Radiolab Classic: Recent Episodes
WNYC Studios
Photojournalist Lynsey Addario captured something that happens all the time but few of us get to see, a soldier fatally wounded on the battlefield.
Producer Briana Breen and the podcast Love + Radio bring us a story about a very eventful year in the life of an accidental voyeur.
As a follow-up to our story Los Frikis, we're bringing you a translated version of Radio Ambulante's story on the same subject.
The story of how punk rock’s arrival in Cuba allowed a small band of outsiders to sentence themselves to death and set themselves free.
This episode we pierce the spandex-ed heart of professional wrestling, and travel 400 years into the past to walk the line between reality and fantasy.
How a tiny group of social engineers are making our online relationships kindler and gentler, whether we like it or not.
The most popular sport in the US is savage, creative, brutal & balletic. Love it or loathe it, it’s a touchstone of the American identity.
The lines between boy and girl can be blurry but NPR's Invisibilia introduces us to someone with a very new idea of how blurry they can be.
We’ve gathered a handful of stories that show how every time we think we’ve settled on a price for something, it slips out of our grasp.
A quartet of buttons that may just leave you stuck, rich, ugly, or dead. Confused? Push the button marked “Play”.
After a public tragedy, a reporter looks at the space between the stories of the people who experienced it and the official narrative.
The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center, Patient Zero. We hunt for Patient Zeroes from all over the map.
How a group of paranormal investigators made one man realize what it really means for a house, or a man, to be haunted.
How the right words can have the wrong meanings, and the best translations lead us to an understanding that's way deeper than language.
Ron and Cornelia Suskind had two healthy young sons, thriving careers and a brand new home when their youngest, Owen, started to disappear.
Horror, fashion, and the end of the world ... the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, philosophers, Jay-Z and True Detective.
It's tough to make small talk with a stranger—especially when that stranger doesn't speak your language. (And he has a blowhole.)
For Robert’s birthday we celebrate with some classic Krulwich and a peek into the spirit and sensibility that, in many ways, drives our show.
Today, a lady with a bird in her backyard upends our whole sense of what we may have to give up to keep a wild creature wild.
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 we willing to go to stop that from happening?
We are dedicating a whole hour to the Galapagos archipelago, the place that inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection. 179 years later, the Galapagos are undergoing rapid changes that continue to pose -- and possibly answer -- critical questions about the fragility and resilience of life on Earth.
Learn a new language faster than ever! Leave doubt in the dust! Could you do all that and more with just a zap to the noggin? Maybe.
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.
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 Lee Berger and Dr. Chris Stringer from London’s Natural History Museum explain how a child’s skull, found in an ancient cave, eventually helped answer one of our oldest questions: Where do we come from? Then Lee takes us on a journey to answer a somewhat smaller question: how did that child die? Along the way, we visit Dr. Bernhard Zipfel at Wits University in Johannesburg to actually hold the skull itself.
We wanted to give you a chance to hold the skull, too. So we did a little experiment: we made a 3D scan of it. If you visit our page on Thingiverse, you’ll see the results. Anyone with access to a 3D printer can print their own copy of the skull. (We printed a bunch, with help from our friends at MakerBot—there’s even a purple one with sparkles.)
We also collaborated with the folks at Mmuseumm, a tiny (really tiny, it’s in an elevator shaft) museum in Manhattan. You can visit them to see the 3D printed skull, along with the other wonderful things in their collection: mosquitoes swatted mid-bite, toothpaste tubes from around the world, and much more.
Thanks to JP Brown, Emily Graslie and Robert Martin at the Field Museum in Chicago for scanning the skull. Thanks to Curtis Schmitt and shootdigital for refining the scan. Thanks to Bre Pettis and Jenifer Howard at MakerBot for guiding us through the world of 3D printing.
It’s hard to think of anything more rational, more logical and impersonal than a number. But what if we’re all, universally, also deeply attuned to how numbers … feel? Why 2 is warm, 7 is strong and 11 is downright mystical.
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.
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?
What do frozen horses and a scorching universe have in common? That's what we wanted to know.
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 transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets.
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?
This hour, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—those peculiar spaces where it’s clear what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but what happens in-between is a mystery.
At the start of this new year we crack open some fossils, peer back into ancient seas, and look up at lunar skies to find that a year is not quite as fixed as we thought it was.
Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution.
In this new live stage performance, Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow.
A preview of Radiolab's live show Apocalyptical: dinosaurs, death, destruction... plus cinematic live scoring and comedic mayhem from Reggie Watts and Kurt Braunohler. Feast your eyes on more video -- including a cut of the full show! -- at radiolab.org/live.
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 the ages.
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.
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 both Henrietta's cells and her family. So, 4 years later, we have a newly updated show!
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 even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we try to find out why.
You may not give a second thought (or backward glance) to what the toilet whisks away after you do your business. But we got wondering -- where would we wind up if we thought of flushing as the start, and not the end, of a journey? In this short, we head out to trace the trail of sludge...from Manhattan, to wherever poop leads us.
We've all felt it, that irresistible urge to point the finger. But why do we need blame and how is new technology complicating accountability?
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.
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.
One of our favorite human beings turns 80 this week. To celebrate, Robert asks Oliver Sacks to look back on his career, and explain how thousands of worms and a motorbike accident led to a brilliant writing career.
The complex racial history of two towns in Ohio leads members of the same family to disagree strongly about whether they're black or white.
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 joining us for the tour. Listen to a quick sneak peek, and grab your tix now.
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.
This is the story of a three-year-old girl and the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl is a legal battle that has entangled a biological father, a heart-broken couple, and the tragic history of Native American children taken from their families.
If you've ever wondered how the podcast comes together, or what it's like to work at Radiolab, here's a peek into our process.
Every 17 years, a deafening sex orchestra hits the East Coast -- billions and billions of cicadas crawl out of the ground, sing their hearts out, then mate and die. In this short, Jad and Robert talk to a man who gets inside that noise to dissect its meaning and musical components.
What if the moon were just a jump away? In this short, a beautiful answer to that question from Italo Calvino, read live by Liev Schreiber.
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 absolute limit, and finding ways to navigate the unknown.
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 at 7 kilohertz. In their honor, we're rebroadcasting one of our favorite episodes: Emergence.
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.
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 ever feeling familiar, to keep pushing his listeners to a kind of psychological limit.
The inhumanly fast world of high-speed trading, an excruciatingly slow experiment, and a physicist plays Zeus.
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 doctors to do for us, and what doctors want done for themselves.
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.
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 questions about what it takes to get a species back to being wild.
Stories of nature and nurture slamming into each other, & shaping our biological blueprints.
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 men in America. And in 1961, when a car crash left him in a coma, these characters may have saved him.
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 argue about the truth of a world they can't see.
200 miles above Earth's surface, astronaut Dave Wolf -- rocketing through the blackness of Earth's shadow at 5 miles a second -- floated out of the Mir Space Station on his very first spacewalk. In this short, he describes the extremes of light and dark in space, relives a heart-pounding close call, and shares one of the most tranquil moments of his life.
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 inspire deeply different stories, and facts that, in the end, might not matter at all.
"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, explains what the gravity-defying Slinky trick reveals about the nature of all things great and small (including us).
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 pinning down another person's hurt is a slippery business.
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 on the red planet, with a rebroadcast of one our favorite episodes: Space.
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 surprising, successful, and rather unsettling strategy of ironclad loyalty, absolute intolerance, and brutal violence.
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 survival story that spans ... well, 4 billion years when you get down to it.
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 our first-ever remix competition. And now we get to play the winners.
In this podcast, a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one famously repetitive piece of music.
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 sounded so deadly serious. In this short, Jad & Robert try to decide how to feel.
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.
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 short, Robert updates us on the science of fetal cells -- one of the first topics he covered as an NPR science correspondent.
In this short, we go looking for the devil, and find ourselves tangled in a web of details surrounding one of the most haunting figures in music--a legendary guitarist whose shadowy life spawned a legend so powerful, it's still being repeated...even by fans who don't believe a word of it.
A look at the messy mystery in our middles, and what the rumblings deep in our bellies can tell us about ourselves.
Alan Turing's mental leaps about machines and computers were some of the most innovative ideas of the 20th century. But the world wasn't kind to him. In this short, Robert wonders how Turing's personal life shaped his understanding of mechanical minds and human emotions.
Every day, every moment, an epic battle is raging across the globe. It's happening in the ocean. And the evidence is both highly visible and totally hidden, depending on your perspective. In this short, the tale of an arms race involving trillions of sea creatures--and why their struggle is vital to our survival.
Sometimes being a good scientist requires putting aside your emotions. But what happens when objectivity isn't enough to make sense of a seemingly senseless act of violence? In this short, Jad and Robert talk to an entomologist about the risks, and the rewards, of trying to see the world through someone else's eyes.
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.
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.
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 questions. Roman joins Jad and Robert to play a few favorites, and to chat about the hidden language of design that shapes our lives--from sound effects to stuff that’s more ... concrete.
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 might have even touched it.
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.
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 isn't the most striking thing about him at all.
For most of human history, flight was an impossible dream. In this short, the dizzying rise and fall of a pilot whose aeronautic feats changed aviation forever and turned chancy stunts into acrobatic mastery.
Writer Ian Frazier made a startling discovery several years ago in eastern Siberia: no one he met there had ever heard of tic tac toe. In this short, Jad and Robert wonder how a game that seems carved into childhood DNA could be completely unknown in some parts of the world.
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 studying what happens when the basal ganglia gets short-circuited in mice...until one fateful day, when things got really, really weird.
In this short, 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 difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.
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 totally work. See you in two weeks with a new short!
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 recorded live at our Curious Sounds concert earlier this month in NYC.
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 heads to the Smithsonian to investigate.
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.
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.
Is the world full of deep symmetries and ordered pairs? Or do we live in a lopsided universe? This striking video by Everynone plays with our yearning for balance, and reveals how beautiful imperfect matches can be. The video was inspired by our episode Desperately Seeking Symmetry.
This hour of Radiolab, 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 we see when we look in the mirror.
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.
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.
What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? This hour, Radiolab looks for ways to gain the upper hand over those forces inside us--from unhealthy urges, to creative insights--that seem to have a mind of their own.
In today's short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.
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 festival in Chicago.
In this episode, Radiolab steers its way through a series of stories about getting lost, and asks how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.
In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.
In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.
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?
A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.
Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?
One tidy mathematical formula may hold the key to how cities work. This hour, Radiolab takes to the streets to test the numbers...and ask what really makes cities tick.
In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie.
In this podcast, Jad and Robert throw some physics at a bible story. We find out just how many trumpeters you'd actually need to blow down the walls of Jericho.
This hour, Radiolab rollicks through stories of falling. We plunge into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, and upend some myths about falling cats.
In this podcast, Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought and the voice in your head. How did it get there? And what's happening when people hear someone else's voice in their head?
This hour, Radiolab revels in the elasticity of Time, and takes a spin through history--stopping at a 19th-century railroad station in Ohio, a track meet, and a Beethoven concert.
Words have the power to shape the way we think and feel. In this stunning video (made to accompany our Words episode), filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante bandy visual wordplay into a moving exploration of the power of language.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that. A woman teaches a 27-year-old the first words of his life, and a neurologist suffers a stroke that wipes out the language center of her brain.
Robert and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success.
An unlikely escape story begins in a supermarket, and ends in a boat off the coast of Maine.
Oops. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of unintended consequences--from a psychologist whose zeal to safeguard national security may have backfired, to a toxic lake that spawned new life.
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.
We examine the strange power of lies with a charismatic cast of characters (from pathological liars to lying snakes to drunken psychiatrists) on this hour of Radiolab.
This hour of Radiolab: famous tumors. Say hello to the growth that killed Ulysses S. Grant, and get to know the woman whose cancer cells changed modern medicine. The good, bad,…and ugly side of anatomical aberrations.
When scientists treat words like data, clues to the real-life mysteries of human aging are found in the writings of Agatha Christie and 678 nuns.
Music duo Buke and Gass talk to Jad about coaxing delightfully twangy sounds from their homemade instruments.
A journey to the edge of human limits. On this hour of Radiolab, we test physical endurance with a bike race that makes the Tour de France look like child’s play, and mental capacity with a mind-stretching memory competition.
Lulu Miller talks to a nursing home in Düsseldorf, Germany that came up with a novel approach to caring for Alzheimer's and Dementia patients.
A rare and haunting disorder called Capgras turns loved ones into imposters--and reveals that recognizing people, even the people we know the best, is more about how they make us feel than what we see in front of our eyes.
Chimps. Bonobos. Humans. We're all great apes, but that doesn’t mean we’re one happy family.
Biopsychologist Barbara Smuts takes us to a remote area of Kenya, where she tried to gain the trust of a troop of baboons in the 1970s.
A showdown between a zookeeper and an orangutan named Fu Manchu raises a question: can an animal know what's in your head well enough to manipulate and deceive you?
This hour of Radiolab: communicating across species. We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks, ask whether dogs feel guilt, and wonder if a successful predator may have fallen in love with a photographer.
From the symbolic power of the doctor coat, to the very real stash of opium in your brain, this hour of Radiolab explores the healing powers of belief and imagination.
Jad talks to musicians Michael Lowenstern and Zoe Keating about their remixes of Terry Riley's In C.
Regardless of how you feel about numbers, chances are you rely on them every day. This hour, Radiolab ponders the nature of numbers, and wonders what life might look like without them.
Robert ambushes Jad with a question we've all been dying to ask him since he became a father. And we revisit some other ideas from our Morality show to think about a few really big modern-day problems (think global warming and nuclear war).
A story about a boy, a mom, and a homemade helicopter--and how radio can move you to feel a little bit different about the world.
This hour of Radiolab: stories of adaptation. Is a peacenik baboon, a man in a dress, or a cuddly fox a sign of things to come? Or just a flukey outlier? We reframe our ideas about normalcy.
They Might Be Giants celebrate at our season launch party with a live concert, and a conversation about the tricky business of combining science and entertainment.
What's gotten into you? In this hour of Radiolab: encounters with parasites. Tales of lethargic farmers, zombie cockroaches, and even mind-controlled humans (kinda, maybe).
Jad--a brand new father--wonders what's going on inside the head of his baby Amil. Is it just chaos? Or is there something more, some understanding from the very beginning?
After hearing our show about moments of death, filmmaker Will Hoffman went out in search of moments of life. What follows is what he found.
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.
Another meditation on what happens after the moment of death, this time as Shakespeare envisions it.
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.
This week on the podcast, we continue our meditations on death (our After Life episode had eleven). We'll throw a new one at you each day, all week long, culminating in a very special treat at the end of the week.
Death is inevitable. But is it truly final? We stare down the very moment of passing, and speculate about what may lie beyond.
Robert challenges Richard Dawkins on a number of sticky spots on the subject of biological evolution.
We follow up on our Stochasticity show with an exploration pf whether the little choices we make every day are predictable or not.
We have a special bonus this week to accompany our Stochasticity episode. We asked our friends, Higher Mammals to produce a song and video for our Stochasticity show. We hope you find it completely Random!
Stochasticity is a wonderfully smarty-pants word for randomness. We ask how it drives our lives, and the patterns we see around us.
We open up an age old can of worms at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space: which medium is superior -- television or radio? Jad and Robert face off, with This American Life's Ira Glass as referee.
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.
Radiolab examines the connection between your brain and your body -- and what happens when it breaks.
There are some questions that just don't give in to experiments and data. We take on one of those questions.
Can you make your own universe? We usually think of the universe as 'everything that exists,' so how could you make another one?
Psychologist Walter Mischel explains how one little test involving a marshmallow might tell you a frightening amount about what kind of person you are.
Radiolab throws a birthday party for Charles Darwin! Robert Krulwich invites three experts to toast the birthday boy.
A study that finds a link between President Obama's election and the test scores of African Americans gets Jad and Robert thinking about an earlier study on a psychological effect called "stereotype threat."
Special bonus of the week! A video inspired by the mathematician, Steve Strogatz. At the age of thirteen, Steve was astonished to find that pendulums and water fountains had a strange relationship that had previously been completely hidden from him.
The pursuit of knowledge leads sometimes to answers, often to failure, and almost invariably to more questions. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of love and loss in the name of science.
What's in a name? In this hour of Radiolab: diagnosis—our attempt to find out what's wrong, and give it a label. We examine how we get to the root of a problem, and how we react when we get there.
Sperm carry half the genes needed for human life. In this hour of Radiolab, we examine our beginnings, take a tour of the animal kingdom, and ponder a world where frozen sperm can last for all eternity.
When presented with a choice, logic and emotion pipe up. This hour of Radiolab, we turn up the volume on those voices in our heads, and try to get to the bottom of what really steers our decisions.
Chris had a crush on Lisa. But how to woo her? He met her on a park bench in Chicago, handed her a stack of CD's, and sent her off on an extremely specific mission. Did it work? Find out on this week's podcast.
Two short pieces on sperm that hint at the new ideas and amazing stories we came across once we started following the trail of this wriggly little cell.
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. Wilson is the kid who never took his eyes off the mound.
We play some never-released tape from the vault, and reveal a bit about what techniques we used to try and make it sing.
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.
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 common than you think.
Robert Krulwich's commencement speech at California Institute of Technology gets at the heart of what we do here at Radiolab. It's a treat to hear his passion. We enjoyed it. And we thought you might too.
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.
First, we asked you to tell us what song gets stuck in your head. Then, we asked youhow you got it out. Finally, we made a podcast. Thank you to everyone who called in, shared their secret techniques, and sang without shame.
An excerpt from Wordless Music on WNYC, a 4-part music program hosted by Jad, exploring the boundaries between classical and pop music. Jad waxes googly-eyed fan when he gets to talk about one of his favorite bands, Stars of the Lid.
Jad presents a piece by one of his favorite producers: Ben Rubin. This audio portrait, called 'Open Outcry,' visits the trading floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange, with its hundreds of traders shouting unintelligible phonic abbreviations and numbers back and forth.
Ever wonder how Jad and Robert met? They tell their tale on stage at Oberlin College, and talk about how they started tinkering around with tape to come up with the Radiolab you know today.
This hour of Radiolab, pop music's pull: nightmarish stories of musical hallucinations, songs that transcend language, and the triumphant return of the Elvis of Afghanistan.
The uneasy marriage of biology and engineering raises big questions about the nature of life. In this hour, Radiolab journeys to the first billion years of life on Earth, looks at how modern engineers tinker with living things, and meets a woman who could have been two people.
This hour of Radiolab teases out stories of laughter--from a baby’s crib, to a rat’s cage, to a remote village in Tanzania that was struck by a laughing epidemic 45 years ago.
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. David Lang had to do just that when a hospital in Garches, France, asked him to write music for their morgue, or 'Salle Des Departs.'
It might seem hyperbole to claim, as many Wagnerites do, that The Ring Cycle is 'The Greatest Work of Art Ever.' But it's permeated our culture from Star Wars to Bugs Bunny to J.R.R. Tolkien. On this Radiolab/WNYC Special, we explore the impact and influence of Wagner's Ring Cycle on the Metropolitan Opera's 2004 Presentation.
In 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright managed to coax their spruce biplane off the North Carolina sand for twelve seconds, and those twelve seconds started a revolution in flight. We examine the human desire to fly, and how getting flight changed us.
This week, a look at the different ways that people connect to each other, and how they act once they’re together. NOTE: This episode contains EXPLICIT language about sex.
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 of time capsule, a collection of sounds and images that would describe life on Earth to whomever or whatever might find it.
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 digital sound editing, and Robert raises editorial questions. And film editor joins them to Walter Murch weigh in on storytelling.
This hour of Radiolab, we ponder our insignificant place in the universe. We boldly go after stories of optimism, narcissism, and cynicism--stories all about Outer Space.
This hour of Radiolab: we explore the line between music and language, and turn to physics and biochemistry to ask how sound becomes feeling.
Digging up the past leads to some very unexpected finds. This hour, Radiolab plays detective and goes sleuthing in some rather unusual places: an ancient trash dump, the side of the highway, and in the blood of millions of Asians.
Jad turns to science to help strangers fall in love...or at least exchange a few phone numbers...as the host of a Singles Night. And he gets some advice from a few experts on the chemistry of a 'brain on love.'
What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form amazingly complicated societies. This hour of Radiolab: a look at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, and even our brains.
For thousands of years philosophers have debated the essence of morality. Now, neuroscientists may have answers. This hour of Radiolab, stories of chimps sharing, human toddlers fighting, and 4th graders playing slumlords.
This hour of Radiolab: fighting the inevitable march of time. We meet a scientist and his particle accelerator, an artist, and a whole cast of characters in the Mojave Desert, where geologic time flows like a frozen hourglass.
Some scientists claim that aging is a disease that can be cured. On this hour of Radiolab, the modern search for the fountain of youth, and personal stories of witnessing death: the death of a cell, the death of a loved one, and the aging of a society.
Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour of Radiolab: implanting false memories in loved ones, and erasing painful memories by simply swallowing a pill. Plus: the story of a man with the worst case of amnesia ever documented.
Blood-thirsty Romans, frozen carcasses, wild jaguars, and a question: how do you build a better cage? This hour of Radiolab, we head to the zoo.
Sleep is one of science's greatest mysteries. This hour of Radiolab, we look for answers in iguanas who doze with one eye open, new parents in the throes of sleep deprivation, and rats who may be dreaming.
The "mind" and "self" were formerly the domain of philosophers and priests. But in this hour of Radiolab, neurologists lead the charge. We reflect on the illusion of selfhood, contemplate the evolution of consciousness, and meet a woman who one day woke up as a completely different person.
Stress may save your life if you're being chased by a tiger. But if you're stuck in traffic, it may be more likely to make you sick. This hour of Radiolab, stories of stress--from a singer who loses her voice, to an author caught in a body that never grew up.