WNYC's Radiolab is a masterpiece of radio science. I'm a late joiner to the "Jad and Rob" party but I've finally caught up on season 4 during my bike rides to and from the lab. The whole series is free to download on their website and I highly recommend listening to it.

To justify this recommendation I've decided to post some of the great things I learned from listening to Radiolab, in reverse chronological order, to whet the knowledge appetite of the reader:

• A study of laughter found 85% of laughing is proceeded by stuff that is not a joke (Laughter)
• You can engineer an E. Coli culture can smell like Wintergreen when it's growing, and Bananas when it's completed growing (So-Called Life)
• People who admit to thinking about raping or being raped by an individual make worse athletes (Deception)
• Our brains produce opium (Placebo)
• Harvard professor Robert Stickgold got a cover of Science thanks to Tetris (Sleep)
• Scientists have erased memories in rats (Memory)
• Lobsters are immortal (Mortality)
• The number of the beast, 666, was once 616 (Detective Stories)
• In Mandarin, there is a single word that means mother, hemp, horse, and reproach depending on the tone it is enunciated (Musical Language)
• A study found killing 1 person by a lever to save 4 people is accepted whereas killing 1 person by pushing them off a bridge to save 4 people is not acceptable, regardless of age, gender, or education level (Morality)
• Some people have a condition where they lose all feeling within their own body (Where Am I?)
• Dr. Peter Diamandis funded the X-prize for the first private-sector manned space flight by making a 10 million dollar "bet" with an insurance company that it could be done (Space)
• It is not known how thousands of fireflies shine can in synchronization (Emergence)
• The author of Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie, may have had psychogenic dwarfism (Stress)
• Monkeys have no introspective consciousness (Who Am I?)
• Your brain activity to wiggle your finger spikes before you "decide" that you want to wiggle your finger (Beyond Time)
• The people of the Andaman Forests in India have a scent calendar where they tell the seasons based on the scent of various fruits and flowers (Time)