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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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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 galaxies burn bright and others dim and sputter out. And in the midst of an unthinkable grief in her personal life, she discove...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

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 moment of uncertainty in physics. Inspired by an essay written by physicist and novelist Alan Lightman, called The Accidental ...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

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? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has changed, but this question feels alive as ever.  And so we’re re-airing M...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

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 very existence -- from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror. Along the way, we look for love...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

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 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...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

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 to do with an international chemical weapons treaty? More than you’d think. From poison and duck hunts to our feuding fathers, we st...

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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. Drills. Drama. Death. Even a coliseum of baby sharks duking it out inside mom’s womb. And a man on a small island in the Mediterran...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

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 discovery that completely changed the course of her life. Inside a customer’s trunk, she found photographs of white sharks flying so h...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

The Shark Inside You

This is episode three of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Today, we take a trip across the world, from the south coast of Australia to … Wisconsin. Here, scientists are scouring shark blood to find one of nature’s hidden keys, a molecular superhero that migh...

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The Cage

This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, sharks that battle giant octopuses. Hollywood has officially turned sharks into monsters of every shape and size. And yet, so...

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Making a Monster

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, ...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

It's Like ... 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 into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

Hi Radiolab listeners, we want to hear from you! Take this podcast survey and let us know how you feel about the show. It only takes about 20 minutes and your feedback will help us make our podcast better! There are no wrong answers, we want your honest takes. You can help out by taking the survey here (www.radiolab.org/survey).

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks

In the summer of 1975, Jaws scared an entire generation out of the water. The film burned an idea into our cultural memory: they are mindless, man-eating monsters. We set out to tell a different story about sharks. Five stories over five days. We tear down deep-seated myths ...

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Double-Blasted

We first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show we’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again today. It’s about a man who experienced maybe one of the most chilling traumas… twice. But then, it leads us to a story of generat...

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The Elixir of Life

Doctor and special correspondent, Avir Mitra takes Lulu on an epic journey live on stage at a little basement club called Caveat, here in New York. Starting with an ingredient in breastmilk that babies can’t digest, a global hunt that takes us from Bangladesh to the Mennonit...

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A Flock of Two

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 ...

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Audio • Greg Hlibok, Karen Peltz Strauss, Meredith Patterson, Stephanie Veverka, Brenda Kelly Fry

The Echo in the Machine

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 ...

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Audio • Eric Kandel, Cynthia Fu, Robert Sapolsky

How to Cure What Ails You

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 ...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

The First Known Earthly Voice

What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature magazine Orion. She called the issue “Queer Planet: A Celebration of Biodiversity,” and it was a wide-ranging celebration of q...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Terrestrials: The Snow Beast

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 po...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

The Age of Aquaticus

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 ...

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Ghosts in the Green Machine

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 depe...

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Audio • Martha Weiss, Josh Rosenthal, Isabel Rosenthal, Harrison Smith, Akito Kawahara, Sarry Nagai, Jo Nagai, Takeru Inagaki, Shusei, Masato Ono

Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow

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 i...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Killer Empathy

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 ...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Malthusian Swerve

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 muc...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Everybody's Got One

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 battl...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

Growth

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 th...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

More Perfect: Sex Appeal

In 2017 our sister show, More Perfect aired an episode all about RBG, In September of 2020, we lost Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the annals of history. She was 87. Given the atmosphere around reproductive rights, gender and law, we decided to re-air this More...

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Revenge of the Miasma

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 la...

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Audio • WNYC Studios

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

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 ever...