PRI: Science and Creativity from Studio 360

Right now, one of the biggest races in science is the search for dark matter. “It's really very very scary to know that after all these years of civilization we still don't know 95% of our universe,” says experimental physicist Elena Aprile. “It makes you feel very small.” Apri...

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. A study published in the Journal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts tracked the mood of pop songs over five decades of 

Computer viruses have evolved from an annoyance to a national security threat. Recently the Department of Homeland Security told Americans to disable Java on our home computers (a thing that few of us knew how to do) because of flaws that left it vulnerable to viruses. And by

William S. Burroughs famously said that “language is a virus.” NovelistBen Marcus took Burrough's line as inspiration for The Flame Alphabet. In the book, the language of children has become literally poisonous to adults, and a married couple with a teenage daughter ...

Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University did groundbreaking research on reconstructing the DNA of viruses (sort of like microbial Jurassic Park). The method was used to re-create the spectacularly lethal influenza behind the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. Why re-create such a monster? "Influenza is a particularly thorny virus that comes back over and over again. There's always the possibility that a particular strain may come back," he tells Kurt Anderse...

In recent years, epidemics have become a hot topic in gaming. In the online video game Pandemic 2, you play the virus, aiming to wipe out humanity. In The Great Flu, you control a world health organization and make decisions about face masks and airport closures.

Wasik 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. They note that Homer used the medical term for rabies to describe animalistic rage on the battlefield, and that old Eastern European legends of vampire...

Carl Zimmer, a science writer, and Larry Madoff, an infectious disease public health expert, pick out a few classics of the virus cinema. The 1971 movie The Andromeda Strain spurred Madoff’s interest in epidemiol...

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has just finished digitizing its entire collection of 150,000 animal sounds — including its especially vast collection of bird songs. We want you to use some of those bird songs to create your own composition on the theme of Spring. Use as many sounds as you like (but at least one), manipulate them however you want, and add any of your own musical elements.

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 qualit...