Radiolab for Kids

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 America, the camel trotted around the globe and w...

Farts. Trouser trumpets. Sulfur squeaks. Or toots, as Lulu insists on calling them. Smelly bubbles of air we don’t like to talk about. But Songbud Alan and Producerbud Ana are not ones to shy away from the stinky sidelines of science. 

First, they take us to a concert hall to meet a FARTchestra and hear how behind some of the world’s greatest works of art lies the power of farts. Next Dr. Juan Pablo Zhenlio takes us through the ecosystem of human digestion, meeting trillions of microscopic organisms to learn why we fart. Then we jump...

Rats have a bad reputation. They’ve been called evil, terrifying and wicked. The lowliest and most abominable of creatures. Songbud Alan felt the same way until he heard of one rat from Tanzania named Magawa. We meet Pendo, Magawa’s human friend and trainer, who wanted to train Magawa for a battlefield of sorts. A battle to save human lives. 

You see, some countries have explosive landmines placed there during war. When the war is over, the landmines remain, meaning people continue to live in danger, afraid they might step on one. Pendo hoped to train Magaw...

Terrestrials returns Thursday, April 17th with a brand-new season!

This spring, we’re diving into the wonderfully weird. Get ready to meet some of the fiercest, strangest creatures on Earth—from Hawaiian jungle goblins to New York City’s elusive sewer beasts to nine-foot-tall misunderstood snow monsters. When we take a closer look at the creatures we usually fear, we often discover a little magic, wonder, even friendship!

Join host Lulu Miller and Songbud Alan Goffinski for our wildest season yet—a nature walk packed with jaw-dropping stories, unforgettable guests, and original music. Listen with your fam...

Artist Ashley (Ash) Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people.  Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging, and collecting — eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes.

 In time, Ash learned that lichen is actually a composite organism, a mixture of two species — algae and fungi — working together to live. This idea originally challenged evolutionary theory so much that scientists didn’t believe it. But lichen had much more to teac...

Have you ever seen an island on a lake? On an island? On a lake? On another island? Josh Calder has. Working in a dusty room of a library, he first saw one on a map, and has been fascinated with these “recursive islands” ever since. Song bud Alan Goffinski takes us on a wild journey into these secret bullseyes hiding all over planet Earth. We learn from ecologist Elba Montes why recursive islands breed species found nowhere else on Earth, and thus are hotbeds of evolution.

Check out Josh Calder’s website for more island information and tr...

BLAST OFF! NASA just sent a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and on the side of that spacecraft, they included a poem. Not just any poem — a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. A poem that’s supposed to represent all of humanity to the universe. No biggie. 

Host Lulu Miller opens up the floor to kids from all over the country to ask Limón and NASA scientist Cynthia Phillips questions about the mission, outer space, poetry and what a space slushie might taste like. Listen to find out the answers to all...

The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks for so long. But there was a rumor circulating among Greenland villagers that this deepsea dweller could survive for centuries. Scientist John Steffensen went on a hunt to see if this was true and discovered that the Greenland shark can live for more than 500 years, making it the longest living vertebrate on the planet. Biologist Steve Austad explains how the shark avoids death for so...

The honeybee. The ever-important pollinator for our plants is disappearing. Some call it the silence of the bees, others call it colony collapse disorder. Dr. Sammy Ramsey, our official bug correspondent, wondered, could it be due to parasites? And if so, how do we catch all of them? This question takes Dr. Sammy to the heart of a jungle in Bangladesh to look for overlooked honeybees impervious to parasites. The only problem? He can't find them. With help from a local guide named Babulall, he learns how the most overlooked bees could possibly save all the honey bees in...

Middle schooler, Aanya, has an up-close encounter with a squirrel in the school yard, which leads her to an obsession with one of North America's most common critters. She tells host Lulu Miller all about the overlooked superpowers of squirrels, including one squirrel who lives way up in the Arctic, where the weather gets so cold the squirrels who live there drop their body temperatures down below freezing and somehow, miraculously, survive.

Host Lulu travels to Alaska to meet one of these squirrels as it sleeps, and Lulu talks with biologists Dr. Kelly Drew and Dr. Brian...