Adam Cole

NPR's Skunk Bear blog received 300 nominations for our Golden Mole Award for Accidental Brilliance. We have a winner: Elizabeth Tibbetts found her luck, and scientific insight, in tiny insect faces.

Author Isaac Asimov once wrote, "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but, 'That's funny ... ' "

Good scientists search for the significance of surprises, coincidences and mistakes. With a little curiosity and perseverance, they can turn unexpected incidents ...

German alchemist Hennig Brand started with about 1,500 gallons of urine in his 17th century hunt for gold. Discovering phosphorus was just a nice surprise. Know a modern tale of scientific luck?

In 1928, Alexander Fleming, a British bacteriologist, escaped the London smog to take a family vacation in Suffolk. When he got back to his lab, he discovered he had forgotten to sterilize his petri dishes. They were covered with bacteria. A few even had mold.

As he was cleaning up, ...

Editor's note: It's National Popcorn Day! We're celebrating by bringing back this tale, first published in 2014, about the history of the beloved snack.

Popcorn is a truly ancient snack. Archaeologists have uncovered popcorn kernels that are 4,000 years old. They were so well-preserved, they could still pop.

The armed militants occupying Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon come from as far away as Texas and Montana. But they are hardly the refuge's first out-of-state visitors.

Malheur Lake is a regional hub for hundreds of thousands of migrating waterfowl. By some measures, it boasts ...

Less than 1 percent of applicants make the cut. But there's more than one way in. Passion helps. Be persistent. Oh, and be tops in what you're doing right now.

Watch a scary movie and your skin crawls. Goose bumps have become so associated with fear that the word is synonymous with thrills and chills.

But what on earth does scary have do to with chicken-skin bumps? For a long time, it wasn't well understood.

Physiologically, it's fairly simple. Adrenaline ...

When it comes to feats of speed and strength, Homo sapiens is a pretty pitiful species. The list of animals that can outsprint us is embarrassing. There's the cheetah, of course, but also horses, ostriches, greyhounds, grizzly bears, kangaroos, wild boars, even some house cats.

Usain Bolt, the fastest ...

In the 1960s, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered scientists to find a malaria antidote to help ailing soldiers in North Vietnam. Today's Nobel Prize for medicine went to one of those researchers.

Hundreds of you sent in questions for Skunk Bear's live conversation with three astronauts and NASA's chief scientist on Tuesday. Thanks! The most common question was: "What happens when you get your period in space?"

I didn't end up asking them this question because:

a) The question itself ...

In Earth's history, there have been some incredibly large animals that look sort of like animals we have today, just a lot bigger. In North America, there was a sloth that was the size of an elephant.

In the history of life on Earth, evolutionary forces have pushed some species to become incredibly large. After most dinosaurs died off 66 million years ago, some mammals and marsupials grew bigger and bigger, taking the dinos' place.

What's so great about living large? A size advantage can help you ...

Tuesday morning, the New Horizons space probe zipped past Pluto going 30,000 miles per hour. It carries the ashes of the man who discovered the dwarf planet, along with several spectrometers to analyze Pluto's surface and one telescopic camera.

That camera has been busy for the past decade, snapping ...

Artist Bob Wysocki and geologist Jeff Karson, both of Syracuse University in upstate New York, have their own personal volcano. It's an old furnace that used to melt bronze for statues. Now, it melts hundreds of pounds of basaltic gravel at a time, mimicking the process inside the ...

The annual Man v. Horse Marathon in Wales sounds like a lopsided contest favoring racers with four feet. But scientists say that Homo sapiens evolved to be incredible endurance athletes, too.

NPR has this tribute to the Hubble Space Telescope — a parody of Iggy Azalea's "Trouble."

In the week after Easter, we had a lot of old Peeps lying around. No one seemed that interested in eating them, so we used them to measure the speed of light.

For centuries the speed of light was an enduring, infuriating mystery. Philosophers, physicists and astronomers from Galileo on ...

In "Mammal March Madness," you win or die. No basketball in this tournament — it's a simulated survival-of-the-fittest game set up by evolutionary biologists. The battle cry? Mammals suck ... milk!

Lonesome George was the last surviving member of his species and a conservation icon. When the tortoise died, taxidermist George Dante set out to preserve his body, and his legacy.