Can marching ants, schooling fish, and herding wildebeests teach us something about the morning commute? Robert Krulwich guides this unique melding of mathematics, physics, and behavioral science as Mitchell Joachim, Anna Nagurney and Iain Couzin examine the creative and sometimes counter intuitive solutions to one of the modern world’s most annoying problems.

In the future, a woman with a spinal cord injury could make a full recovery; a baby with a weak heart could pump his own blood. How close are we today to the bold promise of bionics—and could this technology be used to improve normal human functions, as well as to repair us?

For all that Darwin contributed to our understanding of the biological world, he was haunted by one vexing question: How does the incremental process of evolution suddenly produce, say, humans—animals who walk upright, communicate through language, and possess the brainpower to travel to the moon?

Stuntman and special effects coordinator Steve Wolf shows how actors can fall from a 20-story building without injury and how houses can be set ablaze safely in movies…all through science. …

Come venture deep inside the world’s biggest physics machine, the Large Hadron Collider. This extraordinary feat of human engineering took 16 years and $10 billion to build, and just weeks ago began colliding particles at energies unseen since a fraction of a second after the big bang.

Nobel Laureate Sir Paul Nurse joins Brian Greene for a conversation about the fundamental ideas in biology explored in his new book, What Is Life? Five Great Ideas in Biology. …