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.

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?

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.

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.

Imagine if someone touches your toe and your nose at the same time. You feel those touches simultaneously; but really the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. This is part of the reason why one neuroscientist thinks short people might experience things faster than tall people.

Through Juliet's lips, Shakespeare said "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." But the Bard may have been wrong — names do matter. Language researchers say your sense of the rose depends on what you call it.

How do ants know when another ant is dead? To find out, the most celebrated, most eminent ant scholar in the world came up with a plan. Play a little trick on the ants by creating an artificial corpse — a zombie ant from the living dead. And what did the ant scholar find out? Hint: It stinks!

Many amputees say they can still feel the presence of a missing limb, and often what they feel is intense pain. But how does a doctor treat pain in an arm or a leg that no longer exists? Oddly enough, one researcher used a cardboard box and a $2 mirror.

A 2-year-old, it turns out, knows the difference between right and wrong. And by age 4, children are getting the grasp of empathy. While the seeds of morality may be at least partially built into our genetic makeup, for children, developing a moral sense can still be a battle of impulses.