Podcast
Radiolab
WNYC Studios
Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.
— All episodes
EPISODES
- 01
Mar 6, 2026 · 29m E683
Snail Sex Tape
In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic....
- 02
Feb 27, 2026 · 1h 5m E682
Black Box
In this episode, first aired in 2014, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—spaces where we know what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, b...
- 03
Feb 20, 2026 · 27m E681
Gray's Donation
Before he was even born, Sarah and Ross Gray knew that their son Thomas wouldn’t live long. But as they let go of him, they made a decision that reverberated...
- 04
Feb 13, 2026 · 38m E680
Time is Honey
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....
- 05
Feb 6, 2026 · 44m E679
Kleptotherms
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 ep...
- 06
Jan 30, 2026 · 42m E678
Song of the Cerebellum
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 i...
- 07
Jan 23, 2026 · 1h 17m E677
You and Me and Mr. Self-Esteem
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 histo...
- 08
Jan 16, 2026 · 50m E676
The Punchline
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...
- 09
Jan 9, 2026 · 41m E675
Brain Balls
When neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster was a brand new postdoc, she accidentally used an expired protein gel in a lab experiment and noticed something weird....
- 10
Jan 2, 2026 · 35m E674
Moon Trees
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 can...
- 11
Dec 26, 2025 · 26m E673
Fertility Cliff
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 sho...
- 12
Dec 19, 2025 · 1h 2m E672
The Good Show
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...
- 13
Dec 12, 2025 · 1h E671
The Alien in the Room
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...
- 14
Dec 5, 2025 · 39m E670
Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company
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’s usin...
- 15
Nov 28, 2025 · 38m E669
Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine
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, th...
- 16
Nov 21, 2025 · 53m E669
Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal
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...
- 17
Nov 14, 2025 · 48m E668
Quantum Refuge
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 wri...
- 18
Nov 7, 2025 · 56m E667
The Wubi Effect
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 th...
- 19
Oct 31, 2025 · 28m E665
The Glow Below
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 bril...
- 20
Oct 24, 2025 · 35m E664
What Up Holmes?
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 approac...
- 21
Oct 17, 2025 · 29m E663
Content Warning
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 yearslong...
- 22
Oct 10, 2025 · 34m E662
Creation Story
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...
- 23
Oct 3, 2025 · 45m E661
Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl
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...
- 24
Sep 26, 2025 · 1h 6m E660
Voice
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...
- 25
Sep 19, 2025 · 36m E659
The Spark of Life
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 on...
- 26
Sep 12, 2025 · 33m E658
Los Frikis
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...
- 27
Sep 5, 2025 · 57m E657
Screaming Into the Void
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...
- 28
Aug 29, 2025 · 31m E656
Music Hat
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...
- 29
Aug 22, 2025 · 1h 1m E655
The Medical Matchmaking Machine
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 orga...
- 30
Aug 15, 2025 · 24m E654
Weighing Good Intentions
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 bi...
- 31
Aug 8, 2025 · 38m E653
The Menopause Mystery
Until recently, scientists assumed humans were the only species in which females went through menopause, and lived a substantial part of their lives after th...
- 32
Aug 1, 2025 · 40m E652
Galaxy Quenching
This week: the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some galaxies...
- 33
Jul 25, 2025 · 32m E651
The Nothing Behind Everything
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 o...
- 34
Jul 18, 2025 · 37m E650
More Perfect: The Hate Debate
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,...
- 35
Jul 11, 2025 · 57m E649
Desperately Seeking Symmetry
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 exi...
- 36
Jul 4, 2025 · 38m E648
On [The Divided Dial]: Fishing In The Night
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...
- 37
Jun 27, 2025 · 25m E647
Sex, Ducks and the Founding Feud
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 with an...
- 38
Jun 20, 2025 · 28m E646
Baby Shark
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. Drama...
- 39
Jun 19, 2025 · 21m E645
Mystery Bay
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 that c...
- 40
Jun 18, 2025 · 28m E644
The Shark Inside You
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 … Wis...
- 41
Jun 17, 2025 · 18m E643
The Cage
This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, sharks...
- 42
Jun 16, 2025 · 26m E642
Making a Monster
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 body to...
- 43
Jun 14, 2025 · 29s
It's Like ... Radiolab
Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science...
- 44
Jun 13, 2025 · 2m
Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks
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-eating mon...
- 45
Jun 13, 2025 · 20m E641
Double-Blasted
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 today. It’s...
- 46
Jun 6, 2025 · 50m E640
The Elixir of Life
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. Starting...
- 47
May 30, 2025 · 19m E640
A Flock of Two
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 suffers from...
- 48
May 23, 2025 · 32m E639
The Echo in the Machine
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 frictionless. A...
- 49
May 16, 2025 · 25m E638
How to Cure What Ails You
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 behavior an...
- 50
May 9, 2025 · 38m E637
The First Known Earthly Voice
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 magazine...
- 51
May 2, 2025 · 31m E636
Terrestrials: The Snow Beast
Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole,...
- 52
Apr 25, 2025 · 43m E635
The Age of Aquaticus
For years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73℃/163℉. At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze...
- 53
Apr 18, 2025 · 33m E634
Ghosts in the Green Machine
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 an epi...
- 54
Apr 11, 2025 · 50m E633
Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow
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. We cover...
- 55
Apr 4, 2025 · 25m E633
Killer Empathy
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 career study...
- 56
Mar 28, 2025 · 38m E632
Malthusian Swerve
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 essential...
- 57
Mar 21, 2025 · 28m E631
Everybody's Got One
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 the nurse...
- 58
Mar 14, 2025 · 58m E630
Growth
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 seeds into f...
- 59
Mar 7, 2025 · 1h 5m E629
More Perfect: Sex Appeal
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 annals o...
- 60
Feb 28, 2025 · 35m E628
Revenge of the Miasma
Today we uncover an invisible killer hidden, for over a hundred years, by reasonable disbelief. Science journalist extraordinaire Carl Zimmer tells us the st...
- 61
Feb 21, 2025 · 34m E627
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
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 that sm...
- 62
Feb 14, 2025 · 34m E626
Quantum Birds
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, so that sh...
- 63
Feb 7, 2025 · 25m E625
Vertigogo
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 hijacked by...
- 64
Jan 31, 2025 · 28m E624
Forever Fresh
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. What...
- 65
Jan 24, 2025 · 52m E623
Nukes
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 who can...
- 66
Jan 17, 2025 · 26m E622
The Darkest Dark
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 almost lik...
- 67
Jan 10, 2025 · 34m E621
Smarty Plants
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? Well, it d...
- 68
Jan 3, 2025 · 1h 1m E620
Match Made in Marrow
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 happen wh...
- 69
Dec 24, 2024 · 25m E619
Probing Where the Sun Does Shine: A Holiday Special
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-cutti...
- 70
Dec 20, 2024 · 47m E618
Curiosity Killed the Adage
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 adages—with...
- 71
Dec 13, 2024 · 24m E617
Dark Side of the Earth
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 darkness. An...
- 72
Dec 6, 2024 · 1h 4m E616
How Stockholm Stuck
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 party sta...
- 73
Nov 29, 2024 · 24m E615
Less Than Kilogram
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 standard) f...
- 74
Nov 22, 2024 · 42m E614
Science Vs: The Funniest Joke in the World
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 the ch...
- 75
Nov 15, 2024 · 46m E613
Hello
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 holidays,...
- 76
Nov 8, 2024 · 36m E612
The Ecstasy of an Open Brain
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 periods. Re...
- 77
Oct 31, 2024 · 30m E611
Haunted
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’s back home...
- 78
Oct 25, 2024 · 59m E610
The Unpopular Vote
As the US Presidential Election nears, Radiolab covers the closest we ever came to abolishing the Electoral College. In the 1960s, then-President Lyndon John...
- 79
Oct 18, 2024 · 1h 9m E608
Tweak the Vote
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 democracies ar...
- 80
Oct 11, 2024 · 43m E607
Why Don't Sex Scandals Matter Anymore?
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 what happ...