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.
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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 way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. The medium was once heralded as a utopian, international, and instantaneous mass communication tool — a sort of internet-before-the-internet. But, like the internet, many people quickly saw the power of this new technology and found ways to harness ...
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 you’d think. From poison and duck hunts to our feuding fathers, we step into a very odd tug of war between local and federal law. When Carol Anne Bond found out her husband had impregnated her best friend, she took revenge. Carol's particular flavor of revenge led to a US Supreme Court case th...
This episode explores the surprising ways sharks reproduce, from live birth to spiral egg cases. It then delves into one man's decade-long effort in Malta to rescue shark egg cases from dead fish and raise the babies in captivity before releasing them back into the ocean. The story sparks a debate about the effectiveness of such 'feel-good' conservation versus its impact on public education and changing perceptions about sharks.
Marine biologist Alison Kock discovered the incredible flying great white sharks of False Bay, a predation hotspot for seals. But these apex predators mysteriously disappeared after strange deaths. Drone footage revealed orcas were hunting the sharks specifically for their livers, driving the remaining sharks away through fear, illustrating how even top predators can be displaced.
This episode delves into the surprising world of shark immunology, tracing the evolution of the immune system back 450 million years to these ancient creatures. Researchers are now investigating flexible shark antibodies for their potential to target cancer cells and other diseases, highlighting how animals we fear might hold keys to medical breakthroughs.
In this episode of Radiolab's "Week of Sharks," the team confronts the cinematic image of sharks by embarking on a cage diving expedition in South Australia. The journey involves waiting for days to see a great white shark and experiencing the mix of fear and wonder when finally descending into the water. The episode then delves into the deep evolutionary history of sharks, highlighting their survival through mass extinctions and the astonishing diversity of species across the globe.
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 one of the worst shark attacks ever survived. After he recovered, he was pulled back into the shadowy world he feared most. Again and again and again. That shark attack left behind a question that still lingers, for Rodney, and for all of us: When you can’t see the thing that scares you, ...
Radiolab announces a special week-long series, "Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks," challenging the monstrous image created by Jaws. The series aims to transform the public's perception by exploring diverse, surprising stories about sharks, from flying and glowing species to those potentially curing cancer, presenting them as complex animals rather than just scary predators.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb dropped, miraculously surviving before traveling home to Nagasaki, where he survived the second bomb just three days later. The episode delves into his immediate health struggles and the scientific community's fears that radiation-damaged DNA would create a "thousand-year curse" of genetic defects in future generations. Surprisingly, studies revealed a remarkable resilience, suggesting robust DNA repair mechanisms played a key role, allowing Yamaguchi to live a long life and challenging initial predictions about hereditary damage.
Recorded live, this episode dives into the mysterious undigestible sugars in breast milk and the unique gut bacteria, Bifidobacterium infantis, they nourish. Hear compelling stories of how reintroducing Bifid helped save dying foals and dramatically improved a baby's severe pain. Discover the groundbreaking results in preventing a deadly disease in premature infants, the surprising disappearance of this co-evolved microbe from modern populations, and the theory linking its absence to rising health issues, despite regulatory hurdles.
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 jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. But with the help of Sadie, his pet African Grey Parrot, Jim found an unlikely way to manage his anger. African Grey Parrot expert Irene Pepperberg helps us understand how this could work, and shares some insights from her work with a parrot name...
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 protesters and office workers, it might still be impossible. This week, the story of our attempts to make the spoken visible. The magicians who tried. And the crazy spell that finally did it. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Simon Adler Produced by - Simon Adler Original music from - Simon Adler So...
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 just yet. It seems the workings of our brains are rather too complex and diverse across individuals to really say for certain what a brain scan says about a person. But Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel and researcher Cynthia Fu tell us about groundbreaking work in the field of depression that ju...
This episode features Sabrina Imbler's essay "Key Changes," read by Becca Blackwell, which traces the history of sound from the universe's origins to the first animal songs. It intertwines this natural history with the author's personal journey of voice change during gender transition and quitting drinking, reflecting on identity, loss, and finding a new voice through karaoke.
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 treasures on the ground. One day, she found something the size of a potato chip. Turns out, it was a three and half million year old chunk of bone. Keep reading if you’re okay with us spoiling the surprise. It’s a camel! Yes, the one we thought only hung out in deserts. Originally from North Am...
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 quest to trawl for life in some of the hottest natural springs on Earth would, decades later, change the trajectory of biological science forever, saving millions of lives—possibly even yours. This seismic, totally unpredictable discovery, was funded by the U.S. government. This week, as the Trum...
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, every moment. It's happening in the ocean, and your very life depends on it. In the second half, we make an earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempt to figure out the dollar value of the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the reali...
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 decade ago in an episode called Goo and You – check it out here – and in addition to revealing some fascinating secrets of insect life, it also raises big questions about memory, permanence and transformation. The letter Martha received about building on this study set in motion a series of spec...
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: Gryllacrididae. Or, as Jeff describes them, "crickets on steroids." They have crushingly strong, serrated jaws, and they launch all-out attacks on anyone who gets in their way--whether it's another cricket, or the guy trying to take them out of their cages. In order to work with the gryllacridids,...
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 on Earth—everything from sand to copper to oil— and tally up how much we have left. Are we living with reckless abandon? And if so, is there even a way to stop? This week, we bring you a conversation that’s equal parts terrifying and fascinating, featuring bird poop, daredevil drivers, and s...
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, almost like a tiny war. And right on the front lines of that battle is another major player on the stage of pregnancy that not a single person on the planet would be here without. An entirely new organ: the placenta. In this episode, which we originally released in 2021, we take you on a jo...
It’s easy to take growth for granted, for it to seem expected, inevitable even. Every person starts out as a baby and grows up. Plants grow from seeds into food. The economy grows. That stack of mail on your table grows. But why does anything grow the way that it does? In this hour, we go from the Alaska State Fair, to a kitchen in Berkeley, to the deep sea, to ancient India, to South Korea, and lots of places in between, to investigate this question, and uncover the many forces that drive growt...
This episode explores Ruth Bader Ginsburg's strategic approach to achieving gender equality through law, focusing on the Craig v. Boren beer case. By challenging discriminatory laws against men, Ginsburg exposed underlying biases against women and subtly advanced women's rights. The story also highlights the personal journey of Carolyn Whitener, whose involvement in the case led to significant personal growth.
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 to a head, with tragic consequences, in the very recent past. His latest book, called Airborne, details a largely forgotten history of science that never quite managed to get off the ground. Along the way, Carl helps us understand how we can fail, over and over again, to see a truth right in ...
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 soon it becomes something so big that it has impacted the life of every person reading this right now… and all that without the woman ever even knowing the impact she had. We originally aired this story back in 2010, but we thought we’d bring it back today, as questions about bodily autonomy ci...
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 were harmed in the process, but this brief glimpse into the inner workings of a bird sent her off on a journey to a place where fleshy animal business bumps into the mathematics of subatomic particles. With help from Henrik Mouristen, we hear how one of the biggest mysteries in biology might f...
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 experiencing a bizarre and mysterious set of symptoms that she called “gravitational anarchy.” Special thanks to Sarah Montague and Ellen Horn, as well as actress Hope Davis, who read Rosemary Morton’s story. And the late Berton Roueché, who wrote that story down. EPISODE CREDITS: Produced by - Brenna...
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 Twilley, the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves . Twilley spent over a decade reporting about how we keep food alive as it makes its way from the farm to our table. This conversation explores the science of cold, how fruits hold a secret to etern...
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 Nixon once boasted that at any moment he could pick up a telephone and - in 20 minutes - kill 60 million people. Such is the power of the US President over the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But what if you were the military officer on the receiving end of that phone call? Could you refuse the or...
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 quest to understand how something could possibly be that black, we enter worlds of towering microscopic forests, where gold becomes black, the deep sea meets the moon, and places that are empty suddenly become full. Corrections/Clarifications: In this episode, dragonfish are described as having...
