NEW 'NOVA'

In a living-room-size space draped in green, Robert Krulwich is saying these words to the camera: "What we're going to do is take a wishbone - an ordinary wishbone, the kind you break for good luck - and we're going to take it for a stroll." Although nothing but green is visible around him, in post-production something else will be added: a motorized wishbone taking delicate steps.

"If your mirror neurons are working properly," he continues, "when you see anything, even a wishbone walking along, you're not gonna just watch that bone ... you're gonna be that bone." But the shot is spoiled. A truck horn is blaring outside the makeshift studio, a former photo shop along Manhattan's bustling Fifth Avenue. Krulwich starts over.

So goes taping for the first "NOVA scienceNOW," a magazine show that lends a bit of mind-stretching whimsy to "breaking science," as Krulwich calls it in his introduction: "Science that's right out of the lab, science that sometimes bumps up against politics, art, culture."

Not to mention bumping up against Krulwich, whose inventive manner of explaining things has long been familiar to ABC News viewers and his National Public Radio fans. His newest outlet, "NOVA scienceNOW" (premiering tonight at 8, WNET/13) will pinch-hit five times this season for "NOVA," the 30-year-old science documentary series. Each edition of "NOVA scienceNOW" will feature several stories that host Krulwich finds "very cool or very troubling or very mystifying," he promises.

"I'm interested in things that people don't know that much about - I mean, science that is very brand-new," he says.

"Something discovered eight or nine years ago is new to most people, because they don't follow this stuff that closely. So to reach out for the very newest may be unnecessary. But I just find it very interesting to do.

"Mirror neurons, for example," he says, breaking into a grin. "It's a very new idea, and it's exciting a whole lot of people."

So Krulwich will fill you in on this phenomenon, which allows your brain to mirror behavior you view in others, responding to it as if the behavior were your own.

Mirror neurons might account for why a sports fan zealously identifies with action down on the field or why a theatergoer shares the grief of tragic figures onstage.

"It could mean that we have now discovered the part of our brains that allows us to understand each other's movements," says Krulwich, "and feel each other's feelings."

The hour includes a report on a newfangled "CT scan" for a hurricane, which, by cataloging its stormy innards, might provide lifesaving forecasts for its future path and strength. The premiere also visits the "singing sand dunes" of Death Valley, Calif., where, after much investigation, scientists unearth a theory for what generates the dunes' otherworldly sounds.