I’ve spent a lot of hours driving and cleaning the house lately, and that means I’ve also been listening to a lot of podcasts. Lately I’ve been especially enjoying Radiolab, a show out of the public radio station in New York.  My good buddies Chris Knauer and Ira Glass both recommended the show to me ages ago, but it wasn’t until recently that I began listening regularly. It’s a quirky show similar to This American Life in the type of stories it covers, but is generally more focused on science topics, making it especially interesting to me.  All the back episodes are available free online.  Here I’ll ruin a few of the episodes for you by describing some of the more surprising findings:

Google maps thinks I can bike this 2,964 mile route in 10 days and 15 hours (after 1183 turns and no sleep). I'm less confident.

5/16/2010 Limits – talks about the limits on our bodies and minds. They claim that the human body is very conservative about its own limits, and will make you sore and exhausted long before you really come anywhere close to running out of energy. The energy gets saved just in case something truly terrible happens and the body needs to release some extra bursts. They describe the Race Across America, which sounds like an absolutely horrible experience.  People bike all the way across the country, more or less non-stop; sleep is “optional”.  The winner usually takes about 8-9 days, and bikes 22 hours each day. The radio show describes a rider from the Slovenian army who has won the race in five of the last seven years. Not surprisingly, he basically goes crazy after a day or two of pushing his body so hard, but this just leads to him having vivid hallucinations about being chased by enemy soldiers… in turn, these terrifying visions fill up his adrenaline and trick his body into giving him just a little bit more energy.

6/28/2010 Oops – this show covers various unlikely events and their even more unlikely consequences. One segment discusses the Berkeley Pit in Montana, a lake of toxic waste leftover from mining operations. The spot is of course a huge eyesore, but it was even worse in 1995 when a flock of over 300 snow geese landed in the pool thinking it would make a nice rest stop… they were sadly mistaken. Despite the poisonous nature of the pollutants in the pit, biologists have recently found a number of amazingly hardy microorganisms able to survive there.  One of them is even able to do a remarkably good job at transforming the waste into less harmful substances. The kicker: that particular microorganism has only been found one other place–the bowels of snow geese!

I’ve really enjoyed listening to these and other episodes of the show.  Sometimes the results from one segment of the show are used a bit too freely to make claims about later parts, but it is still quite thought provoking. The two hosts make a great pair, and give the show a nice style.  Highly recommended!