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Remember the first time you ever saw an ant hill? That parade of black insects pouring in and out of a small sand mound…most of us stopped, looked and then moved on to other parts of the playground. E. O. Wilson is the kid who never took his eyes off the mound. […]

Aristotle thought babies became human beings only once they laughed for the first time. He also decided that this should happen around their 40th day. Conventional wisdom now puts it at about the 90th day—but we’re probably not as funny as the ancient Greeks.
In the 1930s, researchers at Toronto University tried to chart […]

Clipart
The use of fetal cells in science has become quite controversial. There was an interesting moment in an interview between Radio Lab co-host, Jad Abumrad. and scientist Dr. Leonard Hayflick on this topic when we were making the show Mortality. Dr. Hayflick grew millions of cells from one aborted fetus and pioneered the use of […]

Last summer we traveled to Tanzania in our Laughter show to investigate a 1962 epidemic of contagious laughter. Well, it turns out these sorts of episodes still happen, and not just with laughter. Several fans of the show wrote in to tell us about the BBC reports of mass fainting among girls at a junior […]

robdownunder
Earlier this year, Jad and Robert visited the Koshland Science Museum in Washington D.C. to give listeners a behind-the-scenes look at Radiolab. The question here is just how far can you go in the name of making an idea clear? What’s allowed? Is music allowed? Are sound effects allowed? What helps? What hurts? […]