Jamila Gordon believes in the power of human connection -- and artificial intelligence -- to help people who might otherwise be left behind. Telling the story of her own path from refugee to global tech executive, she shows how AI is...

The words we use to describe our emotions affect how we feel, says historian Tiffany Watt Smith, and they've often changed (sometimes very dramatically) in response to new cultural expectations and ideas. Take nostalgia, for instance:...

Every act of communication is, in some way, an act of translation. Writer Chris Bliss talks about the way that great comedy can translate deep truths for a mass audience.

All it takes is a simple S to make most English words plural. But it hasn't always worked that way (and there are, of course, exceptions). John McWhorter looks back to the good old days when English was newly split from German -- and...

Hank squares off against Crash Course Astronomy host Phil Plait in our special Valentine’s/Old Timey Medicine edition of SciShow Quiz Show!

Drinking could help you master the complexities of speaking a new language, and might actually help you memorize your flashcards!

Some words just SOUND like the thing they refer to. But are these associations come from the specific culture we were raised in, or is there something more fundamental going on here?

If you've watched the news or followed politics, chances are you've heard the term Orwellian thrown around in one context or another. But have you ever stopped to think about what it really means, or why it's used so often? Noah Tavlin...

The most popular language on earth isn't spoken, it's smelled. Those smells are made up of terpenes, a multipurpose class of chemical compounds.

An animated interpretation of William Butler Yeats's poem "The Second Coming"

An art school professor once told Deborah Willis that she, as a woman, was taking a place from a good man -- but the storied photographer says she instead made a space for a good man, her son Hank Willis Thomas. In this moving talk, the...

Dialects are a part of how we communicate, but it also turns out that many animals have dialects depending on what part of the world they live in.

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,...

Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich...

Pop quiz: When does learning begin? Answer: Before we are born. Science writer Annie Murphy Paul talks through new research that shows how much we learn in the womb -- from the lilt of our native language to our soon-to-be-favorite foods.

It's a common saying that elephants never forget. But the more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative,...

You may need to hear this (if you haven't already): your job is not your family. While you can develop meaningful relationships with your colleagues, calling work your family can actually breed burnout and be detrimental to your mental...

In part 2 of our special series on human ancestry, we ask why we are the only surviving branch on the human evolutionary tree. Just 50,000-100,000 years ago, Earth was home to three or four separate human species, including our most...

In which John Green continues to explore F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby. In this installment, John looks into the titular Gatsby's purported Greatness. Gatsby's single-minded pursuit of Daisy, his checkered past, and his...

We've got two perfectly good hands attached to two perfectly good arms, so why do most people prefer to use one over the other for common tasks?

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. From the EG conference: Productivity guru Tim Ferriss' fun, encouraging anecdotes show how one simple question --...

Is a universal translator possible in real life? We already have many programs that claim to be able to take a word, sentence, or entire book in one language and translate it into almost any other. The reality, however, is a bit more...

Laparoscopic surgery uses minimally invasive incisions -- which means less pain and shorter recovery times for patients. But Steven Schwaitzberg has run into two problems teaching these techniques to surgeons around the world: language...

Compared to most animals in the vast kingdom, humans have one of the longest childhoods. And you might think this is so we have time to develop our advanced thinking skills, but scientists think it might not be that simple.