How To Go To Space (with XKCD!)

Which Bear Is Best?

What challenges lie ahead of a staggering 12,700-kilometer paddle around the entire continent of Australia? Crocodiles and sharks were just the beginning, says Ironwoman Bonnie Hancock. Reflecting on her remarkable feat of becoming the...

We know a lot about fossils, but there's one thing about all those long-dead organisms that's hard to figure out -- their sex. So let's talk about the ways we can try to determine whether those T. rex bones came from a male or a...

Researchers have identified the processes that cause gray hair and have done experiments to reverse it. And believe it or not, we've had some of these options for decades.

A lot of our food comes from plants, including honey! Mister Brown and Squeaks learn how honey goes from being watery nectar in a flower to the sweet sticky substance we all know and love - and it's all thanks to bees!

Sharing his experience of being held captive in a Taliban prison for 105 days, humanitarian Safi Rauf talks about his life's mission to get food, medicine and other critical supplies to Afghans in need -- and urges the world to bolster...

The coronavirus brought much of the world to a standstill, dropping carbon emissions by five percent. Al Gore says keeping those rates down is now up to us. In this illuminating interview, he discusses how the steadily declining cost of...

Congratulations! By being here, alive, you are one of history's winners -- the culmination of a success story four billion years in the making. The other 99 percent of species who have ever lived on earth are dead -- killed by fire,...

Jamila Gordon believes in the power of human connection -- and artificial intelligence -- to help people who might otherwise be left behind. Telling the story of her own path from refugee to global tech executive, she shows how AI is...

The dwarves were master craftspeople. One dwarf, Andvari, forged marvelous creations. He often took the form of a fish and, one day, he swam to the land of the water nymphs, who guarded mounds of gold. When the nymphs laughed at his...

With acidic puddles, lava lakes, and one of the most important early hominid discoveries, the Danakil Depression is home to all of the extremes.

SciShow tackles a Quick Question with a longish answer: What causes auroras? TL;DR: It's a breathtaking display of particle physics in action.

Which Bear Is Best?

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country was "the best on the planet." It wasn't until the famine of the 90s that she began to wonder. She escaped the country at 14, to begin a life in hiding, as a refugee...

Hank introduces us to the man behind the periodic table - the brilliant Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev.

At TED2012, filmmaker Karen Bass shares some of the astonishing nature footage she's shot for the BBC and National Geographic -- including brand-new, previously unseen footage of the tube-lipped nectar bat, who feeds in a rather unusual...

Joseph Gordon-Levitt has gotten more than his fair share of attention from his acting career. But as social media exploded over the past decade, he got addicted like the rest of us -- trying to gain followers and likes only to be left...

A freshly-mopped floor is slippery, but a wet shirt is super-clingy... so what's the deal? Why can water make some things slick and other things sticky?

Dame Stephanie Shirley is the most successful tech entrepreneur you never heard of. In the 1960s, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company in the UK, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her...

Chance plays a far bigger role in life than we're willing to admit, says psychologist Barry Schwartz. Of course, working hard and following the rules can get you far -- but the rest could boil down to simple good fortune. Schwartz...

Is luck real? It might feel like a mystical force tugging us toward good or bad fortune, but it turns out luck is really where probability runs into the human mind. That's right, there's a scientific side to luck, and if you study a few...

Damon Horowitz teaches philosophy through the Prison University Project, bringing college-level classes to inmates of San Quentin State Prison. In this powerful short talk, he tells the story of an encounter with right and wrong that...

A number of studies show that luck is more of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you can actually create it yourself.