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It's You Tube's 17^th Most Viewed Video of All Time, and the 4^th Most Liked, "Somebody That I Used to Know," sung principally by Wouter "Wally" De Backer, also known as "Gotye," who took his clothes off and got a paintjob from designer Emma Hack.

Nikola Nikolovski/iStockphoto

We'll start in a cornfield — we'll call it an Iowa cornfield in late summer — on a beautiful day. The corn is high. The air is shimmering. There's just one thing missing — and it's a big thing...

This is your brain making things up.

What you see isn't really there.

Even if I tell you "this isn't what you think," you'll think it anyway -- until I make a simple move, and suddenly -- you know.

What happens when we go head to head with chickens -- pitting their gaze-steadying powers against our own? The answer involves a rigging a chicken steadicam, take a look.

Writer Elizabeth Giddens answers a listener's question about toddlers by pondering repetition, and how all sorts of activities seem to have a Goldilocks amount that's just right...and a "too much" threshold where things can turn transcendent, or get very troubling.

It turns out these little flashing studs of flesh used to do something very specific (and useful!) for us. Lulu Miller explains how goose bumps used to protect us.

I'm giving thanks in two ways today, first for things that have lasted, persisted (and here's hoping they keep on going), and second -- for change; for our ability to create beauty in new ways. So I'm saying thank you for what's old and what's new.

A seemingly cuddly caterpillar becomes the Terminator in Latif Nasser's story about a not-so-distant epidemic in America's bluegrass country...

A clever take on the works of DaVinci wins our first-ever Halloween Costume Contest. And we got so many great entries, we couldn't resist putting together a slideshow of our favorites -- feast your eyes on all the costume greatness.

Nothin' dainty about these flowers. Nope, these guys are pistol-firing, fire-cracking blossoms from photographer/filmmaker Andrew Zuckerman. Click on this image and stand back ...

Foxtail from Andrew Zuckerman Studio on Vimeo.

It appears the Radiolab staff is giving thanks for a lot of videos this week, spanning the spectrum from sand to origami to baseball to dying cartoons (accompanied by folk music, of course). Intrigued? Check it...

There are people (and I hear from them constantly) who think if a subject is sophisticated, like science, the language that describes it should be sophisticated, too.

If smart people say torque, ribosome, limbic, stochastic and kinase, then the rest of us should knuckle down, concentrate and figure out what those words mean. That's how we'll know when we've learned something: when we've mastered the technical words.

I didn't know what to make of this when I saw it. I live in Manhattan, in a city where people bike, take buses, subways, trains, live and work in towers where they share elevators, share water, share electricity. I thought my town is setting the example for energy-efficient, communal living. And then, the guy who runs the place, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, releases a study — including (see below) a shocking video — that says, you think New York is great on energy? You think that? Well, check this out...

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You walk into a room. There are people there, cars outside, dogs, phones ring, the radio is on, somebody coughs; it's the pleasant blur of a busy world, until something, someone catches your attention. Then you lean in, the other sounds fade back, and you focus. That's how listening works -- for most of us.

Writer Jonathan Gottschall explores why the real world falls away when we hear a good story... 

Lulu recommends a free lecture series you can stream live online on November 15 and 16. The subject: Changing Planet...a look at the past, present, and future of the forces that shape the Earth and its climate.

It was 1569, or maybe early 1570, when it happened: A young French gentleman was out for a ride with his workers, all of them on horseback, when suddenly, "like a thunderbolt," he felt something thick and fleshy slam him from behind. (It was an overzealous, galloping assistant who couldn't stop in time.) Michel de Montaigne's horse crumbled, he went flying up, then down, he crashed to the ground. Then things went black.

I'm going to take you somewhere, but before I do, I should warn you that there's something not quite right about what you'll see. This place I'm going to show you will be astonishingly beautiful. It will be cold. It will be wet. But it will also be a touch -- more than a touch -- mysterious. So watch carefully.

Surgically, this will be complicated. Mathematically, it will be elegant. What we are going to do is take an ordinary bagel, and rather than cut it in half, we are going to turn it, delicately, into two intertwining, interlocked bagel parts, connected, unbroken, one twisting through one the other. In other words, a Mobius bagel.

George W. Hart