The kilogram is the basic unit of mass in the metric system, but there's a serious problem: the standard that defines how much mass a kilogram actually has isn't reliable anymore

Thanks to the wonders of physics, astronomers can map a timeline of the universe’s history. Today, Phil’s going to give you an overview of those first few minutes (yes, MINUTES) of the universe’s life. It started with a Big Bang, when...

We can get to Mars in 3 days, . . .sort of, maybe. In this episode of SciShow Space Reid Reimers explains the possibilities of photonic propulsion in use with space travel.

It’s usually not a great idea to break laws, but breaking the laws of science is an exception! In fact, it’s often how we make progress.

If you find a glowing rock, it probably doesn't mean you're the chosen one. If it's one of these five phenomena, it's quantum mechanics, not narrative significance.

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You might want to hold off on sending your family's secret chili recipe across the internet to your family member who lives out of state. Researchers are working on a way to harness quantum weirdness to send information super securely!

Just now, somewhere in the universe, a star exploded. In fact, a supernova occurs every second or so in the observable universe. Yet, we’ve never actually been able to watch a supernova in its first violent moments. Is early detection...

Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most unintuitive theory ever devised. And yet it's also the most successful, in terms of sheer predictive power. Simply by following the math of quantum mechanics, incredible discoveries have been made....

Because you demanded it .... we break down the EM Drive!

We've been through the first few episodes of our crash course on general relativity, and came out alive! But it's officially "time" for CURVED spacetime. Join Gabe on this week's episode of PBS Space Time as he discusses Newton and...

Two developments in quantum computing in the past couple of weeks are the harbingers of a whole new era of smart technology. Google announced that it's building a quantum computer designed by a company called D-Wave in partnership with...

In this video Paul Andersen explains the wave-particle duality discovered by scientists. In certain situations particles (like electrons and photons) display wave like properties. This phenomenon can best be explored using the double...

DNA isn’t the simple, loose double-helix you might see in a biology textbook, so isolating single strands of it can be next to impossible. But with some simple tricks of physics, scientists came up with a special type of tweezers that...

In this video Paul Andersen explains why light is important in probing matter. Light travels in photons and the energy of individual photons is determined by Planck's equation. Infrared spectroscopy is useful in detecting the...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how stimulated emission can be used to create coherent light. When an atom absorbs a photon it moves to a higher energy level through stimulated absorption. It may then release a photon and moves to...

FYI: We try to leave jargon out of our videos, but if you want to learn more about this topic, here are some handy keywords to get your googling started:

Data - information, typically stored on computers via electrical...

Hank tells us about some developments that are being made in the dramatic area of laser tractor beams.

Since it launched in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope has snapped more than a million images and changed the way we see the universe, literally.

What was the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics given for? Capturing a single photon of light!

How does a laser really work? It's Bose - Einstein statistics! (photons are bosons)

In this video Paul Andersen explains how light travels in photons which can be described as both particles and waves. Einstein showed that photons can be described as particles using the photoelectric effect to show that the energy of a...

We'd like to know why you're staring at yourself in a spoon in the first place. But we can at least answer the question of why you look upside-down when you do.

Eighty-five percent of the matter in our universe is dark matter. We don't know what dark matter is made of, and we've yet to directly observe it, but scientists theorize that we may actually be able to create it in the Large Hadron...

Scientists have known the outside of the sun spins slower than the inside for a while, but they didn't know why until recently.