The best evidence we have suggests that, while Caviomorpha originated in South America, they came from ancestors in Africa, over 40 million years ago. So how did they get there?

There are more than 20,000 species of bees, all of which buzz when they fly, and many of which also do it to communicate. But some bees buzz for a completely different reason that has nothing to do with communication or flight!

You’re in the woods, there’s a full moon, and the wind begins to howl. We can’t take you out of this horror movie scenario, but we can explain why the wind sounds so spooky.

Measuring 'intellect' is a difficult task. Check out one way scientists are attempting to make this endeavor more testable.

Today is the anniversary of the best-worst day of your life. The best part was discovering a subterranean city on Mars. The worst part was when you lost contact with Earth. You and the other 99 scientists have spent the year engineering...

Pia Mancini and her colleagues want to upgrade democracy in Argentina and beyond. Through their open-source mobile platform they want to bring citizens inside the legislative process, and run candidates who will listen to what they say.

Prompted by the Encyclopaedia Britannica ending its print publication, performance poet Rives resurrects a game from his childhood. Speaking at the TEDxSummit in Doha, Rives takes us on a charming tour through random (and less random)...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how electric permittivity of a material resists the formation of electric fields. Capacitors store energy be preventing the formation of electric fields in dielectric material. The electric...

Why isn't the sky violet?

The Limb of the Sun

Paul Andersen explains how the Meselson-Stahl experiment was used to prove that DNA copied itself through a semi-conservative process. They grew E. coli in a medium containing heavy nitrogen (N-15). They then added the E. coli to a...

Tim urban knows that procrastination doesn't make sense, but he's never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done. In this hilarious and insightful talk, urban takes us on a journey through YouTube...

What does it look like when someone in Sweden brushes their teeth or when someone in Rwanda makes their bed? Anna Rosling Rönnlund wants all of us to find out, so she sent photographers to 264 homes in 50 countries (and counting!) to...

Our lives depend on a world we can't see: the satellite infrastructure we use every day for information, entertainment, communication and so much more. But earth orbit isn't a limitless resource, and the problem of space debris will get...

On August 21, 2017, the United States will experience its first total solar eclipse since 1979! If you're in the right place at the right time, you're in for a spectacular show!

How Long To Fall Through the Earth?

Paul Andersen explains how biogeochemical cycling is used to move nutrients from the environment into living material and back again. He explains the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the phosphorus cycle. He also...

Today we’re going to talk about measures of central tendency - those are the numbers that tend to hang out in the middle of our data: the mean, the median, and mode. All of these numbers can be called “averages” and they’re the numbers...

This video is about Hardy's Paradox, wherein an electron and positron (or photons polarized horizontally and vertically) pass through Mach-Zehnder interferometers that overlap such that the particles have a chance of annihilating. If...

One of Jessi and Squeak's favorite things to do on a nice day is to go to the park and fly their homemade kites! Today, Jessi will show you how to build your own kite and tell you how a little wind can send it soaring through the air!

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the magnetic permeability is the ability of a material to form internal magnetic fields. The magnetic permeability of free space is a constant and is much lower than the magnetic permeability of...

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the electric field strength decreases as the square of the radius as you move away from a point charge, or a uniform distribution of charge on a sphere. This is a direct application of Coulomb's...

You don't have to fight feral ghouls to be familiar with the clicking sound of a geiger counter, but what exactly makes these radiation detecting devices click?

In this video Paul Andersen explains how the vector sum of forces can be used to identify the net force on an object. The net force can be used to determine the overall acceleration of the object using Newton's Second Law.