Signal Hill: Caterpillar Roadshow
11 April 2025 - 50 minsA couple years ago, an entomologist named Martha Weiss got a letter from a little boy in Japan saying he wanted to replicate a famous study of hers. We covered that original study on Radiolab more than a decade ago in an episode called Goo and You – check it out here – and in addition to revealing some fascinating secrets of insect life, it also raises big questions about memory, permanence and transformation. The letter Martha received about building on this study set in motion a series of spectacular events that advance her original science and show how science works when a 12-year-old boy is the one doing it. Martha’s daughter, reporter Annie Rosenthal, captured all of it and turned it in...
Series Episodes
Atomic Artifacts
America represents many different things to many different people. What if you could only choose one thing, one physical object, to represent it all?
40 mins
3 July Finished
The Gondolier
What happens when doing what you love means giving up who you really are?
1 hour 13 mins
26 June Finished
This is Your Brain on Hormones
explicitWe don’t have hormones, hormones have us.
39 mins
19 June Finished
On the Media: American Emergency
A little while back, our friends over at On the Media released a gripping and immersive reporting series about FEMA, the agency that is supposed to be there for all of us in the wake of disaster. In American Emergency (https://zpr.io/MtrUmJU3yEMW), OTM investigates how the agency tasked with saving America became distrusted, despised… and defunded.Today we talk to On the Media co-host Micah Loewinger about how this project came out, what reporting went into making it happen, and play a couple of fun and truly surprising bits of the story that the OTM team uncovered. And it’s a story that highlights the ideal and promise of good government, right alongside the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement, and of course the undercurrent of profound mistrust in governmental power. As natural disasters are getting more extreme and less predictable, this series makes sense of that tangle, and provides a prescient peek into FEMA’s future. Special thanks to On the Media. To hear Micah in person, talking more about the complex history of FEMA, join him on June 24th at WNYC's The Greene Space (https://wnyc.org/events/otm-fema). 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.
55 mins
12 June Finished
