Robert Krulwich

This bird likes livers, kidneys, entrails — anything it can pluck that's freshly dead. But what if you served it ... a painting?

OK, I'm doing great science experiments. We've done sex (see previous post). On to lunch!

This is the story of a bird, a puzzle, and a painting. The painting, curiously, helped solve the puzzle, which is: How do vultures find food?

In America, back in the 1820s, everybody knew ...

Done right, a good science experiment is simple, clear and revealing. Done splendidly, it's a tale you don't forget. Let's do the sex one first. It took place in Italy, in the 1760s, when a Catholic priest and scholar, Lazzaro Spallanzani, was thinking about sperm — which is why ...

In the 1760s, an Italian scientist ran a sex experiment that required putting teeny trousers on some ardent male frogs. Hot guys in pants, it turns out, aren't so hot.

Hotel hallways are cramped and narrow, like cages. But Storyboard P won't be trapped. Watch this Brooklyn dancer float toward a fire extinguisher — beauty in tight places.

We live in a sea of air. It holds us, weighs on us, keeps us tethered. The earth, of course, holds us too, keeps us pinned. But not all of us. I want you to meet Storyboard P, a dancer who floats.

In this dance, he's in a British ...

You don't question them. You don't doubt them. You hear them so often, you wouldn't know they are lies. Here are five historical "facts" that aren't true. Never were. And now you'll know.

Here are five stories we tell ourselves — five famous history stories that you have heard all your life — that aren't true. Not only are they not true, but historians have known they aren't true, said they aren't true, insisted they aren't true, and the stories don't change. ...

What if you could turn your finger into a paintbrush and, in real time, draw anything on any surface (even in the air), then turn your creation into a moving figure? No, don't imagine. Watch this.

What can you do with a spotlight?

You can light a spot.

But what if you give yourself more options and invent a tool that lets light spill, splash or tighten into a beam as thin as a pencil line — a beam of light that can draw!

Draw what? ...

I've got this friend, Craig. He's not exactly an outlaw, but if the world needs something moved that is not supposed to be moved, he will move it anyway. Only in the interest of justice. Like Batman.

What he moved (or removed) was a small pot made by a Native ...

Two Harvard professors. One on a rooftop with a bucket of frogs. The other in the front yard, down below. Ready? Get set. Throw!

There are places where frogs could be — but aren't.

And places where frogs could be — and are.

Ninety years ago, scientists were debating the question of animal dispersal. How come there are kangaroos in Australia, and none in southern Africa --which seems, environmentally, very kangaroo-friendly? Certain frogs show ...

It's no big deal. It shouldn't matter. I just realized that something that's been around forever, that I grew up with, took for granted and used all the time, is slowly vanishing. Now that it's going, I suddenly care and want it back again, back in my hands so I ...

It's no big deal. It shouldn't matter. I just realized that something that's been around forever, that I grew up with, took for granted and used all the time, is slowly vanishing. Now that it's going, I suddenly care and want it back again, back in my hands so I ...

Honey is nature's gift. It's natural. Made by bees. Chocolate is the opposite, a great engineering creation that could, just possibly, just maybe, help save our planet.

When you unwrap it, break off a piece and stick it in your mouth, it doesn't remind you of the pyramids, a suspension bridge or a skyscraper; but chocolate, says materials scientist Mark Miodownik, "is one of our greatest engineering creations."

True, it begins with a cocoa bean ...

I've been wondering lately, do animals invent names? As in names for themselves? Names for each other? I've always thought that what we do when we call ourselves "Ralph" or "Laura" is unique, something exclusively human. But it turns out that's wrong. Other animals have name-like calls that they use ...

Names are useful. We use them to catch someone's attention, to talk about them. Do animals create names for each other like we do? Yes, turns out. Here's a crazy example, with a dastardly back story.

You start with difference, with mystery. Some things spiral, some become spheres, some branch, some don't. We know that inert atoms quicken, become bees, goats, clouds, then dissolve back into randomness. We look at these things, all these very, very different things, and we wonder, are they really different, or ...