Stress
Stress may save your life if you're being chased by a tiger. But if you're stuck in traffic, it may be more likely to make you sick. This hour of Radiolab, a long hard look at the body's system for...
View ArticlePinpointing the Placebo Effect
All over the world, people say they are healed by things that turn out to be placebo. So it's easy to think that they must have been faking in the first place if all it took was a little sugar pill to...
View ArticleThe Unconscious Toscanini of the Brain
How does the brain produce a thought? Or experience a unitary, whole, synchronized perception of a cup of coffee? For neuroscientists, this is the Mount Everest of questions. We have a look at one...
View ArticleGenghis Khan
By looking at our genes we can link ourselves to our parents, grandparents, and ancestors long long ago. Tatiana Zerjal and Chris Tyler Smith tell the tale of discovering the genetic relation of over...
View Article(So-Called) Life
In this hour, Radiolab asks what is natural in a world where biology and engineering intersect. Biotechnology is making it easier and easier to create new forms of life, but what are the consequences...
View ArticleGenes on the Move
Biology class is all about putting living things into categories, based on their differences. And creatures are different because they have different genes. But life wasn’t always like that. In this...
View ArticleChasing Bugs
Remember the first time you ever saw an ant hill? That parade of black insects pouring in and out of a small sand mound...most of us stopped, looked and then moved on to other parts of the playground....
View ArticleSperm Tales
In today’s podcast, a teaser for our hour-long Sperm show. If you think you learned all there is to know from that junior high school filmstrip, think again.  We give you two short pieces on sperm...
View ArticleSperm
Sperm carry half the genes needed for human life. In this hour of Radiolab, some basic questions and profound thoughts about reproduction. To begin: why so many sperm? We turn to the animal kingdom for...
View ArticleRace
This hour of Radiolab, a look at race. When the human genome was first fully mapped in 2000, Bill Clinton, Craig Venter, and Francis Collins took the stage and pronounced that "The concept of race has...
View ArticleRace and Medicine
BiDil was the first drug approved by the FDA for a specific racial group. We want to know what the ramifications are for using skin color as a diagnostic tool for diseases and disorders that can't be...
View ArticleHow 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 and feelings. Right? Well, maybe not, or maybe...
View ArticleDiagnosis
Humans love to solve problems. In this hour of Radiolab, diagnosis--our attempt to find out what's wrong, and give it a label. In this day and age, we have astonishing technology--chemicals and...
View ArticleThrill of Discovery
Erica Carmel was unimpressed in her physics class at MIT when a professor demonstrated that by swinging a bucket full of water around on a rope, he could invert the bucket above him without it dumping...
View ArticleGlad Somebody Likes Bugs...
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne got all soft inside when he thought about how the botfly larva in his scalp was eating his tissue and turning it into a new organism. It was of him, like a child. His...
View ArticleYellow Fluff and Other Curious Encounters
In this hour of Radiolab, stories of discovery. One of the great and noble pursuits of humankind, the quest for scientific knowledge is also one of the most dangerous, frustrating, ego-driven,...
View ArticleDarwinvaganza
For this week's podcast, Radiolab throws a birthday party for Charles Darwin! Robert Krulwich invites three experts to toast the birthday boy. David Quammen tells us it takes a village to raise a...
View ArticleStayin' Alive
This week on the podcast we take a look at four unconventional ways to stay alive. We talk to geneticist George Church, who originally appeared in our So Called Life Show, biologist Bernd Heinrich,...
View ArticleRandom Rules
The business of life is the business of taking the disorder of the world, little bits of matter scattered here and there, and giving them shape, regularity, order. Or so we all thought. Science...
View ArticleIn Defense of Darwin?
When evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins' daughter was six years old, he told her that flowers are not here for beauty, not here for the bees, but instead merely to copy their own DNA. Sigh, what a...
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