Since the very beginning of quantum mechanics, a debate has raged about how to interpret its bizarre predictions. And at the heart and origin of that debate is the quantum jump or quantum leap - the seemingly miraculous and instantaneous...

As the 19th century came to a close, physicists were feeling pretty satisfied with the state of their science. The great edifice of physical theory seemed complete. A few minor experiments remained to verify everything. Little did those...

Our universe seems pretty complicated. We have a weird zoo of elementary particles, which interact through very different fundamental forces. But some extremely subtle clues in nature have led us to believe that the forces of nature were...

The universe is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. We don’t know what’s causing that acceleration, but that hasn’t stopped us from giving it a name. We call this unknown influence dark energy. The observed acceleration is,...

Now that we have a primer on the aspects of the Big Bang Theory that we know definitely happened, let’s look further into what we don’t yet know, and how the theory could progress in the future. Since there is a discrepancy between...

The weird rules of quantum mechanics lead to all sorts of bizarre phenomena on tiny scales— particles teleporting through walls or being in multiple places at once or simultaneously existing and not. Shame all this magical behavior...

Quantum computing is cool, but you know what would be extra awesome - a quantum internet. In fact if we want the first we’ll need the latter. And the first step to the quantum internet is quantum cryptography.

Today I’m going to explain why you’re not falling through your chair right now using one simple fact, and one object. The fact is that all electrons are the same as each other, and the object is a structurally critical item of my...

Climate action is speeding up -- and we each have the power to push that transformation forward. As the head of the UNFCCC, the UN's entity supporting the global response to climate change, Simon Stiell points to clear social and...

Lara Brenner talks about her research on how stressed cougars are and how the public views them. Then Jessi from Animal Wonders joins the show with Seraphina the red fox!

What exactly is hypnosis? Some people think it's just a fun trick for magic shows, but can it actually make you do things against your will? Learn all this and more with Michael Aranda in a new episode of SciShow!

Today's data storage solutions have an expiration date. What's on the horizon to replace them?

Hank hits you with a ton of news this time - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has plans to retrieve Saturn V rocket engines from the bottom of the Atlantic; new research on the impacts from the Deep Water Horizon oil spill to life in the Gulf of...

Have you ever found yourself seeing images right before falling asleep? You might be experiencing hypnagogia.

More than 30 million people in the US are eligible to have their arrest and conviction records cleared -- but most people who qualify either can't afford it or simply don't know it's an option. In this gripping talk, second chance...

Thomas Jefferson, founding father of the United States and primary author of the Declaration of Independence, was part of America's fight for freedom and equality. But in his personal life, he held over 600 people in slavery. Are his...

In 1998, a school district removed one of American literature's most acclaimed works from its curriculum. Parents pushing for the ban said the book was both "sexually explicit" and "anti-white." The book at the center of this debate was...

This week Craig Benzine takes a first look at the judicial branch. It's pretty easy to forget that the courts, and the laws that come out of them, affect our lives on a daily basis. But how exactly these decisions are made and where each...

The second law of thermodynamics - the law that entropy must, on average, increase - has been interpreted as the inevitability of the decay of structure. This is .... misleading. Structure can develop in one region even as the entropy...

In which John Green teaches you about nation building and nationalism in Latin America. Sometimes, the nations of Latin America get compared to the nations of Europe, and are found wanting. This is kind of a silly comparison. The rise of...

If you have perfect knowledge of every single particle in the universe, can you use the laws of physics to rewind all the way back to the Big Bang? Is the entire history of the universe perfectly knowable? Or has information somehow lost...

We need to have a talk about your future. You're going to die. We all are. And it's probably going to be expensive. This week on CC Econ, Adriene is talking about the economics of death. Some of the expense is tied to the cost of...

Classical computers struggle to crack modern encryption. But quantum computers using Shor's Algorithm make short work of RSA cryptography. Find out how.

A classic problem that Johann Bernoulli posed to famous mathematicians of his time, such as Newton, and how Bernoulli found an incredibly clever solution using properties of light.