Robert Krulwich

Host Emeritus, Radiolab

Robert Krulwich appears in the following:

David Foster Wallace Tells Us About Freedom

Saturday, May 18, 2013

This being Commencement Time, I'd like to share this gently dramatized version of David Foster Wallace's 2005 address to the graduates of Kenyon College, in which he makes the argument that when you are dog-tired, stuck in traffic, waiting in the supermarket line, when everything is flat, dull, empty, purposeless, ...

Comment

David Foster Wallace Tells Us About Freedom

Saturday, May 18, 2013

What do you get when you get a college diploma? To hear David Foster Wallace tell it, you get a muscle that will help you forever after — in shopping lines, overcrowded parking lots...
Read More

Comments [1]

What Did I Do Last Summer? Oh, I Discovered How To Make Babies Without Sex. And You?

Friday, May 17, 2013

Sex is nice, but can animals make babies without it? One summer, two little boys, their tutor and the tutor's two friends did an experiment to explore this question. What they disco...
Read More

Comment

What Did I Do Last Summer? Oh, I Discovered How To Make Babies Without Sex. And You?

Friday, May 17, 2013

Ah, if only all summers could be like June, July and August 1740 — when three young guys (and a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old) did a science experiment that startled the world. In those days, you could do biology without a fancy diploma. More people could play.

That spring, the ...

Comment

What Is It About Bees And Hexagons?

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Solved! A bee-buzzing, honey-licking 2,000-year-old mystery that begins here, with this beehive. Look at the honeycomb in the photo and ask yourself: (I know you've been wondering this all your life, but have been too shy to ask out loud ... ) Why is every cell in this honeycomb a ...

Comment

What Is It About Bees and Hexagons?

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Bees could build flat honeycombs from just three shapes: squares, triangles or hexagons. But for some reason, bees choose hexagons. Always "perfect" hexagons. Why?

Read More

Comments [2]

Astronomy's Little Secret: The Hidden Art Of 'Moonsweeping'

Saturday, May 11, 2013

A few nights ago, (Wednesday, I think, around midnight), I was by my window looking up, and there, hanging in the sky, I saw the moon. Not all of it, just what the almanac used to call "a crescent" — what my mom called a "toenail moon." The whole moon, ...

Comment

Music, Inside Out

Friday, May 10, 2013

What would it be like to be a string that made music? Not anything simple, like a guitar string or a cello string, but a magical string, a sine curve that's taut then loose, that doub...
Read More

Comments [1]

Music, Inside Out

Friday, May 10, 2013

What would it be like to be a string that made music? Not anything simple, like a guitar string or a cello string, but a magical string, a sine curve that's taut then loose, that doubles then doubles again, that sheds then dissolves into showers of notes — a flaming, ...

Comment

Moths That Drive Cars (Really)

Thursday, May 09, 2013

Welcome to the New World in which, no kidding, insects run robots. In this case, 14 moths take 14 drives in a wheeled vehicle and steer right to the target. Seeing is believing.
Read More

Comment

Moths That Drive Cars (Really)

Thursday, May 09, 2013

What you are about to see — and I'm not making this up — is a moth driving a car.

That's right. A silk moth — actually, 14 different male silk moths — each, in turn, hooked up to a robotic vehicle at Dr. Noriyasu Ando's lab at the ...

Comment

Wildlife That Isn't Wild And Isn't Alive

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Bit by bit, bot by bot, robots are slipping into the real world. Yes, they are born in science labs, but more and more, they're joining us outdoors, up in the sky as drones or spybots (looking like swifts swooping across a meadow), or swimming in the ocean (

Comment

Our Very Normal Solar System Isn't Normal Anymore

Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Some things you just count on. Like if we ever meet a space alien, it should have eyes (and maybe a head). Like somewhere out there, there are planets like ours. Like we have an ordinary solar system — "ordinary" because you know what it looks like ...

It's got ...

Comment

The Boomerang Rocket Ship: Shoot It Up, Back It Comes

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

SpaceX calls it the "Grasshopper" — it's a rocket that doesn't fall back to Earth haphazardly after launch. It carefully returns itself to the launchpad standing up, right where it st...
Read More

Comment

The Boomerang Rocket Ship: Shoot It Up, Back It Comes

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

What in heaven's name is happening here?

We're in McGregor, Texas, surrounded by farms (and the ghost of Johnny Cash). There, on a launch pad, is a 10-story rocket ready to take off. Its engines ignite. Up it goes, higher, then higher, then higher still, until at 820 feet, something ...

Comment

Nobody Throws Balls Like Yu

Saturday, April 27, 2013

He's 26 years old, comes from Japan, plays baseball in Texas and can throw pitches like no one else in the game. He's Yu Darvish and he throws fastballs, sliders, slow curves. Facing him — and this is the thing that makes him bigger than baseball, just a stunning athlete ...

Comment

Mysterious Silly Putty Devours Innocent Magnets

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

If you're old enough to remember the movie The Blob, starring a gelatinous, oozing menace that gooped its way across floors, slid under doors, attached itself to an exposed foot, hand, arm and then devoured its screaming victim without making even a swallowing sound ... If you liked The ...

Comment

A Wet Towel In Space Is Not Like A Wet Towel On Earth

Sunday, April 21, 2013

You just don't know (because who's going to tell you?) that when you leave Earth, travel outside its gravitational reach, hundreds and hundreds of everyday things — stuff you've never had to think about — will change. Like ... oh, how about a wet wash cloth?

Two high school students ...

Comment

Monkeys, Mai Tais And Us

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Some of us can't say no — and I'm using "us" in the broadest sense, to include not just humans, but wallabies, fruit flies, birds and monkeys. We can't control our appetites.

There are monkeys, Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, who "have a strong taste ...

Comment

Trees On Top Of Skyscrapers? Yes! Yes, Say I. No! No, Says Tim

Friday, April 19, 2013

This isn't finished. But it will be. Two residential towers, dense with trees, will have their official opening later this year in downtown Milan, Italy, near the Porta Garibaldi railroad station. (The image is not a photograph, but an architect's rendering. The towers are built and the trees are ...

Comment