archive

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

The Eulogy That Wasn't: The Fate Neil Armstrong Evaded

Neil Armstrong casts a shadow in a photograph he took of the lunar lander Eagle near the end of his historic moonwalk.

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.

Summary

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Designing Yourself

Robert Krulwich delivers the commencement address at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, on June 2.

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.

Summary

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Weekend Special: Underwater Torpedo Adopted By A Group Of Traveling Mammals

Dolphins

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.

Summary

Friday, August 10, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Giant Crumpled Paper Drops From The Sky, Lands On Hill In New Zealand

Neil Dawson Sculpture

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.

Summary

Wednesday, August 08, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Discussing The Mars Landing With My 137-Year-Old Grandfather

Percival Lowell's drawings of "canals" on Mars.

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?

Summary

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

The Worst Way To Stay Alive Forever

Computer and human.

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.

Summary

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Are Butterflies Two Different Animals in One? The Death And Resurrection Theory

Butterfly.

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?

Summary

Monday, July 30, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Embarrassed By Your Olympic Javelin: Did Cavemen Do It Better?

Detail of javelins during day eight of the 13th IAAF World Athletics Championships at Daegu Stadium on Sept. 3, 2011 in Daegu, South Korea.

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.

Summary

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Weekend Special: The Miracle Of The Felt-Tipped Pen

A CT scan showing a pen in a woman's stomach.

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.

Summary

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Which Is Bigger: A Human Brain Or The Universe?

Brain cloud

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?

Summary

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Weekend Special: Curious Kazakh Gopher Not Curious About Nearby Spaceships

Gopher at the cosmodrome.

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.

Summary

Friday, July 20, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Frozen And Blushing Forever

Diplomystus dentatus with Knightia in its mouth.

July 20, 2012 How would you like it if the last thing you did on Earth was really, really embarrassing?

Summary

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?

A mushroom cloud billows into the sky about one hour after an atomic bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan.

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.

Summary

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

Five Air Force officers stand at ground zero of an atomic bomb test at a Nevada test site on July 19, 1957.

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.

Summary

Friday, July 13, 2012

Krulwich Wonders...

Fantasy Baseball For Physicists: Very, Very Fast Fastballs

Relativistic Baseball from what if?

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.

Summary

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