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California-Irvine grad student Garnet Hertz's robot design has a bug in the system. He uses a Madagascar hissing cockroach, poised on a tracking ball, to control a high-tech rover. Hertz explains his experiment.

The third album from the William Parker Quartet is named Petit Oiseau, after a character in a poem written by Parker. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead assesses whether the album — whose French title translates to "Little Bird" — takes flight.

Rapper Snoop Dogg's latest release, a collaboration with Bollywood star Akshay Kumar, is a recent example of urban desi, which blends South Asian pop culture with American hip-hop. Originating in the U.K., the style of music is spreading in the U.S. and India.

His father was a Beatle, but Dhani Harrison wanted a musical project that didn't carry the burden of his family name. So he started a band called thenewno2, where he's created a sound and a promotional strategy that is all his own.

Aryn Kyle, author of The God of Animals, recently gave Weekend Edition Saturday a vivid description of horses mating. Many listeners wrote to recommend like scenes from literature.

Melanie Newman, broadcaster for the Baltimore Orioles, will handle play-by-play duties. "At some point soon, I think we're on our way to this just being a normal day in a broadcast," Newman says.

British playwright Harold Pinter, who juxtaposed the brutal and the banal in such works as The Caretaker and The Birthday Party and made an art form out of spare language and unbearable silence, won the 2005 Nobel Prize in literature Thursday.

As the remaining days of the holiday shopping season slip away, technology guru Rich Dean joins NPR's Liane Hansen on Weekend Edition Sunday to offer gadget gift ideas.

Many artists and art historians consider Romare Bearden one of America's most important and inventive artists. But he's hardly a household name. NPR's Neda Ulaby reports that the National Gallery of Art intends to change that. Bearden is the subject of the gallery's first major retrospective of an African American artist.

For a prolific singer-songwriter like Ryan Adams, this has been a relatively quiet year. The four-time Grammy nominee's new CD, Easy Tiger, is his first release of 2007.