Radiolab

The Alien in the Room

12 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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. B...

Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company

05 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 2 of the show, Evan...

Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

28 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal

21 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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-Y...

Quantum Refuge

14 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Wubi Effect

07 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Glow Below

31 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

What Up Holmes?

24 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Content Warning

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the past five years TikTtok has radically changed the online world. But trust us when we say, it’s not how you’d expect.Today we continue our...

Creation Story

10 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Ella al-Shamahi is one part Charles Darwin, one part Indiana Jones. She braves war zones and pirate-infested waters to collect fossils from prehistori...

Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

03 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 th...

Voice

26 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Over the course of millions of years, human voices have evolved to hold startling power. These clouds of vibrating air carry crucial information about...

The Spark of Life

19 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the 1920s, a Russian biologist studying onion roots made a surprising discovery: underground, down in the darkness, it seemed like the cells inside...

Los Frikis

12 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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.  Re...

Screaming Into the Void

05 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 wi...

Music Hat

29 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 musici...

The Medical Matchmaking Machine

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 mu...

Weighing Good Intentions

15 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode first released in 2010, then-producer Lulu Miller drives to Michigan to track down the endangered Kirtland’s warbler. Efforts to prote...

The Menopause Mystery

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Until recently, scientists assumed humans were the only species in which females went through menopause, and lived a substantial part of their lives a...

Galaxy Quenching

01 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week: the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some ga...

The Nothing Behind Everything

25 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 m...

More Perfect: The Hate Debate

18 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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?...

Desperately Seeking Symmetry

11 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 v...

On [The Divided Dial]: Fishing In The Night

04 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 t...

Sex, Ducks and the Founding Feud

27 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution.What does a betrayed lover’s revenge have to do ...

Baby Shark

20 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is episode five of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Today, the strange, squirmy magic behind how sharks make more sharks. Drills....

Mystery Bay

19 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is episode four of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Alison Kock was working at a car wash in Cape Town when she made a discovery ...

The Shark Inside You

18 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is episode three of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Today, we take a trip across the world, from the south coast of Australia to...

The Cage

17 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, s...

Making a Monster

16 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Episode one of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Rodney Fox went into the ocean one summer day in 1963. He came out barely alive, his b...

Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks

13 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In the summer of 1975, Jaws scared an entire generation out of the water. The film burned an idea into our cultural memory: they are mindless, man-eat...

Double-Blasted

13 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show we’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again tod...

The Elixir of Life

06 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Doctor and special correspondent, Avir Mitra takes Lulu on an epic journey live on stage at a little basement club called Caveat, here in New York. St...

A Flock of Two

30 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. In this episode, first aired more than a decade ago, Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffer...

The Echo in the Machine

23 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today you can convert speech to text with the click of a button. Youtube does it for all our videos. Our phones will do it in real time. It’s fricti...

How to Cure What Ails You

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Now that we have the ability to see inside the brain without opening anyone's skull, we'll be able to map and define brain activity and peg it to beha...

The First Known Earthly Voice

09 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature m...

Terrestrials: The Snow Beast

02 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the Nort...

The Age of Aquaticus

25 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

For years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73℃/163℉.  At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and H...

Ghosts in the Green Machine

18 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In honor of our Earth, on her day, we have two stories about the overlooked, ignored, and neglected parts of nature. In the first half, we learn about...

Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow

11 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A couple years ago, an entomologist named Martha Weiss got a letter from a little boy in Japan saying he wanted to replicate a famous study of hers. W...

Killer Empathy

04 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode first aired in 2012, Lulu Miller introduces us to Jeff Lockwood, a professor at the University of Wyoming, who spent a part of his caree...

Malthusian Swerve

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Earth can sustain life for another 100 million years, but can we?In this episode, we partnered with the team at Planet Money to take stock of the esse...

Everybody's Got One

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We all think we know the story of pregnancy. Sperm meets egg, followed by nine months of nurturing, nesting, and quiet incubation. this story isn’t ...

Growth

14 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It’s easy to take growth for granted, for it to seem expected, inevitable even. Every person starts out as a baby and grows up. Plants grow from see...

More Perfect: Sex Appeal

07 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In 2017 our sister show, More Perfect aired an episode all about RBG, In September of 2020, we lost Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the a...

Revenge of the Miasma

28 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today we uncover an invisible killer hidden, for over a hundred years, by reasonable disbelief. Science journalist extraordinaire Carl Zimmer tells us...

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Today, a story that starts small and private, with one woman alone in her bathroom, as she makes a quiet, startling discovery about her own body. But ...

Quantum Birds

14 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Annie McEwen went to a mountain in Pennsylvania to help catch some migratory owls. Then Scott Weidensaul peeled back the owl’s feathery face disc, s...

Vertigogo

07 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, first aired in 2012, we have two stories of brains pushed off-course. We relive a surreal day in the life of a young researcher hijac...

Forever Fresh

31 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We eat apples in the summer and enjoy bananas in the winter. When we do this, we go against the natural order of life which is towards death and decay...

Nukes

24 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode first reported in 2017, we bring you a look up and down the US nuclear chain of command to find out who gets to authorize their use and ...

The Darkest Dark

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We fall down the looking glass with Sönke Johnsen, a biologist who finds himself staring at one of the darkest things on the planet. So dark, it’s ...

Smarty Plants

10 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode we first aired in 2018, we asked the question, do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? To remember? Or even learn? Wel...

Match Made in Marrow

03 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode first reported in 2017, we bring you what may be, maybe the greatest gift one person could give to another. You never know what might h...

Probing Where the Sun Does Shine: A Holiday Special

24 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This holiday season, we want to take you on a trip around the heavens.First, co-host Latif Nasser, with the help of Nour Raouafi, of NASA, and an edge...

Curiosity Killed the Adage

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The early bird gets the worm. What goes around, comes around. It’s always darkest just before dawn. We carry these little nuggets of wisdom—these ...

Dark Side of the Earth

13 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Back in 2012, when we were putting together our live show In the Dark, Jad and Robert called up Dave Wolf to ask him if he had any stories about darkn...

How Stockholm Stuck

06 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In August of 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson walked into the lobby of a bank in central Stockholm. He fired his submachine gun at the ceiling and yelled “The ...

Less Than Kilogram

29 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In today’s story, which originally aired in 2014, we meet a very special cylinder. It's the gold standard (or, in this case, the platinum-iridium st...

Science Vs: The Funniest Joke in the World

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

When he rounded them up, he had a 100.A few months ago, Wendy Zukerman invited our own Latif Nasser to come on her show, and, of course, he jumped at ...

Hello

15 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It's hard to start a conversation with a stranger—especially when that stranger is, well, different. He doesn't share your customs, celebrate your h...

The Ecstasy of an Open Brain

08 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As we grow up, there are little windows of time when we can learn very, very fast, and very, very deeply. Scientists call these moments, critical peri...

Haunted

31 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode we first aired in 2014, we meet a man named Dennis Conrow, who was stuck. After a brief stint at college, he’d spent most of his 20’...

The Unpopular Vote

25 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As the US Presidential Election nears, Radiolab covers the closest we ever came to abolishing the Electoral College.In the 1960s, then-President Lyndo...

Tweak the Vote

18 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Back in 2018, when this episode first aired, there was a feeling that democracy was on the ropes.  In the United States and abroad, citizens of democ...

Why Don't Sex Scandals Matter Anymore?

11 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1987, Gary Hart was a young charismatic Democrat, poised to win his party’s nomination and possibly the presidency. Many of us know the story of ...

Terrestrials: Stumpisode

04 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As dead as they seem, tree stumps are hubs of life and relationships. Co-host Lulu Miller is back with another season of her hit spinoff show Terrest...

Octomom

27 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A mile under the ocean, we get to watch an octopus perform a heroic act of heart and determination.First aired back in 2020, this episode follows the ...

A Little Pompeiian Fish Sauce Goes a Long Way

20 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Today we follow a sleuth who has spent over a decade working to solve an epic mystery hiding in plain historical sight: did anyone survive the eruptio...

The Times They Are a-Changin'

13 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode first aired back in December of 2013, and at the start of that new year, the team was cracking open fossils, peering back into ancient se...

Shell Game

06 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

One man secretly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone.Today, we feature veteran journalist Evan Ratliff who - for his new podcast ...

Big Little Questions

30 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

First aired back in 2017, here’s a show of questions and, sometimes, answers. Cause, we get a lot of questions. Like, A LOT of questions. Tiny quest...

Uneasy as ABC

23 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

February 1976. A flight out of California turned catastrophic when it crashed into a farm in rural Nebraska. What happened that night at the local hos...

More Perfect: The Gun Show

16 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Given that we’re all gearing up for the Presidential race, and how gun rights and regulations are almost always centerstage during these times. Toda...

Up in Smoke

09 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Two scenes. In the first, a doctor gets a call — the hospital she works at is having an outbreak of unknown origin, in the middle of the worst wildf...

Sleep

02 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We had a question back in 2007, about a thing every creature on the planet does--from giant humpback whales to teeny fruit flies. Why do we all sleep?...

Terrestrials: The Trio

26 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

High above the banks of the Mississippi river, a nest holds the secret life of one of America’s most patriotic creatures. Their story puzzles scient...

Lose Lose

19 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

To celebrate the imminent start of the Summer Olympic Games in Paris, France we have an episode originally reported in 2016. No matter what sport you ...

How to Save a Life

12 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We get it… the world feels too bleak and too big for you to make a difference. But there is one thing - one simple tangible thing - you can do to ma...

Happy Birthday, Good Dr. Sacks

05 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

First aired back in 2013, we originally released this episode to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of our favorite human beings, Oliver Sacks. To cel...

The Alford Plea

28 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In 1995, a tragic fire in Pittsburgh set off a decades-long investigation that sent Greg Brown Jr. to prison. But, after a series of remarkable twists...

Birdie in the Cage

21 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

People have been doing the square dance since before the Declaration of Independence. But does that mean it should be THE American folk dance? That qu...

Aphantasia

14 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Close your eyes and imagine a red apple. What do you see? Turns out there’s a whole spectrum of answers to that question and Producer Sindhu Gnanasa...

Argentine Invasion

31 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

From a suburban sidewalk in southern California, Jad and Robert witness the carnage of a gruesome turf war. Though the tiny warriors doing battle cloc...

Mixtapes to the Moon

24 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

They promised to change you. They ended up changing all of us. On July 20, 1969 humanity watched as Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. It was t...

Lucy

17 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Chimps. Bonobos. Humans. We're all great apes, but that doesn’t mean we’re one happy family.This episode, a mashup of content stretching all the w...

Selected Shorts

10 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

A selection of short flights of fact and fancy performed live on stage.Usually we tell true stories at this show, but earlier this spring we were invi...

Memory and Forgetting

26 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour: a look behind the curtain of how memories are made...and forgotten.  The act of recalling in ...

Small Potatoes

19 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

An ode to the small, the banal, the overlooked things that make up the fabric of our lives.Most of our stories are about the big stuff: Important or d...

The Distance of the Moon

12 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In an episode we last featured on our Radiolab for Kids Feed back in 2020, and in honor of its blocking out the Sun for a bit of us for a bit last wee...

The Moon Itself

05 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a total solar eclipse coming. On Monday, April 8, for a large swath of North America, the sun will disappear, in the middle of the day. Ever...

Short Cuts: Drawn Onward

02 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As a treat for the first palindrome date of the calendar year 2024, 4/2/24, (for those who use U.S. formatting of dates anyway), we are releasing a sp...

Finding Emilie

22 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This is a segment we first aired back in 2011. In it, we hear a story of a very different kind of lost and found. Alan Lundgard, a college art student...

Throughline: Dare to Dissent

15 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

On today’s show, we’re excited to share an episode from our friends at the podcast Throughline. Sometimes, the most dangerous and powerful thing ...

Staph Retreat

08 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when you combine an axe-wielding microbiologist and a disease-obsessed historian? A strange brew that's hard to resist, even for a modern...

Hold On

01 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Two years ago, the United States did something amazing. In response to the mental health crisis the federal government launched 988 - a nationwide, ea...

G: The World's Smartest Animal

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This episode begins with a rant. This rant, in particular, comes from Dan Engber - a science writer who loves animals but despises animal intelligence...

Cheating Death

09 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Maria Paz Gutiérrez does battle against the one absolute truth of human existence and all life… death. After getting a team of sci...

G: Relative Genius

02 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Albert Einstein asked that when he died, his body be cremated and his ashes be scattered in a secret location. He didn’t want his grave, or his body...