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Into the Abyss
Thanks to the very kind folks at the New Jersey Agricultural Experimental Station at Rutgers, I was able to visit their fistulated cow, Lily. I met up with Clint Burgher, the Director of the farm, and...
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Krulwich Wonders: What The Vampire Said To The Horseshoe Crab: 'Your Blood Is...
I'd never seen this before, because I thought it was just a figure of speech referring to kings and noblemen. But in real life, there are creatures that have blue blood — literally blue — like this:...
View ArticleWhen Brains Attack!
In this episode, strange stories of brains that lead their owners astray, knock them off balance, and, sometimes, propel them to do amazing things. We hear from a kid whose voice was disguised from...
View ArticleBasal ganglia gone wild
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. Enter Liza Shoenfeld. After graduating from college in...
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Pigeons Have Magnets...Right?
In our Lost & Found episode, producer Tim Howard told the story of a pigeon named G. I. Joe, an avian war hero whose astonishing navigational skills saved over 1000 lives in an Italian town after...
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Brain Fodder Vol. 2
This week: a singing planet, scientific proof that lots of things really do taste like chicken, a love letter to a map, and lots more... Soren Wheeler Soren confesses his love for data viz: "I’m a...
View ArticleDiagnosis Hangout Party
This weekend, our episode Diagnosis airs on public radio stations across the country. Get fired up with our studio party experiment -- we hosted a quick Google Hangout On Air with a crew of Radiolab...
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Krulwich Wonders: Tough Old Lizards to Face Grave Romantic Troubles, Say...
Oh, dear. Courtesy of Piotr Naskrecki First off, this lizard? It's not really a lizard. It's an almost vanished species, a reptile like no other. Its nearest relatives are ichthyosaurs, pterosaurs,...
View ArticleA Glimpse of Neverland
Ooooooooh, New Normal has been on the airwaves this week. This is by far one of my favorite Radiolabs ever and I think that’s because what the episode is really about is that elusive but definite thing...
View ArticleStochasticity
Stochasticity (a wonderfully slippery and smarty-pants word for randomness), may be at the very foundation of our lives. To understand how big a role it plays, we look at chance and patterns in sports,...
View ArticleWhy we fall into a good book
We tackle a question from a listener, this time about storytelling. To answer it, we turn to the brain of Jonathan Gottschall, a writer who has devoted much of his early career to understanding why...
View ArticleInheritance
Once a kid is born, their genetic fate is pretty much sealed. Or is it? This hour, we put nature and nurture on a collision course and discover how outside forces can find a way inside us, shaping not...
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Leaving Your Lamarck
Jad starts us off with some wishful parental thinking: that no matter how many billions of lines of genetic code, or how many millions of years of evolution came before you, your struggles, your...
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Revenge of the Caterpillars: A Footnote to “Contagious Laughter”
As a grad student who is writing my dissertation on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962, I am partial to one particular Radiolab segment … on the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic of 1962.For those of...
View ArticleOn Goose Bumps
Holy heck, I just learned something crazy.So you know about vestigial traits? Organs or attributes that no longer serve their original purpose, but still haven't completely vanished. Like your...
View ArticleMoms and Inheritance: Tracing the Maternal Line
When talking to researchers for the genetics portion of our Inheritance show, one thing that consistently came up is that it's difficult for science to study the effects maternal lineage has on...
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Brain Fodder Vol. 6
A giant trampoline, a burger refill denied, and buffaloing English grammar...Pat WaltersPat is not pulling our legs, the world now contains a 170-foot long trampoline, in the Kaluga region of western...
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Mapping the Bilingual Brain
I was recently introduced to a friend’s five-year-old daughter, and I’m already living in her shadow. She is being raised with not one, not two, but three languages. I began calculating how soon this...
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Krulwich Wonders: My Yeast Let Me Down: A Love Song
In a moment, there's going to be singing. It will be a love song, sung by Nathaniel, a sad-eyed, blue-gloved scientist who gave his heart to an organism, but then did her wrong. (Or maybe she did him...
View ArticleWhy Cry?
One question that listeners keep shooting our way is why do humans cry? Be it something stuck in our eye, a surge of love, a great joke, a death, or just a crappy Tuesday -- we cry a lot (and when we...
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