TED Talks
TED: How to fight for democracy in the shadow of autocracy | Fatma Karume
Democracy may be an abstract concept, but it holds the very essence of our autonomy and humanity, says lawyer and human rights advocate Fatma Karume. Sharing her journey navigating a tumultuous political transition in Tanzania that put...
TED Talks
TED: A new national park to reclaim Indigenous land | Tracie Revis
In a part of the United States with more than 17,000 years of human history, cultural preservation advocate Tracie Revis is working to turn the Ocmulgee Mounds into Georgia's first national park and preserve. This park would be...
SciShow
Plasma, The Most Common Phase of Matter in the Universe
Get to know plasma, the most common, but probably least understood, phase of matter in the universe!
TED Talks
TED: It's time to rethink the role of First Lady | Irina Karamanos Adrian
Irina Karamanos Adrian didn't plan on becoming Chile's First Lady — but she set out to transform the role all the same. She shares how she's fighting gender stereotypes and protecting democracy by shifting political power back to where...
TED Talks
TED: Life lessons from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 | Benjamin Zander
Legendary conductor Benjamin Zander explains his view on the difference between "positive thinking" and "possibility" (one's a fraud; the other's the real thing, he says) and intersperses delightful stories from a lifetime in music with...
TED Talks
TED: The case for a new Great Migration in the US | Charles M. Blow
Social progress in the United States often seems to take two steps forward and one step back, with hard-fought civil rights wins countered by a seemingly inevitable backlash. In this spirited talk, writer Charles M. Blow makes the case...
SciShow Kids
How Do Lakes Form? | Goodbye, Mister Brown! | SciShow Kids
Mister Brown is moving away to Wisconsin, so Jessi, Squeaks and all of his Fort friends are here to say goodbye. But before he goes, Mister Brown want to teach everyone about the place he's moving to and all the amazing glacial lakes...
PBS
Why Do You Remember The Past But Not The Future?
The laws of physics don’t specify an arrow of time - they don’t distinguish the past from the future. The equations we use to describe how things evolve forward in time also perfectly describe their evolution backwards in time. So the...
PBS
Can Free Will be Saved in a Deterministic Universe?
Physicists have a long history of sticking our noses where they don’t belong - and one of our favorite places to step beyond our expertise is the question of consciousness and free will. Sometimes our musings are insightful, sometimes...
PBS
Does the Universe Create Itself?
Imagine you’re leading a game of 20 questions and you forget the thing you chose half way through. You have to keep answering yesses and nos and hope that you think of something that’s consistent with all your previous questions before...
PBS
Is 'Perpetual Motion' Possible with Superfluids?
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...
PBS
How the Higgs Mechanism Give Things Mass
Fermilab physicists really care about the mass of the W boson. They spent nearly a decade recording collisions in the Tevatron collider and another decade analysing the data. This culminated in the April 7 announcement that this obscure...
PBS
Could the Universe End by Tearing Apart Every Atom?
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,...
PBS
How Do Quantum States Manifest In The Classical World?
In quantum world things are routinely in multiple states at once - what we call a “superposition” of states. But in the classical world of large scales, things are either this or that. The famous thought experiment is Schrodinger’s cat -...
PBS
Zeno's Paradox & The Quantum Zeno Effect
“A moving arrow is at rest.” This is obviously a nonsensical contradiction. But Zeno, a Greek philosopher famous for his metaphysical trolling, devised a paradox whose conclusion is just this. Here’s how it goes: if you look at an arrow...
PBS
How Quantum Entanglement Creates Entropy
Entropy is surely one of the most perplexing concepts in physics. It’s variously described as a measure of a system’s disorder - or as the amount of useful work that you can get from it - or as the information hidden by the system....
PBS
What Happens During a Quantum Jump?
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...
PBS
How Luminiferous Aether Led to Relativity
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...
PBS
Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces
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...
PBS
What’s Wrong With the Big Bang Theory? | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
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...
PBS
Why Quantum Computing Requires Quantum Cryptography
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.
TED Talks
TED: Climate action is on the cusp of exponential growth | Simon Stiell
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...