For centuries, artists have come to art museums, set up camp in the corner of a gallery, and sketched the artwork on the walls. Earlier this month, 23 artists used cutting-edge technologies (including 3-D printers and modeling software) to put their own spin on some of the masterworks at the ...

Each of us can call to mind a clear image of many dinosaurs. That’s surprising, since no human ever set eyes on one. The images that we have derive largely from the work of one man, Charles R. Knight. A gifted wildlife painter at the end of the 19^th century, Knight was ...

Slideshow: Charles R. Knight's dinosaurs

Chris Adrian's novels tell dark, fantastical stories that draw on his experience working as a pediatric oncologist. Adrian tells Kurt how writing helps him deal with the emotional burden of the medicine he practices. Anne Marie Nest reads selections from Adrian's forthcoming novel ...

Medical students spend hours studying information on charts and graphs, but when was the last time they studied the meaning behind a good story? We visited a group of OB/GYN residents taking a narrative medicine class to see how embracing fiction can improve patient care ...

Can the arts actually improve health care? Kurt gets some answers from Jill Sonke, director of the Center for the Arts in Healthcare at the University of Florida. She explains how the arts have been carving out a place in the healing process ...

Slideshow: Art therapy in action

Before the invention of the dialysis machine, kidney failure was basically a death sentence. Registered nurse Janice Breen explains how the design of dialysis machines has evolved since she started working with them back in 1973 ...

After piano music helped him recover from brain surgery, Dr. Richard Fratianne became a true believer in music therapy. In the burn unit at the Cleveland MetroHealth Medical Center, Fratianne is measuring patients’ stress hormones during procedures to try to prove that music therapy ...

Television drama has created the impression of an ideal world where decisions in hospitals are made quickly and cost is never an issue. It directly affects our expectations for treatment, according to Billy Goldberg, an emergency-room physician, and Joseph Turow ...

Video: A scene from the Scrubs episode "My Musical"

Jill Sonke tells Kurt about the benefits and challenges that come with bringing art and artists into health care environments.

At the Rethink Music conference in Boston last month, programmers, developers, and tinkerers showed up for a 24-hour coding frenzy — a hackathon — at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center, vying to make the coolest app that could transform music. ...

Humans love a well-told story and scientists are beginning to understand why. According to a 2010 study by three Princeton researchers, the act of listening to, and comprehending, a narrative creates an unconscious physical alignment between the storyteller and the audience: their brains link ...

Biologist Bernie Krause believes animals communicate with each other on their own frequency, and when you put all those frequencies together, they interact in a way not unlike a symphony orchestra. He calls it “biophony.” “I was sitting here listening to these sounds ...

Listener Challenge: Name that Sound

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 ...

Gerald Joyce is a professor of biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1970s, he was studying biochemistry at The University of Chicago, when he discovered Gravity's Rainbow, the sprawling World War II novel by Thomas Pynchon ...

Last month, thousands of mathematicians attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston — the largest annual gathering of its kind. In addition to presentations on phylogenetic algebraic geometry and trace formulas, the conference featured an art exhibition, with 80 artists presenting ....

Video: Mathematical Art

All over the country, amazing science is happening without institutional or government funding. We visit inventors working in garages, basements, even a Quonset hut on a farm. Rachel Zimmerman works at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, but she was an amateur inventor first ...

Video: Frank Polifka's "Tornado in a Can"

Mike Daisey tells the story of Tesla’s salons, where he played fast and loose with technology. "When he had you there, he'd show you inventions, then make you part of the inventions," Daisey explains. The inventor "cured" Mark Twain of his constipation with an electrical charge ...

Part visionary, part mad scientist, and absolute genius, Tesla should be as famous as Edison — but he’s been largely forgotten. Kurt talks with Samantha Hunt about her novel The Invention of Everything Else. Tesla is the protagonist, and despite the outlandish ...

Bonus Track: Samantha Hunt reads from her novel

Much of science today is grant-dependent and discourages dreamy, out-of-box thinking — who wants to fund mistakes? "I really think of [Tesla] as one of the last people inventing on his own,” Samantha Hunt tells Kurt Andersen. “He didn't have funding from the Department of Defense ...

Tesla’s biggest innovation was introducing alternating current as the standard for modern electric power, breaking Thomas Edison’s monopoly on DC power. Author and monologist Mike Daisey performs a one-man show about Tesla. In this segment he describes the inventor's obsession with electricity ...