Podcasts · Science · Society & Culture

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

300 episodes

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.

Episodes page 1 of 6

  1. Octomom

    · 34 min · Episode 717

    First aired back in 2020, this episode follows the story of an octopus living one mile under the ocean as she performs a heroic act of heart and determination. In 2007, Bruce Robison’s robot submarine stumbled across…

  2. The Smell of Hell

    · 43 min · Episode 716

    Throughout human history, there’s been one element we’ve always associated with death. Just the smell of it is an alarm bell that says, “something here is dangerous.” But what if our noses have been wrong all along?…

  3. Math Vs Machine

    · 31 min · Episode 715 · Explicit

    In less than four years, mathematician Steve Strogatz watched AI go from flailing at basic arithmetic to solving problems that baffle the world’s best mathematicians. In September of 2026, Open AI announced it had…

  4. A 4-Track Mind

    · 21 min · Episode 714

    In this short episode, first aired in 2011, 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…

  5. Grass Apes

    · 22 min · Episode 713

    When you think about grass, what do you think of? Pool parties? Suburbs? Allergies? What about: human history? It turns out, unassuming grass, which exists on every continent, has an epic story to tell. One of…

  6. The Sweetest Thing

    · 31 min · Episode 712

    “What is the sweetest thing in the world?” After co-host Latif Nasser’s sons ask him this deceptively simple question, he goes on a quest to find it. Is it a West African Katemfe berry? Or an industrial sugar…

  7. 23 Weeks 6 Days

    · 1 h 03 min · Episode 711

    When Kelley Benham and her husband Tom French finally got pregnant, after many attempts and a good deal of technological help, everything was perfect. Until it wasn't. Their story raises questions that, until recently,…

  8. 60 Words

    · 58 min · Episode 710

    We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and it had us thinking about an episode we produced in 2014. It’s the story of one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 2001, that has led to…

  9. Dolly Parton's America: Sad Ass Songs

    · 1 h 05 min · Episode 709

    The world lost a legend recently, and we wanted in some small way to pay tribute to the great Dolly Parton. So we’re playing you an episode from a series we had a small part in back in 2017, Dolly Parton’s America. The…

  10. Patient Zero

    · 52 min · Episode 708

    The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zero—the case at the…

  11. Nigel and the Real Gannet

    · 26 min · Episode 707

    In 2016, Chris Bell, a ranger with New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, was the sole human inhabitant of a small island off the west coast of the country, called Mana Island. He was there to take care of the…

  12. Red Herring

    · 36 min · Episode 706

    It was the early '80s, the height of the Cold War, when something strange began happening off the coast of Sweden. The navy reported a mysterious sound deep below the surface of the ocean. Again, and again, and again…

  13. The Shoe Thrower

    · 1 h 17 min · Episode 705

    When no one seems to be listening, how far do you go to be heard? In December 2008, George W. Bush made a surprise visit to Baghdad for a press conference. And at the very end of his remarks, a shoe came flying past…

  14. Return of Alpha Gal

    · 56 min · Episode 704

    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…

  15. Neither Confirm Nor Deny

    · 29 min · Episode 703

    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…

  16. The Holy Shiver

    · 38 min · Episode 702

    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…

  17. Atomic Artifacts

    · 41 min · Episode 701

    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:…

  18. The Gondolier

    · 1 h 13 min · Episode 700

    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…

  19. This is Your Brain on Hormones

    · 40 min · Episode 699 · Explicit

    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…

  20. Bonus: Wild Animal Dads from Terrestrials

    · 36 min · Episode 698

    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.…

  21. On the Media: American Emergency

    · 56 min · Episode 697

    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…

  22. Oliver Sipple

    · 1 h 03 min · Episode 696

    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…

  23. This American Roach

    · 37 min · Episode 695

    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…

  24. Worth

    · 1 h 12 min · Episode 694

    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…

  25. Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

    · 46 min · Episode 693

    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…

  26. The Bad Show

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 692

    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…

  27. What is a Pig Worth?

    · 43 min · Episode 691

    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…

  28. Forests on Forests

    · 20 min · Episode 690

    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…

  29. The Resistance of a Cow

    · 51 min · Episode 689

    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…

  30. The Builders

    · 30 min · Episode 688

    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…

  31. Life in a Barrel

    · 55 min · Episode 687

    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…

  32. Antibiotic Apocalypse

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 686

    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…

  33. Staph Retreat

    · 32 min · Episode 685

    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…

  34. Return of the Screwworms

    · 42 min · Episode 684

    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…

  35. Snail Sex Tape

    · 30 min · Episode 683

    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…

  36. Black Box

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 682

    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…

  37. Gray's Donation

    · 27 min · Episode 681

    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.…

  38. Time is Honey

    · 39 min · Episode 680

    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…

  39. Kleptotherms

    · 45 min · Episode 679

    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…

  40. Song of the Cerebellum

    · 43 min · Episode 678

    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…

  41. You and Me and Mr. Self-Esteem

    · 1 h 18 min · Episode 677

    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…

  42. The Punchline

    · 51 min · Episode 676

    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…

  43. Brain Balls

    · 41 min · Episode 675

    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…

  44. Moon Trees

    · 35 min · Episode 674 · Explicit

    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,…

  45. Fertility Cliff

    · 26 min · Episode 673

    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…

  46. The Good Show

    · 1 h 03 min · Episode 672

    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…

  47. The Alien in the Room

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 671 · Explicit

    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…

  48. Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company

    · 40 min · Episode 670

    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…

  49. Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

    · 38 min · Episode 669

    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…

  50. Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal

    · 54 min · Episode 669

    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…

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