PRI: Science and Creativity from Studio 360

Hackers became anathema to the music labels at the dawn of digital file sharing, but now are key players in the industry. At the Rethink Music conference in Boston last month, programmers, developers, and tinkerers showed up for a 24-hour coding frenzy.

Was Bartleby the Scrivener depressed? Did Clarissa Dalloway need lithium? Today's English lit students seem to want to medicate away the problems of classic literary characters. Studio 360's Eric Molinsky explores this phenomenon with help from NYU professor Elayne Tobin and novelist Michael Cunningham.

Remember the Saturday Night Live skit that asked, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Sound artist Jane Philbrick asked a question just as unlikely: "What if retired Senator Jesse Helms could recite a lesbian love poem by Gertrude Stein?" Andrew Adam Newman found out how Philbrick's project took her to the cutting edge of voice-synthesis technology.

Science is looking for ways to better understand an autistic person's perception of the world. Using laser technology, Ami Klin and Warren Jones of the Yale School of Medicine screened "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and tracked the gazes of autistic viewers precisely, to study how they perceive social interactions. Biologist David Gruber visited their

Magicians wow us on stage with sleight of hand and misdirection. But it turns out there's also a lot magic can tell us about how our brains work. Produced by Michael May.

Sir Thomas Browne's exacting observations and gorgeous prose anticipated modern science writers like Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sacks. But Browne lived in the 1600s, and his way of reconciling the scriptures with science looks surprisingly like what we call "intelligent design." Produced by Sarah Montague

Kurt sits down for our meal du jour with two eating experts: biopsychologist Marci Pelchat, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and John Willoughby, the Executive Editor of Gourmet Magazine. Dr. Pelchat identifies secret ingredients of Dufresne's dishes: emotion, memory and nostalgia.

Are supermodels more symmetrical? Beauty expert Kelley Quan joins Kurt and Mario Livio to talk about how symmetry affects human attraction. Quan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online fashion magazine ZooZOOM.com, and she explains how symmetry -- or the lack of it -- can make people more attractive.

In the standard Hollywood formula, you pretty much can't be a genius without also being nuts. Is there really a connection between great creativity and mental illness? Tamar Brott speaks with Kaye Redfield Jamison and other experts and tries to separate the truth from the myth.

Over the last 16 years, the mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan, now a professor at Duke University, has been working on a theory for how the world works. It's a theory of everything: how living creatures are shaped, how lava flows down mountains, how snowflakes form, how people organize our societies. It's called the constructal law.

Gerald Joyce is a professor of biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1970s, he was studying biochemistry at The University of Chicago, when he discovered Gravity's Rainbow, the sprawling World War II novel by Thomas Pynchon.

Right-brained people are supposed to be artistic and spontaneous, while left-brainers are analytical; in other words, Captain Kirk and Spock. This ubiquitous bit of pop science wisdom came out of Nobel Prize-winning neurology. But does the story of the two brains stand up in the age of the MRI? Produced by Dave Johns.

He's officially in digital forensics, but Hany Farid is really a Photoshop detective, inventing software to catch what the eye can't. Farid gives Douglas McGray, an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation, a glimpse at his current caseload – from fraud in cancer research to white supremacists in prison.

Last month, thousands of mathematicians attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston — the largest annual gathering of its kind. In addition to presentations on phylogenetic algebraic geometry and trace formulas, the conference featured an art exhibition, with 80 artists presenting more than 120 works.

Science and Creativity from PRI's Studio 360: stories about the art of discovery and innovation. A sculpture unlocks a secret of cell structure, a tornado forms in a can, and a child's toy gets sent into orbit. Exploring science as a creative act since 2006. Produced by PRI and WNYC, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.