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

Creative, sustainable solutions find their home in the thousands of informal neighborhoods across the world. Urban planner Jota Samper believes these often overlooked settlements (also known as slums) should be regarded as hubs of...

For many years Sergeant Kevin Briggs had a dark, unusual, at times strangely rewarding job: He patrolled the southern end of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, a popular site for suicide attempts. In a sobering, deeply personal talk...

Picture your favorite place in nature. How would you feel if it disappeared tomorrow? In this love letter to the planet, social worker and environmental activist Knut Ivar Bjørlykhaug invites us to confront the deep, difficult emotions...

James Baldwin was an American novelist and social critic whose essays in “Notes of a Native Son” explored race, sex and class distinctions. -- In the 1960s, the FBI amassed almost 2,000 documents in an investigation into one of...

Here it is, folks: the end. In our final episode of Crash Course Astronomy, Phil gives the course a send off with a look at some of his favorite topics and the big questions that Astronomy allows us to ask.

Temnospondyls were a huge group of amphibians that existed for 210 million years. And calling them 'diverse' would be putting it mildly. Yet in the end, two major threats would push them to extinction: the always-changing climate and the...

As we walk through our daily environments, we're surrounded by exotic creatures that are too small to see with the naked eye. We usually imagine these microscopic organisms, or microbes, as asocial cells that float around by themselves....

Oxygen is crucial for life as we know it, but before it could build up in our atmosphere, earth had to slow down.

Racism thrives on your silence and apathy, says human rights lawyer Dexter Dias. Telling the story of a harrowing UK court case that spotlights the corrosive effects of injustice, Dias urges us all to speak out and expose toxic myths...

Last week, NASA released some pretty cool Mars news: Curiosity found even more evidence to indicate the planet could’ve been habitable billions of years ago.

Nobody likes going to the hospital, whether it's because of the logistical challenges of getting there, the astronomical costs of procedures or the alarming risks of complications like antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But what if we could...

So the Mars Rovers didn't scoop up any alien lifeforms. Scientist Penelope Boston thinks there's a good chance -- a 25 to 50 percent chance, in fact -- that life might exist on Mars, deep inside the planet's caves. She details how we...

Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician -- celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying...

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt asks a simple, but difficult question: why do we search for self-transcendence? Why do we attempt to lose ourselves? In a tour through the science of evolution by group selection, he proposes a provocative...

For more than 1,000 years, Khmer dancers in Cambodia have been seen as living bridges between heaven and earth. In this graceful dance-talk hybrid, artist Prumsodun Ok -- founder of Cambodia's first all-male and gay-identified dance...

The first pairs of jeans were designed for durability; denim was constructed as a sturdy weave worn by sailors and miners. But over the course of the 20th century, as the demand for jeans has gone up, their durability has gone down....

Medical ethicist Harvey Fineberg shows us three paths forward for the ever-evolving human species: to stop evolving completely, to evolve naturally -- or to control the next steps of human evolution, using genetic modification, to make...

Taking cues from soft robotics and the natural world, conceptual artist Anicka Yi builds lighter-than-air machines that roam and react like autonomous life forms. Her floating "aerobes" inspire us to think about new ways of living with...

Trinidad's Pitch Lake is a huge, oily, and filled with millions of tons of asphalt. It may not sound like a great place to live, but the lake is teeming with microscopic life! And learning more about these organisms could give us insight...

There’s a lot we just don’t know about death, but even among the things we think we do know, there are a lot of misconceptions. Here are 5 weird things we believe about death!

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Could it be wrong to help children in need by starting an orphanage? In this eye-opening talk about the bad consequences of good intentions, Tara Winkler speaks out against the spread of orphanages in developing countries, caused in part...

Science is a learning process that involves experimentation, failure and revision -- and the science of medicine is no exception. Cancer researcher Kevin B. Jones faces the deep unknowns about surgery and medical care with a simple...

Slave codes were a method of protecting the investment of white enslavers in the Colonies by restricting the lives of enslaved people in almost every imaginable way. The codes restricted enslaved people’s ability to move around, or...