LATIF NASSER: Hey, it's Latif. This is Radiolab. I'm thinking today, in the aftermath of American Thanksgiving, about all the people who got together with their families, sat down for a nice little meal, and then—oh God, politics came up somehow, and they found there was just something they couldn't agree on. And you can't even reckon, like, how does this other person not even understand the basic facts of the situation? And so if you're leaving this holiday feeling like you need something concrete, something apolitical, something objective in this moment, this episode is for you.

LATIF: It's an episode we originally broadcast in 2014 about a project to make something everlasting, something that everyone everywhere could agree to follow. And we actually have kind of a dramatic update at the end, so stay tuned for that. Here you are: "Less Than Kilogram."

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab, the podcast.

ROBERT: And this ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: I actually brought a list.

ROBERT: Okay, why don't you share with me your list?

ANDREW MARANTZ: Where is this thing?

ROBERT: This is Andrew Marantz. He's a writer and editor at the New Yorker Magazine.

ANDREW MARANTZ: It might've gotten lost.

ROBERT: Who occasionally pops onto our show.

ROBERT: Maybe you were mugged by a ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: Ah, here it is.

ROBERT: And he recently got obsessed with a—it's a list of measurements.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Base units, they're called. They're SI base units. The Système International, you know ...

ROBERT: So let me do it this way: have you ever wondered how long an inch is? I mean, exactly how long?

JAD: I know. I just look at a ruler.

ROBERT: Well, but how do you know that your ruler and my ruler have the same amount of inch space, or that someone in China, that their inch is our inch, as your inch is my inch?

JAD: I hadn't really thought about it, but I'd just assume that there's like a master inch somewhere?

ROBERT: Bien sûr! I say it in French for a reason, and which you'll feel in a moment. That is what was on this list that Andrew was looking at. It's a list of standard measures for everything we have around. How big something is, how far something is, how hot something is, it's all on this list.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Okay, so when you go down the list of the Système International d'unités ...

ROBERT: Here's what you get.

ANDREW MARANTZ: A meter. A meter is a fraction of a second of the distance traveled by light in a vacuum.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: What?

ANDREW MARANTZ: A second is how much radiation corresponds to the transition between two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom.

JAD: That's the definition of a second?

ROBERT: How many times does that particular atom jiggle?

JAD: Yeah.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Well, an ampere, which measures electric current ...

ROBERT: You know, an amp.

ANDREW MARANTZ: ... is a constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2x10-7 newtons per meter of length. I have no idea what that means.

ROBERT: See, that's the thing. If you look at the actual definitions of any of these things: amp, meter, second, whatever, you go ...

[opera singing]

ROBERT: But there is one standard on the list that is unique for its simplicity.

ANDREW MARANTZ: The definition of the standard unit of measurement that is a kilogram is ...

ROBERT: No math. No numbers.

ANDREW MARANTZ: It is a thing.

ROBERT: A particular thing?

ANDREW MARANTZ: A plum-sized thing.

ROBERT: It is the only thing we use to measure things. It's the last one standing, the only physical standard left.

JAD: Why is it the last? And why were there—is it—what? Wait, what?

ROBERT: [laughs] Let me just take you back to the beginning of the story.

LATIF: Like, I must admit that I expected this story to be a lot more boring than I found. It's like an epic story. It's really ...

ROBERT: That is Latif Nasser, science historian, regular on our show. And he says if you go all the way back to the very first farmers back in Mesopotamia ...

LATIF: All of the earliest measurements were super intuitive.

ROBERT: And he says a lot of them ...

LATIF: ... came from the body.

ROBERT: As in, "That bunny is coming close to the net." "How close, Dad?"

LATIF: Two hands. But it's not just, like—because we think of, like, hands and feet, but it was also there were so many other kinds of measurements. Like, you would say, "Oh, something is as far as, you know, my voice can carry." Or that "Something is as far as I can see sitting on the top of a camel." Or "Something is as far as I can throw a stone."

ROBERT: So that would mean, like, say, okay, I'm going to build a farm here, and I'm gonna do it three throws-a-rocks across?

LATIF: Yeah, yeah. The way I read about it was, like, travelers. Like, if you're a Saharan traveler, you know, and you need to know where the next watering hole is, that's kind of a life-and-death measurement.

ROBERT: Yeah.

LATIF: And they would say it's, you know, three throw-a-rocks away or it's 10 throw-a-rocks away.

ROBERT: But, you know, there might be some built-in uncertainty there because if you ask Achilles ...

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: It could be two throw-a-rocks away. But if you asked me, it would be, like, 78.

LATIF: You have nailed exactly the problem with the throw-a-rock system.

ROBERT: And these problems kind of came to a head in the 1700s.

LATIF: It's the eve of the French Revolution.

ROBERT: In a little town called Paris.

LATIF: It's a pretty cosmopolitan place, which means that people are coming from different places, and they all have their own measures. Approximately 250,000 different units of measurement in regular use.

ROBERT: 250,000!

LATIF: Every commodity has its own measure. So you have grain, wine, oil, salt, hay, coal, wood, fabric, everything. And it's extraordinarily confusing.

ROBERT: Not to mention it's extraordinarily bad for trade. So if I came to you and I said, "Monsieur, I have a bit of cloth." You would say, "How much cloth you got?" And I'd say, "I have two yards." And you'd say, "What's a yard?" I'd say, "It's this much." And the other guy would say, "No, no. It's this much." And I'd say, "No, no. It's this much!" And then he'd go, "No, no. It's this much!" And you could see that ...

JAD: [laughs] Frustrating.

ROBERT: It was frustrating.

LATIF: Yeah.

ROBERT: And making matters worse ...

LATIF: In the 1780s, there was a famine. So there was a shortage of grain, and people were hungry and people were angry, which I'm gonna call they were hangry.

ROBERT: They were hangry.

LATIF: They were very hangry. So the bakers at the time, they knew that if they raised the price of bread, like, an angry mob would basically come and kill them.

ROBERT: But they also knew that with no absolute standard, there was no way to be sure that what you were getting is what you were getting.

LATIF: And so what they started doing was they started just lightening their bread loaves by just a little. So as the famine got worse, people would be waiting in longer and longer lines to pay the same amount of money for smaller and smaller loaves. So they were getting hangrier and hangrier. And so one of the things that people are, like, crying out for is that they want standardized weights and measures. If I go to the bakery and I buy a loaf of bread, I want a whole loaf of bread. Don't short me on this. This is serious.

ROBERT: Well, you know what happens next.

LATIF: The Bastille is stormed, and the king is under house arrest. And then under the guillotine.

ROBERT: And as soon as the revolutionary government takes over, they say, "All right."

LATIF: "Okay, this is one of our first priorities. We are going to make a new standard."

ROBERT: But not based on something arbitrary like a king. This is The Enlightenment.

LATIF: Why don't we draw on some kind of totally different authority? The authority of nature.

ROBERT: Of nature.

LATIF: Of nature.

ROBERT: So long story short, they took the circumference of the Earth. They took a quarter of that circumference divided that by 10 million, and they got the meter. The meter they then divided by 10, cubed it, filled the cube with water, took the mass of the water, minted a cylinder of metal with that mass and voila, they created the world's first kilogram.

LATIF: The idea of this was if we make this thing that is so beautiful and perfect and everybody can see it that way, then not only will France use it but the whole world will use it. Then goods and ideas can be exchanged everywhere by all people, and it will be a beautiful day.

ROBERT: Liberté, fraternité, égalité.

LATIF: Exactly. They wanted something that would be eternal and unchanging for everybody for all time.

ROBERT: So now I guess you want to see it, no?

JAD: Yeah!

ROBERT: Okay!

PATRICK ABBOTT: Okay, so it's in here.

ROBERT: We ended up visiting the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Maryland.

PATRICK ABBOTT: And this is where we'll be going in. But we're gonna go ...

ROBERT: And this guy ...

PATRICK ABBOTT: Patrick Abbott, physicist.

ROBERT: ... was our guide. They took us three stories down into the bedrock of the state of Maryland, because they want things down here to be totally still.

ROBERT: We've just gone through one double door. Here comes another double door. Oh!

ROBERT: And then we step into this vault of a room. And there it was.

ROBERT: What we're looking at then is a glass jar with a little handle on top. And then inside that is another glass jar with a little handle on top and inside that is ...

PATRICK ABBOTT: Is the thing.

ROBERT: The thing. It's kind of gorgeous, really.

ROBERT: The shiniest little cylinder you've ever seen.

ROBERT: Very small, and it looks very clean. Doesn't it to you?

PATRICK ABBOTT: Yeah. It's almost hard to tell where the, like, Russian doll glass jar stops because it's so reflective.

LYNN LEVY: This might be a crazy question, but can we hold a kilogram?

JAD: That's our producer Lynn Levy.

PATRICK ABBOTT: No.

ROBERT: [laughs]

LYNN: I'm just curious to know what it feels like. We've been talking about it so much.

ROBERT: They are very careful with the kilogram. And this isn't even really the real one. The original of the original of the original of the original ...

PATRICK ABBOTT: "Le Grand K," as they call it.

ROBERT: Lives in a basement in France. You can't get anywhere near that one.

JAD: I could.

ROBERT: No you couldn't.

JAD: I could get all Tom Cruise on that.

ROBERT: You'd die trying.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: Here's how it works.

PATRICK ABBOTT: The international prototype is ...

ROBERT: The big Kahuna. That's the one used to calibrate six identical platinum cylinders.

PATRICK ABBOTT: What they call witnesses or témoins in French.

ROBERT: Those witnesses are then used to calibrate another set of cylinders, which are then used to calibrate the US standards, which is what we saw. And that one is used to calibrate all kinds of things: the weight of your lemons, the scale in your bathroom.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Biggest Loser: Green tea and you lost 34 pounds.]

ROBERT: Every time somebody loses a pound on that TV show Biggest Loser?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Biggest Loser: 5.87 percent.]

ROBERT: You can actually trace that like a ...

PATRICK ABBOTT: Bloodline if you will, or an unbroken chain back to the international prototype kilogram.

ROBERT: To a single object in a basement in France. The holy of holies that is the kilogram.

JAD: Wait, you're telling me that when something is weighed in the world, often it goes all the way back to this one hunk of metal?

ROBERT: That's what I'm saying. Which was why the next part of the story is so disconcerting.

ANDREW MARANTZ: What happened in 1989 ...

ROBERT: ... is that according to Andrew, the folks who take care of the official kilogram ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: The Big K.

ROBERT: They took it out of its jars.

ANDREW MARANTZ: They put it in a steam bath. Hit it with the steam that rinses everything. Wait for it to dry. Then ...

ROBERT: ... they commence a ceremonial weighing.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Right.

ROBERT: But how do you weigh the thing that is the standard of weight?

ANDREW MARANTZ: Well, you weigh it against the copies.

ROBERT: Like the US copy, for example. So they get one of those, and they put it on one side of the scale and they put the Grand K on the other.

ANDREW MARANTZ: And the IPK, the Le Grand K, the one—is light.

[opera singing]

JAD: What?

ROBERT: It's light.

ANDREW MARANTZ: It doesn't ...

ROBERT: How many—how much lighter is it than its sisters?

ANDREW MARANTZ: Roughly the mass of a grain of sugar.

ROBERT: Oh!

ANDREW MARANTZ: Yeah. So ...

ROBERT: Is that gigantic?

ANDREW MARANTZ: It's measurable.

JAD: Wait, how do they know that it was light and not that the other ones were heavier?

ANDREW MARANTZ: Right. Well, they didn't. So they used the second sister copy.

ROBERT: Still light.

ANDREW MARANTZ: And the third sister copy.

ROBERT: Still light.

ANDREW MARANTZ: And the fourth and fifth and sixth.

ROBERT: In comes the man from Germany.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Light.

ROBERT: In comes the man from Canada.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Light.

ROBERT: In comes the man from Spain.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Light.

ROBERT: Which led them to the troubling possibility that the international standard for weight was losing weight.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Well, we think that. We think the big guy's the problem. As far as how it lost that weight, really no one knows.

ROBERT: One possibility is that it got cleaned too much and maybe some of it got scraped away.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Although it's disputed whether cleaning it more would make it lose weight or gain weight. The other theory is outgassing.

ROBERT: Like maybe a little hydrogen is seeping out of the metal.

ANDREW MARANTZ: And then there was one thing I read that said "Foul play cannot be ruled out."

ROBERT: Well, see, I was thinking maybe the Taliban.

ANDREW MARANTZ: [laughs]

ROBERT: What's clear is we may have a slightly trippy situation here. We got a hunk of metal losing weight, and yet because it is the standard ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: It still weighs exactly a kilogram, right? If the definition of a kilogram is the mass of the International Prototype Kilogram, whatever happens when you put that thing on the scale, that's a kilogram.

ROBERT: You can't do that!

ANDREW MARANTZ: And then everything else in the world is wrong.

ROBERT: No, you can't. That's ridiculous.

ANDREW MARANTZ: It's like, that doesn't sit right. That's like something that, like, the North Korean government would do. It'd just be like, "No more cash!" Like, we can't just go around capriciously doing stuff like that.

JAD: All right. So if the standard of weight is, as you're saying, losing weight, so how do you fix that?

LATIF: An answer to that question after the break.

MOLLY WEBSTER: My name is Molly Webster, and I'm the senior correspondent at Radiolab. My job is to just basically get, like, mini master's degrees every week that I work on this show. [laughs] I've got a mini master's in butterflies, the moon, strange organs, thymus, placenta, black holes. Oh, smoke!

MOLLY: We all specialize and we all have our little corners of the world. But most people just don't have time to leave those corners, and so I think one of the great things about the show and my job is that we get to bring people into all of these spaces that might never be open to them just based on time.

MOLLY: If you rely on Radiolab and the work we create, the best way to support us is to become a Lab member. To learn more about The Lab and its exclusive member perks, go to Radiolab.org/join. That's Radiolab.org/join.

LATIF: Hey! I'm Latif Nasser. You're listening to Radiolab. Before the break, we learned that the international standard for a kilogram, which is a tiny platinum cylinder, is ever so slowly losing weight. A problem which our emeritus host Robert Krulwich and New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz went to Maryland to investigate.

ROBERT: Well ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: I'm getting zero cell phone reception down here. That means we're really deep.

ROBERT: When we were down in that underground room in Maryland, we met a guy who has some thoughts about this.

ROBERT: Well, when we were down in that underground room in Maryland, we met a guy who has some thoughts about this.

JOHN PRATT: Oh, there he is. Okay.

ROBERT: His name's John Pratt.

JOHN PRATT: I'm the leader of the fundamental electrical measurements group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

ROBERT: John walked us through even more high-security doors, and then we walked into this ...

ROBERT: Oh, my God!

ROBERT: Amazing room!

ROBERT: It is big!

ROBERT: About three stories tall.

ROBERT: You know, and it's made of—it's like a silver room. And it has a silver-gray floor. It has silver, shiny walls. And your hair is on the silver-y side.

JOHN PRATT: Very much so.

ROBERT: You probably wouldn't be allowed in here if you were a redhead.

JOHN PRATT: No, no.

ROBERT: I don't even know how to describe it. It looks like a wheel turned on its side with ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: The thing itself looked sort of just like a massive, round, metal cauldron or, like, a big metal pot. But then there are all these weird little gizmos and parts, and then all these coiled-up wires, and ...

ROBERT: It's just a stunning machine.

ANDREW MARANTZ: But it's all just for the benefit of the one.

JOHN PRATT: The one measure.

ANDREW MARANTZ: The one kilogram.

JOHN PRATT: Yep.

ROBERT: Because inside that giant cauldron, there is an extremely, extremely sensitive ...

JOHN PRATT: Balance. An equal arm balance.

ROBERT: Which is basically like a seesaw.

JOHN PRATT: Or a teeter-totter. And usually you would set that up so that you would literally put kid on one side of the teeter-totter, kid on the other side of the teeter-totter.

ROBERT: Now you've been in a playground, so you know how this goes. But what they've done here is on one side of the teeter-totter, they've got the kilogram, like, the Grand K. That's kid number one. On the other side, instead of another kilogram or kid two ...

JOHN PRATT: We'll have a highly variable magnet.

ROBERT: Now here's the thing. The magnet won't be touching that side of the scale, it'll be exerting a force, an invisible force on that side.

JOHN PRATT: It'll produce a force. And we could use that to hold the balance still.

ROBERT: And the force it takes to hold up the balance? That, of course, is the same as the weight of the Grand K sitting on the other side. And if you can convert that force into a number that everybody agrees to?

JOHN PRATT: Voila!

ROBERT: You have just redefined the kilogram. You have wrenched it from the world of things, and it's become attached to the fundamental forces of the universe.

JOHN PRATT: Yep, you've grasped the gist of it. You want to see that happen? Right now I can show you this with our Lego version of the wad balance.

ROBERT: Okay.

JOHN PRATT: If I can fire it up.

JAD: Lego? Lego one?

ROBERT: Well see, the big one was being tested or something, so they took us over to look at the little one.

JOHN PRATT: Okay, so we have ...

ROBERT: Had a little scale and everything.

JOHN PRATT: You can see that I just disturbed the balance and it's, you know, jiggling around a little. It's free floating.

ROBERT: Okay, so you're now going with your tweezers, and you're plucking an itty-bitty ...

JOHN PRATT: Yup, two gram mass.

ROBERT: He puts this tiny little thimble thing on the balance and now it's going to, he says, levitate.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Hoo hoo!

JOHN PRATT: Now it prompts me. "Mass on."

ROBERT: Mass on.

JOHN PRATT: Yeah. I'm gonna put the mass on.

ROBERT: He pushes a button.

JOHN PRATT: All right. And ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: But when do we see the levitation?

JOHN PRATT: That was it.

ROBERT: I didn't—I missed it. Do it again. It was floating?

JOHN PRATT: It is floating sitting on the balance.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Okay.

ROBERT: It's not floating.

JOHN PRATT: It's floating. Does it fall to Earth?

ROBERT: That's a different idea of levitation.

ROBERT: Now the truth is that once I finally figured out what this guy was doing, it was actually sort of cool. He had taken a little metal weight. He'd put it on one side of the scale. Now on the other side of the scale, it was just empty, but yet the thing didn't tip over because the empty side actually had a magnetic force equivalent to the metal holding it just perfectly still.

JAD: So if they're able to do that, does that mean that the Grand K's reign is done?

ROBERT: Not yet, no. Because first of all, you have to get straight with a lot of math.

ANDREW MARANTZ: MC2 = H\nu. Work backwards.

ROBERT: You've got to divide by E, and then by M.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Measure the B field. Whoo, let's go!

ROBERT: And then you get your amperes, and your watts and your Planck's constant.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Classical Bohr model of atoms and stuff. Anyway ...

ROBERT: It is actually way more complicated, this whole thing, than I frankly will ever understand, but here's where we are at: you got all these different teams around the world. You got John's team in Maryland with his seesaw. You got another lab—actually, a couple of them—that have their seesaws. You got a third lab that's literally counting the atoms. They're all doing experiments, comparing numbers, trying to get the numbers to agree so that by whatever route everybody agrees on exactly what a kilogram is. Right now, they're close. They're in agreement out to about six decimal places. And that's not good enough. They want the numbers to be out to eight decimal places. But if they can do that, then and only then will the Grand K be no more.

PATRICK ABBOTT: Yeah.

ROBERT: Because instead of defining the kilogram as whatever is equal to the Grand K, now you have a new definition.

PATRICK ABBOTT: The new definition of the kilogram: the kilogram is the SI unit of the mass. Its magnitude is set by fixing the numerical value of the Planck constant to be equal to exactly 6.626069. And we have Xs because we haven't all agreed what the final ...

ANDREW MARANTZ: Those are the missing decimals.

PATRICK ABBOTT: Those are the missing decimal places. Times 10-34. One is expressed in the unit for actions Joule seconds, which is a meter squared kilogram per second.

ANDREW MARANTZ: Whew! That'll be such a simpler definition.

PATRICK ABBOTT: Oh, yeah.

ANDREW MARANTZ: [laughs]

JAD: And what will happen to the Grand K when the new definition goes into effect?

ROBERT: Well now, so this is the sad part.

SORINE FASSEAU: Vous avez par exemple.

ROBERT: It looks like a church.

SORINE FASSEAU: You will see after.

ROBERT: The Grand K may eventually end up in a place like this, where so many standards have gone to die. This is the Musée des Arts et Métiers.

SORINE FASSEAU: À Paris.

ROBERT: In Paris.

SORINE FASSEAU: So this is the beginning.

ROBERT: Sorine Fasseau is our tour guide.

ROBERT: Yeah. What is this?

SORINE FASSEAU: A litre.

ROBERT: He showed us the original liter.

SORINE FASSEAU: Ou alors, ça c'est 0,8 litre.

ROBERT: Wow!

ROBERT: Some early thermometers.

SORINE FASSEAU: Il y'a un objet qui est peut-être drôle.

ROBERT: In one room, he showed us the original—I think it was the Parisian meter. So in Paris, this was the infallible, the absolute standard.

SORINE FASSEAU: From 1801, I think.

ROBERT: It's in a wooden box with a velvet packing, and it's got silk ribbons at either end. And it's just a very beautiful looking silver rod. [laughs]

JAD: Aw, to imagine, like, the thing, the grand thing being in this place, it's sort of like seeing the Pope in shorts or something. It makes me a little uncomfortable.

LATIF: So while we were over here singing the praises of this object, how beautiful it is to have something real you can hold in your hands, there is a group of people for whom the kilogram situation was unacceptable.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Phillips: This is scandalous!]

LATIF: For example, Bill Phillips here from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He's speaking to a big gathering of people who care about this stuff.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Phillips: If this were the real kilogram that I was holding in my hands, the fingerprints that have been put onto this kilogram would increase the mass. Of course, it can't increase the mass because this is by definition a kilogram. That means all of you would lose weight.]

[laughter]

LATIF: For the people in this room, the fact that we in the 21st century are basing our most finely-tuned measurements on a hunk of metal cast in 1889?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Phillips: Now that's a situation that is clearly intolerable.]

LATIF: After years of work, researchers figured out that new definition they were looking for. In 2018, representatives gathered together in France.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Hello. En commencer.]

LATIF: And they voted to replace the physical kilogram with that abstract bit of math.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: South Africa.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Allemagne. Germany.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Arabie Saoudite. Saudi Arabia.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Thank you. Argentine. Argentina.]

LATIF: The physical kilogram was relegated to the dustbin of history.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Australie. Australia.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Autriche. Austria.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Belgique. Belgium.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Brésil. Brazil.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, delegate: Yes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Thank you.]

ROBERT: Special thanks to ...

[OPERA SINGER: Ari Adland.]

ROBERT: ... and ...

[OPERA SINGER: Eric Perlmutter.]

ROBERT: And also to ...

[OPERA SINGER: Terry Quinn.]

ROBERT: We don't wanna forget ...

[OPERA SINGER: Richard Davis.]

ROBERT: And ...

[OPERA SINGER: Ken Alder, Bob Waters, Michael Bell, Michael Newman.]

ROBERT: And finally ...

JAD: Thank you to our math angel, soprano ...

[OPERA SINGER: Melissa Hughes. [laughs] Very weird to sing my own name.]

JAD: Also big props to reporter Andrew Marantz, Latif Nasser and our producer Lynn Levy.

[LISTENER: Hello. I'm Natalia and I'm from New York City. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our wonderful co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Rebecca Lacks, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Thanks for listening to Radiolab. Bye!]

[LISTENER: Hi, My name's Michael Smith. I'm calling from Pennington, New Jersey. 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.]

 

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