What if you could opt out of society and go live in a completely self-contained glass bubble in the desert? You and your team would be cut off from the rest of society. For two years, you’d have to grow every morsel of food that you wanted to eat and f...

What happens to people who are swept out to sea? Some survive for months and even years, alone in life boats eating whatever they can catch and drinking rainwater. In this episode we ask you, the listener, to imagine a surfing session gone very wrong w...

As we get ready to roll out new Science of Survival episodes beginning on November 14, we wanted to replay the one that started it all. This thrilling re-creation of the classic Outside feature by Peter Stark leads the listener through a series of plau...

Peak performance has always been about getting as close to your genetic potential as possible. The limits of your training, nutrition, and recovery are dictated by your DNA. But what if they weren’t? What if you could change the genetic code you were b...

If you want to understand sleep deprivation, you want to talk to a Navy SEAL, who go nearly a week without rest during training. And there’s probably no better Navy SEAL to talk to than Dr. Kirk Parsley, the physician who started noticing all sorts of ...

Several decades ago, radio producer Scott Carrier and his brother Dave tried to chase down an antelope on foot. That might sound crazy, but Dave was an evolutionary biologist and had just come up with a radical idea: that during the heat of the day hum...

For most athletes, achieving peak performance means training hard, eating right, and maybe some stretching. But when you get to the elite level, where everyone’s doing that, it’s the mental game that makes winners and losers.

Kevin Fedarko is a celebrated and well-heeled journalist, accustomed to dropping in on an exotic place and extracting a story, often in less than a week. But in 2004 he left his job at Outside and went looking for something deeper and more meaningful: ...

More than two decades after he radically transformed big-wave surfing, Laird Hamilton is still a dominant force in the sport. As detailed in the new documentary Take Every Wave, Hamilton is again pushing the edge with his new obsession,

Killer frogs! Forest-destroying moths! Bird-eating mongooses! These may sound like biblical plagues, but they’re all the result of bad human decisions. After an invasive species shows up in an ecosystem and wreaks havoc,