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Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Investigating a strange world.

science natural sciences

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The Glow Below

Radiolab ·

2025/10/31

A call to oceanographer Edie Widder about a fish with a very odd immune system quickly becomes something else: a dive into the deep sea, into a world of brilliant light. But down there, the light doesn’t behave like light -- it sparkles and glows, but also drips, squirts, and dribbles. Today, find out how creatures make the light and how they use it, from hunting and hiding to maybe even … talking. And hear about a series of mysterious moments where Edie goes from studying the creatures to becoming

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What Up Holmes?

Radiolab ·

2025/10/24

Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free speech is actually relatively recent, and you can trace it back to one guy: a Supreme Court justice named Oliver Wendell Holmes. Even weirder, you can trace it back to one seemingly ordinary eight-month period in Holmes’s life when he seems to have done a logical U-turn on what should be say-able. Why he changed his mind during those

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Content Warning

Radiolab ·

2025/10/17

Over the past five years TikTok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say it’s not how you’d expect.Today we continue our years-long exploration of what you can and can’t post online. We look at how Facebook’s approach to free speech has evolved since Trump’s victory, how TikTok upended everything we see, and what all this means for the future of our political and digital lives. Special thanks to Kate KlonickEPISODE CREDITS: Reported by Simon AdlerProduced by Simon

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Creation Story

Radiolab ·

2025/10/10

Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistoric caves, fossils that help us understand the origin of our species. Her recent hit BBC / PBS series Human follows her around the globe trying to piece together the unlikely story of how early humans conquered the world. But Ella’s own origins as an evolutionary biologist are equally unlikely. She sits down with us and tells us a story she has rarely

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Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

Radiolab ·

2025/10/03

This is the story of a three-year-old girl and the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl is a legal battle that has entangled a biological father, a heart-broken couple, and the tragic history of Native American children taken from their families. We originally released this story back in 2013, when that girl’s fate was still in the balance of various legal decisions. We thought now was a good time to bring the story back, because the Act at the center of the

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Voice

Radiolab ·

2025/09/26

Over the course of millions of years, human voices have evolved to hold startling power. These clouds of vibrating air carry crucial information about who we are–and we rely on them to push ourselves up and out into the physical world.This week, we’re on a journey to understand how we got our unique sonic fingerprint, the power it affords us, and what happens when it’s taken away. Special thanks to Alice Wong, Wren Farrell, Hector Espinal and his parents, Crisaly and Hector Espinal, Mary Croke,

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The Spark of Life

Radiolab ·

2025/09/19

In the 1920s, a Russian biologist studying onion roots made a surprising discovery: underground, down in the darkness, it seemed like the cells inside the onion roots were making their own … light.The “onion root experiment” went on to become something of a cult classic in science, and eventually the biologically-made light was dubbed “biophotons.” In the ensuing century, biophoton discoveries moved from onion roots to bacteria, frog embryos, and humans. Today, scientist Nirosha Murugan is on a

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Los Frikis

Radiolab ·

2025/09/12

How a group of 80’s Cuban misfits found rock-and-roll and created a revolution within a revolution, going into exile without ever leaving home. Reporter Luis Trelles brings us the story of punk rock’s arrival in Cuba and a small band of outsiders who sentenced themselves to death and set themselves free. We originally released this episode back in 2015 in a collaboration with Radio Ambulante, but the story is so fascinating (and, in many ways, still relevant) that we haven’t stopped thinking about

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Screaming Into the Void

Radiolab ·

2025/09/05

In August, we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One about a fish that screams into the night—and the mystery of its counterpart that doesn’t. Another about a group of women who gazed at the night sky and taught us just how vast the universe is, and a third about a man who talk to aliens, and the people who tell him he’s putting human civilization at

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Music Hat

Radiolab ·

2025/08/29

With this episode, we’re putting on our music hat. For a program that relies so much on scoring and sound, it’s not often we talk about the musicians and the music they make that inspire us. Today, that changes. Today, we bring you two stories. Each about musicians that our former host and creator of Radiolab, Jad Abumrad, loves. We originally released these stories many years ago, and both start deep in music itself. Then quickly, they dig deeper — into our relationships with technology, and

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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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