Alix Spiegel

In November 1941, two ships crossed paths off the coast of Australia. One was the German raider HSK Kormoran. The other: an Australian warship called the HMAS Sydney. Guns were fired, the ships were damaged, and both sank to the bottom of the ocean.

For several decades, psychiatrists who work with the dying have been trying to come up with new psychotherapies that can help people cope with the reality of their death. One of these therapies asks the dying to tell the story of their life.

This end of life treatment, called dignity therapy, was created by a man named Harvey Chochenoff. When Chochenoff was a young psychiatrist working with the dying, he had a really powerful experience with one of the patients he was trying to counsel, a man with an inoperable brain tumor.

Brent Haddad studies water in a place where water is often in short supply: California.

Haddad is a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. About 14 years ago, he became very interested in the issue of water reuse.

In a small room at police headquarters in Dallas, Texas, a police officer and the eyewitness to a minor crime recently sat down together to consider six photographs in a photo lineup.

Eyewitness identifications like this happen every day in America, and on the surface, it is a straight-forward transaction. The witness looks at the pictures. The witness picks a person from the photos. Or the witness doesn't.

Two months ago, on a wooded path in upstate New York, a psychologist named Chris Chabris strapped a video camera to a 20-year-old man and told him to chase after a jogger making his way down the path.

For close to two years Chabris, who teaches at Union College, had been conducting this same experiment. He did the experiment at night, in the afternoon, with women, with men. All were told to run after the jogger and watch him.

The goal of all this was to answer a question: Is it possible to see something really, really obvious and not perceive it?

In November 2009, Robert Dixon took a test to determine whether he was a psychopath.

After 26 years in prison, he was due for a parole hearing. In California, before a "lifer" like Dixon appears before the parole board, a state psychologist must first evaluate whether he poses a risk of further violence if released. To do that, the psychologist administers a test — the PCL-R, or Psychopathy Checklist-Revised — designed to measure whether that inmate is a psychopath.