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The Wright Brothers Centennial

One hundred years ago this week, Wilbur and Orville Wright managed to coax their spruce biplane off the North Carolina sand for twelve seconds, and those twelve seconds started a revolution in flight. One-hundred years later, we hear their story.

This piece features the voices of:

Tom Crouch, director of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum
Walter Boyne, former director of the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, author of Dawn over Kitty Hawk
Dr. Jani Pallis, aeronautical engineer and leader of Wright Again project
Amanda Wright-Lane, great grand-niece of Wilbur and Orville
John Aliviti, senior curator at the Franklin Institute
Special thanks to Ben Adair at the Savvy Traveler, Morty Savada at Records Revisited & WNYC archivist Andy Lanset.

Links:
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
The Franklin Institute

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The Einstein of Crows

Robert Krulwich (the ABC News correspondent whose been called "the man who makes the dismal science swing") tells the story of the smartest crow in the world, with a little help from Oxford University scientist Dr. Jackie Chappell.

More about the study of tool use in corvids, including video clips of crows constructing and using tools.

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Grey Ghost

Rhys Buckingham is a "freelance ornithologist" from New Zealand. He’s been chasing the South Island Kokako for years. The bird is a grey, crow-sized songbird which, most experts agree, is now extinct. But Buckingham is obsessed with proving its existence. We join him on a hunt for the grey ghost. This program won the Best Documentary Honorable Mention at the 2002 Third Coast International Audio Festival. It originally aired on Radio New Zealand, on July 21, 2002.

Producer: Allan Coukell

Links:
Radio New Zealand
The Third Coast International Audio Festival

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