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November 2, 2012 You're standing smack in the middle of a desert, sand dunes everywhere, when suddenly, up and over a dune comes something totally inexplicable: a petal from a sunflower. Then another, then another. What's going on?

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November 1, 2012 Superstorm Sandy dumped several inches of rain on Maryland and Delaware and forced enormous waves to slam into New York and New Jersey. Watch an animation of the rain that fell between Monday and Wednesday.

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October 31, 2012 Liz Climo, an artist who works on Fox's "The Simpsons" by day, spends her off-hours imagining animals who seem to be imagining being little humans.

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October 30, 2012 In the long run, geoengineering — tinkering with air, oceans, the skies — will help us survive on a changing planet. More and more eminent scientists agree that if the human race survives, the engineers will get smarter, the tools will get better, and one day we will control the climate. But should we?

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October 29, 2012 It's one thing to admire autumn leaves. It's another thing to become those leaves. Here we proudly present a collection of forest insects who spend their lives looking almost exactly like leaves about to drop from trees. And sometimes, they literally do it!

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October 24, 2012 When a species gets rare, its market value rises. The higher its price, the more it's hunted. The more it's hunted, the rarer it gets. It's not a happy cycle — and leads to outrageous prices, like $50,000 cycads and $736,000 fish.

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October 22, 2012 By some counts of human history, the number of humans on Earth may have skidded so sharply that we were down to just 1,000 reproductive adults. And a supervolcano might have been to blame.

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October 20, 2012 Maybe it's because Halloween is right around the corner, but when we saw this image, our first thought was nougat, a confection that's been around for centuries. But what we're looking at is a lot older — and more heavenly.

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October 19, 2012 Geniuses have it easy, right? They wake up and out pops the brilliance. Well, not really. And not if that genius is Charles Darwin, who's got lots to do and absolutely no desire to do it. Those days (like Oct 1., 1861) are days when Darwin decides he "hates everybody and everything."

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October 17, 2012 Its nearest relatives — animals that lived before the great dinosaurs — are all extinct now. The tuatara is the only one of its order to make it through that giant asteroid, the ice ages, volcanoes, changes in sea levels, humans. And now, after 230 million years hunting insects in the forest, this little guy is in trouble.

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October 15, 2012 Morse code isn't used very often for 21st century Earth communication. However, artists, scientists and ham radio enthusiasts still creatively use the dots and dashes to make their imprint in space.

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October 14, 2012 Ever wonder what it would look like to fly high above the Earth in the middle of the night? In a video by NASA scientist Justin Wilkinson, it's clear that while we're asleep, our planet is buzzing with city lights and lightning storms.

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October 14, 2012 It's difficult to build a working four-rotor helicopter that spans 100 feet and only weighs 80 pounds. It's even harder when your engine is a 0.7-horsepower person. But two teams of young engineers hope to do just that.

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On Weekend Edition SundayPlaylist

• TIMELINE: The History of Human-Powered Flight

October 12, 2012 Since Leonardo Da Vinci drew up plans for an ornithopter in 1488, hundreds of engineers and inventors have pursued the dream of flight. A handful have succeeded.

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