Radiolab
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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 halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information int...
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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 w...
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, i...
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...
Gray's Donation
Before he was even born, Sarah and Ross Gray knew that their son Thomas wouldn’t live long. But as they let go of him, they made a decision that rever...
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...
Kleptotherms
In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran...
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...
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 th...
The Punchline
This episode, first aired in 2019, brings you the story of John Scott, the professional hockey player that every fan loved to hate. A tough guy. A br...
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...
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 tak...
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 wa...
The Good Show
The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals car...
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 ac...
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...
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 ge...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 o...
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 prehistori...
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
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 th...
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...
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...
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. Repor...
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 wi...
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...
The Medical Matchmaking Machine
As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with mult...
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 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 a...
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 ga...
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 m...
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?...
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 v...
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 th...
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 t...
Baby Shark
This is episode five of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.
Today, the strange, squirmy magic behind how sharks make more sharks....
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 dis...