Soren Wheeler

An English girl, just shy of 10 years old, didn't realize the strange course her life would take after her red balloon was swept away into the sky.

We want to know what the ramifications are for using skin color as a diagnostic tool for diseases and disorders that can't be seen.

NPR’s David Kestenbaum ran a piece yesterday on Morning Edition about a 16-year-old climate skeptic named Kristen Byrnes. This ambitious teenager has set up a website and dedicated huge chunks of her time to arguing that the rise of global temperature is part of a natural cycle and not, as most climate scientists agree, caused by human action.

Not all scientists are the quiet, serious type. Science writer Carl Zimmer offers a unique peek under the lab coat on his site Science Tattoo Emporium.

To get us thinking about creating new life forms, we tag along with a group of kids on a visit to the American Museum of Natural History exhibit on mythic creatures.

Soren here, one of Radio Lab's worker bees ... With our Pop Music show on the way (the podcast will be released next week), I thought I'd prime the pump with a little personal pop music story:

When I was a kid, my family drove across the country every summer - from Montana, where we lived, to New Hampshire, where my father grew up. There was only one kind of music that played in that ‘74 Pinto station wagon as the great plains rolled by: Willie Nelson. And the favorite song was, of course, “On the Road Again.”

Arthur C. Clarke, the author of the book '2001: A Space Odyssey,' which became a Stanely Kubrick movie, died yesterday. Clarke was a visionary science fiction writer who foresaw the use of satellites for communications and planted a seed of wonder and awe in the universe for many young kids, including me.

If the genetic 'recipe' for making any gene or creature is just a string of letters, then are genes just information, like software code?

Brain scans give us a whole new way of explaining how and why we do the things we do. But while brain scans can help scientists understand how the person inside the scanner thinks, they also make those of us outside the scanner a little bit less savvy.

Scientists like to make computer models of really complicated stuff, like economic markets, global weather, and the beginning of the universe. Now they’ve made a computer model of what might be the most complicated and mysterious object we know of: the brain.