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 / 27Antibiotic ApocalypseDoctor 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...
- 2026 / 3 / 13Return of the Flesh-EatersIf 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,...
- 2026 / 3 / 6Snail Sex TapeIn this episode, we consider a creature we often donât think much aboutâthe snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti...
- 2026 / 2 / 13Time is HoneyIn 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...
- 2026 / 1 / 30Song of the CerebellumOne 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...
- 2026 / 1 / 23You and Me and Mr. Self-esteemMost 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...
- 2026 / 1 / 23You and Me and Mr. Self-EsteemMost 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...
- 2026 / 1 / 9Brain BallsWhen 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...
- 2026 / 1 / 2Moon TreesIn 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu âSmokeyâ 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...
- 2025 / 12 / 26Fertility CliffAs she -- and her friends â approached the age of 35, senior correspondent Molly Webster kept hearing a phrase over and over: âfertility cliff.â It was a short-hand term to describe what she was told would...
- 2025 / 12 / 12The Alien in the RoomItâs faster than a speeding bullet. Itâs smarter than a polymath genius. Itâs everywhere but itâs invisible. Itâs artificial intelligence. But what actually is it?Today we ask this simple question and explore...
- 2025 / 12 / 5Shell Game: Minimum Viable CompanyA 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, Evanâs using AI to do more than just mimic himself â heâs...
- 2025 / 11 / 28Fela Kuti: Enter the ShrineOur original host Jad Abumrad returns to share a new podcast series heâs just released. Itâs all about Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician who created a genre, then a movement, then tried to use his hypnotic beats...
- 2025 / 11 / 21Our Common Nature: West Virginia CoalToday on the show, weâre 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 GonzĂĄlez travel around the United States...
- 2025 / 11 / 14Quantum RefugeQasem 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...
- 2025 / 10 / 31The Glow BelowA 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 doesnât...
- 2025 / 10 / 17Content WarningOver the past five years TikTok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say, itâs not how youâd expect.Today we continue our yearslong exploration of what you can and canât post online....
- 2025 / 10 / 10Creation StoryElla 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...
- 2025 / 9 / 26VoiceOver 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 areâand we rely on them to push ourselves up and...
- 2025 / 9 / 19The Spark of LifeIn 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 âonion...
- 2025 / 9 / 12Los FrikisHow a group of 80âs 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 rockâs...
- 2025 / 9 / 5Screaming Into the VoidIn 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...
- 2025 / 8 / 29Music HatWith this episode, weâre putting on our music hat. For a program that relies so much on scoring and sound, itâs not often we talk about the musicians and the music they make that inspire us. Today, that...
- 2025 / 8 / 22The Medical Matchmaking MachineAs 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...
- 2025 / 8 / 15Weighing Good IntentionsIn an episode first released in 2010, then-producer Lulu Miller drives to Michigan to track down the endangered Kirtlandâs warbler. Efforts to protect the bird have lead to the killing of cowbirds (a species...
- 2025 / 8 / 8The Menopause MysteryUntil 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...
- 2025 / 8 / 1Galaxy QuenchingThis 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...
- 2025 / 7 / 25The Nothing Behind EverythingThis 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...
- 2025 / 7 / 18More Perfect: The Hate DebateBack 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,...
- 2025 / 7 / 11Desperately Seeking SymmetryThis 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...
- 2025 / 7 / 4On [The Divided Dial]: Fishing In The NightHave you heard On the Mediaâs Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial? Itâs awesome and you should, and now you will. In this episode they tell the story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but...
- 2025 / 6 / 27Sex, Ducks and the Founding FeudJilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution.What does a betrayed loverâs revenge have to do with an international chemical weapons treaty? More than...
- 2025 / 6 / 19Mystery BayThis 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...
- 2025 / 6 / 18The Shark Inside YouThis 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...
- 2025 / 6 / 17The CageThis 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...
- 2025 / 6 / 16Making a MonsterEpisode 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...
- 2025 / 6 / 13Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of SharksIn 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...
- 2025 / 6 / 13Double-BlastedWe first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show weâve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again today. Itâs about a man who experienced maybe one of the most...
- 2025 / 6 / 6The Elixir of LifeDoctor 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 canât...
- 2025 / 5 / 30A Flock of TwoAnimals 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 riskâit...
- 2025 / 5 / 23The Echo in the MachineToday 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. Itâs frictionless. And yet, if it werenât for an unlikely crew of...
- 2025 / 5 / 16How to Cure What Ails YouNow 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...
- 2025 / 5 / 9The First Known Earthly VoiceWhat 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 âQueer Planet: A...
- 2025 / 5 / 2Terrestrials: The Snow BeastToday 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...
- 2025 / 4 / 25The Age of AquaticusFor years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73â/163â. At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze werenât convinced. What began as their simple...
- 2025 / 4 / 18Ghosts in the Green MachineIn 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,...
- 2025 / 4 / 11Signal Hill: Caterpillar RoadshowA 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...
- 2025 / 4 / 4Killer EmpathyIn 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:...
- 2025 / 3 / 28Malthusian SwerveEarth 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...
- 2025 / 3 / 21Everybody's Got OneWe all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. this story isnât the nursery rhyme we think it is. In a way, itâs a struggle,...