Radiolab 2008

Choice
Sunday, November 23, 9pm
Having an abundance of choices is the hallmark of freedom, but does it make us happy? Just because we have more choices doesn't mean we're better at choosing. We scan rows upon rows upon rows of brilliantly colored, sensuously textured fruits in an upscale market seeking the peak of gustatory delight. We jostle through the sensory overload of the ding! ding! ding! place your bets? blip clang! clang! of an Atlantic City casino calibrated to overwhelm and overpower our cool, calm logic, and then escape into the quiet mind of a perfectly rational man on our journey to understand how emotion and logic interact to guide us through a million decisions a day. We turn up the volume on the voices in our heads and try to make sense of the babble. Forget free will, some important decisions could come down to a steaming cup of coffee. Listen and learn more.

Sperm
Sunday, November 30, 9pm
Peering through his microscope at the seeds of human life, the discoverer of sperm thought he was seeing the smallest incarnation of a human soul. If that was the case, why so many wasted souls? We turn to the animal kingdom to answer that question, which lands us on a tour of sperm battles in ducks, flying pig sperm, and promiscuous whippoorwills. We ponder the necessity of males in a world where sperm can be frozen and kept for all eternity. And we sit quietly in the stark sonic space with a widow struggling to keep some essence of her husband alive through sperm collected from his body minutes after his death. Listen and learn more.

Race
Sunday, December 7, 9pm
At the turn of the millennium, researchers succeeded in sequencing the entirety of the human genome and our President exulted in announcing that humans, regardless of race, are more than 99.9% the same. But as scientists continue to parse the genome into smaller fragments, is turns out that maybe race, or rather ancestry, does have a genetic signature. We find ourselves at the scene of a crime swamped by news reporters and fearful citizens, and visit a DNA lab where machines hiss and thump as they map out the identity of a single human. We migrate with our ancestors across geographic and cultural boundaries, and wind up in the lunchroom of one of the country's most diverse middle schools to talk about the rainbow of hyphenated ethnic distinctions in teenage life. Finally, we follow an Iraqi man back through his memories of the narrow divisions between Sunni and Shi'a that terrorized daily life in Baghdad. Listen and learn more.

Diagnosis
Sunday, December 14, 9pm
What’s in a name? Everything, if that name is carcinoma, or Alzheimer's, or AIDS. Diagnosis comes with a tangled entourage of emotional, social, and medical implications for patient and diagnostician alike. We ride along on the subways and streets of NYC with a young man who's been keeping his mental disorder a secret from his family. We step behind the curtain that separates patients from doctors and find a roller coaster of detachment, empathy, and gallows humor that accompanies the responsibilities of medical professionals. And we lose ourselves in a historical mystery racing to find our way back from a wrong turn that led to the fatal radiation treatment of healthy babies. Listen and learn more.

Yellow Fluff, Rocket Lizards, and Other Curious Encounters
Sunday, December 21, 9pm
An exacting mistress is science. After long months, years, decades of meticulous work, you think you've taken a step forward only to find yourself two steps back. But the promise of an answer is seductive. In this episode of Radio Lab we hear from scientists about their passionate and sometimes fraught relationships with science. Theoretical physicist and author Alan Lightman takes us into the consuming world of pursuit and inquiry, and geneticist Jerry Coyne describes the sense of wonder he felt when faced with his own personal parasite. We go on location to the Gakkel Ridge with an Arctic research expedition in search of three-eyed tube worms, only to find ourselves holding nothing but yellow fluff. Yellow fluff? It's an hour of scientific questions with no answers at the back of the book. Listen and learn more.