Outside/In

Humans are noisy. The National Park Service estimates that all of our whirring, grinding, and revving machines are doubling or even tripling global noise pollution every 30 years.  A lot of that noise is negatively affecting wildlife and human health. Maybe that’s why we’re so consumed with managing our sonic environments, with noise-cancelling headphones and white noise machines — and sometimes,...

In Appalachia, Hurricane Helene was a thousand-year-flood. It flattened towns and forests, washed roads away, and killed hundreds. But this story is not about the flood. It’s about what happened after. A month after Hurricane Helene, our producer Justine Paradis visited Marshall, a tiny town in the Black Mountains of western North Carolina, a region renowned for its biodiversity, music, and art. S...

A few months ago, producer Marina Henke saw two skunks sprint under her porch. Since then, she can’t stop wondering what’s really going on beneath her feet. And as it turns out, she’s not the only one. Every day across the country, homeowners are waging wars with the animals who stake out our porches, decks and crawl spaces. Have we as humans inadvertently designed luxury apartments for “unwelcome...

For over ten years, biologist Mark Higley has been stalking the forests of the Hoopa Valley Reservation with a shotgun. His mission? To save the northern spotted owl. The threat? The more aggressive barred owl, which has spread from eastern forests into the Pacific Northwest. The federal government plans to scale up these efforts and kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls across multiple states...

For the past few weeks, we’ve been exploring the issue of human remains collections for our miniseries, “What Remains.” Today, we want to share another excellent series that has covered some similar, but also, very different ground. Introducing “Postmortem: The Stolen Bodies of Harvard,” the latest season of Last Seen from WBUR.  In this first episode, the police find buckets of body parts in a ba...

A scholar and an activist make an uncompromising ultimatum. A forgotten burial ground is discovered under the streets of New York City. In Philadelphia, two groups fight over the definition of “descendant community.”  Featuring Michael Blakey, Lyra Monteiro, Chris Woods, aAliy Muhammad, Wendell Mapson, Sacharja Cunningham, Jazmin Benton, Amrah Salomon, and Aja Lans.    MORE ABOUT “WHAT REMAINS” Ac...

A classroom display of human skulls sparks a reckoning at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. A movement grows to “abolish the collection.” The Penn Museum relents to pressure. More skeletons in the closet. This episode contains swears. MORE ABOUT "WHAT REMAINS" Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists say they’ve helped lay...

A 1,500 year old skeleton is diagnosed with tuberculosis. A visit to a modern-day bone library. A fight over the future of ethical science. MORE ABOUT "WHAT REMAINS" Across the country, the remains of tens of thousands of human beings are held by museums and institutions. Scientists say they’ve helped lay the foundations of forensic science and unlocked the secrets of humanity’s shared past.  But...

When KALW’s Marissa Ortega-Welch hit the Pacific Crest Trail, she used her preferred method of navigation: an old-fashioned trail map. But along the way, she met a couple who only used phones to guide them, a Search and Rescue team that welcomes the power of GPS, and a woman who has been told her adaptive wheelchair isn't allowed in official wilderness areas (not actually true). So… does technolog...

Perhaps you’re familiar with our Outside/Inbox hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER. Anyone can leave us a voicemail sharing questions about the natural world, and we periodically answer them on the show.  A few weeks ago, it came to our attention that we hadn't gotten a new voicemail in some time. Turns out our hotline has been bugging out for at least six months, and we have a lot of catching up to do.   So,...

In the early 1900s, people didn’t trust refrigerated food. Fruits and vegetables, cuts of meat… these things are supposed to decay, right? As Nicola Twilley writes, “What kind of unnatural technology could deliver a two-year old chicken carcass that still looked as though it was slaughtered yesterday?” But just a few decades later, Americans have done a full one-eighty. Livestock can be slaughtere...

For more than two hundred years Americans have tried to tame the Mississippi River. And, for that entire time, the river has fought back.  Journalist and author Boyce Upholt has spent dozens of nights camping along the Lower Mississippi and knows the river for what it is: both a water-moving machine and a supremely wild place. His recent book, “The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Missi...

Helium is full of contradictions. It’s the second most abundant element in the universe, but is relatively rare on Earth. It’s non-reactive, totally inert—yet the most valuable helium isotope is sourced from thermonuclear warheads.  And even though we treat it as a disposable gas, often for making funny voices and single-use party balloons, our global supply of helium will eventually run out. That...

Jack Rodolico knows exactly what scares him. Sharks.  But here’s what he doesn’t get: if he’s so freaked out, why can’t he stop incessantly watching online videos of bloody shark attacks?  Why would he deliberately seek out the very thing that spooks him? To figure it out, Jack enlists the help of other scaredy-cats: our listeners, who shared their fears about nature with us. Together, Jack and th...

From the perspective of Western science, plants have long been considered unaware, passive life forms; essentially, rocks that happen to grow.  But there’s something in the air in the world of plant science. New research suggests that plants are aware of the world around them to a far greater extent than previously understood. Plants may be able to sense acoustics, communicate with each other, and...

GPS is essential these days. We use it for everything – from a hunter figuring out where the heck they are in the backcountry, to a delivery truck finding a grocery store, to keeping clocks in sync. But our reliance on GPS may also be changing our brains. Old school navigation strengthens the hippocampus, and multiple studies suggest that our new reliance on satellite navigation may put us at high...

Once again, it’s that wonderful time when scientists everywhere hold their breath as the team opens the Outside/Inbox to answer listener questions about the natural world. Today’s theme is smell: how it works in the nose, the mind, and how much is still unknown about the fifth sense. Question 1: Does it gross you out to know that every time you smell something, a little bit of that thing… is in yo...

Redwood National and State Parks are home to giants: coast redwoods that can grow as tall as a thirty-story building. These ancient California forests support hundreds of different species, and store more carbon than any other forest on the planet. But in the last century, 95% of them were felled by loggers.  Now, scientists have discovered a surprising strategy to foster the next generation of ol...

Will Simone Biles live up to her moniker as greatest gymnast of all time? Will Lebron James and Team USA continue to dominate men's  basketball? And will the Paris 2024 Games be the most sustainable in modern Olympic history? While billions of viewers tune in for the drama of athletes competing on a global stage, climate scientists are tuning in to Paris's climate promises – from the locally sourc...

You might not think much about the sticky bottle of vanilla sitting in the back of your pantry. But that flavor – one of the most common in the world – has a fascinating history, involving a fickle orchid and a 12-year-old enslaved boy who made the discovery of a lifetime.  That’s the sort of tale that attracts poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. From peacock feathers to the sounds of garden insects, her...

Introducing the newest series from NHPR’s award-winning Document team: “The Youth Development Center.” New Hampshire has sent its most troubled kids to the same juvenile detention center for more than a century. It's a place that was supposed to nurture them, that instead hurt them – in some of the worst ways imaginable. It's now at the center of one of the biggest youth detention scandals in Amer...

Maybe you’ve looked at the sky on a clear night and spotted the International Space Station, a tiny white dot gliding through the stars. Maybe it felt special, a rare glimpse of a human-made satellite in space.  But what if you were to look up at the sky and see more visible satellites than stars? What if the Big Dipper and Orion were drowned out by  a satellite traffic jam, criss-crossing through...

Consider the potato.  The typical potato is not all that pretty. They can be beige and lumpy, dusty and speckled, and on top of that, they even sprout alien-like tentacles. Further, no one really knows what to make of the potato. Is it a vegetable, or so starchy that we should really consider it a grain?  It’s time for answers. The Outside/In team ventures into the potato patch and presents three...

Ed Yong’s writing about the pandemic in Atlantic Magazine was read by millions of Americans. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021 for his coverage.  But behind the scenes, he was struggling with burnout, anxiety and depression.  Host Nate Hegyi sits down with Ed for a conversation about how he decided to step back from pandemic reporting, the benefits (and possible drawbacks) of birdwatching for mental...

During their twelve seasons as winter rangers in Yosemite National Park, Rob and Laura Pilewski have learned a thing or two about what it means to love a place – and a person. This episode comes to us from the wonderful folks at The Dirtbag Diaries, another podcast that features stories about conservation, epic adventures, and more.  Featuring Rob and Laura Pilewski   SUPPORT Outside/In is made po...