Nearly 450 million people are affected by mental illness worldwide. In wealthy nations, just half receive appropriate care, but in developing countries, close to 90 percent go untreated because psychiatrists are in such short supply....

Whether you're picking a place to eat or something to watch, machine learning helps us make smarter decisions in our daily lives.

A very clever proof of Euler's characteristic formula using spanning trees.

Humans have been studying the stars for thousands of years, but astrophysicist Juna Kollmeier is on a special mission: creating the most detailed 3-D maps of the universe ever made. Journey across the cosmos as she shares her team's work...

Earth's atmosphere is big, but not as big as many people think. All the air that keeps us alive is just a thin candy shell around our planet. In this episode, echoing the words of John F. Kennedy, I'll show you the science of how we all...

Profit, money, shareholders: these are the priorities of most companies today. But at what cost? In an appeal to corporate leaders worldwide, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya calls for an end to the business playbook of the past -- and...

Author Steven Johnson takes us on a 10-minute tour of The Ghost Map, his book about a cholera outbreak in 1854 London and the impact it had on science, cities and modern society.

"Tipping Point" author Malcolm Gladwell gets inside the food industry's pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce -- and makes a larger argument about the nature of choice and happiness.

Nicholas Negroponte talks about how One Laptop per Child is doing, two years in. Speaking at the EG conference while the first XO laptops roll off the production line, he recaps the controversies and recommits to the goals of this...

Human's sense of smell seems to be better than most people think, and an Australian museum teamed up with some rock climbers to try to help save an endangered species.

Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.

We all want customized experiences and products -- but when faced with 700 options, consumers freeze up. With fascinating new research, Sheena Iyengar demonstrates how businesses (and others) can improve the experience of choosing.

Do two people on the planet have the exact same number of body hairs? How about more than two? There's a simple yet powerful mathematical principle that can help you find out the answer. Kelsey Houston-Edwards breaks down the Pigeonhole...

Every 13 or 17 years, billions of cicadas emerge from the ground to molt, mate and die. Adult cicadas only live a few weeks above ground, but you'd be hard pressed to ignore them -- they are extremely loud! Rose Eveleth explains...

An orchestra fills an opera house with music, but a singer’s voice soars above the instruments. Its melody rings out across thousands of patrons— all without any assistance from a microphone. How is it possible that a single voice can be...

Paul Andersen introduces science for the science classroom. He starts with a brief description of Big Data and why it is important that we prepare future scientists to deal intelligently with large amounts of data. He explains the...

Many of the inanimate objects around you probably seem perfectly still. But look deep into the atomic structure of any of them, and you'll see a world in constant flux - with stretching, contracting, springing, jittering, drifting atoms...

Humans take up a lot of space, but engineers are already coming up with some amazing solutions for the future.

Scientists studying quantum vortices and their impact on superconductivity just won the Nobel Prize.

In which Craig Benzine tells you how we keep bureaucracy in check. So we've spent the last few episodes telling you all about what bureaucracies are and why they are formed. And throughout we've hinted about this ever-expanding power...

Today Craig is going to talk about a topic that makes voters and politicians alike ANGRY! We're going to talk about Gerrymandering - that is the process in which voting districts are redrawn in a way to favor one party during elections....

In the 1980s and 90s, pharmaceutical companies began to market opioid painkillers aggressively, while actively downplaying their addictive potential. The number of prescriptions skyrocketed, and so did cases of addiction, beginning a...

If you needed to tell someone what numbers are and how they work, without using the notion of number in your answer, could you do it?

To understand finance, search algorithms and even evolution you need to understand Random Walks.