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:...

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...

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:...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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 —...

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...

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...

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.