Overheard at National Geographic
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Bonus episode: The Surprising Superpowers of Sharks
13 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sharks have never been able to outswim their reputation as mindless killers, which is so entrenched that the U.S. Navy once even tried to weaponize th...
Olympic Training During a Pandemic
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a dream year in the making. High jumper Priscilla Frederick-Loomis will do anything to support her training for the 2020 Olympics—even clean ...
The Next Generation's Champion of Chimps
15 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How do you calculate the number of chimpanzees living in the forests of Nigeria? If you’re National Geographic Explorer Rachel Ashegbofe, you listen...
The Real-Life MacGyver in Nat Geo’s Basement
08 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the basement of National Geographic’s headquarters, there’s a lab holding a secret tech weapon: Tom O’Brien. As Nat Geo’s photo engineer, O...
Giraffes on a Boat
01 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It sounds like the start of a bad joke: How do you move eight giraffes—including a newborn calf—off an island in Africa’s Western Rift Valley? A...
How Cicadas Become Flying Saltshakers of Death
25 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After 17 years underground, so-called Brood X cicadas get a fleeting moment in the sun and commence their deafening buzz. But periodical cicadas can’...
A Reckoning in Tulsa
18 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A Reckoning in Tulsa A century ago, Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood was a vibrant Black community. One spring night in 1921 changed all that: a white...
Camping on Sea Ice with Whale Hunters
11 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Every spring Inupiaq hunters camp on the sea ice north of the Arctic Circle, in hopes of capturing a bowhead whale to share with their village. But as...
The Battle for the Soul of Artificial Intelligence
04 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With every breakthrough, computer scientists are pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI). We see it in everything from predictive text ...
Treat Your Brain: Season 6 of Overheard
27 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dive with killer whales to observe their surprising cultures. Venture into the world of artificial intelligence to see how scientists are teaching mac...
Bonus episode: The Secret Culture of Killer Whales
13 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Scientists are discovering that killer whales, among the most social and intelligent of marine animals, have unique family structures and behaviors, p...
The Secret of Musical Genius
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mozart wowed audiences as a child. The Beatles blew away Ed Sullivan. Beyonce hypnotized Super Bowl crowds. The world has been enthralled by those we ...
Legends of Kingfishers, Otters, and Red-Tailed Hawks
16 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Photographer Charlie Hamilton James chronicles his days ditching high school to hide out by the river near his home in Bristol, England, to snap photo...
The Real Amazons
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Greek myths tell tales of Amazons, fearsome women warriors who were the equals of men. Now archaeological discoveries and modern DNA analysis are unco...
Deep Inside the First Wilderness
02 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On assignment in the canyons of the Gila Wilderness, Nat Geo photographer Katie Orlinsky has a fireside chat with Overheard host Peter Gwin about tel...
Unraveling a Mapmaker’s Dangerous Decision
23 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For much of recorded history, maps have helped us define where we live and who we are. National Geographic writer Freddie Wilkinson shows us how one s...
Why War Zones Need Science Too
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a jewel of biodiversity, the so-called Galápagos of the Indian Ocean, and might also hold traces of the earliest humans to leave Africa. No wo...
Bonus Episode: In Conversation: Reframing Black History and Culture
12 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For the past year, Overheard has explored the journeys of photographers and scientists who are focusing a new lens on history. National Geographic ...
Mars Gets Ready for Its Close-up
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Mars Gets Ready for Its Close-up Mars has fascinated Earthlings for millennia, ever since we looked skyward and found the red planet. Through telescop...
Searching for the Himalaya’s Ghost Cats
02 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Searching for the Himalaya’s Ghost Cats National Geographic’s editor at large Peter Gwin travels to the Himalaya to join photographer and National...
Overheard Season 5: Bigger. Weirder. Beautiful-er.
26 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tracking snow leopards in the Himalaya. Looking for ancient microbial life on Mars. Uncovering the truth about Amazon warriors. Unraveling a mapmaker’...
Bonus Episode: Bicycles, Better Angels, and Biden
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since George Washington took the first presidential oath of office in 1789, inaugurations have been held during times of war and peace, prosperity and...
A Traveling Circus and its Great Escape
15 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Decades of daring acrobatics, spectacular motorcycle stunts, and mind-blowing magic tricks couldn’t prepare Central America’s oldest-running circu...
An Accidental Case of the Blues
08 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Pigments color the world all around us, but where do those colors come from? Historically, they’ve come from crushed sea snails, beetles, and even g...
Introducing: Trafficked with Mariana van Zeller
03 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today we share an episode of a new podcast series called Trafficked, hosted by National Geographic Channel’s Mariana van Zeller. The series pulls ba...
The Trouble with America’s Captive Tigers
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Less than 4,000 tigers live in the wild, but experts say there may be more than 10,000 captive in the U.S., where ownership of big cats is largely unr...
The Strange Tail of Spinosaurus
24 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Spinosaurus has long been a superstar among dinosaur fans, with its massive alligator-like body and a huge “sail” of skin running the length of it...
The Search for History’s Lost Slave Ships
17 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On the bottom of the world’s oceans lie historic treasures—the lost wrecks of ships that carried enslaved people from Africa to the Americas. Only...
Chasing the World’s Largest Tornado
10 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How do you measure something that destroys everything it touches? That’s an essential question for tornado researchers. After he narrowly escaped th...
Documenting Democracy
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Andrea Bruce, a National Geographic photographer, has covered conflict zones around the world for nearly two decades. She shares how the experience of...
Can You Hear the Reggae in My Photographs?
27 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Photographer and National Geographic Storytelling Fellow Ruddy Roye grew up in Jamaica, a cradle of reggae and social justice movements. He describes ...
Overheard Season 4
13 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Documenting democracy. Untwisting the world’s largest tornado. Searching for wrecks of lost slave ships. Dinosaur hunting in Morocco. Accidentally i...
How I Learned to Love Zombie Parasites
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Photographer Anand Varma details his very first natural history adventures—not in Amazonian rainforests or on Polynesian coral reefs but in suburban...
The Failing of War Photography
28 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Anastasia Taylor-Lind talks about how she grew up living the life of a modern gypsy, traveling across southern England in the back of a horse-drawn wa...
The Canary of the Sea
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Chirp. Whistle. Creak. Beluga whales, the canaries of the sea, have a lot to say. But noise from ships can drown out their calls, putting calves in da...
A Spore of Hope
14 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Humans face an existential problem: feeding billions of people in a warming world. But there’s a ray of hope. And it all starts with microbes. For...
The Tree at the End of the World
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A harrowing journey is all in a day's work for a Nat Geo explorer trying to find the world’s southernmost tree. But what happens when a self-proclai...
The United States v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When a Mongolian paleontologist sees a dinosaur skeleton illegally up for auction in the United States, she goes to great lengths to stop the sale. Fo...
The Unstoppable Wily Coyote
23 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
They're smart, they're sneaky, and they aren't moving out any time soon. Meet your new neighbor, the coyote, and find out why these cunning canids are...
The Towers of Ladakh
16 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A mechanical engineer teams up with an unlikely band of students who use middle school math and science to create artificial glaciers that irrigate La...
Overheard Season 3
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Smuggled dinosaur bones. Man-made glaciers. An audacious quest to find the world's southernmost tree. Each week, we'll dive into one of the curiously ...
The Virus Hunter
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Coronaviruses aren't new. For more than 20 years, German virologist Rolf Hilgenfeld has been looking for ways to slow or stop the virus. What does it ...
The Frozen Zoo
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Right now, one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. Conservation scientists are doing whatever they can to save them, or a...
If These Walls Could Talk
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Social Media is not just for modern folk. In ancient Pompeii, people also shared what they thought, who they met with, what they ate... It's just, the...
The Aquarius Project
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A fireball from outer space crashed into one of Earth's biggest lakes. Scientists didn't know how to find it. So, they called in just the right people...
March of the Beaver
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The desolate Alaskan tundra - a landscape that has literally been frozen solid for thousands of years - is suddenly caving in on itself. Colonizing be...
Cave of the Jaguar God
05 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Crawl into the Maya underworld, where science meets spirits, shamans, and snakes. A long-forgotten cave could shed light on one of history's most endu...
The Hidden Cost of the Perfect Selfie
29 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What do tigers, sloths, elephants and bears have in common? They're all part of the incredibly lucrative captive wildlife tourism industry. Travelers ...
The Alien Underground
22 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Half a mile below the surface of the earth, in a cave too hot to explore without an ice-packed suit, NASA scientist and Nat Geo explorer Penny Boston ...
Digging Up Disaster
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How did an ancient Roman harbor end up in ruins? Scientists realized the culprit was a long-forgotten natural disaster that left tell-tale geological ...
Overheard at National Geographic Season 2
02 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Exploring the ancient Maya Cave of the Jaguar God. The graffiti of Pompeii. Searching for alien life underground. New season of Overheard at National ...
Honeybee Chop Shop
30 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What is a honeybee chop shop, and why do they exist? Turns out the answer has everything to do with the food on our tables. We dig into the sticky bus...
The Glass Stratosphere
23 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What if women had been among the first to head to the moon? A NASA physician thought that wasn't such a far fetched idea back in the 1960s. He develop...
The Harem Conspiracy
16 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Murder, succession, and a 18-foot scroll of papyrus that reads like an ancient Egyptian episode of Law and Order. We get the lowdown on the Judicial P...
The Zombie Mice of Marion Island
09 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Mice on the sub-Antarctic Marion Island are out for blood, and they're feasting, zombie-style, on living, immature albatrosses. Turns out, these tiny ...
Scuba Diving in a Pyramid
02 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of National Geographic's writers was hard to pin down for a while. That's because she was in Sudan, scuba diving underneath a pyramid. We had so m...
Rats vs Humans: A Love Story
25 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Bringers of plague, schleppers of pizza slices, garbage gobblers. Rats have adapted over the millennia to survive and thrive in human company, much to...
Evolution of a Little Liar
18 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Most parents see lying as a cause for worry or reprimand. But some experts suggest lying at a young age could be a welcome sign of childhood developme...
Humpback Hit Factory
11 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There's a humpback whale song sensation that's sweeping the South Pacific. We'll learn about the burgeoning study of "whale culture"-and why these sup...
Introducing Overheard from National Geographic
04 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A new weekly podcast from National Geographic. We talk with explorers and scientists who are uncovering amazing stories at the edges of our wild and w...