Outside/In

For a long time, the elusive night parrot of the Australian outback was believed to be extinct. Then, an experienced birder with a reputation for dubious finds offered up foolproof evidence that the …

In our 10X10 series, we examine places that might not seem all that interesting... places like your typical frozen pond.  Sure, on the surface it's a wind-swept desert of crunchy snow and frigid temp…

Outdoorsy types are the among the biggest ambassadors of Leave No Trace, a set of principles and best practices for sharing and conserving wilderness areas. But while most people agree on the broad s…

The 40-hour workweek is as American as apple pie, and it’s been around almost as long. So, is it finally time to re-think our Monday-through-Friday lifestyle? With modern mechanization and automation…

Here's a humdinger of a thought experiment: How fast could people go before the combustion engine and other technologies drastically increased the speed of the human race? And how did they pull it of…

Pirate trails are everywhere: the pioneers of mountain biking built them on private land, public land and everything in between. They were built by riders just looking for a place to take their new b…

Everyone's heard of Vikings - their daring North Atlantic voyages, their mysterious runes. But there's another ancient culture in Arctic Scandinavia that's much older, and just as fascinating - the S…

There's only one place in the world that you can find the axolotl—the Mexican salamander—in the wild. This creature is the living embodiment of Xolotl, the Aztec god of heavenly fire, of lightning an…

Ask Sam: that special time when scientists worldwide cringe as Sam & the team speculate wildly on a diverse range of topics before picking up the phone to call in the real experts. 

This time, we've …

Listener feedback is a big part of working in radio and podcasting. We try to look for the lesson in every critical email, phone call, or tweet (even the cranky ones). However, there is one listener …

Today the second in our two-part series on the politics of population. In this episode, we’re digging into the story of how around the turn of the millennium, population got all tangled up in immigra…

Today, we’re talking about population. How it went from being on the front pages of our newspapers and all over late night television to being the issue that you’ll only hear from out of the mouth of…

Two barrels. Four bodies. And the decades-long mystery that led to a serial killer.

A special look at a new podcast from NHPR, Bear Brook: A podcast about a cold case that's changing how murders will…

Today, we take a step back to imagine a world without a web of GPS satellites telling your smartphone where you are every second of the day. While this might sound scary, come along and maybe you’ll …

Today, we’re giving you an inside look at what it takes to make the podcast. A bunch of people make this show, which means that our ideas meetings almost inevitably turn into total chaos when one of …

News flash: men aren't the only people who enjoy the outdoors. No sh*#, right? But the outdoor gear industry has only recently started to realize that there are more people wanting high quality gear …

There are between eight and ten thousand wildfires in the United States each year, but most quietly burn out and we never hear about them. The Pagami Creek Wildfire in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Can…

Another year… another record-breaking wildfire season. Thanks to climate change the fire season now starts sooner and ends later.  Scientists also say climate change will make lightning more frequent…

Bengal cat is an attempt to preserve the image of a leopard in the body of a house cat — using a wild animal’s genes, while leaving out the wild animal personality. But is it possible to isolate the …

It took 200 years of dealing with with the invasive European green crab before American scientists finally decided to head back to the source. And when they did, they discovered that the invasive sco…