Radiolab

Several years ago, in 2016, we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she could remember, Amy loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, her body wouldn’t tolerate it.  No steaks. No brisket. No weenies. It made no sense: why couldn’t she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades? 

It turned out Amy was not alone. And the answer to her mysterious allergy involved maps, a dancing lone star tick, and a very particular sugar called Alpha Gal. 

In this...

In an episode we first ran back in 2014, we explore 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.  

Whether it comes from government spokespeople or celebrity publicists, the phrase “can neither confirm nor deny” is the perfect non-denial denial. It’s such a perfect deflection that it seems like it’s been around forever, but reporter Julia Barton takes us back to the 1970s a...

Lauren Brown gets goosebumps. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. When her partner, writer Carmen Maria Machado, noticed it...she couldn't stop thinking about it. Why does she get them in so many different situations? What’s happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it. We face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.  

Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Rupik

EPIS...

Back in the 1950s, facing the threat of nuclear annihilation, federal officials sat down and pondered what American life would actually look like after an atomic attack. They faced a slew of practical questions like: Who would count the dead and where would they build the refugee camps? But they faced a more spiritual question as well. If Washington DC were hit, every object in the the National Archives would be eviscerated in a moment. Terrified by this reality, they set out to save some of America’s most precious stuff. Today, we look back at the items our Co...

Back in 2017, reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad came to us with a story that dug into the difficult and often dark places discrimination creates. We start in Venice, Italy, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we learn about the nearly 1000-year old tradition of the Venetian Gondolier, and how the global media created a 20-year battle between that tradition and a supposed feminist icon. 

We circled back to Alex in 2026, to find out where the canal of life ended up leading after our initial reporting, and w...

After reading something that said her menstrual cycle changes her brain each month, Senior Correspondent Molly Webster goes on a reporting mission to see if that’s true, and, if so, how.

This journey into sex hormones and the brain involves females and males, and exacting self-experimentation. It gets into PTSD, and ends with a new twist on self-care (hint: it’s biological). And, it starts to reveal a sneaky truth: that each one of us is at the mercy of a crashing sea of chemicals inside of us – those things we call hormones.

Special thanks...

In honor of Father's Day, here is a family friendly bonus episode from our kids' podcast Terrestrials. 

What does it really mean to be a dad? In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there’s another creature who tells a sweeter story. 

Two HUMAN dads bring us on this DADventure: Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, who has spent decades studying owl monkey dads in the forests of A...

A little while back, our friends over at On the Media released a gripping and immersive reporting series about FEMA, the agency that is supposed to be there for all of us in the wake of disaster. In American Emergency (https://zpr.io/MtrUmJU3yEMW), OTM investigates how the agency tasked with saving America became distrusted, despised… and defunded.

Today we talk to On the Media co-host Micah Loewinger about how this project came out, what reporting went into making it happen, and play a couple of fun and truly surprising bits of the story that the OT...

One morning, Oliver Sipple went out for a walk. A couple hours later, to his own surprise, he saved the life of the President of the United States. In a story we reported back in 2017, we explain how in the days that followed, Sipple’s split-second act of heroism turned into a rationale for making his personal life into political opportunity. What happens next makes us wonder what a moment, or a movement, or a whole society can demand of one person. And how much is too much? 

Through newly unearthed archival tape, we hear Sipple himself gra...

A couple summers ago, Radiolab reporter Alex Neason got out of the shower and almost stepped on her worst nightmare: an American Cockroach. It was flipped onto its back, struggling, and for a split second, Alex swears she felt the spiny tickle of its legs on the underside of her bare foot. And, like every other time she has come into contact with a roach, this sent her into a debilitating spiral of fear, anger, and disgust. 

This week, Alex tries to understand what might be behind her fear, in the hopes she can overcome it. And i...

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. 

In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact sha...

For most of human history, people went about their daily lives with a worm or two (or fifty) in their guts. Only in the past century, with pharmaceuticals and sanitation practices, have we made significant strides towards deworming the whole of humanity. And that’s typically been thought of as a good thing, because having too many worms in your body can–quite literally–suck the life out of you.

But is it possible to have… too few worms? Science wonders if deworming ourselves has actually led to an increase in certain chronic diseases. On this episode, we dive...

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us.  

Cruelty, violence, badness... in this episode we begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgram's fa...

In 2017, Wayne Hsiung and a crew of animal rights activists from Direct Action Everywhere broke into a Utah pig farm run by Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork distributors in the world. They were there to capture video of what they say were thousands of mistreated and abused animals kept in tiny metal cages barely bigger than their bodies. As they were leaving, they took two sick piglets out with them.

Prosecutors in Utah charged Wayne with burglary and theft. What came next was the court battle that he wanted all along. During his trial, Wayne...

For much of history, tree canopies were pretty much completely ignored by science. It was as if researchers said collectively, "It's just going to be empty up there, and we've got our hands full studying the trees down here! So why bother?"

But then around the mid-1980s, a few ecologists around the world got curious and started making their way up into the treetops using any means necessary (ropes, cranes, hot air dirigibles) to document all they could find. It didn't take long for them to realize not only was the forest canopy not empty, it...

There’s something rotten in the cows of Denmark. And Minnesota. And Wisconsin. And Idaho. What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking water and start drinking … urine? A Danish farmer calls a special investigator, who takes one look at his farm and nopes the heck out of there, refusing to return, citing “bad energy” coming from something nearby … a big building covered in Viking runes. 

It’s not magic. It’s an invisible force that’s far more common. And yet deeply mysterious.

This episode plunges producers Matt Kielty and Simon...

In an episode first aired back in 2025 on our sister show, Terrestrials, we take you on a musical journey all about beavers. Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet than the beaver. With its bright orange buck teeth, the creature is an expert engineer that brings life wherever it waddles and even fights fires. Our story begins in the Bronx river, once known as the  “open sewer” of New York City. After some humans decide to clean it up, we meet one of the river’s residents - José the beaver. We learn about the US governme...

This week, in an episode we first aired in 2022, we flip the Disney story of life on its head thanks to a barrel of seawater, a 1970s era computer, and underwater geysers. It’s the chaos of life.

Latif, Lulu, and our Senior Producer Matt Kielty were all sitting on their own little stories until they got thrown into the studio, and had their cherished beliefs about the shape of life put on a collision course. From an accidental study of sea creatures, to the ambitions of Stephen J Gould, to an undercooked theory that captured the wo...

Doctor and special correspondent Avir Mitra takes Executive Editor Soren Wheeler, plus a live studio audience, on a journey from the operating room to inside the body to the farm to the sewers and back again—searching for answers to an alarming threat to humanity’s existence as we know it: antibiotic resistance in bacteria. 

This live show, performed in New York City and also in Little Rock, Arkansas, is part of a series we’re doing with Avir that we are calling “Viscera.” Each event is a conversation that takes the audience on a journey into a quirk or...

A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern day microbe.

In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives. But in this episode, originally released in 2015, we follow an odd couple, of a sort, to a storied land of elves and dragons. There, they uncover a 1,000-year-old secret that makes us reconsider our most basic assumptions about human progress and wonder: what if the only way forward is backward?

Special thanks to Steve...

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 warm-blooded creatures in North America: the screwworm. That is, until a young scientist named Edward F. Knipling discovered a crucial screwworm weakness and hatched a sweeping project to wipe them out. Knipling’s seemingly zany plan to spray screwworms out of planes all over the continent— with US taxpayer money— succeeded, becoming one of humanity’s biggest environmental interventions ever. 

Today, screwworms have been gone so long that none of u...

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, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very surprising habit—erm kink—of making tiny arrows (actually!) and stabbing each other with them. Known as a “love dart,” these limestone daggers aren’t just a strange trick of nature—they have a deep evolutionary purpose. 

Special thanks to Menno Schilthuizen and Aaron Chase.

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Hosted by - Molly Webster
Repor...

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 out, but can’t see what happens in-between.

From the darkest parts of metamorphosis to a sixty-year-old secret among magicians, and the nature of consciousness itself, we shine some light on three questions. But for each, we contend with an answerless space, leaving just enough room for the mystery and magic, always wondering what’s inside the Black Box.

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by Tim Howard and Molly Webst...

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 reverberated through a world that they never bothered to think about. Years later, after a couple of awkward phone calls, they go on a quest and manage to meet the people and places for whom Thomas’ short life was an altogether different kind of gift. We originally made this story back in 2015, but we wanted to play it again because we love that it brings a view of science that...

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 the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the architecture of the web, he was no closer to an answer. In desperation, Sunil sent out a raft of cold emails to engineering professors. He hoped someone, anyone, could help him figure this out. Eventually, he learned that the internet could only be fixed if he paid attention to the humble honeybee. 

This is the story of the Honeybee Al...

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 this episode in 2021: Five stories that run the gamut from snakes to stars. We start out underwater, with a species of snake that has evolved a devious trick for keeping warm. Then we hear the tale of a young man whose seemingly simple method of warming up might be the very thing making him cold. And Senior Correspondent Molly Webster blows the lid off the idea that 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is a sound...

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 down in the back of her brain called the cerebellum. A couple weeks later, her doctors took a bit of it out, assuring her it was just helping her with motor coordination — she might be a bit clumsy for a while, but she’d still be herself. But afterwards, she didn't feel like herself. So she dove into the dusty basement of the brain (and brain science) to figure out why. What Rachel found was...

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 the history of the world, and can largely be traced back to one man: a rumpled, convertible-driving California state representative named John Vasconcellos who helped spark a movement that took over schools, board rooms, and social-service offices across America in the 1990s. This week, we look at the rise and fall of the self-esteem movement and ask: is it possible to raise your self-esteem? And is trying to do so even a...

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 brawler. A goon. But when an impish pundit named Puck Daddy called on fans to vote for Scott to play alongside the world’s greatest players in the NHL All-Star Game, Scott found himself facing off against fans, commentators, and the powers that be.  Was this the realization of Scott’s childhood dreams? Or a nightmarish prank gone too far? Today on Radiolab, a goof on a goon turns into a parable of the ag...

When neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster was a brand new postdoc, she accidentally used an expired protein gel in a lab experiment and noticed something weird. The stem cells she was trying to grow in a dish were self-assembling. The result? Madeline was the first person ever to grow what she called a “cerebral organoid,” a tiny, 3D version of a human brain the size of a peppercorn.

In about a decade, these mini human brain balls were everywhere. They were revealing bombshell secrets about how our brains develop in the womb, helping treat advanced cancer patients, being implanted into...

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 take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the country and then… everyone forgot about them. Until one day, a third grader from Indiana stumbled on a tree with a strange plaque: "Moon Tree." This discovery set off a cascading search for all the trees that visited the moon across the United States. Science writer, and our ve...

As she -- and her friends — approached the age of 35, senior correspondent Molly Webster kept hearing a phrase over and over: “fertility cliff.” It was a short-hand term to describe what she was told would happen to her fertility after she turned 35 — that is, it would drop off. Suddenly, sharply, dramatically. And this was well before she was supposed to hit menopause. Intrigued, Molly decided to look into it — what was the truth behind this so-called cliff, and when, if so, would she topple? 

This story first premiered in “Thirty Something,” a 2018 Radiolab live show that was part of, Gonads...

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 carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour that we first broadcast back in 2010, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

Sign...

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 actually is it?

Today we ask this simple question and explore why it’s so damn hard to answer.

Special thanks to Stephanie Yin and the New York Institute of Go for teaching us the game. Mark, Daria and Levon Hoover Brauner for helping bring NETtalk to life. 

And a huge thank you to Grant Sanderson for his unending patience explaining the math of neural nets to us. To lea...

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’s using AI to do more than just mimic himself — he’s starting a company staffed entirely by AI agents, and making a podcast about the experience. The show is a smart, funny, and truly bizarre look at what AI can do—and what it can’t. 

This week we bring you the first episode of Shell Game Season Two, Minimum Viable Company. You can sign up to get the...

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 genre, then a movement, then tried to use his hypnotic beats to topple a military dictatorship. Jad tells us about the series and why he made it, and we play the episode that, for us at least, gets to the heart of the matter: How exactly does his music work? What actually happens to the people who hear it and how does it move them to action?

You can find...

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 Ma and host Ana González travel around the United States to meet people, make music and better understand how culture binds us to nature. The series features a few familiar voices, including Ana González (host) and Alan Goffinski (producer), from our kids podcast, Terrestrials (https://link.podtrac.com/vysacqn1). 

About the episode: 
West Virginia is defined by its beauty and its coal, two things that can work a...

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 and writing about the chaos and violence they were living through, as Israel’s military bombardment devastated their lives. But Qasem was trying to describe his reality through the lens of the most notoriously confusing and inscrutable field of science ever, quantum mechanics. We talked to him, from a cafe near the Al-Mawasi section of Gaza, to find out why. And over the course of several conversations, he told us how this reality-breaking corner of...

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 with the United States in the world of computing. However, China’s technological renaissance almost didn’t happen. And for one very basic reason: the Chinese language, with its 70,000 plus characters, couldn’t fit on a keyboard.

Today, we tell the story of Professor Wang Yongmin, a hard-headed computer programmer who solved this puzzle and laid the foundation for the China we know today.

Special thanks to Martin Howard...

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 of brilliant light. But down there, the light doesn’t behave like light -- it sparkles and glows, but also drips, squirts, and dribbles. Today, find out how creatures make the light and how they use it, from hunting and hiding to maybe even … talking. And hear about a series of mysterious moments where Edie goes from studying the creatures to becoming one of them. 

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Hosted by - M...