Robert Krulwich

Put away that old Rand McNally map — it's time for a new way to see what America really looks like.

Look at the center of this map, at the little red dot that marks Kansas City. Technically, Kansas City is at the edge of Missouri, but here on this map it's in the upper middle section of a bigger space with strong blue borders. We don't have a name for ...

She's in Finland now, getting her Ph.D. at the University of Jyvaskyla, but before that, when she was in Adelaide, Australia, she studied elevator behavior. Rebekah Rousi hung around two tall office towers in town, riding elevators up and down day after day, looking for patterns. When a bunch ...

When a bunch of people get into an elevator, do they segregate in any predictable way? Do tall ones stand in the back? Do men stand in different places than women? Who looks where?

The images are sharp and concentrated. But this isn't art, it's more than advertising, and it's not quite education. It's an invitation.

Journalism may not be the right word for this. It's a kind of reporting. What you see here is true, and carefully edited.

It's not art, though the images are sharp and concentrated.

It's more than advertising, (though that's its purpose) because it is telling you something abstract and true ...

A few months ago on Radiolab, we did an hour on color, which included a segment on rainbow watching. We imagined a man, a dog, a sparrow and a butterfly all gazing at the same rainbow and we asked: How many colors does each see?

Dogs See Bleaker Rainbows

...

The Oatmeal

A few months ago on Radiolab, we did an hour on color, which included a segment on rainbow watching. We imagined a man, a dog, a sparrow and a butterfly all gazing at the same rainbow and we asked: How many colors does each see?

Let's get dense. If we take all the atoms inside you, all roughly 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of them, and squeeze away all the space inside, then, says physicist Brian Greene:

That's a very tight fit. So tight that in real life, it couldn't happen. It's not physically possible. Atoms won't crunch ...

What if you put all 7 billion humans into one city, a city as dense as New York, with its towers and skyscrapers? How big would that 7 billion-sized city be? As big as New Jersey? T...

Monty Python's John Cleese gives us a highly sophisticated, totally un-understandable, look at the human brain. The secret is, Cleese isn't speaking English. It sounds like English, b...

You've met them, I'm sure. People who are so learned, so scholarly, so deeply invested in what they're doing, that you can't understand a word they're saying — well, maybe you catch a familiar word or two, but the gist? No. They seem to be speaking a language near yours, ...

They call them Romance Pants, from Instructables.com, one of the world's premier do-it-yourself sites. They're for the Romantic Man who has overplanned (and overthought and overdone) ...

They are pants. Or maybe we should call them Pants with Benefits. Some of you — especially parents of young teens — will find them totally inappropriate. The folks at Instructables.com find them totally silly, which is why they invented them.

Randy Sarafan (author of 62 Projects to Make With ...

If you live in Missouri, they've already gone.

But back East, cicadas are about to climb out of their little holes in the ground, wriggle out of their skins, like this ...

... so after 17 years of getting ready, they can now do the thing they hope, hope, hope ...

They're not locusts. They don't eat crops, don't sting babies to death, don't even harm fruit. Yes, they make loud, screechy noises, but if you were a female cicada, you'd find the ...

You probably know the feeling: You turn on your computer, decide to mosey around, but only for a minute or two, you have important things to do, and then — whooooosh! The computer s...

You sit down, turn on the computer, up comes an image, could be anything, a cloud, a koala bear, a video. On the right side of the screen there are more images like it, or almost like it, so you click on one of those, just because ... because what? ...

We're not as daring as Magellan (who died) or Columbus (who went crazy) or Henry Hudson (who froze), but in our dainty little way, we take astonishing risks. Well, maybe not astonishing. Maybe just embarrassing.

Some of the best science reporters, like the best Vaudevillians, the best circus performers, the ...

Some of the best science reporters, like the best Vaudevillians, the best circus performers, the best teachers, are hungry for attention — not for themselves, but for a way to seize...