NPR People: Robert Krulwich

So Volkswagen has this new concept car — give it two gallons of gas, and it will go 416 miles without a stop. But German engineers, meet your fuel-efficiency master: the honeybee.

Part of the art of being a field scientist in Africa is to make the animals think you're not watching them. So Barb Smuts had to learn to make herself very dull, very uninteresting, very boring, very shy — and to never look a gorilla in the eye. Then one day, the strangest thing happened.

Each New Year's, Christmas and birthday seems to come round faster every year. But why is it that we feel time goes by faster as we get older? Scientists dissect one of life's intriguing mysteries.

The reason for a lack of willpower may be that you're working your prefrontal cortex too hard. If you give it too many jobs to do, it gets tired, calls it a day and gives into temptation.

A biologist reflects on an awe-inspiring experience in Africa, when a group of baboons united in some kind of amazing "mystical" moment.

As gentlemen may have noticed, flies are turning up in urinals with increased frequency. Not real ones, but lifelike images carefully positioned in the porcelain bowl. It seems the very presence of this insect drastically reduces what's politely called "spillage." But why flies?

Lou Padilla is pretty good at fixing things. So when he broke his ankle, Padilla decided to set it himself. The Brooklyn locksmith didn't have health insurance, and he says he doesn't need it. In this series of stories, Padilla — along with a farmer and a young couple – explain how they get by without the safety net of insurance.

Desert ants have a nifty way of finding their way back home after a foray out of the nest to find food — they count their steps. To prove it, some scientists devised a creative experiment that showed just how the little guys do it. It's already known that ants use celestial clues to establish the general direction home, but how do they know exactly the number of steps to take that will lead them right to the entrance of their nest?

You think you know why leaves fall off trees. Well, you're wrong. It's not the wind. It's not the cold. Because leaves aren't the brightest bulbs in the world, the tree has to make an executive decision come fall.

If flu vaccines are in short supply, it's especially important to know who's getting sick and where. At NPR.ORG/health, there's a video that shows how a virus invades the body.

When you get the flu, viruses turn your cells into tiny virus factories that help spread the disease. This animation takes you to the front lines of a viral assault that could be going on inside your body right now.

Bernd Heinrich, one of America's great field biologists, talks with NPR's Robert Krulwich about what to do with our bodies after we're dead. Is it better to be buried, "beetlized," or frozen solid and shattered into a million pieces?

Here's a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of crowd, follow them, and remember them for years. But people — even people who love crows — can't recognize individual crows. Here, two experiments that tell the story.

Now that it's high summer, you're probably wondering how much heat you can take. Some 230 years ago, three curious London gentlemen walked into a room with a few eggs, a steak and a dog — with exactly that question.

Once upon a time, there was a well-known American soldier named Williams Jenkins Worth. His monument still stands in the heart of New York City, but while thousands pass it each day, few remember the man who lies beneath it.