PODCAST

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Investigating a strange world.

science natural sciences

All Episodes

Time is Honey

Radiolab ·

2026/02/13

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 web, he was no closer to an answer. In desperation, Sunil sent out a raft of cold emails to engineering professors. He hoped someone, anyone, could help him figure this out. Eventually, he learned that the internet could only be fixed if he paid attention to the humble honeybee. This

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Kleptotherms

Radiolab ·

2026/02/06

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 stars. We start out underwater, with a species of snake that has evolved a devious trick for keeping warm. Then we hear the tale of a young man whose seemingly simple method of warming up might be the very thing making him cold. And Senior Correspondent Molly Webster blows the lid off

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Song of the Cerebellum

Radiolab ·

2026/01/30

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 and bottom of her brain called the cerebellum. A couple weeks later, her doctors took a bit of it out, assuring her it was just helping her just did basic motor control — she might be a bit clumsy for a while, but she’d still be herself. But afterwards, she didn't feel like herself. So she dove into the dusty basement of the brain

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You and Me and Mr. Self-Esteem

Radiolab ·

2026/01/23

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 rumpled, convertible-driving California state representative named John Vasconcellos who helped spark a movement that took over schools, boardrooms, and social-service offices across America in the 1990s. This week, we look at the rise and fall of the self-esteem movement and ask: Is

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The Punchline

Radiolab ·

2026/01/16

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 fans to vote for Scott to play alongside the world’s greatest players in the NHL All-Star Game, Scott found himself facing off against fans, commentators, and the powers that be. Was this the realization of Scott’s childhood dreams? Or a nightmarish prank gone too far? Today on

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Brain Balls

Radiolab ·

2026/01/09

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 self-assembling. The result? Madeline was the first person ever to grow what she called a “cerebral organoid,” a tiny, 3D version of a human brain the size of a peppercorn.In about a decade, these mini human brain balls were everywhere. They were revealing bombshell secrets about how our

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Moon Trees

Radiolab ·

2026/01/02

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, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the country and then… everyone forgot about them. Until one day, a third grader from Indiana stumbled on a tree with a strange plaque: "Moon Tree." This discovery set off a cascading search for all the trees that

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Fertility Cliff

Radiolab ·

2025/12/26

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 her fertility after she turned 35 — that is, it would drop off. Suddenly, sharply, dramatically. And this was well before she was supposed to hit menopause. Intrigued, Molly decided to look into it — what was the truth behind this so-called cliff, and when, if so, would she topple? This

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The Good Show

Radiolab ·

2025/12/19

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 and reproduce. But in this hour that we first broadcast back in 2010, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a

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The Alien in the Room

Radiolab ·

2025/12/12

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 it’s so damn hard to answer. Special thanks to Stephanie Yin and the New York Institute of Go for teaching us the game. Mark, Daria and Levon Hoover Brauner for helping bring NETtalk to life. And a huge thank you to Grant Sanderson for his unending patience explaining the math of neural

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Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company

Radiolab ·

2025/12/05

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 two of the show, Evan’s using AI to do more than just mimic himself—he’s starting a company staffed entirely by AI agents, and making a podcast about the experience. The show is a smart, funny, and truly bizarre look at what AI can do—and what it can’t.This week we bring you the first episode of Shell Game Season Two, "Minimum Viable Company." You can sign up to get the

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The Mysteries of Menopause

Radiolab ·

2025/12/03

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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Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

Radiolab ·

2025/11/28

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 a military dictatorship. Jad tells us about the series and why he made it, and we play the episode that, for us at least, gets to the heart of the matter: How exactly does his music work? What actually happens to the people who hear it and how does it move them to action?You can find

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Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal

Radiolab ·

2025/11/21

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 people, make music and better understand how culture binds us to nature. The series features a few familiar voices, including Ana González (host) and Alan Goffinski (producer), from our kids podcast, Terrestrials (https://link.podtrac.com/vysacqn1). About the episode: West Virginia is

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Quantum Refuge

Radiolab ·

2025/11/14

Qasem Waleed is a 28-year-old physicist who has lived in Gaza his whole life. In 2024, he joined a chorus of Palestinians sharing videos and pictures and writing about the chaos and violence they were living through, as Israel’s military bombardment devastated their lives. But Qasem was trying to describe his reality through the lens of the most notoriously confusing and inscrutable field of science ever, quantum mechanics. We talked to him, from a cafe near the Al-Mawasi section of Gaza, to find

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The Wubi Effect

Radiolab ·

2025/11/07

When we think of China today, we think of a technological superpower. From Huawei and 5G to TikTok and viral social media, China is stride for stride with the United States in the world of computing. However, China’s technological renaissance almost didn’t happen. And for one very basic reason: the Chinese language, with its 70,000 plus characters, couldn’t fit on a keyboard.Today, we tell the story of Professor Wang Yongmin, a hard-headed computer programmer who solved this puzzle and laid the

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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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