Over the last 16 years, the mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan, now a professor at Duke University, has been working on a theory for how the world works. It’s a theory of everything: how living creatures are shaped, how lava flows down mountains. It’s called the constructal law ...

This is what Kurt Andersen considers a holiday tale ... melting ice caps and extraterrestrial spies? Kurt's story, "Human Intelligence," was produced for radio by Jonathan Mitchell, and stars Melanie Hoopes, John Ottavino, and Ed Herbstman. The unabridged version was ...

Patrick Winston is Principal Investigator at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. He believes that creating better artificial intelligence is not a matter of more powerful processing: we have to teach computers how to think more like humans. “We are a symbolic species,” he ...

Hugh Herr is a leading bionics developer at MIT and a double amputee following a mountain-climbing accident. Herr has developed legs that allow him to climb better than he could previously. With a generation of young injured veterans needing prostheses, the need to build mechanical ...

Video: iWalk PowerFoot Gait Animation

We humans are pretty hot stuff — the most highly evolved species on the planet, or so we like to think. This parable by science-fiction writer Terry Bisson suggests otherwise. To some space aliens who think they’ve seen it all, we’re not just primitive. We’re gross. Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat” was first published in ...

While traditional street photography usually catches strangers passing by in a public space, the photographer Michele Iversen has been catching strangers passing by in their own private spaces, without their permission. At night she sits in her car and watches the warm glowing windows of strangers' homes waiting for the perfect shot ...

Slideshow: Photography by Michele Iversen

Many of the images we know of the Civil War come from the photos of Mathew Brady. Brady and his assistants recorded the rigidly posed generals and the battlefields scattered with bodies. But very few people at the time actually saw Brady's pictures – and those who did were horrified. Illustrators like...

Slideshow: Mathew Brady and Winslow Homer

This is what Kurt Andersen considers a holiday tale... melting ice caps and extraterrestrial spies? Kurt's story, "Human Intelligence," was produced for radio by Jonathan Mitchell, and stars Melanie Hoopes, John Ottavino, and Ed Herbstman.

Michele Iversen has been taking pictures of strangers for years. But she's not your average street photographer. At night she sits in her car and watches the warm glowing windows of strangers' homes, waiting for the perfect shot. Produced by Studio 360's Jonathan Mitchell.

Thriller movies had been set in motels before but "Psycho" marked a major turning point. Studio 360's Jonathan Mitchell traces how motels have evolved on screen: from 1940s noir to kitschy B-movie horror.

To make a convincing zombie, it's all in the pacing. George Romero invented the modern zombie with his 1968 film, "Night of the Living Dead," and he still likes them old-fashioned - slow-moving but hard to stop. But Ruben Fleischer, director of the ...

It's become a holiday tradition: every year, in cities around the world, hundreds of people show up at a public space with their old boomboxes to participate in Phil Kline's ambient, techno Christmas carol called "Unsilent Night." Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

When Klara Hobza came upon a 40-year-old book of construction designs for paper airplanes, she had an epiphany, and the New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest was born. Now Hobza has her own paper airplane book. Jonathan Mitchell discovers how her designs took ...

To make a convincing zombie, it's all in the pacing. George Romero invented the modern zombie with his 1968 film "Night of the Living Dead," and he still likes them old-fashioned -- slow-moving but hard to stop. "I don't know if you're aware of the rift in the ...

In today's scary media landscape -- full of layoffs and closing papers -- arts coverage is especially vulnerable. Arts critics must invent new ways to do what they do. Film critic Mike D'Angelo and visual art critic Lori Waxman are two journalists blazing that trail. Produced ...

Betty Woodman reveals how she keeps coming up with new ideas after 50 years. And Taylor Mead, our candidate for oldest living beatnik, tells of his life as an "extremely semi-famous" artist. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

It's become a holiday tradition: every year, hundreds of people gather with boomboxes to perform Phil Kline's ambient, techno Christmas carol called "Unsilent Night." Jonathan Mitchell went along for the ride.

What do we know about a particular war after we've seen it reenacted dozens of times in dozens of different films? The U.S. pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, and we've been watching movies about it ever since. Film historians Larry Suid and

American kids spend an average of seven hours a week gaming. But what about the grown-ups inside the industry, who play eight to ten hours -– and then leave the office and go home to play some more? Jonathan Mitchell asked game producer Marc ...