in plain historical sight: did anyone survive the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD? Tired of hearing the...

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  • 2024 / 9 / 6
    Shell Game

    One man secretly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone.Today, we feature veteran journalist Evan Ratliff who - for his new podcast Shell Game - decided to slowly replace himself bit by bit...

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  • 2024 / 8 / 30
    Big Little Questions

    First aired back in 2017, here’s a show of questions and, sometimes, answers. Cause, we get a lot of questions. Like, A LOT of questions. Tiny questions, big questions, short questions, long questions. Weird...

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  • 2024 / 8 / 23
    Uneasy as ABC

    February 1976. A flight out of California turned catastrophic when it crashed into a farm in rural Nebraska. What happened that night at the local hospital, and crucially, what went wrong, would inspire a...

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  • 2024 / 8 / 16
    More Perfect: The Gun Show

    Given that we’re all gearing up for the Presidential race, and how gun rights and regulations are almost always centerstage during these times. Today, we’re re-releasing a More Perfect episode that aired just...

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  • 2024 / 7 / 19
    Lose Lose

    To celebrate the imminent start of the Summer Olympic Games in Paris, France we have an episode originally reported in 2016. No matter what sport you play, the object of the game is to win. And that’s hard...

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  • 2024 / 7 / 12
    How to Save a Life

    We get it… the world feels too bleak and too big for you to make a difference. But there is one thing - one simple tangible thing - you can do to make all the difference in the world to someone, possibly even...

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  • 2024 / 7 / 5
    Happy Birthday, Good Dr. Sacks

    First aired back in 2013, we originally released this episode to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of our favorite human beings, Oliver Sacks. To celebrate, his good friend, and our former co-host Rober...

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  • 2024 / 6 / 28
    The Alford Plea

    In 1995, a tragic fire in Pittsburgh set off a decades-long investigation that sent Greg Brown Jr. to prison. But, after a series of remarkable twists, Brown found himself contemplating a path to freedom that...

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  • 2024 / 6 / 21
    Birdie in the Cage

    People have been doing the square dance since before the Declaration of Independence. But does that mean it should be THE American folk dance? That question took us on a journey from Appalachian front...

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  • 2024 / 6 / 14
    Aphantasia

    Close your eyes and imagine a red apple. What do you see? Turns out there’s a whole spectrum of answers to that question and Producer Sindhu Gnanasambandan is on one far end. In this episode, she explores...

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  • 2024 / 5 / 31
    Argentine Invasion

    From a suburban sidewalk in southern California, Jad and Robert witness the carnage of a gruesome turf war. Though the tiny warriors doing battle clock in at just a fraction of an inch, they have evolved a...

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  • 2024 / 5 / 24
    Mixtapes to the Moon

    They promised to change you. They ended up changing all of us. On July 20, 1969 humanity watched as Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. It was the dazzling culmination of a decade of teamwork, a...

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  • 2024 / 5 / 17
    Lucy

    Chimps. Bonobos. Humans. We're all great apes, but that doesn’t mean we’re one happy family.This episode, a mashup of content stretching all the way back to 2010, asks the question, is cross-species...

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  • 2024 / 5 / 10
    Selected Shorts

    A selection of short flights of fact and fancy performed live on stage.Usually we tell true stories at this show, but earlier this spring we were invited to guest host a live show called Selected Shorts, a...

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  • 2024 / 4 / 26
    Memory and Forgetting

    Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour: a look behind the curtain of how memories are made...and forgotten.  The act of recalling in our minds something that happened in the past is an unstable...

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  • 2024 / 4 / 19
    Small Potatoes

    An ode to the small, the banal, the overlooked things that make up the fabric of our lives.Most of our stories are about the big stuff: Important or dramatic events, big ideas that transform the world around...

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  • 2024 / 4 / 5
    The Moon Itself

    There’s a total solar eclipse coming. On Monday, April 8, for a large swath of North America, the sun will disappear, in the middle of the day. Everywhere you look, people are talking about it. What will it...

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  • 2024 / 4 / 2
    Short Cuts: Drawn Onward

    As a treat for the first palindrome date of the calendar year 2024, 4/2/24, (for those who use U.S. formatting of dates anyway), we are releasing a special audio palindrome. A piece that plays the same...

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  • 2024 / 3 / 22
    Finding Emilie

    This is a segment we first aired back in 2011. In it, we hear a story of a very different kind of lost and found. Alan Lundgard, a college art student, fell in love with a fellow art student, Emilie Gossiaux....

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  • 2024 / 3 / 15
    Throughline: Dare to Dissent

    Sometimes, the most dangerous and powerful thing a person can do is to stand up not against their enemies, but against their friends. As the United States heads into what will likely be another bitter and...

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  • 2024 / 3 / 8
    Staph Retreat

    What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe.In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons...

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  • 2024 / 3 / 1
    Hold On

    Two years ago, the United States did something amazing. In response to the mental health crisis the federal government launched 988 - a nationwide, easy to remember phone number that anyone can call anytime...

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  • 2024 / 2 / 16
    G: The World's Smartest Animal

    This episode begins with a rant. This rant, in particular, comes from Dan Engber - a science writer who loves animals but despises animal intelligence research. Dan told us that so much of the way we study...

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  • 2024 / 2 / 9
    Cheating Death

    In this episode, Maria Paz Gutiérrez does battle against the one absolute truth of human existence and all life… death. After getting a team of scientists to stand in for death (the grim reaper wasn’t...

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  • 2024 / 2 / 5
    Breaking Newsve About Zoozve

    Less than two weeks since we released Zoozve, and we have BIG NEWS about our quest to name the first-ever quasi-moon! And that’s only the half of it! Listen to the episode “Zoozve” before you listen to this...

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  • 2024 / 2 / 2
    G: Relative Genius

    Albert Einstein asked that when he died, his body be cremated and his ashes be scattered in a secret location. He didn’t want his grave, or his body, becoming a shrine to his genius. When he passed away in...

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  • 2024 / 1 / 26
    Zoozve

    As co-host Latif Nasser was putting his kid to bed one night, he noticed something weird on a solar system poster up on the wall: Venus had a moon called … Zoozve. But when he called NASA to ask them about...

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  • 2024 / 1 / 12
    Our Little Stupid Bodies

    Sometimes a seemingly silly question gets stuck in your craw and you can’t shake the feeling that something big lies behind it. We are constantly collecting these kinds of questions from our listeners, not to...

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  • 2024 / 1 / 12
    Our Stupid Little Bodies

    Sometimes a seemingly silly question gets stuck in your craw and you can’t shake the feeling that something big lies behind it. We are constantly collecting these kinds of questions from our listeners, not to...

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  • 2024 / 1 / 5
    Stochasticity

    First aired way back in 2009, this episode is all about a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness, Stochasticity, and how it may be at the very foundation of our lives. Along the way, we...

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  • 2023 / 12 / 29
    Zeroworld

    Karim Ani dedicated his life to math. He studied it in school, got a degree in math education, even founded Citizen Math (www.citizenmath.com) to teach it to kids in a whole new way. But, this whole time, his...

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  • 2023 / 12 / 22
    Numbers

    First aired back in 2009, this episode is all about one thing, or rather a collection of things. Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, chances are you rely on numbers every day of your life. Where do they come...

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  • 2023 / 12 / 15
    Death Interrupted

    As a lifeguard, a paramedic, and then an ER doctor, Blair Bigham found his calling: saving lives. But when he started to work in the ICU, he slowly realized that sometimes keeping people (and their hopes)...

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  • 2023 / 12 / 8
    A 4-Track Mind

    In this short episode, first aired in 2011, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably...

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  • 2023 / 12 / 1
    Boy Man

    Could puberty get any more awkward? Turns out, yes. Writer Patrick Burleigh started going through puberty as a toddler. He had pubic hair before he was two years old and a mustache by middle school. All of...

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  • 2023 / 11 / 24
    Shrink

    The definition of life is in flux, complexity is overrated, and humans are shrinking. Viruses are supposed to be sleek, pared-down, dead-eyed machines. But when one microbiologist stumbled upon a GIANT virus,...

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  • 2023 / 11 / 17
    The Interstitium

    In this episode we introduce you to a part of our bodies that was invisible to Western scientists until about five years ago; it’s called "the interstitium," a vast network of fluid channels inside the...

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  • 2023 / 11 / 10
    Funky Hand Jive

    Back when Robert was kid, he had a chance encounter with then President John F. Kennedy. The interaction began with a hello and ended with a handshake. And like many of us who have touched greatness, 14 year...

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  • 2023 / 11 / 3
    Toy Soldiers

    Back in February of 2022, anyone who knew anything thought the War in Ukraine would be over in a few weeks. Russia simply had more bodies to fight with and more steel to kill with.Fast-forward to today,...

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  • 2023 / 10 / 6
    The Secret to a Long Life

    Producer Sindhu Gnanasambandan wants to know how she can live the longest feeling life possible. The answer leads her on a journey to make one week feel like two. And the journey leads her to a whole new...

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  • 2023 / 9 / 29
    Poison Control

    Originally aired in 2018, this episode features reporter Brena Farrell as a new mom. Her son gave her and her husband a scare -- prompting them to call Poison Control. For Brenna, the experience was so odd,...

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  • 2023 / 9 / 22
    Smog Cloud Silver Lining

    Summer 2023 was a pretty scary one for the planet. Global temperatures in June and July reached record highs. And over in the North Atlantic Sea, the water temperature spiked to off-the-chart levels. Some...

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  • 2023 / 9 / 15
    Driverless Dilemma

    Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It’s a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy. That’s the lesson of the...

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  • 2023 / 9 / 8
    Born This Way?

    Today, the story of an idea. An idea that some people need, others reject, and one that will, ultimately, be hard to let go of. Special Thanks to Carl Zimmer, Eric Turkheimer, Andrea Ganna, Chandler Burr,...

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  • 2023 / 9 / 1
    Touch at a Distance

    In this episode from 2007, we take you on a tour of language, music, and the properties of sound. We look at what sound does to our bodies, our brains, our feelings… and we go back to the reason we at...

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  • 2023 / 8 / 25
    Rumble Strip: Finn and the Bell

    A couple years ago, our producer Annie McEwen listened to an audio documentary that, she said, “tore my heart wide open.” That episode , “Finn and the Bell,” (https://zpr.io/TDjwQuXFDSz6) by independent...

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  • 2023 / 8 / 11
    The Internet Dilemma

    Matthew Herrick was sitting on his stoop in Harlem when something weird happened. Then, it happened again. And again. It happened so many times that it became an absolute nightmare—a nightmare that haunted...

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  • 2023 / 8 / 4
    Right to be Forgotten

    In online news, stories live forever. The tipsy photograph of you at the college football game? It’s there. That news article about the political rally you were marching at? It’s there. A charge for driving...

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  • 2023 / 7 / 28
    Little Black Holes Everywhere

    In 1908, on a sunny, clear, quiet morning in Siberia, witnesses recall seeing a blinding light streak across the sky, and then… the earth shook, a forest was flattened, fish were thrown from streams, and...

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  • 2023 / 7 / 14
    The Fellowship of the Tree Rings

    At a tree ring conference in the relatively treeless city of Tucson, Arizona, three scientists walk into a bar. The trio gets to talking, trying to explain a mysterious set of core samples from the Florida...

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  • 2023 / 6 / 23
    Americanish

    Given reporter Julia Longoria’s long love affair with the Supreme Court, it’s no surprise she’s become the new host of More Perfect (https://zpr.io/4R9fMg9gJ96k), a show all about how the Supreme Court got to...

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  • 2023 / 6 / 16
    Beware the Sand Striker

    Shipworms. Hairy Chested Yeti Crabs. Parasitic Barnacles in the cloaca of Greenland Sharks. These are the types of creatures Sabrina Imbler, a columnist at Defector, likes to write about. The stranger, the...

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  • 2023 / 6 / 9
    Eye in the Sky

    Ross McNutt has a superpower: he can zoom in on everyday life, then rewind and fast-forward to solve crimes in a shutter-flash. But should he? In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside...

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  • 2023 / 6 / 2
    The Seagulls

    In the 1970s, as LGBTQ+ people in the United States faced conservatives whose top argument was that homosexuality is “unnatural,” a pair of young scientists discovered on a tiny island off the coast of...

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  • 2023 / 5 / 26
    On the Edge

    At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, one athlete pulled a move that, as far as we know, no one else had ever attempted. In this episode, first aired in the Spring of 2016, we tell you about Surya Bonaly....

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  • 2023 / 5 / 19
    Family People

    In 2021, editor Alex Neason's grandfather passed away. On his funeral program, she learned the name of his father for the first time: Wilson Howard. Not Neason. Howard. And when she asked her family why his...

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  • 2023 / 5 / 12
    The War on Our Shore

    Foreign enemies have seldom brought war to U.S. soil… right? In this episode from 2017, we tell you strange stories of foreign enemies landing on our shore. From bombs floating across the country without a...

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  • 2023 / 5 / 5
    Ologies: Dark Matters

    Testudinologoy. Enigmatology. Hagfishology. Raccoonology. Meteorology. Chronobiology. Chickenology. Delphinology. Bryology. Vampirology. Zymology. Echinology. Screamology. Melaninology. Dolorology.In this...

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  • 2023 / 4 / 28
    The Golden Rule

    At first glance, Golden Balls was just like all the other game shows — quick-witted host, flashy set, suspenseful music. But underneath all that, each episode asked a very serious question: can you ever...

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  • 2023 / 4 / 21
    Corpse Demon

    Heaven and hell, Judgement Day, monotheism — these ideas all came from one ancient Persian religion: Zoroastrianism. Also: Sky Burials. Zoroastrians put their dead on top of a structure called The Tower of...

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  • 2023 / 4 / 14
    Abortion Pills, Take Two

    Abortion pills — a combo of two drugs, mifepristone and misoprostol — are on notice: on April 7, 2023, a federal judge said the FDA’s approval of mifepristone was invalid. And then, not more than an hour...

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  • 2023 / 4 / 7
    The Library of Alexandra

    How much does knowledge cost? While that sounds like an abstract question, the answer is surprisingly specific: $3,096,988,440.00. That’s how much the business of publishing scientific and academic research...

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  • 2023 / 3 / 31
    The Good Samaritan

    Tuesday afternoon, summer of 2017: Scotty Hatton and Scottie Wightman made a decision to help someone in need and both paid a price for their actions that day — actions that have led to a legal, moral, and...

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  • 2023 / 3 / 24
    Alone Enough

    Cat Jaffee didn’t necessarily think of herself as someone who loved being alone. But then, the pandemic hit. And she got diagnosed with cancer. Actually, those two things happened on the exact same day, at...

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  • 2023 / 3 / 17
    Apologetical

    How do you fix a word that’s broken? A word we need when we bump into someone on the street, or break someone’s heart. In our increasingly disconnected secular world, “sorry” has been stretched and twisted,...

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  • 2023 / 3 / 10
    Buttons Not Buttons

    Tiny buttons have such a hold on us. They can be portals to power, freedom, and destruction. Today, with the help of buttons, we tell you about taking charge of the little things in life, about fortunes made...

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  • 2023 / 3 / 3
    Crabs All the Way Down

    This week we examine one of nature's most humble creations: crabs. Turns out when you look closely at these little scuttlers, things get surprisingly existential — about how to come into being, how to survive...

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  • 2023 / 2 / 24
    The Trust Engineers

    First aired in 2015, this is an episode about social media, and how, when we talk online, things can quickly go south. But do they have to? In the earlier days of Facebook, we met with a group of social...

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  • 2023 / 2 / 17
    Golden Goose

    After years of being publicly shamed for “fleecing” the taxpayers with their frivolous and obscure studies, scientists decided to hit back with … an awards show?! This episode, we gate-crash the Grammys of...

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  • 2023 / 2 / 10
    Bliss

    In this deep cut from 2012, we are searching for platonic ideals longing for completion, engaged in epic quests for holy grails in science, linguistics, and world peace. And along the way, we’ll meet the...

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  • 2023 / 2 / 3
    Ukraine: The Handoff

    We continue the story of a covert smuggling operation to bring abortion pills into Ukraine, shortly after the Russian invasion. In this episode, reporters Katz Laszlo and Gregory Warner go to Ukraine, landing...

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  • 2023 / 1 / 27
    Birthstory

    You know the drill — all it takes is one sperm, one egg, and blammo — you’ve got yourself a baby. Right? Well, in this 2015 episode, conception takes on a new form — it’s the sperm and the egg, plus: two...

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  • 2023 / 1 / 20
    Ukraine: Under the Counter

    In the weeks following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a young doctor in Germany sees that abortion pills are urgently needed in Ukraine. And she wants to help. But getting the drugs into the country...

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  • 2023 / 1 / 13
    Games

    In this episode, first aired in 2011, we talk about the meaning of a good game — whether it's a pro football playoff, or a family showdown on the kitchen table. And how some games can make you feel, at least...

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  • 2023 / 1 / 6
    Universe In Verse

    For a special New Year’s treat, we take a tour through the history of the universe with the help of… poets. Our guide is Maria Popova, who writes the popular blog The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings),...

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  • 2022 / 12 / 30
    New Normal

    This episode —first released in 2009 and then again in 2015, with an update — asks, what is “normal”? Maybe it exists, maybe not. We examine peace-loving baboons with Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky,...

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  • 2022 / 12 / 23
    The Flight Before Christmas

    Come fly with me, let’s fly away.Once I get you up thereWhere the air is rarefiedWe'll just glideStarry eyedInto the abyssDevoid of any sort of blissYou might even hearThe shouts of fear just because we’re...

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  • 2022 / 12 / 16
    Null and Void

    This episode, first aired in 2017, has Reporter Tracie Hunte and Editor Soren Wheeler exploring a hidden power in the U.S. Court System that is either the cornerstone of our democracy or a trapdoor to...

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  • 2022 / 12 / 9
    The Middle of Everything Ever

    After graduating from high school, without a clear plan for what to do next, Laura Andrews started asking herself a lot of questions. A spiral of big philosophical thoughts that led her to sit down and write...

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  • 2022 / 11 / 25
    More Perfect: The Political Thicket

    When U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked at the end of his career, “What was the most important case of your tenure?”, there were a lot of answers he could have given. He had presided over...

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  • 2022 / 11 / 18
    What's Up Doc?

    Mel Blanc was known as “the man of 1,000 voices,” but, to hear his son tell it, the actual number was closer to 1,500. Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Barney Rubble, Woody Woodpecker, Sylvester,...

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  • 2022 / 11 / 11
    Butt Stuff

    Why do we have a butt? Well, it’s not just for the convenience of a portable seat cushion. This week, we have a conversation with our Contributing Editor Heather Radke, who has spent the last several years...

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  • 2022 / 11 / 4
    Guts

    This hour, we dive into the messy mystery in the middle of us. What's going on down there? And what can the rumblings deep in our bellies tell us about ourselves?  We join author Mary Roach and reach inside a...

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  • 2022 / 10 / 28
    The Weather Report

    Meteorologists are as common as the clouds these days. Rolling onto the airwaves at morning, noon and night they tell us what to wear and where to plan our picnics. They’re local celebrities with an outsized...

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  • 2022 / 10 / 21
    Black Box

    In this episode, first aired in 2014, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes — spaces where we know what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but can’t see what happens in that in-between...

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  • 2022 / 10 / 14
    No-Touch Abortion

    When the Dobbs decision went down, ER doctor Avir Mitra started to prepare for the worst — botched, at-home abortions that would land pregnant people in the emergency room. To prepare himself and his...

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  • 2022 / 10 / 7
    The Theater of David Byrne's Mind

    It all started when the rockstar David Byrne did a Freaky-Friday-like body-swap with a Barbie Doll. That’s what inspired him — along with his collaborator Mala Gaonkar — to transform a 15,000 square-foot...

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  • 2022 / 9 / 30
    Playing God

    When people are dying and you can only save some, how do you choose? Maybe you save the youngest. Or the sickest. Maybe you even just put all the names in a hat and pick at random. Would your answer change if...

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  • 2022 / 9 / 16
    Quicksaaaand!

    For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear — it held a vise grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. But these days, quicksand can't...

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  • 2022 / 9 / 9
    40,000 Recipes for Murder

    Two scientists realize that the very same AI technology they have developed to discover medicines for rare diseases can also discover the most potent chemical weapons known to humankind. Inadvertently...

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  • 2022 / 9 / 2
    Rodney v. Death

    In the fall of 2004, Jeanna Giese checked into the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin with a set of puzzling symptoms... and her condition was deteriorating fast. By the time Dr. Rodney Willoughby saw her, he...

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  • 2022 / 8 / 26
    Gigaverse

    A pizzeria owner in Kansas realizes that DoorDash is hijacking his pizzas. A Lyft driver conquers the streets of San Francisco until he unwittingly puts his family in danger. A Shipt shopper in Denton, Texas...

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  • 2022 / 8 / 19
    9-Volt Nirvana

    Learn a new language faster than ever! Leave doubt in the dust! Be a better sniper! Could you do all that and more with just a zap to the noggin? Maybe. Back in the early 2010s, Sally Adee, then an editor at...

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  • 2022 / 8 / 12
    Infinities

    In August 2018, Boen Wang was at a work retreat for a new job. Surrounded by mosquitoes and swampland in a tiny campsite in West Virginia, Boen’s mind underwent a sudden, dramatic transformation that would...

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  • 2022 / 8 / 5
    Escape

    This episode originally aired in 2012. An all-star lineup of producers — Pat Walters, Lynn Levy, and Sean Cole — bring you stories about traps, getaways, perpetual cycles, and staggering breakthroughs.  We...

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  • 2022 / 7 / 29
    The Humpback and the Killer

    Killer whales — orcas — eat all sorts of animals, including humpback calves. But one day, biologists saw a group of humpback whales trying to stop some killer whales from eating… a seal. And then it happened...

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  • 2022 / 7 / 22
    You v. You

    This episode, originally aired more than a decade ago, attempts to answer one question: how do you win against your worst impulses? Zelda Gamson tried for decades to stop smoking, but the part of her that...

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  • 2022 / 7 / 15
    The Gatekeeper

    This week, Reporter Peter Smith and Senior Producer Matt Kielty tell the story of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that set the standard for scientific expertise in a courtroom, i.e., whether an expert can...

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  • 2022 / 7 / 8
    Baby Blue Blood Drive

    This is an episode that first aired in 2018 and then again in the thick of the pandemic in 2020. Why? Because though Horseshoe crabs are not much to look at, beneath their unassuming catcher’s-mitt shell,...

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  • 2022 / 7 / 1
    My Thymus, Myself

    Today, we go to a spot that may be one of the most philosophical places in the universe: the thymus, an organ that knows what is you, and what is not you. Its mood may be existential, but its role is...

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  • 2022 / 6 / 24
    Galápagos

    As our co-Hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are out this week, we are re-sharing the perfect episode to start the summer season! This one, which first aired in 2014, tells the strange story of a small group...

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  • 2022 / 6 / 17
    No Special Duty

    Since the massacre that took the lives of 19 schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, people across the world began to ask versions of one question: why did police wait outside the door instead of protecting the...

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  • 2022 / 6 / 10
    Neanderthal's Revenge

    A few months ago, co-Host Latif Nasser, who was otherwise healthy, saw blood in his poop. It was the start of a medical journey that made him not only question what was going on in his body, but also dig into...

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  • 2022 / 6 / 3
    Origin Stories

    We’re all in a tizzy here at Radiolab on account of our 20-year anniversary. And, as one does upon passing a milestone, we’ve been looking back in all kinds of ways. Two weeks ago, we went out over the...

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  • 2022 / 5 / 27
    Radiolab After Dark

    Back in 2002, Jad Abumrad started Radiolab as a live radio show. He DJ’d out into the ether and 20 years later we do the same. To commemorate the 20-year anniversary of the show, the Radiolab team went old...

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  • 2022 / 5 / 20
    La Mancha Screwjob

    All the world’s a stage. Or, sometimes it feels that way, especially these days. In this episode, originally aired in 2015, we push through the fourth wall, pierce the spandex-ed heart of professional...

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  • 2022 / 5 / 13
    Frailmales

    This week, we bring you two stories about little guys trying to do big big things. First, self-proclaimed animal grinch producer Becca Bressler introduces us to perhaps the one creature that has warmed her...

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  • 2022 / 5 / 6
    Debatable

    In competitive debate future presidents, supreme court justices, and titans of industry pummel each other with logic and rhetoric.  Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. Looking back on an episode...

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  • 2022 / 4 / 29
    Hello, My Name Is

    As a species, we’re obsessed with names. They’re one of the first labels we get as kids. We name and rename absolutely everything around us. And these names carry our histories, they can open and close our...

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  • 2022 / 4 / 22
    The Other Latif: Cuba-ish

    Almost exactly twenty years ago, detainee 244 got transferred to Guantanamo Bay. Captured by American forces at the battle Tora Bora five months previous, Abdul Latif Nasser was shaved, hooded, shackled,...

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  • 2022 / 4 / 15
    NULL

    A one-word magical spell. Several years back, that’s exactly what Joseph Tartaro thought he’d discovered. It was a spell that, if used properly, promised to make one’s problems disappear. And so he crossed...

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  • 2022 / 4 / 8
    In the Dust of This Planet

    Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … In this episode, first aired in 2014, but maybe even more relevant today, things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists,...

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  • 2022 / 4 / 1
    Inheritance

    Once a kid is born, their genetic fate is pretty much sealed. Or is it? In this episode, originally aired in 2012, we put nature and nurture on a collision course and discover how outside forces can find a...

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  • 2022 / 3 / 25
    The Right Stuff

    Since the beginning of the space program, we’ve always expected astronauts to be fully abled athletic overachievers who are one-part science-geek, two-parts triathlete – a mix the writer Tom Wolfe famously...

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  • 2022 / 3 / 18
    Stress

    Stress can give your body a boost - raising adrenaline levels, pumping blood to the muscles, heightening our senses. And those sudden superpowers can be a boon when you’re running from a lion. But repeatedly...

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  • 2022 / 3 / 11
    The Helen Keller Exorcism

    Fantasy writer Elsa Sjunneson has been haunted by Helen Keller for nearly her entire life. Like Helen, Elsa is Deafblind, and growing up she was constantly compared to her. But for a million different reasons...

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  • 2022 / 3 / 4
    Life in a Barrel

    This week, we flip the Disney story of life on its head thanks to a barrel of seawater, a 1970s era computer, and underwater geysers. It’s the chaos of life. Latif, Lulu, and our Senior Producer Matt Kielty...

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  • 2022 / 2 / 25
    Speed

    We live our lives at human speed, we experience and interact with the world on a human time scale. In this episode, which first aired in its entirety in the winter of 2013, we put ourselves through the paces....

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  • 2022 / 2 / 18
    The Wordless Place

    This week, we turn to an expert who tromps the wilds of wordlessness. Lulu’s young son. In this essay, originally published for The Paris Review under the title “The Eleventh Word,” Lulu explores what is lost...

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  • 2022 / 2 / 11
    Hello

    It's hard to start a conversation with a stranger—especially when that stranger is, well, different. He doesn't share your customs, celebrate your holidays, watch your TV shows, or even speak your language....

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  • 2022 / 1 / 28
    The First Radiolab

    Jad started Radiolab roughly 20 years ago. And now he is stepping aside from hosting and producing the show to replenish, to think, to rock in his chair and be with his kids and wife, and maybe make some...

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  • 2022 / 1 / 26
    News and Gratitude

    No Description

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  • 2022 / 1 / 21
    The 11th: A Letter From George

    Last week, Lulu heard an interview that trapped her in her car. She decided to play it for Latif. The interview – originally from a podcast called The Relentless Picnic, but presented by one of Lulu’s current...

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  • 2022 / 1 / 14
    Darkode

    It would seem that hackers today can do just about anything they want - from turning on the cellphone in your pocket to holding your life's work hostage. Cyber criminals today have more sophisticated tools,...

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  • 2022 / 1 / 7
    Worst. Year. Ever.

    What was the worst year to be alive on planet Earth?   We make the case for 536 AD, which set off a cascade of catastrophes that is almost too horrible to imagine. A supervolcano. The disappearance of...

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  • 2021 / 12 / 31
    Flop Off

    This past year was a flop. From questionable blockbuster reboots to supply chain shenanigans to worst of all, omnipresent COVID variants. But, in a last ditch effort to flip the flop, we at Radiolab have...

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  • 2021 / 12 / 17
    Vanishing Words

    When Alana Casanova-Burgess set out to make a podcast series about Puerto Rico, she struggled with what to call it. Until one word came to mind, a word that captures a certain essence of life in Puerto Rico,...

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  • 2021 / 12 / 10
    Return of Alpha Gal

    Tuck your napkin under your chin. We’re about to serve up a tale of love, loss, and lamb chops - with a side of genetic modification. Several years ago we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she...

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  • 2021 / 11 / 26
    Animal Minds

    In this hour of Radiolab, stories of cross-species communication. When we gaze into the eyes of a wild animal, or even a beloved pet, can we ever really know what they might be thinking? Is it naive to assume...

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  • 2021 / 11 / 19
    Mixtape: Help?

    In tape five, three stories: first, a tale of how the cassette tape supercharged the self-help industry. Second, cassettes filled with history make an epic journey across Africa with a group of Lost Boys. And...

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  • 2021 / 11 / 12
    Mixtape: Cassetternet

    In 1983, Simon Goodwin had a strange thought. Would it be possible to broadcast computer software over the radio? If so, could listeners record it off the air and onto a cassette tape? This experiment and...

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  • 2021 / 11 / 5
    Mixtape: The Wandering Soul

    As the Vietnam war dragged on, the US military began desperately searching for any vulnerability in their North Vietnamese enemy. In 1964, they found it. It was an old Vietnamese folktale involving a ghost,...

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  • 2021 / 10 / 29
    Mixtape: Jack and Bing

    In 1946 Bing Crosby was the king of media. He was the movie star, the pop star and his radio show was reaching a third of American living rooms each week. But then, it all started to fall apart. His ratings...

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  • 2021 / 10 / 22
    Mixtape: Dakou

    Through the 1980s, the vast majority of people in China had never heard western music, save for John Denver, the Carpenters, and a few other artists included on the hand-picked list of songs sanctioned by the...

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  • 2021 / 10 / 15
    Of Bombs and Butterflies

    Ecologist Nick Haddad was sitting in his new office at North Carolina State University when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was... The U.S. Army. The Army folks told him, “Look, there’s this...

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  • 2021 / 10 / 1
    Oliver Sipple

    One morning, Oliver Sipple went out for a walk. A couple hours later, to his own surprise, he saved the life of the President of the United States. But in the days that followed, Sipple’s split-second act of...

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  • 2021 / 9 / 24
    HEAVY METAL

    Today we have a story about the sometimes obvious but sometimes sneaky effects of the way that we humans rearrange the elemental stuff around us. Reporter Avir Mitra and science journalist Lydia Denworth...

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  • 2021 / 9 / 17
    In the Running

    Diane Van Deren is one of the best ultra-runners in the world, and it all started with a seizure. In this short, Diane tells us how her disability gave rise to an extraordinary ability. For Diane Van Deren, a...

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  • 2021 / 9 / 10
    60 Words, 20 Years

    It has now been 20 years since September 11th, 2001. So we’re bringing you a Peabody Award-winning story from our archives about one sentence, written in the hours after the attacks, that has led to the...

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  • 2021 / 8 / 26
    The Unsilencing

    Multiple sclerosis, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, even psoriasis — these are diseases in which the body begins to attack itself, and they all have one thing in common: they affect women more than men. Most...

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  • 2021 / 8 / 20
    Everybody’s Got One

    We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. But this story isn’t the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, it’s a...

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  • 2021 / 8 / 6
    Gonads: Dutee

    In 2014, India’s Dutee Chand was a rising female track and field star, crushing national records. But then, that summer, something unexpected happened: she failed a gender test. And was banned from the sport....

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  • 2021 / 7 / 23
    The Queen of Dying

    If you’ve ever lost someone, or watched a medical drama in the last 15 years, you’ve probably heard of The Five Stages of Grief. They’re sort of the world’s worst consolation prize for loss. But last year, we...

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  • 2021 / 7 / 19
    Breaking News about The Other Latif

    A major development in the case of Guantanamo detainee Abdul Latif Nasser. To listen to our series about him, go to theotherlatif.org.

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  • 2021 / 7 / 15
    G: Unfit

    In the past few weeks, most people have probably seen Britney Spears' name or face everywhere. When she stood in front of a judge (virtually) and protested the conservatorship she's been living under for the...

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  • 2021 / 7 / 9
    The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 6

    Lift Every Voice.  Black Swan Records was first to record the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. From a family's Thanksgiving dinner, we portal through to the song's past, present, and future. The Vanishing of...

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  • 2021 / 7 / 2
    The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 5

    Roland Hayes and the Lost Generation.  Here’s the extraordinary story of Roland Hayes, another great (and largely forgotten) creator of new cosmologies. The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created and produced by...

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  • 2021 / 6 / 29
    The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 4

    Our Harlem Moon.  In this spin-off tale, Ethel Waters hijacks a degrading song and makes the music her own. The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created and produced by Shima Oliaee and Jad Abumrad.  This series...

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  • 2021 / 6 / 26
    The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 3

    Black No More, White No More.  We follow Harry's grandkids and great grandkids as they grapple with his legacy in their own lives.  The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created and produced by Shima Oliaee and Jad...

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  • 2021 / 6 / 19
    The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 2

    Dreams Deferred.  The story of the post Black Swan years. We follow Harry’s Supreme Court battle to desegregate the South Side of Chicago, and then the mysterious decision which forces him into seclusion,...

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  • 2021 / 6 / 18
    The Vanishing of Harry Pace: Episode 1

    The Rise and Fall of Black Swan.  It was Motown before Motown, FUBU before FUBU: Black Swan Records, the record company founded by Harry Pace. The Vanishing of Harry Pace was created and produced by Shima...

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  • 2021 / 6 / 11
    Breath

    We’ve just barely made it to the other side of a year that took our collective breaths away. So more than ever we felt that this was the time to go deep on life’s rhythmic dance partner. Today we huff and we...

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  • 2021 / 5 / 27
    The Rhino Hunter

    Back in 2014, Corey Knowlton paid $350,000 for a hunting trip to Namibia to shoot and kill an endangered species. He’s a professional hunter, who guides hunts all around the world, so going to Africa would...

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  • 2021 / 5 / 21
    The Dirty Drug and the Ice Cream Tub

    This episode, a tale of a wonder drug that will make you wonder about way more than just drugs.   Doctor-reporter Avir Mitra follows the epic and fantastical journey of a molecule dug out of a distant patch...

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  • 2021 / 5 / 13
    Brown Box

    You order some stuff on the Internet and it shows up three hours later. How could all the things that need to happen to make that happen happen so fast? It used to be, when you ordered something on the...

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  • 2021 / 5 / 5
    Kleptotherms

    In this episode, we break the thermometer watch the mercury spill out as we discover temperature is far stranger than it seems. Five stories that run the gamut from snakes to stars. We start out underwater,...

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  • 2021 / 4 / 22
    Deep Cuts

    Today, Lulu and Latif talk about some of their favorite episodes from Radiolab’s past that hold new power today.   Lulu points to an episode from 2008:  Imagine that you're a composer. Imagine getting the...

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  • 2021 / 4 / 2
    What Up Holmes?

    Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free speech is actually relatively recent, and...

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  • 2021 / 3 / 25
    Elements

    Scientists took about 300 years to lay out the Periodic Table into neat rows and columns. In one hour, we’re going to mess it all up. This episode, we enlist journalists, poets, musicians, and even a...

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  • 2021 / 3 / 19
    Escapescape

    As we hit the one year mark since the first U.S. state (California) issued a stay-at-home order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we put out a call to see if any of you would take us to your secret escape...

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  • 2021 / 3 / 12
    Dispatch 14: Covid Crystal Ball

    Last summer, at a hospital in England, a man in his 70s being treated for complications with cancer tested positive for covid-19. He had lymphoma, and the disease plus his drugs weakened his immune system,...

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  • 2021 / 2 / 25
    The Ceremony

    In November of 2016, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster's apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment...

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  • 2021 / 2 / 19
    Red Herring

    It was the early 80s, the height of the Cold War, when something strange began happening off the coast of Sweden. The navy reported a mysterious sound deep below the surface of the ocean. Again, and again,...

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  • 2021 / 2 / 12
    Facebook's Supreme Court

    Since its inception, the perennial thorn in Facebook’s side has been content moderation. That is, deciding what you and I are allowed to post on the site and what we’re not. Missteps by Facebook in this area...

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  • 2021 / 1 / 29
    Smile My Ass

    Candid Camera is one of the most original – and one of the most mischievous – TV shows of all time. Admirers hailed its creator Allen Funt as a poet of the everyday. Critics denounced him as a Peeping Tom....

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  • 2021 / 1 / 16
    Post Reports: Four Hours of Insurrection

    We’re all still processing what happened on January 6th. Despite the hours and hours of video circulating online, we still didn’t feel like we had a visceral, on-the-ground sense of what happened that day....

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  • 2021 / 1 / 15
    More Money Less Problems

    Back in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was just beginning and the shelter-in-place orders brought the economy to a screeching halt, a quirky-but-clever idea to save the economy made its way up to some...

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  • 2021 / 1 / 13
    Sight Unseen

    As the attacks were unfolding on the Capitol, a steady stream of images poured onto our screens. Photo editor Kainaz Amaria tells us what she was looking for--and seeing--that afternoon. And she runs into...

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  • 2021 / 1 / 7
    A Note from Radiolab

    In the past few weeks, there have been a lot of conversations about the tolerance of harassment and bad behavior in our industry and in particular of a person who worked on our show five years ago, Andy...

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  • 2020 / 12 / 23
    A Terrible Covid Christmas Special

    This year was the worst. And as our staff tried to figure out what to do for our last episode of 2020, co-host Latif Nasser thought, what if we stare straight into the darkness … and make a damn Christmas...

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  • 2020 / 12 / 18
    The Ashes on the Lawn

    A global pandemic. An afflicted, angry group. A seemingly indifferent government. Reporter Tracie Hunte wanted to understand this moment of pain and confusion by looking back 30 years, and she found a...

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  • 2020 / 12 / 10
    Enemy of Mankind

    Should the U.S. Supreme Court be the court of the world? In the 18th century, two feuding Frenchmen inspired a one-sentence law that helped launch American human rights litigation into the 20th century. The...

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  • 2020 / 12 / 3
    The Great Vaccinator

    Until now, the fastest vaccine ever made - for mumps - took four years. And while our current effort to develop a covid-19 vaccine involves thousands of people working around the clock, the mumps vaccine...

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  • 2020 / 11 / 25
    Dispatch 13: Challenge Trials

    What if someone asked you to get infected with the COVID-19 virus, deliberately, in order to speed up the development of a vaccine? Would you do it? Would you risk your life to save others? For months, dozens...

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  • 2020 / 11 / 13
    Breaking Benford

    In the days after the US Presidential election was called for Joe Biden, many supporters of Donald Trump are crying foul. Voter fraud. And a key piece of evidence? A century-old quirk of math called...

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  • 2020 / 11 / 2
    Bloc Party

    In the 1996 election, Bill Clinton had a problem. The women who came out in droves for him in ‘92, split their vote in the ‘94 midterms, handing over control of the House and the Senate to the Republican...

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  • 2020 / 10 / 31
    How to Win Friends and Influence Baboons

    Baboon troops. We all know they’re hierarchical. There’s the big brutish alpha male who rules with a hairy iron fist, and then there’s everybody else. Which is what Meg Crofoot thought too, before she used...

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  • 2020 / 10 / 23
    What If?

    There’s plenty of speculation about what Donald Trump might do in the wake of the election. Would he dispute the results if he loses? Would he simply refuse to leave office, or even try to use the military to...

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  • 2020 / 10 / 8
    Kittens Kick The Giggly Blue Robot All Summer

    With the recent passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there's been a lot of debate about how much power the Supreme Court should really have. We tend to think of the Supreme Court justices as all-powerful...

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  • 2020 / 9 / 25
    Insomnia Line

    Coronasomnia is a not-so-surprising side-effect of the global pandemic. More and more of us are having trouble falling asleep. We wanted to find a way to get inside that nighttime world, to see why people are...

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  • 2020 / 9 / 19
    More Perfect: Sex Appeal

    We lost a legend. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18th, 2020. She was 87. In honor of her passing we are re-airing the More Perfect episode dedicated to one of her cases, because...

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  • 2020 / 9 / 17
    Falling

    There are so many ways to fall—in love, asleep, even flat on your face. This hour, Radiolab dives into stories of great falls.  We jump into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, upend some myths...

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  • 2020 / 9 / 11
    Bringing Gamma Back, Again

    Today, we return to the lab of neuroscientist Li-Huei Tsai, which brought us one of our favorite stories from four years ago - about the power of flashing lights on an Alzheimer’s-addled (mouse) brain. In...

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  • 2020 / 9 / 4
    Fungus Amungus

    Six years ago, a new infection began popping up in four different hospitals on three different continents, all around the same time. It wasn’t a bacteria, or a virus. It was ... a killer fungus. No one knew...

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  • 2020 / 8 / 27
    Translation

    How close can words get you to the truth and feel and force of life? That's the question poking at our ribs this hour, as we wonder how it is that the right words can have the wrong meanings, and why...

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  • 2020 / 8 / 21
    Lebanon, USA

    This is a story of a road trip. After a particularly traumatic Valentine's Day, Fadi Boukaram was surfing google maps and noticed that there was a town called Lebanon... in Oregon. Being Lebanese himself, he...

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  • 2020 / 8 / 14
    The Wubi Effect

    When we think of China today, we think of a technological superpower. From Huawei and 5G to TikTok and viral social media, China is stride for stride with the United States in the world of computing. However,...

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  • 2020 / 8 / 7
    Uncounted

    First things first: our very own Latif Nasser has an exciting new show on Netflix. He talks to Jad about the hidden forces of the world that connect us all. Then, with an eye on the upcoming election, we take...

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  • 2020 / 7 / 31
    Invisible Allies

    As scientists have been scrambling to find new and better ways to treat covid-19, they’ve come across some unexpected allies. Invisible and primordial, these protectors have been with us all along. And they...

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  • 2020 / 7 / 17
    Dispatches from 1918

    It’s hard to imagine what the world will look like when COVID-19 has passed. So in this episode, we look back to the years after 1918, at the political, artistic, and viral aftermath of the flu pandemic that...

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  • 2020 / 7 / 12
    The Flag and the Fury

    How do you actually make change in the world? For 126 years, Mississippi has had the Confederate battle flag on their state flag, and they were the last state in the nation where that emblem remained...

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  • 2020 / 6 / 25
    The Third. A TED Talk.

    Jad gives a TED talk about his life as a journalist and how Radiolab has evolved over the years. Here's how TED described it:How do you end a story? Host of Radiolab Jad Abumrad tells how his search for an...

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  • 2020 / 6 / 19
    Post No Evil Redux

    Today we revisit our story on Facebook and its rulebook, looking at what’s changed in the past two years and exploring how these rules will impact the 2020 Presidential Election.  Back in 2008 Facebook began...

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  • 2020 / 6 / 13
    The Liberation of RNA

    In June of 2019, Brandon Ogbunu got on stage and told a story for The Story Collider, a podcast and live storytelling show. Starting when he was a senior in college being shook down by a couple cops, Brandon...

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  • 2020 / 6 / 7
    Graham

    If former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s case for the death of George Floyd goes to trial, there will be this one, controversial legal principle looming over the proceedings: The reasonable...

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  • 2020 / 6 / 6
    Nina

    Producer Tracie Hunte stumbled into a duet between Nina Simone and the sounds of protest outside her apartment. Then she discovered a performance by Nina on April 7, 1968 - three days after the assassination...

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  • 2020 / 5 / 29
    Dispatch 6: Strange Times

    Covid has disrupted the most basic routines of our days and nights. But in the middle of a conversation about how to fight the virus, we find a place impervious to the stalled plans and frenetic demands of...

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  • 2020 / 5 / 22
    Speedy Beet

    There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from...

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  • 2020 / 5 / 13
    Why Fish Don't Exist

    Our old friend Lulu Miller — former Radiolab producer, co-creator of Invisibilia — has been obsessed by the chaos that rules the universe since long before it showed up as a global pandemic, and a few weeks...

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  • 2020 / 5 / 8
    David and Dominique

    David Gebel and Dominique Crisden have a couple of things in common: they both live in New York, they’re both gay, and they’re both HIV-positive. But David is in his 60s, and has been living with the disease...

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  • 2020 / 5 / 6
    Dispatch 5: Don't Stop Believin'

    Covid-19 has put emergency room doctors on the frontlines treating an illness that is still perplexing and unknown. Jad tracks one ER doctor in NYC as the doctor puzzles through clues, doing research of his...

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  • 2020 / 4 / 24
    Atomic Artifacts

    Back in the 1950s, facing the threat of nuclear annihilation, federal officials sat down and pondered what American life would actually look like after an atomic attack. They faced a slew of practical...

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  • 2020 / 4 / 18
    The Cataclysm Sentence

    One day in 1961, the famous physicist Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this question to a group of undergraduate students: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific...

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  • 2020 / 4 / 11
    Dispatch 4: Six Feet

    Since the onset of the pandemic, we exist in a constant state of calculation, trying to define our own personal bubble. We’ve all been given a simple rule: maintain six feet of distance between yourself and...

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  • 2020 / 4 / 3
    Dispatch 3: Shared Immunity

    More than a million people have caught Covid-19, and tens of thousands have died. But thousands more have survived and recovered. A week or so ago (aka, what feels like ten years in corona time) producer...

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  • 2020 / 4 / 1
    Dispatch 2: Every Day is Ignaz Semmelweis Day

    It began with a tweet: “EVERY DAY IS IGNAZ SEMMELWEIS DAY.” Carl Zimmer — tweet author, acclaimed science writer and friend of the show — tells the story of a mysterious, deadly illness that struck 19th...

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  • 2020 / 3 / 27
    Dispatch 1: Numbers

    In a recent Radiolab group huddle, with coronavirus unraveling around us, the team found themselves grappling with all the numbers connected to COVID-19. Our new found 6 foot bubbles of personal space. Three...

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  • 2020 / 3 / 17
    The Other Latif: Episode 6

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 3 / 6
    The Other Latif: Episode 5

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 3 / 3
    The Other Latif: Bonus Episode!

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 2 / 25
    The Other Latif: Episode 4

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 2 / 18
    The Other Latif: Episode 3

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 2 / 11
    The Other Latif: Episode 2

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 2 / 4
    The Other Latif: Episode 1

    The Other Latif Radiolab’s Latif Nasser always believed his name was unique, singular, completely his own. Until one day when he makes a bizarre and shocking discovery. He shares his name with another man:...

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  • 2020 / 1 / 31
    The Bobbys

    On the occasion of his retirement as cohost of Radiolab, Robert sat down with Jad to reflect on his long and storied career in radio and television, and their work together over the past decade and a half....

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  • 2020 / 1 / 24
    Body Count

    Right now, at this very moment, all across the planet, there are 7.6 billion human beings eating, breathing, sleeping, brushing their teeth, walking their dogs, drinking coffee, walking down the street or...

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  • 2020 / 1 / 7
    60 Words

    This hour we pull apart one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 2001, that has led to the longest war in U.S. history. We examine how just 60 words of legal language have blurred the line...

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  • 2019 / 12 / 28
    Man Against Horse

    This is a story about your butt. It’s a story about how you got your butt, why you have your butt, and how your butt might be one of the most important and essential things for you being you, for being...

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  • 2019 / 12 / 18
    There and Back Again

    Here's a simple question: When an animal disappears in the winter, where does it go? Oddly enough, this question completely stumped European scientists for thousands of years. And even today, the more we...

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  • 2019 / 12 / 12
    Things

    From a piece of the Wright brother's plane to a child’s sugar egg, today: Things! Important things, little things, personal things, things you can hold and things that can take hold of you. This hour, we...

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  • 2019 / 12 / 5
    An Announcement from Radiolab

    No Description

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  • 2019 / 11 / 27
    Breaking Bongo

    Deep fake videos have the potential to make it impossible to sort fact from fiction. And some have argued that this blackhole of doubt will eventually send truth itself into a death spiral. But a series of...

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  • 2019 / 11 / 8
    Dolly Parton's America: Neon Moss

    Today on Radiolab, we're bringing you the fourth episode of Jad's special series, Dolly Parton's America. In this episode, Jad goes back up the mountain to visit Dolly’s actual Tennessee mountain home, where...

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  • 2019 / 10 / 30
    Songs that Cross Borders

    Coming off our adventures with Square Dancing, and Jad's dive into the world of Dolly Parton, we look back at one our favorites. About a decade ago, we found out that American country music is...

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  • 2019 / 10 / 16
    Radiolab Presents: Dolly Parton's America

    Radiolab creator and host Jad Abumrad spent the last two years following around music legend Dolly Parton, and we're here to say you should tune in! In this episode of Radiolab, we showcase the first of Jad's...

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  • 2019 / 9 / 27
    Silky Love

    We eat eels in sushi, stews, and pasta. Eels eat anything. Also they can survive outside of water for hours and live for up to 80 years. But this slippery snake of the sea harbors an even deeper mystery, one...

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  • 2019 / 9 / 17
    Tit for Tat

    In the early 60s, Robert Axelrod was a math major messing around with refrigerator-sized computers. Then a dramatic global crisis made him wonder about the space between a rock and a hard place, and whether...

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  • 2019 / 9 / 5
    What's Left When You're Right?

    More often than not, a fight is just a fight... Someone wins, someone loses. But this hour, we have a series of face-offs that shine a light on the human condition, the benefit of coming at something from a...

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  • 2019 / 8 / 28
    The Memory Palace

    Nate DiMeo was preoccupied with the past, and how we relate to it, from a very young age. For the last decade or so he's been scratching this itch with The Memory Palace, a podcast he created. He does things...

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  • 2019 / 8 / 9
    More Perfect: Cruel and Unusual

    On the inaugural episode of More Perfect, we explore three little words embedded in the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “cruel and unusual.” America has long wrestled with this concept in the context...

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  • 2019 / 7 / 26
    G: Unnatural Selection

    This past fall, a scientist named Steve Hsu made headlines with a provocative announcement. He would start selling a genetic intelligence test to couples doing IVF: a sophisticated prediction tool, built on...

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  • 2019 / 6 / 14
    G: Problem Space

    In the first episode of G, Radiolab’s miniseries on intelligence, we went back to the 1970s to meet a group of Black parents who put the IQ test on trial. The lawsuit, Larry P v Riles, ended with a ban on IQ...

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  • 2019 / 6 / 7
    G: The Miseducation of Larry P

    Are some ideas so dangerous we shouldn’t even talk about them? That question brought Radiolab’s senior editor, Pat Walters, to a subject that at first he thought was long gone: the measuring of human...

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  • 2019 / 6 / 4
    Neither Confirm Nor Deny

    How a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for...

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  • 2019 / 5 / 8
    Bit Flip

    Back in 2003 Belgium was holding a national election. One of their first where the votes would be cast and counted on computers. Thousands of hours of preparation went into making it unhackable. And when the...

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  • 2019 / 5 / 3
    Dinopocalypse Redux

    Using high-powered ballistics experiments, fancy computer algorithms, and good old-fashioned ancient geology, scientists have woven together a theory about the extinction of the dinosaurs that is so precise,...

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  • 2019 / 4 / 25
    Fu-Go

    This week we’re going back to a favorite episode from 2015. During World War II, something happened that nobody ever talks about. This is a tale of mysterious balloons, cowboy sheriffs, and young children...

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  • 2019 / 3 / 29
    For Whom the Cowbell Tolls

    When Nancy Holten was 8 years old her mom put her in a moving van. She fell asleep, woke up in Switzerland, and she's been there ever since. Nancy is big into animal rights, crystals, and various forms of...

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  • 2019 / 3 / 8
    Asking for Another Friend

    Part 2: Last year, we ran a pair of episodes that explored the greatest mysteries in our listeners’ lives - the big ones, little ones, and the ones in between. This year, we’re back on the hunt, tracking down...

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  • 2019 / 2 / 22
    Loops

    Our lives are filled with loops that hurt us, heal us, make us laugh, and, sometimes, leave us wanting more. This hour, Radiolab revisits the strange things that emerge when something happens, then happens...

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  • 2019 / 2 / 8
    The Beauty Puzzle

    When a female animal is checking out her prospects, natural selection would dictate that she pay attention to how healthy, or strong, or fit he is. But when it comes to finding a mate, some animals seem to be...

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  • 2019 / 1 / 16
    The Punchline

    John Scott was the professional hockey player that every fan loved to hate. A tough guy. A brawler. A goon. But when an impish pundit named Puck Daddy called on fans to vote for Scott to play alongside the...

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  • 2018 / 12 / 28
    BONUS: Radiolab Scavenger Hunt

    The question we get more than any other here at Radiolab is “Where do all those stories come from?” Today, for the first time ever, we divulge our secret recipe for story-finding.  Veteran Radiolab story...

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  • 2018 / 12 / 27
    A Clockwork Miracle

    As legend goes, in 1562, King Philip II needed a miracle. So he commissioned one from a highly-skilled clockmaker. In this short, a king's deal with God leads to an intricate mechanical creation, and Jad...

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  • 2018 / 11 / 28
    UnErased: Smid

    Today on Radiolab, we're playing the fourth and final episode of a series Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America. Imagine... You’re openly gay. Then, you become the leader...

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  • 2018 / 11 / 22
    UnErased: Dr. Davison and the Gay Cure

    Today on Radiolab, we're playing part of a series that Jad worked on called UnErased: The history of conversion therapy in America. The episode we're playing today, the third in the series, is one of the...

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  • 2018 / 11 / 13
    The Front Runner

    So, a cool thing happened for the show recently. A couple years ago, our episode "I Don't Have to Answer That" made it to the ears of director Jason Reitman. The story is about presidential candidate Gary...

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  • 2018 / 10 / 26
    In the No Part 3

    In the final episode of our “In The No” series, we sat down with several different groups of college-age women to talk about their sexual experiences. And we found that despite colleges now being steeped in...

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  • 2018 / 10 / 19
    In the No Part 2

    In the year since accusations of sexual assault were first brought against Harvey Weinstein, our news has been flooded with stories of sexual misconduct, indicting very visible figures in our public life....

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  • 2018 / 10 / 11
    In the No Part 1

    In 2017, radio-maker Kaitlin Prest released a mini-series called "No" about her personal struggle to understand and communicate about sexual consent. That show, which dives into the experience, moment by...

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  • 2018 / 9 / 28
    Breaking Bad News Bears

    Today, a challenge: bear with us. We decided to shake things up at the show so we threw our staff a curveball, Walter Matthau-style. In two weeks time we told our producers to pitch, report, and produce...

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  • 2018 / 9 / 21
    Infective Heredity

    Today, a fast moving, sidestepping, gene-swapping free-for-all that would’ve made Darwin’s head spin. David Quammen tells us about a shocking way that life can evolve - infective heredity. To figure it all...

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  • 2018 / 9 / 19
    27: The Most Perfect Album

    More Perfect is back with something totally new and exciting. They just dropped an ALBUM. 27: The Most Perfect Album is like a Constitutional mix-tape, a Schoolhouse Rock for the 21st century. The album...

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  • 2018 / 8 / 17
    Post No Evil

    Back in 2008 Facebook began writing a document. It was a constitution of sorts, laying out what could and what couldn’t be posted on the site. Back then, the rules were simple, outlawing nudity and gore....

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  • 2018 / 7 / 28
    The Bad Show

    With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of...

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  • 2018 / 5 / 22
    Unraveling Bolero

    This week, we're throwing it back to an old favorite: a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of...

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  • 2018 / 5 / 18
    More or Less Human

    Seven years ago chatbots - those robotic texting machines - were a mere curiosity. They were noticeably robotic and at their most malicious seemed only capable of scamming men looking for love online. Today,...

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  • 2018 / 3 / 15
    Rippin’ the Rainbow an Even Newer One

    One of our most popular episodes of all time was our Colors episode, where we introduced you to a sea creature that could see a rainbow far beyond what humans can experience. Peacock mantis shrimps are as...

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  • 2018 / 2 / 23
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Gun Show

    The shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, reignited an increasingly familiar debate about guns in this country. Today, we’re re-releasing a More Perfect episode that aired just after the Las...

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  • 2018 / 2 / 20
    The Curious Case of the Russian Flash Mob at the West Palm Beach Cheesecake Factory

    We don’t do breaking news. But when Robert Mueller released his indictment a few days ago, alleging that 13 Russian nationals colluded to disrupt the 2016 elections, we had a lot of questions. Who are these...

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  • 2018 / 1 / 31
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - One Nation, Under Money

    An unassuming string of 16 words tucked into the Constitution grants Congress extensive power to make laws that impact the entire nation. The Commerce Clause has allowed Congress to intervene in all kinds of...

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  • 2018 / 1 / 23
    The Voice in Your Head - A Tribute to Joe Frank

    How do you pay proper tribute to a legend that many people haven’t heard of? We began asking ourselves this question last week when the visionary radio producer Joe Frank passed away, after a long struggle...

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  • 2018 / 1 / 9
    How to Be a Hero

    What are people thinking when they risk their lives for someone else? Are they making complicated calculations of risk or diving in without a second thought? Is heroism an act of sympathy or empathy? A few...

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  • 2017 / 12 / 22
    Bigger Little Questions

    We're back with Part 2! When we dumped out our bucket of questions, there was a lot of spillover. Like, A LOT of spillover. So today, we’re chasing down answers to some bigger, little questions.   This...

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  • 2017 / 11 / 30
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - Mr. Graham and the Reasonable Man

    This story comes from the second season of Radiolab's spin-off podcast, More Perfect. To hear more, subscribe here. On a fall afternoon in 1984, Dethorne Graham ran into a convenience store for a bottle of...

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  • 2017 / 11 / 23
    Stereothreat

    Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect...

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  • 2017 / 10 / 27
    Oliver Sacks: A Journey From Where to Where

    There’s nothing quite like the sound of someone thinking out loud, struggling to find words and ideas to match what’s in their head. Today, we are allowed to dip into the unfiltered thoughts of Oliver Sacks,...

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  • 2017 / 10 / 13
    Father K

    Today, while the divisions between different groups in this country feel more and more insurmountable, we zero in on a particular neighborhood to see if one man can draw people together in a potentially...

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  • 2017 / 10 / 2
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - American Pendulum I

    This story comes from the second season of Radiolab's spin-off podcast, More Perfect. To hear more, subscribe here. What happens when the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, seems to get it wrong?...

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  • 2017 / 9 / 12
    Radiolab Presents: Anna in Somalia

    This week, we are presenting a story from NPR foreign correspondent Gregory Warner and his new globe-trotting podcast Rough Translation. Mohammed was having the best six months of his life - working a job he...

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  • 2017 / 8 / 23
    Where the Sun Don't Shine

    Today we take a quick look up at a hole in the sky and follow an old story as it travels beyond the reach of the sun.

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  • 2017 / 6 / 27
    Revising the Fault Line

    A new tussle over an old story, and some long-held beliefs, with neurologist and author Robert Sapolsky. Four years ago, we did a story about a man with a starling obsession that made us question our ideas of...

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  • 2017 / 6 / 15
    The Gondolier

    What happens when doing what you want to do means giving up who you really are?  We travel to Venice, Italy with reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding...

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  • 2017 / 5 / 26
    The Radio Lab

    15 years ago the very first episode of Radiolab, fittingly called "Firsts," hit the airwaves. It was a 3-hour long collection of documentaries and musings produced by a solitary sleep-deprived...

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  • 2017 / 4 / 19
    Radiolab Extra: Henrietta Lacks

    With all the recent talk about HBO's upcoming film, we decided it would be good time to re-run our story of one woman's medically miraculous cancer cells, and how Henrietta Lacks changed modern science and,...

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  • 2017 / 3 / 24
    Shots Fired: Part 2

    A couple years ago, Ben Montgomery, reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, started emailing every police station in Florida. He was asking for any documents created - from 2009 to 2014 - when an officer discharged...

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  • 2017 / 3 / 17
    Shots Fired: Part 1

    A couple years ago, Ben Montgomery, reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, started emailing every police station in Florida. He was asking for any documents created - from 2009 to 2014 - when an officer discharged...

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  • 2017 / 2 / 24
    Update: CRISPR

    It's been almost two years since we learned about CRISPR, a ninja-assassin-meets-DNA-editing-tool that has been billed as one of the most powerful, and potentially controversial, technologies ever discovered...

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  • 2017 / 2 / 10
    Radiolab Presents: Ponzi Supernova

    We thought we knew the story of Bernie Madoff. How he masterminded the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, leaving behind scores of distraught investors and a $65 billion black hole.  But we had never heard the...

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  • 2017 / 1 / 27
    Stranger in Paradise

    Back in 1911, a box with a dead raccoon in it showed up in Washington D.C., at the office of Gerrit S. Miller. After pulling it out and inspecting it, he realized this raccoon was from the Caribbean islands...

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  • 2017 / 1 / 18
    Radiolab Presents: On the Media: Busted, America's Poverty Myths

    We love to share great radio, even if we didn’t make it. Today, On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone tells Jad and Robert about a mammoth project they launched to take a critical look at the tales we tell...

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  • 2016 / 12 / 16
    It's Not Us, It's You

    It’s the end of the year, and the entire Radiolab team is starting to take stock and come up for air. We're excited about how much ground we've covered - stories about college debaters and figure skaters,...

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  • 2016 / 11 / 22
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - Object Anyway

    At the trial of James Batson in 1982, the prosecution eliminated all the black jurors from the jury pool. Batson objected, setting off a complicated discussion about jury selection that would make its way all...

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  • 2016 / 11 / 7
    One Vote

    Come election season, it's easy to get cynical. Why cast a ballot if your single measly vote can't possibly change anything? In our first-ever election special, we set off to find a single vote that made a...

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  • 2016 / 10 / 27
    Alpha Gal

    Tuck your napkin under your chin. We’re about to serve up a tale of love, loss, and lamb chops. For as long as she can remember, Amy Pearl has loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And...

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  • 2016 / 10 / 12
    Seneca, Nebraska

    Back in 2014 the town of Seneca, Nebraska was deeply divided. How divided? They were so fed up with each other that some citizens began circulating a petition that proposed a radical solution. If a majority...

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  • 2016 / 9 / 23
    The Primitive Streak

    Last May, two research groups announced a breakthrough: they each grew human embryos, in the lab, longer than ever before. In doing so, they witnessed a period of human development no one had ever seen. But...

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  • 2016 / 9 / 13
    Update: Eye In the Sky

    An update on Ross McNutt and his superpower — he can zoom in on everyday life, then rewind and fast-forward to solve crimes in a shutter-flash. But should he? In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due...

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  • 2016 / 8 / 29
    The Girl Who Doesn't Exist

    In today’s episode, we meet a young woman from Texas, born and raised, who can’t prove that she exists. Alecia Faith Pennington was born at home, homeschooled, and never visited a dentist or a hospital. By...

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  • 2016 / 7 / 30
    From Tree to Shining Tree

    A forest can feel like a place of great stillness and quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour. In this story, a dog...

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  • 2016 / 7 / 12
    David and the Wire

    David Weinberg was stuck. He had been kicked out of college, was cleaning toilets by day, delivering pizzas by night and spending his weekends in jail. Then one night he heard a story on the radio and got it...

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  • 2016 / 6 / 28
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Imperfect Plaintiffs

    On this episode, we visit Edward Blum, a 64-year-old “legal entrepreneur” and former stockbroker who has become something of a Supreme Court matchmaker. He’s had remarkable success, with 6 cases heard before...

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  • 2016 / 6 / 10
    Radiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Political Thicket

    The question of how much power the Supreme Court should possess has divided justices over time. But the issue was perhaps never more hotly debated than in Baker v. Carr. On this episode of More Perfect, we...

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  • 2016 / 6 / 3
    The Buried Bodies Case

    In 1973, a massive manhunt in New York's Adirondack Mountains ended when police captured a man named Robert Garrow. And that’s when this story really gets started.   This episode we consider a string of...

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  • 2016 / 5 / 10
    Bigger Than Bacon

    Today's story is a mystery, shockingly hot, and vanishingly tiny. It starts with a sound, rising like a mist from the marsh, around a dock in South Carolina. But where it goes next - from submarines to...

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  • 2016 / 4 / 6
    Cellmates

    There’s a black hole in the middle of the history of life: how did we go from tiny bags of chemicals to the vast menagerie of creatures we see around us?  Today, we explore one of the most underrated...

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  • 2016 / 3 / 23
    Update: 23 Weeks 6 Days

    An update on Juniper French, a tiny baby, born at 23 Weeks and 6 days -- roughly halfway to full term. And a whole universe of medical and moral questions. Technology has had a profound effect on how we get...

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  • 2016 / 2 / 24
    K-poparazzi

    In the U.S., paparazzi are pretty much synonymous with invasion of privacy. But today we travel to a place where the prying press create something more like a prison break.  K-pop is a global juggernaut -...

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  • 2016 / 2 / 12
    Hard Knock Life

    This Valentine's Day, a mysterious tap tap tapping leads us into a world of sex, death, and head-banging. Biologist Dave Goulson introduces us to the lonely yearnings of an especially pathetic beetle and...

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  • 2016 / 1 / 30
    I Don't Have To Answer That

    Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower … they all got a pass. But today we peer back at the moment when poking into the private lives of political figures became standard practice. In 1987, Gary Hart was a young...

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  • 2015 / 12 / 28
    The Cathedral

    Ryan and Amy Green were facing the unfaceable: their youngest son, Joel was diagnosed with terminal cancer after his first birthday. Producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni tells the story of how Ryan and Amy stumble...

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  • 2015 / 12 / 18
    The Fix

    This episode we take a sober look at the throbbing, aching, craving desire states that return people (again and again) to the object of their addiction … and the pills that just might set them free. Reporter...

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  • 2015 / 10 / 19
    Update: New Normal?

    An update: Peacenik baboons, a man in a dress and cuddly tame foxes. Stories of adaptation, and reframing ideas about normalcy. 3 stories where choice challenges destiny.

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  • 2015 / 8 / 30
    Remembering Oliver Sacks

    In memory of one of our dear friends, a re-release of our last conversation with Dr. Oliver Sacks.

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  • 2015 / 8 / 6
    From the Archives: Oliver Sacks' Table of Elements

    As we're busy working on our next episode, with stories inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, we thought we'd bring you one of its chief inspirations. As a young boy, neurologist, author and Radiolab...

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  • 2015 / 7 / 16
    Gray's Donation

    A donation leads Sarah and Ross Gray to places we rarely get a chance to see. In this surprising journey, they gain a view of science that is redemptive, fussy facts that are tender, and parts of a loved one...

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  • 2015 / 7 / 3
    Mau Mau

    This is the story of a few documents that tumbled out of the secret archives of the biggest empire the world has ever known, offering a glimpse of histories waiting to be rewritten.

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  • 2015 / 6 / 6
    Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR

    Hidden inside some of the world’s smallest organisms is one of the most powerful tools scientists have ever stumbled across. It's a defense system that has existed in bacteria for millions of years and it may...

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  • 2015 / 5 / 22
    Nazi Summer Camp

    Reporter Karen Duffin and her father were talking one day when, just as an aside, he mentioned the Nazi prisoners of war that worked on his Idaho farm when he was a kid. Karen was shocked ... and then...

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  • 2015 / 5 / 12
    Radiolab Live: Tell-Tale Hearts featuring Oliver Sacks

    A few days ago Radiolab performed a live show and this episode we're bringing you a few of the highlights. They were stories of what motivates us, our drives, our loves and losses. Producer Molly Webster...

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  • 2015 / 1 / 9
    Radiolab Presents: Invisibilia

    Producers' Note: A correction has been made to this audio to reflect the wishes of the subject of this story, Paige Abendroth. NPR's Invisibilia's originally included Paige's birth name in this piece due to a...

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  • 2014 / 12 / 23
    Worth

    This episode, we make three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as...

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  • 2014 / 11 / 29
    Outside Westgate

    In the wake of public tragedy there is a space between the official narrative and the stories of the people who experienced it. Today, we crawl inside that space and question the role of journalists in...

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  • 2014 / 11 / 13
    Patient Zero - Updated

    The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds—Patient Zero. This hour, Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes of all kinds...

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  • 2014 / 10 / 3
    John Luther Adams

    What's the soundtrack for the end of the world? We go looking for an answer. When Jad started to compose music for our live show Apocalyptical, he immediately thought of John Luther Adams. Adams' symphony...

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  • 2014 / 9 / 18
    Juicervose

    Ron and Cornelia Suskind had two healthy young sons, promising careers, and a brand new home when their youngest son Owen started to disappear.  3 months later a specialist sat Ron and Cornelia down and said...

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  • 2014 / 9 / 8
    In The Dust Of This Planet

    Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, beard-stroking philosophers, Jay-Z, and True Detective. Today on Radiolab, a...

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  • 2014 / 8 / 7
    Happy Birthday Bobby K

    It’s Robert’s birthday! (Or it was, anyway, a couple days back.) So today we celebrate with some classic Krulwich radio and a backwards peek into the spirit and sensibility that, in many ways, drives our...

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  • 2014 / 7 / 17
    Galapagos

    Today, the strange story of a small group of islands that raise a big question: is it inevitable that even our most sacred natural landscapes will eventually get swallowed up by humans? And just how far are...

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  • 2014 / 6 / 13
    ≤ kg

    A plum-sized lump of metal takes us from the French Revolution to an underground bunker in Maryland as we try to weigh the way we weigh the world around us.

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  • 2014 / 5 / 15
    The Skull

    Today, the story of one little thing that has radically changed what we know about humanity’s humble beginnings and the kinds of creatures that were out to get us way back when.   Wits University Professor...

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  • 2014 / 4 / 1
    Straight Outta Chevy Chase

    From boom bap to EDM, we look at the line between hip-hop and not, and meet a defender of the genre that makes you question... who's in and who's out.

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  • 2014 / 3 / 25
    KILL 'EM ALL

    They buzz. They bite. And they have killed more people than cancer, war, or heart disease. Here’s the question: If you could wipe mosquitoes off the face of the planet, would you?

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  • 2013 / 12 / 19
    Sex, Ducks, and The Founding Feud

    Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution.

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  • 2013 / 12 / 10
    It's Like ... Radiolab

    Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone...

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  • 2013 / 12 / 9
    Apocalyptical

    Cataclysmic destruction. Surprising survival. In this new live stage performance, Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow.

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  • 2013 / 11 / 19
    An Ice-Cold Case

    Scientists' obsession with one particular man - and with the tiny scraps of evidence left in the wake of his death - gives us a surprisingly intimate peek into the life of someone who should've been lost to...

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  • 2013 / 11 / 1
    Cut and Run

    Legions of athletes, sports gurus, and scientists have tried to figure out why Kenyans dominate long-distance running. In this short, we stumble across a surprising, and sort of terrifying, explanation.

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  • 2013 / 10 / 22
    UPDATE: Famous Tumors

    When we first released Famous Tumors, Rebecca Skloot's book about the life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks (and her famous cells) had just hit the shelves. Since then, some interesting things have happened to...

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  • 2013 / 8 / 29
    Dawn of Midi

    In this short, Jad puts on his music hat and shares his love of Dawn of Midi, a band that he recently started using on the show.

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  • 2013 / 8 / 13
    Rodney Versus Death

    What do you do in the face of a monstrous disease with a 100% fatality rate? In this short, a Milwaukee doctor tries to knock death incarnate off its throne.

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  • 2013 / 7 / 2
    Ally's Choice

    Producer Lu Olkowski brings us the story of a tightly-knit family caught on opposite sides of a very big divide. If you ask Ally Manning's mom and sister, they'll tell you there's no question: they're black....

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  • 2013 / 6 / 27
    Curious Sounds from the Solid Sound Festival

    This fall, we're hitting the road with our brand-new live show. We're stopping in 20 cities across the US (plus 1 stop in Canada), and we have some exciting news about the special musical guests who are...

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  • 2013 / 6 / 13
    The Trouble with Everything

    The desire to trace your way back to the very beginning, to understand everything -- whether it's the mysteries of love or the mechanics of the universe -- is deeply human. It might also be deeply flawed.

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  • 2013 / 4 / 2
    Radiolab Presents: TJ & Dave

    Improv comedy puts uncertainty on center stage -- performers usually start by asking the audience for a prompt, then they make up the details as they go. But two actors in Chicago are taking this idea to its...

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  • 2013 / 3 / 26
    Are You Sure?

    This hour, we walk the tightrope between doubt and certainty, and wonder if there's a way to make yourself at home on that razor's edge between definitely...and not so sure.

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  • 2013 / 3 / 19
    REBROADCAST: Emergence

    This spring, parts of the East Coast will turn squishy and crunchy -- the return of the 17-year cicadas means surfaces in certain locations (in patches from VA to CT) will once again be coated in bugs buzzing...

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  • 2013 / 3 / 5
    The Man Behind the Maneuver

    In the 1970s, choking became national news: thousands were choking to death, leading to more accidental deaths than guns. Nobody knew what to do. Until a man named Henry Heimlich came along with a big idea....

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  • 2013 / 1 / 15
    The Bitter End

    We turn to doctors to save our lives -- to heal us, repair us, and keep us healthy. But when it comes to the critical question of what to do when death is at hand, there seems to be a gap between what we want...

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  • 2012 / 12 / 31
    Solid as a Rock

    Is reality an ethereal, mathematical poem... or is it made up of solid, physical stuff? In this short, we kick rocks, slap tables, and argue about the nature of the universe with Jim Holt.

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  • 2012 / 12 / 4
    Raising Crane

    In this short, costumed scientists create a carefully choreographed childhood for a flock of whooping cranes to save them from extinction. It's the ultimate feel-good story, but it also raises some troubling...

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  • 2012 / 11 / 6
    What's Up, Doc?

    Mel Blanc was known as "the man of 1,000 voices," but the actual number may have been closer to 1,500. Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety, Barney Rubble -- all Mel. His characters made him one of the most beloved...

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  • 2012 / 10 / 22
    Seeing in the Dark

    John and Zoltan are both blind, but they deal with the world in completely different ways -- one paints vivid pictures in his mind, while the other refuses to picture anything at all. In this short, they...

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  • 2012 / 9 / 24
    The Fact of the Matter

    Getting a firm hold on the truth is never as simple as nailing down the facts of a situation. This hour, we go after a series of seemingly simple facts -- facts that offer surprising insight, facts that...

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  • 2012 / 9 / 10
    What a Slinky Knows

    "Hey kids," said physicist Tadashi Tokieda, "Wanna see a magic trick?" He pulled out a Slinky and did something that amazed the kids, & their dad Steve Strogatz. Steve, along with Neil deGrasse Tyson,...

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  • 2012 / 8 / 27
    Inside "Ouch!"

    Pain is a fundamental part of life, and often a very lonely part. Doctors want to understand their patients' pain, and we all want to understand the suffering of our friends, relatives, or spouses. But...

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  • 2012 / 8 / 21
    REBROADCAST: Space

    Celebrate the 35th anniversary of the launch of Voyager 2 (it rocketed off Earth on 8/20/77 carrying a copy of the Golden Record), and tip your hat to the Mars rover Curiosity as it kicks off its third week...

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  • 2012 / 7 / 16
    Double Blasted

    In early August of 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi had a run of the worst luck imaginable. A double blast of radiation left his future, and the future of his descendants, in doubt. In this short: an utterly amazing...

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  • 2012 / 7 / 2
    Radiolab Remixed

    Turning ideas into radio is one of the most exciting, frustrating, rewarding, and insanely fun things there is. Which got us thinking--why not ask you to join in on the fun? So we teamed up with Indaba for...

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  • 2012 / 6 / 4
    Grumpy Old Terrorists

    While working on The Bad Show, producer Pat Walters ran across some recordings that spooked him--partly because they seemed like they had to be a big joke ... and partly because, at the same time, they...

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  • 2012 / 5 / 14
    Colors Sneak Peek

    Just before the curtain went up on our live show in Los Angeles, Jad and Robert carved out a little stage time for a sneak peek at next week's Colors episode.

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  • 2012 / 5 / 1
    Fetal Consequences

    Mother's day is nigh. Sort of. Anyway, without knowing it, you might have already given your mom a pretty lasting gift. But whether it helps or hurts her, or both, is still an open question. In this Radiolab...

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  • 2012 / 3 / 19
    The Turing Problem

    100 years ago this year, the man who first conceived of the computer age was born. His name was Alan Turing. He was also a math genius, a hero of World War II and he is widely considered to be the father of...

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  • 2012 / 1 / 24
    Wake Up and Dream

    In today's short, a man confronts a bully, and frees himself from a recurring nightmare that's terrorized him for more than 20 years.

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  • 2011 / 12 / 22
    Mutant Rights

    In this podcast short, a strange twist of legal taxonomy causes a dispute over whether X-MEN action figures are toys or dolls and sparks a court case about what it means to be human.

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  • 2011 / 12 / 13
    Radiolab Presents: 99% Invisible

    Roman Mars loves to spotlight the seams and joints that make up the world around us. He's the host of an irresistible podcast called 99% Invisible--a series of tiny radio stories that provoke enormous...

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  • 2011 / 11 / 28
    Death Mask

    Near the end of the 19th century, a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile turned up in Paris. She became a huge sensation. She also happened to be dead. You'd probably recognize her face yourself. You...

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  • 2011 / 11 / 14
    Patient Zero

    The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zero—the...

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  • 2011 / 10 / 31
    Sleepless in South Sudan

    Carl Zimmer is one of our go-to guys when we need help untangling a complicated scientific idea. But in this short, he unravels something much more personal.

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  • 2011 / 10 / 18
    Slow

    Kohn Ashmore’s voice is arresting. It stopped his friend Andy Mills in his tracks the first time they met. But in this short about the power of friendship and familiarity, Andy explains that Kohn’s voice...

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  • 2011 / 8 / 9
    Damn It, Basal Ganglia

    The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain, deep inside your skull, that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command. In this short, Jad and Robert meet a young researcher who was...

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  • 2011 / 7 / 11
    REBROADCAST: Detective Stories

    We're celebrating summer with a classic episode of Radiolab--full of mystery, intrigue...and a goat standing on a cow. We haven't actually tried listening to it around a campfire, but we're betting it would...

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  • 2011 / 6 / 28
    Curious Sounds: A Radiolab Concert

    In this short, Jad presents the electrifying sounds of three mind-bending musical acts: Brooklyn duo Buke & Gass, drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco, and the one-and-only Reggie Watts. Their performances were...

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  • 2011 / 5 / 31
    Talking to Machines

    This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.

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  • 2011 / 5 / 18
    Dogs Gone Wild

    In this short, a family dog disappears into the woods...and the mystery of what happened to him raises a big question about what it means to be wild.

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  • 2011 / 5 / 3
    Cosmic Habituation

    In this short, Jonathan Schooler tells us about a discovery that launched his career and led to a puzzle that has haunted him ever since.

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  • 2011 / 3 / 22
    Pass the Science

    Richard Holmes went to Cambridge University intending to study the lives of poets. Until a dueling mathematician, and a dinner conversation composed entirely of gestures, changed his mind.

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  • 2011 / 2 / 9
    Radiolab Presents: The Loneliness of the Goalkeeper

    This week on the podcast, football! No, it's not a Super Bowl recap. Jad and Robert present a piece from across the pond--a piece about soccer they fell in love with when they heard it at the Third Coast...

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  • 2011 / 1 / 11
    The Universe Knows My Name

    In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.

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  • 2010 / 12 / 28
    Blood Buddies

    In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.

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  • 2010 / 12 / 14
    The Good Show

    In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

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  • 2010 / 11 / 29
    Gravitational Anarchy

    A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

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  • 2010 / 11 / 16
    What Does Technology Want?

    Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

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  • 2010 / 10 / 18
    Wild Talk

    In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie.

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  • 2010 / 9 / 8
    Voices in Your Head

    Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought, inner speech, and the voice in our heads.

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  • 2010 / 8 / 9
    Words

    It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But this hour, we try to do just that.

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  • 2010 / 7 / 27
    Secrets of Success

    Malcolm Gladwell doesn't like Gifted and Talented Education Programs. And he doesn't believe that innate ability can fully explain superstar hockey players or billionaire software giants. In this podcast, we...

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  • 2010 / 7 / 12
    The Luckiest Lobster

    One place you absolutely, positively do not want to be if you're a healthy, middle-aged American lobster: trapped in a suburban grocery store in western Pennsylvania. But that's where this week's podcast...

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  • 2010 / 6 / 16
    Strangers in the Mirror

    Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can't recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of ... that's right, faces.

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  • 2010 / 5 / 17
    Famous Tumors

    In this hour of Radiolab: an unflinching look at the good, bad, and ugly side of tumors.

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  • 2010 / 4 / 21
    The Loudest Miniature Fuzz

    Music duo Buke and Gass play for us, attempt to describe their genre-bending sound, and talk a bit about what's it like to play out what you don't say in this podcast.

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  • 2010 / 3 / 8
    Do I Know You?

    How do you know your mother is really your mother? It's simple, right? You look at her, you recognize her, enough said. Well, in this podcast...it may not be that simple.

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  • 2010 / 2 / 8
    The Shy Baboon

    In this podcast, a biopsychologist attempts to find an elusive bit of shared space across species lines.

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  • 2010 / 1 / 26
    Fu Manchu

    In our episode Animal Minds, we asked whether it was possible for one animal to know what was going on in another animal's mind. For us, it was a really about whether we, as humans, can really share a...

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  • 2009 / 12 / 15
    In C

    Ok, so last podcast you heard counting babies. Here’s a new spin...

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  • 2009 / 11 / 17
    Killing Babies, Saving the World

    To get this podcast started, Robert ambushes Jad with a question...a question we've all been dying to ask him since June 10th, 2009, when Amil Abumrad came into the world.

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  • 2009 / 11 / 3
    Helicopter Boy

    In this podcast, a story about a mom, a boy, and a home-made helicopter.

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  • 2009 / 10 / 19
    New Normal?

    In this hour of Radiolab: reframing our ideas about normalcy.

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  • 2009 / 10 / 6
    Blink

    We ask a question we thought was a no-brainer in this podcast: why do we blink?

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  • 2009 / 9 / 22
    It Might Be Science

    They Might Be Giants just came out with a new album, 'Here Comes Science.' So we invited them to come play with us at our season launch party last week at the Water Taxi Beach in Queens. And then we ambushed...

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  • 2009 / 8 / 25
    After Birth

    Pardon the graphic pun, but hey! For this podcast, Jad--a brand new father--wonders what's going on inside the head of his baby Amil.

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  • 2009 / 8 / 14
    15: Sum

    For meditation number fifteen we have a reading from David Eagleman's book Sum. It's a vision of the after life that's both playful and... horrifying. Sum is read by actor Jeffrey Tambor.

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  • 2009 / 8 / 13
    14: The Four Groans

    Another meditation on what happens after the moment of death, this time as Shakespeare envisions it.

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  • 2009 / 8 / 12
    13: Gone

    We continue our meditations on death with a reading from poet and writer, Mark Doty. This is an excerpt from Doty's 1996 memoir Heaven's Coast.

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  • 2009 / 8 / 11
    12: Proof

    This week on the podcast, we continue our meditations on death. Our After Life episode had eleven meditations, and now we’re gonna throw a new one at you each day, all week long, culminating in a very special...

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  • 2009 / 7 / 14
    In Defense of Darwin?

    When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' daughter was six years old, he told her that flowers are not here for beauty, not here for the bees, but instead merely to copy their own DNA. Sigh, what a Dad. So...

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  • 2009 / 6 / 30
    Are We Coins?

    After we released our show about Stochasticity, we received a lot of comments about the idea humans can be just as predictable as coins. In that show, Jonah Lehrer was telling us about a study on the 82-83...

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  • 2009 / 6 / 2
    Stayin' Alive

    This week on the podcast we take a look at four unconventional ways to stay alive. We talk to geneticist George Church, who originally appeared in our So Called Life Show, biologist Bernd Heinrich,...

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  • 2009 / 5 / 19
    AV Smackdown . . . The Podcast

    On May 6th, at WNYC's new Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, we opened up an age old can of worms. Jad and Robert faced off over which medium is superior -- television or radio. This American Life's Ira...

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  • 2009 / 5 / 5
    Juana Molina

    Sometimes on the podcast, we like to talk about musicians and the music they make. Today we introduce you to Juana Molina. Last season we used some of her of music in the breaks for the Sperm show. We...

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  • 2009 / 4 / 7
    In Silence

    Here at Radiolab we explore big ideas and ask big questions to see how the world works.

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  • 2009 / 3 / 26
    DIY Universe

    Can you make your own universe? We usually think of the universe as 'everything that exists,' so how could you make another one?

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  • 2009 / 2 / 24
    Darwinvaganza

    For this week's podcast, Radiolab throws a birthday party for Charles Darwin!

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  • 2009 / 1 / 28
    The Obama Effect, Perhaps.

    When Jad and Robert saw this article about a study that found a link between President Obama's election, and the test scores of African Americans, it made them think about an earlier study by Claude...

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  • 2009 / 1 / 12
    Yellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters

    The quest for scientific knowledge is one of the great and noble pursuits of humankind. It's also one of the most dangerous, frustrating, ego-driven, transcendent, dirty, sublime, tedious, demoralizing,...

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  • 2008 / 12 / 29
    Diagnosis

    Humans love to solve problems. In this hour of Radiolab, diagnosis--our attempt to find out what's wrong, and give it a label.

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  • 2008 / 12 / 15
    Race

    This hour of Radiolab, a look at race.

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  • 2008 / 12 / 1
    Sperm

    Sperm carry half the genes needed for human life. In this hour of Radiolab, some basic questions and profound thoughts about reproduction.

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  • 2008 / 11 / 17
    Choice

    Logic and emotion aren't the only forces that guide our decisions. This hour of Radiolab, we turn up the volume on the voices in our heads, and try to make sense of the babble. Forget free will, some...

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  • 2008 / 10 / 21
    Chris And Lisa

    Chris had a crush on Lisa. But how to woo her?

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  • 2008 / 10 / 7
    Sperm Tales

    In today’s podcast, a teaser for our hour-long Sperm show. If you think you learned all there is to know from that junior high school filmstrip, think again.

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  • 2008 / 9 / 23
    Chasing Bugs

    Remember the first time you ever saw an ant hill? That parade of black insects pouring in and out of a small sand mound...most of us stopped, looked and then moved on to other parts of the playground. E. O....

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  • 2008 / 9 / 9
    Making the Hippo Dance

    We play some never-released tape from the vault, and reveal a bit about what techniques we used to try and make it sing.

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  • 2008 / 8 / 25
    Quantum Cello

    Jad and cellist Zoe Keating discuss the physics (if not metaphysics) of looping sound and how to use a 17th century instrument to make avant-garde electronic music.

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  • 2008 / 8 / 12
    The (Multi) Universe(s)

    Robert and Brian Greene discuss what's beyond the horizon of our universe, what you might wear in infinite universes with finite pairs of designer shoes, and why the Universe and swiss cheese have more in...

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  • 2008 / 7 / 29
    Tell Me A Story

    Robert Krulwich's commencement speech at California Institute of Technology gets at the heart of what we do here at Radiolab.

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  • 2008 / 7 / 1
    City X

    This week, a piece from one of our favorite radio-makers, Jonathan Mitchell. 'City X' is a history of the modern shopping mall through perspectives of people living in a real, yet unnamed, city.

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  • 2008 / 6 / 17
    Earworms

    First, we asked you to tell us what song gets stuck in your head. Then, we asked you how you got it out. Finally, we made a podcast. Thank you to everyone who called in, shared their secret techniques, and...

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  • 2008 / 6 / 3
    Wordless Music

    On this week's podcast, we share an excerpt from Wordless Music on WNYC, a 4-part music program hosted by Jad, exploring the boundaries between classical and pop music.

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  • 2008 / 5 / 20
    Open Outcry

    Jad presents a piece by one of his favorite producers: Ben Rubin. Rubin created this audio portrait called 'Open Outcry' as a part of a sound installation called Sonic Garden commissioned to celebrate the...

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  • 2008 / 5 / 6
    Jad and Robert: The Early Years

    Ever wonder how Jad and Robert met?

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  • 2008 / 4 / 21
    Pop Music

    This hour of Radiolab: pop music's pull.

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  • 2008 / 4 / 7
    (So-Called) Life

    In a world where biology and engineering intersect, how do you decide what's "natural"?

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  • 2008 / 2 / 11
    Our Podcast comes in all shapes and sizes

    Jad plays one of his favorite pieces of all time, 'IF' by Sherre DeLys.

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  • 2008 / 1 / 29
    Salle Des Departs

    Imagine that you're a composer. Imagine getting the commission to write a song that will allow family members to face the death of a loved one.

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  • 2008 / 1 / 1
    The Ring and I

    On this Radiolab/WNYC Special, we explore the impact and influence of Wagner's Ring Cycle on the Metropolitan Opera's 2004 Presentation.

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  • 2007 / 11 / 20
    Space Capsules

    How would you describe life on Earth to an alien? In 1977, the Voyager spacecraft launched into space. And with it, went the Golden Record-- a sort time capsule, a collection of sounds and images that would...

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  • 2007 / 11 / 9
    Making Radiolab

    In spring of 2006, Jad and Robert took the stage at the SoHo Apple Store to talk about the making of Radiolab. Jad geeks out on the nitty-gritty of digital sound editing, and Robert discusses the editorial...

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  • 2007 / 9 / 24
    Musical Language

    In this hour of Radiolab, we examine the line between language and music.

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  • 2007 / 9 / 10
    Detective Stories

    Forensics, archeology, genealogy, and genetics are devoted to figuring out what really happened. In this hour of Radiolab, digging up the past leads to some very unexpected finds.

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  • 2007 / 8 / 28
    This is Your Brain On Love

    Radiolab is given the charge to put on a Singles Night. That's right. 'Jad,' they said, 'stand on a stage and make strangers fall in love! Or, at least, you know, exchange a few phone numbers with each...

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  • 2007 / 8 / 14
    Emergence

    What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form staggeringly complicated societies -- all without a Toscanini to conduct them into harmony. This hour of...

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  • 2007 / 7 / 24
    Beyond Time

    This hour, Radiolab goes to the front lines with men and women who are battling against time -- or at least the common-sense view of time.

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  • 2007 / 6 / 14
    Mortality

    This hour of Radiolab: is death a disease that can be cured?

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  • 2007 / 5 / 17
    Placebo

    With new research demonstrating the startling power of the placebo effect, this hour of Radiolab examines the chemical consequences of belief and imagination.

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  • 2007 / 5 / 7
    Who Am I?

    The "mind" and "self" were formerly the domain of philosophers and priests. But in this hour of Radiolab, neurologists lead the charge on profound questions like "How does the brain make me?"

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  • 2006 / 5 / 5
    Where Am I?

    OK. Maybe you're in your desk chair. You're in your office. You're in New York, or Detroit, or Timbuktu. You're on planet Earth. But where are you, really? This hour, Radiolab tries to find out.

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