What gives the trumpet its clarion ring and the tuba its gut shaking oompah-pah? And what makes the trombone so jazzy? Al Cannon shows how these answers lie not in the brass the instruments are made of, but in the journey that air takes...

"Secrets can take many forms -- they can be shocking, or silly, or soulful." Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret.com, shares some of the half-million secrets that strangers have mailed him on postcards.

If you can't afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you, right? Not in US civil court. From high legal fees to confusing paperwork and expensive lawyers, it can be difficult to settle civil matters. Entrepreneur and TED Fellow...

Cancer is a very clever, adaptable disease. To defeat it, says medical researcher and educator Paula Hammond, we need a new and powerful mode of attack. With her colleagues at MIT, Hammond engineered a nanoparticle one-hundredth the size...

Artist Theo Jansen demonstrates the amazingly lifelike kinetic sculptures he builds from plastic tubes and lemonade bottles. His creatures are designed to move -- and even survive -- on their own.

After a visit to a European library in search of Arabic and Middle Eastern texts turned up only titles about fear, terrorism and destruction, Ghada Wali resolved to represent her culture in a fun, accessible way. The result: a colorful,...

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...

Thanks to strontium, oxygen, and rings in a tusk, scientists now have evidence that extinct mastodons may have participated in yearly migrations.

Scientists have successfully created synthetic DNA with twice as many base pairs as normal, with potential implications in medicine, data storage, and even understanding how life could evolve elsewhere in the universe.

Have you ever seen static electricity cause a spark of light? What is that spark? What about lightning, the Northern Lights, or the tail of a comet? All of those things and many others _ in fact, 99.9% of the universe -- are made of...

What is this strange looking stuff? Is this branch just covered in fungus!? Well, it’s not fungus...but fungus DOES have something to do with it!

* Viewer discretion advised. This video includes discussion of mature topics and may be inappropriate for some audiences. Collecting global health data is an imperfect science: Workers tramp through villages to knock on doors and ask...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the total energy of a system is the combination of kinetic, potential and internal energy of the objects. He then shows you how to calculate the kinetic energy, gravitational potential energy,...

Among the great poets of literary history, certain names like Homer, Shakespeare and Whitman are instantly recognizable. However, there's an early 20th century great poet whose name you may not know: Guillaume Apollinaire. Genevieve Emy...

Outside of China, Mandarin and Cantonese are often referred to as Chinese dialects, despite being even more dissimilar than Spanish and Italian. On the other hand, speakers of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, which are three distinct...

To feed everyone in the future, we may need to disrupt 10,000 years of farming practices and turn agriculture into a closed system.

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The Harlem Renaissance was one of the richest, most vibrant, and most culturally generative artistic periods in American history and the work that emerged from that period continues to shape the landscape of American arts and letters...

Remote mental health services have been around for a while, long before the pandemic. So, we've had plenty of time to study how well they work, and there are some encouraging findings.

Thermometers might seem like a basic instrument, but science would not be the same without them, and they helped us understand one of the most important ideas in all of science: the conservation of energy.

How do you make an archaeologist really mad, really fast? Ask her if she’s found any dinosaurs. SciShow helps you Know Your Scientists by explaining the many differences between archaeology and paleontology, and how they’re each awesome...

We've all seen and shared a few LOLCats and Internet Memes in our time, but is it possible that these images and videos are actually a new form of art? Idea Channel takes a closer look at how memes function in our new interconnected...

There's a common misconception that if you like to meticulously organize your things, keep your hands clean, or plan out your weekend to the last detail, you might be OCD. In fact, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) is a serious...

It is time for a gender reckoning, beginning with men authentically confronting our internal selves and each other, says essayist and intersectional justice advocate Jimmie Briggs. In this call to action for gender equity, he unpacks how...

Ice is ice, right? Wrong! From the vacuum of deep space to the inside of ice giant planets, ice gets stretched and squished into way more forms than what we find here on Earth.