The Golden State Killer was finally caught last week after more than 40 years, but the science behind it wasn’t just your everyday DNA forensics.

Many diseases are driven by metabolites -- small molecules in your body like fat, glucose and cholesterol -- but we don't know exactly what they are or how they work. Biotech entrepreneur and TED Fellow Leila Pirhaji shares her plan to...

Medical scans can produce thousands of images for a single patient in seconds, but how do doctors know what's useful? Scientific visualization expert Anders Ynnerman shows us sophisticated new tools -- like virtual autopsies -- for...

Do you like curly fries? Have you Liked them on Facebook? Watch this talk to find out the surprising things Facebook (and others) can guess about you from your random Likes and Shares. Computer scientist Jennifer Golbeck explains how...

Learn how magnetic bacteria work, and how scientists think they can help technology in the future!

Wanda Diaz Merced studies the light emitted by gamma-ray bursts, the most energetic events in the universe. When she lost her sight and was left without a way to do her science, she had a revelatory insight: the light curves she could no...

Hormonal birth control has completely changed the game in health and letting people choose if and when they want to become pregnant. And like any medical treatment, it comes with some risks.

So we've talked a lot in this series about how computers fetch and display data, but how do they make decisions on this data? From spam filters and self-driving cars, to cutting edge medical diagnosis and real-time language translation,...

So we know that sociology is the study of society, but what exactly *is* a society? Today we’re going to find out. We’ll look at Gerhard Lenski's classification of societies into five types, and the technological changes that turn one...

20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use...

Today we’re exploring another branch of conflict theory: gender conflict theory, with a look at sociology’s forgotten founder, Harriet Martineau. We’ll also discuss the three waves of feminism, as well as intersectionality.

Facebook has access to extensive data about its millions of users across the world, but what exactly can they learn from that information?

Is it a bird? A plane? A supernova? No! It turned out to be something else! We've also now studied the weather on a gas giant exoplanet!

Today we're going to walk through a couple of statistical approaches to answer the question: "is coffee from the local cafe, Caf-fiend, better than that other cafe, The Blend Den?" We'll build a two sample t-test which will tell us how...

1, 11, 21, 1211, 111221. These are the first five elements of a number sequence. Can you figure out what comes next? Alex Gendler reveals the answer and explains how beyond just being a neat puzzle, this type of sequence has practical...

Hank tells us about the planned demise of two lunar satellites that have been collecting data for NASA, and have now reached the end of their mission.

Ever wondered what it would take to bring down the Internet? Well, not much.

The discovery of the structure of DNA was one of the most important scientific achievements in human history. The now-famous double helix is almost synonymous with Watson and Crick, two of the scientists who won the Nobel prize for...

New technology has revolutionized how we study wild animals, but it has also bogged down scientists with data...luckily, there's an *intelligent* solution.

Copyright and other media regulations have always been a bit tricky, but the internet made all of that infinitely more complicated. But what does all of that mean for you, the consumer?

Today we're going to discuss the role of statistics during war. From helping the Allies break Nazi Enigma codes and estimate tank production rates to finding sunken submarines, statistics have and continue to play a critical role on the...

Hank comes to you from his inner sanctum of science news to bring you a couple of things you never knew about human origins, the latest from his best friend on Mars, and what you can do to help one of the craziest, greatest people in the...

We’ve all heard the phrase “opposites attract.” It may or may not be true for people, but it’s definitely true in organic chemistry. In this episode of Crash Course Organic Chemistry, we’re learning about electronegativity, polarity,...

There's basically a hole in the universe -- a region where there's much less matter than there should be. And we don't know why it's there.