Radiolab

Bruce Stewart-Brown, Purdue Chicken CMO who led removing routine antibiotics from poultry. Steffanie Strathdee, infectious disease epidemiologist who helped rescue her husband with bacteriophage therapy. Avir Mitra, emergency physician and special correspondent reporting live on antibiotic resistance. They tour hospitals, farms, sewers and labs. They explore bacterial evolution, farm-to-human spread, stewardship, and phage therapy as a countermeasure.

A medieval recipe is recreated and tested against modern staph bacteria. Researchers mix onion, garlic, ox gall, wine and brass following a thousand-year ritual. Lab results show the ancient brew can kill stubborn MRSA strains. The story raises questions about antibiotic resistance, pharmaceutical decline, and whether old knowledge can help solve new medical crises.

Sarah Kari, reporter and producer who led the investigation into screwworm outbreaks, narrates a hunt for a revived parasite and the century-spanning effort to exterminate it. The story covers the sterile-male method, massive aerial releases, a Panama barrier, a 2023 resurgence, rebuilding production, and the ethical debate over deliberately wiping a species from the planet.

Menno Schilthuizen, an evolutionary biologist who studies snail genital evolution, joins to explore snail mating weirdness. Short, vivid scenes describe simultaneous penis eversion, multi-hour hookups, and bizarre love darts. Snail anatomy, sperm conflict, and the surprising role of dart-delivered mucus in manipulating mates are highlighted in lively, often funny detail.

Jesse Cox, radio producer who unearthed his grandparents’ mysterious Piddingtons; Molly Webster, producer who probes the chrysalis transformation; Patrick Purden, anesthesiologist studying brain activity under anesthesia; Tim Howard, producer who narrates the anesthesia and magic strands. They trace disappearing consciousness, a liquefied metamorphosis that keeps memory, and a decades‑old radio telepathy mystery. Each story stays delightfully unknowable.

Sarah Gray, a mother and memoirist who lost her infant son Thomas to anencephaly, tells a deeply personal story. She traces how Thomas’s tissue and organs traveled to labs, from eye research to cord‑blood and liver experiments. The narrative follows her searches, surprising meetings with scientists, and how those discoveries reshaped her sense of meaning.

Sunil Nakrani, an engineer and PhD researcher who studied web infrastructure, tells how honeybee behavior inspired a server-allocation algorithm. He recounts chasing web crashes, collaborating with biologists, and mapping waggle-dance rules to servers. The conversation covers experiments with bees, the math behind the algorithm, and surprising real-world applications.

John, who lives with schizoaffective disorder, shares a personal account of wearing many layers even in heat as a way to cope. He describes voices, medication struggles, and how bundling became a shield. The conversation explores redundant clothing across clinicians and studies, the social meaning of layering, and surprising links between social life and body temperature.

Rachel Gross, science journalist who lived through a cerebellar stroke, tells a personal quest into what the cerebellum really does. She traces its surprising ties to language, emotion, social attunement, and singing. Short scenes move from karaoke failure to choir rehearsals, surgical choices to brain wiring and evolution, all probing how movement and thought might share a neural conductor.

Will Storr, an author and journalist, joins Mitch Saunders, a longtime friend of John Vasconcellos, to explore the fascinating rise and fall of the self-esteem movement. They dive into Vasconcellos's transformative journey from a troubled upbringing to a charismatic political figure who championed self-esteem as a public policy tool. Listeners learn about the controversial impacts of self-esteem initiatives in schools and the cultural backlash that followed. Storr and Saunders reflect on the complexities of self-worth, ultimately questioning whether elevating self-esteem is truly beneficial.