The answer to this question has everything to do with drag & kinetic energy vs momentum change (thrust) ie, a bigger engine fan allows for a larger air mass to be accelerated a smaller amount to give the same thrust as you'd get from a...

Where Was The Big Bang

Hank talks about how warp drives could potentially work.

In the 1800s, Wilhelm Kühne created an image of a window from the eyes of a rabbit. Was this technology applicable to humans? Hosted by: Michael Aranda

William Faulkner is considered one of America's most remarkable and perplexing writers. He confused his audience intentionally, using complex sentences, unreliable narrators, and outlandish imagery. His body of work is shocking,...

In the 1930s, broadcast radio introduced an entirely new form of storytelling; today, micro-blogging platforms like Twitter are changing the scene again. Andrew Fitzgerald takes a look at the (aptly) short but fascinating history of new...

Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.

Hank brings us a special report on the retro-proto-turbo-encabulator, which could very well revolutionize...uh...something.

The answer to this question has everything to do with drag & kinetic energy vs momentum change (thrust) ie, a bigger engine fan allows for a larger air mass to be accelerated a smaller amount to give the same thrust as you'd get from a...

Sci-fi writer Chen Qiufan doesn't fear a dystopian future. Instead, he believes developments in artificial intelligence will make all of our lives better, healthier and safer. He takes us on a tour of the next 20 years of AI and shares...

For ages I’ve been thinking about doing a video analyzing time travel in fiction and doing a comparison of different fictional time travels – some do use wormholes, some relativistic/faster than light travel with time dilation, some...

The Devil has come to town. But don't worry– all he wants to do is stage a magic show. This absurd premise forms the central plot of Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece, "The Master and Margarita." Its blend of political satire, historical...

Where Was The Big Bang

Find out why Flannery O’Connor, an American novelist, is known as a master of the grotesque in Southern Gothic literature. -- Flannery O’Connor scribbled tales of outcasts, intruders and misfits staged in the world she knew best: the...

How do art and morality intersect? Today we look at an ethically questionable work of art and discuss R. G. Collingwood’s view that art is best when it helps us live better lives. We’ll go over Aristotle’s concept of catharsis and how it...

Reading and stories can be an escape from real life, a window into another world -- but have you ever considered how new fictional experiences might change your perspective on real, everyday life? From Pride and Prejudice to Harry...

Sci-fi technology is often more fiction than science, but it turns out there are actually some real-world labs that are working on developing force fields!

Plot often trumps reality when portraying space in movies and, as a result, many films are full of inaccuracies. So how much fiction is actually written into some of our favorite movies? Movies mentioned (and potentially spoiled) in this...

In which John Green teaches you about Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction novel, The Handmaid's Tale. John looks at some of the themes in this classic dystopian novel, many of which are kind of a downer. The world of Gilead that Atwood...

At the age of 21, Simone de Beauvoir became the youngest person to take the philosophy exams at France’s most esteemed university. But as soon as she mastered the rules of philosophy, she wanted to break them. Her desire to explore the...

In which John Green continues to teach you about Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. (WARNING: When Slaughterhouse-Five was published, some of the crude language in the book caused controversy. We quote one mildly controversial line in...

The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story. But as a writer, how do you suck your readers into your stories in this way? Nalo Hopkinson shares some tips for how to use...

This video explains seminal texts.

Howcast - A book report summarizes the content of a book, and is typically assigned in grades K through 12.