Radiolab from WNYC
By WNYC Studios
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Description
A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more. Find these and more great shows at wnyc.org
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
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1 |
Gray's Donation | How a donation leads Sarah and Ross Gray to places we rarely get a chance to see. | 7/16/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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2 |
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. | 7/2/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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3 |
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? | 6/18/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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4 |
Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR | In 2012, scientists had a realization: hidden inside one of the world’s smallest organisms, was one of the world’s most powerful tools. | 6/6/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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5 |
Nazi Summer Camp | The incredible, little-known story of the Nazi prisoners of war kept on American soil during World War II. | 5/22/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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6 |
Radiolab Live: Tell-Tale Hearts featuring Oliver Sacks | Highlights from a live Radiolab performance about hearts, driving forces, and the people we love - including a final conversation with Dr. Oliver Sacks. | 5/12/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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7 |
Sight Unseen | Photojournalist Lynsey Addario captured something that happens all the time but few of us get to see, a soldier fatally wounded on the battlefield. | 4/28/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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8 |
The Living Room | Producer Briana Breen and the podcast Love + Radio bring us a story about a very eventful year in the life of an accidental voyeur. | 4/9/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 9 | VideoVIDEO: Radiolab Presents: Radio Ambulante | 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. | 4/2/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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10 |
Los Frikis | 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. | 3/24/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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11 |
Fu-Go | During World War II, something happened that nobody ever talks about. A tale of mysterious balloons, children caught up in the winds of war. And the terror of silence. | 3/10/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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12 |
La Mancha Screwjob | 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. | 2/23/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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13 |
The Trust Engineers | How a tiny group of social engineers are making our online relationships kindler and gentler, whether we like it or not. | 2/9/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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14 |
American Football | 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. | 1/28/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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15 |
Radiolab Presents: Invisibilia | 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. | 1/9/2015 | Free | View In iTunes |
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16 |
Worth | 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. | 12/22/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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17 |
Buttons Not Buttons | A quartet of buttons that may just leave you stuck, rich, ugly, or dead. Confused? Push the button marked “Play”. | 12/12/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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18 |
Outside Westgate | After a public tragedy, a reporter looks at the space between the stories of the people who experienced it and the official narrative. | 11/29/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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19 |
Patient Zero - Updated | The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center, Patient Zero. We hunt for Patient Zeroes from all over the map. | 11/13/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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20 |
Haunted | How a group of paranormal investigators made one man realize what it really means for a house, or a man, to be haunted. | 10/30/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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21 |
Translation | How the right words can have the wrong meanings, and the best translations lead us to an understanding that's way deeper than language. | 10/20/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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22 |
John Luther Adams | What's the soundtrack for the end of the world? We go looking for an answer. | 10/3/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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23 |
Juicervose | Ron and Cornelia Suskind had two healthy young sons, thriving careers and a brand new home when their youngest, Owen, started to disappear. | 9/18/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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24 |
In The Dust Of This Planet | Horror, fashion, and the end of the world ... the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, philosophers, Jay-Z and True Detective. | 9/8/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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25 |
Hello | It's tough to make small talk with a stranger—especially when that stranger doesn't speak your language. (And he has a blowhole.) | 8/21/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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26 |
Shorts: Happy Birthday Bobby K | 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. | 8/7/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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27 |
Shorts: For the Birds | 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. | 7/24/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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28 |
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 we willing to go to stop that from happening? We | 7/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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29 |
Shorts: 9-Volt Nirvana | 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. | 6/26/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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30 |
Shorts: ≤ 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. | 6/13/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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31 |
Things | This hour we investigate the objects around us, their power to move us, and whether it's better to look back or move on, hold on tight or just let go. | 5/30/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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32 |
Shorts: 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 Lee Berger and Dr. Chris Stringer from London’ | 5/15/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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33 |
Shorts: For the Love of Numbers | 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. | 5/2/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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34 |
60 Words | How one sentence -- just 60 words written in the hours after the September 11 attacks -- became the legal foundation for the "war on terror." | 4/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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35 |
Shorts: 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. | 4/1/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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36 |
Shorts: 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? | 3/25/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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37 |
Shorts: Super Cool | What do frozen horses and a scorching universe have in common? That's what we wanted to know. | 3/13/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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38 |
What's Left When You're Right? | From the stage to the cage, a series of showdowns that leave us wondering about the price of being right ... or coming from the left. | 2/25/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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39 |
Shorts: 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 transparency and the government’s need to | 2/12/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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40 |
Shorts: 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? | 1/28/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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41 |
Black Box | 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. | 1/17/2014 | Free | View In iTunes |
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42 |
Shorts: The Times They Are a-Changin' | 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. | 12/30/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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43 |
Shorts: Sex, Ducks, and The Founding Feud | Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution. | 12/19/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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44 |
Apocalyptical | In this new live stage performance, Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow. | 12/9/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 45 | VideoVIDEO: Radiolab Live Apocalyptical Sneak Peek | 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/ | 12/9/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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46 |
Shorts: 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 the ages. | 11/19/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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47 |
Shorts: 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. | 11/1/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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48 |
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 both Henrietta's cells and her family. So, 4 ye | 10/22/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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49 |
Shorts: 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 even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we t | 10/10/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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50 |
Shorts: Poop Train | 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 | 9/24/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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51 |
Blame | 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? | 9/12/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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52 |
Shorts: 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. | 8/29/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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53 |
Shorts: 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. | 8/13/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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54 |
Blood | The metaphor, magic, and money coursing through our veins... | 7/31/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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55 |
Shorts: Happy Birthday, Good Dr. Sacks | 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. | 7/9/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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56 |
Shorts: Ally's Choice | 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. | 7/2/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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57 |
Shorts: 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 joining us for the tour. Listen to a quick sneak pe | 6/27/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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58 |
Shorts: 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. | 6/13/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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59 |
Shorts: 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 that has entangled a biological father, a heart-broken couple, and the tragic history of Native American c | 5/30/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 60 | VideoVIDEO: Radiolab Behind the Scenes | 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. | 5/20/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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61 |
Shorts: The Septendecennial Sing-Along | 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 mea | 5/14/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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62 |
Shorts: The Distance of the Moon | 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. | 4/16/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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63 |
Shorts: 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 absolute limit, and finding ways to navigate t | 4/2/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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64 |
Are You Sure? | Stories about walking the tightrope between doubt and certainty. | 3/26/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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65 |
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 at 7 kilohertz. In their honor, we're rebroad | 3/19/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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66 |
Shorts: 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. | 3/5/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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67 |
Shorts: 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 ever feeling familiar, to keep pushing his list | 2/19/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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68 |
Speed | The inhumanly fast world of high-speed trading, an excruciatingly slow experiment, and a physicist plays Zeus. | 2/5/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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69 |
Shorts: 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 doctors to do for us, and what doctors want d | 1/15/2013 | Free | View In iTunes |
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70 |
Shorts: 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. | 12/31/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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71 |
Bliss | Stories of striving, grasping, tripping, and falling for happiness, perfection, and Bliss. | 12/17/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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72 |
Shorts: 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 questions about what it takes to get a species | 12/3/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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73 |
Inheritance | Stories of nature and nurture slamming into each other, & shaping our biological blueprints. | 11/19/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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74 |
Shorts: 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 men in America. And in 1961, when a car crash | 11/6/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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75 |
Shorts: 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 argue about the truth of a world they can't see. | 10/22/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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76 |
Shorts: Dark Side of the Earth | 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 | 10/8/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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77 |
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 inspire deeply different stories, and facts that, i | 9/24/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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78 |
Shorts: 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, explains what the gravity-defying Slinky trick re | 9/10/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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79 |
Shorts: 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 pinning down another person's hurt is a slippery bus | 8/28/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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80 |
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 on the red planet, with a rebroadcast of one ou | 8/20/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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81 |
Shorts: 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 surprising, successful, and rather unsettling st | 7/30/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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82 |
Shorts: 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 survival story that spans ... well, 4 billion y | 7/16/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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83 |
Shorts: 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 our first-ever remix competition. And now we get | 7/2/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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84 |
Shorts: Unraveling Bolero | 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. | 6/18/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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85 |
Shorts: 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 sounded so deadly serious. In this short, Jad & | 6/4/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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86 |
Colors | Radiolab rips the rainbow a new one. | 5/21/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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87 |
Shorts: 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. | 5/14/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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88 |
Shorts: 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 short, Robert updates us on the science of fet | 4/30/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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89 |
Shorts: Crossroads | 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 f | 4/16/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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90 |
Guts | A look at the messy mystery in our middles, and what the rumblings deep in our bellies can tell us about ourselves. | 4/2/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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91 |
Shorts: The Turing Problem | 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 an | 3/19/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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92 |
Shorts: A War We Need | 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 | 3/5/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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93 |
Escape! | Stories about traps and getaways ... about getting stuck, and breaking free. | 2/20/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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94 |
Shorts: Killer Empathy | 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 r | 2/6/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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95 |
Shorts: 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. | 1/23/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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96 |
The Bad Show | We wrestle with the dark side of human nature, and ask whether it's something we can ever really understand, or fully escape. | 1/8/2012 | Free | View In iTunes |
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97 |
Shorts: 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. | 12/26/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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98 |
Shorts: 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 questions. Roman joins Jad and Robert to play a few f | 12/12/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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99 |
Shorts: 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 might have even touched it. | 11/28/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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100 |
Patient Zero | We hunt for Patient Zeroes from all over the map. | 11/15/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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101 |
Shorts: 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. | 10/31/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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102 |
Shorts: 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 isn't the most striking thing about him at all | 10/18/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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103 |
Loops | The surprising ways that loops steer… and sometimes derail… our lives. | 10/4/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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104 |
Shorts: Loop the Loop | 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. | 9/20/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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105 |
Shorts: Mapping Tic Tac Toe-dom | 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 som | 9/6/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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106 |
Games | Winners, losers, underdogs -- what can games tell us about who we really are? | 8/23/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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107 |
Shorts: 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 studying what happens when the basal ganglia g | 8/9/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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108 |
Shorts: A 4-Track Mind | 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 t | 7/26/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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109 |
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 totally work. See you in two weeks with a new s | 7/11/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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110 |
Shorts: 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 recorded live at our Curious Sounds concert ea | 6/27/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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111 |
Shorts: A Clockwork Miracle | 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. | 6/14/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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112 |
Talking to Machines | What can machines tell us about being human? | 6/1/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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113 |
Shorts: 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. | 5/17/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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114 |
Shorts: 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. | 5/3/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 115 | VideoRadiolab Video: Symmetry | 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 | 4/18/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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116 |
Desperately Seeking Symmetry | From hair parts to the origin of the universe, how symmetry shapes our existence. | 4/18/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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117 |
Shorts: 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. | 4/5/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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118 |
Shorts: 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. | 3/22/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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119 |
Help! | What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? | 3/8/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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120 |
Shorts: A Flock of Two | 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. | 2/22/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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121 |
Shorts: 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 festival in Chicago. | 2/8/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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122 |
Lost & Found | Stories about getting lost, and how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home. | 1/25/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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123 |
Shorts: 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. | 1/11/2011 | Free | View In iTunes |
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124 |
Shorts: 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. | 12/28/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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125 |
The Good Show | If natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another? | 12/14/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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126 |
Shorts: Gravitational Anarchy | A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall. | 11/30/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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127 |
Shorts: What Does Technology Want? | Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature? | 11/16/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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128 |
Cities | One tidy mathematical formula may hold the key to how cities work. We take to the streets to test the numbers, & ask what really makes cities tick. | 11/2/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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129 |
Shorts: Wild Talk | In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie. | 10/19/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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130 |
Shorts: The Walls of Jericho | 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. | 10/4/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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131 |
Falling | We plunge into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, and upend some myths about falling cats. | 9/20/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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132 |
Shorts: Voices in Your Head | 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? | 9/7/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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133 |
Time | The strange, subjective nature of time -- from a sped-up spin through childhood, to a really, really slowed-down Beethoven symphony. | 8/24/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 134 | VideoBonus Video: Words | 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. | 8/9/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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135 |
Words | It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour, we try to do just that. | 8/9/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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136 |
Shorts: Secrets of Success | Robert and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success. | 7/26/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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137 |
Shorts: The Luckiest Lobster | An unlikely escape story begins in a supermarket, and ends in a boat off the coast of Maine. | 7/12/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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138 |
Oops | Stories of unintended consequences -- from a psychologist who may have helped create a terrorist, to a toxic lake that spawned new life. | 6/28/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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139 |
Shorts: 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. | 6/15/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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140 |
Deception | Lies, liars, and lie catchers. And the strange power of lying to yourself. | 6/1/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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141 |
Famous Tumors | Say hello to the growth that killed Ulysses S. Grant, & get to know the woman whose cancer cells changed modern medicine. | 5/17/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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142 |
Shorts: Vanishing Words | 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. | 5/5/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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143 |
Shorts: The Loudest Miniature Fuzz | Music duo Buke and Gass talk to Jad about coaxing delightfully twangy sounds from their homemade instruments. | 4/20/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
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144 |
Limits | A journey to the edge of human limits -- from a bike race that makes the Tour de France look like child’s play, to a mind-stretching memory competition. | 4/5/2010 | Free | View In iTunes |
| 144 Items |
Customer Reviews
It's hard to estimate the value of this podcast
This podcast stands out as pretty much constantly astounding. As someone who writes about science for a living, the 'scientific' concepts here are rendered in an enviably fascinating and pretty much idiot-proof way. It's a testament to the skills of the hosts in their use of the audio format that they can cruise through really complex stuff and give the ordinary listener entertainment and learning in a single scoop. This is the best. Now if they would only get season one on itunes....
I live for Radio Lab.
I'm not kidding. I am obsessed with this show. What others have said - that it's the best show on radio, that this is what radio should be, that they come home hitting refresh repeatedly on iTunes to see if new episodes are out - is absolutely the truth. This show is at once educational, stimulating, and entertaining. The editing may be one of my favorite things about it, actually. It definitely keeps you on your toes, and it's most definitely not one of those podcasts you sit through for an hour and suddenly realize you haven't been paying attention to any of it.
PLEASE!
Please, please make more episodes! This, without exaggeration, is the best radio show ever made. I'd be willing to pay a handsome sum for it.

