Robert Krulwich

It was 1569, or maybe early 1570, when it happened: A young French gentleman was out for a ride with his workers, all of them on horseback, when suddenly, "like a thunderbolt," he felt something thick and fleshy slam him from behind. (It was an overzealous, galloping assistant who couldn't stop in time.) Michel de Montaigne's horse crumbled, he went flying up, then down, he crashed to the ground. Then things went black.

I'm going to take you somewhere, but before I do, I should warn you that there's something not quite right about what you'll see. This place I'm going to show you will be astonishingly beautiful. It will be cold. It will be wet. But it will also be a touch -- more than a touch -- mysterious. So watch carefully.

Surgically, this will be complicated. Mathematically, it will be elegant. What we are going to do is take an ordinary bagel, and rather than cut it in half, we are going to turn it, delicately, into two intertwining, interlocked bagel parts, connected, unbroken, one twisting through one the other. In other words, a Mobius bagel.

George W. Hart

You know Carl Linnaeus, right? The great Swedish naturalist who categorized plants and animals in the 1750s? He was a singular figure in botany. But when he got a headache, he sto...

When a species gets rare, its market value rises. The higher its price, the more it's hunted. The more it's hunted, the rarer it gets. Not a happy cycle, and this keeps happening ...

Illustration by NPR

By some counts of human history, the number of humans on Earth may have skidded so sharply that we were down to just 1,000 reproductive adults. And a supervolcano might have been to blame.

A lizard-like creature that's endured since the days of the dinosaurs now faces an uncertain future. Robert explains, and shares some stunning photos.

Robert goes way, way, way back in time for some political insights...and finds a surprising factor: plankton. Take a look at how geology makes a mark on political maps of the Deep South.

Every spring, spidery black thingies show up on Mars. Take a look at some photos, and read a few of the best explanations for what scientists think they might be.

Robert responds to concerns about the "Yellow Rain" segment from our latest podcast, and offers an apology. Read his full statement here.

Robert offers some practical advice on what to do if you survive a nuclear blast... and really want to drink that beer that made it through with you.

Scientists have estimated the answer to this age-old question. However, the vastness of these big, big numbers can be limited by our human perspective.

Robert takes a look at a series of dissected cities, and finds himself falling for the charmingly crooked bits and pieces of one in particular.

"I am, and will ever be, a white-socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer, born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transf...

The Apollo 11 moonwalkers were to be remembered as "epic men of flesh and blood" had disaster stranded them on the moon.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in to watch our first-ever Google Hangout. We had a blast!

They weren't crazy. They weren't being punished. All but one volunteered to do this (which makes it all the more astonishing.)

Krulwich explores some wonderfully dizzying, and mind-altering-in-a-perfectly-legal-and-healthy-way, 3D drawings.

If I swipe a little sweat trickling down my leg and hold it to my nose, it smells fine. But if I take a swipe from my arm pit (or several other places I choose not to mention) it's very un-fine. Why the difference?

Robert praises the hardworking, often maligned, but utterly lovable vulture.