A good game--whether it's a pro football playoff, or a family showdown on the kitchen table--can make you feel, at least for a little while, like your whole life hangs in the balance. This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert wonder why we get so invested in something so trivial. Read more here.
In this new short, writer Ian Frazier describes finding a corner of Siberia where no one had ever heard of tic tac toe. And Jad and Robert wonder how a game that seems carved into childhood DNA could be completely unknown in some parts of the world. Read more here.
The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command. In this short, Jad and Robert meet a young researcher who was studying the basal ganglia in mice--until one fateful day...when things got really, really weird. More here.
Robert pinpoints a moment of terror from his 9th grade existence: the day his biology teacher demanded he memorize the Krebs cycle. And he wonders if this fear-inducing task still scares kids off science, and unnecessarily turns them away from their own natural curiosity. Read more here.
Latest Comments
This show does illustrate the scientific process perfectly: we have to always make sure we are ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTION. ...
I liked this episode; it shows that some ideas that seem brilliant at first can ultimately turn out to be ...
I love that you posted this song! I discovered it a few years ago while on a trip to NYC ...
Hello ;) If the word "Qualia" hasn't been brought up already... I think its a good description of this tendency ...