Radiolab
By WNYC Studios
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Description
A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.
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CleanDark Side of the Earth | Astronauts at the International Space Station can make one request to talk to an earthling of their choice. For some reason, Astronaut Mark Vande Hei chose us. A couple weeks ago, we were able to video chat with Mark and peer over his shoulder through | 4/26/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBorder Trilogy Part 3: What Remains | Border Trilogy While scouring the Sonoran Desert for objects left behind by migrants crossing into the United States, anthropologist Jason De León happened upon something he didn't expect to get left behind: a human arm, stripped of flesh. This macabr | 4/20/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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3 |
CleanBorder Trilogy Part 2: Hold the Line | Border Trilogy While scouring the Sonoran Desert for objects left behind by migrants crossing into the United States, anthropologist Jason De León happened upon something he didn't expect to get left behind: a human arm, stripped of flesh. This maca | 4/5/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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4 |
CleanBorder Trilogy Part 1: Hole in the Fence | Border Trilogy While scouring the Sonoran Desert for objects left behind by migrants crossing into the United States, anthropologist Jason De León happened upon something he didn't expect to get left behind: a human arm, stripped of flesh. This macabr | 3/23/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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5 |
CleanRippin’ the Rainbow an Even Newer One | One of our most popular episodes of all time was our Colors episode, where we introduced you to a sea creature that could see a rainbow far beyond what humans can experience. Peacock mantis shrimps are as extraordinary as they are strange and boast wha | 3/15/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Gun Show | The shooting in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, reignited an increasingly familiar debate about guns in this country. Today, we’re re-releasing a More Perfect episode that aired just after the Las Vegas shooting last year that attempts to make | 2/23/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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7 |
CleanThe Curious Case of the Russian Flash Mob at the West Palm Beach Cheesecake Factory | We don’t do breaking news. But when Robert Mueller released his indictment a few days ago, alleging that 13 Russian nationals colluded to disrupt the 2016 elections, we had a lot of questions. Who are these Russian individuals sowing discord? And who | 2/19/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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8 |
CleanSmarty Plants | Do you really need a brain to sense the world around you? To remember? Or even learn? Well, it depends on who you ask. Jad and Robert, they are split on this one. Today, Robert drags Jad along on a parade for the surprising feats of brainless plants. | 2/13/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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9 |
CleanGhosts of Football Past | In anticipation of Super Bowl LII (Go Eagles), we're revisiting an old episode about the surprising history of how the game came to be. It's the end of the 19th century -- the Civil War is over, and the frontier is dead. And young college men are anx | 2/3/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - One Nation, Under Money | An unassuming string of 16 words tucked into the Constitution grants Congress extensive power to make laws that impact the entire nation. The Commerce Clause has allowed Congress to intervene in all kinds of situations — from penalizing one man for g | 1/31/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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11 |
CleanThe Voice in Your Head - A Tribute to Joe Frank | How do you pay proper tribute to a legend that many people haven’t heard of? We began asking ourselves this question last week when the visionary radio producer Joe Frank passed away, after a long struggle with colon cancer. Joe Frank was the radio | 1/22/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanHow to Be a Hero | What are people thinking when they risk their lives for someone else? Are they making complicated calculations of risk or diving in without a second thought? Is heroism an act of sympathy or empathy? A few years ago, we spoke with Walter F. Rutkow | 1/9/2018 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 13 | CleanVideoInside Radiolab (Video) | Take a stroll through where Radiolab is made and meet some of the people who have created your favorite episodes. Help make another year of curiosity possible. Radiolab.org/support If you're having trouble watching the video you can view it by clickin | 12/28/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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14 |
CleanBigger Little Questions | We're back with Part 2! When we dumped out our bucket of questions, there was a lot of spillover. Like, A LOT of spillover. So today, we’re chasing down answers to some bigger, little questions. This episode was reported and produced by Annie Mc | 12/22/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBig Little Questions | Here at the show, we get a lot of questions. Like, A LOT of questions. Tiny questions, big questions, short questions, long questions. Weird questions. Poop questions. We get them all. And over the years, as more and more of these questions arrived in | 12/20/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSuper Cool | When we started reporting a fantastic, surreal story about one very cold night, more than 70 years ago, in northern Russia, we had no idea we'd end up thinking about cosmology. Or dropping toy horses in test tubes of water. Or talking about bacteria. O | 12/5/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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17 |
ExplicitRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - Mr. Graham and the Reasonable Man | This story comes from the second season of Radiolab's spin-off podcast, More Perfect. To hear more, subscribe here. On a fall afternoon in 1984, Dethorne Graham ran into a convenience store for a bottle of orange juice. Minutes later he was unconsciou | 11/30/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanStereothreat | Back in 1995, Claude Steele published a study that showed that negative stereotypes could have a detrimental effect on students' academic performance. But the big surprise was that he could make that effect disappear with just a few simple changes in l | 11/23/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanMatch Made in Marrow | You never know what might happen when you sign up to donate bone marrow. You might save a life… or you might be magically transported across a cultural chasm and find yourself starring in a modern adaptation of the greatest story ever told. One day, | 11/9/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanOliver Sacks: A Journey From Where to Where | There’s nothing quite like the sound of someone thinking out loud, struggling to find words and ideas to match what’s in their head. Today, we are allowed to dip into the unfiltered thoughts of Oliver Sacks, one of our heroes, in the last months of | 10/26/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFather K | Today, while the divisions between different groups in this country feel more and more insurmountable, we zero in on a particular neighborhood to see if one man can draw people together in a potentially history-making election. Khader El-Yateem is a | 10/12/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - American Pendulum I | This story comes from the second season of Radiolab's spin-off podcast, More Perfect. To hear more, subscribe here. What happens when the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land, seems to get it wrong? Korematsu v. United States is a case that’ | 10/1/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanDriverless Dilemma | Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It’s a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy. That’s the lesson of the classic Trolley Problem, a moral puzzle that | 9/26/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanOliver Sipple | One morning, Oliver Sipple went out for a walk. A couple hours later, to his own surprise, he saved the life of the President of the United States. But in the days that followed, Sipple’s split-second act of heroism turned into a rationale for maki | 9/21/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: Anna in Somalia | This week, we are presenting a story from NPR foreign correspondent Gregory Warner and his new globe-trotting podcast Rough Translation. Mohammed was having the best six months of his life - working a job he loved, making mixtapes for his sweetheart - | 9/11/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanWhere the Sun Don't Shine | Today we take a quick look up at a hole in the sky and follow an old story as it travels beyond the reach of the sun. We hear from some moon-peeping listeners and then, on the 40th anniversary of their launch, we check in with the Voyager space probes | 8/23/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBreaking News | Simon Adler takes us down a technological rabbit hole of strangely contorted faces and words made out of thin air. And a wonderland full of computer scientists, journalists, and digital detectives forces us to rethink even the things we see with our | 7/27/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Ceremony | Last November, journalist Morgen Peck showed up at her friend Molly Webster's apartment in Brooklyn, told her to take her battery out of her phone, and began to tell her about The Ceremony, a moment last fall when a group of, well, let's just call t | 7/14/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRevising the Fault Line | A new tussle over an old story, and some long-held beliefs, with neurologist and author Robert Sapolsky. Four years ago, we did a story about a man with a starling obsession that made us question our ideas of responsibility and justice. We thought we | 6/27/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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30 |
CleanThe Gondolier | What happens when doing what you want to do means giving up who you really are? We travel to Venice, Italy with reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we lea | 6/15/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Radio Lab | 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 | 5/25/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanNull and Void | Today, a hidden power that is either the cornerstone of our democracy or a trapdoor to anarchy. Should a juror be able to ignore the law? From a Quaker prayer meeting in the streets of London, to riots in the streets of LA, we trace the history of a | 5/11/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFunky Hand Jive | Back when Robert was kid, he had a chance encounter with then President John F. Kennedy. The interaction began with a hello and ended with a handshake. And like many of us who have touched greatness, 14 year old Robert was left wondering if maybe some | 4/25/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Extra: Henrietta Lacks | With all the recent talk about HBO's upcoming film, we decided it would be good time to re-run our story of one woman's medically miraculous cancer cells, and how Henrietta Lacks changed modern science and, eventually, her family's understanding of its | 4/18/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanNukes | 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 | 4/7/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanShots Fired: Part 2 | A couple years ago, Ben Montgomery, reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, started emailing every police station in Florida. He was asking for any documents created - from 2009 to 2014 - when an officer discharged his weapon in the line of duty. He ended up | 3/23/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanShots Fired: Part 1 | A couple years ago, Ben Montgomery, reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, started emailing every police station in Florida. He was asking for any documents created - from 2009 to 2014 - when an officer discharged his weapon in the line of duty. He ended up | 3/17/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanUpdate: CRISPR | It's been almost two years since we learned about CRISPR, a ninja-assassin-meets-DNA-editing-tool that has been billed as one of the most powerful, and potentially controversial, technologies ever discovered by scientists. In this episode, we catch up | 2/24/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: Ponzi Supernova | We thought we knew the story of Bernie Madoff. How he masterminded the biggest Ponzi scheme in history, leaving behind scores of distraught investors and a $65 billion black hole. But we had never heard the story from Madoff himself. This week, rep | 2/9/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanStranger in Paradise | Back in 1911, a box with a dead raccoon in it showed up in Washington D.C., at the office of Gerrit S. Miller. After pulling it out and inspecting it, he realized this raccoon was from the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe, and unlike anything he’d ever | 1/27/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: On the Media: Busted, America's Poverty Myths | We love to share great radio, even if we didn’t make it. Today, On the Media’s Brooke Gladstone tells Jad and Robert about a mammoth project they launched to take a critical look at the tales we tell ourselves when we talk about poverty. In a 5-par | 1/17/2017 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanLose Lose | No matter what sport you play, the object of the game is to win. And that’s hard enough to do. But we found a match where four top athletes had to do the opposite in one of the most high profile matches of their careers. Thanks to a quirk in the tourn | 12/30/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanIt's Not Us, It's You | It’s the end of the year, and the entire Radiolab team is starting to take stock and come up for air. We're excited about how much ground we've covered - stories about college debaters and figure skaters, meat allergies and salmon-eating trees, deathw | 12/15/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBringing Gamma Back | Today, a startling new discovery: prodding the brain with light, a group of scientists got an unexpected surprise -- they were able to turn back on a part of the brain that had been shut down by Alzheimer’s disease. This new science is not a cure, and | 12/8/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - Object Anyway | At the trial of James Batson in 1982, the prosecution eliminated all the black jurors from the jury pool. Batson objected, setting off a complicated discussion about jury selection that would make its way all the way up to the Supreme Court. On this | 11/22/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanOne Vote | Come election season, it's easy to get cynical. Why cast a ballot if your single measly vote can't possibly change anything? In our first-ever election special, we set off to find a single vote that made a difference. We venture from the biggest electio | 11/7/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAlpha Gal | Tuck your napkin under your chin. We’re about to serve up a tale of love, loss, and lamb chops. For as long as she can remember, Amy Pearl has loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, her | 10/27/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSeneca, Nebraska | Back in 2014 the town of Seneca, Nebraska was deeply divided. How divided? They were so fed up with each other that some citizens began circulating a petition that proposed a radical solution. If a majority wanted to they'd self-destruct, end the tow | 10/11/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Primitive Streak | Last May, two research groups announced a breakthrough: they each grew human embryos, in the lab, longer than ever before. In doing so, they witnessed a period of human development no one had ever seen. But in the process, they crashed up against somet | 9/22/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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50 |
CleanUpdate: Eye In the Sky | An update on Ross McNutt and his superpower — he can zoom in on everyday life, then rewind and fast-forward to solve crimes in a shutter-flash. But should he? In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his te | 9/12/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Girl Who Doesn't Exist | In today’s episode, we meet a young woman from Texas, born and raised, who can’t prove that she exists. Alecia Faith Pennington was born at home, homeschooled, and never visited a dentist or a hospital. By both chance and design she is completely | 8/29/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanPlaying God | When people are dying and you can only save some, how do you choose? Maybe you save the youngest. Or the sickest. Maybe you even just put all the names in a hat and pick at random. Would your answer change if a sick person was standing right in front o | 8/21/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFrom Tree to Shining Tree | A forest can feel like a place of great stillness and quiet. But if you dig a little deeper, there’s a hidden world beneath your feet as busy and complicated as a city at rush hour. In this story, a dog introduces us to a strange creature that burrow | 7/30/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanDavid and the Wire | David Weinberg was stuck. He had been kicked out of college, was cleaning toilets by day, delivering pizzas by night and spending his weekends in jail. Then one night he heard a story on the radio and got it in his head that maybe he too could make a g | 7/11/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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ExplicitRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Imperfect Plaintiffs | Last week, the court decided one of this term’s blockbuster cases — a case that could affect the future of affirmative action in this country. The plaintiff was Abigail Fisher, a white woman, who said she was rejected from the University of Texas | 6/28/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: More Perfect - The Political Thicket | This story comes from Radiolab's first ever spin-off podcast, More Perfect. To hear more, subscribe here. When Chief Justice Earl Warren was asked at the end of his career, “What was the most important case of your tenure?”, there were a lot of ans | 6/10/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Buried Bodies Case | In 1973, a massive manhunt in New York's Adirondack Mountains ended when police captured a man named Robert Garrow. And that’s when this story really gets started. This episode we consider a string of barbaric crimes by a hated man, and the a | 6/3/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanComing Soon: More Perfect | How does an elite group of nine people shape everything from marriage and money, to safety and sex for an entire nation? From the producers of Radiolab, More Perfect dives into the rarefied world of the Supreme Court to explain how cases deliberated in | 5/23/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBigger Than Bacon | Today's story is a mystery, shockingly hot, and vanishingly tiny. It starts with a sound, rising like a mist from the marsh, around a dock in South Carolina. But where it goes next - from submarines to superheroes (and yes, Keanu Reeves!); from the surf | 5/9/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanOn the Edge | At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Japan, one athlete pulled a move that, so far as we know, no one else had ever done in all of human history. Surya Bonaly was not your typical figure skater. She was black. She was athletic. And she didn’t seem to c | 4/21/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanCellmates | There’s a black hole in the middle of the history of life: how did we go from tiny bags of chemicals to the vast menagerie of creatures we see around us? Today, we explore one of the most underrated mysteries of all time, and present one possible a | 4/5/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanUpdate: 23 Weeks 6 Days | An update on Juniper French, a tiny baby, born at 23 Weeks and 6 days -- roughly halfway to full term. And a whole universe of medical and moral questions. Technology has had a profound effect on how we get pregnant, give birth, and think about life a | 3/22/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanDebatable | Unclasp your briefcase. It’s time for a showdown. In competitive debate future presidents, supreme court justices, and titans of industry pummel each other with logic and rhetoric. But a couple years ago Ryan Wash, a queer, Black, first-genera | 3/11/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanK-poparazzi | In the U.S., paparazzi are pretty much synonymous with invasion of privacy. But today we travel to a place where the prying press create something more like a prison break. K-pop is a global juggernaut - with billions in sales and millions of fans ha | 2/24/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanHard Knock Life | This Valentine's Day, a mysterious tap tap tapping leads us into a world of sex, death, and head-banging. Biologist Dave Goulson introduces us to the lonely yearnings of an especially pathetic beetle and snatches a sound back from the hands of the devi | 2/12/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanI Don't Have To Answer That | Roosevelt, Kennedy, Eisenhower … they all got a pass. But today we peer back at the moment when poking into the private lives of political figures became standard practice. In 1987, Gary Hart was a young charismatic Democrat, poised to win his party | 1/29/2016 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Cathedral | Ryan and Amy Green were facing the unfaceable: their youngest son, Joel was diagnosed with terminal cancer after his first birthday. Producer Sruthi Pinnamaneni tells the story of how Ryan and Amy stumble onto an unlikely way of processing their exper | 12/28/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Fix | This episode we take a sober look at the throbbing, aching, craving desire states that return people (again and again) to the object of their addiction … and the pills that just might set them free. Reporter Amy O’Leary was fed up with her ex-boyfr | 12/18/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBirthstory | You know the drill - all it takes is one sperm, one egg, and blammo - you got yourself a baby. Right? Well, in this episode, conception takes on a new form - it’s the sperm and the egg, plus: two wombs, four countries, and money. Lots of money. At | 11/22/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanStaph Retreat | 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 day microbe. In the war on devilish microbes, our weapons are starting to fail us. The antibiotics | 11/2/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanUpdate: New Normal? | An update: we revisit our episode about normalcy. Evolution results from the ability of organisms to change. But how do you tell the difference between a sea change and a ripple in the water? Is a peacenik baboon, a man in a dress, or a cuddly fox a si | 10/18/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSmile My Ass | Candid Camera is one of the most original – and one of the most mischievous – TV shows of all time. Admirers hailed its creator Allen Funt as a poet of the everyday. Critics denounced him as a Peeping Tom. Funt sought to capture people at the | 10/6/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanDarkode | It would seem that hackers today can do just about anything they want - from turning on the cellphone in your pocket to holding your life's work hostage. Cyber criminals today have more sophisticated tools, have learned to work collaboratively around t | 9/21/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Rhino Hunter | Back in 2014, Corey Knowlton paid $350,000 for a hunting trip to Namibia to shoot and kill an endangered species. He’s a professional hunter, who guides hunts all around the world, so going to Africa would be nothing new. The target on the other | 9/7/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRemembering Oliver Sacks | In memory of one of our dear friends and one of the truest inspirations for Radiolab, a re-release of the last conversation we had with Dr. Oliver Sacks. When Radiolab was just starting out, Robert asked Dr. Oliver Sacks if he could help us, maybe | 8/30/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanElements | Scientists took about 300 years to lay out the Periodic Table into neat rows and columns. In one hour, we’re going to mess it all up. This episode, we enlist journalists, poets, musicians, and even a physicist to help us tell stories of matter tha | 8/22/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFrom the Archives: Oliver Sacks' Table of Elements | As we're busy working on our next episode, with stories inspired by the Periodic Table of Elements, we thought we'd bring you one of its chief inspirations. As a young boy, neurologist, author and Radiolab favorite Oliver Sacks pored over the page | 8/6/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanShrink | The definition of life is in flux, complexity is overrated, and humans are shrinking. Viruses are supposed to be sleek, pared-down, dead-eyed machines. But when one microbiologist stumbled upon a GIANT virus, hundreds of times bigger than any seen befor | 7/30/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanGray's Donation | A donation leads Sarah and Ross Gray to places we rarely get a chance to see. In this surprising journey, they gain a view of science that is redemptive, fussy facts that are tender, and parts of a loved one that add up to something unexpected. Before h | 7/16/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanMau Mau | This is the story of a few documents that tumbled out of the secret archives of the biggest empire the world has ever known, offering a glimpse of histories waiting to be rewritten. Just down the road from a pub in rural Hanslope Park, England is a ma | 7/2/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanEye in the Sky | Ross McNutt has a superpower — he can zoom in on everyday life, then rewind and fast-forward to solve crimes in a shutter-flash. But should he? In 2004, when casualties in Iraq were rising due to roadside bombs, Ross McNutt and his team came up with | 6/18/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAntibodies Part 1: CRISPR | Hidden inside some of the world’s smallest organisms is one of the most powerful tools scientists have ever stumbled across. It's a defense system that has existed in bacteria for millions of years and it may some day let us change the course of human | 6/6/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanNazi Summer Camp | Reporter Karen Duffin and her father were talking one day when, just as an aside, he mentioned the Nazi prisoners of war that worked on his Idaho farm when he was a kid. Karen was shocked ... and then immediately obsessed. So she spoke with historia | 5/22/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Live: Tell-Tale Hearts featuring Oliver Sacks | A few days ago Radiolab performed a live show and this episode we're bringing you a few of the highlights. They were stories of what motivates us, our drives, our loves and losses. Producer Molly Webster tells us the story of life, near-death and what | 5/11/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSight Unseen | In December of 2009, photojournalist Lynsey Addario was embedded with a medevac team in Afghanistan. After days of waiting, one night they got the call - a marine was gravely wounded. What happened next happens all the time. But this time it was captur | 4/28/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Living Room | We're thrilled to present a piece from one of our favorite podcasts, Love + Radio (Nick van der Kolk and Brendan Baker). Producer Briana Breen brings us the story: Diane’s new neighbors across the way never shut their curtains, and that was the be | 4/9/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 87 | CleanVideoVIDEO: Radiolab Presents: Radio Ambulante | Our story Los Frikis was a collaboration with Radio Ambulante, who produced a story of their own about two of the last surviving frikis, Yohandra and Gerson. They've also made a translated video of their Spanish-language piece and we're thrilled to sh | 4/2/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanLos 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. In a collaboration with Radio Ambulante, reporter Luis Trelles bring us the story of punk rock’s arriva | 3/24/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFu-Go | During World War II, something happened that nobody ever talks about. This is a tale of mysterious balloons, cowboy sheriffs, and young children caught up in the winds of war. And silence, the terror of silence. Reporters Peter Lang-Stanton and Nick Fa | 3/10/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanLa Mancha Screwjob | All the world’s a stage. So we push through the fourth wall, pierce the spandex-ed heart of professional wrestling, and travel 400 years into the past to unmask our obsession with authenticity and our desire to walk the line between reality and fanta | 2/23/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Trust Engineers | When we talk online, things can go south fast. But they don’t have to. Today, we meet a group of social engineers who are convinced that tiny changes in wording can make the online world a kinder, gentler place. So long as we agree to be their lab ra | 2/9/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAmerican Football | Today, we tackle football. It’s the most popular sport in the US, shining a sometimes harsh light on so much of what we have been, what we are, and what we hope to be. Savage, creative, brutal and balletic, whether you love it or loathe it … it’s | 1/28/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: Invisibilia | Producers' Note: A correction has been made to this audio to reflect the wishes of the subject of this story, Paige Abendroth. NPR's Invisibilia's originally included Paige's birth name in this piece due to a miscommunication between Invisibilia's repor | 1/9/2015 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanWorth | This episode, we make three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations fro | 12/22/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanButtons Not Buttons | Buttons are usually small and unimportant. But not always. Sometimes they are a portal to power, freedom, and destruction. Today we thread together tales of taking charge of the little things in life, of fortunes made and lost, and of the ease with wh | 12/12/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanOutside Westgate | In the wake of public tragedy there is a space between the official narrative and the stories of the people who experienced it. Today, we crawl inside that space and question the role of journalists in helping us move on from a traumatic event. NPR's | 11/29/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanPatient Zero - Updated | The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds—Patient Zero. This hour, Radiolab hunts for Patient Zeroes of all kinds and considers the course of an ongoing ou | 11/12/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanHaunted | Dennis Conrow was stuck. After a brief stint at college, he’d passed most of his 20’s back home with his parents, sleeping in his childhood room. And just when he finally struck out on his own, fate intervened. He lost both his parents to cancer. So | 10/30/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanTranslation | How close can words get you to the truth and feel and force of life? That's the question poking at our ribs this hour, as we wonder how it is that the right words can have the wrong meanings, and why sometimes the best translations lead us to an unders | 10/19/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanJohn Luther Adams | What's the soundtrack for the end of the world? We go looking for an answer. When Jad started to compose music for our live show Apocalyptical, he immediately thought of John Luther Adams. Adams' symphony “Become Ocean,” rooted in the sounds of nat | 10/3/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanJuicervose | Ron and Cornelia Suskind had two healthy young sons, promising careers, and a brand new home when their youngest son Owen started to disappear. 3 months later a specialist sat Ron and Cornelia down and said the word that changed everything for them: A | 9/18/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanIn The Dust Of This Planet | Horror, fashion, and the end of the world … things get weird as we explore the undercurrents of thought that link nihilists, beard-stroking philosophers, Jay-Z, and True Detective. Today on Radiolab, a puzzle. Jad’s brother-in-law wrote a book c | 9/8/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanHello | 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, watch your TV shows, or even speak your language. Plus he has a blowhole. In this episode, we | 8/20/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanHappy Birthday Bobby K | It’s Robert’s birthday! (Or it was, anyway, a couple days back.) So today we celebrate with some classic Krulwich radio and a backwards peek into the spirit and sensibility that, in many ways, drives our show. For his birthday surprise we all liste | 8/7/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFor the Birds | Today, a lady with a bird in her backyard upends our whole sense of what we may have to give up to keep a wild creature wild. When the conservationists showed up at Clarice Gibbs’ door and asked her to take down her bird feeders down for the sake of a | 7/24/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanGalapagos | Today, the strange story of a small group of islands that raise a big question: is it inevitable that even our most sacred natural landscapes will eventually get swallowed up by humans? And just how far are we willing to go to stop that from happening? | 7/16/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean9-Volt Nirvana | Learn a new language faster than ever! Leave doubt in the dust! Be a better sniper! Could you do all that and more with just a zap to the noggin? Maybe. Sally Adee, an editor at New Scientist, was at a conference for DARPA - The Defense Advanced Resear | 6/26/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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Clean≤ kg | A plum-sized lump of metal takes us from the French Revolution to an underground bunker in Maryland as we try to weigh the way we weigh the world around us. In this short, we meet a very special cylinder. It's the gold standard (or, in this case, the p | 6/13/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThings | From a piece of the Wright brother's plane to a child’s sugar egg, today: Things! Important things, little things, personal things, things you can hold and things that can take hold of you. This hour, we investigate the objects around us, their power | 5/29/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Skull | Today, the story of one little thing that has radically changed what we know about humanity’s humble beginnings and the kinds of creatures that were out to get us way back when. Wits University Professor Lee Berger and Dr. Chris Stringer from London | 5/15/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanFor the Love of Numbers | It’s hard to think of anything more rational, more logical and impersonal than a number. But what if we’re all, universally, also deeply attuned to how numbers … feel? Why 2 is warm, 7 is strong and 11 is downright mystical. In this short, | 5/2/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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112 |
Clean60 Words | This hour we pull apart one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 2001, that has led to the longest war in U.S. history. We examine how just 60 words of legal language have blurred the line between war and peace. In the hours after the a | 4/17/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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113 |
CleanStraight Outta Chevy Chase | From boom bap to EDM, we look at the line between hip-hop and not, and meet a defender of the genre that makes you question... who's in and who's out. Over the past 40 years, hip-hop music has gone from underground phenomenon to global commodity. But a | 4/1/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanKILL 'EM ALL | They buzz. They bite. And they have killed more people than cancer, war, or heart disease. Here’s the question: If you could wipe mosquitoes off the face of the planet, would you? Ever since there have been humans, mosquitoes have been biting us, and | 3/25/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanWhat's Left When You're Right? | More often than not, a fight is just a fight... Someone wins, someone loses. But this hour, we have a series of face-offs that shine a light on the human condition, the benefit of coming at something from a different side, and the price of being right. | 2/24/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanNeither Confirm Nor Deny | How a sunken nuclear submarine, a crazy billionaire, and a mechanical claw gave birth to a phrase that has hounded journalists and lawyers for 40 years and embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need | 2/12/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBrown Box | You order some stuff on the Internet and it shows up three hours later. How could all the things that need to happen to make that happen happen so fast? It used to be, when you ordered something on the Internet, you waited a week for it to show up. | 1/28/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBlack Box | This hour, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—those peculiar spaces where it’s clear what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but what happens in-between is a mystery. From the darkest parts of metamorphosis, to a sixty ye | 1/16/2014 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Times They Are a-Changin' | At the start of this new year we crack open some fossils, peer back into ancient seas, and look up at lunar skies to find that a year is not quite as fixed as we thought it was. With the help of paleontologist Neil Shubin, reporter Emily Graslie and | 12/30/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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120 |
CleanSex, 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 jilted lover’s revenge have to do with an international chemical weapons treaty? More than you’d think. From poison and duck hunts to o | 12/19/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 121 | CleanVideoVIDEO: Radiolab Live Apocalyptical Sneak Peek | A preview of Radiolab's live show Apocalyptical: dinosaurs, death, destruction... plus cinematic live scoring and comedic mayhem from Reggie Watts and Kurt Braunohler. Feast your eyes on more video -- including a cut of the full show! -- at radiolab.or | 12/9/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanApocalyptical | Cataclysmic destruction. Surprising survival. In this new live stage performance, Radiolab turns its gaze to the topic of endings, both blazingly fast and agonizingly slow. This hour we celebrate the one thing that all things do: end. From the stage in | 12/8/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAn Ice-Cold Case | Scientists' obsession with one particular man - and with the tiny scraps of evidence left in the wake of his death - gives us a surprisingly intimate peek into the life of someone who should've been lost to the ages. A little over 20 years ago, a perfe | 11/19/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanCut and Run | Legions of athletes, sports gurus, and scientists have tried to figure out why Kenyans dominate long-distance running. In this short, we stumble across a surprising, and sort of terrifying, explanation. At the 1968 summer Olympics in Mexico City, Kipch | 11/1/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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125 |
CleanUPDATE: Famous Tumors | When we first released Famous Tumors, Rebecca Skloot's book about the life and legacy of Henrietta Lacks (and her famous cells) had just hit the shelves. Since then, some interesting things have happened to both Henrietta's cells and her family. So, 4 | 10/22/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanQuicksaaaand! | For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear -- it held a vise-grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. But these days, quicksand can't even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we | 10/10/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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127 |
CleanPoop Train | You may not give a second thought (or backward glance) to what the toilet whisks away after you do your business. But we got wondering -- where would we wind up if we thought of flushing as the start, and not the end, of a journey? In this short, we he | 9/24/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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128 |
CleanBlame | We've all felt it, that irresistible urge to point the finger. But new technologies are complicating age-old moral conundrums about accountability. This hour, we ask what blame does for us -- why do we need it, when isn't it enough, and what happens wh | 9/11/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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129 |
CleanDawn of Midi | In this short, Jad puts on his music hat and shares his love of Dawn of Midi, a band that he recently started using on the show. Midi, for those of you who don't know, is sort of like a computer language for music. But the band Dawn of Midi seems to ex | 8/29/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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130 |
CleanRodney Versus Death | What do you do in the face of a monstrous disease with a 100% fatality rate? In this short, a Milwaukee doctor tries to knock death incarnate off its throne. In the fall of 2004, Jeanna Giese checked into the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin with a set | 8/13/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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131 |
CleanBlood | From medicine to the movies, the horrifying to the holy, and history to the present day -- we're kinda obsessed with blood. This hour, we consider the power and magic of the red liquid that runs through our veins. | 7/30/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanHappy Birthday, Good Dr. Sacks | One of our favorite human beings turns 80 this week. To celebrate, Robert asks Oliver Sacks to look back on his career, and explain how thousands of worms and a motorbike accident led to a brilliant writing career. More Oliver: "The Joy of Old Age. (No | 7/9/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAlly's Choice | Producer Lu Olkowski brings us the story of a tightly-knit family caught on opposite sides of a very big divide. If you ask Ally Manning's mom and sister, they'll tell you there's no question: they're black. But as a teenager, Ally decided that what wa | 7/2/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanCurious Sounds from the Solid Sound Festival | This fall, we're hitting the road with our brand-new live show. We're stopping in 20 cities across the US (plus 1 stop in Canada), and we have some exciting news about the special musical guests who are joining us for the tour. Listen to a quick sneak | 6/27/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Trouble with Everything | The desire to trace your way back to the very beginning, to understand everything -- whether it's the mysteries of love or the mechanics of the universe -- is deeply human. It might also be deeply flawed. In this short, Jad and Robert talk to a writer | 6/13/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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136 |
CleanAdoptive 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 entangled a biological father, a heart-broken couple, and the tragic history of Native American | 5/30/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 137 | CleanVideoVIDEO: Radiolab Behind the Scenes | If you've ever wondered how the podcast comes together, or what it's like to work at Radiolab, here's a peek into our process. If you're a fan of the show, help us make more Radiolab by making a contribution. Thanks so much, Radiolab couldn't exist wit | 5/20/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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138 |
CleanThe Septendecennial Sing-Along | Every 17 years, a deafening sex orchestra hits the East Coast -- billions and billions of cicadas crawl out of the ground, sing their hearts out, then mate and die. In this short, Jad and Robert talk to a man who gets inside that noise to dissect its m | 5/14/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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139 |
CleanThe Distance of the Moon | What if the moon were just a jump away? In this short, a beautiful answer to that question from Italo Calvino, read live by Liev Schreiber. According to one theory, the moon formed when a Mars-sized chunk of rock collided with Earth. After the moon c | 4/16/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRadiolab Presents: TJ & Dave | Improv comedy puts uncertainty on center stage -- performers usually start by asking the audience for a prompt, then they make up the details as they go. But two actors in Chicago are taking this idea to its absolute limit, and finding ways to navigate | 4/2/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanAre You Sure? | This hour, we walk the tightrope between doubt and certainty, and wonder if there's a way to make yourself at home on that razor's edge between definitely...and not so sure. We meet a geologist whose life is rocked by a crisis of faith, talk to a gambl | 3/25/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanREBROADCAST: Emergence | This spring, parts of the East Coast will turn squishy and crunchy -- the return of the 17-year cicadas means surfaces in certain locations (in patches from VA to CT) will once again be coated in bugs buzzing at 7 kilohertz. In their honor, we're rebro | 3/19/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Man Behind the Maneuver | In the 1970s, choking became national news: thousands were choking to death, leading to more accidental deaths than guns. Nobody knew what to do. Until a man named Henry Heimlich came along with a big idea. Since then, thousands and thousands -- maybe | 3/5/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSpeedy Beet | There are few musical moments more well-worn than the first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. But in this short, we find out that Beethoven might have made a last-ditch effort to keep his music from ever feeling familiar, to keep pushing his li | 2/19/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSpeed | We live our lives at human speed, we experience and interact with the world on a human time scale. But this hour, we put ourselves through the paces, peek inside a microsecond, and master the fastest thing in the universe. | 2/4/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanThe Bitter End | We turn to doctors to save our lives -- to heal us, repair us, and keep us healthy. But when it comes to the critical question of what to do when death is at hand, there seems to be a gap between what we want doctors to do for us, and what doctors want | 1/15/2013 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanSolid as a Rock | Is reality an ethereal, mathematical poem... or is it made up of solid, physical stuff? In this short, we kick rocks, slap tables, and argue about the nature of the universe with Jim Holt. It's comforting to think that if you take an object -- a rock, | 12/31/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanBliss | Moments of total, world-shaking bliss are not easy to come by. Maybe that's what makes them feel so life-altering when they strike. And so worth chasing. This hour: stories of striving, grasping, tripping, and falling for happiness, perfection, and ide | 12/16/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
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CleanRaising Crane | In this short, costumed scientists create a carefully choreographed childhood for a flock of whooping cranes to save them from extinction. It's the ultimate feel-good story, but it also raises some troubling questions about what it takes to get a speci | 12/3/2012 | Free | View in iTunes |
| 149 Items |
Customer Reviews
Excellent original radio program!
Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich captivate the imagination with the best original topics and discussion in a the most fun sounding experience found on radio or online. From broad topics like "outer space" to "understanding basic Music language", each show takes the listener on an exploration into the overlooked of the everyday. This is a really great show that is extremely well produced.
This Is Why I Love Radio
Thank you WNYC and all who made this show available as a FREE podcast. Late for work, late for school my family can't t get enough of such a well thought out creative radio delight. My mind is till tingling with shock and awe.
It's hard to estimate the value of this podcast
This podcast stands out as pretty much constantly astounding. As someone who writes about science for a living, the 'scientific' concepts here are rendered in an enviably fascinating and pretty much idiot-proof way. It's a testament to the skills of the hosts in their use of the audio format that they can cruise through really complex stuff and give the ordinary listener entertainment and learning in a single scoop. This is the best. Now if they would only get season one on itunes....
