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Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Investigating a strange world.

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The Medical Matchmaking Machine

Radiolab ·

2025/08/22

As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his condition didn’t work. He had months to live, if that. If he was going to survive, he was going to have to find his own cure. Miraculously, he pulled it off in the nick of time. From that ordeal, he realized that our system of discovering and approving drugs is far from perfect, and that he might be able to

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Looking Into the Dark

Radiolab ·

2025/08/20

First, a biologist who finds himself staring at one of the darkest things on the planet. So dark it’s almost like he’s holding a black hole in his hands. On his quest to understand how something could possibly be that black, we enter worlds of towering microscopic forests where gold becomes black, the deep sea meets the moon, and places that are empty suddenly become full. Then, the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of

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Weighing Good Intentions

Radiolab ·

2025/08/15

In an episode first released in 2010, then-producer Lulu Miller drives to Michigan to track down the endangered Kirtland’s warbler. Efforts to protect the bird have lead to the killing of cowbirds (a species that commandeers warbler nests), and a prescribed burn aimed at creating a new habitat. Tragically, this burn led to the death of a 29-year-old wildlife technician who was dedicated to warbler restoration. Forest Service employee Rita Halbeisen, local Michiganders skeptical of the resources put

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The Menopause Mystery

Radiolab ·

2025/08/08

Until recently, scientists assumed humans were the only species in which females went through menopause and lived a substantial part of their lives after they were no longer able to reproduce. And they had no idea why that happens, and why evolution wouldn’t push females to keep reproducing right up to the end of their lives. But after a close look at some whale poop and a deep dive into chimp life, we find several new ways of thinking about menopause and the real purpose of this all-too-often

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Galaxy Quenching

Radiolab ·

2025/08/01

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 discovers something in the sky—a new kind of light that would guide her path forward.Special thanks to Megan Stielstra, Jad Abumrad, Michael Woodrum, Gina Vivona and Clair Reilly-Roe.EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by Lulu MillerProduced

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The Nothing Behind Everything

Radiolab ·

2025/07/25

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 Universe (https://zpr.io/4965dUdNqtpQ), taken from a book of the same name. Former Radiolab co-host Robert Krulwich pays a visit to Brian Greene to ask if the latest developments in theoretical physics spell a crisis for science

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Swimming With Shadows Part II: The Broadcast

Radiolab ·

2025/07/23

First, shark antibodies: They’re small. They’re flexible. And they can fit into nooks and crannies on tumors that human antibodies can’t. Today, we journey back 500 million years to the moment sharks got these special powers and head to the underground labs transforming these monsters into healers. Can these animals we fear so much actually save us?Then, 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

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More Perfect: The Hate Debate

Radiolab ·

2025/07/18

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 More Perfect’s The Hate Debate. Taped live at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, Elie Mystal, Ken White and Corynne McSherry duke it out over whether the first amendment needs an update in our digital world. Special thanks to

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Desperately Seeking Symmetry

Radiolab ·

2025/07/11

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 in ancient Greece, head to modern-day Princeton to peer inside our brains, and turn up an unlikely headline from the Oval Office circa 1979. EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - Back in the day, when we first aired this episode, the

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On [The Divided Dial]: Fishing In The Night

Radiolab ·

2025/07/04

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 heralded as a utopian, international, and instantaneous mass communication tool — a sort of internet-before-the-internet. But, like the internet, many people quickly saw the power of this new technology and found ways to harness it

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Sex, Ducks and the Founding Feud

Radiolab ·

2025/06/27

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 step into a very odd tug of war between local and federal law. When Carol Anne Bond found out her husband had impregnated her best friend, she took revenge. Carol's particular flavor of revenge led to a US Supreme Court case that

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Swimming with Shadows: The Broadcast

Radiolab ·

2025/06/25

Jaws scared entire generations of people out of the water. Countless Hollywood films have officially turned sharks into monsters of every shape and size. But drop below the surface, into the cold, quiet blue, and another creature appears. One that has survived mass extinctions, outlasted ancient predators and pre-dates Mount Everest, the existence of trees, even the rings of Saturn. Which begs the question, are the scariest monsters swimming out in the sea or deep within our minds?

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Baby Shark

Radiolab ·

2025/06/20

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 Mediterranean trying, against all odds, to give baby sharks a chance in a little plastic aquarium in his living room. Can a human raise a shark? And if so, what good is that for sharks? And for us? Doo doo doo doo doo doo. Special thanks

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Mystery Bay

Radiolab ·

2025/06/19

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 high above the water they looked like airplanes. She followed those photographs to False Bay, "The Great White Capital of the World." These sharks, in this place, are the apex of apex predators. Or they were. Until they

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The Shark Inside You

Radiolab ·

2025/06/18

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 might unlock our ability to cure cancer: shark antibodies. They’re small. They’re flexible. And they can fit into nooks and crannies on tumors that our antibodies can’t. We journey back 500 million years to the moment sharks got these

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The Cage

Radiolab ·

2025/06/17

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, somehow, there will always be more. But drop below the surface, into the cold, quiet blue, and another creature appears. One that has survived mass extinctions, outlasted ancient predators and pre-dates Mount Everest, the existence

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Making a Monster

Radiolab ·

2025/06/16

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, he was pulled back into the shadowy world he feared most. Again and again and again. That shark attack left behind a question that still lingers for Rodney, and for all of us: When you can’t see the thing that scares you, what

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Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks

Radiolab ·

2025/06/13

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 about sharks, plunge into the water with them, and find sharks that explode our sense of what they are – flying sharks, glowing sharks, baby sharks, sharks under attack, and sharks that may save millions of human lives.Look out

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Double-Blasted

Radiolab ·

2025/06/13

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 generational repair. On the morning of August 6th, 1945, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a work trip. He was walking to the office when the first atomic bomb was dropped about a mile away. He survived, and eventually managed to

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The Elixir of Life

Radiolab ·

2025/06/06

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 Mennonite communities here in the US, we discover an ancient symbiotic relationship that might be on the verge of disappearing. So sip a vicarious cocktail, settle in, and explore the surprising ways our bodies forge deep, invisible

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