Radio Lab: Season Three

Airs on WNYC, Fridays at 3PM on 93.9 FM, January 4th-February 1st

Could the best medicine be no medicine at all? With new research demonstrating the startling power of the placebo effect, Radio Lab examines the chemical consequences of belief and imagination...from the symbolic power of the doctor coat to the very real stash of opium in your mind.

Every creature does it - from giant hump back whales all the way down to fruit flies - and yet science still can't answer the basic questions: Why do sleep? What is it for? We'll eavesdrop on the uneasy dreams of rats in search of answers.

In a cruel trick of evolution, humans can stand just three feet from a ferocious wild animal and still be perfectly safe. What's with our need to get close to 'wildness'? We start with the Romans and end in the wilds of Belize, staring into the eyes of forest jaguar.

According to the latest research, recall is an unstable and profoundly unreliable process. It’s easy come, easy go as we learn how true memories can be obliterated and false ones added. And Oliver Sacks joins us to tell the story of an amnesiac whose love for his wife and music transcend his 7 second memory.

Is death a fact of life or a disease that can be cured (as some scientists claim)? We filter the modern search for the fountain of youth through personal stories of witnessing death...the death of a cell, the death of a loved one...and the aging of a society.