Today we follow a sleuth who has spent over a decade working to solve an epic mystery hiding in plain historical sight: did anyone survive the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD?
Tired of hearing the conventional narrative that every Pompeiian perished without any evidence to back it up, Classicist Steven Tuck decides to look into it himself. Although he is nearly two millennia late to ground zero, he uses all the available evidence to reimagine the disaster from the perspective of the people on the ground. Could anyone have survived the volcano? If they did, could they have survived what came after that: earthquakes, tsunamis, pumice stones hurtling like missiles from the sky? If someone did survive, what happened to them after that??! To find out we have to think, feel and possibly even eat like Ancient Romans.
An against-all-odds story of a disaster without warning, a mass disappearance without a trace, and oddly, a particularly stinky fish sauce, care of special guest Chef Samin Nosrat.
We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moon
EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Latif Nasser
with help from - Annie McEwen and Ekedi Fausther-Keys
Produced by - Annie McEwen
Recording help from - Adam Howell
Voice acting by - Brandon Dalton
Original music and sound design contributed by - Jeremy Bloom and Annie McEwen
with mixing help from - Arianne Wack
and Hosting Helo from - Sarah Qari
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger
and Edited by - Pat Walters
EPISODE CITATIONS:
Recipes -
Ancient Roman recipe for garum (https://zpr.io/gMNmXcNZUhZg).
Read more about garum here (https://zpr.io/4gh939TxCRpZ) or in Sally Grainger’s book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World
Articles -
On Pliny's letters and the eruption including a reanalysis of the date of the eruption, Pedar Foss, Pliny and the Eruption of Vesuvius (https://zpr.io/kQH49ttRawNZ)
Documentaries -
A recent PBS documentary, Pompeii: The New Dig (https://zpr.io/LV9sWKc4vbQ8) including segments on Steven Tuck’s work.
Photos and Maps -
To trace building locations or names of home owners as well as photos of every square inch of Pompeii: https://pompeiiinpictures.com/pompeiiinpictures/
From Steven Tuck: “If someone has an otherwise unbeatable case of insomnia, my preliminary publication of findings is in Reflections: Harbour City Deathscapes in Roman Italy and Beyond” (https://zpr.io/3pETS53A9CtF)
Brief description of the casts and casting process of the remains found at Pompeii: https://pompeiisites.org/en/pompeii-map/analysis/the-casts/
Maps of the Ancient Roman world that you can use to trace some of the land and sea routes discussed in the episode: https://orbis.stanford.edu
Signup for our newsletter! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!
Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.
Follow our show on Instagram, X, formerly Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org.
Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Плейлист
Radiolab
How a group of 80’s Cuban misfits found rock-and-roll and created a revolution within a revolution, going into exile without ever leaving home. Reporter Luis Trelles brings us the story of punk rock’...
In August we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One...
With this episode, we’re putting on our music hat. For a program that relies so much on scoring and sound, it’s not often we talk about the musicians and the music they make that inspire us. Today, th...
As he finished his medical school exam, David Fajgenbaum felt off. He walked down to the ER and checked himself in. Soon he was in the ICU with multiple organ failure. The only drug for his conditi...
In an episode first released in 2010, then-producer Lulu Miller drives to Michigan to track down the endangered Kirtland’s warbler. Efforts to protect the bird have lead to the killing of cowbirds (a...
Until recently, scientists assumed humans were the only species in which females went through menopause, and lived a substantial part of their lives after they were no longer able to reproduce. And th...
This week: the story of astrophysicist Charity Woodrum. Charity is an extragalactic astronomer who studies the life and death of galaxies, why some galaxies burn bright and others dim and sputter out....
This week, two conversations from the archives about parts of the world that are imperceptible to us, verging on almost unthinkable. We start with a moment of uncertainty in physics. Inspired by an es...
Back in 2017 our colleagues at More Perfect gathered a room full of people together to debate a straight forward question: Can free speech go too far? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has cha...
This hour of Radiolab, former co-hosts Jad and Robert set out in search of order and balance in the world around us, and ask how symmetry shapes our very existence -- from the origins of the universe,...
Have you heard On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial? It’s awesome and you should, and now you will. In this episode they tell the story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to b...
Jilted lovers and disrupted duck hunts provide a very odd look into the soul of the US Constitution.What does a betrayed lover’s revenge have to do with an international chemical weapons treaty? More...
This is episode five of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Today, the strange, squirmy magic behind how sharks make more sharks. Drills. Drama. Death. Even a coliseum of baby sharks duki...
This is episode four of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Alison Kock was working at a car wash in Cape Town when she made a discovery that completely changed the course of her life. In...
This is episode three of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Today, we take a trip across the world, from the south coast of Australia to … Wisconsin. Here, scientists are scouring shark...
This is episode two of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Jaws spawned a thousand imitators: sharks in tornados, sharks in avalanches, sharks that battle giant octopuses. Hollywood has o...
Episode one of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks.Rodney Fox went into the ocean one summer day in 1963. He came out barely alive, his body torn apart by a great white shark. At the time...
In the summer of 1975, Jaws scared an entire generation out of the water. The film burned an idea into our cultural memory: they are mindless, man-eating monsters. We set out to tell a different story...
We first aired this episode in 2012, but at the show we’ve been thinking a lot about resilience and repair so we wanted to play it for you again today. It’s about a man who experienced maybe one of th...
Doctor and special correspondent, Avir Mitra takes Lulu on an epic journey live on stage at a little basement club called Caveat, here in New York. Starting with an ingredient in breastmilk that babie...
Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. In this episode, first aired more than a decade ago, Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at ri...
Today you can convert speech to text with the click of a button. Youtube does it for all our videos. Our phones will do it in real time. It’s frictionless. And yet, if it weren’t for an unlikely crew...
Now that we have the ability to see inside the brain without opening anyone's skull, we'll be able to map and define brain activity and peg it to behavior and feelings. Right? Well, maybe not, or mayb...
What happens when a voice emerges? What happens when one is lost? Is something gained? A couple months ago, Lulu guest edited an issue of the nature magazine Orion. She called the issue “Queer Planet:...
Today we bring you a story stranger than fiction. In 2006, paleobiologist Natalia Rybczynski took a helicopter to a remote Arctic island near the North Pole, spending her afternoons scavenging for anc...
For years, scientists thought nothing could live above 73℃/163℉. At that temperature, everything boiled to death. But scientists Tom Brock and Hudson Freeze weren’t convinced. What began as their sim...
In honor of our Earth, on her day, we have two stories about the overlooked, ignored, and neglected parts of nature. In the first half, we learn about an epic battle that is raging across the globe ev...
A couple years ago, an entomologist named Martha Weiss got a letter from a little boy in Japan saying he wanted to replicate a famous study of hers. We covered that original study on Radiolab more tha...
In an episode first aired in 2012, Lulu Miller introduces us to Jeff Lockwood, a professor at the University of Wyoming, who spent a part of his career studying a particularly ferocious set of insects...
Earth can sustain life for another 100 million years, but can we?In this episode, we partnered with the team at Planet Money to take stock of the essential raw materials that enable us to live as we d...