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I listen to National Public Radio pretty religiously while I'm at work. Every summer, NPR does a documentary every Tuesday night. The first 5 episodes each year are done by WNYC radio's program, RadioLab.
I am fully in love with this program. They cover a massive breadth of topics, talk to some intensely interesting people, and communicate these things in such a way as to make each subject interesting occasionally in spite of itself.
Strange sound editing and clips, seemingly minor research from unheard-of people that end up contributing a great deal to the subject at hand, and a couple of pitch-perfect hosts, Jeff Abrumrad and Robert Krulwich, that seem like they would be as at home having a beer with you as they do explaining things like time, morality, sleep, etc.
They've done three seasons so far and are working on a 4th for next year; here's a quick summary of the seasons / episodes and a link to where you can download the podcasts or listen to an audio stream.
Season 1
-Who Am I?
-Stress
-Emergence
-Time
-Beyond Time
Season Two
-Detective Stories
-Musical Language
-Morality
-Where Am I?
-Space
Season Three
-Placebo
-Sleep
-Zoos
-Memory & Forgetting
-Mortality
From the last season, I would especially recommend the 'Sleep' and 'Mortality' episodes. I never knew ducks sleep in a row, with the ducks on the inside resting their entire brain and both eyes closed, while the ducks on the outside would sleep with half their brain still active and the eye on the outside of the group still open to watch for predators. Every few hours, the ducks rotate 180 degrees so that the poor saps on the outside can switch the half of the brain that's asleep.
Apparently, dolphins do about the same thing, leaving half their brain awake to keep them floating above water and breathing while the other half sleeps.
Anyway. Massively cool, go check it out.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/ |
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