Overheard at National Geographic

By National Geographic

Society & Culture

What's Overheard at National Geographic about?

Come dive into one of the curiously delightful conversations overheard at National Geographic’s headquarters, as we follow explorers, photographers, and scientists to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. Hosted by Peter Gwin and Amy Briggs.

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Unfolding the Future of Ori...

01.31.2023

The future is bright for origami, the centuries-old art of paper folding. In recent decades, scientists, engineers, and designers have pushed origami beyond its traditional roots and applied its patterns to fascinating technologies like foldable kayaks and tiny robots that ...

Overheard at National Geographic episodes:

01.31.2023 Unfolding the Future of Origami The future is bright for origami, the centuries-old art of paper folding. In recent decades, scientists, engineers, and designers have pushed origami beyond its traditional roots and applied its patterns to fascinating technologies like foldable kayaks and tiny robots that ...
01.24.2023 What Happens After You Uncover Buried History? The 1619 Project was a New York Times Magazine endeavor that explored the ways the legacy of slavery still shapes American society. The story exploded into cultural consciousness in 2019, and has since become a book, a podcast, and now, ...
01.17.2023 The People and Tech That Power Nat Geo Cameras that drop miles beneath the ocean surface. Handmade art that reveals the secrets of archeological sites and extinct animals. For 135 years, National Geographic has pioneered new ways of exploring and illuminating our world—and now you can meet a ...
01.10.2023 Meet an Imagineer Who Built a Wish Last summer, Disney Cruise Line released its fifth and most technologically advanced cruise ship yet: Disney Wish. We’ll meet Laura Cabo, a creative executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, who shares the excitement and challenges in designing a cruise ship that’s ...
01.03.2023 How Sharks Devoured My Career When Nat Geo Explorer Gibbs Kuguru was in college, he found himself trying to choose between two terrifying futures: going free diving with sharks off the coast of South Africa or, even scarier, studying for the MCAT. Since then, he’s ...
12.27.2022 The Nurse Keeping Explorers Alive For 17 years, nurse Karen Barry’s office at National Geographic headquarters has served as an important stop for journalists, photographers, and explorers in need of vaccines and medical advice before they set out on expeditions all over the globe. We’ll ...
12.20.2022 What Science Tells Us About Living Longer Scientists are hard at work trying to understand what causes aging and how to help people stay healthy for longer. Biologist Matt Kaeberlein breaks down the science of longevity and tells us how he’s using a robot to test 100,000 ...
12.13.2022 Presenting: ESPN's "Pink Card" Today we bring you a high-stakes story from ESPN’s 30 for 30 Podcasts—a tale of women’s rights, history, and soccer. As Iranian women took to the streets in fall 2022 to fight gender inequality, they also targeted sports. Iranian women ...
12.06.2022 The People Behind the Photography National Geographic photographers seldom do their work alone, especially those who journey out to far-flung places. This week, we’re shining a light on local collaborators—people whose names don’t show up in the credit line for a photo but who are ...
11.29.2022 There’s a Bear in My Backyard Sure, we love bears when they show up in books or cartoons. But what if one is outside our window? Human-bear encounters are becoming far more frequent as development continues to spread and people and bears seek similar resources of ...
11.22.2022 Playback: The Real-Life MacGyver in Nat Geo's Basement 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’Brien adapts new technologies to capture sights and sounds previously never seen or heard before. In this episode, ...
11.15.2022 Pictures of the Year Every year, National Geographic rolls the year into a collection of photos for its “Pictures of the Year” issue. It’s a mysterious process, and we’re about to share it with you. We’ll see what baby carriages are like in Greenland, ...
11.08.2022 Who Inspired Wakanda's Warrior Women? The fictional, fearsome, and all-female Dora Milaje in the movie Black Panther: Wakanda Forever were inspired by a real group of African warriors: the Agojie. Nat Geo contributing writer Rachel Jones shares the history of the Agojie and discusses the ...
11.01.2022 Wayfinding Through the Human Genome National Geographic Explorer Keolu Fox grew up hearing stories about his ancestors, Polynesian navigators, and the men who in the late 1970s led the first Hōkūleʻa voyage to Tahiti. As the first Native Hawaiian with a Ph.D. in genomic sciences, ...
10.25.2022 Presenting: Greeking Out by National Geographic Kids National Geographic Kids' Greeking Out is a kid-friendly retelling of some of the best stories from Greek mythology. This episode, "Akhenaten The Heretic King," is all about King Tut's father and how he attempted to reset Egyptian religion and politics. ...
10.18.2022 The Hole Where King Tut’s Heart Used to Be One hundred years since the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, archaeologists are still puzzling over the mysteries of his mummy. Why was he covered in “black goo” and buried without a heart? And how did his tomb remain hidden for ...
10.11.2022 Exploring Pristine Seas National Geographic Explorer in Residence Enric Sala quit academia to explore and protect the sea. On his journey to keep the ocean pristine, he has swam with jellyfish in Palau, gone diving in the Arctic, and got acquainted with sharks ...
10.04.2022 What the Ice Gets, the Ice Keeps In 1915 Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, sank off the coast of Antarctica, stranding the crew on drifting sea ice. Shackleton’s desperate rescue mission saved all 28 men. But for more than a century afterward, the location of Endurance eluded archaeologists—until ...
09.27.2022 What You Do Counts Some of the most crucial countries in the global fight against climate change are in Latin America, and yet there are few resources on the crisis for Spanish speakers. Eyal Weintraub, a 22-year-old National Geographic Young Explorer and climate activist ...
09.20.2022 Searching for a Butterfly in a Conflict Zone Photographer Rena Effendi’s father, a Soviet entomologist, collected 90,000 butterflies in his lifetime. But there was one species he couldn’t capture—Satyrus effendi. Effendi takes on the quest to track down the endangered butterfly named after her father, but to do ...
09.13.2022 A Man of the World Go behind the yellow border to meet the family that made National Geographic an American institution. Gilbert M. Grosvenor’s 60-year career followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather—but he learned that sometimes he had to do things his ...
09.06.2022 Inside the Epic World of Bertie Gregory In a collaboration with National Geographic television, we follow 29-year-old adventurer and filmmaker Bertie Gregory on a nail-biting journey to some of the harshest, most spectacular corners of the world. Join guest host Drew Jones as he sits down with ...
08.30.2022 Playback: Why War Zones Need Science Too 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 wonder scientists want to explore Socotra. But it’s also part of Yemen, a country enduring ...
08.23.2022 The Problem With Superchickens Scientists recently discovered a fascinating paradox: when they bred together superproductive, egg-laying hens, they found the chickens produced fewer eggs. We examine what went wrong with these so-called superchickens, and we look at human examples of this phenomenon—a high school ...
08.16.2022 What It Takes to Keep America Beautiful The U.S. is home to some of the most beautiful, incomparable places on the planet, from the pristine Shi Shi Beach at the Makah Reservation in Washington State to the Couturie Forest in New Orleans. But as climate change and ...
08.09.2022 The Triumph and Tragedy of Indian Independence When India and Pakistan gained their independence from Britain, a border was drawn between the two new countries. The split started a chain reaction of violence that led to one of the largest forced migrations in human history. More than ...
08.02.2022 Frank Drake’s Cosmic Road Map Are we alone in the universe? It’s a question we’ve been asking for millennia. Now we’re on the cusp of learning the answer. Frank Drake—one of the most vocal (and brilliant) askers—has spent the past six decades inspiring others to ...
07.28.2022 Playback: Amelia Earhart Part II: The Lady’s Legacy Amelia Earhart’s statue was recently unveiled at the U.S. Capitol, and for good reason: Her adventurous spirit had implications for women around the country. Earhart went well beyond setting records as a pilot--her true end game was equality for women, ...
07.26.2022 Harnessing the Power of Yellowstone’s Supervolcano If a major eruption ever were to occur at Yellowstone’s “supervolcano,” the event could destroy huge swaths of North America. But in recent years, some scientists have proposed that the amazing power locked beneath the caldera could be harnessed to ...
07.19.2022 Stonehenge Has a Traffic Problem The 4,500-year-old Stonehenge attracts hordes of tourists—and massive congestion. To alleviate traffic, the British government is considering a plan to build a tunnel near the monument, but historians and modern Druids alike are concerned that the development could damage artifacts ...
07.12.2022 Do Shark Stories Help Sharks? Our obsession with sharks has generated folklore around the world for thousands of years. But a series of attacks at the Jersey shore in 1916 would forever change the way we tell stories about sharks. We trace how attitudes toward ...
07.05.2022 How Black Climbers Are Closing the Adventure Gap Ever since Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest, there has been a long list of firsts: the first ascent without supplemental oxygen, the first in winter, and the first full ski descent, to name a ...
06.28.2022 Playback: The Tree At the End of the World Deadly seas. Hurricane-force winds. A punishing journey to the tip of South America is all in a day’s work for Nat Geo Explorer Brian Buma. But Craig Welch, a reporter who calls himself a “normal human being,” also tagged along—and ...
06.21.2022 She Shoots, She Scores: Title IX Turns 50 Meet Kari. Now meet the other Kari. One played college lacrosse in the 1980s; the other currently plays at the same school for the same coach. College sports have radically evolved during that time—take the high-tech clothes that emit infrared ...
06.14.2022 This Indigenous Practice Fights Fire with Fire For decades, the U.S. government evangelized fire suppression, most famously through Smokey Bear’s wildfire prevention campaign. But as climate change continues to exacerbate wildfire seasons and a growing body of scientific research supports using fire to fight fire, Indigenous groups ...
06.07.2022 Sonic Postcards From the Appian Way “All roads lead to Rome” was once more than a saying; it was a fact. The first of the great roads of ancient Rome, the Appian Way was the most important of them all. Italians still travel what’s left of ...
05.31.2022 Restoring a Lost Sense of Touch When Brandon Prestwood’s left hand was caught in an industrial conveyor belt 10 years ago, he lost his hand and forearm. Scientists are unraveling the science of touch by trying to tap into the human nervous system and re-create the ...
05.24.2022 Where in the World Is Jessica Nabongo? In 2019 Jessica Nabongo, author of the popular travel blog The Catch Me If You Can, became the first documented Black woman to travel to every country in the world. From swimming with humpback whales near Tonga to eating delicious ...
05.17.2022 Bringing the Dead to Life Thousand-year-old Peruvian queens and medieval murder victims may seem lost to time, but history “detectives” are on a mission to solve a mystery: What did those people look like? We hear from Oscar Nilsson, a forensic facial reconstructionist who uses ...
05.10.2022 The Greening of Pittsburgh When it comes to examples of cities that have successfully emerged from the industrial age into the information age, look no further than Pittsburgh. But can it be done with an eye toward climate solutions? In this editorial collaboration with ...
05.03.2022 Going Undercover to Save Manta Rays After wildlife filmmaker Malaika Vaz stumbled upon manta ray poaching near her home in India, she disguised herself as a fish trader to find out who was behind the plot—a dicey proposition as she pursues traffickers in India, China, and ...
04.26.2022 Farming for the Planet How do you turn barren land into a complex working farm that reflects the planet’s biodiversity? Just ask John and Molly Chester, who traded city life in Los Angeles for 200 acres in Ventura County, where they are rebuilding soil ...
04.19.2022 The Secret Life of Plants How do you capture the image of a 150-foot-tall tree in the middle of a dense rainforest? If you’re National Geographic Explorer Nirupa Rao, you pull out your paints. Rao draws from the centuries-old practice of botanical illustration to catalog ...
04.12.2022 Solving the Mystery of the Boiling River As a boy growing up in Peru, Andrés Ruzo recalls his grandfather’s stories about the horrors Spanish conquistadores encountered in the Amazon, including a “boiling river.” Years later, Ruzo, a National Geographic Explorer, journeys into the Amazon to try to ...
04.05.2022 Turning Old Cell Phones into Forest Guardians What happens when a tree falls in a forest and no one is listening? The sound starts with truck engines and chainsaws and ends with a small piece of forest being silenced. Illegal logging is slowly thinning out the world’s ...
03.29.2022 Queens of the High Seas Yo-ho, a pirate’s life for she! Legends of Blackbeard and movie buccaneers like Captain Jack Sparrow give us the impression that piracy was a man’s world. But historians and the Nat Geo book Pirate Queens: Dauntless Women Who Dared to ...
03.22.2022 First Ascent of a Sky Island In the most remote part of Guyana, plateaus called tepuis—also known as sky islands for poking through the clouds—rise up from the jungle. They’re topped by unique ecosystems, filled with plants and animals never before seen by human eyes. That’s ...
03.15.2022 Nowruz and the Night Sky Not everyone celebrates the New Year in the middle of winter; for 300 million people around the world, their New Year begins at the moment of the vernal equinox. The holiday of Nowruz celebrates that “new day” by encouraging us ...
03.08.2022 Amelia Earhart Part II: The Lady’s Legacy Behind her modest smile and windblown charm, Amelia Earhart was a rarity in the 1930s: a fiercely confident woman with a dream to fly. Her adventurous spirit went well beyond setting records as a pilot—her true goal was perhaps equality ...
03.01.2022 Amelia Earhart Part I: The Lady Vanishes Ever since Amelia Earhart made her last radio transmission somewhere over the Pacific, theories about her disappearance have proliferated; more than 80 years later, the constant retelling of her story shows no signs of slowing. Although the search to find ...

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