How do you square the idea of a bad person who does great good? Or a good person who does terrible harm? Sam Kean introduces us to the confusing life story of Fritz Haber. Around 1900, Haber was a young chemist in Germany, intent on solving the biggest problem facing ...

What would it take to make you do something truly awful? One day, psychology professor David Buss headed to a friend's house for a party. But when he arrived, his friend--a mild-mannered fellow professor--wasn't there to greet him. As David explains to producer Pat Walters, his friend was upstairs in ...

The basal ganglia is a core part of the brain, deep inside your skull, that helps control movement. Unless something upsets the chain of command. In this short, Jad and Robert meet a young researcher who was studying what happens when the basal ganglia gets short-circuited in mice...until one fateful day, when things got really, really weird.

Just after the Big Bang, the universe was a primordial soup made of light. Then, it started belching out matter. Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how deeply shocking this is, and Marcelo Gleiser reveals an imperfection in the laws of physics that makes our very existence possible.

This adaptation of our "Goat on a Cow" story is so beautiful it made Robert cry--he broke into tears at his desk, as he describes to the New York Times. The dance was directed and choreographed by Andrew Palermo, with additional choreography by Taye Diggs, as a ...

In the early 60s, Robert Axelrod was a math major messing around with refrigerator-sized computers. Then a dramatic global crisis made him wonder about the space between a rock and a hard place, and whether being good may be a good strategy. With help from Andrew Zolli and Steve Strogatz, ...

There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But hit the streets, and you can see and feel it. Sxip Shirey avoided New York City most of his life. But as an aspiring musician, he decided that moving there was a necessary evil. Then, one night on a ...

Cities, like bodies, grow and evolve. In the case of New York City, that growth never would have occurred if not for a Homeric engineering feat that occurred mostly underground. Jad digs into the history of the city's water tunnels with Diane Galusha and Nik Sokol. And Sandhogs Ritchie Fitzsimmons ...

Three stories that upend our pre-conceived notions about falling:

3. Falling Cats: David Quammen ponders the terminal velocity of a plummeting cat, teaches Jad a new word, and helps clear up some fallacies of feline physics.

4. Constantly Falling: Brian Greene explains why he can't answer the most basic question you can ask a physicist: "why do we fall?"

5. Falling Fortunes: Garrett Soden and Joan Murray introduce us to the 20th Century's greatest "gravity hero"--who, despite being the first person to survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel, ultimately landed in a poorhouse.

Two stories about heart-stopping falls:

1. Falling Time: David Eagleman gets to the bottom of what goes on in our brains during those life or death moments when time seems to slow way down.

2. Falling in Love: Lulu Miller brings us the story of Sarita and Simon, who fell in...and then out...of love.

In the late 1970s, a new language was born. And Ann Senghas, Associate Professor of Psychology at Barnard, has spent the last 30 years helping to decode it. In 1978, 50 deaf children entered a newly formed school--a school in which the teachers (who didn't sign) taught in Spanish. No ...

Susan Schaller believes that the best idea she ever had in her life had to do with an isolated young man she met one day at a community college. He was 27-years-old at the time, and though he had been born deaf, no one had ever taught him to sign. ...

One morning, neurologist Jill Bolte Taylor woke up with a headache. A blood vessel then burst inside her left hemisphere, and silenced all the brain chatter in her head. She was left with no language. No memories. Just sensory intake, and an all-encompassing feeling of joy.

Soren Wheeler takes us to Butte Montana--where an open pit copper mine’s demise leads to a toxic lake filled with corrosive runoff. Reporter Barret Golding goes to visit the pit lake, and writer Edwin Dobb tells Soren the story of a pile of dead snow geese who made an ill-fated ...

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can't recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close--the great artist known for his enormous paintings of ... that's right, faces.

Can a tumor ever be a source of good? Neurologist Dr. Orrin Devinsky thinks so. He recalls the true story of a man, his tumor, and a euphoric reaction to safety pins. Next, Mark Salzman reads from his novel Lying Awake. When a nun develops a brain tumor, ...