December 22, 2008 · MIT professor Sherry Turkle has spent 25 years collecting essays from her students based on the following prompt: "Was there an object you met during childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your path into science?" One student remembered his obsession with stop signs.
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December 17, 2008 · MIT professor Sherry Turkle has spent 25 years collecting essays from her students based on the following prompt: "Was there an object you met during childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your path into science?" One student remembered her Easter basket.
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November 27, 2008 · The bird we eat on Thanksgiving is an exclusively North American animal. It is found in the wilds of no other continent but ours. So why is this American bird named for a Euasian country? NPR explores.
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November 16, 2008 · British, American, Russian and French nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s and '60s left permanent records in trees around the globe. Scientists have found chemical signatures of the explosions in the wood of old trees in many countries.
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November 12, 2008 · Using NASA satellite photos of Earth, we can calculate that the world supports roughly 61 trees per person. But are we using up our allotments? An Evergreen State College ecology professor and her students look at how we burn through wood-based resources.
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November 4, 2008 · These genes aren't from your parents, but the genetic code of the bacteria in your gut can determine your health — and affect conditions like type 1 diabetes and obesity.
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October 27, 2008 · It's hard for the average person to understand one of Albert Einstein's great insights: that time is not the same for everybody everywhere. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene explains and explores in Icarus at the Edge of Time.
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September 23, 2008 · When someone finds an animal, vegetable or mineral new to science, the discoverer gets the privilege of giving it a name. Most of the time, it's done soberly, responsibly and carefully — but not always.
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September 10, 2008 · For much of the 20th century, Russian (and Soviet) leaders with full heads of hair shared the country's top political spot with bald men. In fact, they very nearly went back and forth — something their American rivals did not come close to doing.
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August 2, 2008 · Virginia Woolf wanted to think about what it's like to think about nothing special, about ordinary things. Novelists, she said, should study life as it happens. That view suggests that while scientists probe and analyze questions, artists discover what questions to ask.Web Extra: Read An Excerpt
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July 30, 2008 · Science writer David Quammen revisits his effort to say a few nice things about mosquitoes. But to agree with him, you'll need to be generous and open-minded — and dabbed with a little repellent.
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July 4, 2008 · Young Indians have their own reasons to celebrate a 19th century shrine to national independence.
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June 9, 2008 · A few years ago, urban cows in Lucknow, India, began starving to death. They had plenty of garbage to graze on, but they were getting skinnier. An inspection of sick cows revealed the problem, and a solution soon followed. So why are the cows still dying?
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April 21, 2008 · We make a lot of noise here on Earth with our TV and radio broadcasts, and some of that sound escapes into space. But how far will our signals travel? Can Lucille Ball's laugh be heard across the universe?
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February 22, 2008 · Those long, spiky thorns on Fifth Avenue trees are no accident, says one biologist. He suspects they evolved millions of years ago to protect the honey locusts from a very large pre-Manhattan predator: mastodons.
()NPR Science Correspondent Robert Krulwich demystifies what's dense and difficult -- even if you feel lost when it comes to science.
