Radiolab

Our lives are filled with loops that hurt us, heal us, make us laugh, and, sometimes, leave us wanting more. This hour, Radiolab investigates the strange things that emerge when something happens, then happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and… well, again.

For most of human history, flight was an impossible dream. In this short, the dizzying rise and fall of a pilot whose aeronautic feats changed aviation forever and turned chancy stunts into acrobatic mastery.

Writer Ian Frazier made a startling discovery several years ago in eastern Siberia: no one he met there had ever heard of tic tac toe. In this short, Jad and Robert wonder how a game that seems carved into childhood DNA could be completely unknown in some parts of the world.

A good game--whether it's a pro football playoff, or a family showdown on the kitchen table--can make you feel, at least for a little while, like your whole life hangs in the balance. This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert wonder why we get so invested in something so trivial. What is it about games that make them feel so pivotal?

The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain, deep inside your skull, that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command. In this short, Jad and Robert meet a young researcher who was studying what happens when the basal ganglia gets short-circuited in mice...until one fateful day, when things got really, really weird.

In this short, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.

We're celebrating summer with a classic episode of Radiolab--full of mystery, intrigue...and a goat standing on a cow. We haven't actually tried listening to it around a campfire, but we're betting it would totally work. See you in two weeks with a new short!

In this short, Jad presents the electrifying sounds of three mind-bending musical acts: Brooklyn duo Buke & Gass, drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco, and the one-and-only Reggie Watts. Their performances were recorded live at our Curious Sounds concert earlier this month in NYC.

This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.

In this short, a family dog disappears into the woods...and the mystery of what happened to him raises a big question about what it means to be wild.

In this short, Jonathan Schooler tells us about a discovery that launched his career and led to a puzzle that has haunted him ever since.

This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence -- from the origins of the universe, to what we see when we look in the mirror.

Richard Holmes went to Cambridge University intending to study the lives of poets. Until a dueling mathematician, and a dinner conversation composed entirely of gestures, changed his mind.

What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you? This hour, Radiolab looks for ways to gain the upper hand over those forces inside us--from unhealthy urges, to creative insights--that seem to have a mind of their own.

In today's short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.

This week on the podcast, football! No, it's not a Super Bowl recap. Jad and Robert present a piece from across the pond--a piece about soccer they fell in love with when they heard it at the Third Coast festival in Chicago.

In this episode, we steer our way through a series of stories about getting lost, and ask how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.

In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.

In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.

In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie.

In this hour of Radiolab, we take to the street to ask what makes cities tick.

Jad and Robert pit physics against a bible story with this simple question: could a team of trumpeters really bring down the walls of Jericho?

Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought, inner speech, and the voice in our heads.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But this hour, we try to do just that.

Malcolm Gladwell doesn't like Gifted and Talented Education Programs. And he doesn't believe that innate ability can fully explain superstar hockey players or billionaire software giants. In this podcast, we listen in on a conversation between Robert and Malcolm recorded at the 92nd St Y.

One place you absolutely, positively do not want to be if you're a healthy, middle-aged American lobster: trapped in a suburban grocery store in western Pennsylvania. But that's where this week's podcast begins.

Oops. In this hour of Radiolab, stories of unintended consequences.

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can't recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close, the great artist known for his enormous paintings of ... that's right, faces.

In this hour of Radiolab: an unflinching look at the good, bad, and ugly side of tumors.

Agatha Christie's clever detective novels may reveal more about the inner workings of the human mind than she intended. In this podcast, a look at what scientists uncover when they treat words like data.

Music duo Buke and Gass play for us, attempt to describe their genre-bending sound, and talk a bit about what's it like to play out what you don't say in this podcast.

On this hour of Radiolab: a journey to the edge of human limits.

There’s a common problem faced by Alzheimer's and Dementia patients all over the world: lost in their memories, they sometimes get disoriented, and wander off. In this podcast, Lulu Miller talks to a nursing home in Düsseldorf, Germany that came up with a novel solution.

How do you know your mother is really your mother? It's simple, right? You look at her, you recognize her, enough said. Well, in this podcast...it may not be that simple.

Chimps. Bonobos. Humans. We're all great apes, but that doesn’t mean we’re one happy family. This hour of Radiolab: stories of trying to live together.

In this podcast, a biopsychologist attempts to find an elusive bit of shared space across species lines.

In our episode Animal Minds, we asked whether it was possible for one animal to know what was going on in another animal's mind. For us, it was a really about whether we, as humans, can really share a meaningful moment with an animal. In this podcast, we take that question another step further.

In this hour of Radiolab, stories of cross-species communication.

Ok, so last podcast you heard counting babies. Here’s a new spin...

Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, chances are you rely on numbers every day of your life. Where do they come from, and what do they really do for us? This hour: stories of how numbers confuse us, connect us, and even reveal secrets about us. Transcripts are on individual segment pages.

To get this podcast started, Robert ambushes Jad with a question...a question we've all been dying to ask him since June 10th, 2009, when Amil Abumrad came into the world.

In this podcast, a story about a mom, a boy, and a home-made helicopter.

In this hour of Radiolab: reframing our ideas about normalcy.

We ask a question we thought was a no-brainer in this podcast: why do we blink?

They Might Be Giants just came out with a new album, 'Here Comes Science.' So we invited them to come play with us at our season launch party last week at the Water Taxi Beach in Queens. And then we ambushed them with annoying little questions about science and about the tricky business of turning science into entertainment ... because of that whole, you know, 'getting the facts right' thing.

What's gotten into you? In this hour, Radiolab uncovers a world full of parasites.

Pardon the graphic pun, but hey! For this podcast, Jad--a brand new father--wonders what's going on inside the head of his baby Amil.