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Outside/In

Outside/In: Where curiosity and the natural world collide. Look around, and you’ll find everything is connected to the natural world. At Outside/In, we explore that idea with boundless curiosity. We report from disaster zones, pickleball courts, and dog sled kennels, and talk about policy, pop culture, science, and everything in between. From the backcountry to your backyard, we tell stories that expand the boundaries of environmental journalism. Outside/In is a production of NHPR. Learn more at

science natural sciences

All Episodes

00:31:20

No Regrets Coyote

Outside/In ·

2024/12/19

Coyotes are a sort of goldilocks animal. They can be active during the day, and at night. They can hunt in groups, or survive solo. They’re wolfish enough to survive in the wild, dog-like enough to blossom in the big city. That adaptability has arguably made coyotes one of the most successful mammalian predators on the planet. It’s also given them a reputation as opportunistic villains that prey on neighborhood garbage, livestock, and (occasionally) household pets. So what makes these animals so

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00:21:35

What Remains: More MOVE remains found

Outside/In ·

2024/12/12

Just a few weeks after we released the What Remains series, news broke that the Penn Museum discovered additional remains of 1985 MOVE bombing victims in the museum.How did this happen? And what's next for the thousands of other human remains still in their possession?Producer Felix Poon knew just the person to talk to for answers.Featuring Rachel Watkins. MORE ABOUT “WHAT REMAINS”Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists

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00:51:27

Making the most of ‘stick season’

Outside/In ·

2024/12/05

Hear ye, hear ye! Winter is fast approaching, and it is time for our fifth annual ‘surthrival’ special, in which the Outside/In team reframes the endurance sport that is winter. We’ve got suggestions for thriving during the cold-season, which we hope will help you positively look forward to dirty snow banks and single-digit temperatures.This year, though, there’s a twist. A listener asked us for advice on what to do before the snow starts to fall, when it’s gray and bleak. This is that dingy

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00:30:38

Shhhh! It’s the sound and silence episode

Outside/In ·

2024/11/28

Humans are noisy. The National Park Service estimates that all of our whirring, grinding, and revving machines are doubling or even tripling global noise pollution every 30 years. A lot of that noise is negatively affecting wildlife and human health. Maybe that’s why we’re so consumed with managing our sonic environments, with noise-cancelling headphones and white noise machines — and sometimes, we get into spats with our neighbors, as one of our guests did…So for this episode, producer Jeongyoon

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00:39:16

The Ballad and the Flood

Outside/In ·

2024/11/21

In Appalachia, Hurricane Helene was a thousand-year-flood. It flattened towns and forests, washed roads away, and killed hundreds.But this story is not about the flood. It’s about what happened after.A month after Hurricane Helene, our producer Justine Paradis visited Marshall, a tiny town in the Black Mountains of western North Carolina, a region renowned for its biodiversity, music, and art.She went to see what it really looks like on the ground in the wake of a disaster, and how people create

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00:24:11

What's living under your porch

Outside/In ·

2024/11/14

A few months ago, producer Marina Henke saw two skunks sprint under her porch. Since then, she can’t stop wondering what’s really going on beneath her feet.And as it turns out, she’s not the only one. Every day across the country, homeowners are waging wars with the animals who stake out our porches, decks and crawl spaces. Have we as humans inadvertently designed luxury apartments for “unwelcome” wildlife? And is that necessarily a bad thing? In a new edition of our (long-retired!) 10x10 series

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00:30:56

The Night Owls

Outside/In ·

2024/11/07

For over ten years, biologist Mark Higley has been stalking the forests of the Hoopa Valley Reservation with a shotgun. His mission? To save the endangered northern spotted owl. The threat? The more aggressive barred owl, which has spread from eastern forests into the Pacific Northwest.The federal government plans to scale up these efforts and kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls across multiple states. But can the plan really save the northern spotted owl? And is the barred owl really

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00:27:48

Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard

Outside/In ·

2024/10/31

For the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the issue of human remains collections for our miniseries, “What Remains.” Today, we want to share another excellent series that has covered some similar, but also, very different ground.Introducing “Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard,” the latest season of Last Seen from WBUR. In this first episode, the police find buckets of body parts in a basement in Pennsylvania. Throughout the series, WBUR reporter Ally Jarmanning tells us what happened at

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00:46:21

What Remains, Part 2: In Memoriam

Outside/In ·

2024/10/24

A scholar and an activist make an uncompromising ultimatum. A forgotten burial ground is discovered under the streets of New York City. In Philadelphia, two groups fight over the definition of “descendant community.” Featuring Michael Blakey, Lyra Monteiro, Chris Woods, aAliy Muhammad, Wendell Mapson, Sacharja Cunningham, Jazmin Benton, Amrah Salomon, and Aja Lans. MORE ABOUT “WHAT REMAINS”Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions

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00:35:57

What Remains, Part 1: No Justice, No Peace

Outside/In ·

2024/10/17

A classroom display of human skulls sparks a reckoning at The Penn Museum in Philadelphia. A movement grows to “abolish the collection.” The Penn museum relents to pressure. More skeletons in the closet.This episode contains swears.MORE ABOUT "WHAT REMAINS"Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists say they’ve helped lay the foundations of forensic science and unlocked the secrets of humanity’s shared past. But these bones

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00:32:14

What Remains: What's Past is Prologue

Outside/In ·

2024/10/10

A 1,500 year old skeleton is diagnosed with tuberculosis. A visit to a modern-day bone library. A fight over the future of ethical science. MORE ABOUT "WHAT REMAINS"Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists say they’ve helped lay the foundations of forensic science and unlocked the secrets of humanity’s shared past. But these bones were also collected before informed consent was the gold standard for ethical study. 19th and

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00:33:06

"Primitive, Unconfined Recreation"

Outside/In ·

2024/10/03

When KALW’s Marissa Ortega-Welch hit the Pacific Crest Trail, she used her preferred method of navigation: an old-fashioned trail map. But along the way, she met a couple who only used phones to guide them, a Search and Rescue team that welcomes the power of GPS, and a woman who has been told her adaptive wheelchair isn't allowed in official wilderness areas (not actually true).So… does technology help people access wilderness? Or does it get in the way? This week’s episode comes to us from “How

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00:31:15

Ghosts in the machine

Outside/In ·

2024/09/26

Perhaps you’re familiar with our Outside/Inbox hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. Anyone can leave us a voicemail sharing questions about the natural world, and we periodically answer them on the show. A few weeks ago, it came to our attention that we hadn't gotten a new voicemail in some time. Turns out our hotline has been bugging out for at least six months, and we have a lot of catching up to do. So, we present: Outside/Inbox, the lost voicemails edition. Featuring Stephanie Spera, with contributions

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00:29:43

The cold, hard truth about refrigeration

Outside/In ·

2024/09/19

In the early 1900s, people didn’t trust refrigerated food. Fruits and vegetables, cuts of meat… these things are supposed to decay, right? As Nicola Twilley writes, “What kind of unnatural technology could deliver a two-year old chicken carcass that still looked as though it was slaughtered yesterday?”But just a few decades later, Americans have done a full one-eighty. Livestock can be slaughtered thousands of miles away, and taste just as good (or better) by the time it hits your plate. Apples can

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00:23:20

The Mississippi Cyborg

Outside/In ·

2024/09/12

For more than two hundred years Americans have tried to tame the Mississippi River. And, for that entire time, the river has fought back. Journalist and author Boyce Upholt has spent dozens of nights camping along the Lower Mississippi and knows the river for what it is: both a water-moving machine and a supremely wild place. His recent book, “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi River” tells the story of how engineers have made the Mississippi into one of the most engineered

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00:36:53

The $1,000 balloon

Outside/In ·

2024/09/05

Helium is full of contradictions. It’s the second most abundant element in the universe, but is relatively rare on Earth. It’s non-reactive, totally inert—yet the most valuable helium isotope is sourced from thermonuclear warheads. And even though we treat it as a disposable gas, often for making funny voices and single-use party balloons, our global supply of helium will eventually run out. That’s because, at a rate of about 50 grams per second, this non-renewable resource is escaping the

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00:35:53

Why we get scared—and why we like it

Outside/In ·

2024/08/29

Jack Rodolico knows exactly what scares him. Sharks. But here’s what he doesn’t get: if he’s so freaked out, why can’t he stop incessantly watching online videos of bloody shark attacks? Why would he deliberately seek out the very thing that spooks him?To figure it out, Jack enlists the help of other scaredy-cats: our listeners, who shared their fears about nature with us. Together, Jack and the gang consider the spectrum of fear, from phobia to terror, and what it might mean when we don’t look

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00:35:49

The not-so-secret life of plants

Outside/In ·

2024/08/22

From the perspective of Western science, plants have long been considered unaware, passive life forms; essentially, rocks that happen to grow. But there’s something in the air in the world of plant science. New research suggests that plants are aware of the world around them to a far greater extent than previously understood. Plants may be able to sense acoustics, communicate with each other, and make choices… all this without a brain.These findings are fueling a debate, perhaps even a scientific

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00:28:28

This is your brain on GPS

Outside/In ·

2024/08/15

GPS is essential these days. We use it for everything – from a hunter figuring out where the heck they are in the backcountry, to a delivery truck finding a grocery store, to keeping clocks in sync.But our reliance on GPS may also be changing our brains. Old school navigation strengthens the hippocampus, and multiple studies suggest that our new reliance on satellite navigation may put us at higher risk for diseases like dementia. In this episode, we map out how GPS took over our world – from

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00:30:33

The fifth sense

Outside/In ·

2024/08/08

Once again, it’s that wonderful time when scientists everywhere hold their breath as the team opens the Outside/Inbox to answer listener questions about the natural world. Today’s theme is smell: how it works in the nose, the mind, and how much is still unknown about the fifth sense.Question 1: Does it gross you out to know that every time you smell something, a little bit of that thing… is in your nose? What happens to the molecules we smell?Question 2: Why do smells have such a powerful connection

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