The big blue buildings of Ikea have sprouted solar panels and wind turbines; inside, shelves are stocked with LED lighting and recycled cotton. Why? Because as Steve Howard puts it: “Sustainability has gone from a nice-to-do to a...

Hank talks with MacArthur Fellow Dr. Victoria Orphan of CalTech about organisms of the deep sea and the impact it has on our environment.

Perpetual motion machines - devices that can do work indefinitely without any external energy source - have captured many inventors' imaginations because they could totally transform our relationship with energy. There's just one...

In this video Paul Andersen shows conceptual thinking in a mini-lesson on simulating systems.

T
ERMS:
Simulations - imitation of a situation
or process
Interactions - reciprocal (two-way) acti
on or...

If you want to be prepared for a nuclear attack, here’s a science-based guide to help you get there.

We’ve developed thousands of technologies for space exploration, but luckily for us, sometimes those solutions apply to problems here on the ground, too.

Michael Aranda sits in for Hank to talk about the forces of nature that conspired to form Typhoon Haiyan, the strongest tropical cyclone ever measured. Plus, what's neutrino astronomy? You're about to find out, because it's a thing now,...

A clever mechanical proof of Snell's law.

Our energy future depends on nuclear fusion, says Michel Laberge. The plasma physicist runs a small company with a big idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that could produce clean, cheap energy. His secret recipe? High speeds,...

Why does too much sun turn some people's skin all red and shiny? Quick Questions explains!

Every 24 hours, wind generates enough kinetic energy to produce roughly 35 times more electricity than humanity uses each day. And unlike coal or oil, this resource is totally renewed each day. So how can we harness this incredible...

Whether it's robots under the sea, wave detectors in space, or star-power on land, this episode has big experiments covered.

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the conservation of mass was replaced with the conservation of mass-energy when it was determined that they are equivalent. This famous equation not only show the mass-energy equivalence but can...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the internal energy of a system can change as the internal structure of the system changes. An object model will not be able to account for the restoring forces and so a system model must be...

Maybe you've seen pictures of glowing blue lava flows and dismissed them as Photoshop trickery. Healthy skepticism is good, but there really is a volcano in Indonesia where a unique fluke of chemistry creates an eerie blue glow.

If you're like us, you love the sound of a brunch buffet. But not everything you eat at that glorious buffet is going to be turned into energy. Your body has to work with different forms of food in different ways. In this episode...

In this video Paul Andersen shows conceptual thinking in a mini-lesson on inputs, processes and outputs in a system.

T
ERMS:
System models - a representation o
f a system
Interactions - reciprocal (two-way) acti
on...

There is a chemical reaction discovered a century ago that could be the key to creating everything from fuel to shelter on Mars!

It's time for planetary-scale interventions to combat climate change -- and environmentalist Tim Flannery thinks seaweed can help. In a bold talk, he shares the epic carbon-capturing potential of seaweed, explaining how oceangoing...

In a talk about how we can build a robust future without wrecking the planet, sustainability expert Johan Rockstrom debuts the Earth3 model -- a new methodology that combines the UN Sustainable Development Goals with the nine planetary...

Blu-rays can hold about ten times more than DVDs because Blu-ray players use special blue lasers to read them. But it took a while for scientists to figure out how to make those lasers work.

You might think we've already found every kind of star by now, but astronomers think there are more that should hypothetically exist!

We've been making particle accelerators for more than a century and have accelerated particles to more than 99.9999% the speed of light. But our accelerators are nothing compared to some of the ones we've found in nature!

Sometimes the males and females of a species can look really different from each other. This is pretty common in animals (think peacocks), but there are some plant species out there with extreme sexual dimorphism! And now scientists...