Nathaniel, a young Berkeley biologist, met a beautiful yeast who promised opportunity and adventure, but once they got together, Nathaniel was clumsy, the yeast not what he'd hoped, and their romance? Well, it didn't work out. It's now a song. Sung by Nathaniel. The yeast, lacking vocal chords, is silent.

This is the tale of one man's slobbering, very unpretty pet cat, his brave sister, his homicidal yet generous uncle, and what happened one winter night when he was a boy.

In the story The Little Prince, a boy from a tiny planet lands on Earth. The boy is tall, the planet small, and you worry he might fall off. In real life, real Earthlings once had a hint of this experience. It was 1972, and you can go there with them.

In New Zealand, where they do things differently, middle schoolers are taught statistics, probability and experimental science in an odd way. They explore frustrating supermarket lines, ungraspable tape, foot seeking thumbtacks and carpet soiling toast.

What if I told you that there's a mathematical formula buried deep in living things that tells us — all of us, dandelions, gorillas, sea grasses, elm trees, buttercups — when it's time to die. Scientists think there is such rule. It has to do with size.

Here's a new way to think about global warming. An interactive map plots how temperatures have changed in any region on the planet since the early 1950s.

A big boxing match usually features two guys, thick with muscle, who know how to bob, weave and use their fists. This bout has two fighters who can't make fists because they don't have hands. What they have are necks. Long necks.

If you are up in space looking down on America west of the Mississippi, one of the brightest patches of light at night is on the Great Plains in North Dakota. It's not a city, not a town, not a military installation. What is it?

It's hard, during flu season, to avoid inhaling a virus or two (or three, or 10,000), but that doesn't mean they're going to take you over. You have an army of defenders in you, ready to take them on.

We start with a pool of oil. We turn on a magnet. The oil travels up a superstructure and blossoms into a tree. Turn off the magnet, the branches, the needles, the tree melt away. It's a puddle again.

Alzheimer's is the disease that creeps in and slowly erases what you know until, eventually, there's no more to erase. How this happens is still a mystery, but this short animation by Po Chou Chi tries to make poetic sense of what goes on.

There you are, hanging with the other pigeons. It's a sunny day. Tranquil. You are taking a bird bath along a river's edge, when suddenly, leaping out of the water onto the land, straight at you — is a fish! A pigeon-eating catfish. (We've got pictures.)

Dashboard video cameras are common in Russia. In case you get bumped into, or bump someone else, insurance companies want to see what happened. So we have a video record of what it's like to drive there. You don't want to see this compilation video. (Oh yes you do.)

Where's the bus? It's supposed to be here by now, but it isn't. You crane your neck. Nothing. And then — miraculously — there's a solution. The bus still isn't here. But something else is.

It's a tombstone like no other. A rough, clumpy hunk of granite, carried across Europe on a sea of ice, dumped in a valley, shipped across the Atlantic, lugged to Massachusetts — all to honor a restless man.

"The President" is a 3,200-year-old giant sequoia that clocks in at 247 feet tall and counting. And contrary to most living things we can think of, giant sequoias grow faster later in life than earlier in life.

YouTube

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.