William McDonough is a grand old man in the young field of green architecture.  In the 1970s, he built the first "green roof" in America — a corporate headquarters with a meadow on top — and is now working on a sustainable building for NASA.  Kurt Andersen asks him about the...

Slideshow:  William McDonough's Green Designs

Just over 30 years ago, an Englishman named Christopher Alexander tried to revolutionize architecture. In A Pattern Language, Alexander told architects and planners to design homes on emotional and spiritual principles – not on traffic flow. The revolution didn’t quite come. But the book had a ...

For chemists, the periodic table of the elements is a hugely coveted piece of real estate. Writer Sam Kean explains the origins of the periodic table and its enduring brilliance. Produced by KJHK’s Becky Sullivan.

Wrapping your brain around the nature of time and the existence of multiple dimensions is a challenge, but comedian-musician Reggie Watts doesn't blink: he takes on mind-wrenching questions of theoretical physics in a fully-improvised song.

In 1928 the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered the fungus from which penicillin is derived. Fleming made the discovery while trying an unusual experiment: painting with strains of bacteria. Lindsay Patterson talked with a team that’s taking bacterial painting to a new level.

As I write this post, Christmas is just days away, and despite the overworked (though still valid) lament that it's all about commerce, hundreds of millions of Christians will take the time to go to church and turn their thoughts to the Divine. This will undoubtedly drive a small group of true believers nuts.

Earlier this week, one-of-a-kind comedian/musician Reggie Watts rocked WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space for a special 'Studio 360' all about Theoretical Physics. That’s right…Theoretical Physics.  Here at 360, we like a little science sprinkled in with our arts and culture.

Studio 360 commissioned this short story from writer Aimee Bender. It has a modest subject: the Big Bang. To bone up on her science, Bender spoke with Nick Warner, a professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. "Origin Lessons" is read ...

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.

The Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen calls himself an experimental geographer. For one of his latest projects, Paglen's been tracking secret government spy satellites and taking photos of them. Reporter Lisa Katayama caught up with Paglen on the roof of his loft in West ...

The iPhone app iSpy lets users watch thousands of live-streaming security cameras around the world. It might sound creepy, but Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky finds this anonymous voyeurism comforting.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, philosopher, and author of the manifesto You Are Not a Gadget. He tells Kurt how our privacy has changed in recent years thanks to social networks and smart phone technology.

Jaron Lanier shares his predictions with Kurt about the direction our surveillance culture is headed.

Peter Belhumeur is a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He's at the forefront of developing computer systems that can recognize faces — a technology that’s of great interest to the U.S. military. Belhumeur explains to Kurt why the gold standard of facial recognition is still a ...

Peter Belhumeur has been collaborating with the Smithsonian on an iPhone app for plant identification. It's based on the same systems he’s developed for facial recognition. During our visit to Belhumeur’s lab, he explained to Kurt how the app works.

Big Brother is just a mouse click away. Our online activity is being tracked, recorded, and then sold to the highest bidder — all thanks to a little line of programming code called a "cookie." Its inventor, Lou Montulli, says that without cookies, the web would be even ...

While doing research for our art and medicine episode, we called our colleagues in the NYPR archives — a treasure trove of nearly a century of media made or collected at the station. And they found some pretty fantastic things in the stacks. 

Final preparations are underway for tonight’s live show in WNYC’s Greene Space: the science magician loads in his equipment in a couple hours, then Reggie Watts will soundcheck, and doors will open at 7pm.  And then… black holes will play drums!  We’ll bend space and time!  And we may just come up with the Theory of Everything. (At the very least, we'll come up with a Theory of A Lot of Things.)