A super bright flash in the sky might be the birth of a supernova remnant and it turns out there's more than one way to build a binary star system.

In a brilliantly tongue-in-cheek analysis, Sebastian Wernicke turns the tools of statistical analysis on TEDTalks, to come up with a metric for creating "the optimum TEDTalk" based on user ratings. How do you rate it? "Jaw-dropping"?...

Today we're going to talk about degrees of freedom - which are the number of independent pieces of information that make up our models. More degrees of freedom typically mean more concrete results. But something that is statistically...

In recent years, scientists have come up with new ways to hack the physics of light, to invent the most powerful microscopes the world has ever seen.

Organic reactions are kind of like carefully choreographed fight scenes, and nucleophilic attack is a key move. This episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry is all about nucleophiles and electrophiles, or what happens at those...

Much like a cell membrane, our atmosphere forms a protective boundary between outer space and the biosphere that allows for all life to exist on Earth’s surface. Today, we’re going to talk about its composition and layers (the...

The Chinese internet has grown at a staggering pace -- it now has more users than the combined populations of the US, UK, Russia, Germany, France and Canada. Even with its imperfections, the lives of once-forgotten populations have been...

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences.

When Nancy Lublin started texting teenagers to help with her social advocacy organization, what she found was...

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to...

An overview of backpropagation, the algorithm behind how neural networks learn.

Carbon-carbon double bonds are pretty common in nature, but triple bonds between carbons, called alkynes, are not. When alkynes do pop up in nature, it’s usually in a compound that’s toxic to humans, however, we can synthesize alkynes...

How does knowledge grow? Sometimes it begins with one insight and grows into many branches; other times it grows as a complex and interconnected network. Infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the thousand-year history of mapping data...

Throughout this series we’ve mostly talked about pairs of electrons, but electrons don’t always have a buddy. An atom or group of atoms with a single unpaired electron is called a radical. In this episode of Crash Course Organic...

If you: do laundry, are (or have been) pregnant, tidy up, shop for your household or do similar labor, then by GDP standards, you're unproductive. In this visionary talk, economist Marilyn Waring seeks to correct the failures of this...

There are over 13,000 active seismic stations out there, producing far more data than seismologists have time to go through. So, researchers set up a showdown of humans versus machines to sift through all this information and, in the...

On earth it rains water, on the exoplanet WASP-76b, it rains liquid iron, but no matter what planet you're on, the rain drops there have a lot more in common than you might think.

What if you could know exactly how food or medication would impact your health -- before you put it in your body? Genomics researcher Jun Wang is working to develop digital doppelgangers for real people; they start with genetic code, but...

SciShow Space explores the origins of Earthquakes that aren't on Earth. Moonquakes and Marsquakes can happen, too!

Paul Andersen shows you how to calculate the ch-squared value to test your null hypothesis. He explains the importance of the critical value and defines the degrees of freedom. He also leaves you with a problem related to the animal...

Hank revisits his passion for exploring the Red Planet, breaking down the two biggest challenges of sending humans to Mars: radiation and propulsion. He explains the science behind the obstacles future Mars-bound astronauts...

How will we communicate with the ships that we send to other stars? Scientists think the answer might involve using the sun as a giant lens to strengthen the signal.

From village to metropolis, global flooding is on the rise, and traditional approaches to managing the swells won't cut it, says water resource engineer Virginia Smith. Giving an overview of the dynamic shift needed to stymie the flow of...

Astronomers looking farther back in time than ever before are giving us a better idea of what the early universe must have been like, and we've identified another of the mysterious ultraluminous X-ray pulsars.

We're losing animal and plant species at such a swift, unprecedented rate that it's nearly impossible to keep up. Computational biologist Tanya Berger-Wolf demonstrates how harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and one of the...