radiolab podcast

Radiolab - Time [Brian Greene, Jay Griffiths, Ben Rubin, Dr. Oliver Sacks and Rebecca Solnit]
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Jorge Luis Borges wrote, Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. And it’s still as close a definition as we have. This hour of Radiolab, we try our hand at unlocking the mysteries of time. We stretch and bend it, wrestle with its subjective nature, and wrap our minds around strategies to standardize it...stopping along the way at a 19th-century railroad station in Ohio, a track meet, and a Beethoven concert.
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Radiolab - Secrets of Success [Malcolm Gladwell]
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Malcolm Gladwell doesn't like Gifted and Talented Education Programs. And he doesn't believe that innate ability can fully explain superstar hockey players or billionaire software giants. In this podcast, we listen in on a conversation between Robert and Malcolm recorded at the 92nd St Y.
Robert asks Malcolm if he's a 'genius denier,' and Malcolm asks Robert if he's uncomfortable with the power of love, as they duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success.
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Radiolab - Strangers in the Mirror [Oliver Sacks]
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Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can't recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of ... that's right, faces.

Oliver and Chuck--both born with the condition known as Face Blindness--have spent their lives decoding who is saying hello to them. You can sit down with either man, talk to him for an hour, and if he sees you again just fifteen minutes later, he will have no idea who you are. (Unless you have a very squeaky voice or happen to be wearing the same odd purple hat.)

In this podcast, we listen in on a conversation Robert had with Chuck and Oliver at Hunter College in New York City as part of the World Science Festival. Chuck and Oliver tell Robert what it's like to live with Face Blindness and describe two very different ways of coping with this condition, which may be more common than we think.

The World Science Festival is an annual festival in New York City that pays tribute to imagination, ingenuity, and inventiveness. It's pretty much an all-star line up of fascinating talks and performances. This year's festival just concluded, but you can still catch full broadcasts of the 2010 programs, follow their blog, and sign up for email updates HERE. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy this particular morsel.
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Radiolab - Falling [Joan Murray, David Quammen, Garrett Soden and Neil deGrasse Tyson]
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There are so many ways to fall—in love, asleep, even flat on your face. This hour, Radiolab dives into stories of great falls.

We jump into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, upend some myths about falling cats, and plunge into our favorite songs about falling.
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Radiolab - Words [Charles Fernyhough, Susan Schaller, Ann Senghas, James Shapiro, Elizabeth Spelke and Jill Bolte Taylor]
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It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But this hour, we try to do just that.

We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago
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Radiolab - The Luckiest Lobster [Trevor Corson, Bonnie Hazen and Toni Leone]
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One place you absolutely, positively do not want to be if you're a healthy, middle-aged American lobster: trapped in a suburban grocery store in western Pennsylvania. But that's where this week's podcast begins.

It doesn't stay there long, though. Bonnie Hazen and Toni Leone take us on an adventure that carries us by car, by plane, and by boat toward a deeper understanding of those mysterious protective feelings that sometimes sweep over us -- well, some of us -- when we encounter our fellow animals -- um, okay, some of them. Trevor Corson, author of the bestselling The Secret Life of Lobsters, assists.
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Radiolab - Lost & Found [Lera Boroditsky, Emilie Gossiaux, Dr. Giuseppe Iaria, Karen Jacobsen]
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In this episode, we steer our way through a series of stories about getting lost, and ask how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.
After hearing about a little girl who gets lost in front of her own house, Jad and Robert wonder how we find our way in the world. We meet a woman who has spent her entire life getting lost, and find out how our brains make maps of the world around us. We go to a military base in New Jersey to learn about some amazing feats of navigational wizardry, and are introduced to a group of people in Australia with impeccable orientation. Finally, we turn to a very different kind of lost and found: a love story about running into a terrifying, and unexpected, fork in the road.
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Radiolab - REBROADCAST: Detective Stories
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We're celebrating summer with a classic episode of Radiolab--full of mystery, intrigue...and a goat standing on a cow. We haven't actually tried listening to it around a campfire, but we're betting it would totally work. See you in two weeks with a new short!
In the meantime, we go sleuthing to dig up the past in some very unusual places: an ancient trash dump in Egypt, the side of the highway in California, and in the blood of 16 million men in Central Asia.
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Radiolab - Voices in Your Head [Charles Fernyhough]
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Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought, inner speech, and the voice in our heads.

In our last episode, Words, we got into a debate about whether kids can think before they have words. For this podcast, Jad revisits that question with Charles Fernyhough, who tells Jad about a theory developed by a Russian psychologist name Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky’s theory describes how words and thoughts move from speech outside our heads to speech inside our heads. We also talk to someone who hears other people's voices in his head, and ask Fernyhough about whether Vygotsky's ideas could shed light on this surprisingly common phenomena.

If you want to read more about voice-hearing and schizophrenia, check out the study that Fernyhough mentioned in this podcast.
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Radiolab - Gravitational Anarchy [David Quammen and Neil deGrasse Tyson]
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A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.
In this podcast, we revist some ideas from our recent epsiode on Falling. We begin with a story excerpted from an essay by Berton Roueché, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called The Medical Detectives. Read for us by the actress Hope Davis, it tells the true tale of a woman named Rosemary Morton, who had a little, um, trouble with gravity. After that, we return to a segment from the Falling episode that has troubled some of our listeners: the mystery of falling cats. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, takes us to task for using bad data. We call on science writer David Quammen to help us fight back and, in the end, we wonder how we can ever know the mind of a falling cat.
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Radiolab - Help! [What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you?]
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What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? This hour, Radiolab looks for ways to gain the upper hand over those forces inside us--from unhealthy urges, to creative insights--that seem to have a mind of their own.
We meet a Cold War negotiator who, in order to quit smoking, backs himself into a tactical corner, and we visit a clinic in Russia where patients turn to a radical treatment to help fight their demons. Plus, Elizabeth Gilbert lays out strategies for doing battle with your muse.
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Radiolab - Nukes [Bruce Blair, Tony De Brum, Harold Herring, Sonya McMullen, Secretary of Defense William Perry and Alex Wellerstein]
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President Richard Nixon once boasted that at any moment he could pick up a telephone and - in 20 minutes - kill 60 million people. Such is the power of the US President over the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But what if you were the military officer on the receiving end of that phone call? Could you refuse the order?

This episode, we profile one Air Force Major who asked that question back in the 1970s and learn how the very act of asking it was so dangerous it derailed his career. We also pick up the question ourselves and pose it to veterans both high and low on the nuclear chain of command. Their responses reveal once and for all whether there are any legal checks and balances between us and a phone call for Armageddon.
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Radiolab - Cities [Luis Bettencourt, Diane Galusha, Dr. Robert Levine, Joan Quigley, Sxip Shirey]
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In this hour of Radiolab, we take to the street to ask what makes cities tick.
There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who's walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that's slipping away.
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Radiolab - A Flock of Two [Irene Pepperberg]
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In today's short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.

Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk--it jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. But with the help of Sadie, his pet African Grey Parrot, Jim found an unlikely (and seemingly successful) way to manage his anger. African Grey Parrot expert Irene Pepperberg helps us understand how this could work, and shares some insights from her work with a parrot named Alex.

And one quick note from our producer Pat Walters: Jim considers Sadie to be a “service animal,” a designation under the Americans with Disabilities Act that protects the rights of individuals with disabilities to bring certain animals into public places. The federal government recently redefined the term service animal to include only dogs and miniature horses. And while Jim disagrees with the change, he says he hasn’t run into any problems yet—in fact, the local bus company has already told him they’ll make an exception for Sadie.
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Radiolab - Talking to Machines [Freedom Baird, Rollo Carpenter, Brian Christian, Caleb Chung, Dr. Robert Epstein]
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This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.
We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.
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Radiolab - Colors [Thomas Cronin, Jules Davidoff, Guy Deutscher, Victoria Finlay, James Gleick, Jonah Lehrer, Jay Neitz]
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Our world is saturated in color, from soft hues to violent stains. How does something so intangible pack such a visceral punch? This hour, in the name of science and poetry, Jad and Robert tear the rainbow to pieces.
To what extent is color a physical thing in the physical world, and to what extent is it created in our minds? We start with Sir Isaac Newton, who was so eager to solve this very mystery, he stuck a knife in his eye to pinpoint the answer. Then, we meet a sea creature that sees a rainbow way beyond anything humans can experience, and we track down a woman who we're pretty sure can see thousands (maybe even millions) more colors than the rest of us. And we end with an age-old question, that, it turns out, never even occurred to most humans until very recently: why is the sky blue?
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Radiolab - The Good Show [Robert Axelrod, Richard Dawkins, Oren Harman, Walter F. Rutkowski]
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In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?
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, 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 selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?
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Radiolab - The Universe Knows My Name [Paul Auster and Michael Barrier]
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In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.
Questions of fate and free will come up all the time on Radiolab, whether we're telling a story or talking to a scientist. And in this short, we decided to take a playful approach to the subject. Paul Auster tells a couple good yarns (true ones) that make Jad and Robert wonder whether the universe is playing puppet master. Then Pat Walters and Lulu Miller talk to Michael Barrier (he's the guy you call if you have a big profound question about Looney Tunes). Along the way, they answer a question that has been bugging Lulu for a long, long time.
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Radiolab - Wild Talk [Professor Con Slobodchikoff and Professor Klaus Zuberbuhler]
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In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie.
Reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro tells us about Klaus Zuberbuhler's work in the Tai Forest of West Africa. When Klaus first came to the forest, he hit a wall of sound. But he slowly started making sense of that sonic chaos by scaring a particular monkey called the Diana Monkey. Turns out, the Diana Monkey is making more than just noise. Then we jump from the jungle to the prairie, where Con Slobodchikoff has discovered what he calls a grammar of color, shapes, and sizes embedded in prairie dog chirps. His discovery leaves Jad and Robert wondering whether we could ever understand the language of a different species. Back in the jungle, Klaus is wondering the same thing, and tells us about one day when the cacophony of monkey calls distilled into a life-saving warning.
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Radiolab - The Radio Lab [Ellen Horne]
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15 years ago the very first episode of Radiolab, fittingly called Firsts, hit the airwaves. It was a 3-hour long collection of documentaries and musings produced by a solitary sleep-deprived producer named Jad Abumrad. Things have changed a bit since then.

Today, with help from our long time Executive Producer Ellen Horne, we celebrate our 15th birthday by surprising Jad and Robert in the studio and forcing them to look back on a time when “Radiolab” was just that: a lab for experimenting with radio.
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Radiolab - The Walls of Jericho [David Lubman and Cantor Daniel Pincus, Woody Norris]
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Jad and Robert pit physics against a bible story with this simple question: could a team of trumpeters really bring down the walls of Jericho?
Sure, sound can be a powerful - an alarm clock can get you out of bed and headed for the shower, a pop song can send you back to Junior Prom. But what about sound as a physical force? In the bible, the walls of Jericho fall to the sound of seven shofar players (shofars are basically trumpets made of rams' horns). In this podcast, Jad and Robert talk to engineer and sound expert David Lubman to find out how many shofars it would actually take to level a Bronze Age wall. To get a sense of the power of the shofar, we pay a visit to Cantor Daniel Pincus to hear him and his students blow some horns. Then, we talk to inventor Woody Norris for a modern approach to this biblical challenge.

Many thanks to the 2010 Shofar All-Stars who played for us: David Liebowitz, Daniela Drakhler, Miriam Frank, Adam Hametz-Berner, Rachel Kelk, Ed Kerson, Anna Levy, Richard Scheiner, and Robert Wine.
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Radiolab - Blood Buddies [Professor Gerald S. Wilkinson]
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In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.

In our recent episode The Good Show, we grappled with a troubling question: how can goodness and self-sacrifice thrive in a world that Darwin tells us ought to favor selfishness? We follow up on that idea with Jerry Wilkinson, chair of biology at the University of Maryland-College Park, who describes an amazing discovery he made in 1977 that revealed an entirely new way of explaining selflessness.
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Radiolab - Radiolab Presents: The Loneliness of the Goalkeeper
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This week on the podcast, football! No, it's not a Super Bowl recap. Jad and Robert present a piece from across the pond--a piece about soccer they fell in love with when they heard it at the Third Coast festival in Chicago.
Back in October, Jad and Robert hosted the awards ceremony at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. And one piece, well...kinda blew their minds. Partly because it's beautiful (it won one of the big awards), and partly because it has a lot to say about symmetry--a topic we'll spend a full hour on in an upcoming episode. (By the way: Jad and Robert will be performing the symmetry show live in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle in March, get more info and tickets here!)

So, consider this an appetizer for the symmetry shmorgishborg to come. The Loneliness of the Goalkeeper, presented by writer, broadcaster, and former goalkeeper Hardeep Singh Kohli, and produced by Adam Fowler, is a Ladbroke Radio production, and was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Enjoy!
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The startling specifics of how dinosaurs were wiped off the planet.

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From Radiolab's stage show Apocalyptical, recorded live in Seattle.

A stunning film from Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante to accompany Radiolab's Words episode. With an original score by Keith Kenniff.
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Dinosaurs, death, and destruction -- a thought-provoking and laughter-inducing dance on the grave of our inevitable demise.

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Cataclysmic destruction. Surprising survival. Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow, in its live show Apocalyptical. With their signature blend of storytelling, science, and music, hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich romp through hundreds of millions of years of history to arrive at the end, again and again. Comedians Reggie Watts and Kurt Braunohler join the party, while musicians On Fillmore and Noveller create a cinematic live score before your eyes. Recorded live on stage in Seattle.

Bill rambles robbing banks, custom underwear and slavery.

Full Episodes of the Monday Morning Podcast:
Full Episodes of the Thursday Afternoon Podcast:
Full Episodes of the MMP One-Shots:

Here’s the website!