PODCAST

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

A show where we uncover the strangeness right here on Earth

kids & family

All Episodes

The Mastermind: An Octopus Heist

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/04/02

A color-changing creature many people assumed to be brainless outsmarts his human captors. SPOILER: The creature is an octopus! Author Sy Montgomery tells the story of one octopus named Inky who makes us question who we consider intelligent (and kissable) in the animal kingdom. Learn about the storytellers, listen to music, and dig deeper into the stories you hear on Terrestrials with activities you can do at home or in the classroom on our website, Terrestrialspodcast.org. Find MORE original

en-us

Vanished Moon!

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/04/01

The moon has disappeared. Ok, just kidding. Happy April Fool’s Day. But what if the moon actually vanished?After songbud Alan saw a movie about stealing the moon, he wondered what would actually happen if the moon disappeared. He found the perfect person to talk to – Mika McKinnon who has a masters in disasters. We learn about eerie silences, ocean stench, hurricanes, and ecosystems in total flux. Also a whole new season of Terrestrials is coming out soon! New stories, new songs and new wild beasts

en-us

Gettin' Crabby

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/03/20

If someone calls you crabby, it’s not a compliment – they’re calling you grumpy, grouchy or snappy. But let’s reconsider this stain on the humble crab’s reputation. Look closely at a crab’s gnarled shell and you’ll see an incredible creature. Today, we bring you two very different crab stories. The first comes from former Radiolab producer Rachael Cusick about a woman who replicated the ocean to breed hermit crabs. Next, how crabs may hold a secret to surviving the chaos of the universe.Radiolab

en-us

Luck of the Lobster

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/03/06

St. Patricks day is coming up. People worldwide will wear leprechaun hats and celebrate the luck of the Irish. But what about the luck of lobsters? Today we have a story about the biggest, luckiest lobster we have ever heard of — Nick. As lobsters age, they keep growing bigger and bigger. They don’t wear out or get sick like most other creatures do. The most common way they die is through accidents.One day a woman named Bonnie went to her nearby grocery store and saw behemoth Nick cramped in a

en-us

The Big Cat and the Little Boy

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/02/20

When wildlife conservationist Alan Rabinowitz was a boy, he had a stutter. Strangely, his stutter vanished when he spoke to animals. One day, when his father took him to the Bronx Zoo, Alan saw a majestic jaguar and made a promise to it. He spent the rest of his life fulfilling that promise.Read Alan Rabinowitz’s picture book: “A Boy and a Jaguar.” Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound

en-us

It's Raining Cats and Cats

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/02/06

Next week is Valentine’s Day, but instead of talking about falling in love, we’re going to talk about falling cats and barrels. First, writer David Quammen tells us about a strange observation: cats are falling out of buildings in New York City. When a cat falls from less than five stories or more than nine stories, it usually survives. But when it falls from between five and nine stories, it suffers serious injury. Why? Physics has the answer. Then we meet Annie Taylor, the first person who went

en-us

Build-A-Dragon

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/01/23

On January 29, in places like China, Malaysia, Korea and Chinatowns across the globe, dragons will rise in the form of massive puppets. Today we bring you a special Terrestrials episode on dragons to understand what they have to do with the New Year, what the dragon myth means, and explore the tiny chance that dragons could have ever been real. First, we meet Mr. Lu Dajie, one of China's most renowned dragon dancers, who tells us about the significance of dragons in China. Then producer bud Ana and

en-us

Stars from the Big Fib

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/01/16

Today we bring you an episode from our friends over at The Big Fib. In the era of fake news, kids need to learn to be able to tell what’s true from what’s false. And what better way to do that than a game show that puts kids in the driver’s seat, adults in the hot seat, and a sound-effects robot strapped to the roof?Each week, a kid interviews one fake and one real expert on a particular topic and they have to figure out who’s the true expert and who’s a liar. In this episode, they interview two

en-us

Hole-y Cow

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/01/09

For centuries, the stomach was a black box to humans. We didn’t understand the mystery of what happened to food after it went inside us. That is, until the early 1800s, when Dr. William Beaumont found a boy, Alexis St. Martin, with a hole in his stomach. Writer Mary Roach brings us that story. She first sticks her hand inside the stomach of a live cow and then tells us how Beaumont conducted experiments on St. Martin to understand how the stomach breaks down food. This strange relationship between

en-us

The Present: A Gift from our Furry Friends

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2025/01/01

To celebrate New Year’s Day, there are all kinds of traditions. Some people eat black eyed peas for good luck, some list out resolutions. But here at Terrestrials, we are taking a cue from the wisdom of pets, who are so, so, so good at sleeping. After a short preamble from Lulu, we’ll turn the microphone over to listeners’ furry friends snoring and snoozing in various positions, places, and locations. The piece will be largely wordless, with some narration from listeners describing their pets, and

en-us

Volcanoes on the Moon

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/12/26

The year’s best celestial event was, without a doubt, April’s solar eclipse. The moon went in front of the sun to cast a 115 mile wide shadow on Earth. A swathe of North America was showered in sudden darkness. In honor of the eclipse, the Radiolab team made a show about the star of the show: the moon. We think we know the moon — we know that humanity visited it, that it’s a shiny white rotating rock in the sky. But what else really? In today’s episode, the team tells us about the moon’s formation,

en-us

Milky Seas From Atlas Obscura

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/12/19

Today we bring you an episode from our friends over at Atlas Obscura. It's about something that for centuries people thought was a tall tale, something sailors would occasionally spot out in the waves like mermaids or the Loch Ness monster, but most people on the land didn't think was real. Until one day, when a satellite in the sky was able to solve the case. Host Dylan Thuras tells us the story of a satellite scientist and a ship captain in search of gigantic swaths of bioluminescence that

en-us

The Littlest Black Hole

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/12/12

In less than 10 days, the world will witness the winter solstice, or the shortest day of the year. Half of the Earth will be tilted the farthest away from the sun, and we will plunge into the dark. So today we thought we’d play another story about the dark. One of the darkest places in the universe actually: a black hole. But not just any black hole, a really tiny black hole, the size of an atom.We start the story on a calm morning in Siberia. All of a sudden, a large ball of fire appears in the

en-us

Zoozve

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/12/05

Radiolab co-host Latif Nasser was putting his child to sleep one day when he noticed a poster of the solar system on the wall. It showed that Venus had a moon called Zoozve. When he looked it up, the internet told him that Venus did not have a moon. And searching “Zoozve” gave him a bunch of Czech results about zoos. This moment sets Latif off on a curiosity odyssey. What is the mystery behind this moon? Turns out, it’s both a moon and not a moon. And we get to name one. And now that you know all

en-us

A Feast for Baboons

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/11/28

We start this story off with a question. Are human beings innately violent? Then we head to East Africa with Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who spent his summers studying wild baboons there. Baboons are a textbook example of a hierarchical, male-dominated, and aggressive society. But one day, Sapolsky noticed that a troop of baboons became unexpectedly gentle. They deviated from the usual aggressiveness so characteristic of them and groomed each other. The key question was how do these

en-us

Whale of a Rescue

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/11/14

We start off in a cathedral full of animals – hermit crabs, parrots, hamsters, dogs, cats and bunnies – being blessed. We then wonder, do the animals feel grace? What do we really know about what goes on inside an animal’s mind? Do they also experience gratitude, despair or anger? How much emotionality do humans and animals share? And can we measure it? We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks to its rescuers. And then we speak to behavioral scientist Clive Wynne,

en-us

The Fuzzy Ruckus: The Power of Lichen

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/10/31

Artist Ashley 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, Ashley learned that lichen is actually a composite organism, a mixture of two species — algae and fungi — working together to live. This idea

en-us

The Bullseye: Treasure Hunt to Recursive Islands

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/10/24

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. Songbud 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

en-us

An Ocean in Space

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/10/17

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

en-us

The Sea Troll: An Everlasting Shark?

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials ·

2024/10/10

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

en-us

48 results

Radiolab for Kids Presents: Terrestrials

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Tale Teller Kids™

Sarnia de la Mare

米克馬故事坊

咪萊

Imagination Station

Imagination Station

Die Pferde sind nicht das Problem - und du bist nicht zu blöd. Der Aha-Podcast für Pferdemenschen

Silke Jahn & Maren Diehl

Hanna fragt Papa - Der Podcast für neugierige Kinder und Eltern

Hanna und Thomas Schamberger