Skip to content
Melo Podcasts Home
CategoriesLanguagesFollowing

Episode 675 · Radiolab

Brain Balls

9 Jan 2026 · 41 min

Play episode WhatsApp Download

Episode notes

When neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster was a brand new postdoc, she accidentally used an expired protein gel in a lab experiment and noticed something weird. The stem cells she was trying to grow in a dish were self-assembling. The result? Madeline was the first person ever to grow what she called a “cerebral organoid,” a tiny, 3D version of a human brain the size of a peppercorn. In about a decade, these mini human brain balls were everywhere. They were revealing bombshell secrets about how our brains develop in the womb, helping treat advanced cancer patients, being implanted into animals,…

Podcast

Radiolab

WNYC Studios · Tech & Science · English

Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.

More from Radiolab All episodes →

  1. E680 · 13 Feb 2026 · 39 min

    Time is Honey

    In the early 2000s, Sunil Nakrani felt stuck. Back then, websites crashed all the time. When Sunil noticed this, he decided he was going to fix the internet. But after nearly a year of studying the architecture of the web, he was no closer to an answer. In desperation, Sunil sent out a raft of cold emails to engineering professors. He hoped someone, anyone, could help him figure this out. Eventually, he learned that the internet could only be fixed if he paid attention to the humble honeybee. This is the story of the Honeybee Algorithm: How tech used honeybees to build the internet as we…

  2. E679 · 6 Feb 2026 · 45 min

    Kleptotherms

    In this episode, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out as we discover that temperature is far stranger than it seems. We first ran this episode in 2021: Five stories that run the gamut from snakes to stars. We start out underwater, with a species of snake that has evolved a devious trick for keeping warm. Then we hear the tale of a young man whose seemingly simple method of warming up might be the very thing making him cold. And Senior Correspondent Molly Webster blows the lid off the idea that 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is a sound marker of health. Reported by - Lulu Miller…

  3. E678 · 30 Jan 2026 · 43 min

    Song of the Cerebellum

    One spring evening in 2024, a science journalist named Rachel Gross bombed at karaoke. The culprit was a bleed in a fist-sized clump of neurons tucked down in the back of her brain called the cerebellum. A couple weeks later, her doctors took a bit of it out, assuring her it was just helping her with motor coordination — she might be a bit clumsy for a while, but she’d still be herself. But afterwards, she didn't feel like herself. So she dove into the dusty basement of the brain (and brain science) to figure out why. What Rachel found was a burgeoning new frontier in neuroscience. We learn…

  4. E677 · 23 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 18 min

    You and Me and Mr. Self-Esteem

    Most of us spend some part of our lives feeling bad about ourselves and wanting to feel better. But this preoccupation is a surprisingly new one in the history of the world, and can largely be traced back to one man: a rumpled, convertible-driving California state representative named John Vasconcellos who helped spark a movement that took over schools, board rooms, and social-service offices across America in the 1990s. This week, we look at the rise and fall of the self-esteem movement and ask: is it possible to raise your self-esteem? And is trying to do so even a good idea? Special…

  5. E676 · 16 Jan 2026 · 51 min

    The Punchline

    This episode, first aired in 2019, brings you the story of John Scott, the professional hockey player that every fan loved to hate. A tough guy. A brawler. A goon. But when an impish pundit named Puck Daddy called on fans to vote for Scott to play alongside the world’s greatest players in the NHL All-Star Game, Scott found himself facing off against fans, commentators, and the powers that be. Was this the realization of Scott’s childhood dreams? Or a nightmarish prank gone too far? Today on Radiolab, a goof on a goon turns into a parable of the agony and the ecstasy of the internet, and…

  6. E674 · 2 Jan 2026 · 35 min

    Moon Trees

    In 1971, a red-headed, tree-loving astronaut named Stu ‘Smokey’ Roosa was asked to take something to the moon with him. Of all things, he chose to take a canister of 500 tree seeds. After orbiting the moon 34 times, the seeds made it back to Earth. NASA decided to plant the seeds all across the country and then… everyone forgot about them. Until one day, a third grader from Indiana stumbled on a tree with a strange plaque: "Moon Tree." This discovery set off a cascading search for all the trees that visited the moon across the United States. Science writer, and our very own factchecker,…

  7. E673 · 26 Dec 2025 · 26 min

    Fertility Cliff

    After 35, does fertility tank? As she -- and her friends — approached the age of 35, senior correspondent Molly Webster kept hearing a phrase over and over: “fertility cliff.” It was a short-hand term to describe what she was told would happen to her fertility after she turned 35 — that is, it would drop off. Suddenly, sharply, dramatically. And this was well before she was supposed to hit menopause. Intrigued, Molly decided to look into it — what was the truth behind this so-called cliff, and when, if so, would she topple? This story first premiered in “Thirty Something,” a 2018 Radiolab…

  8. E672 · 19 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 3 min

    The Good Show

    The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today's plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour that we first broadcast back in 2010, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness ... or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine…

  9. E671 · 12 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 1 min

    The Alien in the Room

    It’s faster than a speeding bullet. It’s smarter than a polymath genius. It’s everywhere but it’s invisible. It’s artificial intelligence. But what actually is it? Today we ask this simple question and explore why it’s so damn hard to answer. Special thanks to Stephanie Yin and the New York Institute of Go for teaching us the game. Mark, Daria and Levon Hoover Brauner for helping bring NETtalk to life. And a huge thank you to Grant Sanderson for his unending patience explaining the math of neural nets to us. To learn more about how these 'thinking machines' actually think, we highly…

  10. E670 · 5 Dec 2025 · 40 min

    Shell Game: Minimum Viable Company

    A year ago we brought you a show called Shell Game where a journalist named Evan Ratliff made an AI copy of himself. Now on season 2 of the show, Evan’s using AI to do more than just mimic himself — he’s starting a company staffed entirely by AI agents, and making a podcast about the experience. The show is a smart, funny, and truly bizarre look at what AI can do—and what it can’t. This week we bring you the first episode of Shell Game Season Two, Minimum Viable Company. You can sign up to get the rest of the Shell Game ad-free, and the Shell Game newsletter, at shellgame.co . EPISODE…

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.

Get it on Google Play