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November 13, 2012 The world's first essayist, Michel Montaigne, was out riding one day when he got slammed from the rear, was thrown from his horse, crashed to the ground and for a brief time was, as he puts it, "dead." He described exactly what it felt like. Here's what he learned.

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November 10, 2012 Four million people watched this video filmed beneath the surface of a frozen lake. What really happened on that cold day in Finland can now be revealed, although clever viewers may have already figured out the tricks.

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November 8, 2012 All you need is a bagel, a knife and a high score on your math SAT, and you can do this (unless you're me): You can transform a single bagel into two intertwining, connected parts, one twisted through the other. In other words, a Mobius bagel. Watch and learn.

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November 7, 2012 You're born, live and die with one body. One is all you get. But some people, says neurologist Oliver Sacks, occasionally get another one; it's an illusion, a hallucination, but it follows you around, copying everything you do. It looks like it's keeping you company. But it's not.

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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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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 23, 2012 Here are three baby bats only a bat mommy could love; one's got its face covered, one's got its mouth covered, the other one? It's just enjoying the quiet. This photo won a prize today.

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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 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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