Life in a Barrel

This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kieltywith help from - Shahib Al-Masawa Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim HowardFact-checking by - Michelle Soraka EPISODE CITATIONS: Books - Memoir of A Debulked Woman by Susan Gubar's book called Being Mortal by Atul Gawande Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Signup (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

For most of human history, people went about their daily lives with a worm or two (or fifty) in their guts. Only in the past century, with pharmaceuticals and sanitation practices, have we made significant strides towards deworming the whole of humanity. And that’s typically been thought of as a good thing, because having too many worms in your body can–quite literally–suck the life out of you. But is it possible to have… too few worms? Science wonders if deworming ourselves has actually led to an increase in certain chronic diseases. On this episode, we dive into Necator americanus, a.k.a. the American Hookworm, and its mysterious relationship with each of us. We trace the hookworm’s 118-year journey from a demonized economic depressant, to its use as a desperate D.I.Y. immunosuppressant, to its potential as a medical treatment for a number of chronic diseases, everything from asthma to MS. We’re bringing back two stories  from our 2009 episode Parasites plus new research on hookworms and autoimmune diseases, reported by Molly Webster Special thanks to Ethan Hein for the use of his remix of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21. Plus, Doris Pierce, and Dan and Alice Hadley. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Pat Walters and Molly Websterwith help from - {{wREPORTERS}} Produced by - Matt Kielty with help from - Rebecca Rand Fact-checking by - Diane A. Kelly and Edited by  - Arianne Wack EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles - Effect of experimental hookworm infection on insulin resistance in people at risk of type 2 diabetes (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37495576/) by Giacomin PR et al. Nat Commun. 2023 Jul 26 Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us. Cruelty, violence, badness... in this episode we begin with a chilling statistic: 91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgram's famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it's both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918...around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why? EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Pat Walters and Latif Nasser Produced by - Pat Watlers with help from - Carter Hodge. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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 in the world. They were there to capture video of what they say were thousands of mistreated and abused animals kept in tiny metal cages barely bigger than their bodies. As they were leaving, they took two sick piglets out with them. Prosecutors in Utah charged Wayne with burglary and theft. What came next was the court battle that he wanted all along. During his trial, Wayne made a truly bizarre argument that forced the jury, and all of us, to stare straight at our complicated, sometimes uncomfortable relationship with animals. This week on the show, we grapple with the impossible question at the center of it: What is the value of a piglet? Special thanks to Kim Nederveen Pieterse, Nathan Peereboom, Jo Eidman, Sam Kozloff, Rachel Gross, Alex Allaux, and Joan Schaffner. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Sindhu Gnanasambandan and Jae MinardProduced by - Sindhu Gnanasambandanwith help from - Pat Walterswith mixing help from - Jeremy BloomFact-checking by - Diane A. Kellyand Edited by  - Alex Neason and Pat Walters EPISODE CITATIONS: Articles - A Rabbit, is a rabbit, is a rabbit… Not under the Law (https://zpr.io/ezUPRE36VZVk) by Schaffner, J. E. in The Global Journal of Animal Law Animal Rights Activists Are Acquitted in Smithfield Piglet Case (https://zpr.io/ayaV9gDneNsw) by Andrew Jacobs in The New York Times Meet the Activists Risking Prison to Film VR in Factory Farms (https://zpr.io/HEXdpf5Q7VAB)  by Andy Greenberg in Wired Audio - VR Puts Viewers Inside the Grisly Reality of Factory Farms (https://zpr.io/pMHq5RVkzUM3) a 2-part podcast by Wired Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

For much of history, tree canopies were pretty much completely ignored by science. It was as if researchers said collectively, "It's just going to be empty up there, and we've got our hands full studying the trees down here! So why bother?" But then around the mid-1980s, a few ecologists around the world got curious and started making their way up into the treetops using any means necessary (ropes, cranes, hot air dirigibles) to document all they could find. It didn't take long for them to realize not only was the forest canopy not empty, it was absolutely filled to the brim with life. You've heard of treehouses? How about tree gardens?! This week, we bring you a story we first released in 2022. We journey up into the sky and discover forests above the forest. We learn about the secret powers of these sky gardens from ecologist Korena Mafune, and we follow Nalini Nadkarni as she makes a ground-breaking discovery that changes how we understand what trees are capable of. P.S. This episode is a layer cake of arboreal surprises (including the reappearance of a certain retired host. LATERAL CUTS:From Tree to Shining Tree (https://zpr.io/4cHtDdYTuNxT): The episode that started this journey, where we look down instead of up. EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Annie McEwenProduced by - Annie McEwen EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - Inside the Fight to Save an Ancient Forest (and the Secrets it Holds) (https://zpr.io/XKipP2z4NFiM), by Michael Werner, Joe Hanson, and the PBS Overview team. We first learned about the magical world of the canopy from this beautiful video. It features Korena Mafune’s research up in the treetops, as well as the people who have dedicated their lives to saving what’s left of the old growth forests. We highly recommend checking it out! Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected] support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.