Radiolab for Kids Podcast

Artist Ashley Eliza Williams was so shy growing up that they found it hard to speak to people. Instead, they withdrew from the world of humans and found comfort in the forest, where they spent hours exploring, scavenging and collecting, eventually discovering lichen. They began painting portraits of lichen’s wild, colorful, and fuzzy shapes. In time, Ashley learned that lichen i

Have you ever seen an island on a lake? On an island? On a lake? On another island? Josh Calder has. Working in a dusty room of a library, he first saw one on a map, and has been fascinated with these “recursive islands” ever since. Songbud Alan Goffinski takes us on a wild journey into these secret bullseyes hiding all over planet Earth. We learn from ecologist Elba Montes why

BLAST OFF! NASA just sent a spacecraft to Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, and on the side of that spacecraft, they included a poem. Not just any poem — a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón. A poem that’s supposed to represent all of humanity to the universe. No biggie. Host Lulu Miller opens up the floor to kids from all over the country to ask Limón and NASA scientist Cyn

The Greenland shark is ugly. Its eyes look cloudy and dead. Its snout and fins are stubby. Its meat is poisonous. And that may be part of why most people have overlooked these sharks for so long. But there was a rumor circulating among Greenland villagers that this deepsea dweller could survive for centuries. Scientist John Steffensen went on a hunt to see if this was true and disc

The honeybee. The ever-important pollinator for our plants is disappearing. Some call it the silence of the bees, others call it colony collapse disorder. Dr. Sammy Ramsey, our official bug correspondent, wondered, could it be due to parasites? And if so, how do we catch all of them? This question takes Dr. Sammy to the heart of a jungle in Bangladesh to look for overlooked honeybe

Middle schooler, Aanya, has an up-close encounter with a squirrel in the school yard, which leads her to an obsession with one of North America's most common critters. She tells host Lulu Miller all about the overlooked superpowers of squirrels, including one squirrel who lives way up in the Arctic, where the weather gets so cold the squirrels who live there drop their body tempera

As dead as they seem, tree stumps are hubs of life and relationships. From stumps to snags, deadwood provides habitat for rodents, falcons, insects, and even humans! Stumps hold together the forest floor, give hunting perches to birds of prey in flatlands, prevent erosion and the encroachment of invasive species, usher in sunlight, provide nutrients, can be wells of renewable fuel,

Terrestrials is Radiolab's spin-off nature show for families and for people of all ages that explores the strangeness that exists right here on Earth. Each episode feels like a fairytale that is 100% true. Host Lulu Miller (co-host of Radiolab) leads you on a nature walk to encounter incredible creatures, wild storytellers, and original songs from "The Songbud" Alan Goffinski. That

Think about the sounds you hear on a daily basis. Air conditioners whirring, keyboards clicking, cars honking, mosquitos buzzing, dishes clanking. Now picture yourself in a jungle. What do you hear? How do you make sense of it? Today on Radiolab for Kids, we eavesdrop on the world of animals. We bring you a story of two humans decoding animal sounds in nature. Science journalist Ar

Today’s episode asks how scientists see the world. We bring you two stories: one about a math guy and a bug guy. First, how the math guy—or one of our country's greatest mathematicians—Steven Strogatz, first became enchanted with math as a kid. Then a story about a human developing a soft corner (literally) for a fly that lived in his scalp—the botfly. Evolutionary biologis