Radiolab

When I was an undergrad I used to mock my neighbor who listened to npr all day while sitting at his computer. Now that I have a job, I pretty much spend all day at my computer and about the best thing I can find for free that requires very little channel surfing on my part is NPR. In particular there is a show Radiolab that I have become quite fond of. If you are the impatient kind you can find their webcasts at www.radiolab.org, start listening, and skip the rest of what I have to say.

I was about 5 years late to the NPR party, and figured I wasn't really breaking into any scenes when I started listening to radio lab. Its two guys talking about science in an interesting way. Nothing super fancy about it, maybe some special effects and a lot of introspective background music but overall well produced. Each episode is about a common theme, and in reality each 1 hour episode is really 3 or 4 smaller episodes that get strung together.

What makes the show good, and really what I am saying is what makes this show worth sitting down to every day and listening to for 4 or 5 hours until you have listened to them all is that it doesn't exhaust your attention. The show is not a textbook, nor a one hour lecture it simply is a collection of stories about science about people.