Robert Krulwich

Usually they're naked, ancient and stony. But all of a sudden, they could live next door.

The Paris-based designer Leo Caillard had, as he wrote me, "the idea conception" and took the photographs. Alexis Persani dressed them. (Not actually; it was done on a computer, as you

The 19th century just lost its last living man.

Jiroemon Kimura, of Kyotango, Japan, was born in April 1897, lived right through the 20th century and died last Wednesday. He was 116. According to Guinness World Records (which searches for these things), he was the last surviving male born in ...

What is it about dolphins? They have very, very big brains, and that makes we humans, whose brains are nothing to sniff at, nervous. We don't know what to make of them.

The latest example: On May 17 in India, the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued an order ...

India has just banned dolphin entertainment parks. They are "morally unacceptable," says a government ministry. Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the U.S. Navy announced t...

I've been to New Delhi where traffic is frightening. I've seen pictures of Nairobi and Bangkok, where it's even scarier. But Ho Chi Minh City? The town we used to call Saigon? I don't think I'd put myself in a truck, car, bike or even a Sherman tank in that ...

Moving north: two vans. Moving east: three taxis, a peddle cab and one lady walking. Moving west: six motorcycles, another taxi, a truck and a van. Moving south: a bicyclist, two ca...

Take a bunch of broccoli, or make it a Slurpee, burger, pizza and fries, swallow, and ask yourself, "How much energy did I just consume?" Enough to light a flashlight? Run an electr...

There's a new lunch place down the block, so like you do when the menu looks interesting, I walked in and ordered something mysterious, which for me was the "Red Lentil and Edamame Salad," mostly because I can never remember what edamame is, and because that word suggests doing something ...

I was standing in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art the other day, where there's a full-sized Egyptian temple, called Dendur. It's housed under a glass roof ...

And standing there, gazing at profiles of Egyptian nobles etched onto the limestone, I noticed a bunch of what we now call ...

Be really careful when you carve your name onto an ancient Egyptian temple. Not because it's wrong (which it is), but because sometimes the temple comes back to haunt you. The true st...

It starts on a highway.

The camera pushes in. And there, near the meridian line, you see a faint scattering of red lights. Something is in the tar. And it's glowing.

One by one, teeny red cubes, with delicate circuitry on their sides, squeeze themselves out of the suddenly soft ...

This is the season of night noises, chirps, buzzes, little cries. The air is telling you, "Things are going on out here," and if you like you can step out onto the porch and do what the writer Rachel Carson did back in 1956: She played a hunting game. The ...

Join us for a night of nanospectucular wonders, hosted by Robert Krulwich, live from the World Science Festival tonight (May 30) at 8pm ET here on radiolab.org. Watch below, and join two Radiolab producers for a live chat as the event gets underway.

Humans do it with smoke.

Dolphins do it with air.

With a little snort, dolphins can produce a nearly perfect "air" rings, (sophisticated non-dolphins called them toroidal vortices) which they turn into underwater toys.

If they leave the rings alone, (because air is lighter than water) the underwater circles will ...

I email. I search. I shop. I Facebook. I stream. I Skype. Every year I seem to do these things a little bit more. Stroke by stroke, as I slip deeper into the Internet's embrace, I find myself wondering:

"What would happen if the Internet went away?"

Can it? It ...

Take a look at this.

It's a dog drinking water. It's also the answer to a riddle. When you and I take a drink, we can lift a glass, hold it to our mouth, tilt and use gravity to pour the water in. Dogs can't do that. In a pinch, ...

Ask a great inventor to invent, and that's exactly what he'll do. Sometimes the ideas pop out like cannon bursts: "consider this ... " or "maybe this?" or "Wait! How about THIS!"

Ben Franklin did that with balloons.

In the 1780s, Franklin was America's ambassador to France, living in Paris, ...

If this wasn't a science page, if this happened 3,000 years ago in, say, a Middle Eastern desert, I would call it a Miracle. But it's not. It's just a plain, ordinary moment of "wow!"

First, the beginner's version. A man takes a bunch of metronomes, sets them ticking in ...

Take a metronome. Then take another. Then another. Set them ticking at different times. Look. Lift. (That's the key part.) Watch. Then Laugh. Because you will be dumbfounded.

This being Commencement Time, I'd like to share this gently dramatized version of David Foster Wallace's 2005 address to the graduates of Kenyon College, in which he makes the argument that when you are dog-tired, stuck in traffic, waiting in the supermarket line, when everything is flat, dull, empty, purposeless, ...