Since the days of Ancient Greece, philosophers and scientists have been wondering: What is space? Is the absence of things.... a thing? These questions continued to fascinate physicists in the modern era, leading Isaac Newton, Ernst...

Quasars, X-ray Binaries and Supermassive voids at the center of our galaxies .... black holes take many forms. In this episode Matt tells us what these different types of black holes are and how scientists are using VLBI, Very Long...

Future advances in engineering may come from chemistry. From molecular motors to salt-shaker-drug-deliverers, the future looks small.

Documentary photographer Olivia Arthur has been exploring a new frontier: the evolution of the blurring line between humanity and technology. In this meditative talk, she shows her work documenting the remarkable ways humans have merged...

Scientists have warned that as CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise an increase in Earth's temperature by even two degrees could lead to catastrophic effects across the world. But how can such a tiny, measurable change in one factor lead to...

MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on...

For millions of people with Parkinson’s disease, movement becomes much harder. But researchers have found that dance therapy may help them both physically and mentally.

How Do Airplanes Fly?

Pandora was the first mortal woman, breathed into being by Hephaestus, god of fire. The gods gave her gifts of language, craftsmanship and emotion. From Zeus she received two gifts: the trait of curiosity and a heavy box screwed tightly...

What if human flight wasn't just the stuff of epic comic book stories? Is it scientifically possible to fly? In this series, Joy Lin tackles six superpowers and reveals just how scientifically realistic they can be to us mere mortals.

Anyone who’s frequently around kids knows that they throw up a lot, and at seemingly weird times. But there are some interesting biological reasons why that might be!

The human brain is visibly split into a left and right side. This structure has inspired one of the most pervasive ideas about the brain: that the left side controls logic and the right side controls creativity. And yet, this is a myth,...

This video is about how the way we describe the world can influence the way we perceive it. In particular, with regards to Bohmian mechanics, Schrodinger wave functions, Feynman path integrals, and Galilean...

What if super speed wasn't just the stuff of epic comic book stories? Is it scientifically possible to be super speedy? In this series, Joy Lin tackles six superpowers and reveals just how scientifically realistic they can be to us mere...

All the stars in a spiral galaxy rotate around a center -- but to astronomers, the speed that each star travels wasn't making sense. Why didn't stars slow down toward the edges as expected? Don Lincoln explains how a mysterious force...

Artist eric Dyer spent years working at a computer to produce images for the screen. Longing to get his hands back on his work, he began exploring the zoetrope, a popular 19th-century device that was used to create the illusion of motion...

If you’ve been to a sporting event with a large number of people, you’ve likely seen, or even been a part of, “the wave.” But did you know that there are little fishies who do a version of the wave not for fun, but for survival?

How scientifically accurate is your favorite sci-fi space battle?

In this unmissable look at the magic of comics, Scott McCloud bends the presentation format into a cartoon-like experience, where colorful diversions whiz through childhood fascinations and imagined futures that our eyes can hear and touch.

Exorings are pretty elusive, but we’ve already found what might be the first set of exorings, and if we find more, we’ll have a treasure trove of new information.

How to Find an Exoplanet

This week, scientists revealed a sample of amber containing an extinct tick that fed on dinosaurs. Unfortunately, we can't take a blood sample from it and make Jurassic Park a reality, but it can still tell us a lot about how dinosaurs...

We live in a world of unseeable beauty, so subtle and delicate that it is imperceptible to the human eye. To bring this invisible world to light, filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg bends the boundaries of time and space with high-speed...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the kinetic energy gained by an object is equivalent to the work done on the object. The force on the object must act parallel or antiparallel to the motion of the object to do work. Several...