So last week we talked about what special interest groups are and how they influence the political system, and today we’re going to focus on why we even have them in the first place. As to avoid getting too cynical, we’re going to focus...

Air pollution knows no borders -- even in your own body, says public health expert María Neira. In this startling talk, she describes how the microscopic particles and chemicals you breathe affect all your major organs (including your...

In a 1990's study, participants recalled getting lost in a shopping mall as children. Some shared these memories in vivid detail, but there was one problem: none of these people had actually gotten lost in a mall. They produced these...

An overview of backpropagation, the algorithm behind how neural networks learn.

How do we respect someone's religious beliefs, while also holding religion accountable for the damage those beliefs may cause? Chelsea Shields has a bold answer to this question. She was raised in the orthodox Mormon tradition, and she...

Working in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century, he began his career as a neurologist before pioneering the discipline of psychoanalysis, and his influence towers above that of all other psychologists in the public eye. But was Sigmund...

Tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world after water __ and from sugary Turkish Rize tea to salty Tibetan butter tea, there are almost as many ways of preparing the beverage as there are cultures on the globe. Where did this...

If you hear the word “baby-faced” you might picture a doe-eyed celebrity who never seems to age. But, really, you should be thinking of the axolotl. However, it is possible to transform these otherwise forever-babies, causing them to...

It goes on some of our favorite foods, and it can even make our least favorite foods taste better. Yes, we're talking about melted cheese.

4000 years ago, the ancient Sumerians made a surprising discovery: if they scraped the bark off a particular kind of tree and ate it, their pain disappeared. Little did they know that what they'd found was destined to influence the...

History is written by the victors, as the saying goes -- but what would it look like if it was written by everyone? Journalist and TED Fellow Mikhail Zygar is on a mission to show us with Project1917, a "social network for dead people"...

Today, Craig is going to talk about something you fans out there have been demanding for months - money in politics. Specifically, we're going to talk about special interest groups and their role in the U.S. political system. Special...

An unnoticed industry worth two trillion dollars a year is influencing almost every carbon emission. Sustainability solution seeker Solitaire Townsend calls this sector the "X industry" (where "X" stands for influence), and it includes...

Focus groups have been widely used by organizations and individuals to find out how their products and ideas will be received by an audience. From the usage of household products to a politician's popularity, almost everything can be...

Much like the biological processes in the rest of your body, a lot of your brain's psychological processes happen without you thinking directly about them,or even being aware of them.

When you think of matrices as transforming space, rather than as grids of numbers, so much of linear algebra starts to make sense.

SciShow Space explains how different experts define our the boundaries of our solar system and why it's way more complicated (and interesting) than it sounds.

The Internet has a lot to say about how color affects our mood and behavior, but it's not as cut and dry as it may sound.

Stretched across a tree-peppered expanse in Southern Africa lies the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, a medieval stone city of astounding wealth. Located in the present-day country of Zimbabwe, it's the site of the second largest settlement...

Does your toilet water drain differently than in the other hemisphere? Is it because of the Coriolis effect? Hank has some things to clarify about these questions, and more in this edition of I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means.

In our second to last episode of Soft Skills, Evelyn talks to us about Power and how it's not always bad, not always good, and useful to understand. Enjoy!

I normally drink about ten cups of coffee per day but today I decided to cut back and haven't had any caffeine but now my head hurts and I don't know why do YOU know why!?

Over our lifetimes, our bodies undergo a series of extraordinary metamorphoses: we grow, experience puberty, and many of us reproduce. Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works constantly to orchestrate these changes. Emma Bryce...

This video is about how causal models (which use causal networks) allow us to infer causation from correlation, proving the common refrain not entirely accurate: statistics CAN be used to prove causality! Including:...