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Their Dark Materials
Episode 386
Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a hole cut out…
6 years, 1 month ago
Shade
Episode 385
Journalist Sam Bloch used to live in Los Angeles. And while lots of people move to LA for the sun and the hot temperatures, Bloch noticed a real dark…
6 years, 1 month ago
Mini-Stories: Volume 8
Episode 384
This is part 2 of the 2019- 2020 mini-stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world that don’…
6 years, 2 months ago
Mini-Stories: Volume 7
Episode 383
It’s the end of the year and time for our annual mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories that came up in our research for anot…
6 years, 2 months ago
Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman- Founder Effect
The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars.
Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate …
6 years, 2 months ago
The ELIZA Effect
Episode 382
Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum's life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at MIT. It wa…
6 years, 3 months ago
The Infantorium
Episode 381
“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs and am…
6 years, 3 months ago
Mannequin Pixie Dream Girl
Episode 380
In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of mannequin…
6 years, 3 months ago
Cautionary Tales
Episode 379
Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster often makes catastrophe all the more likely. His ba…
6 years, 3 months ago
Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness
Episode 378
There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little…
6 years, 3 months ago