TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the basketball robot riddle? | Dan Katz
You’ve spent months creating a basketball-playing robot, the Dunk-O-Matic, and you’re excited to demonstrate its capabilities. Until you read an advertisement: “See the Dunk-O-Matic face human players and automatically adjust its skill...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Does math have a major flaw? | Jacqueline Doan and Alex Kazachek
A mathematician with a knife and ball begins slicing and distributing the ball into an infinite number of boxes. She then recombines the parts into five precise sections. Moving and rotating these sections around, she recombines them to...
TED Talks
TED: How AI will step off the screen and into the real world | Daniela Rus
The convergence of AI and robotics will unlock a wonderful new world of possibilities in everyday life, says robotics and AI pioneer Daniela Rus. Diving into the way machines think, she reveals how "liquid networks" — a revolutionary...
SciShow
Ada Lovelace: Great Minds
Ada Lovelace, Daughter of Lord Byron, was somehow the first author of a computer program...even though she lived more than a century before the first modern computer.
SciShow
The Infamous, Brain-Bending Birthday Problem
There's a rather famous problem in math of probability called the Birthday Paradox. Let's get into how it works, and how creative uses of this hypothetical problem have real-world applications!
PBS
New book details U.S. government’s UFO investigations and search for alien life
Since the 1940s, unidentified flying objects have been a part of our nation’s cultural phenomena. But for the U.S. government, UFOs have been a mystery and something the military has been investigating for decades. Amna Nawaz discussed...
SciShow
The Implant That Literally Freezes Away Pain
It's no secret that cold can help treat a source of pain, like a sprained ankle or even a burn. But new technology might be able to take that principle and apply it /directly/ onto your nerves!
TED Talks
TED: How to make learning as addictive as social media | Luis von Ahn
When technologist Luis von Ahn was building the popular language-learning platform Duolingo, he faced a big problem: Could an app designed to teach you something ever compete with addictive platforms like Instagram and TikTok? He...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Can you solve the secret assassin society riddle? | Alex Rosenthal
Your agent has infiltrated a life or death poker game in a hidden back room of a grand casino. Your team is on the trail of an elite society of assassins, each of whom carries a signature playing card corresponding to their role—...
SciShow
Why are Astronomers So Bad at Naming Things?
With star names like 2MASS J05551028+0724255, it might seem like astronomers are not so great at naming things. But if you know the code, these names can actually help you find the star in the sky.
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
What If The Universe Is Math?
In his essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics”, the physicist Eugine Wigner said that “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious”. This statement was inspired by...
PBS
Breaking The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
Quantum mechanics forbids us from measuring the universe beyond a certain level of precision. But that doesn’t stop us from trying. And in some cases succeeding, by squeezing the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to its breaking point.
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
Could the Higgs Boson Lead Us to Dark Matter?
The discovery of the Higgs boson ten years ago in the Large Hadron Collider was the culmination of decades of work and the collaboration of 1000s of brilliant and passionate people. It was the final piece needed to confirm the standard...
PBS
How To Detect a Neutrino
Why is there something rather than nothing? Well the answer may be found in the weakest particle in the universe: the neutrino. For over half a century Fermilab has been the premier particle accelerator facility of the United States and...
PBS
Are We Running Out of Space Above Earth?
While recent news about the Chinese Long March 5 Rocket made a lot of people very nervous because a 22-ton rocket was going to fall out of the sky, this sort of thing happens all the time. Boosters, dead satellites, and sometimes even...
PBS
How Stars Destroy Each Other
Our galaxy is full of dysfunctional stellar relationships. With more than half of all stars existing in binary orbits, it’s inevitable that many stellar remnants will end up in parasitic spirals with their partners. Today we’re going to...
PBS
What If We Live in a Superdeterministic Universe?
Today we’re going to try to save reality - or at least realism. However this rescue effort has a price; one that you may not be willing to pay. Your very soul, or at least your free will, is on the line.
PBS
Do Black Holes Create New Universes?
Physicists have been struggling for some time to figure out why our universe is so comfy. Why, for example, are the fundamental constants - like the mass of the electron or the strength of the forces - just right for the emergence of...
PBS
NEW DISCOVERY About Supermassive Black Holes Explained!
Astrophysicists have discovered a black hole that for millions of years has been blasting vast particle beams in opposite directions across the sky. And has recently swiveled to point its one of these jets directly at us. Is this an...
PBS
Is Interstellar Travel Impossible?
Space is pretty deadly. But is it so deadly that we’re effectively imprisoned in our solar system forever? Many have said so, but a few have actually figured it out.
PBS
What If Space And Time Are NOT Real?
Physics progresses by breaking our intuitions, but we’re now at a point where further progress may require us to do away with the most intuitive and seemingly fundamental concepts of all—space and time.