Radiolab

In 2017, Wayne Hsiung and a crew of animal rights activists from Direct Action Everywhere broke into a Utah pig farm run by Smithfield Foods, one of the largest pork distributors i...

There’s something rotten in the cows of Denmark. And Minnesota. And Wisconsin. And Idaho. What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking wate...

In an episode first aired back in 2025 on our sister show, Terrestrials, we take you on a musical journey all about beavers. Few mammals have a bigger positive impact on the planet...

Doctor and special correspondent Avir Mitra takes Executive Editor Soren Wheeler, plus a live studio audience, on a journey from the operating room to inside the body to the farm t...

If a species is horrible enough, do we have the right to kill it forever? Seventy years ago, a nightmare parasite feasted on the live flesh of warm-blooded creatures in North Amer...

In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion an...

In this episode, first aired in 2014, we examine three very different kinds of black boxes—spaces where we know what’s going in, we know what’s coming out, but can’t see what happe...

Before he was even born, Sarah and Ross Gray knew that their son Thomas wouldn’t live long. But as they let go of him, they made a decision that reverberated through a world that t...

In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck. Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a y...

In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran this episode in 2021: Five sto...

One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back of her brain...

Most of us spend some part of our lives feeling bad about ourselves and wanting to feel better. But this preoccupation is a surprisingly new one in the history of the world, and ca...