Quantcast
Channel: Science and Creativity (Studio 360)
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 50 View Live

Evolution

It’s been over 150 years since "On the Origin of Species" was published, but we’re still fighting over Charles Darwin’s big theory. One of Darwin's descendants, Ruth Padel, writes poems about her...

View Article



Homo-Thespian

The play "Hominid," by Ken Weitzman, reenacts a violent incident that took place in a chimpanzee colony. Primate expert Frans de Waal and the play's actors describe what it took to stage a chimpanzee...

View Article

"Alpha"

Novelist Lydia Millet imagines a future where a genetic engineering accident has wiped out much of the earth's plant life. When a few blades of grass appear on a remote island, a scientist goes to...

View Article

Darwin’s Life in Verse

Charles Darwin's great-great-granddaughter Ruth Padel tells her famous ancestor's life story in verse in her book "Darwin: A Life in Poems." One poem describes Darwin's awe at the sea life that washed...

View Article

You’re a Good Man, Charlie Darwin

"Set the sails; I feel the winds a-stirring." So begins the song "Charlie Darwin" by the rock band The Low Anthem. Frontman Ben Knox Miller describes how the band came up with the tune and its darker...

View Article


Where Do We Come From?

Where did we come from? Evolutionary biologist Spencer Wells is pretty close to the answer. He's the founder of a National Geographic initiative called the Genographic Project. By collecting DNA...

View Article

The Art Instinct

Denis Dutton was a professor of the philosophy of art who took an interest in evolutionary biology. In his controversial book “The Art Instinct,” he argued that certain tastes in art are genetic....

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Museum of God

Amateur paleontologist Jon Halsey isn't afraid to turn over a few rocks. By digging in areas near his home outside of Dallas, he's been able to amass an extensive collection of fossils which he stores...

View Article


Aparna Nancherla’s Failed Science Career

Aparna Nancherla is a comedian who has appeared on “Inside Amy Schumer” and written for “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” She was also a smart kid in high school....

View Article


360 Live: Wyatt Cenac Drives Drunk (for Science)

Wyatt Cenac is a comedian and former correspondent for The Daily Show. He’s no scientist – but while completing a community service requirement in high school, he conducted a little experiment to...

View Article

360 Live: Herman Pontzer Ends Up in the Hot Seat

Herman Pontzer is a professor of anthropology at Hunter College, where he investigates human and ape evolution. A few years ago, while studying the Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe, Dr. Pontzer’s experiment...

View Article

360 Live: Dr. Rachel Yehuda Misses Her Rats

Rachel Yehuda is a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. For years, Dr. Yehuda researched PTSD by measuring stress hormones in lab rats. But when she...

View Article

Going Viral

How does a deadly plague inside “World of Warcraft” spread like a real virus? Also, rabies experts connect the dots between “The Iliad,” “Twilight,” and Louis Pasteur. And an apocalyptic world where...

View Article


Our Computers, Our Viruses, Our Selves

Computer viruses have evolved from an annoyance to a national security threat. In 2013, the Department of Homeland Security told us to disable Java on our home computers (a thing that few of us knew...

View Article

The Flame Alphabet

William S. Burroughs famously said that “language is a virus.” Novelist Ben Marcus took Burrough's line as inspiration for “The Flame Alphabet.” In the book, the language of children has become...

View Article


Playing Against the Virus

Lately, viruses have been spreading through the gaming world. In the online game “Pandemic 2,” you play the virus, aiming to wipe out humanity. In “The Great Flu,” you control an international health...

View Article

Reconstructing Viruses

Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University has done groundbreaking research on reconstructing the DNA of viruses (sort of like microbial “Jurassic Park”). The method was used to re-create the...

View Article


What Does Going Viral Mean?

Computer viruses emerged in the 1980s. In the internet era, we decided not to beat viruses, but to join them. “Going viral” became the goal of any piece of content, from a movie to a Facebook post....

View Article

Does Your Zombie Have Rabies?

Long before science explained rabies, the virus showed up in folklore and literature. "The vampire myth, the werewolf myth, and the zombie myth are all saliva-born infections that manifest as a...

View Article

Viruses at the Movies

What radiation was to the 1950s — a real but poorly understood menace that served as an all-purpose plot device — viruses have become for our era. Viruses explain vampires in “Blade” and zombies in “I...

View Article

The Science of Singing

When you hear a singer like the late Whitney Houston belt out a song like “I Will Always Love You,” you’re listening to a marvel of vocal skill. But there’s no anatomical difference between her vocal...

View Article


This is Your Brain on Art

Dr. Eric Kandel is a neuroscientist at Columbia University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who won the Nobel Prize for his research into how we form memories. He’s also an avid art collector....

View Article


The Neuroscience of Jazz

Charles Limb is a professor of otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins Medicine who has a sideline in brain research; he’s also on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. He wants to know what...

View Article

Imaginary Friends Forever

Lots of kids have imaginary friends — a young Kurt Andersen had a gaggle including Robbie Dobbie, Crackerpin, Jimmy the Cat, a poodle called Genevieve. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the...

View Article

How Creative Are You?

The man nicknamed “the father of creativity” was psychologist E. Paul Torrance. In the 1940s he began researching creativity to help improve American education. In order to encourage creativity, we...

View Article


So You Think You're Creative?

We're always talking about creativity, but what do we mean? Can we find creativity, can we measure it, can we encourage it? Kurt talks with Gary Marcus, a psychology professor about what science tells...

View Article

Gary Marcus: Defining Creativity

Kurt Andersen talks with Gary Marcus about what science knows, and doesn’t know, about creativity. Marcus is the director of New York University’s Center for Language and Music, and the author of...

View Article

Gary Marcus: Enhancing Creativity

Gary Marcus, who directs New York University’s Center for Language and Music, talks with Kurt Andersen about scientific efforts to find and describe creativity. They discuss experiments that produce...

View Article

Canaries in the Coal Smoke

When artists and scientists collaborate, it’s usually because an artist wants to make a piece of art inspired by some scientific concept. But in Chicago, an artist is helping a biologist uncover...

View Article



Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Abou Farman on Leonor Caraballo’s “Vision”

In 2012, Studio 360 aired a story about a pair of artists — a husband and wife team named Leonor Caraballo and Abou Farman. In 2008, Caraballo had been diagnosed with breast cancer. She felt a strong...

View Article

How Time-Travel Stories Borrow from Einstein

It's hard to believe, but the words “time” and “travel” were never really linked until H.G. Wells' 1895 novel,  “The Time Machine.” James Gleick, author of “Time Travel: A History”  discovered that...

View Article

It's All Relativity

When he was growing up in Germany in the 1880s and 90s, nobody had pegged Einstein as a genius. “Einstein was slow in learning to speak as a child,” says biographer Walter Isaacson, author of...

View Article

Way to Go, Einstein

This week, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity: how Einstein upended the way we see space and time, his effect on pop culture, and how one of his most...

View Article


How to Catch a Spacetime Wave

Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1916. Exactly 100 years later, a group of scientists using giant contraptions that cost a billion dollars confirmed the existence one of his most...

View Article

Albert Einstein’s Pop Culture Afterlife

While he was researching his novel “The Lost Time Accidents,” the writer John Wray learned a lot about Albert Einstein. His novel is about an eastern European family in the early 1900s that believes...

View Article

Shakespeare in Space

Miranda, Caliban, Prospero, and Ferdinand: the moons of Uranus read like the cast of The Tempest.  Why is that? The practice of naming planets and stars goes all the way back to Galileo. For centuries,...

View Article


E.T. (Eight Tentacles)

Philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith (author of the “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness”) believes that octopuses are the closest we’ll come on Earth to...

View Article


The Neuroscience of the Mandela Effect

If you misremember Queen’s “We Are the Champions” ending with the line “of the world!” or the children’s book series “The Berenstain Bears” as “The Berenstein Bears” — you might be experiencing a...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

A Crash Course in Designing Life

The innovations that are happening in synthetic biology will change life on Earth. But most of the decision-makers in the field are at large research institutions and corporations. In the past few...

View Article

Synthetic Biology in Pop Culture

Synthetic biology sounds like a field inaccessible to the layperson, but Kurt Andersen has been seeing these ideas play out in pop culture for decades. Screenwriters are fond of two basic archetypes....

View Article

“Blood Music”

Actor Steven Kearney reads excerpts from Greg Bear's 1985 novel "Blood Music." Bear was one of the first sci-fi authors to delve deep into the possibilities of synthetic biology. In this section, a...

View Article


The Ethics of Synthetic Biology

We usually praise art for sparking a conversation and even making us uncomfortable — but does that mean anything bio-artists do is totally cool?Kurt Andersen talks with Stanford University professor...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Bio Art

Few artists have embraced bio-hacking as much as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr. They’re a husband and wife team who run SymboticA, a lab for biological art at the University of Western Australia. Their...

View Article


Designing Life

From "Semi-Living Dolls" to glowing florescent illustrations, artists are using the tools of synthetic biology to grow their own materials and create works of art that are, essentially, alive. It’s one...

View Article

It’s Tommy Westphall’s Universe, We Just Live in It

When Tom Fontana was a producer on the show “St. Elsewhere” in the 1980s, he loved to push the boundaries of weirdness that he could get away with on network TV. For instance, he staged a crossover...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

What Is the Multiverse (Or, How Can There Be Two Mr. Spocks)?

The parallel universe is a staple of science fiction. These other universes — almost like the one we know and love, but with subtle, uncanny differences — started showing up in programs like “The...

View Article

Across the Multiverse

Universe not big enough for you? There’s always the multiverse — many universes, scattered through time and space. In one world, you might drive a bus; in another, you might be a Formula One racer. If...

View Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The Theoretical Physicist Wore a Toga

It’s a basic human impulse to ask ourselves “what if?” What if I had made other decisions? Would things have turned out better, worse, or just different? Questions like that make the idea of multiple...

View Article

Hugh Everett Is Alive and Well in an Alternate Universe

Mark Oliver Everett (AKA "E") is best known as the singer, songwriter, and driving force behind the indie rock band Eels. His songs can be poppy, but there's always a hint of sadness in there —...

View Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Turning the Scottish Countryside into a Map of the Multiverse

“The Crawick Multiverse” is a sprawling piece of landscape art tucked into Dumfries and Galloway in the Scottish countryside, on the site of what used to be a coal mine. The artist Charles Jenks...

View Article

Browsing latest articles
Browse All 50 View Live




Latest Images