The uneasy marriage of biology and engineering raises big questions about the nature of life. In this hour, Radiolab journeys to the first billion years of life on Earth, looks at how modern engineers tinker with living things, and meets a woman who could have been two people.
In 1938, Orson Welles produced a radio play that sounded an awful lot like a news report about Martians invading New Jersey. On this hour of Radiolab: deconstructing “The War of the Worlds,” and the power of mass media to create panic.
We examine the strange power of lies with a charismatic cast of characters (from pathological liars to lying snakes to drunken psychiatrists) on this hour of Radiolab.
We travel across the ocean and back to the year 1962, to a girl's boarding school on the outskirts of a rural village in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where an epidemic of contagious laughter broke out. Producer Ellen Horne investigates and her search for an explanation brings us back to the ...
This hour of Radiolab: we explore the line between music and language, and turn to physics and biochemistry to ask how sound becomes feeling.
What happens when there is no leader? Starlings, bees, and ants manage just fine. In fact, they form amazingly complicated societies. This hour of Radiolab: a look at the bottom-up logic of cities, Google, and even our brains.
It's not only artists who rebel against time, many physicists too take issue with our standard notion of clock time. Some even deny time exists at all. Blame Einstein. We peer into pandora's box of post-Einsteinian physics with Brian Greene, Michio Kaku and Lisa Randall to consider the implications of ...
Remembering is a tricky, unstable business. This hour of Radiolab: implanting false memories in loved ones, and erasing painful memories by simply swallowing a pill. Plus: the story of a man with the worst case of amnesia ever documented.
Wanted: Meat. Preferably alive. That is, if you're a carnivore. But most carnivores in zoos find themselves being fed something more along the lines of a hamburger... or in zoo lingo "a meatsicle." And like in the movie "Supersize Me," the result of this diet is a bunch of overweight, ...
This hour, Radiolab revels in the elasticity of Time, and takes a spin through history--stopping at a 19th-century railroad station in Ohio, a track meet, and a Beethoven concert.
Sleep is one of science's greatest mysteries. This hour of Radiolab, we look for answers in iguanas who doze with one eye open, new parents in the throes of sleep deprivation, and rats who may be dreaming.
From the symbolic power of the doctor coat, to the very real stash of opium in your brain, this hour of Radiolab explores the healing powers of belief and imagination.
The "mind" and "self" were formerly the domain of philosophers and priests. But in this hour of Radiolab, neurologists lead the charge. We reflect on the illusion of selfhood, contemplate the evolution of consciousness, and meet a woman who one day woke up as a completely different person.
Under high gravity forces, fighter pilots often lose consciousness while flying jet planes. This hour of Radiolab, examining the connection between your brain and your body...and what happens when it breaks.
Warning: this section gets gorey. We'll start off with fatality, trauma, and bear attack. Neurologists Robert Sapolsky and Antonio Damasio weigh in on 19th century philosopher William James, and his theory of emotion (and of bears), which says “emotion is a slave to physiology.” ...
