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This episode was recorded on November 10th, 2024 at the Culture Center Theater in Charleston, WV. The lineup includes Blitzen Trapper, Low Cut Connie, Town Mountain, and Humbird. https://bit.ly/4gv55LG

Annie McEwen went to a mountain in Pennsylvania to help catch some migratory owls. Then Scott Weidensaul peeled back the owl’s feathery face disc, so that she could look at the back of its eyeball. No owls were harmed in the process, but this brief glimpse into the inner workings of a bird sent her off on a journey to a place where fleshy animal business bumps into the mathematics of subatomic particles. With help from Henrik Mouristen, we hear how one of the biggest mysteries in biology might finally find an answer in the weird world of quantum mechanics, where the classical rules of space and time are upended, and electrons dance to the beat of an enormous invisible force field that surrounds our planet.A very special thanks to Rosy Tucker, Eric Snyder, Holly Merker, and Seth Benz at the Hog Island Audubon Camp. Thank you to the owl-tagging volunteers Chris Bortz, Cassie Bortz, and Cheryl Faust at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. Thank you to Jeremy Bloom and Jim McEwen for helping with the owls. Thank you to Isabelle Andreesen at the University of Oldenburg and thank you to Andrew Farnsworth at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, as well as Nick Halmagyi and Andrew Otto. Thank you everyone!EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by –  Annie McEwenProduced by –  Annie McEwenOriginal music and sound design contributed by –  Annie McEwenwith field recording and reporting help by – Jeremy S. BloomFact-checking by –  Natalie Middletonand Edited by  –  Becca BresslerEPISODE CITATIONS:Places –  Check out Hog Island Audubon Camp at https://hogisland.audubon.org/. If you like birds, this is the place for you. The people, the food (my god the food), the views, the hiking, and especially the BIRDS are incredible. And if it’s raptors you’re specifically interested in, I highly recommend visiting Hawk Mountain Sanctuary www.hawkmountain.org. You can watch these amazing birds wheeling high above a stunning forested valley, if you’re into that sort of thing… and maybe if you’re lucky you’ll even catch sight of some teeny weeny owls.Books  Scott Weidensaul will make you love birds if you don’t already. Check out his books and go see him talk! http://www.scottweidensaul.com/Website If you want to learn more about the fascinating and wildly interdisciplinary field of magnetoreception in birds, you can dig into the work of Henrick Mouritsen at the University of Oldenburg and his colleagues at the University of Oxford here: https://www.quantumbirds.eu/  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, 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.

Hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot welcome Eric Johnson of long-running indie folk band Fruit Bats for an interview and performance. The hosts also review the debut album from punk shock activists, Lambrini Girls.Join our Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/3sivr9TBecome a member on Patreon: https://bit.ly/3slWZvcSign up for our newsletter: https://bit.ly/3eEvRnGMake a donation via PayPal: https://bit.ly/3dmt9lUSend us a Voice Memo: Desktop: bit.ly/2RyD5Ah  Mobile: sayhi.chat/soundops Featured Songs:Fruit Bats, "When U Love Somebody," Mouthfuls, Sub Pop, 2003The Beatles, "With A Little Help From My Friends," Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Parlophone, 1967Lambrini Girls, "Bad Apple," Who Let the Dogs Out, City Slang, 2025Lambrini Girls, "Nothing Tastes As Good As It Feels," Who Let the Dogs Out, City Slang, 2025Lambrini Girls, "Scarcity Is Fake (communist propaganda)," Who Let the Dogs Out, City Slang, 2025Fruit Bats, "Rushin River Valley (Live on Sound Opinions)," A River Running To Your Heart, Merge, 2023Fruit Bats, "Today," Siamese Dream, Turntable Kitchen, 2020Califone, "Bottles and Bones (Shades and Sympathy)," Roomsound, Perishable, 2001Fruit Bats, "We Used To Live Here (Live on Sound Opinions)," A River Running To Your Heart, Merge, 2023Fruit Bats, "Humbug Mountain Song (Live on Sound Opinions)," Absolute Loser, Easy Sound, 2016Fruit Bats, "When U Love Somebody (Live on Sound Opinions)," Mouthfuls, Sub Pop, 2003Chumbawamba, "Tubthumping," Tubthumper, EMI, 1997See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Moon has an especially close companion at dawn tomorrow: Spica, the brightest star of Virgo. Depending on your location, they might be separated by as little as the width of a pencil held at arm’s length. And from some parts of the world, the Moon will briefly cover the star. Spica is a binary – two stars locked in orbit around each other. They’re so close together that we can’t see them as individual stars. If we could line up the Sun and the system’s main star, Spica A, at the same distance, Spica A would look more than 2,000 times brighter than the Sun. But that’s only part of the story. The surface of Spica A is tens of thousands of degrees hotter than the Sun. Such hot stars produce much of their light in the ultraviolet. If you add that to the equation, Spica A is about 20 thousand times the Sun’s brightness. The star is so hot because it’s especially heavy – roughly a dozen times the mass of the Sun. Gravity squeezes the star’s core much more tightly than the Sun’s core. That makes the core extremely hot, which revs up its nuclear fusion reactions. Energy from those reactions heats the surrounding layers. But such massive stars don’t live long. Spica A is only about 12 million years old, compared to four and a half billion years for the Sun. Yet it’s already completed the prime phase of its life. Within a few million years, it’s likely to explode as a supernova – a brilliant demise for a brilliant star. Script by Damond Benningfield

New música episode! We spotlight the latest and greatest from Chicano Batman, Helado Negro, Mexican Institute of Sound, Marissa Mur, The Warning, Cineplexx, CHICOCHICA, Caloncho, Diamante Electrico, Delaciio and more.