every three years, more than 30 million Hindu worshippers gather for the Kumbh Mela in India, the world's largest religious gathering, in order to wash away their sins. With massive crowds descending on small cities and towns, stampedes...

Logarithms are confusing, but perhaps some alternate notation could make them more intuitive.

From social media to massive financial institutions, we live within a web of networks. But how do they work? How does Googling a single word provide millions of results? Marc Samet investigates how these networks keep us connected and...

Secrets, disease and beauty are all written in the human genome, the complete set of genetic instructions needed to build a human being. Now, as scientist and entrepreneur Riccardo Sabatini shows us, we have the power to read this...

What can an equation tell us about whether or not we're alone in the universe?

What else did we leave on the moon? Smarter Every Day explains

In this video Paul Andersen explains how systems are two or more objects that interact with one another. If a system has no relevant internal structure it can be treated as an object. The conservation laws apply to energy, charge and...

Is math real or simply something made up by mathematicians? You can't physically touch a number yet using numbers we're able to build skyscrapers and launch rockets into space. Mathematician Kelsey Houston-Edwards explains this...

Mastering any physical skill takes practice. Practice is the repetition of an action with the goal of improvement, and it helps us perform with more ease, speed, and confidence. But what does practice actually do to make us better at...

Your research team has found a prehistoric virus preserved in the permafrost and isolated it for study. After a late night working, you're just closing up the lab when a sudden earthquake hits and breaks all the sample vials. Will you be...

'I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof.' That is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families he met while researching the fractal patterns he'd noticed in villages across the continent.

Why can we find geometric shapes in the night sky? How can we know that at least two people in London have exactly the same number of hairs on their head? And why can patterns be found in just about any text - even Vanilla Ice lyrics?...

What is the dot product? What does it represent? Why does it have the formula that it does? All this is explained visually.

Authentic dollar bills are equipped with many security features to make them difficult to forge. But that doesn't stop counterfeiters from trying to fool people with fakes. Luckily, anyone can help catch a counterfeit; all you need are a...

How high can you count on your fingers? It seems like a question with an obvious answer. After all, most of us have ten fingers -- or to be more precise, eight fingers and two thumbs. This gives us a total of ten digits on our two hands,...

Humans are great at understanding medium-sized things, like how far the supermarket is from your house, or how to find the bathroom in the dark. But imagining distances in light-years is a lot harder -- so you'll have to use a trick or two.

They predate the dinosaurs and they outnumber us by trillions, yet you might not ever have the pleasure of seeing one. So let us introduce to you, the nematode.

What is the best voting system? Voting seems relatively straightforward, yet four of the most widely used voting systems can produce four completely different winners.

After learning about mitosis and meiosis from our individual videos, explore the stages side by side in this split screen video by The Amoeba Sisters! Expand video details for table of contents. Vocabulary in this video includes...

The pigments in our food all get destroyed on their way through our digestive system...so where do the colours of our poop and pee come from?

Once the powerhouse of America's industrial might, Detroit is more recently known in the popular imagination as a fabulous ruin, crumbling and bankrupt. But city planner Toni Griffin asks us to look again -- and to imagine an...

Why is there something instead of nothing? In other words: Why does the universe exist (and why are we in it)? Philosopher and writer Jim Holt follows this question toward three possible answers. Or four. Or none.

They often don’t get as much attention, but North America had major cities long before European colonizers arrived, but the residents left behind no written history. How have archaeologists pieced together the details of these population...

Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists.