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 everything from Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to Doc Brown's DeLorean can be traced back to Wells. “He wasn't trying to say anything about science,” Gleick says. “In order to tell his story, he invented this gimmick.” And “The Time Machine” explained this gimmick with another bit of sci-fi whimsy: that time is the fourth dimension of space. “That was ten years before Einstein's first publication of the special theory of relativity,” Gleick says. And once Einstein validated this view of space-time, it inspired countless stories about characters visiting the past and the future.

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 and created an artwork about the experience titled Object Breast Cancer. Her husband and artistic partner Abou Farman told us that her final spiritual and creative journey began when he introduced her to Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic and medicinal plant used in the Amazon. She wanted to make a feature film about a woman who goes to the Amazon in search of the plant. Just as they began pre-production, Carballo learned that the cancer had returned in full force, but she was determined to finish the film, even if the production process wore her down. Sadly, Leonor passed away in 2015. She worked on Icaros until the end of her life, although she didn’t live to see the film completed. ”Icaros: A Vision” screened at Tribeca and several other film festivals.

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 something about the climate. Shane DuBay is an evolutionary biologist and Carl Fuldner is an art historian, both getting their PhDs at the University of Chicago. The two have been photographing bird specimens at The Field Museum from the last century and a half — and they noticed something strange: The feathers on the birds from a long time ago looked dirtier than newer specimens. DuBay and Fuldner used software to analyze their photographs of the birds and figured out that dinginess of their plumage correlates to the changing amount of air pollution. Which suggests that during the age of impressionist painting, all those magnificent landscapes, the new coal-powered factories were making the air dirtier than ever before — or since.

Nothing clears a dinner party faster than talking about math. But maybe what the subject needs is a friendly ambassador. Someone like Eugenia Cheng, who teaches math to artists studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s found the ideal vehicle for teaching math to people who don’t think it’s for them: baked goods. Her book is called "How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics" The book is full of real recipes that Cheng uses to explain math concepts. She visited Kurt at his home to talk math and bake one of the recipes from the book, for chocolate lava cupcakes.

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 happens in our brains when we play piano. Simple: stick a musician in an fMRI machine, and see what happens.

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. In his latest book, "Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures," Kandel combines his two passions in an explanation of how our brains process art. Stemming from his decades of researching snail brains and memory, Kandel’s research breaks down how our cognitive functions perceive, process and appreciate art.

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 what happens when a singer damages their voice? Singers of all ages come into Dr. Steven Zeitels’ medical practice with trauma caused by breathing dried-out air in planes or singing in towns or buildings that have unfamiliar allergens. One of his patients. Aerosmith’s lead singer, Steven Tyler, is nearly 70 and has been torturing his vocal folds since he was a teenager, but with Dr. Zeitel's treatment, Tyler can sing “Dream On” as loudly as when he was 25 years old. 

Talking about building an interstellar space ship makes you sound like a sci-fi fan who’s lost touch with the real world. Unless you’re Mae Jemison, a former astronaut and the head of 100 Year Starship, an organization the home page of which boldly commands, “Let’s make human interstellar travel capabilities a reality within the next hundred years.” The problem: space is big, and our current rocket technology isn’t cutting it, says Marc Millis, the head of the Tau Zero Foundation. The heads of yet another interstellar organization, Starship Century, think they are on the right track. The technology is the beam sail, pushed with microwave beams, instead of wind, to extremely high speeds.

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 in his garage. He calls the collection "The American Museum of God," revering the power he believes is behind his discoveries. Lindsay Patterson went digging with Halsey in the bed of the Sulfur River..

The desirable robot has been a trope in science fiction for almost a century, from the femme fatale Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to Gigolo Joe in Steven Spielberg’s A.I..

Despina Kakoudaki is the author of Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People. She says a robot lover is an appealing fantasy because it can be perfectly beautiful, ageless, and brilliant. “It’s indestructible, it has replaceable body parts,” she says, “as if it is the alternative to the vulnerable, very fleshy, very gooey, very sometimes smelly human body.”

An android can take physical and emotional abuse that a human being often can’t … or shouldn’t. And some social scientists have actually advocated for the creation of robot prostitutes or soldiers. But Kakoudaki says when we buy into that fantasy, we still don’t get it. “We treat objects with quite a lot of fascination and we treat objects really well. We treat people badly as a matter of course in culture,” she laments. 

At the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, they have curators for everything you would expect, like telescopes, missiles, planetary science and space shuttles. But Margaret Weitekamp’s collection is completely different. It includes things like ray guns, board games, pins, hats, t-shirts, and lunchboxes, all having something to do with space or space science fiction. Weitekamp’s title is Curator of the Social and Cultural Dimensions of Spaceflight, with a collection of more than 4,000 pieces of space-related ephemera to show for it. The Buck Rogers XZ-31 Rocket Pistol isn’t even the coolest piece of super-nerdy space stuff in her collection. Weitekamp’s principal obsession these days is an object that may resonate more deeply than anything else in museum’s collection, at least for the generation that grew up when America was going to the Moon.

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 reduces pain and anxiety.

Now that virtual reality is becoming a consumer product that costs less than a smartphone or video game console, what will that mean for the future of storytelling? Obviously there will be markets for gaming — and pornography — at the start. But, for some directors, the medium has more idealistic applications.  Kurt Andersen visited Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a pioneer in virtual reality research and development, to test drive an experience that’s more realistic than any movie or video game.

Since the dawn of humanity, more or less, people have used representations of animals to tell stories. We drew pictures of them on the walls of caves, told stories about hapless spiders and mischievous rabbits, watched cartoons of coyotes running off cliffs and fish looking for lost sons. 

But some artists have wanted to buck that trend, depicting animal stories from the animals’ point of view.

What makes us have especially productive sessions — those minutes or hours when you’re so immersed in what you’re doing that everything melts away? What exactly is going on in our brains to make us feel so focused?

These are exactly the questions that drive Dr. Heather Berlin, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She studies the neuroscience of imagination, creativity and improvisation.

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. (A young Kurt Andersen had a gaggle including Robbie Dobbie, Crackerpin, Jimmy the Cat, a poodle called Genevieve — which he pronounced in the French manner.) Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective of another person in real life. We have found that they are more creative on some kinds of tasks. Other people have found that their narratives are richer.”

Taylor is exploring the idea that these children are more creative — in particular, the kids who build a paracosm, a country or place for their friends “where children think about all kinds of things like entertainment, the food, the clothes, the transportation, the money.”

Maxine, who is eight years old, walks us through her paracosm and the friends in it. Some are a little creepy, like Devil Man and Betchaboo, who takes the shape of a gun, but they’re not frightening to her. “They’re not the kind of people who will go and kill people. They’re not like gangsters, they’re just tricksters.” Besides, Maxine says, if imaginary friends caused trouble, “then they would be deleted. Because then you don’t exist. Sometimes when I forget about them they die, but they’re not deleted.” When you imagine the world, you get to set the rules.

The man nicknamed “the father of creativity” was psychologist E. Paul Torrance. In the 1940s he began researching creativity in order to improve American education. In order to encourage creativity, we needed to define it — to measure and analyze it. We measured intelligence with an IQ score; why not measure creativity?

But there’s a problem. “I’m not sure I have a definition of creativity,” says James Borland. And Borland should know; he’s a professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University. “It’s one of those human constructions that isn’t discovered but invented ... It’s a word we use in everyday speech and it makes perfect sense, but when you start to study it and try to separate out its constituent parts, it becomes more and more and more confusing. Nobody agrees on what it is.” How can we measure something if we can’t agree on what it is?

Few readers of science fiction can name any African-American writers in the genre apart from Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler. Black authors, however, have been contributing to sci-fi since its inception. 

Carl Hancock Rux is a playwright, performer, and musician; his first novel, Asphalt, was set in a post-apocalyptic New York. Where the uses and misuses of technology have been central to mainstream sci-fi, Rux believes that, “for writers of African descent, science fiction has offered a unique place to try out something unthinkable in realistic fiction: an end to America’s tortured history with race." 

Excerpts from M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud were read by Reg E. Cathey; the music in this story was composed by Carl Hancock Rux and Daniel Bernard Roumain.

You can write a movie about a gravity-defying superhero or a time-traveling zombie, and if you make that movie in Hollywood, you’re probably going to hire a science adviser. No scenario is too far out for someone with a PhD to add a real bit of jargon and a sheen of plausibility. 

On any given day, 2,000 scientists and engineers work at the European Nuclear Research Center (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. They’re analyzing data coming out of the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle accelerator, which is trying to recreate the Big Bang in a series of tunnels underground.It's not the kind of place where you would expect to find artists. But since 2011, dancers, musicians, and filmmakers have spent time at CERN through a program called Collide@CERN.

Until recently, virtual reality has been the stuff of science fiction. But last year, Facebook placed a large bet on the future of the medium when it bought Oculus Rift, the leading virtual reality technology company. Oculus VR will start selling its affordable, state-of-the-art setup early next year. Samsung has just released a $99 version of its Gear VR headset. And Google has even made a low-end cardboard device that wraps around your smartphone to turn it into a virtual reality viewer — and, if you subscribe to The New York Times, you recently got one in your Sunday paper. Kurt Andersen visited Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a pioneer in virtual reality research and development, to test drive an experience that’s more realistic than any movie or video game.

Now that virtual reality is within months of becoming a consumer product that costs less than a smartphone or video game console, what will that mean for the future of storytelling? Obviously there will be markets for gaming — and pornography — at the start. But, for some directors, the medium has more idealistic applications.

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 with “Cheers” — a sitcom — but they shot the sequence like a drama. And he pulled one of the strangest trick endings in TV history. In the series finale of “St. Elsewhere,” we learn that the entire show had been a fantasy of a boy with autism named Tommy Westphall. These shenanigans didn’t go unnoticed by fans like Keith Gow, a writer in Melbourne, Australia. He wondered if every show that Tom Fontana produced or staged a crossover with could be connected back to the finale of “St. Elsewhere.” In other words, did Tommy Westphall — the kid who dreamed up the characters on “St. Elsewhere” — dream up all these other shows as well?

Ingmar Riedel-Kruse runs a biophysics lab at Stanford University, but he spends about half his time tinkering with videogames. He’s not playing World of Warcraft. Riedel-Kruse creates his own videogames using living microbes. The most playable is Pacmecium, inspired by classic Pac-Man, in which the player guides a host of paramecia around obstacles and targets. The four-button controller shifts a weak electrical field, which the paramecia are attracted to. To test the game, our reporter enlisted Scott Patterson, the world record holder on several versions of Pac-man, for a pixilated showdown in the lab. Patterson was impressed, noting subtle differences in game play: “It’s more like I’m guiding them, rather than instructing them.” Who will win the title — the inventor, or the champ?

Patrick Winston is a researcher at MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab. He believes that creating better artificial intelligence is not a matter of more powerful processing. First, he thinks, we have to teach computers how to think more like humans. To this end, he has created a computer program that takes in text — for example, a synopsis of "Macbeth" — and extracts patterns and themes, such as the concept of revenge. 

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who had no background in computing when he began the effort. 

Everywhere we go, we leave a trail of personal information — in the stray hairs that land on park benches, or saliva on the edges of coffee cups. And artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg may be collecting that information, whether you like it or not. Using equipment and procedures now easily available, she extracts the DNA from strangers’ hair or fingernail clippings, and uses it to makes life-like models of people’s faces — people she’s never met or seen. She calls the project Stranger Visions.

A Louisiana physician (and amateur filmmaker) teamed up with a cinematographer to invent a system that they say improves the quality and reliability of photos used in medical records — using some basic Hollywood technology.

If just reading the word “drone” makes you nervous, you’re not alone. Americans have been uneasy – fascinated but nervous – ever since unmanned aerial vehicles entered our consciousness about a decade ago. We talked to some artists who are exploring how we think and feel about UAVs, from “Stealthware” burqas and hoodies that make the wearer invisible to surveillance, to drones that dance instead of spying.

Neuroscience is a vast field. Here’s how Greg Dunn describes it: “It’s as if in New York, there’s like a little neighborhood for electro-physiologists, there’s a little neighborhood for the behaviorists and for the cellular specialist. It’s quite a labyrinth.” When he was studying in grad school, Dunn’s neighborhood of neuroscience was epigenetics. “It’s how your body learns,” he says. For example, if a skinny person gains 100 pounds — will their future offspring be prone to obesity? Or if you experience a traumatic event, will your future offspring have anxious dispositions? Our traditional understanding of genetics and inheritance says an individual’s experience doesn’t get passed down to the next generation. But epigenetics studies the ways that our parent’s experiences do affect us.

Take a look at Laurie Frick’s artwork, made up of colorful wooden blocks mounted to the gallery wall, and the first thing you think of is a childhood playroom strewn with building blocks. But Frick’s artwork is actually a complex response to the growing trend of self-tracking. She takes data collected by tracking her daily activity and turns it into hand-crafted visualizations in materials like wood and leather. Frick calls her art "data selfies" — abstract self-portraits that reveal volumes about their subjects. But they aren't creepy. They're cheerful and optimistic, because that's how Frick sees the future of data. In her art and in frequent talks, she spreads her mantra: “Take back your data. Turn it into art.”

The LEGO brick as we know it was released in 1958. But it wasn’t until 20 years later that the company made its first minifigure, or “minifig.” It was a little modular man with a yellow face: just two dots for eyes and a black curve for a smile. But the humble minifigure populated the LEGO world and gave it heart. It was a very smart move. LEGO has since made a fortune creating Star Wars and Harry Potter sets. There are now hundreds of different minifigures.

But one thing has not changed. It’s truly a man’s world when it comes to LEGOs. Very few minifigures are female — and they’re often relegated to being sidekicks. Maia Weinstock is hoping to change that. She’s a LEGO provocateur, rearranging these stock minifig parts to challenge the company to create more options for girls.

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. First, there's the lone scientist –– Dr. Frankenstein meets Dr. Moreau –– who has been exiled from the scientific community because his or her ideas are "too extreme." Then there's the other archetype –– the loyal scientist who works within a corporation and has an ethical blind spot to the dangers of mixing science and business. When mayhem ensues it's not their fault: they were just doing their job.

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 biologist named Michael Bernard is infected with a killer virus that has wiped out most of North America. The virus is made up of tiny biological computers called “noocytes,” where were intended to improve the human body — giving it routine maintenance and maximizing human potential. Instead, it wiped out most of North America. Bernard is under quarantine in a lab in Europe, while being monitored by his friend Paulson-Fuchs. Bernard starts hearing voices in his head. The noocytes have become self-aware, and they're full of questions for him. Bernard has his own questions — leading to a very unusual dialogue.

We usually praise art for sparking a conversation and even making us uncomfortable — but does that mean anything bio-artists do is totally cool?

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 first big buzzed-about project in 2004 was a "victimless" leather jacket, which was so small, Catts jokes it would only be suitable for a mouse. But it was created out of living cells from human and mouse DNA. When the piece was shown at MoMA in New York, the jacket grew too quickly, clogging up the bioreactor where it was growing and the work of art had to be "killed." 

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 years, there’s been a growing movement around the world working to democratize biotech and put these high tech tools into the hands of bio-hackers, artists, hobbyists –– and now public radio reporters. Reporter Julia Wetherell took a three-day crash course in designing life at Genspace, the world’s first community biolab in downtown Brooklyn.

We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from.

Frances Arnold is a biochemical engineer at Cal Tech working on one part of the energy crisis. In a process called “directed evolution,” Arnold’s team is altering the genetic codes of bacteria to evolve a strain of organisms than can digest grass and excrete biofuel.

More than 25 years ago, the largest audience ever for a TV movie tuned to ABC to watch a simulated nuclear holocaust. “The Day After” focused on a group of survivors in the heartland of Kansas. Studio 360's Derek John grew up nearby. He asks his 9th grade science teacher why she made him watch the program.

EEG — electroencephalography — is almost a century old, and it’s creeping out of the research lab and the neurologist’s office. Headsets embedded with electrodes to read electrical activity in the brain are commercially available, and designers are using that information for all sorts of purposes. On the one hand, experimental wheelchairs can now be guided by brainwaves; videogame companies, inevitably, are exploring game control without a joystick.

Exciting as that may be, Henry Holtzman, the Chief Knowledge Officer of MIT’s Media Lab, feels that EEG has a larger potential. 

"Dark matter" has been in the news again lately as scientists in Switzerland have begun mapping what they believe is its prevalence across the universe. But they're not the only ones focused on identifying and describing it. French artist Abdelkader Benchamma has been making intricate drawings of cosmic phenomena for a while now, and his obsession with dark matter reaches its zenith in an installation on view for the next 12 months at The Drawing Center in New York City.

Nearly a decade after the human genome was decoded, scientists are only now beginning to understand its implications. One of the leading thinkers in this field is the biotech entrepreneur Gregory Stock. A biophysicist by training, his 2002 book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future makes the case that full-scale genetic engineering is on the way — whether we like it or not.

And, Stock believes, if the US doesn’t lead the way in developing those advances, other nations will. “Between a third and two-thirds of the population — and even higher if you look at China or Thailand and other eastern cultures — of parents say if they could enhance the genetics of their children, enhance their either cognitive or physical capabilities, they would absolutely do it."

But engineering traits to “improve” people remains a thorny issue. “It sounds so compelling, ‘take out a little bit of this, that, it’s going to be the best of you,’” Stock says, “but actually we don't have a clue what creates exceptional capabilities."

While Stock’s attitude is full-speed ahead, he admits, “it’s going to get weird."

To make art, a computer first needs to understand what art is. 

A group of computer scientists at Brigham Young University is attempting this by feeding their program images by the thousands and describing those images. Digital Artist Communicating Intent (she goes by DARCI) recognizes about 2,000 adjectives so far, including terms like peaceful, scary, and dark. The goal is to teach DARCI to pick out those visual qualities in artwork — and ultimately, to write algorithms modeling creativity for artificial intelligence. 

Last month, the team took DARCI out for a spin at the Conference on Creativity and Cognition in Atlanta. They invited artists to put their work on a thumb drive, upload to the program, and be judged by DARCI. The program scored works according to simple criteria, which were kept secret; the accepted work was displayed in a temporary exhibition at the High Museum.

Several experienced artists had their work rejected; so did George, age six, who was skeptical of the algorithmic curation. “I can’t believe a computer can do it, because there's never good art or bad art — there's different types of art,” he says.

BYU professor Dan Ventura says their effort wasn’t much different from the normal operation of the art world. “Whenever you enter art into a juried show, you're often not told what the criteria are,” he reasons. “Somebody is going to make a judgment about your art and decides whether you get in or not. And DARCI is that someone right now.”. 

What makes a hit? A catchy hook? A good beat? Even the experts can’t really explain what the recipe is. “You can check off all of those checkboxes,” says Keith Caulfield, an associate director at Billboard, “but it doesn’t necessarily mean that song is going to become a hit. Because otherwise everyone would have a hit single and we’d all be incredibly wealthy, and it doesn’t work that way.” 

Vart (it rhymes with fart) is software engineer Jenn Schiffer’s experiment in teaching herself, and others, more about art by coding. She decides on a way to replicate or elaborate on an artist’s work in Javascript, and writes about the process and the artist. Using her program, you can generate works similar to “Composition No. 10,” and tweak the size and nature of the grids, as well as the colors. After that, she moved on to another Javascript art project: this one focused on the surrealist René Magritte.

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 happens in our brains when we play piano. Simple: stick a musician in an fMRI machine, and see what happens.

Big Data — and how we use it — is changing the way we understand our culture and history. Research scientists Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean Baptiste Michel (Uncharted: Big Data as Lens on Human Culture) teamed up with Google to create the (highly addictive) Ngram Viewer: it sifts through millions of digitized books and charts the frequency with which words have been used. Aiden and Michel call their method of combing through text to map cultural trends “culturomics.” “It’s like genomics but with culture,” Aiden tells Kurt Andersen.

The association of art with altered states of consciousness goes back a long way. Archeological evidence of fermented beverages and some of the oldest musical instruments were found at the same 9,000-year-old site in China. (If the Lascaux painters had had six-packs, the caves would undoubtedly have been littered with them.) In modern times, it’s hard to imagine American culture without drugs — from the epic drinking of Hemingway and Fitzgerald to the reefer preferred by Louis Armstrong and other jazz musicians. Do alcohol and marijuana improve creativity? How do they compare with each other? 

The idea of geoengineering — tampering with the Earth’s climate to fit our needs — has been a favorite trope of science fiction since the 1920s. In the 1970s, Carl Sagan speculated that we could terraform Mars to make it into a second Earth. That inspired novelist Kim Stanley Robinson to write his Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars — in which he imagines how that scenario would play out. Robinson relied on actual science — and there’s plenty on this subject.

As the dangers of climate change become imminently clear, some scientists believe that geoengineering’s time has come — not on Mars, but on Earth. Yale professor and atmospheric scientist Trude Storelvmo studies cirrus clouds, which tend to trap heat in the atmosphere. She analyzes what would happen if the clouds were seeded with ice crystals that would thin them. “If you don’t put enough of these seeding particles into the upper atmosphere, you would get no effect at all,” Storelvmo says. “But if you put too much, you could actually have the opposite effect, which would obviously be disastrous.”

Laurel Braitman is a historian of science and the author of Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves. She’s particularly interested in animals held in captivity. “If their minds aren’t stimulated and challenged they can end up with all sorts of disturbing behaviors,” she explains. Braitman wondered if music — so often soothing to people, but usually foisted on animals without their permission — could help counter animal anxiety and depression?

Don Ingber is a cell biologist from Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital. One day he saw a piece of modern sculpture, Kenneth Snelson's "Needle Tower" — and Eureka! — it inspired a scientific breakthrough. Produced by Lu Olkowski.

When Manoush Zomorodi was eight years old, she walked around her house gathering up all the houseplants. She arranged them in rows, gave them all name tags, and then performed a concert for their benefit. Why? Because she was bored. But Zomorodi — host of WNYC’s podcast New Tech City — says her kids will never do anything so charmingly pointless, because old-fashioned boredom is a thing of the past, for fidgety kids as well as their parents. “When I’m on the subway, I look at my phone,” she tells Kurt Andersen. “When I walk down the street, I look at my phone. Is that bad? Is there a consequence to not having that time when you are literally getting bored?”

A growing body of research suggests that there is. Neuroscientists have seen fMRI evidence of organized, spontaneous thinking when the brain is supposedly idle. “When you’re given nothing to do, it certainly seems like your thoughts don’t stop,” says Jonny Smallwood, professor of neuroscience at the University of York. “[You] continue to generate thought even when there’s nothing for you to do with the thought.”

Humpback whales’ remarkable ability to produce sounds is part of their biology. But the songs they sing is in their culture. Researchers looking at how the songs of whales change over time have learned that a new song can catch on and spread across populations of thousands whales in a matter of months, in much the same way that a hit song spreads across a country.

Talking about building an interstellar space ship makes you sound like a sci-fi fan who’s lost touch with the real world. Unless you’re Mae Jemison, a former astronaut and the head of 100 Year Starship, an organization the home page of which boldly commands, “Let’s make human interstellar travel capabilities a reality within the next hundred years.” The problem: space is big, and our current rocket technology isn’t cutting it, says Marc Millis, the head of the Tau Zero Foundation. The heads of yet another interstellar organization, Starship Century, think they are on the right track. The technology is the beam sail, pushed with microwave beams, instead of wind, to extremely high speeds.

Alan Turing might be best known today for the Turing test, but during World War II, he cracked the Nazi’s “Enigma” code at Britain’s top-secret spy center Bletchley Park, significantly speeding the Allied victory. He also helped invent modern computing. In the 1950s, he was persecuted for homosexuality in Britain, and he died under mysterious circumstances. As late as 2001, the film Enigma left Turing out of the story of the code breakers at Bletchley Park, replacing him with a heterosexual mathematician-hero. But many writers and artists have taken note of the tragic arc of Turing’s story, and he’s becoming more than a groundbreaking mathematician. He’s becoming an almost mythic figure. 

Ted Berger is trying to build a microchip that can remember things for us. He teaches biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, and his goal is to create a device that can take over for the hippocampus of the brain, translating thoughts into long-term memories. But that’s a complicated task. Berger would like to help patients with severe memory loss, but at the moment he’s teaching rats to pull a lever. He studies what happens when the rat learns a task — how the electrical signal of an individual thought moves through its brain. If scientists can identify the electrical pattern of a thought, could they, one day, implant that thought or memory in another person? Berger doesn’t think so, and he says we should be relieved.

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 Omni in 1991. Our version was performed by Miriam Tolan and Russ Armstrong; Jonathan Mitchellproduced and directed.

Mouna Andraos is an artist and web designer who’s always been fascinated by street vendors since her childhood in Lebanon. She created a working portable generator that uses a crank and a solar cell to charge cell phones and laptops, and even run small appliances. Ada Lee Halofskyhit the New York City streets with Andraos to see Power Cart in action.

To make art, a computer first needs to understand what art is. A group of computer scientists at Brigham Young University is attempting this by feeding their program images by the thousands and describing those images. Digital Artist Communicating Intent (she goes by DARCI) recognizes about 2,000 adjectives so far, including terms like peaceful, scary, and dark. The goal is to teach DARCI to pick out those visual qualities in artwork — and ultimately, to write algorithms modeling creativity for artificial intelligence.

Where did we come from? Evolutionary biologist Spencer Wells is pretty close to the answer. He's the National Geographic "Explorer-in-Residence" and heads an initiative called the Genographic Project. By collecting DNA samples from people around the world, he's tracing the paths of human migration, and he's uncovered some startling facts about homo sapiens' early history: we almost didn't make it.

The Long Now Foundation is designing a clock to tell time over 10,000 years. It will tick once every minute, chime once a year, and play music once a millennium.

If there's one climate change scientists are sure of, it's that sea levels are rising - and coastal cities are in their way. In a 2010 exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art, teams of architects envisioned radical approaches to the problem. Studio 360's Eric Molinsky looks into how innovation in design can help protect coastal cities.

In college, Ronald D. Moore's Captain Kirk dorm room poster prompted teasing, but his passion for the original "Star Trek" has paid off. A few years ago he transformed the sci-fi TV genre when he reimagined the cheesy 1980s "Battlestar Galactica" into a gripping allegory for the War on Terror.

In the official Hollywood template, you pretty much can't be a genius without also being nuts. Is there a connection between great creativity and mental illness? Tamar Brott speaks with Kaye Redfield Jamison and other psychiatrists to separate the truth from the myth.

The painter Alexis Rockman gets worked up by news from the scientific world. He wants his paintings to help people visualize — and get a little freaked out by — big phenomena like genetic engineering and global warming. He doesn’t have a science background, but Rockman consults with so many scientists before he starts to paint, he’s become something of an expert himself. Trey Kay caught up with the artist at his studio and spoke with him about imagining the future.

As part of Studio 360's series on science and creativity,Sarah Lilley talks with scientists who admire the impressionist painter Claude Monet not just for his color choices, but for his ability to trick the human eye and brain.

Marc Branch works at NASA as an aerospace engineer testing instruments used on outer-space telescopes. When he's off the clock, Branch is one of the most sought after hip-hop DJs around the country. Leading a double life as "DJ Scientific" he hopes to attract young hip-hop fans to math and science. Produced by Jocelyn Gonzales.

Scientists and science writers can rattle off all the sci-fi that inspired them to build great things. But Annalee Newitz, editor of io9, thinks that dystopian science fiction is less inspirational, but more influential.

Magicians wow us on stage with sleight of hand and misdirection. But it turns out there's also a lot magic can tell us about how our brains work. Produced by Michael May.

“Some doctors golf as their hobby,” says Shaun Carpenter, a wound care specialist in Louisiana; “my hobby is to make movies.” But in the process of amateur filmmaking, Dr. Carpenter has stumbled upon a way to improve his medical practice.

In an age of hyperspecialization, Saul Griffith is an old-school inventor. A MacArthur "genius," his work includes a new way to manufacture eyeglasses, kites that generate power, and rope that knows how much weight it carries. Griffith explains how to get kids excited about inventing our future: send them to school on zip lines.

The life of the average artist is not known for its sense of security. Most will experience little money, or fame, or recognition. They may dream of these things, but what many artists should be yearning for more than anything is… health insurance. Sarah Lilley explains why.

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.

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. Taylor is exploring the idea that these children are more creative — in particular, the kids who build a paracosm, a country or place for their friends. 

The pink ribbon has been an incredibly successful piece of marketing for breast cancer research. For cancer survivor Leonor Caraballo, though, it's supremely annoying. "I’ve always hated the color pink," she says. "I don’t like the association between the infantilization of pink and women." Caraballo is a new media artist who collaborates with her husband, Abou Farman, under the name caraballo-farman. The couple came up with a new approach to representing breast cancer: they make bronze models of real tumors, created from MRI scans, that you can wear around your neck or put on your desk.

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 Am Legend and 28 Days Later. But viruses aren’t quarantined to genre flicks. Modern thrillers like Blindness and Contagion aspire to accurate epidemiology. In the era of SARS, reality may be scary enough.Carl Zimmer, a science writer, and Larry Madoff, an infectious disease public health expert, pick out a few classics of the virus cinema.

Bill Wasik, an editor at WIRED magazine, and co-author Monica Murphy, a public health veterinarian, trace our responses to rabies over millennia in Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus. Over the years, they say, old Eastern European legends of vampires have evolved into more contagious, more animal-like, and more rabid zombie and vampire myths. [originally aired March 8, 2013]

The association of art with altered states of consciousness goes back a long way. Archeological evidence of fermented beverages and some of the oldest musical instruments were found at the same 9,000-year-old site in China. In modern times, it’s hard to imagine American culture without drugs — from the epic drinking of Hemingway and Fitzgerald to the reefer preferred by Louis Armstrong and other jazz musicians. Do alcohol and marijuana improve creativity? How do they compare with each other? 

Pop music's not what it used to be. That’s what every generation of no-longer-kids says about what the kids are listening to, but fogey clichés aren’t necessarily wrong.

Did you ever wonder who decides the color of your shampoo bottle? As part of our on-going series about creativity and science, Lu Olkowski talks with a polymer chemist who creates pigment formulas for plastics at the Engelhard Corporation.

We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from.

Are supermodels more symmetrical? Beauty expert Kelley Quan joins Kurt and Mario Livio to talk about how symmetry affects human attraction. Quan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online fashion magazine ZooZOOM.com, and she explains how symmetry -- or the lack of it -- can make people more attractive.

“4Chambers” premiered in New York in 2013, and was most recently performed in an abandoned wing of a Brooklyn hospital; the company transformed a tiled room formerly used to prepare bodies of dead patients. The work is a kind of hybrid of a dance piece and a science project, with videos about the heart — including the choreographer Ismael Houston-Jones describing his own heart attack — and a room in which audience members are hooked up to a device that measured changes in their heart rates when they were asked difficult questions. 

But the company members do dance, most memorably in a visceral sequence that seems to depict a cardiac arrest. “I begin looking down at my chest and digging,” dancer Mercedes Searer describes, “pulling the skin apart at the breastbone, digging my fingers in as if trying to get past the bone, into my chest.”

“There are places [in the piece] to reflect on what is a life,” Jody Obderfelder explains. “That’s where I am in my life right now. It’s not going to last forever. The heart is an apt metaphor for what keeps you alive and for all emotions. Even though the heart doesn't think, it definitely registers what you’re thinking and feeling."

When Philip Seymour Hoffman died last month, he was still in the process of filming the final The Hunger Games movie. Hoffman plays Plutarch Heavensbee, the mastermind behind the Games. Instead of a rewrite to accommodate the missing scenes, the film’s producers are attempting a 21st century solution: creating new footage of Hoffman using all the tools of computer animation. The filmmakers aren't discussing their work publicly. But Steve Preeg, a veteran special effects supervisor at Digital Domain, thinks their most difficult challenge will be navigating the so-called uncanny valley.

Synesthesia causes people to hear music -– or see letters or numbers -– in color. Neuroscience is beginning to unravel what’s going on in the brains of people with this cerebral phenomenon, but hasn’t yet explained why the genetic mutation exists. V.S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at UC San Diego, has a theory, as he explains to producer Michael May.

It’s easy to look back at old science fiction and see it as silly. But there are important ideas embedded in those stories that influenced scientists and the way technology developed. Take the first science fiction film, Le Voyage dans La Lune or A Trip to the Moon, based on a story by Jules Verne. This 1902 silent movie blasts scientists to the moon in a giant cannon. Claire Evans, editor of the recently rebootedOmni magazine, says Verne was on to something. “He just extrapolated from the technology around him,” she says. “A massive shotgun barrel shoots people into space. That’s not what happened in the real world” of rocketry, but “that essential gesture is correct.”

“A successful science fiction story — or novel, or film — allows its readers to become comfortable with the future, with radical new technologies and ideas before they become commonplace,” she says. “It softens the edge of change.” Or, as the science fiction writer Frederik Pohl once said, “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile, but the traffic jam.”

“By 2013, I literally envisioned that I would be retiring on the moon,” says Candy Torres, a former software engineer for the International Space Station. Like so many scientists of her generation, Torres grew up watching Star Trek in the late 1960s. On the Enterprise, “science officers” were trusted senior members of the crew, going boldly into unknown universes in the pursuit of knowledge and peace. So it’s probably not a surprise that America's first Space Shuttle Orbiter, from 1977, was named Enterprise. And the technologies inside the ship inspired real-world development as well.

Chris Hadfield’s recent cover of David Bowie’s classic song “Space Oddity” has more than 20 million views on YouTube. And not because of Hadfield’s voice (which isn’t bad, for an astronaut). Commander Hadfield was singing the song in space aboard the International Space Station. He describes the video as “a bending of science fiction and science fact.”

Social media has changed what it means to be an astronaut. Tweeting and blogging in space earned Hadfield millions of fans back on Earth — and they had a ton of questions. So Hadfield started producing videos demonstrating how he brushes his teeth or what happens totears without gravity. He even earned a fan in his childhood hero, Captain James T. Kirk. “I had a long phone call back and forth with … I guess I can call him Bill Shatner now,” Hadfield says. “He wasn’t interested in talking about things that happened 40 years ago on TV. He was interested in what’s going on, what’s happening on-station, where are we headed next, what’s the purpose of it, what’s the actual experience like?” 

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.

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 for us by Kevin Pariseau.

Paul Bartlett was slogging through a PhD in animal behavior when he decided he would rather be painting. Bartlett finished his studies, left behind the zebra finches in his research lab, and now depicts razorbills, puffins, and other shore life in his native Scotland. Produced by Ari Daniel Shapiro.

Ken Laws was in his early 40s when he decided he wanted to study ballet. Laws taught college physics, and when he had to shift his center of gravity to perform a simple pose at the barre, he immediately connected the dots between physical principles and dance movements. Produced by Hillary Frank.

"If I were at work right now, I'd be paid to have these thoughts." With that thought, control.com/zack/">Zack Booth Simpson dropped out of high school — then started reading biology textbooks and designing video games. Now he's at a university — not as a student, but as a researcher, combining living organisms with computer programming. Produced by Lindsay Patterson.

If a button’s missing on your remote control, your kid’s toy car has a broken wheel, or the temple tips fall off your eyeglasses, you’d probably just throw your hands up and say, well there goes that. Those days could soon be over thanks to a cutting-edge technology: 3D printing.

Science is looking for ways to better understand an autistic person's perception of the world. Using laser technology, Ami Klin and Warren Jones of the Yale School of Medicine screened "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and tracked the gazes of autistic viewers precisely, to study how they perceive social interactions. Biologist David Gruber visited their lab to learn about the technique.

Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Lord Kelvin are remembered as unimpeachable geniuses. But over the course of their careers, they each made tremendous errors — not just faulty equations but fundamental misunderstandings. In Brilliant Blunders, Mario Livio showcases those failures and the surprising discoveries they lead to. “Science is presented as this direct march to the truth,” Livio, a NASA astrophysicist, tells Kurt Andersen. “Being a scientist myself, I know that’s very far from the truth.