archive
Krulwich Wonders...
The Eulogy That Wasn't: The Fate Neil Armstrong Evaded
August 26, 2012 The Apollo 11 moonwalkers were to be remembered as "epic men of flesh and blood" had disaster stranded them on the moon.
Krulwich Wonders...
Designing Yourself
August 14, 2012 In Robert Krulwich's 2012 commencement address to the College of the Atlantic, he says it's important to know your insides, know your pleasures, and create a version of yourself boosted and buoyed by others to maximize happiness in your life.
Krulwich Wonders...
Weekend Special: Underwater Torpedo Adopted By A Group Of Traveling Mammals
August 11, 2012 Four guys fishing for tuna off the coast of Santa Cruz came across a pretty amazing site. And they just so happened to have an underwater camera to capture it.
Krulwich Wonders...
Giant Crumpled Paper Drops From The Sky, Lands On Hill In New Zealand
August 10, 2012 You are standing in a park in New Zealand. You look up at the top of a hill, and there, balanced on the ground, looking like it might catch a breeze and blow away, is a gigantic sculpture that looks like a wrinkled piece of paper.
Krulwich Wonders...
Discussing The Mars Landing With My 137-Year-Old Grandfather
August 8, 2012 Krulwich's grandfather read, as did many others in 1907, of alleged "canals" and alien life on the red planet. How would he feel about Curiosity's successful landing on and future exploration of Mars?
Krulwich Wonders...
The Worst Way To Stay Alive Forever
August 7, 2012 If machines could one day duplicate a human brain, connections alone won't be enough. A brain has (and a machine needs) something else.
Krulwich Wonders...
Are Butterflies Two Different Animals in One? The Death And Resurrection Theory
August 1, 2012 Moths and butterflies radically change shape as they grow, from little wormy caterpillar critters to airborne beauties. Why are they born this way? Could they actually be separate organisms?
Krulwich Wonders...
Embarrassed By Your Olympic Javelin: Did Cavemen Do It Better?
July 30, 2012 After German Uwe Hohn threw his javelin nearly out of the stadium in 1984, a move that spooked officials with its potential deadliness, the flying spears were changed to fly shorter. But people have been throwing sticks for 400,000 years, and some of these ancient spears might have been able to fly far farther than modern javelins.
Krulwich Wonders...
Weekend Special: The Miracle Of The Felt-Tipped Pen
July 28, 2012 Things get swallowed all the time, but one tale from a hospital case study in Devon, England, tells us something extraordinary about felt-tip pens.
Krulwich Wonders...
Which Is Bigger: A Human Brain Or The Universe?
July 24, 2012 You can fly with me across vast distances, go to impossibly faraway places because you have the tool that lets you — that hunk of flesh in your head. But can the universe outwit us?
Krulwich Wonders...
Weekend Special: Curious Kazakh Gopher Not Curious About Nearby Spaceships
July 21, 2012 He's compact. He digs. He's careful. He inspects everything. This is exactly the kind of Earthling I'd want to send to a nearby planet.
Krulwich Wonders...
Frozen And Blushing Forever
July 20, 2012 How would you like it if the last thing you did on Earth was really, really embarrassing?
Krulwich Wonders...
If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?
July 18, 2012 Tsutomu Yamaguchi was late for work in August 1945, in Hiroshima, Japan, when he saw an airplane drop a silvery speck into the air. He survived the bombing only to make his way to Nagasaki three days later...just as that city was bombed, too.
Krulwich Wonders...
Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb
July 17, 2012 The country was just beginning to worry about nuclear fallout, and the Air Force wanted to reassure people that it was OK to use atomic weapons. And so on July 19, 1957, five Air Force officers stood on a patch of ground in the Nevada desert and waited for the bomb to drop.
Krulwich Wonders...
Fantasy Baseball For Physicists: Very, Very Fast Fastballs
July 13, 2012 Here's a question: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? The answer is: Don't.