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Act One

In 1980, deep in a nuclear missile silo in Arkansas, a simple human error nearly caused the destruction of a giant portion of the Midwest. Joe Richman, founder of Radio Diaries tells the story.  Eric Molinsky helped report this story.

Act Four: Period Drama

Remember learning that women’s menstrual cycles tend to sync up when they spend a lot of time together? Producer Diane Wu was skeptical. So she went looking for evidence.

Prologue

If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, why haven’t we heard from the extraterrestrials yet? Producer David Kestenbaum explains The Fermi Paradox to host Ira Glass. The possibility that we are alone in the universe makes David sad.

Prologue

Ira talks to Biba Struja – a Serbian man who says that when he was in high school, he discovered that he seemed to have a high resistance to electricity. It’s a power that he’s utilized, but is mostly a curse.

Prologue

A year ago, we did a story about a study that found that a simple 20-minute conversation could change someone’s mind about controversial issues like gay marriage and abortion. But a few weeks after we aired the story, the study was discredited.

Act One: Do These Genes Make Me Look Fatless?

Journalist David Epstein tells the story of Jill Viles, who has muscular dystrophy and can’t walk. But she believes that she somehow has same condition as one of the best hurdlers in the world, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep.

Prologue

NPR Science reporters Alix Spiegel and Lulu Miller explain to Ira Glass how they smuggled a rat into NPR headquarters in Washington, and ran an unscientific version of a famous experiment first done by Psychology Professor Robert Rosenthal. It showed how people’s thoughts about rats could affect their behavior.

Act One: Batman Begins

Lulu tells the story of Daniel Kish, who’s blind, but can navigate the world by clicking with his tongue. This gives him so much information about what’s around him, he does all sorts of things most blind people don’t.

Act Five

Science teacher Jason Pittman, who teaches pre-school through sixth grade at a school in Fairfax County, Virginia, won a big teaching award this week. In fact, during his ten years teaching, he’s won many, many awards.

Prologue

David Kestenbaum tells Ira about the time, when he was doing graduate work in physics, he and his other single friends decided to figure out the mathematical probability that they’d find girlfriends. They wanted to know what the chances were that there was more than one person in the world for them.

Prologue

Reporter Josh Bearman tells Ira a story about two coded messages that Galileo sent to fellow scientist Johannes Kepler back in the 17th century. Galileo was trying to tell Kepler about some of the amazing discoveries he made with his new telescope.