When a species evolves from living in water to living on land it’s called terrestrialization, and it’s not an easy task. Yet crabs keep making the jump from sea to shore. Why? And how do they do it?

Have you ever seen an airplane high in the sky leave a long trail behind it? That's called a contrail! It's kind of like a cloud, or your breath on a cold day. Jessi and Squeaks explain the special circumstances that make contrails happen!

A clever mechanical proof of Snell's law.

Since the days of Ancient Greece, philosophers and scientists have been wondering: What is space? Is the absence of things.... a thing? These questions continued to fascinate physicists in the modern era, leading Isaac Newton, Ernst...

You might not expect the chief operating officer of a major global corporation to look too far beyond either the balance sheet or the bottom line. But Harish Manwani, COO of Unilever, makes a passionate argument that doing so to include...

Every day, we use materials from the earth without thinking, for free. But what if we had to pay for their true value: would it make us more careful about what we use and what we waste? Think of Pavan Sukhdev as nature's banker --...

As the world faces recession, climate change, inequity and more, Tim Jackson delivers a piercing challenge to established economic principles, explaining how we might stop feeding the crises and start investing in our future.

When radium was first discovered, its luminous green color inspired people to add it into beauty products and jewelry. It wasn't until much later that we realized that radium's harmful effects outweighed its visual benefits....

You might think of plate tectonics as destructive since it's the ultimate force behind earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. But the slow movement of our planet's surface does a lot more than shake things up now and then. Some...

From helping build smart cities to supporting the sustainable energy sector, the possibilities of big data are endless. But many companies are still wary of sharing data that could expose them to risk and diminish their competitive...

Mainstream American films don’t often tackle race and racism head-on, and when they do, they often end up trying to find easy answers. Which makes films like Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing all the more powerful. It’s an intimate portrait...

Cities are becoming increasingly privatized: commercial real estate dominates the streets, carving up open space that once belonged to the public and selling it as a commodity to the highest bidder. Architect Elizabeth Diller explores...

Astronomers have found a Hot Jupiter - WASP-121b - that is leaking metal, and put together a new 3D map of the Milky Way showing that our galaxy is actually a bit twisted!

We're back in Bozeman, Montana this week talking to Amy Atwater, Collections Manager at the Museum of the Rockies. MOR has among the largest collections of North American dinosaurs in the United States. We talk to Amy about her job and...

Whether it's robots under the sea, wave detectors in space, or star-power on land, this episode has big experiments covered.

You might be familiar with the concept of self-harm, but it isn’t just physical. As it turns out, people can harm themselves through the anonymity of the internet.

Modern American health care is defined by its high costs, high overhead and inaccessibility -- especially for low-income patients. What if we could redesign the system to serve the poor and still have doctors make money? In an...

A little over a decade ago, a neuroscientist found "significant activation" in the neural tissue of a dead fish. While it didn't prove the existence of zombie fish, it did point out a huge statistical problem.

Maybe you've seen pictures of glowing blue lava flows and dismissed them as Photoshop trickery. Healthy skepticism is good, but there really is a volcano in Indonesia where a unique fluke of chemistry creates an eerie blue glow.

Do periodical cicadas "know" how to calculate prime numbers? One of the strangest life cycles in all of biology, explained!

Today we’ll continue to explore sociology’s founding theorists with a look at Karl Marx and his idea of historical materialism. We’ll discuss modes of production, their development, and how they fit into Marx’s overall theory of...

Today we’re going to talk about how computers understand speech and speak themselves. As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been an growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly...

If a doctor has told you to quit smoking, that's not just because they're worried about lung cancer. Those cigarettes are messing up your body's natural healing process in more ways than one.

Pitching your movie to people can be hard. A studio, a friend, your mom... each of these entities will have different stressed and give you different results. But, what's important in a pitch? And what happens after the pitch? How do you...