Robert Krulwich

Birds are everywhere, but the greatest concentration of different birds — the "bird mecca" of America — is not in our great parks, not in our forests, not where you'd suppose. Not at all.    

This is a trick question. Where would you expect to find the greatest variety of birds?

Downtown, in a city?

Or far, far from downtown — in the fields, forests, mountains, where people are scarce?

Or in the suburbs? In backyards, lawns, parking lots and playing fields?

Not the city, ...

It's a highly specialized category to be sure: "Longest." But that's what the auctioneer is selling. According to the catalog of I.M. Chait Gallery, in Beverly Hills, "This truly spectacular specimen is possibly the longest example of coprolite ever to be offered at auction."

Coprolite is fossilized fecal matter. ...

A Beverly Hills auction house has an unusual fossil for sale. It's not an ancient animal. It's something an ancient animal left behind — and it's very, very long.

This may be the most heart-rending, most beautiful eclipse in our solar system. But you can't travel to see it. Not yet.

Any eclipse is worth seeing. A total eclipse — where the moon completely blots out the sun, where day turns to night, where solar flares ring the moon's shadow like a crown of flame — that's the eclipse everybody wants to see, the alpha eclipse that eclipses all the other ...

Forty-five years ago, this week, 123 million of us watched Neil and Buzz step onto the moon. In 1969, we numbered about 200 million, so more than half of America was in the audience that day. Neil Armstrong instantly became a household name, an icon, a hero. And then — ...

The year he landed on the moon, astronaut Neil Armstrong was famous, iconic, an American hero. One year later he wasn't. In 1970, how many people remembered his name? This will surprise you.

I'm standing on a beach and I see, a few hundred yards out, a mound of water heading right at me. It's not a wave, not yet, but a swollen patch of ocean, like the top of a moving beach ball, what sailors call a "swell." As it gets closer, ...

What if I told you that an ordinary-looking wave hitting your beach had traveled, intact, halfway across the planet? Would you believe me? Well, believe this.

You drop into the world. You are beautiful, full-bodied, ready for anything, but the world is bigger than you — to your surprise, you are small. You try to make your way, but the big world spits you out, so you fight your way back.

And because life is like ...

It's just a drop of water. It's about to fall. And when it does, a story begins. What happens next may feel oddly familiar. Maybe it's telling you — about you.

Harry Potter is attending the Quidditch World Cup with his family, as well as Ron and Hermione. He is in his 30s, with "a couple of threads of silver" in his hair and a mysterious cut on his cheek.

"I'm sitting next to a swimming pool and somebody dives in," says the great physicist Richard Feynman in a conversation recorded in 1983. Other people jump in as well.

Could a really clever person, Feynman asks, just by looking at the waves on the pool's surface, imagine those waves rippling ...

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest science teachers ever, asks a wave to tell him a story.

They are called excavator mulchers. That's polite. What they really do is swallow trees. This one, a DAH Forestry Mulcher from Quebec's manufacturer Denis Cimaf, consumes a 30-foot-tall, mature spruce (starting at the top, landing at the bottom) in 15 seconds. The tree that was, suddenly isn't.

...

It's got big iron teeth and a powerful jaw. When it finds a 30-foot tree it goes to the top, opens its mouth and — watch this.

They're odds. That's all they are. Not fate, just probabilities. Lauren Weinstein, cartoonist, is having a baby, and she's told — out of the blue — that she and her husband are both carriers of the gene that causes cystic fibrosis. They are sent to a genetic counselor. What ...

They were having a baby. Both she and her husband carry a gene that might cause problems, "might" being a 25 percent chance. Is that high? Low? What to do? Here's the story, nicely drawn, deeply felt.

This bird likes livers, kidneys, entrails — anything it can pluck that's freshly dead. But what if you served it ... a painting?