Radiolab

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.

For meditation number fifteen we have a reading from David Eagleman's book Sum. It's a vision of the after life that's both playful and... horrifying. Sum is read by actor Jeffrey Tambor.

Another meditation on what happens after the moment of death, this time as Shakespeare envisions it. 

We continue our meditations on death with a reading from poet and writer, Mark Doty. This is an excerpt from Doty's 1996 memoir Heaven's Coast.

This week on the podcast, we continue our meditations on death. Our After Life episode had eleven meditations, and now we’re gonna throw a new one at you each day, all week long, culminating in a very special treat at the end of the week. 

This hour: Radiolab stares down the very moment of passing, and speculates about what may lie beyond.

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 Dad. So is Richard Dawkins always so gloomy and reductionist about the world? Well yes, but he would say that his vision of the world is anything but gloomy, he even calls it romantic. In this conversation from the 92nd St Y, Robert challenges Dawkins on this and a number of other sticky spots on the topic of biological evolution.

After we released our show about Stochasticity, we received a lot of comments about the idea humans can be just as predictable as coins. In that show, Jonah Lehrer was telling us about a study on the 82-83 76ers, and he was saying that even when a basketball player is supposedly hot – really on a streak – he is no more likely to make his next shot that any other time. Basketball players are slaves to their averages. Well, it turns out this isn't the whole story.

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, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body.

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, neuroscientist David Eagleman, and finally, we visit a CPR class.

On May 6th, at WNYC's new Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, we opened up an age old can of worms. Jad and Robert faced off over which medium is superior -- television or radio. This American Life's Ira Glass was the referee. There were stunning jabs, wicked uppercuts, and even the occasional low blow.