For our Guts episode, producer Tim Howard bravely headed to Rutgers University to see, feel...and smell...a fistulated cow firsthand. Check out his pictures here.

While visiting Sweden, Latif Nasser encountered the spirit of a long-dead legend of taxonomy. And he found himself wondering about an age-old puzzle: how do you savor the mystery of new-found oddities while you're uncovering the facts behind the weirdness?

Sean Cole tries to square the idea that the fallout from a war between teensy organisms and teensier viruses can be seen from space. Luckily, he finds a perspective-shaking demo built by two 14-year-old boys that helps him get his bearings. Read more, and play with the demo, here.

Every day, every moment, an epic battle is raging across the globe. It's happening in the ocean. And the evidence is both highly visible and totally hidden, depending on your perspective. In this short, the tale of an arms race involving trillions of sea creatures--and why their struggle is vital to our survival.

Sometimes being a good scientist requires putting aside your emotions. But what happens when objectivity isn't enough to make sense of a seemingly senseless act of violence? In this short, Jad and Robert talk to an entomologist about the risks, and the rewards, of trying to see the world through someone else's eyes. 

Look at this animal. ... What do you see? Or more importantly, what don't you see?

After hearing about the "Whale Fall" story in our just-released Loops episode, former Radiolab intern Sharon Shattuck rallied the folks at Sweet Fern Productions and made this beautiful video. They created an intricate world of paper cutouts to illustrate the different stages a whale carcass goes through after dropping to the bottom of the ocean. The music is courtesy of Kentucky-based band Rachel's.

Little kids love dinosaurs, bugs and exploring the woods. Science doesn't scare them; they find it fun — until 9th grade. That's when most of us take our first biology class and everything changes. That's when we learn, not because we choose to, but because we know it might be on The Test, and too often, curiosity gets replaced by fear.

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 a brief snippet from a conversation Robert had with Richard Dawkins at the 92 Street Y in New York City, we learn that natural selection is often a brutal arms race, inherently full of suffering and cruelty. But if Darwin's big idea is really predicated on pain and selfishness, ...

Soren Wheeler takes us to Butte Montana--where an open pit copper mine’s demise leads to a toxic lake filled with corrosive runoff. Reporter Barret Golding goes to visit the pit lake, and writer Edwin Dobb tells Soren the story of a pile of dead snow geese who made an ill-fated ...

To start, Robert tries to touch--literally touch--the tumor that killed President Ulysses S. Grant. But will its keepers (Dr. Adrianne Noe and Brian Spatola) let him?

Next, writer David Quammen explains an unsettling discovery in Tasmania. When wildlife photographer Christo Baars noticed strange ...

Can a tumor ever be a source of good? Neurologist Dr. Orrin Devinsky thinks so. He recalls the true story of a man, his tumor, and a euphoric reaction to safety pins. Next, Mark Salzman reads from his novel Lying Awake. When a nun develops a brain tumor, ...

We end with the extraordinary story of Henrietta Lacks. Though she died of cervical cancer in 1951, she unknowingly held the key to unlocking medical advancements (from polio vaccines to chemotherapy drugs) in her tumor cells. After taking a biopsy of Henrietta's cervical cancer, researcher Dr. George Gey and his ...

Is empathy a purely human quality? In this segment, Jad and Robert explore the inner workings of the spindle cell, those long neurons that might connect thoughts to feelings, with the help of Dr. Patrick Hof and Jonah Lehrer. Then they talk to Dr. Clive Wynne again to ...

Brian Hare tells us the story of Dmitri Belyaev, a geneticist and clandestine Darwinian who lived in Stalinist Russia and studied the domestication of the silver fox. Through generations of selectively breeding a captive population, Belyaev noticed not only increased docility, but also unexpected physical changes. Why did these ...

When executive producer Ellen Horne was expecting a baby, she really had no particular intention of becoming a self-made expert on a parasite named Toxoplasma Gondii. Robert Sapolsky explains to us why Ellen had reason to worry when she was scratched by her cat, and he traces the unlikely ...

Dickson Despommier tells us the story of how the insatiable millionaire John D. Rockefeller turned an eye to the untapped market of the American South and ended up eradicating the hookworm (and, in the process, a number of other awful afflictions) with an ingenious contraption. Then Pat Walters ...